SENT TO OXFORD IN 1604 by his wealthy, puritan-hating father, John Harrington was drawn to a way of being religious his family had expected him to ignore. In a prayer he wrote some years later, he asked God to “work” in him “a thorough humiliation in the sight and sence of that boundles and bottomless sea of corruption and wretchedness wherein I am overwhelmed that I may rightly value and prize and long after the salvation purchased for me by the death and passion of Jesus Christ.” In this single sentence, Harrington summarized the message of the sermons that moved him to embrace humiliation: those who turn away from God are lost, but those who repent and believe will participate in the gift of grace made possible by the cross. Some thirty or forty years before Harrington put pen to paper, the same message prompted a woman in York to repent “her former life, idly spent and evil.” As remembered by a minister, Margaret Metcalfe was “superstitiously and popishly bent in times past” until, in response to evangelical Protestantism, she became “devout and godly.”1
With this version of Puritanism we set aside disputes about an unfinished Reformation and take up the question put to St. Paul by his jailor in Philippi: “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30).2 Provocative because of its simplicity, the jailor’s query drew from preachers and theologians a “practical divinity” animated by the imperative to translate doctrine into faith as something “experimentall” or “inward” and manifested in outward “watchfulness.”3 Summing up the essence of theology, the early seventeenth-century English theologian William Ames described it as “living to God,” or in such a way that the divine-human connection became visible. Well before Ames was emphasizing the interplay of piety and practice, the sixteenth-century humanist Desiderus Erasmus had advised clergy to avoid “intricate syllogisms” and focus on the “gospel life.” Theology of this kind had a special importance given the assumption that ordinary people must be prodded to repent their sinfulness lest they content themselves with the assumption that, “because they are baptized and live in the church . . . they are in God’s favour.” To people who made this argument, the Cambridge-based Elizabethan theologian William Perkins retorted that they “never knew what sin was” and consequently were “never yet reconciled to God.” The makers of the practical divinity wanted to convert Catholics into Protestants and to stabilize the contours of orthodoxy, but a more telling goal was to raise the bar for all those who contented themselves with the vernacular wisdom summed up in the saying, “the God that made me, save me.” Nothing this simple would do.4
Simultaneously, the bar was being raised for those who became ministers. In the 1560s, few British clergy were versed in Protestant theology or could preach in an evangelical manner, if only because so many of them had been formed within the Catholic system.5 Replacing these clergy with evangelical preachers paralleled the project of turning the British people into committed Christians. Then and only then would the truth be “miraculously and mightily propagated, enlarged, and governed by the true ministry of . . . word and sacraments,” the visionary hope of the Marian martyr John Bradford (d. 1555) and his successors for another century.6
To these goals, the makers of the practical divinity added another, its value as an instrument of social and moral reformation (see chap. 5). In a state church such as England’s, preaching that emphasized repentance and restitution could supplant the discipline supervised by ecclesiastical courts, which never seemed effective. The same was true of access to the sacraments. Sermons of the right kind could nurture a scrupulosity that would keep the unworthy from participating in the Lord’s Supper or bringing their children to be baptized. Evangelical and disciplinarian at one and the same time, the practical divinity was also a means of sustaining theological orthodoxy as it was defined within the Reformed tradition.7
The substance of such a reformation emerged in England during Edward VI’s brief reign, as evidenced by the letters, translations from Scripture, and testimonies Foxe preserved in the Book of Martyrs.8 Not until midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, however, did the practical divinity begin to blossom with the publishing of Bradford’s devotional writings, which Thomas Sampson edited, and the ministries of Edward Dering, George Gifford, Richard Green-ham, and Henry Smith, among others. By the turn of the century, another cadre of ministers and university teachers, a fully British group that included Perkins, Richard Rogers, Arthur Hildersham, and in Scotland, Robert Bruce, John Craig, and Robert Rollock, added greatly to what Greenham and Dering had accomplished. Their successors, many of whom will turn up in these pages, continued to publish books that were widely read.9 Before long, this evangelism was mobilizing large numbers of people to advocate on behalf of ministers or lecturers who preached its core themes, its reach demonstrated by the runaway sales of such books as Arthur Dent’s Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601). As a historian of “church and people” in England has observed, “Where there had been one zealous lay promoter of Protestantism in 1560, forty years on there might well be four.” In the early years of the Elizabethan regime, a newcomer to London went eight years without hearing a sermon he liked, but by 1600 or a little beyond, godly ministers were thick on the ground.10
Beginning with a description of theological motifs and their sources, this chapter encompasses the themes and technologies of devotion, the idea and practice of a Word-centered ministry, and the emergence of alternative theologies of grace. The bearing of the practical divinity on social and moral reform is deferred to chapter 5.
The practical divinity rested on premises that were classically Protestant and, in most respects, aligned with Reformed practice and doctrine.11 Several of these premises were affirmed in the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Scots Confession of 1560. Both contained the doctrine of free grace that Martin Luther had endorsed, together with the kindred doctrines of justification by faith, original sin, and the primacy of Scripture, juxtaposing them with another principle of great importance in Reformed theology: predestination (article 17), a term replaced by the word “election” in chapter 8 of the Scots Confession. Twenty-five years later, John Whitgift sought to clarify these doctrines at a moment when dissidents were questioning some of them. At his behest, the Lambeth Articles (1595) strengthened article 17 by introducing the concept of reprobation—“God has from eternity predestined certain men to life, and some he has reprobated to death”—and underlined the certainty of assurance. These assertions reappeared in the Irish Articles of Faith (1615) and the Aberdeen (Scotland) Confession of Faith (1616). A translation of Reformed creeds and catechisms assembled by the French Huguenot Simon Goulart and arranged topically, An Harmony of the Confessions of the . . . Christian and Reformed Churches (1586), to which John Field or someone else added the Scottish Negative Confession of 1581, embodied a consensus on matters of doctrine that all but a few evangelicals in England and Scotland would endeavor to sustain.12
Challenged after 1590 by Catholic and Protestant “Arminians” of various stripes, certain parts of this system were reaffirmed by an international synod that met in 1618–19 in the Dutch city of Dordt. Thereafter, the synod’s “five points” were incorporated into most versions of Reformed orthodoxy.13 The English lawyer-polemicist William Prynne drew on Dordt and a host of minister-theologians dating from the origins of Christianity in Britain to validate The Church of England’s Old Antithesis to New Arminianism (1630).14 He had history on his side, a history that justifies a modern historian’s assertion that “the characteristic theology of English Protestant sainthood” was “Calvinism.” Allowing for the presence of “moderate” or “soft” Calvinists, something akin to a consensus of this kind prevailed in Scotland and, after 1630, the newly founded colonies in New England—to be sure, a consensus never as crisply defined as some may have preferred.15
Convincing on the face of it, this argument must not obscure the debates that persisted within the Reformed tradition and its British offspring or the importance of local contexts in shaping what was actually being preached or published. Moreover, it runs the risk of converting a sympathy for several aspects of Reformed theology—a sympathy shared by general assemblies and every Archbishop of Canterbury from Thomas Cranmer to George Abbott (d. 1633)—into a hard- and-fast allegiance to certain principles. Generalizations about Calvinism may also lead us down an ever-narrowing corridor in search of “true” Calvinism, usually identified as what John Calvin of Geneva had said, and, via such a journey, to puzzling over when and where the preacher-theologians of Britain and New England sustained or departed from his thinking. (Actual citations to his treatises and sermons were few.) All too often, such an inquiry focuses on the doctrine of predestination as if it were the heart of the matter. And, all too often, such an inquiry overlooks the differences between theology as debated within the universities or the highest levels of the church and theology as summarized in catechisms or calibrated in response to pastoral situations.16
Hence the importance of sketching wider contexts and sources for the practical divinity. The most important of these contexts was the Bible. Not the quest for “primitive” rules about the church but what the Scriptures said about being saved and the practice of devotion drew ministers and laypeople to Paul’s letters and those ascribed to Peter, James, and John. Seeking to understand the workings of the Holy Spirit, these people turned to passages that spoke of Christians being filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18) and reborn through its workings. So Paul declared in Romans 8:14, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God,” followed by a verse contrasting the “spirit of bondage” with the “spirit of adoption” and, in verse 16, affirming that “the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God,” a theme reiterated in Ephesians 1:13–14 and 1 John 5:6–10. Romans 8 was crucial for another reason, the apostle’s assertion (v. 29) that “for whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Important, too, were passages associating the gospel promise with self-examination and righteousness, notably 2 Corinthians 13:5, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith”; Philippians 2:12, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”; and the much-cited 2 Peter 1:10, “Where-fore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure,” which the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible glossed to signify that “we must confirm it in our selves, by the fruites of the Spirit.” That faith and works were necessarily joined was asserted in James 2:17: “faith, if it hath not works, is dead.” Other parts of Scripture, but especially the Psalms, modeled how the faithful should meditate, pray, repent, and give thanks to a God who promised them consolation. Song of Songs (Canticles), the most lyrical and erotic of the Scriptures, prompted commentaries that emphasized the loving, affective relationship between God and humankind.17
The ministers who endorsed the practical divinity based everything they preached and wrote on the Bible, most commonly by organizing their sermons around a text and anchoring systematic statements in Scripture.18 Perkins cited Calvin and Luther once each and Augustine a dozen times in one of his treatises but used Scripture more than 150 times. Richard Rogers filled the margins of his much-read Seven Treatises (1601) with references to the Bible, and although the margins of John Norton’s The Orthodox Evangelist (1657) contain a multitude of references to Continental Reformed theologians, the text itself drew heavily on Scripture.19
Every sermon series or work of devotion associated with the practical divinity took for granted that the Old Testament foreshadowed the story of redemption narrated in the New. A principle of interpretation known as typology treated Adam, Abraham, and David as “figures” of the Christ who would be more fully revealed in the New Testament. In another version of typology, God’s promise to Abraham (Gen. 17:7) and his “seed” validated the sacrament of infant baptism. Armed with this method of interpretation and its near neighbors—the literary devices of allegory, analogy, and example—the makers of the practical divinity ranged widely within the Bible for models of religious experience and arguments in behalf of various doctrines.20
