CHAPTER 4: The Practical Writings of the English Puritans

CHAPTER 4: The Practical Writings of the English Puritans

CHAPTER FOUR

The Practical Writings

of the English Puritans

Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory, composed in 1664–65 and printed in 1673, contained, in the judgement of Baxter’s first editors, ‘perhaps the best body of practical divinity that is extant in our own or any other tongue.’ In his prefatory ‘Advertisement’ Baxter says that he wrote it partly so that ‘the younger and more unfurnished and unexperienced sorts of ministers, might have a promptuary at hand, for practical resolutions and directions on the subjects that they have need to deal in.’ Under the heading ‘Ecclesiastical Cases of Conscience’ he tackles, as seen in the last chapter, many practical matters on which younger ministers might need guidance, and when in reply to question 174, ‘What books, especially of theology, should one choose, who for want of money of time can read but few?’ he lists ‘the poorest or smallest library that is tolerable’, it is of the young minister’s bookshelf that he is thinking. His answer, numbered in standard Puritan style, consists of six items, and the sixth, following Bible, concordance, commentary, some English catechisms, and some English books on the doctrine of grace, is: ‘As many affectionate practical English writers as you can get.’ Having named more than sixty of these (!), he repeats, ‘as many as you can get.’ His emphatic repetition, and the length of his list, are both remarkable. Clearly he has little hope for young ministers who will not steep themselves in ‘affectionate practical English writers’. 

Nor is it only to ministers that he recommends them. In the dedicatory letter prefixed to his first written work, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1649; an 844-page bestseller, annually reprinted for the first ten years of its life), he urged his Kidderminster congregation: ‘Read much the writings of our old, solid divines.’ It was to these same ‘affectionate practical’ writers that he was referring. The summons to read them, often with particular recommendations, comes many times in Baxter’s devotional books, which were themselves put together to augment this corpus. ‘I have laboured to fit all, or almost all, for matter and manner, to the capacity of the vulgar,’ he wrote in the preface to his sermon on the absolute sovereignty of Christ (1654). 

And though, for the matter, it is as necessary to the greatest, yet it is for the vulgar, principally, that I publish it; and had rather it might be numbered with those books which are carried up and down the country from door to door in pedlars’ packs, than with those that lie on booksellers’ stalls, or are set up in the libraries of learned divines. And to the same use would I design most of my published labours, should God afford me time and ability.…  

Baxter himself had learned faith in Christ from Sibbes’ Bruised Reed, sold to his father over the doorstep by a pedlar a quarter of a century earlier, and he could envisage no higher usefulness for his own books than that they should fulfil just such a ministry. Here, again, is a pointer to the value he found in ‘affectionate practical English writers’. 

My present task is to introduce or reintroduce these men to a Christian world that habitually neglects them. Popular and prized in their day, and for two centuries after, they are now hardly known. The interest in Puritanism that has stirred in the past half-century is mainly academic, and not many believers seem to read the Puritan reprints that are nowadays happily available. I believe that this neglect impoverishes us grievously, and I would like to see it end. 

I shall call these ‘affectionate practical English writers’ Puritans, as everyone else does. But we should note that this usage dates from the eighteenth century, and is not contemporary with the authors themselves. To make distinction in the field of practical theology, the mark of a Puritan is to use the word in a way that corresponds to none of its applications in the period (1564–1642) when it was current. During that period it was an insult, implying one or both of the two evils of ‘pure-church’ elitism and priggish censoriousness—two ugly forms of pride. Thus loaded, the word was contemptuously applied to would-be reformers of the national church and to pious people generally, like Richard Baxter’s father, who was mocked as a Puritan by his neighbours for staying indoors on Sunday afternoons to read the Bible and pray with his family instead of dancing and playing games on the village green. Apart from the obscure Anabaptists in London of whom John Stowe had heard, who according to his report called themselves ‘Puritans, the unspotted lambs of the Lord’, no one ever claimed the name, and William Perkins, the father-figure among ‘affectionate practical English writers’, rejected it as ‘vile’. It is certainly slippery, and hard to handle. R.T. Kendall observes with justice that ‘if one accepts the term “Puritan” one must, if consistent, either readjust the definition to fit one man at a time, or, if dealing with a tradition, begin with one definition and end up with another’. Kendall opts for calling the ‘affectionate practical’ school ‘experimental predestinarians’—which is apt. For convenience, however, I shall adhere to the conventional description of these writers as Puritans. 

The best introduction to the ‘affectionate practical’ writers is their history, which I shall now quickly review. It is not in fact well known. Much better known is the fact that from 1564 the label ‘Puritan’ was being fastened on to advocates of more external reform for the Church of England. A host of historians over two centuries have defined Puritanism in terms of this. G.M. Trevelyan, for instance, is typical when he explains Puritanism as ‘the religion of all those who wished either to “purify” the usage of the established church from the taint of popery or to worship separately by forms so “purified”’. Rarely, however, has it been recognised that Puritan ecclesiastical agitation was one aspect only of a many-sided religious movement that had evangelism and nurture at its heart. This pastoral movement, in which conformists and nonconformists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Erastians were all essentially at one, was unspectacular, as pastoral movements often are. It never won itself a party name and its story has never been adequately written. That story is one of spiritual revival starting small but gaining impetus over most of a century till Restoration policies snuffed it out. In summary form it runs thus. 

1

Ten years after the Elizabethan settlement, the Church of England was in a bad way. In the first place, it lacked money. Royal and aristocratic depredations at the time of the Reformation had left many livings so poor as to be unable to support an incumbent. Moreover, it lacked men. Mary’s persecutions had taken from it its convinced Protestants; the Oath of Allegiance imposed by Elizabeth had denuded it of its convinced papists; most of the clergy who remained were men of little ability and no clear convictions at all. Many of them were known to be immoral. Livings were held in plurality by nonresidents, and untrained artisans were ordained, for lack of anyone better, to read the services on Sunday while continuing to practise their trade during the week. Many churches had not had a sermon preached in them for years. Nor could the Elizabethan bishops attract young university men into the ministry in sufficient numbers to stop the rot.

The ignorance of mid-sixteenth-century country clergy may be judged from the records of Bishop Hooper’s enquiry into conditions in his diocese in 1551. His clergy were asked the following questions:

1.How many commandments are there?

2.Where are they to be found?

3.Repeat them.

4.What are the articles of the Christian faith?

5.Prove them from Scripture.

6.Repeat the Lord’s Prayer.

7.How do you know it is the Lord’s?

8.Where is it to be found? 

Out of 311 examined, only 50 could answer these questions, and 19 of them ‘mediocriter’. Ten did not know the Lord’s Prayer, and 8 did not answer a single question. 

Nothing had happened between 1551 and 1570 to improve this situation; rather the reverse, for as we saw, the ablest men on both the Protestant and the papist side had been lopped off. The only competent protagonists of Reformed religion in England were the returned Marian exiles, and of those who had not become bishops or deans practically all had settled either in the universities (Oxford and Cambridge) or in London. Scarcely one went to the country. For all the difference it had made to religion in England during twenty years, the doctrinal reformation of the English Church might never have happened. In the time of Edward VI, and again after Mary, there had been a superficial move among large sections of the community in the direction of Protestantism; but by 1570 it was clear that this amounted to little more than a violent anti-papalism. The religion of justification by faith was as little known, and superstition was as widespread and deep-rooted, as it has been for the previous century. England might profess a Reformed Protestant religion and come obediently to church on Sundays (it was illegal not to), but England was not yet converted.

In February 1570, Edward Dering, a celebrated young Puritan leader, preaching before Elizabeth, spoke plainly to her concerning this matter.

I would first lead you to your benefices, and behold, some are defiled with impropriations, some with sequestrations, some loaden with pensions, some robbed of their commodities.… Look … upon your patrons. And lo, some are selling their benefices, some farming them, some keep them for their children, some give them to boys, some to serving men, a very few seek after learned pastors.… Look upon your ministry, and there are some of one occupation, some of another, some shake-bucklers, some ruffians, some hawkers and hunters, some dicers and carders, some blind guides and cannot see, some dumb dogs and will not bark.…

And yet you, in the meanwhile that all these whoredoms are committed, you at whose hands God will require it, you sit still and are careless. Let men do as they list. It toucheth not, belike, your commonwealth, and therefore you are so well contented to let all alone. 

What Dering laments is not the lack of echoes from Geneva in the Church of England but the appallingly barren pastoral situation and Elizabeth’s refusal to do anything about it. ‘She is in the habit of listening with the greatest patience to bitter and sufficiently cutting discourses’ was Cox’s testimony to her in 1571; and certainly she refused to let Dering’s denunciations shake her out of inactivity. Her only reaction to the sermon was to suspend him from preaching. 

It is not easy to see what Elizabeth could have done to improve this situation, even had she wanted to; but in fact she did not want to. For political reasons she wished clergy to be undistinguished men without initiative and to limit themselves to maintaining the status quo. Those, however, who sought the conversion of England and the glory of God in the English Church could not conscientiously sit still as she did. But what did their quest for spiritual quickening require of them? What were they to do? What should their strategy be? To this question different answers were given.

