William Perkins
WILLIAM PERKINS
(1558-1602)
A Puritan Pioneer
The name of William Perkins is hardly known today outside a small circle of professional historians and theologians. It may therefore come as a surprise to learn that during the half-century from 1585 to 1635 Perkins was far and away the best-known and best-selling English writer of Christian books for ordinary people. More than that, he was the best-known English international theologian, being classed with Calvin and Beza as third in what someone called ‘the trinity of the orthodox’. But so indeed he was. It is a fact that almost ninety editions of works by him were published in translation in the Netherlands, fifty plus in both Switzerland and Germany, and smaller printings in half a dozen other languages. No Puritan author save Richard Baxter ever sold better than Perkins, and no Puritan thinker ever did more to shape and solidify historic Puritanism itself.
Many nowadays know that the real Puritanism was not the eccentric and combative Protestant Pharisaism that nineteenth-century novels and history books imagined. Many know that the real Puritanism was an evangelical holiness movement seeking to implement its vision of spiritual renewal, national and personal, in the church, the state and the home; in education, evangelism, and economics; in individual discipleship and devotion, and in pastoral care and competence. Many know that real Puritan piety centred upon regeneration and repentance, self-suspicion and self-examination, rational Biblicism and righteous behaviour, discursive meditation and rhetorical prayer, faith in and love to Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord, recognition of the sovereignty of God in providence, grace, and judgment, the comfort and joy of a well-grounded assurance, the need to educate and cherish one’s conscience, the spiritual war against the world, the flesh, and the devil, the ethic of discipline and duty, and the saints’ hope of glory. Few however know as yet that it was Perkins, quite specifically, who established Puritanism in this mould.
Who was this man William Perkins? He is a somewhat shadowy figure, but the main facts of his life are not in doubt. He was an Elizabethan in a very precise sense, for he was born in 1558, the year in which Elizabeth became queen, and he died of unrelieved gallstones at the age of forty-four, in 1602, shortly before Elizabeth’s death in 1603. He was a Warwickshire man who in 1577, aged nineteen – late in the day, by Elizabethan standards – went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge, the most Puritan-minded house in the University at that time, where Laurence Chaderton, a well-known gospel preacher, later to be master of Emmanuel and Perkins’s lifelong friend, became his tutor. At first Perkins ran wild, but then was converted (details not known); a passion for theology now replaced the devotion to astrological studies that had marked him hitherto, and he impressed his peers by the thoroughness and speed with which he mastered the things of God. In 1584, having graduated M.A., he was elected to a fellowship at Christ’s, where he began to excel as a tutor of undergraduates. Before the year was out, following a few months of strikingly effective evangelism on a volunteer basis in Cambridge jail, he was also installed as lecturer (that is, endowed preacher) at Great St Andrews, a poor and needy parish that brought in to its vicar the less than princely stipend of 10 pounds per annum. Perkins as lecturer was not the vicar, and whatever he received for his preaching would have come from private sources. We learn that when in 1595 he left Christ’s, a celibate community, to marry a lady named Timothye Cradock of Grantchester, parishioners and wealthy supporters augmented his income to ensure that his ministry at St Andrews would continue; which it did, till Perkins died seven years and seven children later. When Thomas Goodwin, twelve years old and not yet a Christian, matriculated in 1613, so he tells us, ‘the Town was then filled with the discourse of the Power of Mr Perkins, his Ministry still fresh in Men’s Memories,’ even though Perkins had been more than ten years in his grave.
