A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Repackage) E-Book

J. I. Packer

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 810

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A Rich Vision for Christian Living from Great Puritan Leaders A Quest for Godliness explores the depth and breadth of Puritan spiritual life. Drawing on a lifetime of study, renowned evangelical theologian and church leader J. I. Packer surveys the lives and teachings of great Puritan leaders such as John Owen, Richard Baxter, and Jonathan Edwards. He examines the Puritan view of the Bible, spiritual gifts, the Sabbath, worship, social action, and the family. The Puritans' faith, Packer argues, stands in marked contrast with the superficiality of modern western Christianity. In a time of failing vision and decaying values, this powerful portrait of the Puritans is a beacon of hope that calls Christians to radical commitment and action, both of which are desperately needed today. Beautifully written, A Quest for Godliness is a moving and challenging exploration of Puritan life and thought.  - Classic Work from J. I. Packer: Theologian and author of several books, including Knowing God; Keep in Step with the Spirit; and God Has Spoken - Timeless Puritan Teaching for Modern Believers: A descriptive survey of the history of the Puritans, from leaders including John Owen, Richard Baxter, and Jonathan Edwards - Ideal for Pastors, Students, and Lay People: Essential lessons on evangelism, preaching, Christian living, and more

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“When a giant of the faith speaks of those who are giants of the faith to him, it is time for the rest of us to listen and learn. J. I. Packer’s understanding and appreciation for the Puritans is peerless and timely.”

Os Guinness, author, The Call

“This is one of the most influential books in both my life and ministry for several reasons. I first met J. I. Packer on the day in 1990 when Crossway formally presented him with his copy of the original edition of A Quest for Godliness. I was in attendance that afternoon when he spoke from one of the chapters to a small group of pastors gathered in Wheaton to hear him. Afterward I introduced myself and explained that I was writing a book on godliness, that I’d quoted extensively from the Puritans, and boldly asked if he would consider writing the foreword. I could hardly contain my excitement when he agreed and there is no question that his contribution was a major factor in the success of my first book. Since then, I have used A Quest for Godliness with thousands of students in a seminary class on personal spiritual disciplines. Many have told me that, except for the Bible, it’s the best book they’ve ever read. Not only is it a solid introduction to the lives and teaching of the Puritans, but it is also a feast of theology, biography, history, and practical spirituality. I urge every minister, seminary student, and seriously minded layperson to devour this book.”

Donald S. Whitney, Professor of Biblical Spirituality and Associate Dean, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; author, Family Worship; Praying the Bible; and Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life

“In A Quest for Godliness, J. I. Packer paints a vivid portrait of Puritans—their piety, church life, and social impulse—providing a model of passionate, holy living for today’s often-complacent church. Packer’s characteristically lucid style and penetrating insights into Christians of old send a vibrant challenge to those of us who follow Christ in this last decade of the twentieth century. I heartily recommend this book.”

Chuck Colson

“Dr. Packer has blended theology, biography, history, and practical exhortation in a book that is a delight to read. But even more, the book speaks to our contemporary church situation and causes us to search our hearts and examine our ministries. Whether you are just getting acquainted with the Puritans or are a long-time friend, A Quest for Godliness will instruct and inspire you. Here is solid spiritual food that contributes to maturity.”

Warren W. Wiersbe

A Quest for Godliness

A Quest for Godliness

The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life

J. I. Packer

A Quest for Godliness

Copyright © 1990 by J. I. Packer

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First US printing 1990 (Crossway)

First British printing 1990 (Kingsway Publications Ltd.)

First US trade paperback printing 1994 (Crossway)

Reprinted in US with new hardcover 2022 (Crossway)

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-7895-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Packer, J. I. (James Innell)

A quest for godliness: the Puritan vision of the Christian life / J.I. Packer. — 1st U.S. trade pbk. ed.

ISBN 13: 978-0-89107-819-7

ISBN 10: 0-89107-819-3

p. cm.

1.Puritans—England. 2. Puritans—New England. 3.Christian life—History—16th century. 4. Christian life—History—17th century.

I. Title.

BX9322.P33 1994 285'.9—dc20 94-10535

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2025-08-26 01:27:09 PM

In memory of two friends

John Gywn-Thomas

preacher of grace,

shepherd of souls

and

Raymond Johnston

champion of truth,

campaigner for righteousness

both of whom knew what the Puritans were about and shared their wisdom with me.

He was . . . [a man foursquare],

immoveable in all times, so that they

who in the midst of many opinions

have lost the view of true religion,

may return to him and there find it.

John Geree, The Character of an Old English Puritane, or Nonconformist

Contents

1  Introduction

Part 1: THE PURITANS IN PROFILE

2  Why We Need the Puritans

3  Puritanism as a Movement of Revival

4  The Practical Writings of the English Puritans

Part 2: THE PURITANS AND THE BIBLE

5  John Owen on Communication from God

6  The Puritans as Interpreters of Scripture

7  The Puritan Conscience

Part 3: THE PURITANS AND THE GOSPEL

8  “Saved by His Precious Blood”: An Introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ

9  The Doctrine of Justification in Development and Decline among the Puritans

10  The Puritan View of Preaching the Gospel

Part 4: THE PURITANS AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

11  The Witness of the Spirit in Puritan Thought

12  The Spirituality of John Owen

13  John Owen on Spiritual Gifts

Part 5: THE PURITAN CHRISTIAN LIFE

14  The Puritans and the Lord’s Day

15  The Puritan Approach to Worship

16  Marriage and Family in Puritan Thought

Part 6: THE PURITANS IN MINISTRY

17  Puritan Preaching

18  Puritan Evangelism

19  Jonathan Edwards and Revival

20  Afterword

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

1

Introduction

On a narrow strip of the northern California coastline grow the giant Redwoods, the biggest living things on earth. Some are over 360 feet tall, and some trunks are more than 60 feet round. They do not have much foliage for their size; all their strength is in those huge trunks, with foot-thick bark, that rise sheer for almost half their height before branching out. Some have actually been burned, but are still alive and growing. Many hundreds of years old, over a thousand in some cases, the Redwoods are (to use a much-cheapened word in its old, strict, strong sense) awesome. They dwarf you, making you feel your smallness as scarcely anything else does. Great numbers of Redwoods were thoughtlessly felled in California’s logging days, but more recently they have come to be appreciated and preserved, and Redwood parks are today invested with a kind of sanctity. A 33-mile road winding through Redwood groves is fittingly called the “Avenue of the Giants.”

