J. Gresham Machen once wrote: ‘If we are going to avoid controversy, we might as well close our Bibles; for the New Testament is a controversial book practically from beginning to the end.’ Then he made this prediction about the future:

I do not know all the things that will happen when the great revival sweeps over the Church, the great revival for which we long. Certainly I do not know when that revival will come; its coming stands in the Spirit’s power. But about one thing that will happen when that blessing comes I think we can be fairly sure. When a great and true revival comes in the Church, the present miserable, feeble talk about avoidance of controversy on the part of the servants of Jesus Christ will all be swept away as with a mighty flood.¹

You understand that in speaking of revival, Machen was not speaking simply of a time of blessing or excitement in a local church; he was referring to the kind of awakening in the churches and in society which turns attention to God, brings conviction of sin, humbles people, and even changes the course of history. But is his prediction, that such an event will be accompanied by controversy, justified? I believe that it is. Church history shows that all the great turning points in history have been times of controversy and there is good reason why that is the case. It is because every great advance of the kingdom of God takes place in conjunction with the recovery of biblical truth, and when the truth is known in its power opposition will not be absent. Thus when the book of Acts tells us, ‘The word of God grew and multiplied’, we go on to read that the Christians were seen as a ‘sect’ and ‘everywhere spoken against’ (Acts 28: 22). Before we speak of the benefits of controversy, I note three examples of controversies that marked turning points in history.

1. The great Reformation of the sixteenth century. There are those today who think that the Reformation, and the division that gave rise to the Protestant churches, were things that might have been avoided. There ought, it is said, to have been more tolerance and less passion on both sides. The differences, they believe, were more over words than over fundamental issues. Such spokesmen concede that some Reformation of the church was necessary, but suggest that it might have been carried on peacefully had there been better mutual understanding. This argument overlooks something: there were people who thought in just that kind of way at the time of the Reformation. Erasmus, the Renaissance Dutch scholar, is their best representative. Erasmus believed in the need for the Bible to be translated and known; and he supported the reform of abuses in the church. At the same time he thought that all this might be achieved peacefully by a cautious policy of education. So he complained that Martin Luther was a threat to the peace and unity of the church; the German reformer was too dogmatic—he treated opinions, and ‘doubtful and unnecessary’ beliefs, as though they were certainties. Erasmus blamed Luther for his ‘delight in assertions’.

It was to this thinking of Erasmus that Luther replied in The Bondage of the Will, a book which showed that Erasmus was not a real believer in the doctrines of the Bible at all. The Dutchman’s thinking, Luther wrote, meant regarding ‘Christian doctrines as nothing better than the opinions of philosophers and men: and that it is the greatest folly to quarrel about, contend for, and assert them, as nothing can arise therefrom but contention and the disturbance of the public peace.’²

He replied to Erasmus:

Allow us to be assertors, and to study and delight in assertions: and do you favour your Sceptics and Academics until Christ shall have called you also. The Holy Spirit is not a Sceptic, nor are what he has written in our hearts doubts or opinions, but assertions more certain, and more firm, than life itself. ³

Erasmus, Luther says, made keeping peace of ‘greater consideration than salvation, than the word of God, than the glory of Christ’, and the cause of his mistake was that his viewpoint was fundamentally different from that of the Reformers. He saw the controversy over the Reformation as a difference between men. For Luther it was much more than that: it was a movement of the Spirit of God. Men were called to take part but God was the true agent. In the words of John Knox, ‘God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance.’ In essence, the Reformation was a revival. God sent forth light and truth, and the hostility that erupted was exactly what Scripture warns us to expect. The uproar in the sixteenth century did not come about because of ‘opinions’; it came from enmity to the Bible and to God. ‘The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be’ (Rom. 8:7).