Some, led by veteran Marian exiles, were already campaigning for the removal from the Prayer Book of four ceremonies: the clergyman’s surplice, the wedding-ring, tracing the cross on the forehead in baptism, and kneeling at Holy Communion. The objection was that, in addition to lacking Scripture sanction, these touches seemed to endorse the medieval superstitions that clergy are mediating priests, marriage is a sacrament, baptism is magic, and transubstantiation is true. Take them away, so it was thought, and God would be honoured and basic Christianity appreciated very much more. 

Then, following the deposing of Cambridge’s Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity Thomas Cartwright in 1570, for advocating Presbyterianism in his lectures on Acts, agitation began for a radical Presbyterianising of Elizabeth’s Church of England by parliamentary enactment. Young men took the lead, and the theoretician’s rigidity and over-arguing arrogance that usually appear when youthful revolutionaries get the bit between their teeth were much in evidence. The notorious ‘Admonition to the Parliament’ by John Field and Thomas Wilcocks, which earned its authors a year in gaol, was the manifesto of this movement. Here, too, the assumption was that God’s honour and Englishmen’s godliness would be much furthered by the change. Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, had been a Marian exile and was always a doughty Protestant, but his view of the Presbyterian agitators was dim. ‘New orators are rising up from among us,’ he wrote to Bullinger in Zurich in 1573,

foolish young men who, while they despise authority, and admit of no superiors, are seeking the complete overthrow and rooting up of our whole ecclesiastical polity … and are striving to shape out for us, I know not what new platform of a church … that you may be better acquainted with the whole matter, accept this summary of the question at issue reduced under certain heads: 

1. The civil magistrate has no authority in ecclesiastical matters. He is only a member of the church, the government of which ought to be committed to the clergy.

2. The church of Christ admits of no other government than that by presbyteries; viz. by the minister, elders and deacons.

3. The names and authority of archbishops, archdeacons, chancellors, commissaries, and other titles and dignities of the like kind, should be altogether removed from the church of Christ.

4. Each parish should have its own presbytery.

5. The choice of ministers of necessity belongs to the people.

6. The goods, possessions, lands, revenues, titles, honours, authorities and all other things relating either to bishops or cathedrals, and which now of right belong to them, should be taken away forthwith and forever.

7. No one should be allowed to preach who is not a pastor of some congregation; and he ought to preach to his own flock exclusively, and no where else.…

None of this, Sandys judged, ‘will make for the advantage and peace of the church, but for her ruin and confusion. Take away authority, and the people will rush headlong into every thing that is bad. Take away the patrimony of the church, and you will by the same means take away not only sound learning, but religion itself.’ 

Surely Sandys was right to judge that in the England he knew, where most people were still illiterate and in the grip of ignorance and superstition, the Presbyterian reform programme, whatever its motives and warrants, was doctrinaire, impracticable, and inimical to the cause of godliness. What England needed was not Presbyterianism so much as pastoral care: which meant, precisely, pastors who would care for their flocks. Presbyterianisers spluttered on intermittently for the next twenty years, but created no ground swell of opinion that theirs was the right point of entry into the quest for the sanctifying of England; rather the reverse, and the scurrilous Marprelate tracts of 1588–89 finally destroyed their moral credit. Lampooning dignitaries as the tracts did was no formula for winning souls! It was a further event of 1570 that showed the fruitful way to go.

On 24 November of that year the Abraham of the ‘affectionate practical’ school of pastors and writers left his Mesopotamia and headed for the promised land. His name was Richard Greenham, and he had resigned his fellowship at Pembroke Hall in Cambridge to become minister of Dry Drayton, some seven miles out of the city. He was the pioneer Reformed Pastor of Baxter’s type, the first genuinely able man as far as we can tell to tackle in an authentically apostolic way the task of rooting the gospel in rural England. We have already seen something of his labours. He won himself a great reputation as a pastoral counsellor, or (as he himself conceived it) a spiritual physician, and it was a source of lasting regret to his friends that he did not ‘leave to Posterity a Commentary of such particular Maladies as God had made him instrumental in the cure of, together with the means used by him for effecting of the same’. Those are the words of Henry Holland, Greenham’s biographer, who expatiates on the theme as follows: 

The diet and cure of souls afflicted is a very great mystery, wherein, but few have travailed to reduce that matter into any good form of art, or to give us any good method of practice … wanting art and good experience, we conceive the danger to be greater; for that we ratherquess uncertianly to apply good remedies and speeches unto the sick, than know how to proceed by any certian rule of art, and well grounded practice.If the natural Physician might truly say, as touching his faculty, Vita brevis, etc. much more assuredly may the spiritual Physician prefix such an aphorism to all this mystery we have in hand. For herein the godly learned know it is a matter far more difficult to judge what secret causes breed the hidden distemper of the soul; and here it is far more dangerous to proceed only by experience, without art and skill.… 

This reverend man of God M. [=Master] GREENHAM, was a man in his life time of great hope, and could have given best rules for this unknown faculty.…  

Greenham never wrote the treatise on pastoral direction that his friends desiderated (Holland’s own forty-page collection of ‘Grave Counsels and Godly Observations’, the first item in Greenham’s Works, shows what its range and thrust might have been); however, he did the next best thing, if not an even better thing: he trained many of the next generation of pastors. Ordinands lived in his home and studied with him as, in effect, apprentices; local ministers and visitors from further afield regularly joined them at the midday meal; and thus in Holland’s words Greenham ‘was a special Instrument and means under God to encourage and train up many godly and learned young men in the holy service of Christ, in the work of the Ministry’. 

Though settled at Dry Drayton, Greenham continued to exercise considerable influence in the university, with which he kept in close contact. We find him in the pulpit of Great St Mary’s in 1589, inveighing against one of the bishop-baiting Marprelate tracts on the ground that ‘the tendency of this Book is to make sin ridiculous, whereas it ought to be made odious’. He consistently opposed Cambridge’s Presbyterian agitators. Their course, he told them, was ‘tantamount to rearing a roof before laying a foundation’. ‘Some, ignorant how to reforme themselves, will be talking of reforming the church.’ ‘Some busie themselves in Church-discipline, and are slender-sighted in their privie corruptions.’ 

All his influence in Cambridge was directed to promote personal religion and peace within the church, and against sin and schism. Anything that made against Christian love and peace he regretted and opposed, even when he sympathised with the views expressed. In his personal practice he was a nonconformist as far as the four obnoxious ceremonies were concerned, and sympathised with the vision of Presbyterian reformation; but he never made an issue of it. All he asked was liberty to obey his conscience and to preach the gospel to his people. In 1573 Bishop Cox summonsed him for failing to wear the surplice, and he wrote a full account of his position in reply. He professed himself reluctant to argue about such a matter:

I perceyve by experience, that dissention of reasons, doeth cause alienation of affections. Agayne, these matters have bin, and are debated betwixt the godly learned, where I a sole poore Countryman, a yong scholler, having occupied my selfe daylie by the space of these three yeares last past, in preaching Christ crucified unto my selfe and Country people, am not in these matters anie whit to reason with you.…  

His own position was not in doubt: ‘I neyther can, nor will weare the apparrell, nor subscribe unto it, or the communion booke’; but when faced with the questions, ‘What judge you then of so many learned and good men, that thinke that they may beare with the ceremonies?’ he would not commit himself:

I reverence the true disposinges of God his misteries, and their godlines of life; I judge them not in ceremonies, for they may use them to the Lorde, as I desire not to be judged in refusing them, for I doe it to the Lorde. 

In conclusion, he gently reminds the bishop that the scriptural criterion of Christ’s ministers is not ceremonial conformity. He quotes Matthew 7:15–16 and continues thus: 

Our heauenly maister hath left the true badge, or common liverie, whereby his true servauntes shall bee decerned from others.… This kind of traiall, as you onely towardes me have hitherto used, and I have not refused; so I trust so long as I shall abyde it, you will content yourselfe therewith. 

In other words, he asks simply to be judged on the quality of his pastoral ministry, and to be left in peace to discharge it. And in this he was typical of the new generation of Puritan pastors whom he led out into the spiritual darkness of rural England. Some of them were nonconformists, but many were satisfied with the existing framework of the established church and deplored only its lack of pastors. Such were Laurence Chaderton, Richard Sibbes, William Perkins, and Robert Bolton. Membership of this brotherhood of ‘affectionate practical’ teachers and spiritual physicians was not affected by individual views on problems of ecclesiastical polity. 