California’s Redwoods make me think of England’s Puritans, another breed of giants who in our time have begun to be newly appreciated. Between 1550 and 1700 they too lived unfrilled lives in which, speaking spiritually, strong growth and resistance to fire and storm were what counted. As Redwoods attract the eye, because they overtop other trees, so the mature holiness and seasoned fortitude of the great Puritans shine before us as a kind of beacon light, overtopping the stature of the majority of Christians in most eras, and certainly so in this age of crushing urban collectivism, when Western Christians sometimes feel and often look like ants in an anthill and puppets on a string. Behind the Iron Curtain and in the starving, war-torn lands of Africa the story may well have been different, but in Britain and America, the parts of the world that I know best, affluence seems for the past generation to have been making dwarfs and deadheads of us all. In this situation, the teaching and example of the Puritan giants have much to say to us.

The ecclesiology and politics of the Puritans, their conscience-bound but reluctant and stumbling transitions from medieval solidarities to the individualism of their nonconformist and republican stances, have often been studied, but only recently have Puritan theology and spirituality (that is, to use their own word, godliness) begun to receive serious scholarly attention. Only recently has it been noted that a devotional quickening occurred throughout the divided Western church during the century after the Reformation and that Puritanism was a foremost expression (the foremost expression, I would contend) of this stirring. My own interest in the Puritans has, however, always centered here, and the essays in this book are the fruit of more than forty years’ pursuit of it. Nor is my interest merely academic, though it is not, I hope, less than academic. The Puritan giants have shaped me in at least seven ways, and the thrust of the following chapters may be clearer if I list at the outset these items of conscious debt. (Any reader whom this personal stuff wearies may of course skip it; I do not claim for it any intrinsic importance.)

First, at something of a crisis time soon after my conversion, John Owen helped me to be realistic (that is, neither myopic or despairing) about my continuing sinfulness and the discipline of self-suspicion and mortification to which, with all Christians, I am called. I have written about this elsewhere,1 and shall not rehash the matter here. Suffice it to say that without Owen I might well have gone off my head or got bogged down in mystical fanaticism, and certainly my view of the Christian life would not be what it is today.

Second, some years after that, Owen, under God, enabled me to see how consistent and unambiguous is the biblical witness to the sovereignty and particularity of Christ’s redeeming love (which is also, of course, the love of the Father and the Holy Spirit: the Persons of the Godhead are always at one). The theological implications of he “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20 RSV), “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25 RSV), “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8 RSV), and many other passages came clear to me, after some years of dalliance with what I now know to call Amyraldism, through a study of Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, out of which five years later grew the essay on that title in this book. I have found since that I could have learned the same lesson in substance from Spurgeon’s sermons or Toplady’s hymns or Bernard’s discourses on Canticles; but in fact it was Owen who taught it to me, and it has marked my Christianity ever since, as decisively as did the kindred realization, which came to me some years earlier, that biblical religion is God-centered, not man-centered. To get the love of Christ in focus changes one’s whole existence.

Third, Richard Baxter convinced me long ago that regular discursive meditation, in which as he quaintly put it you “imitate the most powerful preacher you ever heard” in applying spiritual truth to yourself, as well as turning that truth into praise, is a vital discipline for spiritual health. This was the unanimous Puritan view, and it is now mine too. God knows, I am a poor practitioner of this wisdom, but when my heart is cold I do at least know what I need. In much current teaching about prayer, contemplation is “in” and talking to yourself before God is “out.” I am Puritan enough to think that this contemplative fashion is largely a reaction against devotional formalism, and that it owes as much to twentieth-century anti-intellectualism and interest in non-Christian mysticism as it does to Scripture, and that in cutting loose from the meditative manner of the Psalms, the Fathers, and specifically the Augustinian heritage of which the Puritans are part, it loses without gaining. The contemplative style is not the whole of biblical prayer. At this point Puritan influence puts me out of step with my time, but much, I think, to my advantage.

Fourth, Baxter also focused my vision of the ordained minister’s pastoral office. As Warfield said of Luther’s Bondage of the Will, so do I say of Baxter’s Reformed Pastor: its words have hands and feet. They climb all over you; they work their way into your heart and conscience, and will not be dislodged. My sense of being called to preach the gospel, teach the Bible, and shepherd souls could have been learned from the Anglican ordinal that was used to ordain me, but in fact it crystallised out through my study of Baxter’s own ministry and his Reformed (we would say, Revived) Pastor. From student days I have known that I was called to be a pastor according to Baxter’s specifications, and my subsequent commitments to lecturing and writing have simply defined for me aspects of the way in which I should fulfill that role. I wish I had done better at it.

