He intended it as a response to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Divinity School Address, delivered a few months earlier.
The sermon refuted some of Emerson's pantheist ideas and reasserted, as the title suggests, the willful personality of God.
The sermon is generally regarded as one of Ware's best works and marks a turning point in the perceptions of true Unitarianism.
Where it had previously been portrayed as liberal or even radical by the Trinitarians who had just fifty years before controlled the University, the departure of the Trinitarians and the rise of both transcendentalism and secular humanism now made Unitarianism the conservative position.
Accordingly, Ware's sermon never received the wide attention and study that Emerson's address did.