2. The Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century, or as it became known in the American colonies, ‘The Great Awakening’. This also was attended by controversy, not now between Protestants and Roman Catholics but between Protestants themselves. Yet the issue was very similar to the main issue at the Reformation. The devil’s constant strategy is to seek to merge the church and the world so that the people of God lose their distinctiveness and be no longer as ‘a city set upon a hill’. The primary way for Satan to achieve this is to confuse what it means to be a Christian. He uses false prophets to make entrance into the kingdom of God broad and not narrow, and so becoming a Christian is just a matter of belonging to the institutional church. ‘Be baptized, profess Christianity, attend church’, and that is all. This was largely the position on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, as it had been two centuries earlier. When Whitefield and Wesley began to preach the necessity of being born again people heard it as though it was a new religion. Typical was the testimony of Thomas Webb, a parish clerk in England, who had listened to many sermons in his lifetime, and yet confessed, ‘The new birth, justification by faith only, the want of free will in man to do good works without the special grace to God, was as it were, a new language to me.’⁴ Archibald Alexander, who was brought up among Presbyterians in the Shenandoah Valley, says the same thing. The day came in his life when, away from home, a Baptist millwright asked him

Whether I had experience the new birth. I hesitated and said, ‘Not that I know of.’ ‘Ah’, said he, ‘if you had ever experienced this change you would know something about it!’ Here the conversation ended; but it led me to think more seriously whether there were any such change. It seemed to be in the Bible; but I thought there must be some method of explaining it away; for among the Presbyterians I had never heard of anyone who had experienced the new birth, nor could I recollect ever to have heard it mentioned.’⁵

The fundamental controversy in the eighteenth-century revival was about the nature of vital, life-changing Christianity. The evangelicals appealed to the testimony of the New Testament on such truths as the power of the Holy Spirit in conviction of sin, and his work in giving assurance of salvation, and they were told such things were no longer necessary in ‘Christian’ countries. It was ‘fanaticism’ and highly offensive to preach to churchgoers as though they might not be Christians. Take one particular instance of this controversy. Jonathan Edwards, leader in the Awakening in colonial America, was dismissed from the church at Northampton which he had served for twenty-three years. The cause of his dismissal was that he had come to see the wrongness of allowing churchgoers to come to the Lord’s Table although they could give no testimony to their personal faith in Christ. When he sought to persuade his people that the Lord’s Table, and the purity of the church, needed to be guarded, there was such an outcry against him that it terminated his ministry.

3. The Modern Controversy over Scripture. In the last century practically all the historic denominations of the English-speaking nations, from America to New Zealand, fell into serious decline. Whole communities where light once burned brightly were left in darkness. This happened because the leadership in these churches took the wrong side in controversy over whether the whole Bible is God-given revelation which is to be obeyed in all it says. Now although this controversy continues to be contemporary, we are all aware that it did not begin yesterday. It came out into the light in the 1880s, and it was at its height until about the 1920s, when tragically the mainline churches in our countries gave in to the teaching that the Bible contains both truth and error. The majority argued that this change of belief was simply the inevitable result of a better understanding of the nature of the Bible. No one should be disturbed about this discovery, they said, because faith does not rest upon a Book but upon the living Christ. The claim was, ‘It is Christ we worship, not a book!’ Such was a common way in which falsehood was presented and it was promised that there was no danger in accepting it. After all, they said, there is a difference between believing the Bible and ‘believing in theories about the Bible’. The historic Christian belief in the inerrancy of all Scripture was only ‘a theory’ produced to explain its composition. Other possible explanations were not to be excluded. In 1888 a prominent English Baptist leader, John Clifford, defended this thinking in a major speech which he entitled ‘The Battle of the Sacred Books’.⁶ ‘Books’ in the plural was central to his thesis. There are other ‘sacred books’; Christianity cannot be exclusive in its claim to have revelation from heaven. The Bible is only ‘superior revelation’, but in saying this, he added, ‘Let me carefully note that we speak of the Bible ITSELF, and not of any human theories concerning its composition.’ Without stating whom he was attacking, Clifford referred to those of orthodox belief as ‘scholastic system-builders, and priest-bitten ecclesiastics’. They are people, he said, who think ‘geography and statistics as equally vital with redemption and ethics’—a veiled way of saying that if matters of fact are wrong in the Bible that should not trouble us. It is, he said, ‘fatal’ to forget ‘that our faith does not rest, in its last support, upon the qualities and forces of the Scriptures, but on God . . . Jesus did not say to His disciples, “Go, preach to everybody, everywhere, and lo, a book is with you; but, lo, I am with you.” Our trust is in a living Leader; not in a book we read.’