Fifth, the Puritans have taught me to see and feel the transitoriness of this life, to think of it, with all its richness, as essentially the gymnasium and dressing-room where we are prepared for heaven, and to regard readiness to die as the first step in learning to live. Here again is a historic Christian emphasis—Patristic, Medieval, Reformational, Puritan, Evangelical—with which the Protestantism that I know has largely lost touch. The Puritans experienced systematic persecution for their faith; what we today think of as the comforts of home were unknown to them; their medicine and surgery were rudimentary; they had no aspirins, tranquilizers, sleeping tablets or antidepressant pills, just as they had no social security or insurance; in a world in which more than half the adult population died young and more than half the children born died in infancy, disease, distress, discomfort, pain, and death were their constant companions. They would have been lost had they not kept their eyes on heaven and known themselves as pilgrims travelling home to the Celestial City. Dr. Johnson is credited with the remark that when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully, and in the same way the Puritans’ awareness that in the midst of life we are in death, just one step from eternity, gave them a deep seriousness, calm yet passionate, with regard to the business of living that Christians in today’s opulent, mollycoddled, earthbound Western world rarely manage to match. Few of us, I think, live daily on the edge of eternity in the conscious way that the Puritans did, and we lose out as a result. For the extraordinary vivacity, even hilarity (yes, hilarity; you will find it in the sources), with which the Puritans lived stemmed directly, I believe, from the unflinching, matter-of-fact realism with which they prepared themselves for death, so as always to be found, as it were, packed up and ready to go. Reckoning with death brought appreciation of each day’s continued life, and the knowledge that God would eventually decide, without consulting them, when their work on earth was done brought energy for the work itself while they were still being given time to get on with it. As I move through my own seventh decade, in better health than can possibly last, I am more glad than I can say for what Puritans like Bunyan and Baxter have taught me about dying; I needed it, and the preachers I hear these days never get to it, and modern Christian writers seem quite clueless about it—save for C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, whose insight on this as on so much else is surely unique in the twentieth century.

Sixth, the Puritans shaped my churchly identity, by imparting to me their vision of the wholeness of the work of God that they called reformation, and that we would more likely nowadays call renewal. Today, as in my youth, some conservative Anglicans (I speak as one of them) care about orthodoxy, some about liturgy and corporate life, some about individual conversion and nurture, some about aspects of personal sanctity, some about central and congregational structures, some about national moral standards, some about compassionate social witness, some about the reviving of piety amid our Laodiceanism. But each of these concerns gets outflanked, undermined, and ultimately trivialized if it is not linked with all the others. Divided, they fall and run into the sand. I have seen this happen across the board, both in and outside Anglicanism, in my own lifetime. The Puritans gave me a concern for all these things together, as all sustaining each other, and all bearing on the honor and glory of God in his church, and I am thankful to be able to say that inside me they are together still.

I could have learned this ideal of overall evangelical renewal from England’s still unappreciated reforming genius Thomas Cranmer or from the nineteenth-century colossus J. C. Ryle (hardly from any more recent Anglican, I think); but, in fact, I got most of it from the Puritans, and principally from the would-be Anglican and reluctant nonconformist Richard Baxter, to whom I owe so much in other areas, as I have already said. Following this gleam as a reforming Anglican has sometimes put me in places where I seemed not to be in step with anyone, and I do not suppose that my judgement on specific questions was always faultless, but looking back I am sure that the comprehensive, non-sectarian lead that Baxter gave me was the right one. I continue to be grateful for it, and expect that gratitude to last for eternity.

Seventh, the Puritans made me aware that all theology is also spirituality, in the sense that it has an influence, good or bad, positive or negative, on its recipients’ relationship or lack of relationship to God. If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both; if it does not encourage the commitment of faith, it reinforces the detachment of unbelief; if it fails to promote humility, it inevitably feeds pride. So one who theologizes in public, whether formally in the pulpit, on the podium or in print, or informally from the armchair, must think hard about the effect his thoughts will have on people—God’s people, and other people. Theologians are called to be the church’s water engineers and sewage officers; it is their job to see that God’s pure truth flows abundantly where it is needed, and to filter out any intrusive pollution that might damage health. The sociological remoteness of theological colleges, seminaries, and university faculties of theology from the true life of the church makes it easy to forget this, and the track record of professional teachers in these units has in my time been distinctly spotty so far as concerns their responsibility to the church and to the world. In fact, anyone could learn the nature of this responsibility from the Fathers, or Luther, or Calvin, or even, in his own funny fashion, Karl Barth, but it was given to me to learn it through watching the Puritans put every “doctrine” (truth) they knew to its proper “use” (application) as a basis for life. It seems to me in retrospect that by virtue of this Puritan influence on me all my theological utterances from the start, on whatever theme, have really been spirituality (i.e., teaching for Christian living), and that I cannot now speak or write any other way. Am I glad? Frankly, yes. It is a happy inability to suffer from.

C. S. Lewis’s first and, for my money, most dazzling Christian book was his Bunyanesque allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933). There he traced the lure of what he called Sweet Desire, and Joy: namely, that tang of the transcendent in the everyday that hits the heart like a blow as one experiences and enjoys things, revealing itself ultimately as a longing not satisfied by any created realities or relationships, but assuaged only in self-abandonment to the Creator’s love in Christ. As Lewis knew, different stimuli trigger this desire in different people; for himself, he talks of “the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, the noise of falling waves.”2 None of those items produces the full effect for me, though I understand how they could do so for Lewis and others; but I can speak of the sight of trees, waterfalls, and steam locomotives, the taste of curry and crab, bits of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Wagner, some improvisatory moments and architectural marvels on my records of performances by Wilhelm Furtwängler, Edwin Fischer, and Otto Klemperer, and occasional sublimities by Jelly-Roll Morton, Bubber Miley, and Louis Armstrong, plus—and this is why I bring the matter up—some touches of rhetoric which for me are recurrently numinous in the five writers I have already named: Lewis himself, and Williams, and (you saw it coming) seraphic Baxter, dreamer Bunyan, and elephantine Owen. Form and content though distinct are connected, and here I connect them, saying that by writing as they do, no less than what they do, these authors fill their books with God for me, making me want him more as they bring him closer. That this material should be as significant for me in its style as it is in its substance seems to me peculiarly happy. Your experience here may not match mine (Owen’s lumbering Latinised idiom, in particular, delights very few); however, there will be that in your experience which enables you to understand mine, and I wanted you fully to know where, as the Americans say, I am coming from when I celebrate the Puritan giants.