Nor was this the whole story, or even the main part of it. During the years that Perkins preached his pen was busy and he left behind him almost fifty separate treatises of various kinds, covering the whole range of theology, spirituality and ethics, and including several major pieces of biblical exposition. Perkins’s special strength both in preaching and on paper was to be systematic, scholarly, solid and simple at the same time. No one else in world Protestantism had hitherto produced material of Perkins’s type and range, at Perkins’s level of lucidity and soon Perkins’s books were appearing in French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Czech, German, Hungarian, Latin and Welsh. Ian Breward, writer of the best survey of Perkins’s work to have appeared so far, explains Perkins’s international popularity and influence as ‘due to an attractive and practical piety, ability to popularise and an extraordinarily wide range of theological activity,’ and observes that ‘translating and publishing Perkins was a minor industry,’ listing twenty-nine translators and twenty-eight publishers outside England to prove his point.1
‘After his death,’ writes William Haller, ‘his disciples ... gathered up for publication or republication three tall volumes of his polemics, treatises and sermons ... No books, it is fair to say, were more often to be found upon the shelves of succeeding generations of preachers, and the name of no preacher recurs more often in later Puritan literature. “As for his books,” Fuller observed half a century later, “it is a miracle almost to conceive how thick they lye”.’2
It was these books that determined seventeenth-century Puritanism’s profile and priorities and that led the Dutch theologian Voetius in his treatise Concerning Practical Theology, in which many Puritan pietists are commended, to call Perkins ‘the Homer [that is, the magisterial classic], of practical Englishmen.’3
We speak of George Stephenson as the Father of Railways because in designing the Rocket and in laying out first the Stockton and Darlington and then the Liverpool and Manchester lines he got everything basically right, albeit at a rudimentary level, so that the development of steam traction world-wide could and did proceed most successfully by following the guidelines he had established. In the same way we should call William Perkins the Father of Puritanism, for it was he more than anyone else who crystallised and delimited the essence of mainstream Puritan Christianity for the next hundred years. This makes it ironical, first, that Perkins detested and refused the word ‘Puritan’ as a label for himself and those like him and, second that among the forty or so Puritan writers who have been reprinted for the common Christian reader during the past forty years Perkins’s name has hardly appeared. Banner of Truth republished The Art of Prophesying (i.e. Preaching) in 1996, and Ian Breward excerpted a selection for scholars from Perkins’s books (The Work of William Perkins; Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), and that is all. To be sure, the irony diminishes on closer inspection, for the word ‘Puritan’ in Perkins’s day carried implications of both a revolutionary spirit and a separatist purpose, and Perkins’s plain-glass treatments of basic themes were all superseded by later Puritan presentations that were fuller and had more punch. But the key fact remains as stated: Perkins was the pioneer who shaped Puritanism in a decisive way, imparting to it the qualities that were to characterise it for the next hundred years.
Before Perkins, Calvinistic Anglicans seeking change in the national church had not been at one on their goals and priorities, and a strident hotheadedness had marked their public style. Some had sought Prayer Book revision, so as to get further away from Roman-type worship, and had flaunted their nonconformity to the established liturgical order. Some had sought a workable pattern of parochial church discipline, and had flung themselves into the crypto-Presbyterian classism movement, which had this as one of its aims. Not many had yet focused their goal in evangelistic terms, as the conversion of England to real godliness through teaching, preaching and pastoral care. Perkins’s example and influence, however, along with that of parish clergymen like Richard Greenham and Richard Rogers, Arthur Hildersam and John Dod, established mainstream Puritanism as a movement majoring on evangelism and spiritual life, bearing with ecclesiastical inconvenience for the time being in order to fulfil in the Church of England a full-scale soul-saving ministry. Puritanism, with its complex of biblical, devotional, ecclesiastical, reformational, polemical and cultural concerns, came of age, we might say, with Perkins, and began to display characteristically a wholeness of spiritual vision and a maturity of Christian patience that had not been seen in it before.
PERKINS’S MINISTRY
How, we may now ask, did Perkins himself approach his own ministerial work? We are told that in daily life he was a man of peace, studied moderation, and a personal sanctity that impressed everyone. He was faithful in fulfilling his role as a professional academic and a college tutor, but it is clear that his wider ministry at Great St Andrews, and the popular writing that went with it, were his chief concerns. We are told that at the head of the title-page of each of his manuscripts he would write this message to himself: ‘Thou art a Minister of the Word: Mind thy business.’ That, certainly, is what he did.
Here is Benjamin Brook’s account of Perkins as a preacher. It goes back to Thomas Fuller, who though a royalist in politics was a Puritan in his Christianity, and was fascinated by Perkins, who died six years before he was born; Fuller researched Perkins, wrote a brief life of him, and introduced him as a model of faithfulness in ministry in several of his own writings. Drawing on Fuller, Brook pinpoints Perkins’s pulpit strengths as follows:
His hearers consisted of collegians, townsmen and people from the country. This required those peculiar ministerial endowments which providence had richly bestowed upon him. In all his discourses, his style and his subject were accommodated to the capacities of the common people, while, at the same time, the pious scholars heard him with admiration ... Mr Perkins’s sermons were all law and all gospel. He was a rare instance of those opposite gifts meeting in so eminent a degree in the same preacher, even the vehemence and thunder of Boanerges, to awaken sinners to a sense of their sin and danger, and to drive them from destruction; and the persuasion and comfort of Barnabas, to pour the wine and oil of gospel consolation into their wounded spirits. He used to apply the terrors of the law so directly to the consciences of his hearers, that their hearts would often sink under the convictions; and he used to pronounce the word damn with so peculiar an emphasis, that it left a doleful echo in their ears a long time after.4
His preaching was as erudite and edifying as it was authoritative and clear. ‘In a word,’ declares Fuller, ‘the Scholar could have no learneder, the Townsmen no plainer Sermons.’ And again: ‘Our Perkins brought the schools into the Pulpit, and unshelling their controversies out of their hard school-terms, made thereof plain and wholesome meat for his people.’5
Majestic and magisterial, expository and evangelical, informal and applicatory, Perkins’s preaching set standards for the whole Puritan movement thereafter, just as it brought benefit to great numbers in the Cambridge of his own day.
