What we've done so far is to review
the history of the word Puritan, and thereby
to get a preliminary answer to the question,
who were the Puritans?
And we've also sketched out in a preliminary
way the nature of Puritanism as a worldview.
What I'm supposed to do now is to
pose and try and answer a further question,
namely this.
Where did Puritanism come from?
It's a fascinating compound product.
It came to be in the second half
of the 16th century.
The interesting question to ask is the question
about its roots and its sources.
What was it that threw up to the
surface in its features that gave it its
distinctive character?
Where did its dominant motif originate?
What was it which, if you like, shrunk
the sparks which burned in the movement and
made the movement what it was?
I propose to set before you what seemed
to me to be the four main sectors
which went to its making.
That is, the four sectors which went to
make it distinctive in the way that it
was distinctive from other forms of Protestantism, such
as that manifested in the Church of England
at that time.
And the four sectors I'm going to discuss
with you are these.
One, the legacy of Tyndale, which is a
double legacy.
Secondly, first, the lordship of the Bible, and
second, the thought of justified man being covenant
with God.
Second, the legacy of Bradford, which I characterize
as the piety of repentance, treat, live, and
whistle about.
Thirdly, the legacy of Hooper and Frankfurt.
Frankfurt is the plane, Hooper is the stamp.
You mustn't mind this.
It's necessary to bracket them together.
The legacy of Hooper and Frankfurt, which legacy
I define as the passion for pastoral care
and reformed church order.
And the fourth is the legacy of John
Fox.
John Fox the meteorologist, which again is a
double legacy.
One, the thought of the calling of England
to the ideal of the Puritan hero.
Now let me set this material before you.
First sector, the legacy of Tyndale.
Let me tell you some facts about Tyndale.
You should know right off the outset that
though there were in the late, in the
16th and early 17th centuries, a number of
editions of the scriptures in English, Coverdale's Bible,
the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishop's
Bible, the authorised version of 1611, there was
in fact, and is in fact, only one
English Bible, and that is Tyndale.
For all these other versions of the scripture
were nothing more than verbal revisions of Tyndale.
Tyndale made the English Bible in the same
way that Luther made the German Bible.
He was born in 1484 and he was
educated at Oxford and he was ordained and
became a tutor in a nobleman's house at
a place called Little Prospery near Bristol in
the county of Gloucestershire, for which I come.
He was a brilliant linguist and his mind
turned to translation.
He was a serious Christian man.
According to his light, we are not quite
sure just how much light he had at
this time, his first thought was to translate
a resume of the Enchiridion, Enchiridion Militia Christiani,
the handbook of the Christian soldier.
He planned to do that, we know, in
1522.
But then in the next year, his mind
had moved on and he had resolved to
translate the Bible.
These were the early days of Henry VIII's
reign.
There was nothing in principle to stop a
man translating the Bible.
It was the age of humanism.
Luther was translating the Bible in Germany.
Henry VIII was acting the part of a
patron of humanistic learning.
And Tyndale was convinced that this was something
which he ought to do.
Ought to do, because on the one hand
he knew he could do it, he was,
as I told you, a brilliant linguist with
a fine literary staff.
Ought to do, on the other hand, because
Luther needed it.
It's reported that he'd done, as many priests
in those days did, he'd done philanthropy, or
preaching, and he'd spoken in anti-traditional terms,
probably just in terms of the kind of
reforms that the humanists wanted in those days.
And various priests, present at the sermon, had
hops at what he said and he'd try
to argue with them.
And as a result of this encounter, as
I've said, he became convinced that the thing
he must do was to translate the Bible
into English.
Because, as here I quote him, I had
perceived by experience, how that it was impossible
to establish the lay people, it's interesting he's
singled out the lay people, in any truth,
except the scripture was plainly laid before their
eyes in their mother tongue.
That they might see the process, order, and
meaning of the text.
But Tyndale was a determined man, and once
he put his hand to this particular cloud,
he never halted.
Not for the next thirteen years until his
martyrdom.
He went to London.
And he went to the Bishop of London,
Custer Tomstall, and offered to do this job
in Tomstall's household.
That means under Tomstall's patronage.
The pattern in those days was that rich
men would take poor scholars into their household,
let them live there, provide them with bed
and meals, and give them the run of
the place to do their work.
That was the way that Erasmus lived on
the continent, going from great man's house to
great man's house.