Clifford was only repeating an idea already becoming popular and supposedly the result of the progress of scholarship. It was thirty-six years after his speech that a document called the Auburn Affirmation was published in the United States, signed by 150 Presbyterian ministers and then by others until the number grew to about 1,300. This Affirmation claimed that men of liberal belief in their theology had the same right to be in pulpits as traditionalists. They all ‘believed the Bible’, it was just ‘certain theories concerning the inspiration of the Bible’ over which they differed.

But by the 1920s the distinction between the Bible and ‘theories’ was worked out more widely. It was now said that one could believe in the cross of Christ without accepting any ‘theory’ of the atonement. Or one could believe in ‘the resurrection of Christ’ without determining whether it was a bodily resurrection. Bodily resurrection was only a ‘theory’, and the liberals were equally entitled to their theories.⁷

In some great controversies the leaders on the side of truth are not always seen to win in their lifetimes. It was so in this controversy. The two foremost leaders in opposition to liberal theology were C. H. Spurgeon in Britain, and J. Gresham Machen in America. Both men saw the tide go against them. Spurgeon saw a majority failing to support his call for subscription to a definite creed, and Machen was suspended by the Presbyterian Church, after a heroic defence of the faith. Both men died in their mid-fifties. Books by other faithful men have since demonstrated that the position defended by Spurgeon and Machen is the position taken by Scripture itself. Yet these books were largely ignored. What cannot be ignored is the providence of God in bringing spiritual desolation in all the denominations where the unbelief of liberalism was accepted. Once fruitful churches became a wilderness. Disbelief cannot coexist with the sanction of the Holy Spirit.

The benefits of controversy

That great blessings may result from controversies is an evident lesson of history.

1. Controversy leads to closer and clearer definitions of the truth. The great creeds and confessions of the churches have been born out of controversies. Heresies that might have ended Christian testimony have been overruled to establish the truth more brightly.

In the year 1555 error had come in like a flood in England, and those who opposed it were being put to death in numbers. Yet when Hugh Latimer died at the stake, October 16, 1555, he could say to his fellow martyr, ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ His belief that controversy and persecution would be overruled for good was correct. ‘There must be divisions among you’, Paul told the church at Corinth, ‘that those approved may become more manifest’ (1 Cor. 11:19). As Charles Hodge says: ‘It is a great consolation to know that dissensions . . . are not fortuitous, but are ordered by the providence of God, and are designed, as storms, for the purpose of purification.’ Or, in the words of the Puritan, Samuel Bolton: ‘God suffers errors to arise to bring us back to the original word of God, that there we might rectify all. If there had not been such clashing and disputing in former ages, our way had not been clear to us, in many glorious truths.’⁸

Jonathan Edwards’ sufferings at Northampton had the same consequence. They were not in vain. More attention came to be given to the need for a credible evidence of a change of heart in order to permit admittance to the Lord’s Supper, and this led to a very general change in practice of many churches.⁹

Judged in purely numerical terms, the decline of the mainline churches into liberalism a hundred years ago was a tragedy, but it prompted many faithful men and women at home and on the mission fields to take a stronger stand on the inerrancy of Scripture.

2. Controversy has brought divisions that are a blessing to the world. There are times in history when the call of Hebrews 13:13 is again appropriate: ‘Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.’ First-century Christians were to leave a dead Judaism; they belonged to the Jerusalem ‘which is above,’ outside the Jerusalem which ‘is in bondage with her children’ (Gal. 4:25, 26). The call to separation is sometimes the call of God.