But this was not the whole of his ministry. Like his older contemporary, Richard Greenham of Dry Drayton, just outside Cambridge, Perkins became known as an expert in spiritual pathology, and he fulfilled a notable counselling ministry to confused and tormented souls who for one reason or another feared themselves spiritually ruined and lost. Here is one example from Perkins’s gaol ministry of 1584, narrated by Samuel Clarke in a book dated 1654. A young felon mounting the scaffold looked panicky and half-dead. Perkins, attending the execution as chaplain,
laboured to cheer up his spirits, and finding him still in agony, and distress of mind, he said to him, What man? What is the matter with thee? Art thou afraid of death?
Ah no (said the prisoner, shaking his head) but of a worser thing.
Sayest thou so (said Master Perkins) come down again man, and thou shalt see what God’s grace will do to strengthen thee: Whereupon the prisoner coming down, Master Perkins took him by the hand and made him kneel down with himself at the ladder foot ... when that blessed man of God made such an effectual prayer in confession of sins ... as made the prisoner burst out into abundance of tears; and Master Perkins finding that he had brought him low enough, even to hell gates, he proceeded to the second part of his prayer, and therein to show him the Lord Jesus ... stretching forth his blessed hand of mercy ... which he did so sweetly press with such heavenly art ... as made him break into new showers of tears for joy of the inward consolation which he found ... who (the prayer being ended) rose from his knees cheerfully, and went up the ladder again so comforted, and took his death with such patience, and alacrity, as if he actually saw himself delivered from the hell which he feared before, and heaven opened for the receiving of his soul. 6
Nor was it only to persons of the criminal class that Perkins ministered in this way. It is well known that at the end of the sixteenth century many serious souls were troubled and often desperate about their condition and prospects before God, and this is sometimes seen as the unhealthy fruit of injudicious and excessive Puritan preaching about predestination and hell-fire. That the Puritans were never mealy-mouthed on these two topics is certainly true, but all the evidence shows that they presented them in a pastorally responsible way and a more adequate explanation of the distresses people felt centres upon four other factors.
First, uncertainties and anxieties about the future pervaded late Elizabethan community life, partly as a reaction to what seemed to be the permanent embattled hostility to England of the whole Roman Catholic world, partly at least as a spinoff from the enterprising but often anarchic and calamitous individualism that had developed during Elizabeth’s reign on the economic and political fronts; and this mood of anxiety naturally infected English religion.
Second, as in the modern West a quarter of the population needs treatment for depression at some point in their lives, so in Puritan times depressive tendencies, linked as so often today with obsessive-compulsive neuroses, were widespread; indeed, it was an era in which a measure of ‘melancholy’, as depression was then called, was expected and even cultivated among the cultured, so naturally problems of spiritual depression were widespread.
Third, in that age of compulsory church attendance Puritans like Perkins rightly laid stress on the need for self-suspicion and self-search in order to arouse the complacent among their hearers to the possibility of their still being unconverted and hell-bound, and such teaching has a naturally traumatic and anxious-making effect, as of course it is intended to.
And, fourth and most important of all, the Holy Spirit worked in power in England throughout the Puritan period, so that the impact of gospel preaching, conviction of sin, demands for repentance, and the fear of divine rejection, went very deep.
I venture to affirm that there was nothing intrinsically unhealthy about any of this from a spiritual standpoint; much unhealthier was, and is, the unconcern of those who refuse to care about the issues of eternity as the gospel sets them out and who ridicule preachers and people who do in fact care about them. That persons convicted of sin, and those whom we would label clinically depressed, should feel hopeless and helpless should not cause us surprise. And anyhow, the record states that many troubled souls came to Perkins one on one, and he was able to help them to faith, hope, confidence, and devoted discipleship. As Fuller quaintly puts it: ‘An excellent Chirurgeon [surgeon] he was at jointing of a broken soul, and at stating of a doubtful conscience.’7 In Perkins’s pastoral counselling, no less than in his pulpit expositions, wisdom about the paths God opens to conversion and the peace God gives to troubled hearts flowed abundantly, and there was joy in Cambridge as a result.