And that was the way that Tyndale asked
that he might live while he was translating
the Bible.
But the Bishop of London told him politely
that his household was full.
There was no room for Tyndale there.
And he would look elsewhere.
Tyndale did look elsewhere, and he found himself
a patron named Humphrey Monmouth, a cloth merchant,
and a man who we know had links,
by reason of the cloth trading he was
doing with the continent, with the Luceran world.
Remember, Lucer had posted his theses on the
door of Wittenberg Church six years earlier, 1517.
And all over the continent now they were
discussing the teaching of Lucer, and reading Lucer's
books.
And it was via the cloth trade, we
know, that these books came into England, though
they were officially banned by authority.
And Humphrey Monmouth had connections with the Lucerans,
and he was implicated in bringing in the
Luceran books, and he was interested in Luceran
ideas.
Also, we know, Humphrey Monmouth was linked with
the Lollard tradition in England.
The Lollards were the tag-end, you might
say, at least the people called Lollards in
the 16th century, were the tag-end of
the Wycliffe-like movement of the 14th century.
Wycliffe had raised an anti-papal flag, and
he translated the Bible into the English of
those days, and he brought into being an
order of preachers called Lollards, who went around
the country, preaching against the Pope, and advising
people to read the Bible.
And those who maintained the practice of reading
Wycliffe-like translations of the Bible, which still
existed, very much hidden away, and hidden away
from authority, and they existed at the late
of the early 16th century, they were still
in general called Lollards after their first order
of preaching.
So Monmouth had links with both these worlds.
He sent Tyndale, after six months, to Wittenberg
to meet Lucer, to confer with Lucer, and
to complete his work there.
And to Wittenberg, Tyndale went, matriculated at the
university in 1524, and met Lucer, and learned
from Lucer the finer points of the doctrine
of justification by faith.
Meanwhile, Monmouth and other merchants sent money over
to Germany to finance the printing of this
translation.
They knew, you see, that the printing couldn't
be done in England, and therefore, as the
manuscript began to advance towards conclusion, and Monmouth
could see that Tyndale was making a job
of it, it became necessary to send him
to some place where he could get it
printed, and hence there was another reason for
this journey to Wittenberg.
Tyndale got on with the job, and in
1526, he had the English New Testament in
print.
And in 1513, he followed it with a
pendicute.
And later, he prepared manuscripts and translations of
Jonah, he even published Jonah, and then manuscripts
of Judges and Chronicles, which were afterwards included
in the so-called Matthew's Bible, which was
produced by one of his followers in the
year after his death.
But in 1535, he was betrayed to the
authorities in Antwerp.
The authorities were anxious to keep in with
the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
The Emperor was against any support of Protestant
enterprises.
Tyndale, by then, had come to be known
as a Protestant pamphleteer, and so the authorities
in Antwerp arrested him, he was actually betrayed,
and he was burned in the following year
at a place in Holland, Vilvoorde, V-I
-L-V-O-R-D-E.
And that was the end of Tyndale, but
the English Bible, which he produced last year,
was completed, and as they're completing, the first
complete English Bible was brought out in the
next year, and then there were a series
of revisions of it, culminating in our authorised
version.
Meanwhile, Tyndale's works, his theological expositions and texts,
they were printed separately and smuggled into England,
despite the fact that by the 1530s, Henry
VIII was forbidding their circulation, and they were
all of them published together in 1572 by
the Protestant printer John Day, in a big
folio edited by the martyrologist John Fox, of
whom you're going to hear under heading four,
in this section of the notice.
If we look through Tyndale's pamphlet, we find
the following four themes standing out.
First, the authority, the lordship of the Bible.
Tyndale was thoroughgoing in his insistence that everything
in church and faith must be subjected to
the rule of the word of God.
That it's in this way and in no
other that we honour God and honour Christ.
Here he expounded this in very general terms.
He didn't get down to the detailed problems
of exegesis in applying the Bible to particular
situations in church and faith.
He wrote particular pamphlets, to be sure, on
particular abuses, but it's all pretty rough and
ready stuff.
But on the general principle, it's vivid, it's
strong, it's clear, and it became part of
the Tyndale legacy.
The insistence that the Bible must rule and
there must be no half measures in allowing
it to direct what is done in the
church and in the community.
Second theme, justification by faith.