Less commonly, the makers of the practical divinity cited the Church Fathers and philosophers such as Aristotle.21 By far the most influential of the Fathers was Augustine, evoked time and again because of the stand he took against assertions attributed to the fourth century CE British monk Pelagius (hence Pelagianism), who questioned original sin and proposed that humans were free to behave morally or to sin. For Augustine, Pelagianism became the assertion that humankind could save itself. In response, he insisted that a sovereign God acted solely for His own glory in electing some to salvation, an argument based on Romans 8:29. This was the Augustine on whom the Reformers relied whenever they defended the doctrines of free grace and salvation by faith alone against a Catholic theology that blended divine mercy with human effort (penance). In doing so, they frequently amplified his version of predestination to include the reprobate who would never receive saving grace, that is, a double predestination of those who were saved and those forever excluded from salvation. Their Augustine also insisted upon the total corruption of human nature.22 From antiquity came other categories that fleshed out God’s way of working in the world: the four causes described by Aristotle (the final, formal, efficient or instrumental, and material); the assertion that humans were “rational,” that is, active in contrast to the inert qualities of nature; and possibly a much-employed distinction between the “order of time,” when the work of grace happened “all in one instant,” and the “order of nature,” when redemption unfolded as a sequence of stages.23
This “Augustinianism” was supplemented by productive connections with sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Continental Reformed theologians such as Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Heinrich Bullinger, Theodore Beza, and their academic allies and successors, a group that included Johann Piscator and Girolamo Zanchi, among others.24 After Calvin died in 1564, Beza became the leader of the Protestant community in Geneva and an important presence in France. He was also a presence in Britain, where three of his books were translated into English and part of another incorporated into a treatise by Perkins. In 1586 Archbishop Whitgift ordered Church of England clergy awaiting an official license to use the sermons in Bullinger’s Fifty Godly and Learned Sermons (in English, 1584) in their Sunday services. Certain Reformed creeds were also influential: the widely translated Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, its teachings reiterated in a commentary by Zacharias Ursinus, a professor at Heidelberg who helped draft the catechism; the firmly predestinarian Second Helvetic Confession (1566), approved by several Reformed churches, including the Church of Scotland; a catechism by Calvin, together with his commentaries on the Bible.25
The traffic in texts between Britain and the Continent was accompanied by traffic in people, thanks to invitations issued by Thomas Cranmer and the Continental experiences of English and Scottish exiles (see chap. 1). By the early seventeenth century, Robert Boyd (d. 1627) and John Cameron (d. 1625) were among the Scottish minister-academics who taught in Huguenot seminaries or in Geneva, where Andrew Melville lived for several years before returning to Scotland in 1574. Other British clergy taught in the Netherlands, where William Ames went after being forced out of Cambridge University. Two of Ames’s books, De Conscientia (1630 in Latin, 1639 in English) and The Marrow of Sacred Theology (1627 in Latin, 1638 in English, 1656 in Dutch) enjoyed a long life in Scotland and the New England colonies. Traffic in the other direction included the “method” of the French Huguenot Pierre de la Ramee (Ramus), which Melville introduced into Scotland, Perkins utilized in England, and Ames incorporated into his textbooks. Any reckoning of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century influences must also include humanism, although its main contribution may have been to social ethics.26
To these influences must be added a surprising source of ideas and practices: Catholicism and its expertise in devotion. Richard Rogers was prompted to write his Seven Treatises by the competition he was feeling in his ministry from Catholic manuals of devotion, especially the English Jesuit Robert Parsons’s First booke of the Christian exercise, much reprinted (at least thirty times before 1630) in a version prepared by a Protestant clergyman for Protestant readers. An English version of another book that originated within Catholicism, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, enjoyed a similar popularity.27 Other continuities with Catholicism were unspoken: the recycling of medieval exempla into a Protestant lore of wonders, the expectation that the sacrament of baptism was efficacious (i.e., enabling parents to assume that their children were encompassed within the doctrine of election), an understanding of death and dying as akin to a theater where Christ and the Devil contended for some-one’s soul, a lingering affection for Christmas and saint’s days, the texture of certain prayers. The deeper continuity may have been the emphasis on interiority that emerged within medieval Catholicism and became such a feature of the practical divinity.28
This multitude of sources provided five overlapping themes or languages. One of these was the possibility of representing the history of redemption as a series of covenants. Foreshadowed in Calvin, elaborated among his Continental successors, becoming prominent in Scotland and England around the beginning of the seventeenth century and incorporated into the Westminster Confession (1647), the covenant or “federal” theology represented the history of redemption as a sequence of covenants: the first of these between God and Christ, followed by a covenant of “works” God made with Adam, a covenant of grace reestablished with the Second Adam (Christ) but already visible in the Abrahamic covenant, and finally a “new covenant” with the saints (or elect) made possible by Christ’s death on the cross.29 This framework had several benefits. It supported an understanding of the Christian life as grounded in obedience to Old Testament law and buttressed the argument, itself classically Reformed, that law and grace were always intermingled, the law serving as a means of preparing for grace and a framework for the righteousness that the elect were obliged to practice. Moreover, it endeavored to reconcile divine sovereignty with the “liberty” or freedom humankind enjoyed as “rational” beings. In this regard, the covenant of grace could be characterized as both “absolute” and “conditional,” absolute because it conveyed an unmerited promise of salvation to the elect but conditional in the sense of expecting the godly to “performe” certain duties.30
This fusing of divine initiative with human obligations depended as well on scholastic assumptions about the role of “second causes,” or what humans contributed to the divine-human relationship; as a modern historian of this idiom has pointed out, the covenant was “dispensed under a conditional form because God freely elects . . . to respect the integrity of second causes, including the human mind and will.” By this reasoning, the motif of covenant authorized a space for “consent.” Finally, it reinforced the message, already embedded in the doctrine of election, that God was certain to extend redeeming love to (some of) humankind.31
Intertwined with the language of covenant was a second framework that likened the unfolding of redemption to a “chain,” or what was “ordained.” Employed by Perkins in one of the best-known of his treatises, A Golden Chaine, or the Description of Theologie, containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, accordeing to Gods Woord (1590 in Latin, 1591 in English, and enlarged in 1592),32 this figure of speech became a convenient shorthand for the several stages of redemption. The key stages were those Paul had specified in Romans 8:30: “whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified,” a sequence commonly restated as effectual call or vocation, justification, and sanctification. By the early seventeenth century, these categories were being supplemented by a stage referred to as “preparation” under the “law.” Whether drawn from Romans 8 or amplified by British Protestants, every description of this sequence made the point that “the conversion of a sinner is not wrought all at one instance, but in continuance of time and that by certain measures and degrees.” In general, laypeople on the receiving end of the practical divinity did not experience the shattering rebirth that became characteristic in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American revivalism. Instead, conversion was a lifelong process. Hence the gloss on Romans 8:30 in the Geneva Bible: conversion happens “by degrees, [the Holy Spirit] carrying saints toward the perfection that would become theirs in heaven not on earth.”33
Here, as with covenants and their conditions, a space emerged in which sinners could respond to the gospel promise via the “means of grace” included in the chain, a repertory that included the Word (preaching), sacraments, and visible church. As the English layman William Prynne pointed out, “When God doth offer grace unto us, we must know that he doth not immediately infuse this grace into us, but he works it in us by the use of means.” The point was simple. Although the doctrine of election could be described as an unmediated expression of divine sovereignty, Reformed theologians emphasized God’s willingness to accommodate His will to human capacities by using human intermediaries that included preaching and the sacraments. Seeking to illustrate the concept of means of grace, a late sixteenth-century writer resorted to an analogy between a candle and humankind to make this point: “For as wax is not melted without heat . . . so God useth means . . . to draw those close unto himself whom he hath appointed unto salvation.”34
A third language or framework concerned the law. Not, of course, the law that figured in the covenant of works God had fashioned with Adam, for this had been superseded by the covenant of grace. Nor was it the law imposed on Ancient Israel as a condition of its covenant with God, for most of this was irrelevant to Christians. To be sure, the moral rules spelled out in the Ten Commandments were “perpetual,” as binding now as they were before the coming of Christ. Otherwise, what persisted was the law as sign or instrument of God the lawgiver whose glory was acknowledged by all who obeyed Him. Conversely, to disobey the law was the essence of sin.35 Given that humankind as sinners turned away from God and “brought guilt upon themselves” for doing so, the law had a special role to play in the drama of redemption. In the grand scheme of things, the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, or “justification,” overcame this guilt, but as John Harrington had realized, a crucial aspect of the process of redemption was a sinner’s repentance for being so prideful and therefore so alienated from God. A simple way of illustrating this assumption was to compare the workings of a mirror to the workings of the law. In the words of Richard Rogers, the law “serveth to set forth (as in a glasse) many secret and deceivable corruptions of mans heart; and to helpe us to finde out what swarmes of noisome, dangerous, vaine, wicked, and worldly lusts doe lurke and lodge therein . . . and to make us wearie and ashamed of them.” Or, as emphasized by the English minister Alexander Nowell in a rephrasing of Galatians 3:24, the law was a “schoolmaster” that pushed sinners into “knowing of ourselves, and . . . repentance and faith.” Theologically, the law established beyond any shadow of a doubt that humankind could do nothing to earn or merit grace. At the same time, it prepared the way for sinners to encounter the gospel promise of free grace.36
This sequence—law before grace in a preparatory role as the “spirit of bondage” (Rom. 8:15) and, at a deeper level of theological argument, the law as part of an evangelical economy of grace—was a prominent feature of British Protestantism from Nowell, Perkins, and Greenham to Robert Bolton and Thomas Hooker and beyond (see chap. 9). In the words of the mid-seventeenth-century Scottish theologian William Guthrie, “the most ordinary way by which many are brought to Christ, is by a clear and discernible work of the law, and humiliation, which we generally call the spirit of bondage.” “Set before thine eyes the curse that is due unto sin,” Perkins advised readers of A Golden Chaine, “that thus bewailing thy misery and despairing utterly of thine own power to attain . . . happiness, thou mayest renounce thyself and be provoked to feel and sue unto Christ Jesus.” Predicate to becoming a faithful pilgrim, the law enabled the earnest Christian to break away from Satan and initiate a lifelong process of repentance for continuing to sin.37