It is true that there have been times when earnest resistance to error in a denomination has been owned of God for its recovery, but there are also times when believers have to find spiritual life outside churches that are dead. There are religious institutions where believers have remained even after all attempts at recovery have proved futile.¹⁰ Those who did not leave the Presbyterian Church with Machen were to find this. Henry Coray, a witness of the 1930s’ controversy, commented on that point fifty years later: ‘One is constrained to look back and ask the question, “How goes the battle?” The answer had to be: the battle is over and the mopping up process is going on. The warriors have sheathed their swords. Where is there in the (now) United Presbyterian Church a single rallying point, a stalwart uncompromising post where the conflict is raging?’¹¹

Certainly, as I will argue, divisions arising out of controversy are not always beneficial, but both the Reformation and the eighteenth-century Awakening demonstrate the great blessings that have come to nations in times of disruption. It is not romanticising history to say that vast benefits, spiritual, moral, and economic, followed the Reformation: society was uplifted, tyrannies put down, and freedom of speech established.

Dangers

1. The danger of Christians not recognising when serious controversy is justified and when it is not. I believe that the three controversies noted above warranted controversy and division. The truths involved were fundamental and worth suffering for. We are commanded to ‘contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints’. But that does not mean we are to contend over every difference that arises. There are fundamental truths, lesser truths and matters which belong more to the sphere of speculation. If the line between these is not correctly drawn then great damage is liable to be done. The understanding of the best of men remains imperfect, and that means that a determination to secure or insist on unanimity in all things, will only multiply disputes and divisions. There are many instances where this has happened in church history, when the kingdom of God has been injured by believers engaging in disputes among themselves on issues not fundamental. This was part of the reason why the Puritan movement in England lost its ascendency. Men like-minded on the gospel fell out over the issue of how the church is to be governed. Now that is not a trivial subject. The Bible speaks on church government. But godly men differ on how parts of the biblical teaching are to be interpreted. The difference between those of Presbyterian and Independent views weakened their whole cause. In the last sermons Puritans preached before they were put out of their churches in 1662, there are pleas for more brotherly love, but by that date much damage had been done.¹²

Or consider what happened among Bible-believing Presbyterians in the United States in the 1930s. Those who rallied round Machen formed a new denomination, but it was to split over such questions as unfulfilled prophecy, and whether the wine drunk at the Lord’s Supper should be alcoholic. Again these points are not incidental, but they were claimed to justify the breaking of fellowship between men who had stood together on fundamental truths.

If good men, as these men were, failed to draw the distinction between first and secondary truths, and between mistakes which are tolerable and errors which are not, it underlines the difficulty that often enters into controversy. One lesson to be drawn is that not all Christians are called to be engaged in controversy. To play a useful part in a controversy means being a teacher of others, and Scripture is clear, not all Christians are called to teach: ‘Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren’ (James 3:1). For a start that rules out women taking any lead in controversies. Others are also ruled out. While all are called to be faithful, not even all teachers are gifted for controversy. Some may be eminent in one sphere but not in this one. It was an old Methodist who once said that the Methodists are good for leading sinners to Christ but no good in controversy. John Duncan, speaking about the early church Fathers, said, ‘The primitive Fathers were very poor divines. I don’t think Polycarp could have stood a theological examination by John Owen; but he was a famous man to burn.’ That is to say, God qualified Polycarp for what he was called to be, a martyr for Christ.¹³ This is not an argument to justify theological pacificism, yet it needs to be said that not all are called to be leaders in controversy. Unhappily it has too often been that men of a contentious spirit have taken this role for themselves.¹⁴

