Experiments of Spiritual Life & Health, and Their Preservatives / In Which the Weakest Child of God May Get Assurance of His Spirituall Life and Blessednesse Etc.

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And their
PRESERVATIVES
In which the weakest Child of God may get Assurance of his Spirituall Life and Blessednesse
And the Strongest may finde proportionable Discoveries of his Christian Growth , and the means of it.
By Roger Williams of Providence in New-England .
London, Printed, in the Second Month, 1652.
RE-PRINTED BY SIDNEY S. RIDER, PROVIDENCE. 1863.
The object of the work is, briefly to present to the christian the evidences of personal piety and guard these evidences from abuse and misapprehension. It is divided into three parts. The author first treats of the evidences of a piety, which, though real, is weak and imperfect; secondly, the evidences of a vigorous and maturer piety; and the third part contains directions for maintaining and increasing piety in the soul of the believer. It is written with clearness and discrimination, and much resembles the treatises of Baxter on the same subject. It is as well adapted to the condition of christians of the present day as to the condition of those for whom it was written, two hundred and ten years since. There cannot be found in it a word of sectarian bitterness; on the contrary, it everywhere breathes the spirit of catholic, christian charity.
The circumstances under which it was written are certainly peculiar. It seems that his wife, to whom he appears to have been tenderly attached, had been dangerously ill, but was now recovering. During her sickness he had been from home, laboring among the Indians; and while absent, he wrote this little treatise in the form of a letter to her, his object being simply to promote her spiritual improvement. At the request of his friends, it was published in London; and a dedication was prefixed to it, addressed to Lady Vane the Younger. In this dedication, occurs the following remarkable passage: The form and stile I know will seem to this refined age too rude and barbarous, and the truth is, the most of it was penned and writ, (so as seldom or never such discourses were,) in the thickest of the naked Indians of America, in their very wild houses, and by their barbarous fires, when the Lord was pleased this last year (more than ordinarily) to dispose my abode and travel among them.