CHAPTER 14: The Puritans and the Lord’s Day

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Puritans and the Lord’s Day

If we are to profit from studying Puritan teaching on this or any subject, our approach to it must be right. For it is all too easy for admirers of the Puritans to study their work in a way which the Puritans themselves would be the first to condemn. Thus, we can have a wrong attitude to the men; we can revere them as infallible authorities. But they would scarify us for such a gross lapse into what they would regard as papalism and idolatry. They would remind us that they were no more than servants and expositors of God’s written word, and they would charge us never to regard their writings as more than helps and guides to understanding that word. They would further assure us that, since all men, even Puritans, can err, we must always test their teaching with the utmost rigour by that very word which they sought to expound. Or, again, we can make a wrong application of their teaching. We can parrot their language and ape their manners, and imagine that thereby we place ourselves in the true Puritan tradition. But the Puritans would impress on us that that is precisely what we fail to do if we act so. They sought to apply the eternal truths of Scripture to the particular circumstances of their own day—moral, social, political, ecclesiastical, and so forth.

If we would stand in the true Puritan tradition, we must seek to apply those same truths to the altered circumstances of our own day. Human nature does not change, but times do; therefore, though the application of divine truth to human life will always be the same in principle, the details of it must vary from one age to another. To content ourselves with aping the Puritans would amount to beating a mental retreat out of the twentieth century, where God has set us to live, into the seventeenth, where he has not. This is as unspiritual as it is unrealistic. The Holy Spirit is pre-eminently a realist, and he has been given to teach Christians how to live to God in the situation in which they are, not that in which some other saints once were. We quench the Spirit by allowing ourselves to live in the past. And such an attitude of mind is theologically culpable. It shows that we have shirked an essential stage in our thinking about God’s truth—that of working out its application to ourselves. Application may never be taken over second-hand and ready-made; each man in each generation must exercise his conscience to discern for himself how truth applies, and what it demands, in the particular situation in which he finds himself. The application may be similar in detail from one generation to another, but we must not assume in advance that it will be so. And therefore our aim in studying the Puritans must be to learn, by watching them apply the word to themselves in their day, how we must apply it to ourselves in ours.

This point is crucial for us who believe that modern evangelicalism stands in need of correction and enrichment of a kind which the older evangelical tradition can supply. It seems that modern evangelicalism is guilty of just this error of living in the past—in this case, in the recent, late nineteenth-century past. We are too often content today to try and get along by rehashing the thin doctrinal gruel and the sometimes questionable ideas about its ethical, ecclesiastical and evangelistic application which were characteristic of that decadent period in evangelical history. But the answer to this situation is emphatically not that we should retreat still further, and start living, not now in the nineteenth, but in the seventeenth century. Such a cure would in many ways be worse than the disease. We certainly need to go back behind the nineteenth century and reopen the richer mines of older evangelical teaching; but then we must endeavour to advance beyond the nineteenth-century mentality into a genuine appreciation of our twentieth-century situation, so that we may make a genuinely contemporary application of the everlasting gospel.

And this principle is as relevant when we study the subject of the Lord’s Day as it is anywhere. For here, surely, is a subject on which fresh thinking about the contemporary application of biblical principles is long overdue. Our thoughts and speech about it often betray a degree of negative legalism as it is. If we rigidly imposed on ourselves the application of the Fourth Commandment which the Puritans worked out in terms of their own age, we would merely increase and perpetuate that legalism. Yet, if we resist the temptation to take over this application ready-made, and set ourselves to reapply God’s law realistically to our own present-day situation, we shall find in the Puritan expositions an incomparably rich and suggestive presentation of the positive principles that must guide our judgement in this matter.

First, however, we must fill in the historical background of our study.