Tyndale faithfully echoes Luther.
Tyndale indeed translates a good deal of Luther
into English and publishes it under his own
name.
From one standpoint, the best thing that Luther
ever did was to publish his own introduction
to the Epistle to the Romans, which is
taken almost entirely, word for word, from Luther's
introduction to the Epistle to the Romans in
his own German Bible.
The emphasis is the Lutheran emphasis, namely that
the gospel is God's promise to men who
are under the law and doomed to perish
by the law because they are unable to
provide the good works which the law requires.
But the promise is of pardon and the
grace of the Holy Spirit to enable them
to fulfill the law.
So that the Christian man, justified by faith
in the promise of forgiveness through Christ, spontaneously
keeps the law and does righteousness.
Faith works.
And through his coming to faith, he enters
into the light of his spirit, the indwelling
spirit energizing him, energizing his faith.
And so his good works, as Tyndale writes
in a little tract called A Pathway to
the Holy Scripture to be published in 1530,
our good works, quote, certify us that we
are heirs of everlasting life and that the
spirit of God who is the earnest thereof
is in us.
The evidential value of good works, another good
Puritan theme.
But as a second of the two emphases
that you find in Luther's text, biblical authority,
justification by faith, thirdly, and very interestingly, the
thought of justified men in covenant with God.
Tyndale came to justification by faith in the
context of his work translating the New Testament.
Help, of course, by Luther.
Tyndale came to the thought of justified men
in covenant with God through translating the Pentateuch,
first part of the Old Testament.
Particularly, Deuteronomy seems to have influenced his thinking
at this point.
And the thought that he develops is that
the justified man who puts faith in the
free promise of salvation through Christ, he now
stands in covenant with God, just as Old
Testament Israel did, and he must walk before
God in holiness, seeking to keep all God's
laws, seeking to fulfill all righteousness in daily
life.
This, of course, in fact, is a thoroughly
biblical development of the thought of justification by
faith.
It's simply putting the truth of justification in
what really is its biblical context.
The context, namely, of a covenant obligation which
binds man to God.
And Tyndale, in his writings on the covenant
scene, did, as the Old Testament leads him
to do, draw out the corporate and the
social context which this covenant notion yields.
That is, that it's not simply one justified
man who's in covenant with God, but all
the people of God together as a community,
a fellowship.
And so they must be a holy and
law-keeping fellowship, just as Israel was called
to be a holy and law-keeping nation.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that
in later Puritan theology, the cause of a
covenant relationship between God and man was, in
truth, the fundamental, one might say the architectonic
concept into which the whole revelation of God
and the whole doctrine of grace was fitted.
In recent years, Puritan scholars, namely L.J.
Kinterod, in an article in Church History from
March 8, 1961, and a scholar who has
followed him closely at this point, W.A.
Klebsch, B-L-E-B-S-C-H,
in a book called England's Earliest Protestants, published
only a year ago, they have affirmed that
it's here in Tyndale that you find the
origins of this Puritan doctrine of the covenant.
Now, that, I think, is an overstatement.
It needs to be qualified, rather, before it's
true, because it's not completely true.
So far as the thought of God in
covenant with man is concerned, well, I could
be telling you later in more detail, I
think there's no doubt that the Puritans learned
it from the first covenant theologians on the
continent, people like Olavian and Athenus, and then
Harkin, the great Puritan divine at the end
of the Elizabethan period, popularized it in English,
and so it went on from there.
To be sure, it hadn't earlier in the
Continental Reformation.
You find the thought in Zingley and you
find it in Bullinger and you find it
in Palantavius, the Zurich reformer, but there's no
evidence that I can discover of a link
between Tyndale and them, and in fact, Tyndale
doesn't expound the thought of God in covenant
with man in the way that the later
Puritan covenant theologians actually do.
For Tyndale makes much of the thought that
God will cast off those who are in
covenant with him if they're not faithful.
Don't blame Tyndale too much here.
He hadn't been brought up on the reform
doctrines of race in the way that we
have.
Transfigurance hadn't become an issue in his day.
Calvin, indeed, hadn't written the Institute while Tyndale
was doing his work.
But this, of course, is a line of
thought which would absolutely vanish from the covenant
theology of later Puritanism, which insistently grounded the
covenant relationship on God's eternal election and insisted
that once God had brought men into covenant
with him, well, he would certainly keep them
in the covenant relation from that time on.
