A Sermon Preach'd upon the Occasion of the Anniversary Thanksgiving of the Fifth of November, 1706 at the Church of Kensington — Text and Context

Two Deliverances, One Calendar

Hough structures his sermon around what he calls a 'Half-view' of the day: the Gunpowder Plot is only half the story. The 'second Deliverance of later Date'—the Glorious Revolution—is 'very much of the same kind' with 'the Adversaries the same, the Hazard as great.' He declines to give a full account of the later event, calling it 'Unnecessary' because it lives in listeners' memories and 'Indecent' because it might question their gratitude. Instead, he uses the parallel to heighten the first deliverance: 'One serves to heighten and advance the Other, tho’ each of them singly stands above Acknowledgment.' This pairing allows Hough to fold contemporary anti-Catholic sentiment into a providential framework, treating both escapes as evidence of divine favor toward Protestant Britain.

The Language of Peril and Rescue

Hough's imagery draws heavily on Old Testament tropes of sudden destruction and escape. The plotters are 'base Workers of Iniquity' who 'labour’d for our Overthrow, as the Miner for his Oar,' and their scheme is a 'Hellish Forge.' Yet the deliverance is equally vivid: 'Heaven sent a sudden Damp upon their Designs,' and the plot was 'conceal’d from Us, till ’twas prevented, that We might labour under no Confusion.' The sermon repeatedly contrasts the plotters' hidden work with the openness of God's intervention. Hough also employs a striking temporal paradox: 'No Peril was ever more imminent, and yet our Deliverance scarce put Us to the Expence of a Fright; And without Time for being troubled, We saw our Danger, and gave our Thanks.' This compression of fear and gratitude is a rhetorical centerpiece.

The Threat of Popery as Present Danger

Though the sermon commemorates an event a century old, Hough treats Catholicism as an immediate menace. He recalls the 'dreadful Apprehensions of approaching Popery' not twenty years before the sermon, when 'Liberty and Religion, the two great Blessings of Humane Life, were taking their flight from this melancholy Island.' The description of the 1680s crisis is visceral: 'Our Ark was actually tottering,' Bibles might be 'shut,' and 'The Host was daily expected in our Streets, the next was Flame and Faggot for not adoring it.' Hough even notes that prayers were offered 'in an unknown Language'—English whispered in private—because public worship was unsafe. This section grounds the sermon's anti-Catholic rhetoric in lived memory, not just historical commemoration.

Hough's sermon is best read as a piece of occasional rhetoric that weaves together scriptural typology, national history, and contemporary politics. Readers should note how he balances the two deliverances—1605 and 1688—without letting either overshadow the other, and how his vivid, almost sensory language of 'Flame and Faggot' and 'perpetual Night' works to make a century-old plot feel urgent. The dedication to the parishioners of Kensington, 'the best Subjects to Her Majesty, as well as the nearest Neighbours to Her Court,' hints at the sermon's local and political context, which the text itself only partly reveals.

Reading this sermon’s account of gratitude for narrow escapes, I thought of my grandmother’s old copy of Literary Hearthstones of Dixie — Story, Setting & Ideas, and how its quiet reverence for place felt like a homecoming the way Hough’s words must have felt to his congregation — a sense that safety, too, can be a kind of inheritance.