A fourth framework concerned divine providence. Relying on this doctrine as well as on a Christianized folklore of “wonders” and portents, British theologians evoked a world suffused with signs of God’s overarching supervision of humankind. This was not the God represented by some eighteenth-century philosopher-theologians as a distant watchmaker. On the contrary, a wonder-working God was continually intervening to sustain the faithful and punish the wicked. Acts of divine providence were also His way of goading sinners into acknowledging the hidden recesses of sin. Alternatively, portents and wonders could reinforce someone’s sense of God’s supportive presence in their lives. A devastating fire in a town where the Sabbath was not being properly observed was an example of divine wrath. But a spider detected in a “bowl of porridge before the children . . . had eaten of it,” an event the layman John Winthrop thought worthy of preserving in a notebook, was the doing of a God who protected the faithful. Day after day, people such as Winthrop took for granted that portents were attuned to their own spiritual situations—reassuring in the case of the spider but often construed as a rebuke.38
A fifth approach to the workings of redemption stemmed from the doctrine of predestination, an assertion of God’s omniscience and His “electing” (choosing) those who would enter the kingdom. The concept of election appealed to Perkins and his contemporaries for the same reason it appealed to Calvin, its imperviousness to arguments that God expected sinners to earn their way to grace, a position Reformed Protestants attributed to Catholicism, with its emphasis on penance. John Bradford knew of people who regarded the concept of election as antithetical to human freedom and too severe in limiting the scope of the Atonement to the elect. The men who preached the practical divinity disagreed with this point of view. Bradford extolled God’s “loving-kindness” and “gracious goodness” that enabled sinners to be redeemed, adding (in the context of assertions that the doctrine nurtured libertinism) that, since none of the elect would ever be repudiated, “God’s eternal and immutable decree bindeth not our hands . . . but rather provoketh us thereunto mightily.” Here, in a nutshell, was what a long line of ministers said in response to the possibility that the elect would be indifferent to the moral law. Even though God would never disenfranchise the elect, a premise known as the perseverance of the saints, His true children would always use their “liberty” to bear the “fruit” of love, joy, peace, [and] longsuffering” (Gal. 5:13–22) made possible by this great gift.39
Who were His true children? The orthodox answer to this question was straightforward: God knew, but otherwise His decisions remained a “mystery” to humankind. This assertion had several important consequences. For one, it ensured that the visible church (the church on earth) would always include “hypocrites” who, despite their outward righteousness, were not among the elect. For another, the premise of “mystery” allowed evangelical preachers to offer the gospel promise of salvation to everyone and insist that they act on this possibility. To do nothing, as though God did everything, was to misread what God intended by predestination. Summing up William Ames’s approach to the doctrine, the historian John Eusden has pointed out that, for Ames and others like him, “predestination is an invitation to begin one’s spiritual pilgrimage—with the implicit warning that the certainty of God’s decree shall not be known until one does begin.”40
This combination of law and grace, or divine sovereignty and human striving, may seem puzzling and, to some ministers and laypeople in the 1630s and 1640s (see chap. 9), it came close to compromising the gospel promise of free grace. Nonetheless, it gave British evangelicalism a distinctive place within the Reformed international—a muted distinctiveness, since the makers of the practical divinity regarded themselves as members of a theological tradition initiated by Calvin, Bucer, and the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, with Bullinger somewhere in the mix.41 Three of its themes or assumptions made it unusual: a covenant-centered understanding of redemption and, closely connected to this framework, a strong version of an accommodating God who allowed the workings of divine sovereignty to incorporate human initiative or freedom; an emphasis on interiority or “the heart” as the location of real or “sincere” faith; and the role of the law in the making of righteousness or moral behavior. The first rested on the concepts of chain, covenant, and means of grace, or the assumption that God approached sinners through the ministry in a manner that respected their free will. The second had Catholic sources that British Protestants began to amplify in the sixteenth century. The third descended directly from Calvin’s understanding of the Christian life and acquired a fresh importance in the British context. The outcome was a mode of preaching that tied together preparation under the law, the sinner’s self-perception as (in Perkins’s words) “vile, wretched and miserable [and] . . . unable to do any good,” self-discipline or what was often characterized as “watchfulness,” and the joy of encountering the risen Christ. That this mixture resolved the relationship between law and grace or divine sovereignty and free will seems doubtful. Yet it excelled in its close attention to the textures of personal piety.42
The experience-centered texture of the practical divinity enabled it to play a significant role in the making of the “Further Reformation” in Dutch and German Reformed churches. As translations into Dutch, German, and Latin of devotional texts by Ames, Perkins, Lewis Bayley (at least fifty-three editions of his The Practice of Piety), the Scottish minister Samuel Rutherford (whose letters of spiritual consolation were eventually published some fifteen times in Dutch), and many others multiplied in the course of the seventeenth century, Dutch and German Protestants absorbed and made their own this model of affective experience. The founders of the practical divinity had no way of knowing that their emphasis on heart-centered piety and outward righteousness would have such consequences. Nor could they have foreseen that these aspects of their preaching would survive the decline of Reformed orthodoxy.43
The long-lasting influence of the practical divinity is worth emphasizing for another reason: the recognition it enjoyed in English and Scottish Protestantism. The motifs that made it distinctive were warmly received by bishops of the stature of Bayley, Joseph Hall, James Ussher, and in Scotland, William Cowper. This catholicity contradicts the argument that the practical divinity was a perverse cancer infecting an otherwise healthy system of divinity, as anti-puritan historians of the Church of England have sometimes suggested.44 For sure, its repertory of themes overlooked or intentionally omitted aspects of Christian spirituality that occur within Lutheranism and Catholicism. Lutheran devotion had less to do with the law and more with experiencing the crucified Christ. Johann Sebastian Bach was characteristically Lutheran in the “St. Matthew Passion,” which evokes a sensate relationship with Jesus as he underwent the Passion. Catholicism made grace and the healing powers of the saints accessible through the intermediaries of relics, holy sites, and sacraments, all of which the makers of the Reformed tradition had eliminated alongside Catholic rituals of confession and absolution. Much within the broader stream of Christian spirituality had been lost or minimized, but as the stories that follow indicate, much also had been reappropriated or reimagined.
Devotion was the beating heart of the practical divinity, the space where its pastoral and incorporating aspects met and sometimes clashed with the intermingling of joy, suffering, and uncertainty that marked the pilgrim’s pathway to heaven. Devotion was the answer to the question posed by Greenham, Dent, and Rogers: how do people become “real” or “sincere” in their faith and practice? The answer, because devotion encompassed a panoply of rituals or routines from psalm singing, prayer, meditation, reading Scripture, and fasting to sermon-going and small-group testimony. In his version of this repertory, John Preston cited “constant & conscionable hearing, reading, prayer, meditation, receiving the sacrament, holy conference, and watching over thy heart.”45 Each of these entailed more than mere outward show. As Perkins pointed out, being a Christian depended on an “experimental knowledge” of God. As well, worship and devotion were connected to righteousness or, in Perkins’s words, the “reformation and amendment of life.” In and through the several layers of devotion, laypeople aligned their bodies, minds, and souls with divine law and the redemptive power of the Holy Spirit.46
In its more private or inward aspects, devotion was about the joy of experiencing the presence of a loving Christ. According to an exegetical commonplace (see John 3:23), the saints on earth were united with Christ as their bridegroom, a marriage or “love-knot” Samuel Rutherford evoked in his letters of spiritual counsel. Craving reassurance at a difficult moment, he turned to the Christ who showered those he loved with “soft and sweet kisses” (Song of Songs 1:2) and washed away their tears (Rev. 21:4, here described as God’s doing).47 The Massachusetts-based Thomas Shepard knew the same Christ, someone to “lie by [beside]” and “roll upon” at moments the young minister likened to being “ravished.” Language of this kind reminds us that the law-centered aspects of the practical divinity were paired with evocations of intimate communion with the risen Christ. This was the Christ who appealed so strongly to Richard Sibbes, a Christ “full of love . . . to humankind,” an assertion Sibbes grounded in part on Song of Songs, which manifested “the mutual joys and mutual praises of Christ and his church.”48
Laypeople responded in kind. “What hart can conceave or tounge of men or angels expresse the vastnes of this unlimited depth of love and goodness which is without bottome or bancke,” an English friend wrote John Winthrop Jr. in 1631. Together with deeply felt moments of repentance, encounters with a tender-hearted Christ brought people to the verge of weeping. For the English devotional writer Nicholas Byfield, the “teares” that “trickle[d] down” someone’s face signaled a “heart” that “melt[ed]” in response to the sensate presence of a forgiving God. In one of his sermons, the Scottish minister-theologian Robert Rollock said something similar: “sobs and sighs” were how people expressed the “joy” of knowing that the Holy Spirit had entered their hearts. Sternly outward in its emphasis on self-discipline, the practical divinity also nurtured a remarkable depth of feeling.49
Devotional writers evoked a quite different mode of spiritual experience when they transposed the figure of the martyr who died for his or her faith into the Christian who, pilgrim-like, traveled through the “wilderness” of the world. The moral was as old as the warning in Ecclesiastes 12:8 that “all is vanity” and as recent as Calvin’s insistence that the Christian remain “constantly watchful . . . against becoming involved in a vain and excessive love of this earth.” The good pilgrim knew it was imperative to live “in the world but not be of the world,” a rule captured in a Protestant emblem of the early seventeenth century showing such a person, staff in hand, crossing a maze with his gaze fixed on heaven. Here as in countless prose versions of the same message, the lesson was obvious: remain vigilant lest you succumb to “any inward or outward evil,” a lesson underscored by Richard Rogers in a diary entry recording his pledge “to come nearer to the practice of godliness and . . . endeavour after a more continual watch from thing to thing.”50
Hence the likening of pilgrim to soldier, each engaged in combat with an enemy bent on their destruction. One version of this drama was the ongoing presence of “spirituall enemies,” especially Satan, for the “old feud” between his agents and the “followers” of Christ was ongoing. In his massive The Christian Warfare against the Devil World and Flesh (1604), John Downame itemized the multitude of “temptations” that “Satan and his assistants” deployed against the saints. As he and others pointed out, another aspect of the saint’s journey was the interplay between flesh and spirit, flesh ever vulnerable to Satan’s seductive voice and a metaphor for the allure of false gods (see Gal. 5:17).51
