If there is one haunting line from literature that may encapsulate the American and Christian spirit regarding Salem, Massachusetts, it may be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous line from The House of Seven Gables: “Shall we never get rid of this Past?…
For the previous post in this four-part series, part 1, part 2, part 3. Perhaps the most general Puritan principle on habits was their effects in promoting Christlikeness. The Puritans appealed to this in both a positive and a negative…
The sermon was the minister’s attempt through reason to encourage faith as it affected this life and the next. They were committed to a style that was plain but not dull. Each minister was pledged by his own creed to…
One of the great follies of which many studies on Puritanism are guilty is the practice of analyzing and criticizing the Puritans rather than allowing them to analyze and criticize us! It is not my intent in this series of…
In the first post of this two-part series, we began to examine the various reasons why the Christian may struggle to find peace with the help of William Bridge’s first sermon from his work, A Lifting Up for the Downcast.…
The Church of England, increasingly angry over the Puritan’s unwillingness to conform to their practices (for which they found no Scriptural warrant or felt were throwbacks to Popery), began to persecute the Puritans to drive them out of their pulpits…
Jesus most assuredly promised a great peace to his children with the words, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither…
That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. Romans 8:4 Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee; Let the water and…
John Donne – Poet of Grace and Comfort In 1623, when a sudden illness brought the poet and preacher John Donne close to death, he expressed his lament with words that may sound relevant during our coronavirus pandemic: “Variable and…
Nathanael Ranew died in 1677, “a judicious divine, and a good historian.”[1] He had served as vicar in Felsted, Essex, until his ejection in 1662 for nonconformity, after which he moved twenty miles south to teach in the town of…