The Puritans created the English Christian Sunday—that is, the conception and observance of the first day of the week as one on which both business and organised recreations should be in abeyance, and the whole time left free for worship, fellowship and ‘good works’. This ideal was never generally accepted by continental Protestants; as Baxter observed: ‘England hath been the happiest in this piece of reformation.’ The history of the Puritan achievement spans a century. At the end of the sixteenth century, it was the Englishman’s custom after church was over to pass the rest of Sunday in ‘frequenting of bawdy stage plays … may-games, church-ales, feasts and wakes; in piping, dancing, dicing, carding, bowling, tennis-playing, in bear-baiting, cock-fighting, hawking, hunting and such like; in keeping of fairs and markets on the Sabbath … in ‘football-playing, and such other devilish pastimes.’ Serious Christians (‘Puritans’ in the popular sense) grew increasingly concerned about this. The ‘Puritan’ point of view on the subject, which Dennison shows to have been already affirmed in essence by Bishops Hooper and Latimer, Dean Edmund Bunny and Gervase Babington, received its first full statement in print in Dr Nicholas Bound’s True Doctrine of the Sabbath (1595)—though the first exposition of it to be written seems to have been Richard Greenham’s Treatise of the Sabbath, which was privately circulated for some years prior to this.

James I’s Declaration of Sports (1618) laid it down that, apart from bull- and bear-baiting and bowls, all the popular games of the day might be played on Sundays after church. In fact, James hereby ‘simple reiterated what had been the law of the State and of the Church since the early days of the Reformation’; but his Declaration brought consternation to the rapidly growing body of Puritan clergy and laity. In 1633 Charles I republished it, and ordered the bishops to see that all clergy read it from their pulpits; some refused to do so, and lost their livings as a result. What things in the country were like at this time appears from these words of Baxter:

In my youth … one of my father’s own tenants was the town piper, and the place of the dancing assemble was not a hundred yards from our door, and we could not on the Lord’s day either read a chapter, or pray, or sing a Psalm, or catechize or instruct a servant, but with the noise of the pipe and tabor and the shoutings in the street continually in our ears; and … we were the common scorn of all the rabble in the streets and called Puritans, Precisians, Hypocrites, because we rather chose to read the Scriptures than do as they did.… And when the people by the book [i.e., the Declaration, 1633] were allowed to play and dance out of public service time, they could so hardly break off their sports that many a time the reader was fain to stay till the pipe and players would give over; and sometimes the morris dancers would come into the church in all their linen and scarves and antic dresses, with morris bells jingling at their legs, and as soon as common prayer was read did haste out presently to their play again. Was this a heavenly conversation?

But Puritan teaching had its effect. As a result of Baxter’s work at Kidderminster, what had previously been a brawling, drunken, irreligious community was so changed that ‘on the Lord’s Day; there was no disorder to be seen in our Streets; but you might hear a hundred Families singing Psalms and repeating Sermons as you passed through the Streets.’

A similar reformation took place in many other places where Puritans ministered. The Long Parliament and its successors, prompted by Puritan convictions, passed a series of ordinances forbidding games, trading and travel on Sunday. Finally, in 1677, when the Puritans were out of power and in disgrace, a violently anti-Puritan Parliament passed the Sunday Observance Act, which repeated, and confirmed, Commonwealth legislation on this subject. It prescribed that all should spend Sunday, not in trading, travelling, ‘worldly labour, business, or work of their ordinary callings’, but in ‘exercising themselves … in the duties of piety and true religion, publicly and privately’. The significance of this piece of legislation is clear. England had come generally to accept the Puritan ideal for Sunday. Royalist and republican, conformist and nonconformist alike were agreed on it. The Puritan teaching had created a national conscience on the subject; and this despite the fact that the Caroline divines had consistently opposed the Puritans’ view as being theologically incorrect.

Against this background of history we now turn to the Puritan teaching itself.

1. The meaning of the Fourth Commandment (Ex 20:8–11). Here the Puritans advanced on the Reformers. These latter had followed Augustine and medieval teaching generally in denying that the Lord’s Day was in any sense a Sabbath. They held that the Sabbath, which the Fourth Commandment prescribes, was a Jewish typical ceremony, foreshadowing the ‘rest’ of a grace-faith relationship with Christ. So Calvin explains it:

The analogy between the external sign and the thing signified is most apt, inasmuch as our sanctification consists in the mortification of our own will.… We must desist from all the acts of our own mind that, God working in us, we may rest in him, as the apostle teaches (Heb 3:13; 4:3, 9).