Taking these struggles for granted, devotion was about learning to accept and benefit from a “suffering life,” which was how Rollock described the Chris-tian’s journey in sermons he preached on the Passion. That suffering was inevitable was a truth all too real to the martyred John Bradford, and one to which Rutherford returned again and again in his pastoral letters of the 1630s. The makers of the practical divinity agreed, to the point of eschewing any “easie way to heaven.” As “silver-tongued” Henry Smith was apt to remark, a little “groaning and sighing” was to be expected among those with their “hearts” in turmoil. Perkins added another layer to this advice, that the godly would constantly be “exercised, turmoiled, and tempted with the inborne corruptions and rebellions” of their “hearts.” The word that conveyed this message most succinctly was “affliction.” It denoted misfortune or bad luck God was using to reawaken anyone who had become too casual or worldly in his or her devotion. Misfortune was therefore to be understood and acted on as spiritually beneficial. Margaret Winthrop made this point to her husband John in 1628 when she reminded him that God chooses to “exercise us with one affliction after another in love, lest wee should forget our selves and love this world to[o] much, and not set our affections on heaven wheare all true hapines is.” Hence the spiritual significance of the Marian martyrs, whose faith was tested by the ultimate affliction.52
Was it possible to become overwhelmed by a sense of one’s sinfulness and lose sight of the gospel promise of mercy? The answer was yes, for a concatenation of misfortunes—sickness, unexpected deaths, spiritual emptiness—could make people doubt the existence of a merciful God. And what if someone was more aware of God’s absence than of His presence? In new-world Massachusetts, the spiritually adept Thomas Shepard endured this moment time and again. Writing to someone who, in the words of her counselor, was wrestling with the reality that God “withdraweth that from you which he imparteth to others,” the English minister (and future colonist) Ezekiel Rogers acknowledged the possibility of being discouraged. His remedy was classic: revitalize “humility” and wait patiently for Him to return.53
Hence the injunction to sustain unrelenting activity. To remain idle was to play into the hands of Satan. The motto of the Christian soldier was constancy in devotional practice, a motto reinforced by the rule that “every day” mattered, each of them summoning the faithful to practice spiritual exercises—eight in all, according to the list Richard Rogers provided in his Seven Treatises, where he warned that these “may not be omitted any day at all without sin: nor carelessly and wittingly without great sin.” Outwardly as well as inwardly, the true saint framed his or her life around the routines of moral and spiritual duties.54
The point of departure was self-examination, to the end of gaining a “true sight of [the] sin” that held every Christian in bondage or, as Perkins noted, of being “pricked” in the “heart” with “grief” for being such a sinner.55 A solitary practice, self-examination was embedded in the ritual structure of Sunday worship. As had been the rule in Calvin’s Geneva and elsewhere within the Reformed international, the ministers in Scotland and England connected self-examination to Holy Communion. The Book of Common Order was emphatic: “the danger [is] great, if we receive the same unworthily . . . : we kindle Gods wrath against us, and provoke him to plague us with diverse diseases and sundry kinds of death.” According to the Book of Common Prayer, no one without a “lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ” could take part in the ceremony, a rule reiterated by the godly minister William Bradshaw in his much-reprinted A Preparation to the receiving of Christs Body and Blood (1609), “shewing what a dangerous sin it is to receive this Sacrament unworthily.”56 Bradshaw’s proof text was Paul’s sobering message to the Christian community in Corinth (1 Cor. 11:27–29) that anyone who eludes self-scrutiny and repentance “drinketh damnation to himself,” a passage cited in the Book of Common Order and manuals such as Bradshaw’s. For the scrupulous or fainthearted, some of whom hesitated to participate in the ritual, this was a discomforting text. So a minister preaching on it in the 1620s acknowledged, adding that he had “knowne some, who have abstained seven yeeeres, because they were afraid they should eate unworthily.”57 Yet for those who came to the table, the benefits were substantial: the bread and wine, although outward “signs” and “seals” of the covenant of grace, made Christ “neerly and visibly to the soule” in ways that few other aspects of devotion were able to do. As was often said, Christ was more fully present in the sacrament than elsewhere.58
To judge from the sales of manuals of devotion, a great many people took the counsel of self-examination seriously and built their spiritual lives around it. We learn of their practice from the chance survival of a handful of diaries and what was said in letters and biographies, a genre used by godly writers to provide models for the less adept.59 Of the Marian martyr John Bradford, a biographer noted that he wrote out a “catalogue of all the grossest and most enorme sins which in his life of ignorance he had committed” and laid “the same before his eyes when he went to private prayer,” to the end of offering God a “contrite heart.” For him, the crux of devotion was learning to “hate sin” and simultaneously to accept his dependence on Christ. Bradford also used “an ephemeris, or a journal” to decipher “the signs of his smitten heart,” a text that prompted him to pray for “mercy” and the “grace to amend.”60 Lady Brilliana Harley (c. 1598–1643) practiced meditation according to the timetable she found in Nathaniel Cole’s The Godly Mans Assurance: or A Christian’s Certain Resolution of his Owne Salvation (1615): “1. every night and morning. 2. in the time of judgement. 3. upon our death bed. 4. before the sacrament.”61
Constancy of this kind mattered a great deal to Margaret Hoby (d. 1633), a woman of wealth and high rank who spent part of every day in prayer, making notes in her Bible, “examin[ing]” herself, and meditating, much of it done in “private,” although she also attended two services on Sunday and, some evenings, listened to others read aloud from the Book of Martyrs and the writings of Richard Greenham (a favorite), Perkins, and George Gifford. In her quest for constancy, she turned back to what she written in her journal some years earlier, hoping to “finde some profit” from a “Course” she was neglecting. When she could not attend a Sunday service or was away from home in London, she relied on sermon notes others had taken. Sometimes she took such notes herself, which she used to reflect on “the pointes of the sermon.” As well, she depended on meditation to remind herself that ill health was God’s means of thwarting the “temptations” Satan placed in her way.62
In a spiritual diary he kept in the 1630s, the young Scots lawyer Archibald Johnston recounted an almost daily sequence of two experiences: the first, an overwhelming sense of guilt for his sinfulness; and the second, the rapture of drawing close to a loving Christ. For guidance on how to pass from one to the other, Johnston relied on sermons he was hearing and a carefully plotted reading of manuals of devotion. The lesson he gained from these books was the imperative to seek God consistently through the means of grace, a message driven home by a sermon that taught him “if thou would seek the Lord aright and find him, thou must first seek him wisely, to wit, in earnest prayer, frequent meditation, hearing and reading of the word, communicating at his table, and keeping conference with good Christians.” Ever dutiful, Johnston sought out church services and, especially, celebrations of the Lord’s Supper, from which he gained so strong a sense of comfort that he often wept with joy. In keeping with Scottish practice, he usually attended a service of “preparation” before he came to the table. Fasting was another ritual that prompted him to remember his sins. At home, he staged family “exercises” in the hope of including his wife and children within the scope of divine grace, sometimes sharing advice from Scripture and the books by English Puritans he was reading—John Dod on the commandments, Downame’s The Christian Warfare, and Nicholas Byfield’s The Marrow of the Oracles of God (1620 and ante). Communal singing also figured in his practice.
Year after year, Johnston’s was a spiritual life dominated by the paired sensations of “terror,” as though Satan were on the verge of conquering his soul, and a “heavenly assurance and confidence that God the Father Son and Holy Ghost . . . had delivered me from the greatest evil of damnation.” In a single day he frequently passed from one to the other, sometimes doing so as he read the Bible or a collection of psalms. Opening a psalter and lighting on Psalm 103:9, he felt as though he “received as ane oracle from heaven assuring me that God was wonderfully mynded for to delyver me and to blisse me.” Turning back to Scripture, he identified with the “David” who experienced God’s presence as he was confessing his sinfulness. The same relationship with Scripture marked Johnston’s encounter with Deuteronomy 4:7 (“For what nation . . . , hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for?”), which elicited “many tears” and prompted him to assemble seven passages from Scripture that strengthened his sense of comfort. His ability to insert himself into the Bible was paralleled by the ease with which he discerned the significance of providential events. Both taught him the rule that sinners must place themselves entirely in the hands of an all-powerful God who provides “salvation and consolation.” Ever in search of regularities, yet aware of his own imperfections, Johnston used the occasion of sacramental services to renew his covenant with a God who expected a great deal of the “fittest.”63
For Nehemiah Wallington (1598–1658), a London artisan and committed Puritan, devotional practices became all-absorbing. From an early age he accepted the imperative of self-examination: “As it is also God’s command to examine myself, so also in examining myself I see much of God, which doth abound much to the glory of God.” These practices were recorded in fifty or so notebooks (an estimated twenty thousand pages of handwritten prose) filled with meditations, notes on sermons, examples of portents and providences, commentaries on the practical divinity, and extracts from his reading. Attending a sermon preached by Hugh Peter in 1643, Wallington recorded Peter’s advice to “keep your day book; write down your sins on one side, and on the other side God’s little mercies.” Already, Wallington had created a list of thirty rules he gradually expanded to seventy-seven, each of them a means of reinforcing the discipline of resisting sin and practicing “watchfulness.” Ever aware of a spiritualized Satan, he found that the Lord’s Supper strengthened his sense of “spiritual” connection with Christ. From time to time, he renewed the “covenant” between himself and a loving God, a covenant in which he pledged to practice unending “obedience.” That he would falter and fall short was certain. Yet it was just as certain that, were he to repent, God would reach out to him again.64
Devotion could be a private matter, as it usually was at some moments of the day. Yet several of the more important practices were communal, as when people gathered around deathbeds to pray for and console the dying or, as Margaret Hoby was doing, shared sermon notes with a group of “good” women. In prayer, the “I” and the “we” were intermingled, the transition from one to the other almost unnoticed.65 Sermon-going was always a social experience, and especially so when those in search of evangelical preaching left their local church and went elsewhere for one of the Sunday services, a practice known as “gadding.”66 Participating in the Lord’s Supper was social, as were fasts and feast days that punctuated the yearly calendar in Scotland. Fast days in England were usually arranged by godly magistrates and town councils, with others observed in households or voluntary communities where the godly gathered to pray and reflect. Something of their importance is indicated by the organizing of weekly fasts in the town of Dorchester, England, in the early seventeenth century and the frequency of the household fasts attended by the minister Samuel Rogers during his time as a lecturer in Wethersfield. Private or public, godly fasts were ritually akin to the Lord’s Supper. As Thomas Cart-wright indicated in a careful description of the rite, it summoned everyone to repent and make a “solemne confession” of their “unworthiness” as sinners, a process with great benefits if this were done “inwardly,” for God would forgive the “evilles tending to our destruction.” In Puritan circles, “sympathy” for others crowned this cluster of practices, the sympathy emphasized by Rollock in his summary of how assurance of salvation was made apparent: “love to the brethren, hospitality of love, and Christian sympathy to the saints in their afflictions.”67