I hope these chapters will excite you, for in them I share discoveries that for forty years have been exciting me. The essays are not just history and historical theology; they are themselves, in aim at least, spirituality, as much as anything else I have written; they focus on ways in which, as I see it, the Puritans are giants compared with us, giants whose help we need if ever we are to grow. Learning from the heroes of the Christian past is in any case an important dimension of that edifying fellowship for which the proper name is the communion of saints. The great Puritans, though dead, still speak to us through their writings, and say things to us that we badly need to hear at this present time. I shall try to set some of these before you, in the chapters that follow.

Sources

Much of the material in this book is reproduction or revision of items that have appeared in print before: hence the occasional repetition.

“Why We Need the Puritans” is partly based on a chapter contributed to Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,1986), ix–xvi.

“Puritanism as a Movement of Revival” was published in The Evangelical Quarterly, LII:i (January 1980), 2–16.

“The Practical Writings of the English Puritans” began life as the Evangelical Library Lecture for 1951.

From the privately printed and now out of print annual reports of the Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference come “John Owen on Communication from God” (One Steadfast High Intent [1966], 17–30); “The Puritans as Interpreters of Scripture” (A Goodly Heritage [1958], 18–26); “The Puritan Conscience” (Faith and a Good Conscience [1962], 18–26); “The Doctrine of Justification in Development and Decline among the Puritans” (By Schisms Rent Asunder [1969], 18–30); “The Puritan View of Preaching the Gospel” (How Shall They Hear? [1959], 11–21); “The Witness of the Spirit in Puritan Thought” (The Wisdom of Our Fathers [1956], 14–25); “John Owen on Spiritual Gifts” (Profitable for Doctrine and Reproof [1967], 15–27); “The Puritans and the Lord’s Day” (Servants of the Word [1957], 1–12); “The Puritan Approach to Worship” (Diversity in Unity [1963], 3–14); “Jonathan Edwards and Revival” (Increasing in the Knowledge of God [1960], 13–28).

Some of the material in “The Spirituality of John Owen” was printed in my introduction to John Owen, Sin and Temptation, abridged and edited by James M. Houston (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1983), xvii–xxix, and some is taken from “The Puritan Idea of Communion with God” (Press Toward the Mark, Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference report [1961], 5–15).

“Puritan Preaching” in its original form was written for The Johnian (Lent 1956), 4–9.

“Puritan Evangelism” broke surface in The Banner of Truth 4 (1957): 4–13. Some of the material in the chapter comes from my introduction to Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, edited by William Brown (London: Banner of Truth, 1974), 9–19.

“Saved by His Precious Blood” is my introduction to a reprint of John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (London: Banner of Truth, 1958).

Quotations

Absolute consistency in reproducing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century material has not been aimed at, nor achieved. Materials are cited as they appear in whatever printed books I was using as I wrote each item. Where reprints of Puritan material exist I usually cite them, but not invariably.

Part 1

The Puritans in Profile

2

Why We Need the Puritans

I

Horse racing is said to be the sport of kings. The sport of slinging mud has, however, a wider following. Pillorying the Puritans, in particular, has long been a popular pastime both sides of the Atlantic, and most people’s image of Puritanism still has on it much disfiguring dirt that needs to be scraped off.

“Puritan” as a name was, in fact, mud from the start. Coined in the early 1560s, it was always a satirical smear word implying peevishness, censoriousness, conceit, and a measure of hypocrisy, over and above its basic implication of religiously motivated discontent with what was seen as Elizabeth’s Laodicean and compromising Church of England. Later, the word gained the further, political connotation of being against the Stuart monarchy and for some sort of republicanism; its primary reference, however, was still to what was seen as an odd, furious, and ugly form of Protestant religion.

In England, anti-Puritan feeling was let loose at the time of the Restoration and has flowed freely ever since. In North America it built up slowly after the days of Jonathan Edwards to reach its zenith a hundred years ago in post-Puritan New England. For the past half-century, however, scholars have been meticulously wiping away the mud, and as Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel have unfamiliar colors today now that restorers have removed the dark varnish, so the conventional image of the Puritans has been radically revamped, at least for those in the know. (Knowledge, alas, travels slowly in some quarters.) Taught by Perry Miller, William Haller, Marshall Knappen, Percy Scholes, Edmund Morgan, and a host of more recent researchers, informed folk now acknowledge that the typical Puritans were not wild men, fierce and freaky, religious fanatics and social extremists, but sober, conscientious, and cultured citizens: persons of principle, devoted, determined, and disciplined, excelling in the domestic virtues, and with no obvious shortcomings save a tendency to run to words when saying anything important, whether to God or to man. At last the record has been put straight.

But even so, the suggestion that we need the Puritans—we late twentieth-century Westerners, with all our sophistication and mastery of technique in both secular and sacred fields—may prompt some lifting of eyebrows. The belief that the Puritans, even if they were in fact responsible citizens, were comic and pathetic in equal degree, being naive and superstitious, primitive and gullible, superserious, overscrupulous, majoring in minors, and unable or unwilling to relax, dies hard. What could these zealots give us that we need, it is asked.

The answer, in one word, is maturity. Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity. The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. We are spiritual dwarfs. A much-travelled leader, a native American (be it said), has declared that he finds North American Protestantism, man-centered, manipulative, success-oriented, self-indulgent and sentimental, as it blatantly is, to be 3,000 miles wide and half an inch deep. The Puritans, by contrast, as a body were giants. They were great souls serving a great God. In them clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined. Visionary and practical, idealistic and realistic too, goal-oriented and methodical, they were great believers, great hopers, great doers, and great sufferers. But their sufferings, both sides of the ocean (in old England from the authorities and in New England from the elements), seasoned and ripened them till they gained a stature that was nothing short of heroic. Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings us today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle however do, and the Puritans’ battles against the spiritual and climatic wildernesses in which God set them produced a virility of character, undaunted and unsinkable, rising above discouragement and fears, for which the true precedents and models are men like Moses, and Nehemiah, and Peter after Pentecost, and the apostle Paul.