2. The danger of being distracted from what is of first importance. Potential controversies are ever present and it is easy to become participants. The warnings of Scripture are relevant to this phenomenon: we are told not ‘to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies’ that lead to ‘fruitless discussion’ (1 Tim. 1:4, 6). ‘Avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless’ (Titus 3:9). The nature of the controversies to which Paul refers is not clear; what is clear is the continuing existence of many debatable subjects which are not fundamental to the work of the gospel ministry. The Puritans used to say, ‘The devil never lets the wind of error blow long in the same direction.’ His purpose is to keep side-tracking Christian leaders from their main work.
Professor John Frame has listed twenty-one controversies which he believes have engaged evangelical Reformed Christians among themselves in the last seventy years.¹⁵ Whatever one thinks of the issues Frame covers, it is surely a sad thing how much time was taken up in these disputes. Ministers of the gospel are called to awaken sinners and to lead them to Christ and glory. The time is short in which to do it. Our strength is small. Unless we are watchful, precious time will go to little purpose and opportunities for greater things be lost forever.

Matthew Henry gave this wise counsel:

Ministers should avoid, as much as may be, what will occasion disputes; and would do well to insist on the great and practical points of religion, about which there can be no disputes; for even disputes about great and necessary truths draw off the mind from the main design of Christianity, and eat out the vitals of religion.¹⁶

In eighteenth-century Scotland a Secession took place from the Established Church of Scotland that incorporated numbers of the best people and preachers in the land. The Secession was an evangelistic and missionary force for good. But the congregations which adhered to it were drawn into repeated controversies among themselves and with others. One of their most eminent ministers, John Brown of Haddington, left this testimony: I look upon the Secession as indeed the cause of God, but sadly mismanaged and dishonoured by myself and others. Alas! for that pride, passion, selfishness, and unconcern for the glory of Christ and spiritual edification of souls, which has so often prevailed. Alas! for our want of due meekness, gentleness. Alas! that we did not chiefly strive to pray better, preach better, and live better, than our neighbours.¹⁷

3. The danger of treating matters of belief as the only priority. Truth is indeed a priority. Error is to be resisted. False teachers are to be exposed. But it is not the only priority. If one asks the question, What should be the chief features of Christian behaviour according to the New Testament, it would be hard to argue that contending for the faith stands alone at the top of the list. Consider how much is said in Scripture on the believer as a peacemaker. ‘Peacemakers’, says our Lord, ‘shall be called the children of God’ (Matt. 5:9). ‘If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men’ (Rom. 12:18). ‘Pursue peace with all men’ (Heb. 12:14). Within the church, the duty is ‘being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph. 4:3). ‘Have peace one with another’, is the command of Christ (Mark 9:50); ‘Be at peace among yourselves’ (1 Thess. 5:13).

Or consider the biblical emphases on brotherly love. ‘A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another’ (John 13:34, 35). But what if a fellow-Christian sins against you? The answer is, ‘forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you’ (Eph. 4:32). What such texts teach us is that the Christian life is more than a matter of knowledge and correct thinking. Spiritual life does not reside only in the intellect. A person can hold the right beliefs and not be a Christian at all. Where there is the new birth there is not only light to the mind, but love in the heart and grace in the spirit. Orthodox belief is not the only mark of true Christianity. When controversies begin between Christians they are tempted to forget this and attention may begin to turn solely on the points of difference. This was one of the problems of the church at Corinth. Knowledge was being treated as if it alone mattered. Some believed that they had got better knowledge and opinions than others, and there was something fundamental missing in their controversies. ‘Knowledge makes arrogant’—‘puffeth up’— ’but love edifies’ (1 Cor. 8:1). ‘Though I have all knowledge . . . and have not love, I am nothing’ (1 Cor. 13:2). The truth defended without love is not genuine Christianity. When disputes and differences arise they are not likely to be solved only by argument. Supernatural aid is needed. Thomas Manton wrote: ‘In our contests about religion, God must especially be sought unto for a blessing . . . disputing times should also be praying times. Prejudices will never vanish till God “send out his light and truth”, Psa. 43:3; and if the devil be not prayed down, as well as disputed down, little good cometh of our contests.’¹⁸