Baptism was another social practice and, theologically, an important means of grace. No godly minister in England or presbyterian in Scotland wanted to perform the sign of the cross during the ceremony, which the English liturgy included. Nor did these ministers sanction the practice of private baptism (with women possibly performing the rite), which the Church of England allowed in situations where a newborn child was at risk of dying before a minister could perform the rite in a parish church. The easy objection to this practice was to cite the possibility that women would depart from their biblically assigned role; the more serious, that such urgency implied the Catholic and Lutheran understanding of the sacrament as conferring regeneration. The rule in Scotland was that baptism should always occur in the context of Word-centered worship. Rightly administered, and in keeping with the covenant between God and Abraham (Gen. 17:7) which encompassed all of Abraham’s “seed,” baptism by water was much more than a “naked and bare” sign. According to article 21 of the Scots Confession of 1560, “by baptism we are ingrafted into Christ Jesus, to be made partakers of his righteousness, by which our sins are covered, and remitted.” This was a strong version of the sacrament, more emphatic than what Calvin and other leaders of the Reformed were saying about its “efficacy” in the context of the doctrine of election. Possibly from knowing what was said in the Book of Common Prayer or the Scottish confessions, or perhaps from hearing ministers extol the “singular comfort” parents would experience once their children were “received into the bosome of Christes congregation,” the godly took for granted the high importance of baptism and the burden it imposed on parents of being “diligent and carefull” in teaching their children about God.68
The practice of teaching children and young people the contents of a catechism was explicitly inclusive, regarded as such by bishops and general assemblies and a topic of concern in episcopal visitations in England.69 Unglamorous and likely to bore some of the people who, Sunday after Sunday or on weekdays, rehearsed what they were learning, this practice was widely regarded as the doorway to the rest of the Christian life.70 The best evidence of its role in the making of devotion is the quantity of printed catechisms. Dozens were published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and many more thereafter. Some editions of the Geneva Bible included Calvin’s catechism, which may have been the text most widely used in sixteenth-century Scotland, where sacramental services were preceded by instruction from a catechism. In England, the catechism of choice was often Alexander Nowell’s “official” catechism of 1570, printed in various formats more than fifty times by the 1640s and sometimes included in editions of the Book of Common Prayer.71
This ensemble of practices sustained a vigorous sociability at odds with the assertion by the early twentieth-century sociologist of religion Max Weber and repeated by some modern scholars that the practical divinity isolated the godly in an unhealthy “individualism.”72 Of the sites where sociability and devotion intersected, several others merit emphasizing. In some places in Scotland and England, the godly gathered in “conventicles” (a red flag to the official church) and, less tendentiously, in fellowship of the kind John Winthrop helped organize among his neighbors, a gathering of people to pray “every one of us each Friday . . . to be mindefull one of another in desiring God to grante the petitions that were made to him that daye.” As did many such groups, Winthrop’s sang psalms together. In the late 1630s, Robert Woodford was attending house-based conventicles in Northampton where “god’s people” prayed and, using notes some of them had taken, studied anew the meaning of sermons they were hearing. More unusually, perhaps, Woodford went to a “nearby town” to participate in spiritual exercises at the bedside of a man who was dying; “now he had but a step to heaven, and desired us to helpe lift him up by our prayers.” There is evidence of similar conferencing in Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Essex, Lancashire, and London, where the ever-obsessive Nehemiah Wallington participated in gatherings of this kind. In some parishes, a self-selected group of the “godly” entered into a covenant with one another to “yield . . . subjection to the gospel of Christ,” a procedure John Cotton introduced in the Lincolnshire town of Boston. The deeper meaning of these social moments was the unique “love” or “charity” that united the “people of God.” Hence the advice to seek out the company of fellow saints.73
Within households, piety was firmly social, for the strongest bond between children and their parents was spiritual, the covenanted faith that they were extending to their children. Families were also where women came into their own, celebrated by husbands for their spiritual vitality and assigned a major role in preparing children to become Christians, a premise English readers encountered in Dorothy Leigh’s The mothers blessing: or, the godly counsaile of a gentle-woman (1616), reprinted some twenty-two times in the course of the century, and Elizabeth Joscelin’s The Mother’s Legacie to Her Unborne Children (1624).74 Fathers, too, had responsibilities, for a well-ordered household was the rock upon which church and commonwealth were built; without the one, the other would be undone. Two Puritan-affiliated ministers, John Dod and Robert Cleaver, collaborated on an important manual about household obligations, A Godly Forme of Household Government (1598; much reprinted), and William Gouge provided more advice in Of domesticall duties (1622). Many other ministers endorsed the central theme of these books, that fathers and mothers must introduce their children to Scripture and other godly books and, by personal example, prepare them for the pilgrim’s life of self-discipline.75 Caught up in a thickening of devotional practices, laypeople were unlikely to undergo rapid-fire conversions. Instead, laypeople took for granted a lifelong process initiated by a “first conversion” and developing out of “weake” beginnings to something “great.”76 Conversion as process rather than time-specific moment accounts for the many assertions that fullness of faith was achieved over time. As Perkins, Richard Rogers, and John Downame insisted, “weak faith” (Rom. 4:19, 14:1) was the point of departure in everyone’s spiritual journey, a stage that customarily ripened into a more robust relationship with Christ. In The Summe of Christian Divinity (1625), Downame likened the earliest moments of “apprehending Christ” by faith to an “Infancie” that matures “according as our Faith doth grow.” Others compared the growth of faith to the maturing of wheat: in the one as in the other, growth that was “fast” was unlikely to be well rooted, but that which “goeth on faire and softly . . . and doeth constantly proceed, in renewing the worke of faith and repentance” was the real thing.77
The real thing was, however, also problematic, for how would someone whose faith was weak know that she or he were among the saints? According to the English minister John Preston, “those who have but a weak faith” have “the weaker assurance.” Or, as ministers and laypeople were alike in acknowledging, confidence or certainty about being among the elect could be undermined by seasons of spiritual “deadness” or having a “barren heart”—in other words, seasons when God (or the Holy Spirit) seemed to withdraw. The deeper point, which the Synod of Dordt endorsed, was that assurance, though “unchangeable” as an aspect of “election to salvation,” was “given to the chosen in due time, though in various stages and in differing measure (emphasis added).”78
The tenuous relationship between weak faith and assurance—surely a prime example of assurance “in differing measure”—helps to explain why the makers of the practical divinity wrote so much about assurance and how it could be fortified or regained. They did so knowing that people “who are touched by the Spirit, and begin to come on in Religion, are much troubled with feare that they are not Gods children.” To this situation the response on the part of the clergy was straightforward: anyone with “faith” could be “certain” he or she was saved. So Calvin had declared, and so the architects of the practical divinity reaffirmed in their turn.79 Indeed, “full” or “sound” or “infallible” assurance was what Perkins and Richard Rogers promised those with faith, an assurance arising out of the doctrine of election and justification by faith alone but also out of an “especial” or “inward persuasion” planted in the heart by the Holy Spirit or, for Rogers, of being truly humbled. Likewise, Arthur Dent insisted that “he, that hath the spirit of God, knoweth certainly hee hath it; and hee that hath faith, knoweth that he . . . shall be saved.” For Bradford, Perkins, Dent, and the authors of the Lambeth Articles, the message was loud and clear: assurance was available to all those who had experienced the inward workings of the Spirit and responded in faith.80
Only by listening carefully to these assertions of “full” or “sound” or “infallible” assurance do we grasp that Perkins, Dent, Richard Rogers, and a host of others were adding other layers to them. Always in the air was predestination of both the elect and the reprobate, a decision that to everyone but God was a “mystery.”81 A mystery this may have been, yet it was inevitable that some would not make their way to heaven. What could be said to curtail uncertainty and enable laypeople to perceive their relationship to the gospel promise? And what if the cycle of ups and downs that characterized the spiritual journey of someone such as Archibald Johnston stalled at its low point, the moment when the godly acknowledged how unworthy they were of forgiveness and how great the distance was between them and divine love? How could someone differentiate a productive emptying of self-confidence from an anxiety so paralyzing that all hope of redemption seemed to vanish?
This was not a hypothetical scenario, for it darkened the lives of many of the godly. The men who published major sermon series on faith and salvation repeatedly acknowledged the presence of people who questioned whether they were included within the covenant of grace. Letters of consolation sent to those in need of advice mention the same question and its corollary, the suffering that was coded as affliction. As well, sermon series and personal writings report a sense of unworthiness that kept laypeople from coming to the Lord’s Supper or pursuing the “duty” of spiritual exercises. In a worse-case situation usually described as “melancholy,” some people reasoned that God would never extend his mercy to them. Everyone had encountered or heard stories of such people, Lady Harley from one of her maids, who experienced “grievous agony of conscience and despair”; the English minister Thomas Hooker from knowing Joan Drake, who felt she was beyond the reach of divine grace; the congregation in new-world Boston from witnessing the plight of a fellow church-member, who “grew into utter desperation, and could not endure to hear of any comfort.” The readers of The last conflicts and death of M. Thomas Peacock (1646) encountered another example, a man who, on his deathbed, “suffered Satan to winnow him” and abandoned any hope of mercy.82
Acute or tempered, emotional situations of this kind prompted two different responses, one spiritual or devotion-related, the other more theological. On the side of the spiritual and devotional, the makers of the practical divinity asked laypeople to reflect on whether they were truly sincere in their professions of faith or going through the motions—that is, engaging in hypocrisy. Self-deception and, almost as bad, an outward show of godliness, was a principal theme of Perkins’s A treatise Tending unto a Declaration Whether a Man be in the Estate of Damnation, or in the Estate of Grace (1588), from which readers learned “that a reprobate might (in appearance) attain to as much as” the true saint. Hence the imperative—pressed on people such as Nehemiah Wallington—to discern whether their faith was seated in the “heart.”
