In the preaching of the gospel of justification by faith alone, the church of Christ possesses her greatest asset for changing the whole world. – Errol Hulse, in “Who are the Puritans and What Do They Teach?” (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2000), p. 128.
Category Archives: Puritans
Catechisms
Since catechisms were, generally, intended for the young, emphasis was on plainness and clarity. This, also, set the pattern for the audience of later plain sermons. John Rudd explained: “the method wee have followed is plaine and naturall, the matter wholesome but not adorned with flowers of eloquence.” Puritan offerings frequently made use of classical allusions, but they were usually employed to the end of inculcating an appreciation of the greater importance of godly learning. A tutor at Christ Church reminded his intended young readers that “if Socrates sayeth the fayrest of all creatures is a man bountyfied with knowledge, lett us account ourselves most deformed and ugly in God’s syghte if our hartes be not purified by faythe & our lives directed by His truthe.”
From: Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560-1640 by John Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 154.
The Puritans on the Book of Revelation
It is a little-known fact that the Puritans…produced far more commentaries on Revelation than on any other book, most of them eminently forgettable and, mercifully, forgotten.
From: New Testament Commentary Survey by D. A. Carson; 6th edition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007 [1986]), p. 145.
A Birthday Greeting
The Rev. Dr. J. I. Packer is 84 today. Happy birthday!
What Puritan emphases can establish and settle restless experientialists? These, to start with. First, the stress on God-centeredness as a divine requirement that is central to the discipline of self-denial. Second, the insistence on the primacy of the mind and on the impossibility of obeying biblical truth that one has not yet understood. Third, the demand for humility, patience, and steadiness at all times and for an acknowledgement that the Holy Spirit’s main ministry is not to give thrills but to create in us Christlike character. Fourth, the recognition that feelings go up and down and that God frequently tries us by leading us through wastes of emotional flatness. Fifth, the singling out of worship as life’s primary activity. Sixth, the stress on our need of regular self-examination by Scripture, in terms set by Psalm 139:23-24. Seventh, the realization that sanctified suffering bulks large in God’s plan for His children’s growth in grace. No Christian tradition of teaching administers this purging and strengthening medicine with more masterful authority than does that of the Puritans, whose own dispensing of it nurtured a marvellously strong and resilient type of Christian for a century or more.
From: A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life by J. I. Packer (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990), p. 31.
No Friend of the Puritans, He
It has to be admitted that the Puritans could be extremely irritating. They had inherited, from their Elizabethan predecessors, a remarkable flair for scurrilous propaganda and showed less than discretion in the use they made of it. The bishops could not be expected to be pleased when Dr. Henry Burton, rector of St. Matthew’s, Friday Street in the City of London, referred to them all in a sermon as “upstart mushrumps;” when one worthy lady pegged up her washing in the chancel of her church, saying that, if the parson brought his old linen into the church, she would do so, too; when another marched into Lichfield cathedral, accompanied by the town clerk and his wife, and ruined the alter-hangings with a bucketful of pitch.
From: Anglicanism by Stephen Neill (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958), pp. 143-144.
Stephen Neill (1900-1984) was an Anglican missionary to India (1924-1944). After his missionary years, he became an academic and author.
On Jonathan Edwards
As a Bible-lover, a Calvinist, a teacher of heart-religion, a gospel preacher of unction and power and, above all, a man who loved Christ, hated sin, and feared God, Edwards was a pure Puritan – indeed, one of the purest and greatest of all the Puritans.
From: “Jonathan Edwards and Revival,” in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life by J. I. Packer (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990), p. 314.
The Lord’s Day
Preparation must be made for the Lord’s Day. First, the Puritans tell us, we must realize the importance of the Lord’s Day and learn to value it rightly. It is a great day for the church and for the individual: a “market-day for the soul,” a day for entering the very “suburbs of heaven” in corporate praises and prayers. We must never, therefore, let our Sundays become mere routine engagements; in that attitude of mind, we shall trifle them away by a humdrum formality. Every Sunday is meant to be a great day, and we should approach it expectantly, in full awareness of this. Therefore, we must plan our week so that we may make the most of our Sabbaths. Haphazard improvidence will preclude our profiting here, just as it will in any other enterprise.
Preparing the heart is the most important matter of all, for the Lord’s Day is, pre-eminently, “a day for heart-work.” From this point of view, the battle for our Sundays is usually won or lost on the foregoing Saturday night, when time should be set aside for self-examination, confession, and prayer for the coming day. Richard Baxter’s young people’s fellowship used to spend three hours each Saturday evening preparing together for the Sabbath in this way. “If thou wouldst thus leave thy heart with God on the Saturday night,” [George] Swinnock assures us, “thou shouldst find it with Him in the Lord’s Day morning.” The last rule for preparation comes from the supremely practical mind of Richard Baxter: “Go seasonably to bed, that you may not be sleepy on the Lord’s Day.”