But now that Christ has come the type is cancelled, and it would be as wrong to perpetuate it as to continue offering Levitical sacrifices. Calvin appeals here to Colossians 2:16, which he interprets as referring to the weekly day of rest. He allows that, over and above its typical significance, the Fourth Commandment also teaches the principle that there must be public and private worship, and a day of rest for servants and employees, so that its full Christian interpretation is threefold:

First, that throughout our whole lives we may aim at a constant rest from our own works, in order that the Lord may work in us by His Spirit; second, that each man should diligently exercise himself in devout meditation on the works of God, and … that all should observe the lawful order appointed by the Church for hearing the word, administering the sacraments, and public prayer; thirdly, that we should avoid oppressing those subject to us.

But he speaks as if he regards this as being all that the commandment now prescribes, and finds nothing in it, in its Christian sense, to prohibit work or play on the Lord’s Day out of church time. Most of the Reformers spoke in the same way. Yet the extraordinary thing is that their statements in other contexts show that ‘the Reformers, as a body, did hold the divine authority and binding obligation of the fourth command, as requiring one day in seven to be employed in the worship and service of God, admitting only of works of necessity and mercy to the poor and afflicted’. Why they never saw the inconsistency between asserting this in general terms and yet offering an Augustinian exegesis of the Christian Sunday is a standing puzzle. One can only suppose that unwillingness to entertain the thought that Augustine might be wrong blinded them to the fact that they were riding two horses.

The Puritans, however, corrected the inconsistency. They insisted, with virtual unanimity, that, although the Reformers were right to see a merely typical and temporary significance in certain of the detailed prescriptions of the Jewish Sabbath, yet the principle of one day’s rest for public and private worship of God at the end of each six days’ work was a law of creation, made for man as such, and therefore binding upon man as long as he lives in this world. They pointed out that, standing as it does with nine undoubtedly moral and permanently binding laws in the Decalogue, it could hardly be of a merely typical and temporary nature itself.

In fact, they saw it as integral to the first table of the law, which deals systematically with worship: ‘the first command fixes the object, the second the means, the third the manner, and the fourth the time.’

They noted that the Fourth Commandment begins ‘Remember … ’thus looking back to a pre-Mosiac institution. They observed that Genesis 2:1ff represents the seventh-day rest God’s own rest after creation, and that the sanction attached to the Fourth Commandment in Exodus 20:8ff looks back to this, depicting the day as a weekly memorial of creation ‘to be observed to the glory of the Creator, asn an engagement upon ourselves to serve him, and the encouragement to us to trust in Him who made heaven and earth. By the santification of the Sabbath, the Jews declared that they worshipped the God that made the Earth.… ’So speaks that entirely representative latter-day Puritan Matthew Henry, commenting on Exodus 25:11. Henry further pointed out that the commandment declares God to have sanctified the seventh day(i.e.,appropriated it to himself)and blessedit (i.e., ‘put blessings into it, which He has encouraged us to expect from Him in the religious observance of that day’); and that Christ, though he reinterpreted the Sabbath law, did not cancel it, but rather established it by keeping it himself and showing that he expected his disciples to continue keeping it (cf Mt 24:20).

All this, the Puritans argued, showed that the seventh-day rest was more than a Jewish type; it was a memorial of creation, and a part of the moral law (first table, prescribing proper worship of the Creator), and as such it was perpetually obligatory for all men. So that when we find the New Testament telling us that Christians met for worship on the first day of the week (Acts 23:7; 41; 1 Cor 16:1), and kept that day as ‘the Lord’s day’ (Rev 1:10), this can only mean one thing: that by apostolic precept, and probably in fact by dominical injunction during the forty days before the Ascension, this had been made the day on which men were henceforth to keep the Sabbath of rest which the Fourth Commandment prescribes. The Puritans observed that this change from the seventh day of the week, the day which marked the end of the old creation, to the first, the day of Christ’s resurrection, which marked the start of the new, was not precluded by the words of the Fourth Commandment, which ‘merely determined, that we should rest and keep as a Sabbath every seventh day … but … in no way determine where those six days shall begin … There is no direction in the fourth commandment how to reckon the time.’ Therefore nothing hinders the supposition, which the New Testament seems to require, that the apostles actually made this change. In that case, it becomes clear that the condemnation (in Col 2:16) of Jewish sabbatarianism has nothing to do with the keeping of the Lord’s Day at all. Such, in outline, were the considerations on which the Puritans based their doctrine of the Lord’s Day; which is well summed up in the Westminster Confession, XXI:vii-viii .