Over the next half-century Cambridge produced many spiritual physicians in Greenham’s mould. Christ’s College was their nursery at first. Dering was at Christ’s, first as an undergraduate, from 1560, then as a fellow. Laurence Chaderton, who became a Protestant during his time as an undergraduate there, was a fellow for the best part of two decades before becoming first Master of Sir Walter Mildmay’s new foundation, Emmanuel College, in 1584. Chaderton delivered a weekly ‘lecture’ (i.e., sermon) in St Clement’s Church for fifty years, and when, at eighty-two, he decided to cease preaching he got letters from forty clergy begging him not to and testifying that they owed their conversion to his ministry. It was Chaderton whose apology for preaching all of two hours was once greeted, so Fuller tells us, with the cry from the congregation For God’s Sake Sir Go on, go on. Richard Rogers, ‘another Greenham’, minister of Wethersfield from 1574, and Arthur Hildersam, preacher for forty years at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and mentor of William Gouge and John Preston, were both Christ’s men; so was William Perkins, Chaderton’s pupil, converted as an undergraduate and made a fellow in 1584. Paul Baynes, yet another Christ’s man, who succeeded Perkins as weekly lecturer at Great St Andrew’s Church when the latter died in 1602, preached to the conversion of Richard Sibbes, who preached to the conversion of John Cotton, who preached to the conversion of John Preston. When Thomas Goodwin went up to Christ’s in 1613, aged twelve, the college boasted ‘six Fellows that were great Tutors, who professed Religion after the strictest sort, then called Puritans’, and a funeral sermon on repentance from Bainbridge, the Master, soon became the human means of Goodwin’s own conversion. Chaderton, Rogers, Hildersam, Perkins, Gouge, Baynes, Sibbes, Cotton, Preston, and Goodwin all gained role-model status among ‘affectionate practical’ pastor-evangelists. So the Cambridge movement progressed, maintaining spiritual depth and gathering numerical strength all the time. 

Sadly, though not surprisingly, young men who took their cue from these patriarchal figures had difficulty in finding pastoral charges. We can well imagine that few patrons in those days would want to offer incumbencies to preachers of righteousness and repentance as aggressive and uncompromising as these men sought to be. A plea to Parliment in 1586 from some Cambridge students calls for action in this matter:

It cannot be denied but this our Universitie doth flourish at this present in all kinds of good literature as much as at any time heretofore, the praise being given to God for the same; yet it cannot be denied likewise but that that part of us which have chosen the studie of the Sacred Scriptures and have prepared ourselves for the holie ministerie do find lesse lawfull entrance into the Church of God and preferment for our labours than in former times, a lamentable thing to be heard of in this gratious light of the Gospel. There are now in our Universitie of  

Cambridge … able men, furnished with sufficient gifts to teach the ignorant people, a common subject to be wrought upon in most places of this land, as partlie we know by experience, and partlie the generall complaints of the people do show, yet for all that, how fewe of us are called to this business with just and equall conditions, and not rather the unlearned ministers, the verie scumme of the people, preferred to the ruine of thousands of soules, to the shame of the Church of God, and the utter ruine of learning. For if we ourselves use some meanes to have entrance into a charge, the covetousnes of patrons is such, and so insatiable for the most part, that there is no waie by them but by simonie, perjurie, and afterwards almost plaine beggarie. So that, in this great want of labourers we stand idle in the market place all the day, for almost no man regardeth us to use our labours, so lamentable is the state of this our Church at this time. 

No official action was taken; but lectureships were endowed in many parishes to provide preaching-posts for these young Puritans, and thus the leaven of the gospel spread through England in the days of Elizabeth, James, and Charles.

2

Every movement of ideas needs its own literature, and pastoral Puritanism was no exception. Perkins, a gifted scholar with a flair for clarity and simplicity, was the pioneer at this point. In 1589 he started a series of popular books written in sermon style to promote Puritan piety: A treatise tending unto a declaration, whether a man be in a state of damnation, or in the estate of grace (1589); A Golden Chain (1590: a Calvinistic projection of the plan of salvation); Spiritual Desertions (1591); A Case of Conscience … how a man may know whether he be the child of God, or no (1592); Two treatises; of the nature and practice of repentance; of the conflict of the flesh and spirit (1593); and many more (in Perkins’ collected Works, which fill three folios, there are forty-seven separate items). 

Others followed where Perkins led. Richard Rogers produced a large work, Seven Treatises … leading and guiding to true happiness, both in this life, and in the life to come … the practice of Christianity … in the which, more particularly true Christians may learn how to lead a godly and comfortable life every day (1603; fifth edition, 1630; abridged version, The Practice of Christianity. Or, an Epitome of Seven Treatises, 1618). John Downame also wrote a folio, The Christian Warfare (1604). Greenham’s Works appeared in folio in 1599, Perkins’ in 1608–9; Dering’s were on sale in 1597. The folios were for ministers’ bookshelves, but for layfolk there were soon quartos and octavos (i.e., pocket-books) in abundance: Perkins’ separate works, already mentioned; the two books that formed Mrs Bunyan’s dowry, Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety (fortieth edition, 1640); The Ten Commandments by John Dod and Robert Cleaver (1603; nineteenth edition, 1635); and a vast number of expository sermons in topical series. England had had no devotional literature worth speaking of until this flow started; hence, writing at layman’s level, the same level at which they preached, the pastors were soon able to capture a very large readership, and the influence of their published works in the first half of the seventeenth century was far-reaching and profound. 

Some sense of the impact of Puritan books over two generations may be gained by comparing Greenham’s ministry at Dry Drayton with Baxter’s at Kidderminster. Greenham laboured for twenty years (1570–90) with virtually no fruit; Baxter worked for fourteen (1641–42, 1647–60), in a situation where ‘they had hardly ever had any lively serious preaching’, and saw the greater part of the town, which was about 800 families and 2,000 adults strong, make a meaningful profession of faith. ‘O what am I, a worthless Worm … that God should thus abundantly encourage me, when the Reverend Instructors of my Youth, did labour Fifty years together in one place, and could scarely say they had converted one two two of [i.e.,out of] their Parishes!’ The means used were essentially the same in both cases; Baxter too could say with truth that he spent his time ‘preaching Christ crucified unto my selfe and Country people’, both from the pulpit and in personal dealings with individuals; but Baxter’s England, leavened by two generations of Puritan preaching and religious writing, was a different place from Greenham’s. The fallow ground had been broken up, the seen sown faithfully over many decades, and now harvest time had come. In ministries like Baxter’s the vision of converted communities that had led men like Greenham and Rogers into their pastoral charges was finding fulfilment at last. 

Though, spiritually speaking, the harvest sun shone brightly in many parts of England during the Commonwealth years, storm clouds soon returned and the story of the ‘affectionate practical English writers’ ends not happily but in very dark shadows. The Puritans who came to power in the 1640s, for all their oneness of view about personal religion, could not agree politically (which was why Cromwell had to become a reluctant dictator, contrary to what he and most people desired). Again, though they were at one in seeking the glory of God in his church, they could not agree ecclesiastically (which was why Cromwell had to establish a frankly pluralist independency of a non-episcopal, non-Socinian, non-Roman type—an arrangement that satisfied very few).

Moreover, eccentricity and fanaticism came in to upset the Puritan apple-cart. Where the pastors had insisted that conscience must be controlled by the word of God, lay leaders now quoted Scripture to support the promptings of the light within. Where the pastors had taught the art of living on earth in the light of eternity, zealots now dreamed of seeing the kingdom of heaven set up in seventeenth-century England. Where the Puritans had exalted the office of the preacher as he declares God’s mind out of his word, people now treated every man bold and uninhibited enough to air his views in public as inspired. Where the preachers had explained that learning without the Holy Spirit will not give understanding of Scripture, education was now thought of as unfitting one to see the Bible’s meaning. And when the university-trained, theologically erudite Puritan pastors spoke against these tendencies, Quakers, Ranters, Muggletonians and many more told them they were quenching the Spirit. 

Baxter saw something satanic in the field-day the printers were having in all of this. ‘I confess,’ he wrote in 1653, ‘I am … apprehensive of the luxurious fertility of licentiousness of the press of late, as being a design of the enemy to bury and overwhelm … those judicious, pious, excellent writings, that before were so commonly read by the people.’ Confusion and instability, both political and spiritual, were spreading; the Puritan revival was burning itself out; and after Cromwell died, nothing seemed to be under control any more. Restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England was the inevitable reaction, and in 1660 this duly took place. 

For the pastors, the result was misery. The vengeful, fear-driven Clarendon Code ejected and repressed them. The ministry which they conscientiously maintained outside the Church of England was made illegal, so that it pitchforked them into prison. They saw the Church of England surrender to latitudinarianism, legalism, and laxity in faith and morals as the country blindly aped its Merry Monarch. The great pastoral theologians—John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, John Howe, Richard Baxter, Stephen Charnock—wrote much of their best material during these years, and Bunyan’s wonderful allegories date from this period also. But because the pastors could not totally assent to the Church of England as restored, the universities were barred to them and to young nonconformists with them, and this meant that they could not effectively reproduce their kind. Hence the organised nonconformity that staggered into daylight when toleration came (1689) fell painfully short in stature of the Puritanism that had preceded it. When John Howe, the last of the giants, died in 1705, Puritanism was over.