And there's really no evidence to warrant the
supposition that the later Puritan doctrine of God
in covenant with man came from Tyndale or
was picked up from Tyndale.
Tyndale never quoted for it and, in fact,
it was expanded differently.
But, and this is the half-truth that
there is in this suggestion of Prince Reuben
Klench, it is, I think, true to say
that Tyndale was the founder of the Puritan
thought of man in covenant with God, the
human side of the covenant relationship.
And, in other words, it was a real
case of picking up Tyndale's emphasis when later
Puritans who had read the folio, folio edition
of Tyndale's works in 1572, took up and
began to develop on their own account the
thought of the English church and the English
nation as a community in covenant with God,
particularly the English church, the company of believers
in England, of a community in covenant with
God who must walk faithfully before the Lord
and fulfill all his laws or else they
will bring down heavy judgments upon them.
To suggest that there is a link at
this point seems much more plausible.
I spoke of heavy judgments as a threat
which God declares towards those who are unfaithful
to his covenant.
This actually is the fourth point of emphasis
that you find in all Tyndale's writings.
Tyndale, like many medieval preachers before him and
like all the Puritans after him, insisted on
the reality of judgment and blessing to groups
in history.
Insisted, in other words, on the fact that
God was the same God who had cursed
and blessed groups in Old Testament times.
In fact, most Protestants believed him.
It was a prominent motive in all Protestant
preaching in the 16th and the 17th centuries.
I labour it a little here because, of
course, we hear very little of it today.
But Tyndale, one of the pioneer English Protestant
writers, made a great deal of this thought
threatening England, threatening the bishops, threatening the king,
threatening the If the gospel was not heeded
and the law not obeyed.
In the practice of Prelate, one of his
texts, he really goes to prone in the
closing pages foretelling doom for England.
It doesn't repent of its disregard of the
Bible and its little moral tenders.
And that's only one of the places where
this line of thought is developed.
And this too is something, well, all these
emphases that I've mentioned are things which later
a Puritan writer took up which became part
of the fateful intellectual furniture, if I may
put it this way, of all of Puritan
thinkers and Puritan theologians.
Here, right at the beginning, you've got Tyndale
expounding in a very vivid and intense way
these basic thoughts.
As I say, the most the most significant
of all are the two that I mentioned
in the heading to this section of the
note.
The lordship of the Bible and the thought
of justified man in covenant with God.
Here you've got part of the intellectual seabed
under which Puritanism grew.
Clemson, page 199 of his book of his
book, Writes the Sorrows, thus Tyndale first among
English writers gave literary expression to the major
theological themes of law, covenant, and reward, upon
which the Puritan tradition within English-speaking Christianity
built.
And with the one qualification regarding Tyndale's covenant
teaching that I made a moment ago, that
statement seems to me to be true.
And Tyndale, the martyr, thus stands as one
of the grandfathers, if we may put it
this way, of the Puritan movement.
Well, there's element number one in this list
of formative influences on Puritanism.
Go to section number two.
Unless there are questions about Tyndale which you
want to ask before we go on, are
there?
He used the phrase righteousness being reckoned to
a man, but he used it in just
the same way that Luther had used it,
namely of the actual reckoning to a man
of a status, the actual bestowing upon a
man of a status, a status of forgiveness
and acceptance, as neither Luther nor Tyndale worked
it out in terms of the righteousness of
Christ being reckoned to us.
That you find in Calvin's Institute, but again,
not worked out in any very great detail.
The really elaborate statements of it belong to
later and essentially later Reformed divines, well, and
Lutheran divines too.
But here we are right at the beginning
of Reformation theology, and this particular point had
not yet been clarified.
So when you read Tyndale speaking of righteousness
being imputed to a man, his thought is
just of his being given a justified status
for Christ's sake on the grounds of the
atonement because of the bloodshedding of Christ by
reason of the cross.
That's the way Luther said it and that's
the way that Tyndale said it.
That's as far as they got.
No more?
Onward to Bradford.
Second element in the making of Puritanism, the
legacy of Bradford, which I described as the
piety of repentance, preached, lived out, written out
or written up.
The first chapter of Terry Lillow's book The
New England Mind speaks of the, indeed this
is his title, the Augustinian strain of piety
which marks all the purity.