4. The danger of underestimating how much combustible material there is still in the best of Christians. Controversy can easily be the spark that ignites pride, conceit, ambition, and thus gives scope to the worst in human nature. It is sadly clear that some controversies in the churches show little concern for the glory of God. Archibald Alexander wrote: ‘It has long been remarked, that no spirit is more pungent and bitter than that of theologians in their contentions with one another; and it has often happened, that the less the difference, the more virulent the acrimony.’¹⁹ How is such a thing possible if there are Christians on both sides? It is because in the heat of controversy the weakness and imperfection which beset us all are ignored. And we have an adversary who is well able to tempt us to wrong judgments and suspicions about other Christians. ‘Satan knows that nothing is more fit to lay waste the kingdom of Christ than discord and disagreement among the faithful’ (Calvin). One temptation of the devil is to lead Christians to think that so long as they are defending the truth, and ‘upholding the church’, then other duties may be temporarily suspended. Who does not know that in controversy there are duties which almost pass out of sight? Christ’s ‘Golden Rule’, ‘Whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you even so to them’ (Matt. 7:12), is laid aside.²⁰ So is the royal law, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’, and the apostolic command, ‘Let each esteem other better than themselves’ (Phil. 2:3).

When controversies start brotherly love can degenerate into meaning loving those who agree with me, or loving those who belong to the same party or denomination as I do. Robert Candlish has the evidence of church history supporting him when he writes of how brotherly love can turn into sectarianism and partisanship:

You love as brethren those who happen to agree with you in holding certain opinions, pursuing certain ends. But if your unity is simply the result of your unanimity, it may make you strong as an ecclesiastical corporation; it may make you proud and happy as a select spiritual company, dwelling apart, nearer the throne than many. But it does not enlarge or elevate the heart. It is of the earth. It breeds earthly passions,—censoriousness, superciliousness, the bigot’s mean intolerance. Such brotherly love has been the bane and curse of the Church in all ages, the scandal of Christianity, the fruitful mother of strife among its professors.²¹

5. The danger of not foreseeing what desolations controversy can cause in the churches. The evidence of church history is that times of controversy between Christians have commonly been followed by times of much deadness and lack of evangelistic success. That is not surprising, for contentions between Christians and churches grieve the Holy Spirit and encourage unbelief in the world. Unbelievers commonly may not understand the points of difference in controversies, but they can understand a worldly spirit, and when they see that operating among Christians they judge there is nothing supernatural in the faith.

Charles J. Brown, Free Church of Scotland leader of the nineteenth century, says this on Paul entreating the Christians at Philippi to unity: ‘He knew that contention at once eats into the vitals of the Church itself, and exposes it to the ridicule and scorn of the world, stops the progress of the Gospel in Christians themselves and paralyses all their efforts to make it known to others. Therefore is he so intensely desirous to crush this evil in the bud.’²² Henry Coray, a witness to the divisions among men of Reformed persuasion after the death of Machen in 1937, left this testimony in 1981:

In retrospect, there is probably not a person living who passed through those tumultuous years who does not look back on the fragmentation with sorrow and regret. Unfortunately in controversy emotions too often color principles, feelings run high, statements are tossed off that should never be voiced, personality clashes with personality, and scars of battle will be carried to the cemetery.²³

How often we miss the warning of Scripture: ‘The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water’ (Prov. 17:14), on which Charles Bridges writes: ‘One provoking word brings on another. Every retort widens the breach. Seldom, when we have heard the first word, do we hear the last. An inundation of evil is poured in, that lays desolate peace, comfort, and conscience. Does not grace teach us the Christian victory, to keep down the expression of resentment, and rather bear provocation, than to break the bond of unity?’