Spiritual warfare made the Puritans what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling, seeing themselves as their Lord’s soldier-pilgrims, just as in Bunyan’s allegory, and not expecting to be able to advance a single step without opposition of one sort or another. Wrote John Geree, in his tract The Character of an Old English Puritane or Nonconformist (1646): “His whole life he accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his captain, his arms, praiers and tears. The Crosse his Banner and his word [motto] Vincit qui patitur [he who suffers conquers].”1

The Puritans lost, more or less, every public battle that they fought. Those who stayed in England did not change the Church of England as they hoped to do, nor did they revive more than a minority of its adherents, and eventually they were driven out of Anglicanism by calculated pressure on their consciences. Those who crossed the Atlantic failed to establish new Jerusalem in New England; for the first fifty years their little colonies barely survived. They hung on by the skin of their teeth. But the moral and spiritual victories that the Puritans won by keeping sweet, peaceful, patient, obedient, and hopeful under sustained and seemingly intolerable pressures and frustrations give them a place of high honor in the believers’ hall of fame, where Hebrews 11 is the first gallery. It was out of this constant furnace experience that their maturity was wrought and their wisdom concerning discipleship was refined. George Whitefield, the evangelist, wrote of them as follows:

Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross; the Spirit of Christ and of glory then rests upon them. It was this, no doubt, that made the Puritans . . . such burning and shining lights. When cast out by the black Bartholomew-act [the 1662 Act of Uniformity] and driven from their respective charges to preach in barns and fields, in the highways and hedges, they in an especial manner wrote and preached as men having authority. Though dead, by their writings they yet speak; a peculiar unction attends them to this very hour. . . . 2

Those words come from a preface to a reprint of Bunyan’s works that appeared in 1767; but the unction continues, the authority is still felt, and the mature wisdom still remains breathtaking, as all modern Puritan-readers soon discover for themselves. Through the legacy of this literature the Puritans can help us today toward the maturity that they knew, and that we need.

II

In what ways can they do this? Let me suggest some specifics. First, there are lessons for us in the integration of their daily lives. As their Christianity was all-embracing, so their living was all of a piece. Nowadays we would call their lifestyle holistic: all awareness, activity, and enjoyment, all “use of the creatures” and development of personal powers and creativity, was integrated in the single purpose of honoring God by appreciating all his gifts and making everything “holiness to the Lord.” There was for them no disjunction between sacred and secular; all creation, so far as they were concerned, was sacred, and all activities, of whatever kind, must be sanctified, that is, done to the glory of God. So, in their heavenly minded ardor, the Puritans became men and women of order, matter-of-fact and down-to-earth, prayerful, purposeful, practical. Seeing life whole, they integrated contemplation with action, worship with work, labour with rest, love of God with love of neighbor and of self, personal with social identity, and the wide spectrum of relational responsibilities with each other, in a thoroughly conscientious and thought-out way. In this thoroughness they were extreme, that is to say far more thorough than we are, but in their blending of the whole wide range of Christian duties set forth in Scripture they were eminently balanced. They lived by “method” (we would say, by a rule of life), planning and proportioning their time with care, not so much to keep bad things out as to make sure that they got all good and important things in—necessary wisdom, then as now, for busy people! We today, who tend to live unplanned lives at random in a series of non-communicating compartments and who hence feel swamped and distracted most of the time, could learn much from the Puritans at this point.

Second, there are lessons for us in the quality of their spiritual experience. In the Puritans’ communion with God, as Jesus Christ was central, so Holy Scripture was supreme. By Scripture, as God’s word of instruction about divine-human relationships, they sought to live, and here too they were conscientiously methodical. Knowing themselves to be creatures of thought, affection, and will, and knowing that God’s way to the human heart (the will) is via the human head (the mind), the Puritans practised meditation, discursive and systematic, on the whole range of biblical truth as they saw it applying to themselves. Puritan meditation on Scripture was modeled on the Puritan sermon; in meditation the Puritan would seek to search and challenge his heart, stir his affections to hate sin and love righteousness, and encourage himself with God’s promises, just as Puritan preachers would do from the pulpit. This rational, resolute, passionate piety was conscientious without becoming obsessive, law-oriented without lapsing into legalism, and expressive of Christian liberty without any shameful lurches into license. The Puritans knew that Scripture is the unalterable rule of holiness and never allowed themselves to forget it. Knowing also the dishonesty and deceitfulness of fallen human hearts, they cultivated humility and self-suspicion as abiding attitudes and examined themselves regularly for spiritual blind spots and lurking inward evils. They may not be called morbid or introspective on this account, however; on the contrary, they found the discipline of self-examination by Scripture (not the same thing as introspection, let us note), followed by the discipline of confessing and forsaking sin and renewing one’s gratitude to Christ for his pardoning mercy, to be a source of great inner peace and joy. We today, who know to our cost that we have unclear minds, uncontrolled affections, and unstable wills when it comes to serving God and who again and again find ourselves being imposed on by irrational, emotional romanticism disguised as super-spirituality, could profit much from the Puritans’ example at this point too.

Third, there are lessons for us in their passion for effective action. Though the Puritans, like the rest of the human race, had their dreams of what could and should be, they were decidedly not the kind of people that we would call “dreamy”! They had no time for the idleness of the lazy or passive person who leaves it to others to change the world. They were men of action in the pure Reformed mold—crusading activists without a jot of self-reliance; workers for God who depended utterly on God to work in and through them and who always gave God the praise for anything they did that in retrospect seemed to them to have been right; gifted men who prayed earnestly that God would enable them to use their powers, not for self-display, but for his praise. None of them wanted to be revolutionaries in church or state, though some of them reluctantly became such; all of them, however, longed to be effective change agents for God wherever shifts from sin to sanctity were called for. So Cromwell and his army made long, strong prayers before each battle, and preachers made long, strong prayers privately before ever venturing into the pulpit, and laymen made long, strong prayers before tackling any matter of importance (marriage, business deals, major purchases, or whatever). Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive, and (one fears) prayerless; cultivating an ethos which encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor for the most part seek influence beyond their own Christian circle. Where the Puritans prayed and labored for a holy England and New England, sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns national judgement threatens, modern Christians gladly settle for conventional social respectability and, having done so, look no further. Surely it is obvious that at this point also the Puritans have a great deal to teach us.