2. The character of the Fourth Commandment. ‘The sabbath,’ writes Matthew Henry, commenting on Mark 2:27,

is a sacred and divine institution; but we must receive and embrace it as a privilege and a benefit, not as a task and a drudgery. First, God never designed it to be an imposition upon us, and therefore we must not make it so to ourselves.… Secondly, God did design it to be an advantage to us, and so we must make and improve it.… He had much more regard for our souls. The sabbath was made a day of rest, only in order to its being a day of holy work, a day of communion with God, a day of praise and thanksgiving; and the rest from worldly business is therefore necessary, that we may closely apply ourselves to this work, and spend the whole time in it, in public and private.… See here what a good master we serve, all whose institutions are for our own benefit.…

This quotation fairly sums up the Puritans’ approach to the Lord’s Day. Here we would merely underline three of Henry’s points, and add a fourth by way of corollary.

(a) Sabbath-keeping means action, not inaction. The Lord’s Day is not a day for idleness. ‘Idleness is a sinne every day: but much more on the Lord’s Day.’ We do not keep the Sabbath holy by lounging around doing nothing. We are to rest from the business of our earthly calling in order to prosecute the business of our heavenly calling. If we do not spend the day doing the latter, we fail to keep it holy.

(b) Sabbath-keeping is not a tedious burden, but a joyful privilege. The Sabbath is not a fast, but a feast, a day for rejoicing in the works of a gracious God, and joy must be its temper throughout (cf Is 58:3). ‘Joy suits no person so much as a saint, and it become no season as well as a sabbath.’

It is the duty and glory of a Christian to rejoice in the Lord every day, but especially on the Lord’s Day.… To fast on the Lord’s Day, saith Ignatius, is to kill Christ; but to rejoice in the Lord this day, and to rejoice in all the duties of the day … this is to crown Christ, this is to lift up Christ.

Joy must be the keynote of public worship. Baxter in particular deplores drab, mournful services. There must be no gloom on the Lord’s Day. And those who say that they cannot find joy in the spiritual exercises of a Christian Sunday thereby show that there is something very wrong with them.

God hath made it our duty, by his institution, to set apart this day for a special seeking of his grace and blessing. From which we may argue, that he will be especially ready to confer his grace on those who thus seek it.… The sabbath day is an accepted time, a day of salvation, a time wherein God especially loves to be sought, and loves to be found.…

So speaks Edwards, and every Puritan would have agreed. George Swinnock waxes lyrical on the grace of the Christian Sabbath:

Hail thou that art highly favoured of God, thou golden spot of the week, thou marker-day of souls, thou daybreak of eternal brightness, thou queen of days, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among days.… Oh how do men and woman flutter up and down on the weekdays, as the dove on the waters, and can find no rest for their souls, till they come to thee their ark, til thou put forth thy hand and take them in! Oh how they sit under thy shadow with great delight, and find thy faith sweet to their taste! Oh the mountings of mind, the ravishing happiness of heart, the solace of soul, which on thee they enjoy in the blessed Saviour!

(d) Sabbath-breaking brings chastisement, as does the abuse of any God-given privilege and means of grace. Spiritual decline and material loss accrue to both individuals and communities for this sin. The good gifts of God may not be despised with impunity. Thomas Fuller thought that the Civil War, Brooks that the fire of London, came as judgements on the nation for Sabbath-breaking.

The admirable positive and evangelical character of this approach to the Lord’s Day could scarcely be bettered.

3. Practical principles for keeping the Lord’s Day holy. The Puritans were methodical men, and nothing if not thorough; and we find them giving detailed attention to this aspect of our subject. Four principles in particular fall to be considered here.

(a) Preparation must be made for the Lord’s Day. First, the Puritans tell us, we must realise the importance of the Lord’s Day, and learn to value it rightly. It is a great day for the church and for the individual; a ‘market-day for the soul’, a day for entering the very ‘suburbs of heaven’ in corporate praises and prayers. We must never, therefore, let our Sundays become mere routine engagements; in that attitude of mind, we shall trifle them away by a humdrum formality. Every Sunday is meant to be a great day, and we should approach it expectantly, in full awareness of this. Therefore we must plan our week, so that we may make the most of our Sabbaths. Haphazard improvidence will preclude our profiting here, just as it will in any other enterprise.

