Less known than Flavel, but somewhat akin to him in natural and spiritual taste, was Isaac Ambrose, whose work, entitled Looking to Jesus, is full of pleasant illustrations, drawn from the scenes of nature amidst which he delighted to ramble, especially “the sweet woods of Widdicre,” on the banks of the Darwen, where in a little hut, to which he annually repaired, this Puritan hermit, for the time, spent hour after hour in meditation and prayer.
John Spencer, in his Things New and Old; Robert Cawdray, in his Treasury of Similes; and Benjamin Keach, in his Key to open Scripture Metaphors;—also belong to the same class of authors as Flavel.[568]
PRACTICAL PURITAN THEOLOGY.
Many of the practical treatises published in the seventeenth century consisted of courses of sermons, and partook largely of the diffuse style proper to the pulpit; also many of the sermons of that day are in fact practical treatises. We see this fashion of treating Divinity in the works of Taylor and Barrow, and still more strikingly in the works of Owen, Baxter, and Howe. Casuistry, now neglected by Protestants, was then much studied by theologians of all schools. Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium, and Baxter’s Christian Directory, are worthy of a chief place on the shelf of a library appropriated to works of this description. The characters of the men, and the peculiarities of the different schools of theological thought to which they belonged, may be traced in these volumes, and there is truth in the remark of one well read in all kinds of theological literature,—“Both may be consulted occasionally with profit and advantage; but if resorted to as oracles, they will frequently be found as unsatisfactory as the responses of the Delphic tripod.”[569]
As, in common with devoted Conformists, Dissenting preachers “watched for souls,” the means they pursued for the accomplishment of their end bore a stamp indicating their distinctive theological principles. One peculiarity in the mode of preaching adopted by the Anglican, and an opposite peculiarity in the mode of preaching adopted by the Puritan, grew—as differences always must—out of different systems of Divinity maintained by the two parties. The first, regarding the ordinance of baptism as lying at the root of Christianity, and looking upon all who had undergone the holy rite, as regenerated Christians, addressed their congregations at large—those congregations being composed almost entirely of the baptized—as members of the mystical body of Christ, as people already in fellowship with the Redeemer, and as needing only to be awakened to a sense of their privileges, and of their responsibility, and to be stimulated to the discharge of their duties. The Puritan, on the contrary, regarding spiritual consciousness as at the bottom of all spiritual life, and looking upon those who were destitute of such consciousness, as dead in trespasses and sins, laboured at making people feel the need of that new birth which our Lord inculcated upon Nicodemus. The tone of the Anglican harp is heard sweetly in Jeremy Taylor’s Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying. The Puritan trumpet waxes loud in Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted.
The office of expositor was necessarily, to some extent, combined with that of preacher. Puritan homilies were chiefly expository, and Puritan expositions were chiefly homiletic. Biblical criticism, in the precise sense of the word, was not studied then so thoroughly as it is in the present day; but looking at the critical literature produced by Puritans, in comparison with that which was produced by other scholars, those who come in the line of succession after the former have no reason to be ashamed of their predecessors. Thomas Gataker the younger, Incumbent of Rotherhithe, who died in 1654, was one of the first scholars of his age, and applied his extensive and profound learning to Biblical investigations. He was somewhat erratic in certain of his conclusions, but in the defence of them he displayed both erudition and ingenuity. In his work on the style of the New Testament, he overthrew the positions of Sebastian Pfochenius, who maintained the classical purity of the Scripture Greek; and in establishing the fact of Hebraistic peculiarities in apostolic writings, he anticipated the opinions of modern scholars, and also entered upon original inquiries respecting the origin of languages.[570] Pool’s Synopsis, published between 1669 and 1674, with the Annotations, which appeared in 1683, present, in an accurate and well-digested form, the principal results of all the learning which had then been applied to the investigation of the Old and New Testament. And Owen’s Exposition of the Epistles to the Hebrews is a rare monument of erudition:—considering the age in which it was written, it is equal if not superior to anything on the same subject which has been composed since. Still, its value as a series of devout and practical meditations far surpasses its exegetical worth, and that which is a pre-eminent quality in Owen is a pre-eminent quality in his brethren. Thomas Goodwin, if not equal in Biblical scholarship to John Owen, does not come very far behind him. His exposition of a part of the Epistle to the Ephesians is a noble production; but the chief excellence of Goodwin, like that of the other “Atlas of Independency,” lies in his clearness, sagacity, comprehensiveness, and point, as a practical and experimental expositor. Burroughs on Hosea; Caryl on Job; Greenhill on Ezekiel; Manton on James, Jude, the 119th Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, and the 53rd chapter of Isaiah,—and the list could be easily enlarged,—are commentaries, in which the critical element appears faint, when compared with the theological and hortatory characteristics.
PURITAN EXPOSITORS.
As Divines, as expositors, and preachers, the Puritans showed a wonderful acquaintance with the Bible and with the human heart, for they apply the one to the other with singular skill, force, and pathos. No doubt they were deficient in taste, and sometimes worried their metaphors to death, and handled their flowers till they dropped to pieces, and are open to all kinds of criticism from modern masters of science. No doubt, also, we in our day have many advantages over them in reading the Bible; for, owing to helps now familiar, we acquire a keener insight into ancient Eastern life than any of these worthies could ever attain. They had no works in those days like that of Conybeare and Howson; yet they had a pre-eminent gift in bringing to bear, for spiritual and practical purposes, the daily life of patriarchs and Apostles upon the daily life of the people to whom they preached, and for whom they wrote. Travellers often gaze with interest upon those frescoes in the churches of Florence and other Italian cities, in which the stories of Scripture are rendered into landscapes and figures, derived from streets and gardens, and costumes and faces, with which the artist happened to be familiar in the place where he dwelt. And who that has seen them has not been struck with the stained glass windows in Germany, grotesquely portraying Scripture scenes and incidents under forms borrowed from German dwellings and German people? So at times, when reading the homely applications of Bible stories in Puritan writers, are we not reminded of these works of art; do we not feel that amidst a great deal which provokes criticism, and which may make one smile, there is in the Puritan writer, as in the mediæval painter, an instinct of truth, and an insight into the connection between the Bible and common life, most profound, most keen, most admirable? As the wickedness of old is still reproduced, and as the enemies of Christ are the same in spirit whether dressed like Jewish priests or as Saxon burgomasters,—so the devotion and piety of ancient and sacred times may transmigrate into the souls, and be embodied in the habits of modern citizens. But of all the excellencies of Puritan divinity, this is the chief,—that it exhibits clearly, and with warmth and love, with light and fire, the distinctive doctrines of Christianity—the Fatherhood of God, the Divinity, the mediation, the priesthood, and the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, the agency of the Holy Spirit, the freeness of salvation, the way of acceptance with God through faith, and the new birth and sanctification of the human soul, through the efficacious operations of Divine grace.
COMPARISON.
Thus I have attempted to give an outline of the opinions which divided the English Christendom of the latter half of the seventeenth century. In citing passages from various authors I am fully aware how fallacious quotations are when taken by themselves; at the best they are insufficient for the formation of a judgment. The old illustration of a brick taken out of a house as a specimen of the structure scarcely applies to the subject; yet no judicious student of literature will rely upon passages extracted from an author, detached from their connection and separated from the leading idea and spirit of his work. Those which are employed in these pages have been chosen on account of their being not mere blocks lying upon the surface, but the croppings up of characteristic strata, penetrating deeply, and spreading far beneath the surface of the ground upon which they appear.