Fourth, there are lessons for us in their program for family stability. It is hardly too much to say that the Puritans created the Christian family in the English-speaking world. The Puritan ethic of marriage was to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment, but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, and then to proceed with God’s help to do just that. The Puritan ethic of nurture was to train up children in the way they should go, to care for their bodies and souls together, and to educate them for sober, godly, socially useful adult living. The Puritan ethic of home life was based on maintaining order, courtesy, and family worship. Goodwill, patience, consistency, and an encouraging attitude were seen as the essential domestic virtues. In an age of routine discomforts, rudimentary medicine without pain-killers, frequent bereavements (most families lost at least as many children as they reared), an average life expectancy of just under thirty years, and economic hardship for almost all save merchant princes and landed gentry, family life was a school for character in every sense, and the fortitude with which Puritans resisted the all-too-familiar temptation to relieve pressure from the world by brutality at home, and labored to honor God in their families despite all, merits supreme praise. At home the Puritans showed themselves (to use my overworked term) mature, accepting hardships and disappointments realistically as from God and refusing to be daunted or soured by any of them. Also, it was at home in the first instance that the Puritan layman practiced evangelism and ministry. “His family he endeavored to make a Church,” wrote Geree, “. . . laboring that those that were born in it, might be born again to God.”3 In an era in which family life has become brittle even among Christians, with chicken-hearted spouses taking the easy course of separation rather than working at their relationship, and narcissistic parents spoiling their children materially while neglecting them spiritually, there is once more much to be learned from the Puritans’ very different ways.

Fifth, there are lessons to be learned from their sense of human worth. Through believing in a great God (the God of Scripture, undiminished and undomesticated), they gained a vivid awareness of the greatness of moral issues, of eternity, and of the human soul. Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man!” is a very Puritan sentiment; the wonder of human individuality was something that they felt keenly. Though, under the influence of their medieval heritage, which told them that error has no rights, they did not in every case manage to respect those who differed publicly from them, their appreciation of man’s dignity as the creature made to be God’s friend was strong, and so in particular was their sense of the beauty and nobility of human holiness. In the collectivized urban anthill where most of us live nowadays the sense of each individual’s eternal significance is much eroded, and the Puritan spirit is at this point a corrective from which we can profit greatly.

Sixth, there are lessons to be learned from the Puritans’ ideal of church renewal. To be sure, “renewal” was not a word that they used; they spoke only of “reformation” and “reform,” which words suggest to our twentieth-century minds a concern that is limited to the externals of the church’s orthodoxy, order, worship forms, and disciplinary code. But when the Puritans preached, published, and prayed for “reformation” they had in mind, not indeed less than this, but far more. On the title page of the original edition of Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor, the word “reformed” was printed in much larger type than any other, and one does not have to read far before discovering that for Baxter a “reformed” pastor was not one who campaigned for Calvinism but one whose ministry to his people as preacher, teacher, catechist, and role-model showed him to be, as we would say, “revived” or “renewed.” The essence of this kind of “reformation” was enrichment of understanding of God’s truth, arousal of affections Godward, increase of ardor in one’s devotions, and more love, joy, and firmness of Christian purpose in one’s calling and personal life. In line with this, the ideal for the church was that through “reformed” clergy all the members of each congregation should be “reformed”—brought, that is, by God’s grace without disorder into a state of what we would call revival, so as to be truly and thoroughly converted, theologically orthodox and sound, spiritually alert and expectant, in character terms wise and steady, ethically enterprising and obedient, and humbly but joyously sure of their salvation. This was the goal at which Puritan pastoral ministry aimed throughout, both in English parishes and in the “gathered” churches of congregational type that multiplied in the mid-seventeenth century.

The Puritans’ concern for spiritual awakening in communities is to some extent hidden from us by their institutionalism; recalling the upheavals of English Methodism and the Great Awakening, we think of revival ardor as always putting a strain on established order, whereas the Puritans envisaged “reform” at congregational level coming in disciplined style through faithful preaching, catechizing, and spiritual service on the pastor’s part. Clericalism, with its damming up of lay initiative, was doubtless a Puritan limitation, and one which boomeranged when lay zeal finally boiled over in Cromwell’s army, in Quakerism, and in the vast sectarian underworld of Commonwealth times; but the other side of that coin was the nobility of the pastor’s profile that the Puritans evolved—gospel preacher and Bible teacher, shepherd and physician of souls, catechist and counselor, trainer and disciplinarian, all in one. From the Puritans’ ideals and goals for church life, which were unquestionably and abidingly right, and from their standards for clergy, which were challengingly and searchingly high, there is yet again a great deal that modern Christians can and should take to heart.

These are just a few of the most obvious areas in which the Puritans can help us in these days.

III

The foregoing celebration of Puritan greatness may leave some readers skeptical. It is, however, as was hinted earlier, wholly in line with the major reassessment of Puritanism that has taken place in historical scholarship. Fifty years ago the academic study of Puritanism went over a watershed with the discovery that there was such a thing as Puritan culture, and a rich culture at that, over and above Puritan reactions against certain facets of medieval and Renaissance culture. The common assumption of earlier days that Puritans both sides of the Atlantic were characteristically morbid, obsessive, uncouth, and unintelligent was left behind. Satirical aloofness toward Puritan thought-life gave way to sympathetic attentiveness, and the exploring of Puritan beliefs and ideals became an academic cottage industry of impressive vigor, as it still is. North America led the way with four books published over two years, which between them ensured that Puritan studies could never be the same again. These were: William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938); A. S. P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (London: Macmillan, 1938), Woodhouse taught at Toronto; M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago University Press, 1939); and Perry Miller, The New England Mind, Vol I, The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). Many books from the 1930s and later have confirmed the view of Puritanism that these four volumes yielded, and the overall picture that has emerged is as follows.