3

Among Puritan devotional writers Richard Baxter was from the first acknowledged as outstanding for the ‘heavenliness’ both of his matter and of his manner. Clarity and energy, order and ardour, wisdom and warmth, breadth and depth, ministerial faithfulness and magisterial authority come together in all his ‘affectionate practical’ productions. With his first book, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, which he began to write in order to direct his thoughts upward when he thought he was on his deathbed, he hit the ground running: not only because the book centres, fair and square, on that which was always central to the godliness that he lived and taught, namely the hope of glory strengthening the heart, but because the sublime rush of his rhetoric transcended anything that Puritan stylists had achieved up to that time (1649). Elizabethan Puritan prose, like most of the rest of Elizabethan prose, is pedestrian; early seventeenth-century writers like Richard Sibbes, Robert Bolton, and John Preston had more colour and vividness; but Baxter’s high-pressure eloquence on paper put all his peers in the shade. His book ‘Of Rest’, as he used to call it, became a bestseller, and catapulted him overnight to prominence as a writer on issues of spiritual life. 

Old James Usher, Bible chronologist, alp of learning and ex-Archbishop of Armagh, was one in heart with the ‘affectionate practical’ school, and much appreciated Baxter’s quality as an exponent of devotional truth. Meeting Baxter in London in 1654, he put before him a project for the furtherance of religion in England which he judged Baxter supremely fitted to carry out.

In that short acquaintance I had with that reverend learned servant of Christ, Bishop Usher, he was oft, from first to last, importuning me to write a directory for the several ranks of professed Christians, which might distinctly give each one their portion; beginning with the unconverted, and then proceeding to the babes in Christ, and then to the strong; and mixing some special helps against the several sins that they are addicted to. By the suddenness of motion at our first congress, I perceived that it was in his mind before; and I told him, both that it was abundantly done by many already, and that his unacquaintedness with my weakness, might make him think me fitter for it than I was. But this did not satisfy him, but still he made it his request. 

Three years later, after Usher’s death, Baxter took the task in hand. In 1657 he wrote:

…… I resolved, by God’s assistance, to proceed in the order following. First, to speak to the impenitent, unconverted sinners, who are not yet so much as purposing to turn.… And with these, I thought, a wakening persuasive was a more necessary means.… My next work must be for those that have some purposes to turn, and are about the work, to direct them for a thorough and a true conversion, that they miscarry not in the birth. The third part must be directions for the younger and weaker sort of Christians, that they may be established, built up, and persevere. The fourth part, directions for lapsed and backsliding Christians, for their safe recovery. Besides this, there is intended some short persuasions and directions against some special errors of the times, and against some common, killing sins. As for directions to doubting, troubled consciences, that is done already. And then the last part is intended more especially for families, as such, directing the several relations in their duties. 

In pursuance of this scheme, Baxter published during the next few years A Treatise of Conversion (1657): A Call to the Unconverted (1658); Directions and Persuasions to a Sound Conversion (1658); Directions for Weak, Distempered Christians (1669); Crucifying the World by the Cross of Christ (1658); Catholic Unity (1659); Self-Denial (1660); The Vain Religion of the Formal Hypocrite Detected (1660); The Mischiefs of Self-ignorance (1662); The Divine Life (1664); The Life of Faith (1670); while the family vade-mecum swelled into the enormous Christian Directory (1673), ‘perhaps the best body of practical divinity that is extant in our own or any other tongue’, plus the shorter Poor Man’s Family Book (1674) and The Catechizing of Families (1683). This series is a peak point in Puritan devotional writing, and will serve as a convenient orientation point for those seeking to find their way around in the wide world of Puritan spiritual teaching. 

4

Our historical survey has indicated the overall aim and character of what the ‘affectionate practical English writers’ wrote. A reader’s introduction to them and their books now follows. Two general points will direct us to approach them rightly.

First, we should appreciate that Puritan practical theology was the envy of continental Protestants. Fighting for their theological life against the Roman Counter-reformation, racked and torn by incessant wars, and with their best minds wholly committed to controversy, Reformed and Lutheran churches had never been free for deep thought about spiritual life. ‘It is long ago,’ wrote Baxter, in the ‘Advertisement’ to his Christian Directory, 

since many foreign divines subscribed a request, that the English would give them in Latin a sum of our practical theology, which Mr. [John] Dury sent over, and twelve great divines of ours wrote to Bishop Usher … to draw them up a form or method. But it was never done among them all. And it is said that Bishop [George] Downame at last undertaking it, died in the attempt. Had this been done, it is like my labour had been spared. But being undone, I have thus made this essay. 

How much continental churches valued Puritan practical theology appears from the number of translations they made of it. The Practice of Piety went into a string of European languages. Perkins’ English works were put into Latin, Dutch, Spanish, Irish (Erse) and Welsh. Baxter was read as far afield as Poland and Hungary, and of translations of his works he wrote in 1691: 

About Twelve of them are Translated into the German tongue; and the Lutherans say they have done good. Some are translated into French; one into the language of the New-England Americans by Mr. John Eliot. Multitudes say, they have been the means of their conversion, and more of their information, confirmation and consolation. And the chief benefit that I expect by them to the world is when I am dead and gone. 

The book translated into American was the Call to the Unconverted, the ‘wakening persuasive’ of which Baxter wrote elsewhere: 

In a little more than a year there were about twenty thousand of them printed by my own consent, and about ten thousand since, besides many thousands by stolen impressions.… Through God’s mercy I have had information of almost whole households converted by this small book, which I set so light by: And as if all this in England, Scotland and Ireland were not mercy enough to me, God (since I was silenced) hath sent it on his message to many beyond the seas; for when Mr. Eliot had printed the Bible in the Indians language, he next translated this.… And yet God would make some farther use of it; for Mr. Stoop the Pastor of the French church was pleased to translate it into elegant French, and print it … and I hope it will not be unprofitable there; nor in Germany, where it is printed in Dutch. 

Realising that Puritan practical writings were valued all over Europe (not to mention Scotland and New England!) in their own day should prepare us to learn to value them too.

Second, we should appreciate that this devotional literature, though popular in the sense of being expressed simply and not presupposing any technical knowledge, is not popular in the sense of being crude, or frothy, or theologically inept, or ill-informed, or ill-digested, or incompetent in any other way. The modern snobbery of learning whereby professional scholars refuse to popularise and popularisers are expected to apologise for not being professional scholars was not a seventeenth-century syndrome. Puritan authors were learned, strong-minded, well-read, scholarly men in the tradition of Perkins, whom Thomas Fuller rightly hailed as the pioneer who ‘first humbled the towering speculations of philosophers into practice and morality’, but who in his own day was also known throughout Western Europe as a top Reformed theologian of the Bezan sort. To bring what they knew about God down to the level of ordinary people in sermons and in print seemed to Puritan clergy a supreme privilege and a prime duty, and they saw their practical writing—sermon material, mostly—as no less important than anything else that they wrote. 

As all the world knows, they were great controversialists on questions of doctrine as well as of church order, and saw this as essential to their ministry. Pastors, they said, are responsible for rebuking heresy and defending truth, lest their flocks be misled and thereby enfeebled, if not worse. Biblical truth is nourishing, human error is killing, so spiritual shepherds must guard sound doctrine at all costs. As John Owen put it:

It is incumbent on them [pastors] to preserve the truth or doctrine of the gospel received and professed in the church, and to defend it against all opposition. This is one principal end of the ministry.… And the sinful neglect of this duty is that which was the cause of most of the pernicious heresies and errors that have infested and ruined the church. Those whose duty it was to preserve the doctrine of the gospel entire in the public profession of it have, many of them ‘spoken perverse things, to draw away disciples after them’. Bishops, presbyters, public teachers, have been the ringleaders in heresies. Wherefore this duty, especially at this time, when the fundamental truths of the gospel are on all sides impugned, from all sorts of adversaries, is in an especial manner to be attended unto. 

But controversy, though a painful necessity when dangerous error was around, had no value save as a prophylactic against evil. Only direct exposition and application of truth would edify in a positive way. It should not, therefore, be thought strange that Puritan intellectuals and academics should put their best efforts into practical writing, view the result as the crown of their achievement, and expect it to prove more useful than anything else they did.

Realising that behind the studied simplicity of Puritan practical books lies the care and competence of brilliant and deeply learned theologians should prepare us to rate this literature at its true worth.

Books are communications from their authors to their readers, and what the authors have to communicate depends on who and what they are themselves. Five positive qualities made the Puritan authors what they were and gave them the message that they still have for those who read them today.