The many businesslike laymen’s books on principles and problems of Christian living that came from Perkins’s pen were part of this same ministry. They were written, not to advance the author’s reputation and career, but to build up Englishmen in the Christian faith. When Perkins’s ministry began, Protestant England had no devotional literature of its own at popular level at all. Literate clergy – a minority at that stage in Anglican history, be it said – could enlarge their overall Christian understanding by reading Calvin, his successor at Geneva, Beza, the Decades of Bullinger, and the two official Anglican books of Homilies. If questions of church order captured their interest, they could pursue them via the keen though dryish writings of Cartwright, Whitgift, and Travers. If they wanted anti-Roman reinforcing, Jewel’s Apology and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments were available. But there was nothing whatever as yet for their literate parishioners to read, to build them up in the faith. Perkins set himself to fill this gap. If you think of him as in this respect a forerunner of J.C. Ryle, C.S. Lewis, and John Stott, you will not be far wrong. Perkins devoted his first-class mind and his flair for simple forceful statement to the production of popular nurturing literature for laypeople. Let us now survey his achievement.
The Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments were, and are, the three classic formulations on which mainstream Christianity rests, and around which the Prayer Book Catechism and countless other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century catechisms were constructed. Perkins composed expositions of all three: An Exposition of the Symbol, or Creed of the Apostles (1595); An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer (1592) and chapters 19-29 of A Golden Chain: or, The Description of Theology (1590 in Latin, 1591 in English), where the Decalogue is systematically laid open. Starting with the dictum, ‘Theology is the science of living blessedly for ever,’ this latter work analyses all God’s purposes and procedures in relation to human destiny. It sold well, running through nine editions in thirty years. In addition, Perkins composed The Foundation of Christian Religion, Gathered into Six Principles: And it is to be Learned of Ignorant People, that they may be fit to hear Sermons with Profit, and to Receive the Lord’s Supper with Comfort (1590). This was a question-and-answer evangelistic catechism on the contents of the gospel. Beginning with an address to the ignorant, listing thirty-two ‘common opinions’ in which their ignorance found expression, it showed them in simplest form (1) God’s triunity; (2) man’s sin and lostness; (3) Christ’s saving work; (4) the individual’s salvation ‘by faith alone apprehending and applying Christ with all his merits to himself’;8 (5) the means to faith, namely the Word preached, backed by sacraments and prayer; and (6) the prospect of heaven for the godly and hell for unbelievers. In writing this work, Perkins became the spiritual ancestor of moderns like Michael Green and Nicky Gumbel, and alerts us today, four centuries after, to the need for initial knowledge of the Christian ABC if one is to get the best out of expository preaching. These pieces by Perkins were the first significant resources for the Puritan discipling of England, and the catechism in particular was very widely used for half a century after its composer’s death.9
Producing these basic items was only, however, a small part of Perkins’s labour as a formulator and populariser of Puritan faith and practice. Consider the following series of books (all fairly small, despite their titular fulsomeness), which Perkins wrote with a lay readership directly in view.
And whereas these have been published heretofore in English two sermons of repentance, one by Mr Bradford Martyr, the other by Mr Arthur Dent; sermons indeed which have done much good: my meaning [intention] is not to add thereunto, or to teach another doctrine, but only renew and revive the memory of that which they have taught.
Neither let it trouble thee that the principal divines of this age, whom in this treatise I follow, may seem to be at difference in treating of repentance. For some make it a fruit of faith, containing two parts, mortification and vivification: some make faith a part of it, by dividing contrition, faith, new obedience [marginal reference to Melanchthon]: some make it all one with regeneration [marginal reference to Calvin, who also proposed the mortification-vivification analysis]. The difference is not in the substance of doctrine, but in the logical manner of handling it ... repentance ... is taken two ways ... Generally for the whole conversion of the sinner, and so it may contain contrition, faith, new obedience ... and be confounded with regeneration. It is taken particularly for the renovation of life and behaviour: and so it is a fruit of faith. And this only sense do I follow in this treatise. 11
The treatise on repentance includes an elaborate scheme for self-examination by the light of the Decalogue and the gospel, and both treatises hit out hard at the Tridentine teaching on meritorious human acts.
These seven items, taken together, point us to the concerns that were central in Perkins’s ministry. As a professional theologian of the Church of England, he used his gifts of lucid analysis and straightforward exposition to fill gaps in the Church’s pastoral resources as he saw them, and so to provide Englishmen, both from the pulpit and on paper, with guidance on godliness from the cradle of conversion to the grave. The guidance he gave was Bible-based, according to the principles of literal and contextual interpretation established by the Reformers; it was Calvinistic, in the second-generation Aristotelian manner of Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva for forty years, and of Zanchius, the converted Italian Thomist, with his colleagues Ursinus and Olevianus, who taught and wrote Reformed theology at Heidelberg; it was practical, being attuned at every point to the business of finding and following the path of eternal life; and it was experiential, in the sense that it focused constantly on motives, desires, distresses, graces and disgraces in the heart and inner life, as the source from which both obedience to God and its opposite take their rise.