Puritanism was at heart a spiritual movement, passionately concerned with God and godliness. It began in England with William Tyndale, the Bible translator and Luther’s contemporary, a generation before the word “Puritan” was coined, and it continued till the latter years of the seventeenth century, some decades after “Puritan” had fallen out of use. Into its making went Tyndale’s reforming biblicism; John Bradford’s piety of the heart and conscience; John Knox’s zeal for God’s honor in national churches; the passion for evangelical pastoral competence that is seen in John Hooper, Edward Dering, and Richard Greenham; the view of Holy Scripture as the “regulative principle” of church worship and order that fired Thomas Cartwright; the anti-Roman, anti-Arminian, anti-Socinian, anti-Antinomian Calvinism that John Owen and the Westminster standards set forth; the comprehensive ethical interest that reached its apogee in Richard Baxter’s monumental Christian Directory; and the purpose of popularizing and making practical the teaching of the Bible that gripped Perkins and Bunyan, with many more. Puritanism was essentially a movement for church reform, pastoral renewal and evangelism, and spiritual revival; and in addition—indeed, as a direct expression of its zeal for God’s honor—it was a worldview, a total Christian philosophy, in intellectual terms a Protestantized and updated medievalism, and in terms of spirituality a reformed monasticism outside the cloister and away from monkish vows.

The Puritan goal was to complete what England’s Reformation began: to finish reshaping Anglican worship, to introduce effective church discipline into Anglican parishes, to establish righteousness in the political, domestic, and socioeconomic fields, and to convert all Englishmen to a vigorous evangelical faith. Through the preaching and teaching of the gospel and the sanctifying of all arts, sciences, and skills, England was to become a land of saints, a model and paragon of corporate godliness, and as such a means of blessing to the world.

Such was the Puritan dream as it developed under Elizabeth, James, and Charles, and blossomed in the Interregnum, before it withered in the dark tunnel of persecution between 1660 (Restoration) and 1689 (Toleration). This dream bred the giants with whom this book is concerned.

IV

The present chapter is, I confess, advocacy, barefaced and unashamed. I am seeking to make good the claim that the Puritans can teach us lessons that we badly need to learn. Let me pursue my line of argument a little further.

It must by now be apparent that the great Puritan pastor-theologians—Owen, Baxter, Goodwin, Howe, Perkins, Sibbes, Brooks, Watson, Gurnall, Flavel, Bunyan, Manton, and others like them—were men of outstanding intellectual power, as well as spiritual insight. In them mental habits fostered by sober scholarship were linked with a flaming zeal for God and a minute acquaintance with the human heart. All their work displays this unique fusion of gifts and graces. In thought and outlook they were radically God-centred. Their appreciation of God’s sovereign majesty was profound, and their reverence in handling his written word was deep and constant. They were patient, thorough, and methodical in searching the Scriptures, and their grasp of the various threads and linkages in the web of revealed truth was firm and clear. They understood most richly the ways of God with men, the glory of Christ the Mediator, and the work of the Spirit in the believer and the church.

And their knowledge was no mere theoretical orthodoxy. They sought to “reduce to practice” (their own phrase) all that God taught them. They yoked their consciences to his word, disciplining themselves to bring all activities under the scrutiny of Scripture, and to demand a theological, as distinct from a merely pragmatic, justification for everything that they did. They applied their understanding of the mind of God to every branch of life, seeing the church, the family, the state, the arts and sciences, the world of commerce and industry, no less than the devotions of the individual, as so many spheres in which God must be served and honored. They saw life whole, for they saw its Creator as Lord of each department of it, and their purpose was that “holiness to the Lord” might be written over it in its entirety.

Nor was this all. Knowing God, the Puritans also knew man. They saw him as in origin a noble being, made in God’s image to rule God’s earth, but now tragically brutified and brutalized by sin. They viewed sin in the triple light of God’s law, Lordship, and holiness, and so saw it as transgression and guilt, as rebellion and usurpation, and as uncleanness, corruption, and inability for good. Seeing this, and knowing the ways whereby the Spirit brings sinners to faith and new life in Christ, and leads saints, on the one hand, to grow into their Savior’s image, and, on the other, to learn their total dependence on grace, the great Puritans became superb pastors. The depth and unction of their “practical and experimental” expositions in the pulpit was no more outstanding than was their skill in the study in applying spiritual physic to sick souls. From Scripture they mapped the often bewildering terrain of the life of faith and fellowship with God with great thoroughness (see Pilgrim’s Progress for a pictorial gazetteer), and their acuteness and wisdom in diagnosing spiritual malaise and setting out the appropriate biblical remedies was outstanding. They remain the classic pastors of Protestantism, just as men like Whitefield and Spurgeon stand as its classic evangelists.

Now it is here, on the pastoral front, that today’s evangelical Christians most need help. Our numbers, it seems, have increased in recent years, and a new interest in the old paths of evangelical theology has grown. For this we should thank God. But not all evangelical zeal is according to knowledge, nor do the virtues and values of the biblical Christian life always come together as they should, and three groups in particular in today’s evangelical world seem very obviously to need help of a kind that the Puritans, as we meet them in their writings, are uniquely qualified to give. These I call restless experientialists, entrenched intellectualists, and disaffected deviationists. They are not, of course, organized bodies of opinion, but individual persons with characteristic mentalities that one meets over and over again. Take them, now, in order.

