Topic Archives: 17th Century

But I have this against you, that you have left your first love (Revelation 2:4). By 1630 Scotland was in need of another revival, a time of visitation by God when a whole community is soaked with his presence. Such had occurred five years earlier in the town of Stewarton under the ministry of David […]

An excellent wife, who can find? For her worth is far above jewels. (Proverbs 31:10) Richard Baxter, the tireless, heavenly minded Puritan minister of the seventeenth century, was a confirmed bachelor,1 devoting himself completely to the ministry of the gospel in Kidderminster, England. When going there in 1641 the parish was notorious for godlessness and […]

An extract, with slight editing, from Memoirs of the Rev James Fraser of Brea.1 Being at the University, and being at the age of 17 or 18 years, our minister proposed to celebrate the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, of which he gave warning the Sabbath preceding the celebration thereof. I purposed (I know not […]

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 […]

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 […]

Gentlemen. I have long looked for a suitable opportunity of acknowledging an old debt to a favourite author of mine. But when I proceed to pay a little of that old debt today, I am not to be supposed to put any of you into that same author’s debt. All I wish to do is […]

[This is the first of a five part series originally published in the Banner of Truth magazine under the title “Thomas Hooker and the Dctrine of God.” This portion was in Issue 195, December 1979, pp. 19-29.] Among the multitude of Puritan books which have survived the 17th Century The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan […]

“I need not tell you of this who knew him, that it was his great Design to promote Holiness in the Life and Exercise of it among you: But it was his great Complaint, that its Power declined among Professors. It was his Care and Endeavor to prevent or cure spiritual Decays in his own […]

An Introduction James I. Packer ‘BAXTER, Richard, gentleman; born 12 November 1615, at Rowton, Salop; educated at Donnington Free School, Wroxeter, and privately; ordained deacon by Bishop of Worcester, Advent 1638; head of Richard Foley’s School, Dudley, 1639; curate of Bridgnorth, 1639-40; lecturer (curate) of Kidderminster, 1641-42; army chaplain at Coventry, 1642-45, and with Whalley’s […]