Perkins gave prime attention throughout his ministry to the religious concerns already indicated – each person’s need of regeneration; the quest for the peace and joy of assurance; the duty and discipline of self-examination to uncover one’s sins, and of invoking Christ constantly by faith to cover them by His blood; the experience of flesh-spirit conflict; the reality of falls and recoveries as one travels the path of obedience; battles against doubts, discouragements and depression; the practice of lifelong repentance, and conscientious avoidance of wrongdoing. By concentrating on these things Perkins earned from the German writer August Lang the description, ‘father of pietism’, inasmuch as reading Perkins’s practical works sparked and fed the continental movement, particularly in Holland and Germany, that went by this name. Pietism, so-called, was a seventeenth and eighteenth century development within Protestant state churches and Europe-wide Roman Catholicism. It was a renewing of personal devotion, marked by the principles, practices and priorities, the attitudes and aspirations, that were mentioned above. We should at once note here that the anti-intellectual, anti-cultural, anti-national-church attitudes, plus the emotionalistic and legalistic and individualistic inclinations, that marked and marred some later pietists represent deviations from, and indeed contradictions of, Perkins’s Puritan humanism. With that (admittedly, rather heavy!) qualification, however, we should accept ‘father of pietism’13 as a true label for Perkins, and treat the phrase as a title of honour. The first note in any definition of pietism, after all, is that it gives priority to piety. Perkins did this, insistently and robustly; and so, I venture to say, should we all.
PRECEPTS FOR SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
In A Grain of Mustard Seed Perkins depicted the sinner’s conversion through the Holy Spirit as typically a complex unitary process involving the whole person over a period of time, and he urged that the only final proof that it has started is that it advances – in other words, that the personal change from natural sinfulness to supernatural godliness continues. At the end of the book he speaks his mind on the way to ensure growth in grace, in a passage so striking that I cite it at length and claim for it classic status in the literature of Western spirituality. Here, then, is Perkins explaining his assertion that ‘the ... beginnings of grace are counterfeit unless they increase’, and showing us as he does what for him constitutes health in the Christian’s inner life.
The wickedness of man’s nature and the depth of hypocrisy is such that a man may and can easily transform himself into the counterfeit and resemblance of any grace of God. Therefore I put down in this last conclusion a certain note whereby the gifts of God may be discerned, namely that they grow up and increase as a grain of mustard seed to a great tree and bear fruit answerably. The grace in the heart is like to the grain of mustard seed in two things: first, it is small to see at the beginning; secondly, after it is cast into the ground of the heart, it increaseth speedily and spreadeth itself. Therefore, if a man at the first have but some little feeling of his wants, some weak and faint desire, some small obedience, he must not let this spark of grace go out, but these motions of the Spirit must be increased by the use of the word, sacraments and prayer; and they must daily be stirred up by meditating, endeavouring, striving, asking, seeking, knocking (Matt. 25:26; 2 Tim. 1:6). As for such motions of the heart that last for a week or a month and after vanish away, they are not to be regarded. And the Lord by the prophet Hosea complains of them saying, O Ephraim, thy righteousness is like the morning dew (Hosea 6:4).
Therefore, considering grace unless it be confirmed and exercised is indeed no grace, I will here add certain rules of direction that the more easily we may put in practice the spiritual exercises of invocation, faith and repentance, and thereby also quicken the seeds and beginnings of grace.
- With these rules of practice, join rules of meditation: whereof I propound six unto thee, as I find them set down by a learned divine called Victor Strigelius.
- We must not fall away from God for any creature.
- Infinite eternity is far to be preferred before the short race of this mortal life.
- We must hold fast the promise of grace, though we lose temporal blessings, and they also in death must needs be left.
- Let the love of God in Christ and the love of the church for Christ be strong in thee and prevail against all other affections.
- It is the principal art of a Christian to believe things invisible, to hope for things deferred, to love God when he shews himself to be an enemy and thus to persevere unto the end.