A strain of piety which derives, says Lillow,
very rightly, from the prominence in men's minds
of three thoughts, the thought of God, holy
and gracious, the thought of sin, damning and
potent, and the thought, Lillow says, of regeneration.
I think it's truer if you're characterizing the
Puritan movement as a whole to say the
thought of turning to God from sin.
That turning to God which of course all
the Puritans knew could not be without regeneration
but which was specifically regeneration expressed in action.
God, sin, turning to God from sin, that's
the, those are the three elements which make
the Augustinian strain of piety.
Calvin has put in this tradition, and you
will remember that in Institute Book Three he
tells us in his chapter on repentance that
the whole of the Christian life from one
standpoint is repentance.
It is a matter of continually turning to
God, turning away from sin and sin's allurement.
And the pioneer in setting before Englishmen a
model of this particular strain of piety, this
particular understanding of the Christian life, this particular
understanding that is to say worked out in
a reformed context, worked out on the basis
of the doctrine of justification by faith, was
John Bradford.
You probably know his name as one of
the Marian martyrs.
Here are the basic facts about him.
He was born in Manchester about 1510 of
a wealthy family who first of all sent
him into the army.
After a short military career he decided to
become a lawyer.
In 1547, when he was 37, and when
he was studying law in London, he was
converted.
Converted quite strikingly and dramatically probably through his
friend who at that time was also studying
law, a man named Thomas Sampson who later,
like Sampson with a P by the way,
S-A-M-P-S-O-N who
later, like Bradford, was ordained and was in
exile under Mary and after Elizabeth's reign began
became a leader in the Vesparian Controversy.
He became, that is, a leading Puritan campaigning
for the abolition of the surface.
Sampson came to be the means of Bradford's
conversion.
And Bradford, having once come to a living
faith, manifested immediately a very intense piety and
he made very rapid progress both in Christian
sanctity and in Christian understanding.
And he decided almost at once to become
a minister.
We are told that immediately on his conversion
he sold his chains, rings, brooches and jewels
of gold to distribute the proceeds for the
poor.
He went to Cambridge to study the scriptures
and equip himself to preach.
He was ordained in 1560.
He became a fellow of a Cambridge college.
He became a friend of Martin Dueser, a
Dueser of Strasbourg reformer who had come to
Cambridge to be professor of divinity at that
time.
And in 1551, only four years after his
conversion, he was chosen to be one of
Edward VI's six itinerant chaplains who were to
thump the country preaching the faith of the
Reformation and teaching Englishmen the gospel.
Well, it was a rapid rise that he
was that sort of man.
He'd grown in grace very rapidly and he'd
won praise on all hands for sanctity and
also for theological skill and power of utterance.
His writings, as a matter of fact, reveal
this.
He is one of the most pointed and
powerful writers, one of the clearest writers of
all the reformers.
In his work as a preacher during the
two years in which he was at liberty
to fulfill this ministry, and I'll quote the
words of John Fox, the martyrologist, quote, sharply
he opened and recruited sin, sweetly he preached
Christ crucified, tiffany he impugned heresy from error,
earnestly he persuaded to godly life.
During that period he had one famous sermon
that he preached on more than one occasion,
a sermon of repentance which people asked him
to publish.
And in 1553 he did publish it and
it was the first reformed Protestant sermon of
repentance, sermon on the subject of repentance, that
England had had in print ever.
Then that sermon, I may say, was reprinted
in 1574 because of the popular demand for
it.
Then the year 1553, about the time when
the sermon came out, Bradford was arrested.
Edward VI had died and Queen Mary had
come to the throne.
She was determined to bring England back to
Rome as soon as she could and she
set to work to inhibit, by fair means
or foul, all the major Protestant preachers who
remained in the country, and of course a
lot of Protestants in fact didn't remain in
the country, no less than 800 of them
fled abroad for the period of Mary's reign,
they saw what was coming.
But Bradford stayed and was arrested and was
condemned, as all the Marian martyrs were condemned,
for unorthodoxy regarding the mass.
Transubstantiation was the test question.
A man who on examination professed that he
didn't believe in transubstantiation went to the stake
for heresy.
That was the principle of the Marian barons.
Anne Bradford was burned in 1655.
He was burned with a young man, an
apprentice, named Leif.
And it's recorded that almost his last words
were words of encouragement to young Leif.