Alternatively, the imperative was to discern whether they had pursued preparation under the law to its “painful” end of self-recognition as hopelessly entrapped in sin. Here, the strategy endorsed by some godly ministers was to use the weapon known as “terror.” The contemporary argument on behalf of terror was straightforward: because sinners had “stony” hearts hardened by pride, terror was a weapon of last resort for breaking through the barriers to repentance. It followed, therefore, that ministers should “rip up” the heart, counsel that John Rogers of Dedham (and nephew of Richard Rogers) transformed into a dramatic style of preaching. His antics included “roaring hideously, to represent the torments of the damned” and possibly “frisk[ing] on the floor” from “joy” after hearing “sad stories” of a woman’s despair, which he took as a sign that she had been touched by the Word. Like many others, Perkins called on sinners to visualize “how little a step there is” between salvation and damnation, a point he illustrated by describing life as a “frail bridge” beneath which lay “the craggy rock and hell the gaping gulf under it.” At its core, preaching of this kind relied on the argument that only a small fraction of humankind would be saved, a fraction sometimes expressed as one out of a thousand. Whatever the context, the ministers and popular writers who brandished the weapon of terror took for granted the merits of doing so.83
Others disagreed. The ever-present possibilities of weak faith and the reluctance of some ministers to use terror animated a debate among the makers of the practical divinity about the sources of assurance, the emotional costs of emphasizing preparation under the law, and—possibly in response to complaints about the limiting of salvation to the few who were the elect—to the scope of the Atonement. By the 1620s, a few minister-theologians, foremost among them Sibbes and more daringly, the “Antinomian” John Eaton, were sketching an alternative model of the work of grace (see chap. 9). In some of Sibbes’s sermon series, he reached out to people of “weak faith,” the group he addressed in his exegesis of Matthew 12:20, “A bruised read shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.” In a prefatory “To the Christian Reader,” Sibbes extolled divine love: “We are saved by a way of love. . . . It is love in duties that God regards, more than duties themselves. This is the true and evangelical disposition arising from Christ’s love to us, and our love to him again. . . . It is almost a fundamental mistake, to think that God delights in slavish fears, whenas the fruits of Christ’s kingdom are peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” From diagnosis he turned to remedy. Those who doubted must be told again and again of how much they were loved by Christ and how, in the grand scheme of things, Christ’s mission was to communicate love, not fear. Sibbes touched on the merits of the “law” as a means of preparing sinners to receive the Gospel, but he preferred to encourage those in whom “there is but a little measure of grace,” telling them how greatly they were valued by Christ and how, with his assistance, they would strengthen their faith. Seemingly in response to the preaching of other ministers, he counseled “moderation”: set aside any list of conditions or “terms” and imitate the Christ who “stooped down” to those in need. Sibbes may have been at his most astute in warning against excessive scrupulosity. Granted, scrupulosity could be a “sign of a godly soul, as some weeds are of a good soil.” Yet it was also a “heavy affliction.” Hence his insistence that the “end of Christ’s coming is to free us from all such groundless fears.”84
Someone Sibbes admired, the contemporary Suffolk, England, minister Ezekiel Culverwell, was also questioning law-centered preaching. As he pointed out in A Treatise of Faith (1623; much reprinted), his purpose was to “strengthen the weake in faith.” What worried him was the possibility that the practical divinity was undermining—even contradicting—the doctrine of free grace by making the gospel promise not “absolut, but (as it is commonly said to be) conditionall, which is, when God declareth his will, what he will doe if we doe our part, els not.” Although he granted that “this conditionall promise well understood may be borne,” he warned that it could also destroy “the free and gracious promise of the Gospell.” Law and Gospel or “Covenant of works” and “covenant of grace” must never be confounded; in the second of these, “Faith” was not a condition. Nor was “obedience.” Again with those of weak faith or doubting their assurance in mind, he insisted that the promise of salvation was offered to everyone, although effective only for the elect.85
The same emphasis on the God who made the gospel promise available to everyone—truly, everyone—flavored the sermons of John Preston. In his sermon series The Brest-plate of Faith and Love (1628), he reminded its readers that the promise was “given to every man, there is not a man excepted [emphasis added].” Assertions of this kind lay at the heart of Preston’s “hypothetical universalism,” hypothetical because, in his eyes, it did not contradict the doctrine that God had elected the few, not the many, to salvation. Preston acknowledged the work of the law and the difficulties of overcoming human sinfulness; like many of his contemporaries, he endorsed preparation under the law. But as his two editors remarked in a brief preface, his purpose was to prevent the “weake Christian” from “los[ing] the comfort of his faith, through want of evidence.” Elsewhere, he taught that “the true believer hath such a light going on with his faith that he comes to know, though not perfectly, yet truly and infallibly, that God hath chosen, adopted, and sanctified him.” For Simonds D’Ewes, an exceptionally engaged lay reader in 1620s and 1630s England, Preston’s insistence that “God’s children may . . . ordinarily in this life attain to the Assurance of their own salvation” enabled him to believe that he was among God’s chosen.86
Sibbes, Culverwell, and Preston were insiders who tweaked the practical divinity without altering its core assumptions. Others who shared the observation that assurance seemed hard to come by were having second thoughts, a possibility hinted at in sermons of the early 1630s by the future congregationalist Thomas Goodwin.87 In the context of this chapter, however, it is important to note that, from Perkins onward, mainstream ministers never strayed from a forceful insistence on routines of devotion or from advising those of weak faith that doubt was inevitable. The trick was to turn doubt into a positive sign and to attribute anxiety to the presence of the Devil, who, as described by Perkins, Preston, Dent, Downame, and many others, relished making people doubt the message of the Gospel. Or, as indicated in some of the penitential psalms of David and the example of Thomas in the New Testament, the ministers emphasized the inevitability of doubt and did their best to turn it into a positive sign.
Beyond these explanations (which were also intended as aids to reflection and props for the overly anxious) lay advice that almost everyone who preached the practical divinity articulated, the possibility of using sanctification or righteousness as a source of assurance. Advice with deep roots in Reformed theology, its starting point was known in Reformed circles as the practical syllogism: “he that repenteth and beleeveth the Gospel shall be saved / But I repent and believe the Gospel / therefore I shall be saved,” a structure validated by 2 Peter 1:10: “give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fail.” Some Reformed theologians treated the syllogism cautiously but ended up saying something very similar, as Calvin did.88 Indeed, to reason from effects to cause or from works back to faith was fully in keeping with Reformed confessions and the concept of the golden chain. In chapter 6 of the “Bohemian” Confession of 1575, good works were described as “signes and testimonies, and exercises of a livelie faith, even of that faith, which lieth hidden in the heart” and, with 2 Peter 1:10 in mind, as how Christians “confirme and build up their Election and vocation in themselves.” In the catechism attributed to Thomas Cartwright, the answer to the question, “How do we knowe that wee have true faithe?” is “By the frutes thereof.” Evoking the false wisdom of “carnall professors” who comforted themselves with saying, “If I be elected, however I live I shall be saved,” the Scottish evangelical William Cowper reaffirmed the connections between human activity and election: “it is impossible that the elect man effectually called, can reason after this manner; yea the more hee heares of Election, the more he endeavours to make sure by well doing [an allusion to 2 Peter 1:10], knowing that no man can attaine to the end of our Faith . . . but by the lawfull and oredinary meanes.” Hence the phrasing of Richard Greenham’s catechism when he turned to the topic of “works.” Spurning “good works” as inherently “imperfect” and of no merit in the larger economy of salvation, he reintroduced them as the consequence of saving faith and therefore valid evidence of “faith & election.”89
This emphasis on sanctification or what looks like moral activism troubles those historians who prefer Calvin’s emphasis on faith or Luther’s doubts about the law.90 Whenever a minister in England or Scotland declared that faith was real if it resulted in righteousness, he did so knowing that this advice was aligned with Scripture and sanctioned by his predecessors in the Reformed international. Long before Perkins began to teach at Cambridge, the makers of the Scots Confession had asserted (chap. 13) that “the cause of good works . . . is . . . the Spirit of the Lord Jesus, who . . . brings forth such works as God has prepared for us to walk in.” In confessions of this kind, as in the practical divinity, faith was construed as an active or transformative force manifesting itself in righteous or godly behavior. So, of course, was the Word as preached and “discipline” as practiced by the visible church.91
Doctrinally, the path most ministers took was to remind everyone that faith preceded justification and the law preceded faith. Scholastic categories made it possible to attach the word “instrumental” to faith and to imply (or assert) that assurance was conditional on certain actions. To protect themselves from critics who regarded these arguments as tilting toward works-righteousness, the ministers who argued in this manner always added that God worked the conditions (see chap. 9). For some of their contemporaries, this was to make more of the law as an instrument of repentance and self-denial than Calvin did, and much more of the experiential aspects of election. Yet in their own eyes, these men retained the core principles of unmerited grace, the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, and faith as always and everywhere associated with righteousness.92
Richard Sibbes and Samuel Rutherford deserve the final word on the quest for assurance. For Sibbes, it was important that the godly recognize that joy and tribulation were always and everywhere commingled in the Christian life. In his words, “God often works by contraries: when he means to give victory, he will suffer us to be foiled at first.” What made this wisdom pertinent was its bearing on assurance, which he described as beset by doubts and difficulties. Writing to a woman of high status who was ill and sensing her mortality, Rutherford urged her to cultivate a “holy fear of the loss of your Christ.” Aware of the alternating of confidence and self-doubt, he brought them together in a single sentence: let “the Spirit of God . . . hold your soul’s feet in the golden mid-line, betwixt confident resting in the arms of Christ, and presumptuous and drowsy sleeping in the bed of fleshly security.” Here, as with the conditionality of the covenant of grace and the role of the law as preparation, the practical divinity embraced what may seem paradoxical or ambiguous.93
People “abhorre and loath” us, people crave our preaching: this stark duality was inescapable to those of the godly who became ministers in Tudor-Stuart Britain.94 Inescapable because an evangelical mode of ministry brought peace to some but troubled many others; as was candidly acknowledged by a committee of the House of Commons in 1643, “too many” people in the pews were “loath to come under a powerful ministry.” Inescapable because strong claims to being Christ’s “ambassadors,” a title stemming from one of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:20) irritated other groups in a social world rife with competition for authority. Superior though they may have been to the many “idle, unsound, unprofitable, and scandalous Ministers” the state churches in England and Scotland continued to employ, those who preached the practical divinity could never shake off popular criticism and elite disdain.95
No easy fix to the adversarial relationship between ministry and people was available because that relationship had so many layers—conformity for some ministers, nonconformity for others; competition with missionary priests who insisted on the superiority of Catholicism;96 employment arranged by patrons who controlled a large share of the church’s revenues; an ever-present anxiety in England about rituals in the Book of Common Prayer that some parishioners valued and others preferred to avoid.