In the first place, they were, as we have seen, physicians of the soul. They valued God’s revealed truth for its healing power in sinners’ lives, and purely theoretical discussions seemed to them false to the true nature of theology. Perkins spoke for them all when he defined theology as ‘the science of living blessedly for ever’. ‘Blessed life ariseth from the knowledge of God, Ioh. [John] 17:3.… ’ he added. So theology is essentially a practical matter, and is best studied with a practical end directly—existentially, we might say—in view. Baxter’s remarks apropos of his bad health in early manhood are significant here: 

Thus was I long kept with the calls of approaching Death at one Ear, and the Questionings of a doubtful conscience at the other! and since then I have found that this method of God’s was very wise, and no other was so like to have tended to my good.… It set me upon that Method of my Studies, which since then I have found the benefit of, though at the time I was not satisfied with myself. It caused me first to seek God’s Kingdom and His Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing needful; and to determine first of my Ultimate End; by which I was engaged to choose out and prosecute all other Studies, but as meant to that End: Therefore Divinity was not only carried on with the rest of my Studies with an equal hand, but had always the first and chiefest place. And it caused me to study Practical Divinity first, in the most Practical Books, in a Practical Order; doing all purposely for the informing and reforming of my own Soul. So that I had read a multitude of our English Practical Treatises, before I had ever read any other Bodies of Divinity, than Ursine and Amesius..…  

Elsewhere Baxter recommends the same order to others, and in doing so he speaks for the ‘affectionate practical’ writers as a body. God’s revealed truth, they maintained, is for health-giving practice; therefore it is best studied in a practical way; therefore pastors must preach and teach it in that way. Gospel doctrine is to be obeyed; truth is to be, not just acknowledged, but done, in the sense of doing what it requires. So the most biblical theologian will be the most practical theologian, and vice versa; and the preaching style, with practical applications and challenges at every turn, will be the most biblical manner of theologising.

Truth obeyed, said the Puritans, will heal. The word fits, because we are all spiritually sick—sick through sin, which is a wasting and killing disease of the heart. The unconverted are sick unto death; those who have come to know Christ and been born again continue sick, but they are gradually getting better as the work of grace goes on in their lives. The church, however, is a hospital in which nobody is completely well, and anyone can relapse at any time. Pastors no less than others are weakened by pressure from the world, the flesh, and the devil, with their lures of profit, pleasure, and pride, and, as we shall see more fully in a moment, pastors must acknowledge that they the healers remain sick and wounded and therefore need to apply the medicines of Scripture to themselves as well as to the sheep whom they tend in Christ’s name. All Christians need Scripture truth as medicine for their souls at every stage, and the making and accepting of applications is the administering and swallowing of it. The ability to apply God’s truth therapeuticaly implies the prior ability to diagnose spiritual ill-health, and diagnostic ability is learned as much by discovering and keeping track of one’s own sins and weaknesses as by any other means. The frequency with which Puritan pastors lament their own sinfulness should not be dismissed as a trivial cultural convention; it is in fact an assurance to us, as it was to their own first hearers and readers, that they know what they are talking about when they ‘rip up’ our consciences (their phrase), diagnose our spiritual diseases, and prescribe a regimen of biblical directives for our cure. Their own self-examination and self-acquaintance before God is a large part of the secret of the skill with which they probe hearts, nail sins, and show us how Christ’s healing power may rescue us from moral and spiritual evil. 

In the second place, they were expositors to the conscience. Their practical writings are always expositions of Scripture, directed to the ends for which Scripture is profitable: ‘doctrine [teaching], reproof, correction, and instruction [nurture, training] in righteousness’ (2 Tim 3:16). The Puritan hermeneutic, learned from Scripture itself (more precisely, from the New Testament use of the Old), saw the written word as showing us the nature and mutual relations of God and men, the way in which a covenant-love relation becomes real in Christ, and how to live it out once it has become real. The Puritan expository method was to state the doctrines—that is, the principles concerning the God-and-us relationship—that their texts yielded, and then to apply them. That is why the writers were termed ‘practical’. Their applications were directed to the conscience, that is, self-judging practical reason: reason weighing questions of one’s duty and one’s desert and one’s actual relationship to God in each present moment. The Puritans believed that this was the scriptural way to expound Scripture, and they looked to the Holy Spirit to honour it by giving understanding and conviction of the divine truth of what was said, by triggering the process of self-judgement, and by calling forth appropriate responses to the verdict that was reached. These responses would range over the whole area of faith, hope, and love; repentance, humility, and self-distrust; self-denial, self-devotion, and obedience; praise, thanksgiving, adoration and petition; plus the various dispositional ‘affections’ (not just waves of passing emotion, but set inclinations of heart with a feeling-tone) that contribute to one’s actual cleaving to God and communing with God. Their stress on the importance of these dispositions, and their constant efforts to evoke and strengthen them (joy, sorrow, desire, fear, and so on, all directed to their proper objects), explains why the writers were called ‘affectionate’. 

Built into the Puritan hermeneutic was the belief, argued so successfully by the Reformers that their English successors could in practice take it for granted, that justification by faith through Christ by grace is a God-given grid or prism through which all Scripture should be passed in order fully to see what light and truth it has for us. William Tyndale, who on this as on many other matters may justly be called the grandfather of Puritan practical theology, spelt out this contention as follows: 

Which two points, that is to wit, the law spiritually interpreted, how that all is damnable sin that is not unfeigned love out of the ground and bottom of the heart … and that the promises be given unto a repenting soul that thirsteth and cryeth for them out of the fatherly mercy of God, through our faith only, without all deserving of our deeds or merits of our works, but for Christ’s sake alone, and for the merits and deserving of his works … which two points, I say, if they be written in thine heart, are the keys which open all the scriptures unto thee.…  

Directions for the study of Scripture follow. Tyndale adduces 2 Timothy 3:16, Romans 15:4 and 1 Corinthians 10:11 and proceeds: 

Seek therefore in the Scripture as thou readest it, first the law, what God commandeth us to do; and secondarily the promises … in Christ Jesus our Lord. Then seek ensamples, first of comfort, how God purgeth all them that submit themselves to walk in his ways, in the purgatory of tribulation … never suffering any of them to perish that cleave fast to his promises. And finally note the ensamples which are written to fear the flesh, that we sin not; that is, how God suffereth the ungodly and wicked sinners … to continue in their wickedness … they harden their hearts against the truth, and God destroyeth them utterly. 

Again, he instructs

that thou takest the stories and lives which are contained in the Bible for sure and undoubted ensamples that God will so deal with us unto the world’s end. 

Once those principles are applied, says Tyndale, Scripture is found to be self-interpreting: ‘the Scripture giveth record to itself, and ever expoundoth itself by another open text.’ The key is justification by faith, and the door (as we should expect) is the Epistle to the Romans. ‘A light and way unto the whole Scripture’, Tyndale calls it, and translates Luther’s verdict upon it: ‘a bright light, and sufficient to give light unto all the Scripture.’ These principles of exegesis were handed on to the Puritan brotherhood by Perkins, who laid it down that if one began one’s study with Romans, and followed it with John’s Gospel, one had the key to the entire Bible; analysis shows that these principles have virtually axiomatic status in all Puritan exegesis. 

Puritan accounts of faith—the faith that brings justification, and by which Christians live each day—are not in every respect uniform. All the writers agree that faith is more than bare belief of known facts, but when they seek to show what more it is their definitions diverge somewhat. Perkins, knowing how the Reformers drew on Scripture to correlate faith with the Spirit’s witness to God’s promise, find faith’s essence in applicatory assurance, which he sees as an exercise of the mind; Ames, his disciple, knowing how the Reformers also drew on Scripture to present the living Christ, crucified and risen, as faith’s object, and evidently influenced by the voluntarist view of faith held by the Arminians with whom he constantly debated, finds faith’s essence in receiving and relying on Christ in personal, covenantal terms, which he sees as an exercise of the will; and most Puritan accounts after Ames, if not before, include both elements. But all the Puritans see faith as involving conscience, the judging of oneself in God’s presence by the light of biblical truth, and therefore they structure all their biblical expositions, designed as these are to induce and nurture faith, as sustained addresses and appeals to the conscience. Typical as an indication of their conscious mental discipline in this matter is John Owen’s directional guideline at the start of his large and complex treatise on The Doctrine of Justification by Faith: 

It is the practical direction of the consciences of men, in their application unto God by Jesus Christ, for deliverance from the curse due unto the apostate state, and peace with him … that is alone to be designed in the handling of this doctrine.… And whereas we cannot either safely or usefully treat of this doctrine, but with respect unto the same ends for which it is declared, and whereunto it is applied, in the Scripture, we should not … be turned aside from attending unto this case and its resolution, in all our discourses on this subject. For it is the direction, satisfaction, and peace of the consciences of men, and not the curiosity of notions or subtlety of disputations, which it is our duty to design. 

Not only in connection with justification, but at every point, first to last, the Puritan account of faith’s focus, exercise, and fruits is structured in terms of conscience receiving God’s word and by its light judging how God sees one and how through Christ one may or does stand related to him in covenant mercy. This explains why the writers in their own day were regularly called ‘experimental’, and what they themselves meant when they spoke of Christian ‘experience’. They were not using the word to denote all states of consciousness and emotion as such; they were using it with careful precision to signify all that is involved in living the life of faith through the exercise of conscience on God’s word. Nor, when they talked about experience in this sense, was it their own experience that they took as their reference-point; instead, they read the Bible as a book of normative experience, no less than of normative doctrine. And here, in fact, they were pursuing an insight that is a peculiar treasure of Augustinian biblicism, whether in Augustine himself or Bernard or the Reformers or the original Puritans or such latter-day Puritans as C.H. Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. What Augustinians see, as others often do not, is that those biblical documents in which the writers give their teaching by telling of their experience must set standards of spiritual experience, just as they do of divine truth, and must be expounded in a way that brings out and enforces the one as much as the other. If, in particular, apostolic teaching is to be set forth as definitive, so must apostolic experience be, for the apostles regularly recount their doctrine in terms of its effect in their own lives, and the response of their own consciences to it: again and again their message and their experience are stated in terms of each other. (Think of Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and 1 John in particular for illustrations of this.) Here is a further matter about which it is proper to say: What God has joined, let not man put asunder. 