- It is a most effectual remedy for any grief to quiet ourselves in a confidence of the presence and help of God, and to ask of him, and withal to wait either for some easement or deliverance.14
PERKINS THE THEOLOGIAN
Educationalist, populariser and gap-filler, rapid reader, lightning writer, and master crafter of simplicity without shallowness, father both of pietism as a European ethos and of Puritanism as an English ideology, Perkins produced luminous didactic treatments of many subjects that I have not yet mentioned, among them the callings of Christian people; Christian family life; ‘the virtue of equity, or moderation of mind’15; the role of the professional ministry; the principles of homiletics; the functioning of conscience; the worship of God; the control of the tongue; the errors of Rome; and the doctrine of predestination. Clearly, however, the realities of religion in the regenerate – in other words, conversion, assurance, devotion, and biblically-ordered behaviour – were always central to his interest. Kendall’s statement that Perkins ‘devoted himself primarily to showing men that they must, and how they can, make their calling and election sure to themselves’ is too narrow;16 Perkins’s first concern was that people should be Christians, and his aim of helping them to know they were Christians came second. The passage just quoted brings together the main things he had to say about the believer’s inner life, which is the touchstone of Christian reality, and this profile of the growing saint gives us a vantage-point from which to review Perkins’s theology as a whole, asking as we go how each aspect of it bears on what we now see to be its author’s major focus.
The shape and substance of didactic devotional writing depends always on three things: the writers’ understanding of what the Bible teaches about union with Christ and discipleship to Him, their view of the spiritual needs of their envisaged readers, and their own experience of walking with God. If they have undergone adult conversion, what they write will likely highlight the contrast between life with and without God, as Paul, Augustine, Bunyan, G.K. Chesteron and C.S. Lewis illustrate. Perkins, too, is a copybook example of this, as the above extract shows.
The real Christian life, as Perkins conceives it, is both aspirational and transformational. It is aspirational in that it centres throughout on heartfelt endeavour to exercise prayerful faith – that is, informed trust in the once-crucified, now risen Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ – and with that to practise repentance – that is, self-search for sinful behaviour and sinful habits of heart, past and present – in order with God’s help to leave them behind, and so clear the ground for holiness (law-keeping in love) henceforth. The information on which faith’s appeal to the Father and the Son is founded and on which faith’s hope and assurance directly rest, concerns justification and adoption into God’s family through Christ’s reconciling cross. And the Christian life is transformational in that the change aspired to and prayed for now noticeably begins to take place. Increasingly, those who thus pray and seek a re-ordering of their lives from the inside out find their identity, contentment and peace in further pursuing their quest, while their awareness grows that they are now different persons from what they once were; for they have come to be in Christ, the Holy Spirit now indwells them, and they can be sure that God the Father loves them savingly and will continue thus loving them for ever. Later Puritans would organise this sense of new reality under the rubric of regeneration; this however is not one of Perkins’s technical terms, any more than it is in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, or in the writings of William Tyndale the Bible translator, and John Bradford, the Reformation martyr, by whom the shape of this aspirational-transformational life of grace was first spelled out.
In delineating England’s spiritual needs, Perkins mentions many forms of immorality and irreligion, but clearly what troubled him most was the Protestant formalism and spiritual complacency of his own era which had replaced its earlier Roman Catholic equivalent. So his ministry tasks, as he saw them, boiled down with exact precision to afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.
Basic to all Perkins’s work is a desire to maintain continuity with the Reformational heritage, both at home and abroad, and to disciple people in it. As Kendall truly states, ‘he saw himself as being in the mainstream of the Church of England, which he often defended.’ 17 He had no sympathy with the advocates of separation over questions of church order; as long as the Church was committed to Reformation orthodoxy and he himself was free to teach, preach, and apply that orthodoxy, his Anglican loyalty would not be in doubt, even when he had to endure harassment from within the system. (An example of this was that in 1587 he had to answer to the University Vice-Chancellor for saying in a sermon that the Prayer Book requirements of kneeling at communion and having the celebrant administer the elements to himself were not the best options.) Nonetheless, loyalty to the established system was integral to the Christianity he taught.
As for the wider Protestant heritage, it is important to see that Perkins, who identified himself as a Calvinist, absorbed the teaching not only of Calvin but of other Reformed writers also, such as, apparently, Bucer, Bullinger, Musculus, and Peter Martyr, and particularly Beza of Geneva and Zanchius of Heidelberg. A long appendix from Beza rounds off A Golden Chain (the basic material of which had been borrowed from Beza in the first place), and a digest of Zanchius’ thoughts about assurance fills more than half of A Case of Conscience; and Perkins’s own account of faith and assurance clearly reflects the influence of these two giants. Generically, Reformation theology conceived faith as the Christian’s whole-souled reliance on the Christ of the biblical promises for a right relationship with God. Calvin had defined faith as a Spirit-taught persuasion of God’s favour for Christ’s sake, in other words as an assured confidence of mind and heart, and he had explained Peter’s summons in 2 Peter 1:10 to ‘make your calling and election sure’ as a simple plea for behaviour consistent with one’s Christian profession.18 Perkins, however, extended the definition of faith to include both the will (that is, the desire and longing) to believe which precedes active trust, and the act of the soul applying the Christ of the promises to one’s own troubled heart and guilty conscience; and he follows Beza and Zanchius in understanding 2 Peter 1:10 as telling Christians to make their standing ‘in the life’, as the Welsh phrase it, sure and certain to themselves, by noting how grace has already changed them.