Those whom I call restless experientialists are a familiar breed, so much so that observers are sometimes tempted to define evangelicalism in terms of them. Their outlook is one of casual haphazardness and fretful impatience, of grasping after novelties, entertainments, and “highs,” and of valuing strong feelings above deep thoughts. They have little taste for solid study, humble self-examination, disciplined meditation, and unspectacular hard work in their callings and their prayers. They conceive the Christian life as one of exciting extraordinary experiences rather than of resolute rational righteousness. They dwell continually on the themes of joy, peace, happiness, satisfaction, and rest of soul with no balancing reference to the divine discontent of Romans 7, the fight of faith of Psalm 73, or the “lows” of Psalms 42, 88, and 102. Through their influence the spontaneous jollity of the simple extrovert comes to be equated with healthy Christian living, while saints of less sanguine and more complex temperament get driven almost to distraction because they cannot bubble over in the prescribed manner. In their restlessness these exuberant ones become uncritically credulous, reasoning that the more odd and striking an experience the more divine, supernatural, and spiritual it must be, and they scarcely give the scriptural virtue of steadiness a thought.

It is no counter to these defects to appeal to the specialized counseling techniques that extrovert evangelicals have developed for pastoral purposes in recent years; for spiritual life is fostered and spiritual maturity engendered, not by techniques but by truth, and if our techniques have been formed in terms of a defective notion of the truth to be conveyed and the goal to be aimed at they cannot make us better pastors or better believers than we were before. The reason why the restless experientialists are lopsided is that they have fallen victim to a form of worldliness, a man-centred, anti-rational individualism, which turns Christian life into a thrill-seeking ego-trip. Such saints need the sort of maturing ministry in which the Puritan tradition has specialized.

What Puritan emphases can establish and settle restless experientialsts? 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 acknowledgment 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 marvelously strong and resilient type of Christian for a century and more, as we have seen.

Think now of entrenched intellectualists in the evangelical world: a second familiar breed, though not so common as the previous type. Some of them seem to be victims of an insecure temperament and inferiority feelings, others to be reacting out of pride or pain against the zaniness of experientialism as they have perceived it, but whatever the source of their syndrome the behavior-pattern in which they express it is distinctive and characteristic. Constantly they present themselves as rigid, argumentative, critical Christians, champions of God’s truth for whom orthodoxy is all. Upholding and defending their own view of that truth, whether Calvinist or Arminian, dispensational or Pentecostal, national church reformist or Free Church separatist, or whatever it might be, is their leading interest, and they invest themselves unstintingly in this task. There is little warmth about them; relationally they are remote; experiences do not mean much to them; winning the battle for mental correctness is their one great purpose. They see, truly enough, that in our anti-rational, feeling-oriented, instant-gratification culture conceptual knowledge of divine things is undervalued, and they seek with passion to right the balance at this point. They understand the priority of the intellect well; the trouble is that intellectualism, expressing itself in endless campaigns for their own brand of right thinking, is almost if not quite all that they can offer, for it is almost if not quite all that they have. They too, so I urge, need exposure to the Puritan heritage for their maturing.

That last statement might sound paradoxical, since it will not have escaped the reader that the above profile corresponds to what many still suppose the typical Puritan to have been. But when we ask what emphases Puritan tradition contains to counter arid intellectualism, a whole series of points springs to view. First, true religion claims the affections as well as the intellect; it is essentially, in Richard Baxter’s phrase, “heart-work.” Second, theological truth is for practice. William Perkins defined theology as the science of living blessedly forever; William Ames called it the science of living to God. Third, conceptual knowledge kills if one does not move on from knowing notions to knowing the realities to which they refer—in this case, from knowing about God to a relational acquaintance with God himself. Fourth, faith and repentance, issuing in a life of love and holiness, that is, of gratitude expressed in goodwill and good works, are explicitly called for in the gospel. Fifth, the Spirit is given to lead us into close companionship with others in Christ. Sixth, the discipline of discursive meditation is meant to keep us ardent and adoring in our love affair with God. Seventh, it is ungodly and scandalous to become a firebrand and cause division in the church, and it is ordinarily nothing more reputable than spiritual pride in its intellectual form that leads men to create parties and splits. The great Puritans were as humble-minded and warm-hearted as they were clear-headed, as fully oriented to people as they were to Scripture, and as passionate for peace as they were for truth. They would certainly have diagnosed today’s fixated Christian intellectualists as spiritually stunted, not in their zeal for the form of sound words but in their lack of zeal for anything else; and the thrust of Puritan teaching about God’s truth in man’s life is still potent to ripen such souls into whole and mature human beings.

I turn finally to those whom I call disaffected deviationists, the casualties and dropouts of the modern evangelical movement, many of whom have now turned against it to denounce it as a neurotic perversion of Christianity. Here too is a breed that we know all too well. It is distressing to think of these folk, both because their experience to date discredits our evangelicalism so deeply and also because there are so many of them. Who are they? They are people who once saw themselves as evangelicals, either from being evangelically nurtured or from coming to profess conversion within the evangelical sphere of influence, but who have become disillusioned about the evangelical point of view and have turned their backs on it, feeling that it let them down. Some leave it for intellectual reasons, judging that what was taught them was so simplistic as to stifle their minds and so unrealistic and out of touch with facts as to be really, if unintentionally, dishonest. Others leave because they were led to expect that as Christians they would enjoy health, wealth, trouble-free circumstances, immunity from relational hurts, betrayals, and failures, and from making mistakes and bad decisions; in short, a flowery bed of ease on which they would be carried happily to heaven—and these great expectations were in due course refuted by events. Hurt and angry, feeling themselves victims of a confidence trick, they now accuse the evangelicalism they knew of having failed and fooled them, and resentfully give it up; it is a mercy if they do not therewith similarly accuse and abandon God himself. Modern evangelicalism has much to answer for in the number of casualties of this sort that it has caused in recent years by its naivete of mind and unrealism of expectation. But here again the soberer, profounder, wiser evangelicalism of the Puritan giants can fulfill a corrective and therepeutic function in our midst, if only we will listen to its message.