In this regard the Puritans were in fact exemplary. Studying the New Testament Epistles, the Psalms, and the ‘ensamples’ of faith and faithfulness and their opposites in both Testaments, they built up alongside their full formulations of the doctrine of God’s grace correspondingly full formulations of the distinctive experience of faith which this doctrine is intended to produce; and just as they learned to refute heresies and correct misstatements that were distorting the apostolic gospel, so they learned to diagnose and prescribe treatment, not like quack doctors, ‘blind Empyrikes’ as Holland calls them, who are even more of a menace in soul-therapy than they are in bodily medicine, but as true physicians with a proper theoretical basis for their diagnosis and for the remedies they offer. Those who see the Reformers as having given the church classical formulations of the doctrine of God’s saving grace should hail the Puritans as classical exponents, through their understanding of faith and conscience, of the application of that doctrine to human spiritual needs. If the Reformers are classic theologians, then the Puritans are classic pastors and spiritual guides, as any who read them will soon find.

In the third place, the Puritans were educators of the mind. This point relates to their teaching method. Much thought was given in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to educational theory, and the Puritan pastors as a body had a well planned out educational technique, at which we shall now glance. 

The starting-point was their certainty that the mind must be instructed and enlightened before faith and obedience become possible. ‘Ignorance is almost every error,’ wrote Baxter, and one of his favourite maxims about preaching was ‘first light—then heat’. Heat without light, pulpit passion without pedagogic precision, would be no use to anyone. Unwillingness on the part of church attenders to learn the faith and accept instruction from sermons was a sure sign of insincerity. ‘If ever you would be converted, labour for true knowledge,’ Baxter told his working-class congregation, and when they did as a modern congregation would, and objected, ‘We are not learned, and, therefore, God will not require much knowledge at our hands,’ he replied as follows: 

(1) Every man that has a reasonable soul should know God that made him; and know the end for which he should live; and know the way to his eternal happiness, as well as the learned: have you not souls to save or lose as well as learned have? (2) God hath made plain His will to you in His Word; He hath given you teachers and many other helps; so that you have no excuse if you are ignorant; you must know how to be christians if you are no scholars. You may hit the way to heaven in English, though you have no skill in Hebrew or Greek; but in the darkness of ignorance you can never hit it. (3) … if you think, therefore, that you may be excused from knowledge, you may as well think that you may be excused from love and from all obedience; for there can be none of this without knowledge.… Were you but as willing to get the knowledge of God and heavenly things as you are to know how to work in your trade, you would have set yourself to it before this day, and you would have spared no cost or pains till you had got it. But you account seven years little enough to learn your trade, and will not bestow one day in seven in diligent learning the matters of your salvation. 

And again:

If heaven be too high for you to think on, and to provide for, it will be too high for you ever to possess. 

All the Puritans regarded religious feeling and pious emotion without knowledge as worse than useless. Only when the truth was being felt was emotion in any way desirable. When men felt and obeyed the truth they knew, it was the work of the Spirit of God, but when they were swayed by feeling without knowledge, it was a sure sign that the devil was at work, for feeling divorced from knowledge and urgings to action in darkness of mind were both as ruinous to the soul as was knowledge without obedience. So the teaching of truth was the pastor’s first task, as the learning of it was the layman’s.

But how was truth to be taught? Principally from the pulpit, by the systematic analysis and application of biblical texts, all of which were approached as utterances of the Holy Spirit. The basic method was set out by Perkins in his Art of Prophecying. The preacher must serve his text by becoming the mouthpiece for its message. He should first paraphrase it, give the ‘connexion’ (context) and point out its structure and component parts, that is, ‘divide’ it: all to make sure that his readers understood the biblical writer’s general meaning and scope. Then he should extract from it one or more doctrinal propositions or theses which the text asserted, implied, presupposed or instanced. Arthur Hildersam, for instance, ‘raises’ from Psalm 51:1–2 the following three ‘doctrines’: 

That God’s people, when they are in any distress, must fly to God by prayer, and seek comfort that way; That pardon of sin is more to be desired than deliverance from the greatest judgments that can befall us; That the best of God’s servants have no other ground of hope to find favour with God, for the pardon of their sins, but only in the mercy of the Lord. 

John Owen, on the second half of Romans 8:13, raises these three: 

The choicest believers, who are assuredly free from the condemning power of sin, ought yet to make it their business all their days to mortify the indwelling power of sin; The Holy Ghost … only is sufficient for this work …; The vigour and power and comfort of our spiritual life depends on our mortification of the deeds of the flesh. 

Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted is an extended exposition of seven doctrines derived from Ezekiel 33:11: 

It is the unchangeable law of God, that the wicked shall live, if they will but turn; God takes pleasure in men’s conversion and salvation, but not in their death or damnation …; This is a most certain truth, which … God … hath cofirmed … solemny by His oath; The Lord doth redouble His commands and persuasions to the wicked to turn; The Lord condescendeth to reason the case with them, and asketh the wicked, why they die? If after all this, the wicked will not return, it is not long of God that they perish, but of themselves … they die because they will die. 

The doctrines, once stated, are to be ‘proved’ by further analysis of the text, plus appeal to other passages of Scripture; they must be ‘cleared’ against possible misunderstandings and difficulties and ‘confirmed’ against objections that might arise in the listeners’ minds. ‘Doctrine’ must then lead on to application, or ‘use’. This was usually subdivided into several particular ‘uses’, such as the use of information, whereby the truth would be applied to instruct the mind and mould the judgement, so that a man might learn to conform his thoughts and opinions to the revealed mind of God; the use of exhortation or dehortation, whereby the listener was shown in the light of the doctrine what to do and what not to do; the uses of lamentation and persuasion, whereby the preacher sought to impress on his hearers the blind folly of those who fail to respond to God’s grace as set forth in the doctrine and to rouse them to lay hold of it for themselves; the use of comfort, whereby the doctrine was shown to be the answer to doubt and uncertainty; the use of trial, or self-examination, whereby the preacher calls the congregation to judge of their own spiritual condition in the light of the doctrine (which may state one of the marks of a regenerate man, or some Christian privilege or duty); and so on. The details of this expository method might be varied, but it was always variation on the theme of doctrine plus use. ‘It would be an uncouth sermon,’ commented John Owen, ‘that should be without doctrine and use.’ 

Application must always be relevant, otherwise it is hollow histrionics, and since congregations contain people in many different spiritual conditions a wide range of applications must constantly be made. There must be something of application for everyone. Perkins offers preachers a sevenfold pastoral grid for planning application. First, he says, there are ‘unbelievers who are both ignorant and unteachable’; the strategy with them must be one of ‘reproving in them some notorious sin, that being pricked in heart and terrified, they may become teachable’. Second, ‘some are teachable, but yet ignorant’: they need to be taught the basic gospel, preferably by use of a question-and-answer catechism (a much favoured Puritan means of instruction) to supplement sermons. Third, ‘some have knowledge, but are not as yet humbled’: these need to hear how God’s law condemns them. Fourth, ‘some are humbled’: these need to hear ‘the doctrine of faith and repentance, and the comforts of the Gospel’. Fifth, ‘some do believe’: these need grounding in ‘1. The Gospel touching justification, sanctification and perseverance. 2. The law without the curse, whereby they may be taught to bring forth fruits of new obedience beseeming repentance.’ Sixth, ‘some are fallen’ from true faith or true righteousness: these need ‘that doctrine which do cross their error … demonstrated and inculcated (or beaten upon them) together with the doctrine of repentance, and that with a brotherly affection’. Seventh, ‘there is a mingled people. A mixed people are the assemblies of our Churches.’ (This was true. Church attendance was required by law under Elizabeth, on pain of the sizeable fine of one shilling for a first conviction and worse if the offence of non-attendance was repeated. This law, the purpose of which was to winkle out Catholic recusants, gave ministers a captive audience but not always an alert one.) What to do here? Let preachers ring the changes on all these types of application on a regular basis. Each will be right for some hearers, and the well of applicatory material will never run dry. Many forms and levels of ‘home-coming’ application (the adjective is from Alexander Whyte) can be drawn by inference from just about any text with which the preacher is dealing. 