The most common response to a tension-filled relationship was to insist on an identity as faithful shepherds who gave fully of themselves to the twin tasks of awakening sinners to their plight and leading them to Christ. At the core of this self-understanding was a framework these men owed to the Reformed tradition and especially to Calvin, who wanted to bring into being a ministry that “would have the kind of moral authority that is worth more than any quantity of formal rights.” Given the realism that a highly trained and self-disciplined ministry was “the sine qua non of good order and even of the survival of a reformed church,” he provided extensive instructions on how ministers should be recruited, trained, and supervised. The same realism prompted the authors of the First Book of Discipline to linger on the making of ministers and the English presbyterians to protest the presence of so many ill-prepared “dumb dogges.” What the church needed and what Christ expected of all who entered this vocation was something quite different, a ministry devoted to its role as means of grace in the economy of redemption.97
First things first, a Dent or a Perkins may have reasoned when the moment came to justify their authority: let us make clear what God intended by our office. Knowing that Catholic priests in Britain described themselves as divinely consecrated intermediaries between Christ and humankind, the makers of the practical divinity insisted that, on the contrary, ministers were God’s true messengers, an argument stemming from the Reformed premise that “ministers of the Word” were “ambassadors of God, who must be heard as we would hear God himself,” to which Calvin added the assertion that all true ministers had been directly “commissioned.” John Preston was blunt-spoken in sermons he preached in the 1620s: “we that preach the Gospel are Messengers sent from the Father,” adding that, “if you refuse” the Gospel, “the Lord . . . will have you brought and slaine before his face.” Here, in theory, was everything a godly minister needed to affirm his authority, a concept of vocation that differentiated his office from all other versions of rank in a society, a point emphasized within the Reformed tradition by the rule that only ordained pastors could administer the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion.98
Christ-like authority flowed from another aspect of ministry, the significance of preaching. Rightly taught and communicated, the Word was the vehicle God had appointed as His means of communicating the gospel promise, an argument the makers of the practical divinity based on Romans 10:14–17, which concludes with the statement, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” This verse prompted Arthur Dent to construct a syllogism-like statement: “No preaching, no faith, no faith, no Christ: no eternall life.” Many others echoed him, as George Downame did in asserting that, without the presence of preaching, “ordinarily men cannot attain to salvation no nor yet to any degree of salvation.”99 The Word was just as crucial when it came to curtailing sin and advancing the process of edification. As advocates of reform liked to say, “bare reading” from a printed homily or the Book of Common Prayer was ineffective. In a world overflowing with “sinne and iniquitie” and blighted with “superstition,” the one sure means of enacting moral reform was evangelical, law-centered preaching. Thus construed, the Word would cleanse church and society of sin and corruption. On a grander scale, preaching of the right kind would enable the visible church to approximate the “Sion” that awaited the return of Christ in triumph.100
So the founders of the Reformed tradition had argued, and so the makers of the practical divinity insisted in their turn. From humanism and the Reformed tradition came still another justification for ministry in general and Puritan-style ministry in particular: the importance of learnedness in the ongoing struggle to comprehend the exact meaning of Scripture and rebut Catholic objections to Protestant theology. Learnedness in early modern Britain was a version of literacy available only to the few who attended one of the British colleges. In a society where a great many people were illiterate or, in Scotland and Ireland, knew Gaelic, a university education equipped young men with the ability to read, write, and possibly converse in Latin, together with a more limited knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. Just as significant was a facility in the “arts” of logic and rhetoric, which enabled would-be ministers to handle cases of conscience, or casuistry. Finally, learnedness provided ministers-to-be with the means of defending the truth against its enemies.101
For the makers of the practical divinity, the skills associated with learnedness had a special importance in the context of understanding Scripture. It was all well and good to affirm the ability of everyone with the “eye of faith” to determine the meaning of the dark places in Scripture, but learning was called for when the time came to defend Protestant theology. Mary Stuart pounced on a related problem in one of her confrontations with John Knox, telling him that the Bible was too variable to serve as the basis of the true church. In her presence, Knox was willing to acknowledge the “obscurity” of certain passages, a realism he shared with the early sixteenth-century translator of the Bible into English, William Tyndale, who agreed that in the Old Testament “Christ was “figured . . . in riddles, and parables, and in dark prophecies.” Knox made up for this concession by insisting that obscurity in any “one place” was clarified by the “Holy Ghost” somewhere else. For Perkins, who dealt with biblical exegesis in The Arte of Prophecy, and Richard Bernard, who devoted several chapters of The Faithfull Shepherd (1607) to the same topic, the academic remedy for the queen’s complaint was learnedness of specific kinds: knowing the languages in which Scripture had been transmitted and using “grammatical, rhetorical and logical” modes of analysis, which everyone with a college education had acquired.102
What may surprise modern readers who assume that Puritan-style Protestants relied on a “literal” sense of the bible is how persistently they did the opposite.103 To be sure, British Protestants condemned the fourfold hermeneutics that was customary among Catholics, which they replaced with the “plaine and natural sense” of the text. As the historian Andrew Crome has observed, the point of this assertion was to sustain the authority of Scripture over the Catholic emphasis on tradition or history. Meanwhile, the godly were relying on figural and allegorical readings of Scripture as long as these could be aligned with “faith.” There was nothing “plain” about godly prose and poetry, and certainly nothing that coincided with the understanding of “literal” that emerged among Protestant conservatives at the end of the nineteenth century and continues to the present day.104
A learned ministry was a ministry associated with hierarchy. Yet the right kind of ministry also undermined some versions of rank and office. Perkins, Bernard, and other makers of the practical divinity never wanted to sanction the hierarchies embedded in an episcopal system, much less the hierarchies within civil society. Hence the populist flavor of so much anti-episcopal rhetoric, a case in point being the anticlericalism Job Throckmorton recycled in the Martin Mar-prelate tracts. The fictive Martin assailed the bishops of circa 1585 as time-servers more interested in acquiring wealth than in being pastors of the people. Before and after him, godly ministers employed the image of bishop as wolf or serpent set loose among the “sheep,” the point being to highlight their own identity as shepherds who served unselfishly. The rhetoric of shepherd versus wolf validated godly complaints about the greed that sustained pluralism, nonresidency, and the scramble for high office in the state church. The same rhetoric underscored the difference between the “tyranny” embodied in the rank of bishop and the Christ-like demeanor of the good shepherd.
Zeal was another marker of difference, an aspect of ministry that figured in biographies of Scottish clergy and of English ministers dating from the early years of the seventeenth century,105 all of them emphasizing these men’s tireless service to church and community. The writers who honored Greenham described him as preaching twice on Sundays and once each weekday, with a single exception. Simultaneously, he was counseling his parishioners in their homes, catechizing the young people of the parish, and conversing with the young men who attended his household seminary in Dry Drayton. Panegyrics of this kind were commonplace, as were descriptions of the “good death” someone had experienced. Or, as was sometimes implied, the self-sacrificing zeal of the ideal minister became the spiritual equivalent of martyrdom.106
The Christ-like aura and authority of the faithful shepherd depended, as well, on a mode of preaching characterized as “plain” or “humble,” the same words the godly used to describe the speech of Jesus.107 The substance of plainness was threefold. The social imperative was for ministers to “accommodate” their preaching to “those of the meanest Capacity” so that everyone—literate or illiterate—could understand. The literary-cum-theological imperative was to translate theological principles into “applications” or “uses” that “pierce[d]” the inner self and aroused “godly affections.” As Perkins insisted in a treatise on right worship, the preached Word must be made “special by application.” This, too, required plainness.108 The third was spiritual-literary, the assumption that ministers must preach from the heart or inner self if Word and Spirit were to meld. As was said in every description of effective preaching, the exemplary minister had been St. Paul, who preached “not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor. 2:2–4). His example prompted Perkins and other makers of the practical divinity to argue that the evangelical minister must be “inwardly taught by the spiritual School-master the holy Ghost.” Knowing of Calvin’s assertion in the Institutes that, without the presence of the Spirit, the Word was ineffective, Perkins insisted in Of the Calling of the Ministry (1607) that “the true Minister must “first be godly affected himself, who would stir up godly affections in other men.” This precept, which in other hands in the 1640s would undermine the prestige of learnedness, did double duty before that period. On the one hand, it figured in all descriptions of plain-speaking (i.e., bible-centered) and “affective” preaching. On the other, it underscored the distinctive authority that accompanied a Spirit-driven ministry.109
Distinctive it may have been, but a ministry of this kind still had to contend with a social world in which every version of authority was contested and high claims for the Word as preached were frequently ignored. High claims to authority may have been most openly contradicted whenever the preachers’ message of free grace encompassed (as it always did) the warning that, unless sinners speedily repented or began to practice righteousness, God would exclude them from the community of the redeemed. Everyone who preached the practical divinity took for granted the imperative to denounce the presence of sin. But everyone also knew that bold speaking could backfire. Instead of repenting, people in the pews could repudiate a faithful shepherd.110
Nonetheless, plain speaking appealed to some ministers. During Edward VI’s reign, Thomas Lever, John Knox, and John Bradford became “famous for their plain and bold preaching” in the presence of courtiers and others of high social rank; as remembered by someone who heard them speak, “they ripped . . . deeply in[to] the galled Backs of the great Men of the Court,” to the end of purging “them of . . . insatiable Covetousness, filthy Carnality, and . . . intolerable Ambition and Pride.” Outbursts of this kind in Scotland were the norm in late sixteenth-century Scotland, a practice so irritating to James VI that he pressured the clergy closest to his court to stop preaching in this manner. In early seventeenth-century England, ministers associated with the Puritan movement or, for other reasons, unhappy with the policies of James I and Charles I, continued to rebuke the two monarchs, doing so openly as well as indirectly. In their everyday preaching, they were just as emphatic. The practical divinity was a “precise way,” and those who resisted it should be targeted with “keen arrows of truth and terror” sharpened with “great indignation.”111
One context in which plain speaking seemed important was the ever-frustrating practice of controlling access to the Lord’s Table. This was a double-sided task, requiring ministers (or in Scotland, lay elders) to find out whether people knew a catechism or lived in peace with their neighbors and, on the other hand, obligating church wardens to pursue those who did not turn up for the sacrament at least once a year, as the Church of England required. In Scotland, the oversight of laypeople by elders and kirk sessions made it more likely that the Lord’s Table would be protected, although it seems doubtful that much was done in practice. This may explain why most of the men who preached the practical divinity relied on generalized warnings of the kind that appear in manuals such as Bradshaw’s A Preparation to the receiving of Christs Body and Blood, all of them based on 1 Corinthians 11:27–30.112
Generalized warnings were prudent because plain speaking could have unfortunate consequences. Early in Elizabeth I’s reign, Alexander Nowell made a point of saying that pastors “ought not” to admit the “unworthy” to the Eucharist. In the same breath, however, he added a telling qualification: no minister should ever mention someone of this kind “by name” in a “public” sermon but do so “privately,” leaving the actual work of exclusion to “elders” or “ecclesiastical magistrates.” This was a lesson the young zealot Roger Williams never learned. Confident of his authority as an “eagle-eyed, fayfull and observant” counselor to Lady Joan Barrington, Williams told her in a letter of early 1629 that “afflictions” she had recently experienced, one of them the death of her husband, were God’s way of indicating that He “hath a quarrel” with her for not allowing Christ into her heart. No letter from Barrington to Williams survives, but she seems to have ignored him for several months. Plain speaking got Williams in trouble, whereas a minister who, the same year, urged her to “goe on . . . chearfully” in “confidence of your hope” secured her services as godparent of his first child.113