That policie and discretion which we see in naturall men about the market of their bodies, we must learne about the market of our souls: they will be providing, and thinking before what they must buy … and sell there … so, if ever we will make good markets for our souls, we must [all the week before] be preparing our hearts … that we may then be burdened with no sinne nor worldly care.… We must .… stop out all distractions and encumbrances, and raise up our hearts against deadness and dulness … if ever we will comfortably and profitably spend the Lord’s day in the Lord’s work.

Preparing the heart is the most important matter of all, for the Lord’s Day is pre-eminently ‘a day for heart-work.’ From this point of view, the battle for our Sundays is usually won or lost on the foregoing Saturday night, when time should be set aside for self-examination, confession and prayer for the coming day. Richard Baxter’s young people’s fellowship used to spend three hours each Saturday evening preparing together for the Sabbath in this way. ‘If thou wouldst thus leave thy heart with God on the Saturday night,’ Swinnock assures us, ‘thou shouldest find it with him in the Lord’s-day morning.’ The last rule for preparation comes from the supremely practical mind of Richard Baxter: ‘Go seasonably to bed, that you may not be sleepy on the Lord’s Day.’

(b) Public worship must be central on the Lord’s Day. The day must be built round public worship, morning and afternoon or evening (‘the publike exercises are twice at the least to be used every Sabbath’). Private devotions must take second place to this, if one or the other for any reason has to go. But we must get up on Sunday mornings in time to prepare our hearts afresh to praise and pray and hear God’s word preached, for ‘if we come rudely into the Lord’s House from brawling or chiding at home or so soone as he is out of his bed … the Word shall be but a tediousness and serve to the further hardening of his heart.’

Puritan services might last anything up to three hours; but the Puritans had little sympathy with those who complained at their length. Baxter’s comment is simply that those who found a church service tedious, and yet could spend a far longer time in a public house, or at a public entertainment, without boredom, must have very bad hearts; though he then takes occasion to speak a word in season to preachers and suggest to them

an honester way to cure people’s weariness. Preach with such life and awakening seriousness … and with such easy method and with such variety of wholesome matter that the people may never be weary of you. Pour out the rehearsal of the love and benefits of God; open so to them the privileges of faith, the joys of hope, that they may never be angry. How oft have I heard the people say of such as these, I could hear him all day and never be weary! They are troubled with the shortness of such sermons, and wish they had been longer.…

(c) The family must function as a religious unit on the Lord’s Day. The Westminster Larger Catechism, question 118, is emphatic on this: ‘The charge of keeping the Sabbath is more specially directed to government of families, and other superiors, because they are bound not only to keep it themselves, but to see that it be observed by all that are under their charge.’ The head of the house must conduct family prayers twice, take the family to church, and examine and catechise the children and servants afterwards to make sure that they had thoroughly absorbed the sermon. The principle here is that the man of the house has an inalienable responsibility to care for the souls of the household, and that it is on the Lord’s Day supremely that he must exercise it. The Puritan pastor, unlike his modern counterpart, did not scheme to reach the men through the women and children, but vice versa. Was he not perhaps wiser, and more scriptural too?

(d) The pitfalls of legalism and pharisaism must be avoided in regard to the Lord’s Day. These wrong attitudes threaten here, as in all other spiritual concerns. There was no dispute among the Puritans that, as the answer to question 60 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism put it:

the Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in the publick and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy.

But there are right and wrong ways of pursuing all goals, and the shrewdest among the teachers went out of their way to warn that both legalism, the negative habit of mind which stresses what one must not do on the Lord’s Day and stops there, and pharisaism, the self-justifying habit of mind which is all too ready to censure others for real or fancied lapses in this matter, are both a violation of the spirit of the gospel. Baxter, as we should perhaps expect, has most to say about them, and he counters both with a constructive evangelical principle of judgement:

I will first look at a man’s positive duties on the Lord’s Day, how he heareth and readeth and prayeth and spendeth his time, and how he instructeth and helpeth his family; and if he be diligent in seeking God, and ply his heavenly business, I shall be very backward to judge him for a word or action about worldly things that falls in on the by.…

Here, surely, is Christian wisdom.