Perkins linked this view of the verse with his own clearly focused Thomistic concept of conscience as the mind working its way through what he called ‘practical syllogisms’ for either disapproval and condemnation or approval and comfort. In a practical syllogism the major premise would be a moral or spiritual rule, ideally a biblical declaration; the minor premise would be a factual observation; and the conclusion a moral judgment. A simple example, which Perkins actually uses, as many of us also do today, is:
Everyone that believes is the child of God;
But I believe;
Therefore I am the child of God.
Kendall finds Perkins’s account of faith confused and his path to assurance illusory, but his criticisms seem to depend on separating the mind and the will in a way that Perkins never did, on equating biblical self-examination with introspection, and on forgetting Perkins’s axiom that real grace grows, and proves its reality thereby.19 In my opinion, Perkins was right, first to analyse conscience as operating, in however compressed a way, by practical syllogisms, and second to affirm that scriptural self-examination will ordinarily yield the Christian solid grounds for confidence as to his or her regeneration and standing with God.
Basic too to all Perkins’s work was his insistence that Holy Scripture must be received as the teaching and testimony of God, and that interpretation must take the form of applying biblical principles to the interpreter’s own times and needs. Breward states this well, highlighting the Christocentric focus of Perkins’s hermeneutic. He begins by citing Perkins’s contention that Holy Scripture ‘agrees with itself most exactly and the places that seem to disagree may easily be reconciled,’ for the simple reason that ‘the scope of the whole Bible is Christ with his benefits.’ If diverse opinions about the meaning of scripture existed:
In this diversity of opinions ... we must still [always] have recourse to Christ, and that in the scripture alone: for although there were a thousand diverse expositions of one place, yet by the circumstances thereof, conferring [comparing] it with other like places of scripture, a man shall be able to find out the true sense: for Christ in Scripture expoundeth himself.20
Of the supralapsarian version of Calvinism that Perkins learned from Beza and Zanchius, set forth in A Golden Chain, and defended in Latin in De Praedestinatione (1598) and in English in God’s Free Grace and Man’s Free-will (1602), little need be said here. Supralapsarianism is the view that in God’s initial, pre-mundane decision-making with regard to mankind His purpose of electing some and reprobating the others envisaged human beings not yet created, as distinct from the infralapsarian view that in decreeing this double predestination God envisaged human beings as both created and fallen. Perkins embraced supralapsarianism out of a desire to maintain the absolute sovereignty of God in our salvation against the Lutherans, semipelagian Roman Catholics like Bellarmine, and anti-predestinarians in England like Peter Baro, Samuel Harsnet and William Barrett. By embracing it, however, he surrounded the good news of the redeeming love of God to lost sinners with a forbidding rationalistic framework which, like all versions of the supralapsarian formula, seemed to imply that God is an arbitrary decision-maker with an abstract interest in having two sorts of people, one justly saved and one justly condemned, and that He willed the fall in Eden as a means to this end.21 Most seventeenth-century Puritans, like most Reformed theologians since their time, were infralapsarian, and it is in order, I think, to express quiet regret that Perkins the Elizabethan Puritan pioneer took a different line. The sovereignty of God in salvation must surely be maintained, but dogmatic supralapsarianism is not the best nor the most scriptural way to do it.
But the supralapsarianism in Perkins’s head did not in any way inhibit the expressing of his evangelistic and pastoral heart, and it is to this that I return as I close. From an exposition of Zephaniah 2:1-2, ‘preached at Stourbridge Fair, in the field; taken from his mouth’ 22 – that is, recorded, presumably in shorthand, as he spoke, apparently in 1593, and published posthumously in 1605 – I draw two extracts, both characteristically Puritan (by which I mean that any Puritan preacher over the next hundred years might have said the same; indeed, we know that very many did). The first extract shows us Perkins the evangelist, proclaiming the whosoever-will invitation of the gospel. Speaking of the gospel promise as a ‘precious jewel’, Perkins says:
. . . never allege that it is above thy compass and being a jewel is too dear and costly for thee, for I offer it freely unto you and to every one of you. I pronounce unto you from the Lord that here this blessed doctrine is offered unto you all in his name freely and that you may buy it without money (Isa. 55:1). Happy is that day when thou, coming so far to buy things for thy body and paying so dear for them, dost meet with so precious a jewel, the virtue whereof will save thy soul, and payest nothing for it.