Be of good comfort, brother, for we shall
have a merry supper with the Lord this
night.
From that you can gather the kind of
men he was.
And we're told that his very last words
as he died in the fire, that they
were continually repeated, repent, England.
Repent, England.
What about John Bradford?
A man who, as his biographer, Samson, Samson
became his biographer, and Samson wrote of him
that he fulfilled a great ministry in a
very short time.
His particular legacy, that legacy which became part
of the intellectual heritage of Puritanism, was along
the line of devotional literature explicating and enforcing
the piety of repentance.
There was this sermon of which I've already
spoken to you.
And there was another volume of his work,
Meditations on the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and
the Commandments, plus A Defense of Election.
An interesting little volume.
Published in 1562, after Elizabeth's reign had begun,
and often reprinted, found very acceptable, therefore, evidently,
by the people of God in England at
that time.
All that he wrote is on the wonder
of grace for sinners, on humility for sins,
and on the life of faith and repentance.
These were his staple themes.
They have come out, too, in certain letters
that he wrote from Britain, which were published
in 1564, in a compendium that Miles Coverdale,
the one-time bishop of Exeter, the one
-time agent, well, the one-time successor of
Wycliffe, in publishing translations of the Bible, had
got out, a compendium called Godly Letters of
the Martyrs.
The sermon itself is what we would call
an evangelistic sermon, and an exceedingly powerful one.
It defines repentance in terms of sorrow for
sins, together with trust in God, through Christ,
for pardon, together with a purpose to amend,
or conversion to a new life.
That phrase is actually quoted from Britain, a
purpose to amend, or conversion to a new
life.
And having swept away the errors of Rome
about the meaning of repentance, poietentia, penance, just
something formal that you do after you've been
to confession, he goes on to speak, first
of the way in which the law shows
us our sin and our need of repentance,
he dwells on the reality of the curse
and wrath of God against sin, and then
he gives model prayers for repentance and faith,
just as modern evangelists do.
He said a little about Christ's invitation in
Matthew 11, 28 and following, come unto me,
all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
even the worst of you.
And he ends up finally with a strong
exhortation to conversion to a new life, holiness,
obedience to the law of God, obedience to
the lordship of Jesus.
All these things are there in Bradford, in
Bradford's 1553 sermon of repentance.
And something of the power of it still
comes across, despite the fact that the colloquial
language in which it's written inevitably reads a
little bit cramped and quaint at the present
time.
Of this sermon, William Perkins, the leading Puritan
theologian at the end of Elizabeth's reign, wrote
as follows in the preface to his own
little tract on repentance, published in 1593.
I quote the words, you don't need to
take them down.
The interesting thing is the testimony which they
bear.
Whereas there have been published heretofore two sermons
of repentance, one by Mr. Bradford, Marker, the
other by Mr. Arthur Dent, sermons indeed which
have done much good, my meaning is not
to add thereunto or to teach another doctrine,
but only to renew and revive the memory
of that which they have taught.
Which is simply to say that Perkins deliberately
sits himself in the Bradford succession so far
as teaching about repentance is concerned.
And he's got no ambition for himself as
a writer on this subject other than simply
to echo and rethink what Bradford has taught.
As we go on you'll have evidence of
abundance set before you to enable you to
see just how fundamental in Puritan piety this
thought of repentance was.
Repentance that is expounded in this large way
as conversion to a new life, turning from
all sin and every sin every day of
your life.
If Bradford inspired the Puritan tradition on this
subject, then clearly he too makes his mark
as a grandfather of Puritanism.
Bradford in fact is a grandfather of Puritanism
in more ways than this.
For not merely did he sorry, not merely
did he write about repentance but he also
distinguished himself by the way that he practiced
it.
Now this, wait a minute, this is a
book which ought to have the record of
his practice on page 90, oh yes, here
it is.
I thought for a moment that I brought
the wrong book.
I would like to read to you from
the way in which Samson in his Life
of Bradford, Prefix to the 1574 Reprint of
the Sermon describes Bradford's own practice of repentance.
Because this too is Puritanism.
This presents you in a strikingly intense form
with the kind of piety that was characteristic
of the Puritan leaders all through.
