ABSTRACT
Charisma in Society In the preceding analysis the Half Way Covenant and the jeremiad sermons were presented as crucial mechanisms in the institutionalization of the original religious visions of the Puritan settlers to New England. ey were, in fact, only two of a number of different social mechanisms that developed at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries that permitted Congregational Puritanism to “go beyond” its original “religious” premises and constitute a wider social and civil tradition.1 ese mechanisms, developing, as it were, against the great symbolic canvas of the jeremiad, were in many ways attempts to reformulate the basic concepts of social ordering that had begun to break down with the institutionalization of the Half Way Covenant in the last two decades of the seventeenth century.