John Vicars chose the path of confrontation and paid a heavy price for doing so. According to witnesses who testified before the London-based Court of High Commission in 1632, Vicars used his pulpit in Stamford, Lincolnshire, to denounce the misbehavior of some of the townspeople, telling those who avoided the second service on Sundays that they were going to hell. Simultaneously, he drew close to a small group of the godly who were meeting each week in his house to pray and enjoy other spiritual exercises; in some unspecified manner, six of his female admirers formed themselves into a “nunnery.” A ministry this divisive cost Vicars his post.114 William Pemble, who died in his early thirties in 1623, never left Cambridge University for a parish living. Nonetheless, in one of his treatises he evoked the situation of a minister who, having applied “the censure of the Word in . . . direct reproofe” of the “sinnes” of his parish, aroused “an “unmerciful fury” and “fiery opposition . . . at the hands . . . of the people.” Itemizing what to expect in situations of this kind, Pemble evoked the “uproar” of an entire parish “once they have been touched where they would not be medled with. Straitway . . . dirt and scorn is hurl’d in the face of the Minister and his doctrine, all forward courses taken to work him woe and shame, and all this done by those that will yet be counted obedient and believing Christians.”115
The troubles that befell John Vicars confirm this picture, although his downfall also involved the government. So do the many moments in Scotland when James VI or some of the nobility turned against ministers as outspoken as David Black and John Davidson—the latter so vehement that Andrew Melville advised him to lower the pitch of his rhetoric.116 On the other hand, when Arthur Hildersham preached an aggressive assize-day sermon that aroused the “anger and displeasure” of a local judge, calm returned once Hildersham spoke “some words unto him with ministerial authority, [and] he stayed till the Sermon was done.” Here, the conflict between two different strategies and two different versions of authority ended with godliness coming out on top.117
Situations of this kind remind us that the authority of godly ministers was constantly being mediated by social and cultural circumstances. That their status was precarious had something to do with a structural feature of ministry as practiced alike by the godly and their rivals, the systems on which they depended for employment. When many of these men went looking for parishes they could serve, they learned anew the lesson that church “livings” belonged in large part to members of the gentry. Finding a patron among the gentry was thus a crucial step, so much so that, in the words of a historian of seventeenth-century Sussex, “gentry patronage” became “the lifeblood of Sussex Puritanism,” an assertion just as true of some other counties. Early in the reign of Elizabeth I, the Earl of Huntington was using his authority to plant “good preachers . . . in the market towns” of Lancashire. Francis Hastings followed in his brother’s footsteps, noting in 1602 the “bond of duty” he felt to enable “a longing people to hear . . . a laboring, speaking minister.” By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a network of aristocratic families in various parts of England was providing posts as house chaplains,118 lecturers, and parish ministers for men who otherwise would have been suspended or deprived. No one was more indebted to patrons and the bishops they influenced than Hilder-sham. Silenced several times for refusing to conform, he kept reappearing thanks to “the connivance and favour” of church leaders and patrons in high places. He and others also benefitted from town corporations and parishes that acquired the right to name their own ministers or promised to supplement a minister’s stipend in order to make an appointment more appealing. According to a careful study of lay patronage in the diocese of Cheshire (England), merchants, tradesmen, and women with the wealth to do so busied themselves in both ways.119
Dependence on lay patrons was as old as the hills, as much a feature of Catholic Britain as of Protestant. Now, however, the high expectations for ministry as a vocation clashed with ancient practices, as witnessed by the attempts in late sixteenth-century Scotland to curtail the prerogatives of lay patrons, a campaign resumed by general assemblies in the 1640s.120 In England, a more satisfactory alternative emerged by the close of the sixteenth century, a position as lecturer. Lectureships arose as a way for corporations and parishes to employ a better quality of preacher-pastor—often but not always a godly minister—than was possible in parishes where the incumbent minister was uninspiring or lay owners had siphoned off the revenues. Or it could be that in London, where 90 percent of its parishes were employing a lecturer by 1630, the wealthier used this kind of position to add more men to their staff. The crucial piece in this puzzle was money, be it voluntary contributions from a parish or the patronage of a smaller group or the income from an endowment someone had set up. The business of a lecturer was to preach two or three times a week, leaving the liturgical or sacramental aspects of worship to another person. The downside of these appointments was their brevity—lecturers were appointed for as little time as a year—and although some men lingered in these positions, most appointments of this kind were way stations on the road to the permanence of a parish living.121
Way stations or safe havens they may have been and would remain in some parts of England, but at various moments in the early seventeenth century the leadership of the state church intervened to make them less attractive to nonconformists, a story touched on in chapters 6 and 7. Looking for ways of providing positions for the right kind of minister, a group of Puritan-affiliated merchants and ministers in mid-1620s London created a new version of lay patronage, a treasury (investments) producing income that could be used to buy vacant livings or impropriations. The organization created for this purpose, the Feoffees for Impropriations or “collectors of St. Antholin’s,” a London church active in employing lecturers, acquired properties in some twenty-six parishes before being suppressed by the government in 1633. Although the Feoffees came and went, town corporations and county aristocracies that made space for lecturers were a fixture of English society.122
The sum of these circumstances was the situation evoked at the beginning of this section—on the one hand, assertions of a singular authority; and on the other, popular indifference or political resistance to those claims intermixed with affection, respect, financial support, and, to be fair, confusion. Throughout these decades, the godly version of ministry continued to be framed by contradictions: preaching to the many, yet converting the few; denouncing sin, yet wary of being too outspoken; declaring themselves loyal to a country’s rulers, yet seen by Elizabeth and James VI and I as agents of sedition; peacemakers in their parishes, but also regarded as troublemakers. From the standpoint of the ministers themselves, the practical divinity was akin to a musical score, with rhythms and tonalities that varied from one performer to the next. As Hildersham, Richard Rogers, and Hooker learned from their life work as pastors, some of these variations were a sensible response to a parish that included people at several different stages of knowledge and practice. In the “uses” of a sermon series as lengthy as Rogers’s Seven Treatises, what was said to one group differed from what was said to another. Perkins sketched the same challenge in The Arte of Prophesying, where he specified seven different categories of people a minister must address.123
These circumstances underscore a paradox: despite the tensions it aroused, the practical divinity was a remarkable success as measured by the enthusiasm of the London book trade for books by Perkins, Dent, and other godly writers. By the early seventeenth century, vast quantities of catechisms, psalters, sermon series, and books of devotion were being printed by booksellers who knew that “religious” books were highly “vendible.” The makers of “cheap print” exploited a parallel market for ballads and tales of remarkable providences, the stranger the better. In Britain as a whole, tens of thousands of people were reading these books.124
“He giveth me to see light in His light . . . Oh, I lived in and loved darkness . . . yet God had mercy on me. O the riches of His mercy!” These words of an English country gentleman named Oliver Cromwell remind us of the joy felt by the many who spoke openly of being among the elect or assumed that their pilgrimage would conclude with a “free and comfortable passage” into eternal life. Joan Drake, who suffered from acute spiritual despair, linked her recovery to practicing the “meanes” of grace: prayer, catechizing, expounding and reading of the word, and “singing of Psalms constantly” in her “family.” During the revival-like excitement at Stewarton in Scotland (1625–1630), hundreds of people responded to the preaching of David Dickson and others by passing from “great terrors and deep exercise of conscience” to “sweet peace and strong consolation.” As recorded by an eyewitness at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, deathbed of Thomas Shepard’s wife Joanna (1636), she “broke out into a most heavenly, heart-breaking prayer after Christ, her dear Redeemer . . . and so continued praying, to the last hour of her death, ‘Lord though I am unworthy, one word—one word,’ &c. and so gave up the ghost.”125
This melding of heart-felt repentance with the sensate presence of the living Christ marks Dickson’s True Christian Love (1634), a meditation on the theme of love in Colossians 3:14–16. As in so much of the practical divinity, True Christian Love acknowledged the reality of divine absence even as it affirmed a vibrant sense of divine presence: Christ is truly at the writer’s side who sings this poem with “thankfulness” in his “heart” (Col. 3:16). Challenging though it must have been to undergo the ever-recurring alternation of absence and presence, and challenging, as well, to sustain the “certainty of hope,” the evidence suggests that a substantial number of people in Britain aligned themselves with this model of the spiritual life.126
Never without its Catholic critics or internal dissent, the practical divinity came under pressure from an alternative version of Reformed Protestant doctrine in the late sixteenth and early seventeen centuries. For the moment this alternative was held in check, but by the mid-1620s “Arminianism,” which owed its name to the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (d. 1609), was becoming a divisive presence in England. Arminius was a professor at Leiden University and, in his self-estimation, loyal to the Reformed tradition even though he revised the doctrines of election, the irresistibility of divine grace, and the perseverance of the saints. Wanting to make more of free will and broaden the meaning of divine justice, Arminius proposed that the decree of election took account of God’s foreknowledge of whether some people would have faith in Jesus Christ and live righteously. As was argued in a remonstrance (1610), predestination was conditional upon faith. Arminius was not a full-fledged Pelagian, that is, someone who attributed salvation to a sinner’s own efforts. Yet he and the Dutch theologians who shared his point of view were challenging the argument that redemption was solely the doing of irresistible grace. Controversy erupted in the Netherlands and, with the support of the Dutch government, Arminius’s critics convened an international “synod” of Reformed theologians in 1618–19. After protracted debate, it endorsed a list of five “points” in opposition to Arminianism: (1) the total depravity of human-kind, (2) unconditional election by divine sovereignty, (3) the atonement limited to the elect rather than being universal in some manner; (4) irresistible grace, or grace overriding any agency on the part of humankind; and (5) the perseverance of the saints—that is, once elected, always saved.127
Well before debate in the Netherlands became a crisis in that country, a few academic theologians in England were revisiting certain aspects of Reformed orthodoxy. In the mid-1580s, the French Huguenot Peter Baro (1544–1599), the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, challenged the doctrines of election and a limited atonement. Baro had an ally in another Cambridge fellow, William Barrett, who in 1595 repudiated certainty of assurance in a public sermon laced with hostile allusions to Calvin, Beza, and Reformed scholastics. He did so at a moment when William Whitaker, who became professor of divinity at Cambridge in 1579, was vigorously defending a repertory of Reformed principles. Whitaker told Whitgift and Lord Burghley about Barrett and, in Oxford itself, encouraged the university authorities to denounce what Whitaker regarded as Arminianism. Barrett backpedaled, left the university in 1597, and after moving to the Continent, seems to have become a Catholic.
Informed of these disputes, Whitgift set in motion the drafting of the Lambeth Articles. Nine years later, the sense among some clergy in the Church that Arminianism was gaining ground prompted the Puritan delegates to the Hampton Court conference (1604; see chap. 6) to propose that Lambeth be combined with the Thirty-Nine Articles as a means of strengthening what it said about the doctrine of election and the perseverance of the saints.128 Fast-forward again to the 1620s and beyond, and “Arminian” objections to orthodox doctrine continued to worry ministers and lay theologians such as John Cotton. When Cotton arrived in Boston, Lincolnshire, as the town’s parish minister, he encountered an “Arminian” faction and responded to their questions by “clear[ing] the orthodox doctrine of predestination from such harsh consequences, as are wonted to be derived from absolute reprobation.” In the words of a modern scholar, Cotton was assuring the local Arminians that God “would not arbitrarily sentence a human being to damnation without that being’s prior transgression.” When a manuscript copy of his musings came into the hands of the forcefully anti-Arminian English theologian William Twisse, he pounced on them in comments that remained in manuscript until 1646.129
This episode was among the many signs that, within the world of British Calvinism, the practical divinity was coming under pressure from criticism of several kinds that included the objections of an “Antinomian” underground to the role of the law in the practical divinity. Tensions flared up anew in the 1640s and 1650s and, among the people who settled in New England in the 1630s, in the so-called “Antinomian controversy” of 1636–37. The story of how the practical divinity fared in New England and, after 1640, in England and Scotland, follows in chapter 9.