The above passages speak for themselves, and need no further comment. The issues of spiritual well-being that they raise must be left to each reader to consider. We close with a testimony and an admonition.

The testimony is that of Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale:

I have found by a strict and diligent observation that a due observance of the duties of the Lord’s Day hath ever had joined to it a blessing upon the rest of my time, and the week that hath been so begun hath been blessed and prosperous to me; and on the other side, when I have been negligent of the duties of the day, the rest of the week has been unsuccessful and unhappy in my own secular employments. This I write, not lightly or inconsiderately, but upon long and sound observation and experience.

The admonition is from Thomas Brooks:

For a close, remember this, that there are no Christians in all the world comparable for the power of godliness and heights of grace, holiness, and communion with God, to those who are more strict, serious, studious and conscientious in sanctifying the Lord’s Day.… The true reason why the power of godliness is fallen to so low an ebb, both in this and in other countries also, is because the Sabbath is no more strictly and conscientiously observed … And O that all these short hints might be so blessed from heaven as to work us all to a more strict seriousness and conscientious sanctifying of the Lord’s Day.…

1.See particularly W.B. Whitaker, Sunday in Tudor and Stuart Times (Houghton Publishing Co: London, 1933), and James T. Dennison, Jr, The Market Day of the Soul: The Puritan Doctrine of the Sabbath in England, 1532–1700 (University Press of America: Lanham, 1983).

2.Richard Baxter, Works, III:906.

3.Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses in England (1583).

4.Early Writings of John Hooper (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1843), p 342: ‘This Sunday that we observe is not the commandment of man…but it is by express words commanded, that we should observe this day for our sabbath, as the words of St. Paul declareth, I Cor. xvi….’

5.Sermons by Hugh Latimer (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1844), pp 471–473: ‘This day was appointed of God, that we should hear his word, and learn his laws, and so serve him….God hateth the disallowing of the sabbath as well now as then [under the Old Testament]…he will have us to keep his sabbath, as well now as then….’

6.Edmund Bunny, The Whole Summe of Christian Religion (1576), p 47: the Fourth Commandment requires Christians ‘to spend the whole Sabboth day, eyther in Publique exercise, as in ordinary service, or sermons; or in private meditation’.

7.Gervase Babington, A very fruitfull Exposition of the Commandments (1583): ‘the first unambiguous statement of what history knows as the Puritan doctrine of the Sabbath…the Sabbath commandment is perpetually binding upon all men. To hallow the Sabbath day is to: (1) rest from the labors of our calling; (2) assemble for worship; (3) rest from sin….’(Dennison,op cit, p 29).

8.Whitaker, op cit, p 95.

9.Baxter, Works, III:904; from The Divine Appointment of the Lord’s day, Proved (1671).

10.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 84.

11.John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II:viii:29.

12.Ibid, II:viii:34.

13.Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture (Smith and English: Philadelphia, 1854), II:142; see Appendix A, pp 514ff, for the evidence.

14.Jonathan Edwards, sermon II on ‘The Perpetuity and Change of the Sabbath’, a fine statement of the Puritan position; in Works, II:95. The definitive Puritan statement is in Westminster Confession,XXI:vii:

As it is the law of nature that in general, a due proportion of time be set apart for the worship of God; so, in his Word, by a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto him: which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ was the last day of the week, and from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week, which, in Scripture, is called the Lord’s Day, and is to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian Sabbath.

15.Ibid, II:96.

16.John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the Ten Commandments (London, 1628), p 143.

17.George Swinnock, Works (James Nichol: Edinburgh, 1868), I:239.

18.Thomas Brooks, Works, VI:299.

19.Edwards, Works, II:102.

20.Swinnock, Works, I:258.

21.Dod and Cleaver, op cit, pp 138f.

22.Baxter, Works, I:470.

23.Swinnock, Works, I:230.

24.Baxter, Works, I:472.

25.Richard Greenham, Works, (1611 edition), p 208.

26.Dod and Cleaver, op cit, p 145.

27.Baxter, Works, III:905.

28.Ibid, III:908.

29.Works of Sir Matthew Hale, ed T. Thirlwall (1805), I:196.

30.Brooks, Works, VI:305f.

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