From: “The Puritans and the Lord’s Day,” in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life by J. I. Packer (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990), pp. 240-241. This essay was originally published in 1957.
The Puritan Ethics
The Puritan concern for a good conscience lent great ethical strength to their teaching. Of all English evangelicals, from the Reformation to the present day, the Puritans were, undoubtedly, the most conspicuous as preachers of righteousness. They were, in truth, the salt of society in their time and, on many points, they created a national conscience which has, only recently, begun to be eroded. A demand for the sanctification of the Sabbath, plain speaking against demoralizing amusements (bawdy plays, promiscuous dancing, gluttony and drunkenness, salacious fiction), abhorance of profanity, insistence on a faithful management of one’s calling and station in life – these are emphases which are still remembered (sometimes applauded, sometimes ridiculed) as “Puritan.” Just as [William] Laud had a policy of “thorough” in ecclesiastical affairs, so the Puritans had a policy of “thorough” in the ethical realm, and they went to great pains to give detailed guidance on the duties involved in the various relationships to God and man in which the Christian stood. Among the memorials of their work in this field are the many printed expositions of the Ten Commandments: major works, like Richard Rogers’s Seven Treatises…on the Practice of Christianity (1603), Perkins’s and Ames’s volumes on conscience and casuistry, and Baxter’s Christian Directory (1670), plus countless small vade-mecums on the Christian life, from Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) down to Thomas Gouge’s Christian Directions Shewing How to Walk with God All the Day Long (1688).
From: “The Puritan Conscience,” in A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan View of the Christian Life by J. I. Packer (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990), p. 108. This article was originally published in 1962.
The Rev. Dr. James Innell Packer (born in 1926) is now, at 83, retired.
John Knox
Knox’s influence even continued into the next century. John Milton, in writing a treatise justifying the putting to death of Charles I, leaned heavily upon John Knox. That is why I put such emphasis upon his perspicacity and his understanding of the Scriptures in this matter of not only opposing rulers at times, but even, if necessary, of putting them to death. The fact that John Milton recognized this is, surely, a powerful proof of the fact that Knox is the founder of Puritanism. In 1683, when Charles II was beginning to show, openly, that he was a Roman Catholic, at the command of the authorities the works of John Knox were burned in public at Oxford and a prohibition was issued that his works should not be read. 1683, and Knox died in 1572! His influence continued and was feared. He is, indeed, the founder of English Puritanism as well as of that of Scotland.
From: “John Knox – The Founder of Puritanism,” an address delivered by the Rev. Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones at the 1972 Westminster Conference at Westminster Chapel, London, on Wednesday, December 10, 1972, in The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors: Addresses Delivered at the Puritan and Westminster Conferences, 1959-1978 by D. M. Lloyd-Jones (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), p. 278.
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) was pastor of Westminster Chapel, London, from 1943-1968. He succeeded G. Campbell Morgan (1863-1945; pastor: 1904-1917, 1933-1943) as his handpicked associate (1938-1943) who became pastor upon Morgan’s retirement.
On the Puritans
To me, I confess, this Northern division of our once unruly colonies is, and always has been, the dearest. I am no Puritan, myself, and fancy that, had I lived in the days of the Puritans, I should have been anti-Puritan to the full extent of my capabilities. But I should have been so through ignorance and prejudice, and actuated by that love of existing rights and wrongs which men call loyalty. If the Canadas were to rebel now, I should be for putting down the Canadians with a strong hand; but not the less have I an idea that it will become the Canadas to rebel and assert their independence at some future period – unless it be conceded to them without such rebellion.
Who, on looking back, can now refuse to admire the political aspirations of the English Puritans, or decline to acknowledge the beauty and fitness of what they did? It was by them that these States of New England were colonized. They came hither stating themselves to be pilgrims and, as such, they first placed their feet on that hallowed rock at Plymouth on the shore of Massachusetts. They came here driven by no thirst of conquest, by no greed for gold, dreaming of no Western empire such as Cortez had achieved and Raleigh had meditated. They desired to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, worshipping God according to their own lights, living in harmony under their own laws, and feeling that no master could claim a right to put a heel upon their necks. And be it remembered that here, in England, in those days, earthly masters were still apt to put their heels on the necks of men. The Star Chamber was gone, but Jeffreys had not yet reigned. What earthly aspirations were ever higher than these, or more manly? And what earthly efforts ever led to grander results?
From: North America by Anthony Trollope; 2 volumes; reprint (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968 [1862]), 1:35-36.
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) was the most important British novelist of the 19th century. His 47 novels comprise one of the most remarkable accomplishments of the Victorian era. The above excerpt is from one of the several travel books he also wrote.