The second extract is pastoral, prophetic, and in the best sense patriotic. It has to do with England, England’s Church, and the threat of national judgment.
The common sins of England ... are ... First, ignorance of God’s will and worship ... The second main sin of England is contempt of Christian religion ...
Our church doubtless is God’s cornfield and we are the corn heap of God and those Brownists [followers of Robert Browne who wanted separation] are blinded and besotted who cannot see that the Church of England is a goodly heap of God’s corn. But withal we must confess that we are full of chaff ... therefore God will winnow us to find out the corn ... the way to escape God’s trial is to try thyself ... and so the way to escape the fearful fan of God is to fan thine own heart by the law of God ... Once a day put thyself and thy life under the fan of God’s law ... Once a day keep a court in thy conscience, call thy thoughts, thy words, thy deeds to their trial. Let the ten commandments pass upon them, and thy sins and corruptions which thou findest to be chaff, blow them away by repentance ... Our long peace, plenty and ease have bred great sins ... When we have renewed our repentance, let us then every one of us deal with the Lord by earnest prayer for this church and nation, that the Lord would show his mercy upon it and continue unto it this peace and the gospel.
In the original title of this study I rated William Perkins, theologian, preacher and pastor four centuries ago, an Anglican to remember; and I trust that what we have learned has justified that estimate. I now ask: is there not an uncanny relevance for us in the thoughts about England and the Church of England that we have just found Perkins expressing? And, so we might add, the churches of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. That is a question that I hope we shall all ponder.
1 Intro. and ed., Ian Breward, The Work of William Perkins (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1969), xi, p. 130.
2 William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 65; quoting Thomas Fuller, Abel Redevivus, 1651, p. 434.
3 Tr. and ed. J.W. Beardslee, Reformed Dogmatics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 274-5.
4 Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans, (1813, repr. Pittsburgh: Soli Deo Gloria, 1994), II. p. 130.
5 Thomas Fuller, The Holy State, (1642), p. 89.
6 Samuel Clarke, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, (1654), pp. 416-17; quoted from Breward, op cit., 9-10, with modernised spelling.
7 Thomas Fuller, The Holy State, p. 90.
8 The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge Mr William Perkins, (1616), I. pp. 32-69.
9 Breward, p. 147.
10 Breward, p. 355.
11 Workes, I.454; spelling modernised, as in all quotations from Perkins’s text. The treatise runs from pp. 453-74. Bradford’s sermon is in Works of John Bradford: Sermons and Treatises, (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848, repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1988), pp. 20-81. The sermon by Arthur Dent, author of The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601), one of the two books that formed the dowry of Mrs John Bunyan, has not been reprinted.
12 Workes, III. 1f. (1613). The Treatise occupies pp. 1-152.
13 A. Lang, Puritanismus und Pietismus, (Neukirchen Kreis Moers, 1941), pp. 126-31; reference taken from Breward, p. 131.
14 Breward, pp. 405-10; Workes, I. pp. 642-44. Victor Strigelius was a Lutheran divine who taught at Heidelberg. Perkins, after saying he will quote six ‘rules of meditation’ [guidelines for devotional reflection] from Strigelius, adds a seventh, ‘All the works of God are done in contrary means,’ which is apparently a way of saying that as God works out His purpose things are regularly the opposite of what they seem, as Christ’s cross was victory over Satan, in the form of seeming defeat by him.
15 Breward, p. 481. The title of the treatise is Epieikeia. It is based on Philippians 4:5.
16 R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 54.
17 R.T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 54.
18 ‘Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded on the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed in our hearts through the Holy Spirit’, Inst. III. ii. 7.
19 Kendall, p. 74 f.
20 Breward, p. 47, drawing on Perkins, Workes, II.55 f., I.484, III.220; my italics. Breward’s review of Perkins’s interpretative procedures, as set forth in his pioneer homiletical handbook, The Art of Prophesying (1607; in Latin Prophetica, 1592), and illustrated by his printed expositions, should by all means be consulted.
21 The sharpest statement of this defect is that of B.B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation, (revised ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966), p. 88: ‘That (God) has any creatures at all they (the supralapsarians) suppose to be in the interest of discrimination, and all that he decrees concerning his creatures they suppose that he decrees only that he may discriminate between them.’
22 Breward, p. 279.