Because this was so, and because so many distinct points of doctrine could be derived from each text as well, and because doctrines, once introduced, were felt to need full and thorough statement lest they be misunderstood, Puritan preachers might ‘stand’ on the same text for many sermons together, and stay with a single passage for months and years at a time. The result in print looks daunting to the modern eye: the array of numbered headings and sub-headings is forbidding, and one easily loses one’s way. One reason why these expositions floor us at first is that they are controlled by a much stronger interest in the Bible as a whole than we are used to. Where we concentrate on focusing the flow of each passage with minimum reference to other Scriptures, Puritan expositors labour throughout to show how each passage reflects and links up with the teaching of the rest of the word of God. Then a second reason why we are floored is that whereas our way of presenting a topic is to assume total ignorance of it and build it up inductively from a chosen starting-point, the Puritan way was to assume some awareness of it and break it down by cross-sectional analysis. The claim of Peter Ramus, a sixteenth-century French Protestant educationist, that dichotomising analysis was the best way to understand any subject, led many Puritans to ‘divide’ texts and spell out themes that way in the pulpit, in the belief that this would make everything clear and memorable. One hopes that for their own hearers it did, but there is no denying that for us to read the Puritans’ preached treatises today is initially hard. Jotting down the headings as one comes to them does, however, help greatly to get the structure of their presentations into one’s mind. 

Puritan analytical method accounts for the length of Puritan expositions—Joseph Caryl’s 6,000 quarto pages on Job; 2,000 plus in folio on Hebrews from John Owen; Hildersam’s 152 sermons on Psalm 51:1–7; over 800 pages of small print in all modern editions of William Gurnall’s treatment of Ephesians 6:10–20, The Christian in Complete Armour; et cetera! What led the Puritans into such long-windedness was their passion for thoroughness in extracting all doctrines and developing all applications. Clearly, once they started drawing out implications and applications they found it hard to stop. Yet their variety of matter is great, repetition is minimal, the sense that they begin in the middle rather than at the beginning is soon overcome, and interest once gained does not fade. You doubt that? Taste and see! 

In the fourth place, the Puritans were enforcers of the truth. This point relates to their way with words. They turned their back on the airs and graces which won ‘witty’ preachers reputations at Oxford and Cambridge and court. They chose instead a plain, straightforward style, solemn yet lively and homely, for their messages; and their plainness was with power. Perkins caused comment in Cambridge by resolutely preaching in this simple lucid way; some who heard him wrote him off as ‘a barren empty fellow, and a passing mean scholar’, but when Thomas Goodwin went up to Cambridge in 1613 he found the memory of Perkins’ ministry still vivid, though the man himself had been dead eleven years. At first Goodwin set his heart on becoming a ‘witty’ preacher like Dr Senhouse of St John’s, whose sermons were ‘the eminentest farrago of all sorts of flowers of wit that are found in any of the fathers, poets, histories, similitudes, or whatever has the elegancy of wit in it’. After his conversion, however, he renounced such self-display. 

I came to this resolved principle, that I would preach wholly and altogether sound and wholesome words, without affectation of wit and vanity of eloquence.… I … have continued in that purpose and practice these three-score years [Goodwin was writing at the end of his life]. I have preached what I thought was truly edifying, either for conversion, or bringing them up to eternal life. 

This was typical. The Puritans as a body were clear that the preacher’s job is to display Christ’s grace, not his own learning, and to design his sermons so that they bring benefit to others rather than applause to himself. Therefore Puritan preaching revolved around the three Rs of biblical religion—ruin, redemption, regeneration—and clothed these gospel truths in the vivid dress of studied simplicity.

In the preface to his Treatise on Conversion, Richard Baxter seeks to disarm mockers of the ‘plain style’ by explaining that in the sermons of which the treatise is composed ‘I was to preach not only to a popular auditory, but to the most ignorant, sottish part of that auditory’. He continues thus: 

The plainest words are the profitablest oratory in the weightiest matters. Fineness is for ornament, and delicacy for delight; … when they are conjunct, it is hard for the … hearer or reader to observe the matter of ornament and delicacy, and not to be carried from the matter … and to hear or read a neat, concise, sententious discourse, and not to be hurt by it; for it usually hindereth the due operation of the matter, and keeps it from the heart, and stops it in the fancy, and makes it seem as light as the style. We use not to stand upon compliment or precedency, when we run to quench a common fire, nor to call men out to it by an eloquent speech. If we see a man fall into fire or water, we stand not upon mannerliness in plucking him out … I shall never forget the relish of my soul, when God first warmed my heart with these matters, and when I was newly entered into seriousness in religion: when I read such a book as Bishop [Lancelot] Andrewes’ Sermons, or heard such kind of preaching, I felt no life in it; methought they did but play with holy things.… But it was the plain and pressing downright preacher, that only seemed to me to be in good sadness … and to speak with life, and light, and weight: and it was such kind of writings that were wonderfully pleasant and savoury to my soul….And yet I must confess, that though I can better digest exactness and brevity, than I could so long ago, yet I as much value seriousness and plainness: and I feel in myself in reading or hearing, a despising of that wittiness as proud foolery, which savoureth of levity, and tendeth to evaporate weighty truths, and turn them all into very fancies, and keep them from the heart. As a stage-player, or morris-dancer, differs from a soldier or a king, so do these preachers from the true and faithful ministers of Christ: and as they deal liker to players than preachers in the pulpit, so usually their hearers do rather come to play with a sermon, than to attend a message from the God of heaven about the life or death of their souls. 

Baxter’s ‘noble negligence’ of style, of which the quotation displays some touches, should not be taken to indicate that Puritan prose was ever slipshod. Owen’s Latinised style is tortuously exact, as was Goodwin’s crabbed ‘familiar’ style; Baxter and Bunyan write with a force and pungency that little if any religious prose since their day has matched, let alone surpassed; while William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Thomas Watson, Thomas Brooks, Thomas Manton, and William Gurnall (to look no further) are models of tidy lucidity, all of them save Perkins overflowing with vivid analogies and illustrations. By the standards of the day their homespun forthrightness was no eloquence at all, but it was a deliberately chosen idiom, the rationale of which was well if sententiously expressed by John Flavel as follows:

A crucified style best suits the preachers of a crucified Christ.… Prudence will choose words that are solid, rather than florid.… Words are but servants to matter. An iron key, fitted to the wards of the lock, is more useful than a golden one that will not open the door to the treasures.… Prudence will cast away a thousand fine words for one that is apt to penetrate the conscience and reach the heart. 

It will be found that Puritan plainness works in this way for the modern reader, just as it did for the preachers’ own contemporaries. We, too, experience it as a channel of God’s unction and power, and we can forgive occasional lapses into diffuseness and redundancy. ‘I confess my memory often lets slip the passages that I have before written, and in that forgetfulness I write them again: but I make no great matter of it,’ declared Baxter with captivating candour; ‘the writing of the same thing is safe to the reader, and why then should it be grievous to me?’ There’s no answer to that! 

In the fifth place, the Puritans were men of the Spirit; lovers of the Lord, keepers of his law, and self-squanderers in his service, which are in every age the three main elements of the truly Spirit-filled life. Baxter’s Reformed Pastor opens by admonishing God’s shepherds as follows: 

Take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of that saving grace of God which you offer to others … be also careful that your graces are kept in vigorous and lively exercise, and that you preach to yourselves the sermons which you study, before you preach them to others … watch therefore over your own hearts: keep out lusts and passions, and worldly inclinations; keep up the life of faith, and love, and zeal; be much at home, and much with God … take heed to yourselves, lest your example contradict your doctrine … lest you unsay with your lives, what you say with your tongues.… We must study as hard how to live well, as how to preach well. We must think and think again, how to compose our lives, as may most tend to men’s salvation, as well as our sermons.…  

This was what the great Puritans in fact did, and their writings bear witness to the quality of their own Christian living. ‘A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul,’ wrote John Owen. ‘And he that doth not feed on and thrive in the digestion of the food which he provides for others will scarce make it savoury unto them; yea, he knows not but that the food he hath provided may be poison, unless he have really tasted of it himself. If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us.’ Perkins had said: ‘Good words are vain where there is no good life. Let not Ministers think that their golden words shall do so much good as their leaden lives shall do hurt.… As no man is more honourable than a learned and holy minister, so none is more contemptible in this world, none more miserable for that to come than he who by his loose and lewd life doth scandalize his doctrine.’ And Calvin had said very bluntly: ‘It were better for him [the preacher] to break his neck going up into the pulpit, if he does not take pains to be the first to follow God.’ 

The Puritan teachers saw this to be true, and acted accordingly. Pre-eminently, they were holy men, and the authority that their printed words carry is the authority not just of Scripture in itself, as the word of God, but of Scripture in experience—their own experience—as the power of God, through what they recognised as the illuminating and applying agency of the Holy Spirit. Of the doctrine of justification Owen wrote:

Unto him that would treat of it in a due manner, it is required that he weigh every thing he asserts in his own mind and experience, and not dare to propose that unto others which he doth not abide by himself, in the most intimate recesses of his mind, under his nearest approaches unto God, in his surprisals with dangers, in deep afflictions, in his preparations for death, and in his most humble contemplations of the infinite distance between God and him. 