His manner, Bradford's manner writes Samson was to
make himself a catalogue of all the grossest
and worst sins which in his life of
ignorance he had committed and to lay the
flame before his eyes when he went to
private prayer that by the sight and remembrance
of them he might be stirred up to
offer to God the sacrifice of a contrite
heart to seek assurance of salvation in Christ
by faith to thank God for his calling
from the ways of wickedness and to pray
for increases of grace to be conducted in
holy life acceptable and pleasing to God.
Such a continual exercise of conscience he had
in private prayer that he did not count
himself to have prayed to his contentation until
in it he had felt inwardly some lighting
of heart for sin and some healing of
that wound by faith feeling the saving health
of Christ with some change of mind into
the detestation of sin and love of obeying
the good will of God.
Without such an inward exercise of prayer our
Bradford did not pray to his full contentation
as appears by this.
He used in the morning to go to
the common prayer in the college where he
was that's when he was at Cambridge in
1550 and after that he used to make
some prayer with his pupils in his chamber
but not content with this he then repaired
to his own secret prayer and exercise in
prayer by himself as one that had not
yet prayed to his own mind for he
would want to say to his familiars that
is his friends I have prayed with my
pupils but I have not yet prayed with
myself.
And this Bradford described this Samson described as
our Bradford's exercises of repentance.
And there's more to come another of his
exercises was this he used to make to
himself an ephemeris or a journal that's 16th
century language for a diary in which he
used to write all such notable things as
either he did see or hear each day
of the month but whatsoever he did hear
or see he did so tell it that
a man might see in that book the
signs of his slip and heart for if
he did see or hear any good in
any man by that sight he found and
noted the want thereof in himself and added
a short prayer craving mercy and grace to
a man if he did hear or see
any plague or misery he noted it as
a thing procured by his own sins and
constantly added Domine Miserere me, Lord have mercy
upon me and he used of the same
book to note such evil thoughts as did
rise in him as of ending the good
of other men or thoughts of unthankfulness of
not considering God in his work of hardness
and unsensibleness of heart when he did see
others moved and affected moved and affected that
is by the things of God and thus,
Lord sent us in the quote thus he
made to himself and of himself a book
of daily practices of repentance and here you've
got first the pioneer the pioneer example of
a Puritan of prayer all Puritans when they
went to God were concerned to feel the
things that they prayed about all were concerned
to pray about the things that Grandfather prayed
about and all thought I shall not say
but one has to say feelings I hate
the word, I was trying to dodge it
it's so inadequate for the real thing but
they all thought to feel what they prayed
they all thought feelings of hatred of sin
love for Christ confidence in Christ revolution to
serve God henceforth also, here in Brentford you've
got the pioneer Puritan diary this became a
standard devotional exercise among the Puritans namely to
keep a diary and to record in the
diary such things that when you read them
would humble you for sin and stir you
up to new revolution and zeal a diary
was intended to be a record of one's
own spiritual pilgrimage it was, as has been
said the Puritan confessional not of course in
the theological sense but simply the way that
the Puritan kept stock kept stock of the
way that his spiritual life was going if
you want Puritan examples of this read at
your leisure M.
M.
Natton the man who wrote on Puritanism M.
M.
Natton two Elizabethan Puritan diaries they're in the
library they're the diaries of Samuel Ward and
Richard Rogers the diary of Richard Rogers in
particular it's fascinating Richard Rogers was one of
the pioneer Puritan pastors of whom I'll be
speaking later here then you've got Blaircliffe teaching
repentance practicing repentance writing about repentance and hereby
teaching this place as one of the ancestors
of Puritanism one of the pioneers of the
experimental piety to use the Puritan phrase which
the Puritans always aspired after a piety of
strong faith and strong repentance a piety of
daily turning from sin knowing one's sins daily
reckoning daily with the fate of indwelling sin
turning from sin daily and seeking by the
grace of God to keep clear of sin
daily basic in the Puritan understanding of the
life of saints and it was Bradford who
more powerfully than anyone else of his generation
set this before the minds of earnest godly
Englishmen and there then you've got the second
element in the making of Puritanism as a
distinctive spiritual movement our time's gone, we must
stop are there any questions about Bradford?
I hope I've convinced you incidentally that Bradford
is a man whose works are worth reading
not everybody whose works were published in the
Parker Society the Parker Society volumes is worth
reading some of them are really rather secondary
specimens of exposition but Bradford is so great
and if ever you've read all your Puritan
research and want something else to go on
to you could do works and go on
to Bradford goodbye