Topic Archives: Puritan Biography

At last ‘Banner’ have published an edition of this greatly valued Christian classic, and have done so in a format worthy of the lasting spiritual value of the work. John Bunyan (1628-1688) wrote voluminously, his collected making three portly volumes in the definitive nineteenth-century edition (available in facsimile reprint from the Banner of Truth Trust). […]

John Hurrion was born in Suffolk, circa 1675, in a period when those who had stood apart from the Church of England after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 were undergoing persecution. Almost the only knowledge we have of his youth is this statement: ‘In his younger years, he was brought to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.’1 […]

In the 1600’s a special relationship developed between John Owen (1616-1683), and John Bunyan (1628-1688). Although they were both English Puritans, there were some striking differences between the two men. And yet they were good friends. You might call them the Puritan odd couple. Bunyan had little education. He spent time in the army, and […]

While commenting upon the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm, I was brought into most intimate communion with Thomas Manton, who has discoursed upon that marvellous portion of Scripture with great fulness and power. I have come to know him so well that I could pick him out from among a thousand divines if he were […]

The poet John Milton lived from 1608 to 1674, this year being the four hundredth anniversary of his birth (December 9). He was also a controversialist, a Londoner by birth and death, who after education at St. Paul’s School, and Christ’s College, Cambridge, abandoned his intention of ordination in the Church of England because of […]

Over 40 gathered on June 3 at the Evangelical Library in Chiltern Street to hear Dr Jonathan Moore give an excellent lecture on ‘Predestination and Evangelism in the Life and Thought of William Perkins‘. After briefly acquainting us with what little is known of Perkins’ life (he was born 450 years ago and died at […]

An old writer on the Puritans tells us how Robert Atkins, in one of his last sermons at St. John’s, Exeter, before the Great Ejection of 1662, took the opportunity of declaring in the presence of Bishop Gauden and other dignitaries that ‘those ministers who beget converts to Christ may most properly be called Fathers […]

Mary Stone was the daughter of Matthew Stone, a successful London Merchant. She met her husband Christopher Love, in 1639 and six years later they married. Christopher Love was a Puritan who became the lecturer at St. Ann’s Aldergate for three years before becoming the minister of St. Laurence Jewry, a church in London, in […]

In this final of three articles on John Owen,1 Jeremy Walker looks at Owen’s classic work, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.2 Reader, if thou intendest to go any farther, I would entreat thee to stay here a little. If thou art, as many in this pretending age, a sign or title […]

Having provided this brief and necessarily shallow study of the life of John Owen,1 I want to pick out several aspects of his life and character which deserve particular attention. A general description of his character is given in the biographical note that opens his collected works: He is said to have stooped considerably during […]

John Owen is worthy of our attention because of his example as a Christian man. In many respects he was a man of his times; in others he was far ahead of them. Nevertheless, he possessed qualities and lived by principles and embraced values which – because they were the fruits of grace – are […]

CHRISTIAN SOCIETY IN AMERICA: GOD WILL DIRECT THE BULLET! When the Mayflower began her nine weeks’ voyage across the Atlantic in September, 1620, the intention of her passengers was ‘to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia’ under which description they had in view land around Manhattan Island at the mouth of […]

Stephen Charnock, B.D., was born in the year 1628, in the parish of St. Katharine Cree, London. His father, Mr. Richard Charnock, practiced as a solicitor in the Court of Chancery, and was descended from a family of some antiquity in Lancashire. Stephen, after a course of preparatory study, entered himself, at an early period […]