The same applied, so the Puritans perceived, to all doctrines. Accordingly it was out of the exercise of their own hearts and consciences at every point over the truth they had to teach that the preachers addressed the hearts and consciences of others. Thus they fulfilled Paul’s formula that ‘as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ’ (2 Cor 2:17). 

Spiritual authority is hard to pin down in words, but we recognise it when we meet it. It is a product compounded of conscientious faithfulness to the Bible; vivid perception of God’s reality and greatness; inflexible desire to honour and please him; deep self-searching and radical self-denial; adoring intimacy with Christ; generous compassion manward; and forthright simplicity, God-taught and God-wrought, adult in its knowingness while childlike in its directness. The man of God has authority as he bows to divine authority, and the pattern of God’s power in him is the baptismal pattern of being supernaturally raised from under burdens that feel like death.

The great Puritans lived out this pattern in their own day as they battled against poor health, circumstantial distractions and distresses, and most of all their own sluggish hearts so as to preach the gospel ‘with life, and light, and weight’, and we who read three and a half centuries later what they prepared for their own pulpits (for that, as we have seen, is what most of the Puritan material is) will find that their authority still comes through to us. The Reformers left to the church magisterial expositions of what our gracious God does for us; the Puritan legacy is equally authoritative declarations of what that same God does in us. To turn to the works of the ‘affectionate practical English writers’ is like entering a new world; one’s vision is cleared, one’s thoughts are purged, one’s heart is stirred; one is humbled, instructed, quickened, invigorated, brought low in repentance and raised high in assurance. There is no more salutary experience! Churches and Christians today are sadly Laodicean: complacent, somnolent, shallow, stuffy. We need reviving. What to do? Opening the windows of our souls to let in a breath of fresh air from the seventeenth century would, I suggest, be the wisest possible course.

1.Richard Baxter, Works, editors’ preface (1707), p xiii. 

2.Ibid, I:4. 

3.Ibid, I:731. 

4.Ibid, I:732. 

5.The authors and particular books in Baxter’s list are: Richard Alleine; William Gurnall; John Preston; Richard Sibbes; Robert Bolton; William Whateley; Edward Reyner; William Scudder; Simon Ford; John Howe, The Blessedness of the Righteous; George Swinnock; William Gouge; Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety; Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man; Henry Hammond, A Practical Catechism; John Pearson, Exposition of the Creed; George Downame, A Treatise of Prayer (‘on the Lord’s Prayer’); John Dod (and Thomas Cleaver), The Ten Commandments; Lancelot Andrewes, The Ten Commandments; John Brinsley, The True Watch and Rule of Life; Richard Greenham; Arthur Hildersam; Anthony Burgess; William Pink; John Downame, The Christian Warfare; Richard Rogers; John Rogers, The Doctrine of Faith and A Treatise of Love; John Stoughton; Thomas Taylor; Edward Elton; Daniel Dyke; Jeremiah Dyke; John Ball, A Treatise of Faith and The Covenant of Grace; Ezekiel Culverwell, A Treatise of Faith; Nathaniel Ranew; Faithful Teate; Samuel Shaw; John Rawlet; John Janeway; Thomas Vincent; Thomas Doolittle; Samuel Ward; William Fenner; Samuel Rutherford, Letters; Joseph Alleine, The Life and Death of (by his widow, Theodosia Alleine), and An Alarm to the Unconverted; Samuel Clark, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (2 parts) and A General Martyrology (both mainly biographical; Baxter refers to Clark’s ‘Lives’ simply); The Morning Exercise at (St. Giles) Cripplegate; The Morning Exercise at (St.) Giles in the Fields; Benjamin Baxter; George Hopkins, Salvation from Sin; Edward Reynolds; Matthew Meade; Richard Vines; Henry Smith; Samuel Smith; Thomas Smith; William Strong; Joseph Symonds. Interestingly present are non-Puritan Anglicans (Allestree, Hammond, Andrewes, Pearson); surprisingly absent are John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Thomas Watson, and Thomas Brooks, each of whom was an established ‘affectionate practical writer’ when Baxter composed the Christian Directory. But clearly the list comes off the top of Baxter’s head, and is not meant to be taken as exhaustive. 

6.Baxter, Works, III:2. 

7.Ibid, IV:797. 

8.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, pp 3f. 

9.See the Banner of Truth Trust catalogue, where the names of Owen, Sibbes, Goodwin, Gurnall, Baxter, Brooks, Flavel and others appear; also the publications list of Soli Deo Gloria (Ligionier, PA), which features Baxter, Burroughs, Bridge, and several more. 

10.See the quotation from Whitefield above. 

11.See above, pp. 35f. 

12.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 2. 

13.Three Sixteenth-Century Chronicles, ed J.M. Gairdner (Camden Society: London, 1880), p 143. 

14.William Perkins, Works (1609), III:15. 

15.R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1979) pp 6–9. 

16.G.W. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts (Methuen: London, 1947), p 50. The statement is loose: separatists did not call themselves Puritans, nor were they so called in Elizabethan and Stuart days. 

17.Later Writings of John Hooper (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1842), p 151. 

18.Edward Dering, Works (1597), p 27; L.J. Trinterud, Elizabethan Puritanism (Oxford University Press: New York, 1971), p 159. 

19.Zurich Letters, 1558–1579 (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1842), p 236. 

20.Ibid, pp 295f. 

21.See above, Chapter 3, p.43 

22.‘To the Reader’ prefixed to Richard Greenham, Works (1599), np. 

23.Ibid, p 204. 

24.Ibid, p 1. 

25.A Parte of a Register (1593), p 87. My italics. 

26.Ibid, p 89. 

27.Ibid, p 90. 

28.Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England (1662), p 117. 

29.Stephen Egerton, ‘To the Reader’, prefixed to Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (1603). 

30.Cited from William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (Columbia University: New York, 1938), p 75. 

31.The Seconde Parte of a Register, ed Albert Peel (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1915), II:185f. 

32.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 85; see above. 

33.Baxter, Works, II:885f. 

34.Ibid, II:501. 

35.He refers to The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience (1653). 

36.Loc cit. 

37.Ibid, I:4. 

38.‘The Printer to the Reader’, prefixed to Perkins, Works, I (1608). 

39.Baxter, Works, II:983. 

40.Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), preface. 

41.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 115. 

42.Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane State, ed J. Nichols (Thomas Tegg: London, 1841), p 81. 

43.John Owen, Works, ed William Goold (Johnstone and Hunter: Edinburgh, 1850–53), XVI:81f. The first sixteen volumes of this edition were reprinted photographically by the Banner of Truth Trust, 1965–68. 

44.Perkins, Works, I:11. 

45.Reliquiae Baxterianae, first pagination, p 5. ‘Ursine’ is Zacharias Ursinus, The Summe of Christian Religion (1587), a commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism of which he was one author. ‘Amesius’ is William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1643), a translation of Medulla Theologiae (1623). 

46.William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises (Parker Society: Cambridge, 1848), pp 464f. 

47.Ibid, p 399. 

48.Ibid, p 463. 

49.Ibid, p 320. 

50.Ibid, p 484. 

51.Perkins, Works, II:650f. 

52.Cf, for instance, the answer to question 72 in the Westminster Larger Catechism: ‘Justifying faith is a saving grace, wrought in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit and word of God, whereby he being convicted of his sin and misery, and of the disability in himself and all other creatures to recover him out of his lost condition, not only assenteth to the truth of the gospel, but receiveth and resteth upon Christ and his righteousness, therein held forth, for pardon of sin, and for the accepting and accounting of his person righteous in the sight of God for salvation.’ My italics. Complementary is the definition in XIV:2 of the Confession: ‘By…faith, a Christian believeth to be true whatsoever is revealed in the Word, for the authority of God himself speaking therein; and acteth differently upon that which each particular passage thereof containeth; yielding obedience to the commands, trembling at the threatenings, and embracing the promises of God for this life, and that which is to come. But the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace.’ My italics again. 

53.Owen, Works, V:8. My italics. 

54.Baxter, Works, II:481f. 

55.Ibid, II:527. 

56.Arthur Hildersam, CLII Lectures upon Psalm LI (1642), pp 55f. 

57.Owen, Works, VI:7ff. 

58.Baxter, Works, II:509. 

59.Owen, Works, XXIV:218. 

60.Perkins, Works, II:665ff. 

61.Edward Bagshawe, ‘Life and Death of Mr. Bolton’ (bound with M[r]. Bolton’s Four Last Things, 1632), p 13. 

62.Thomas Goodwin, Works, ed J. Miller (James Nichol: London, 1861), II:lxivf. 

63.Baxter, Works, II:399. 

64.The Works of John Flavel (Banner of Truth: Edinburgh, 1968), VI:572. 

65.Baxter, Works, II:400. 

66.Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, ed William Brown (Banner of Truth: Edinburgh, 1974), pp 53–64. 

67.Owen, Works, XVI:76. 

68.Cited from John Brown, Puritan Preaching in England (Hodder and Stoughton: London, 1900), p 66. 

69.Cited from T.H.L. Parker, The Oracles of God (Lutterworth Press: London, 1947), p 60. 

70.Owen, Works, V:4. 

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