John Newton as an example

John Newton was a peace maker. He lived at a time when there were some sharp disputes between evangelical Christians, and he stressed the catholicity that should mark all who belong to Christ:

I profess myself to be of no party, and to love all of every party who love the Lord in sincerity. If they preach the truth in love, live as they preach, and are wise and watchful to win souls, and to feed the flock, I care not much whether they are called, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Churchmen, Kirkmen, or Methodists . . . In some of the great shops of London, there are several counters; and servants at each attend the customers. If these servants are faithful and have their master’s interests at heart, they will not be jealous of each other, they will not affront the customers by saying ‘Why do you not come to be served on my side of the shop?’ If they are all well served and pleased, it signifies not to which counter they come. Now what are we but servants of one great master? What are our denominations and distinctions but as the several counters? ²⁴

Newton was not the kind of easy-going pacifist who did not believe in controversy at all. But he has a good deal to say to gospel ministers, and especially to young ministers, on being drawn into controversy. We find him, for example, in correspondence with John Ryland Jr, a young preacher who has recently escaped from hyper-Calvinism. He now believed, as Newton believed, that the gospel is to be offered to all people. But his father, a veteran preacher, still leant on the side of hyper-Calvinism and put his belief into print. The son writes to Newton and asks whether he should go into print with his views, contrary to those of his father. In reply Newton grants the father has some failings, and then comments: ‘He has not left many equal to him, in some respects. I would no more write against such a man, though he is not my father, than I would use my right hand to wound my left.’ Newton gently suggests that Ryland Jr was too ready to get into combat, and writes: ‘It seems errors are breaking out in the several places you mention, and you are on the point of writing to suppress them. But if there was a fire in all these towns, must they be burned to ashes, unless you can go with your bucket of water to quench the flames?’ He urges him to concentrate on preaching the truth and to take ‘less pains to combat and confute error’.²⁵ Elsewhere Newton writes of the need for an earnest defence of the faith, but while he underlines that such work is praiseworthy and honourable, he says it is also dangerous: ‘We find but very few writers of controversy who have not been manifestly hurt by it. Either they grow in a sense of their own importance, or imbibe an angry contentious spirit. . . . What will it profit a man if he gains his cause, and silences his adversary, if at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights, and to which the promise of his presence is made!’²⁶ If a Christian is convinced of his duty to enter into dispute with men teaching errors, then, Newton says, first, commend your opponent by earnest prayer ‘to the Lord’s teaching and blessing’. Then consider whether the opponent is to be regarded as a believer. In that case the Lord loves him, is patient with him, and ‘you must not despise him, or treat him harshly. . . . In a little while you will meet in heaven; he will then be dearer to you than the nearest friend you have upon earth is to you now. Anticipate that period in your thoughts; and though you may find it necessary to oppose his error, view him personally as a kindred soul, with whom you are to be happy in Christ forever.’

But supposing you think the opponent is unconverted (a conclusion not to be reached without good evidence), then, ‘He is a more proper object for your compassion than your anger. If God in his sovereign pleasure, had so appointed, you might have been as he is now. You were both equally blind by nature. If you attend to this, you will not reproach or hate him, because the Lord has been pleased to open your eyes and not his. Of all people who engage in controversy, we, who are called Calvinists, are most expressly bound by our own principles to the exercise of gentleness and moderation. If, indeed, they who differ from us have a power of changing themselves, if they can open their own eyes, then we might with less inconsistency be offended at their obstinacy.’²⁷ In addition to Newton’s letters, we have valuable information from another source on how he sought to practise his principles. The Rev. Thomas Scott served a parish not far from Newton’s at Olney. When they first met, Scott did not believe in the Trinity and treated evangelical beliefs as matters for amusement. ‘Once’, Scott writes, ‘I had the curiosity to hear him [Newton] preach; and, not understanding his sermon, I made a very great jest of it.’ Yet he was drawn to Newton, and when Newton gave him an evangelical book, he wrote to him in the hope of engaging him in ‘a controversial discussion of our religious differences’. ‘My arguments’, he believed ‘would prove irresistibly convincing’. Accordingly about nine or ten letters passed between the two men, but to Scott’s annoyance Newton would not debate theological points with him; instead he wrote of such things as the nature of true faith and how it is to be sought and obtained. For an interval of sixteen months this correspondence was dropped, but Newton treated his proud critic as a friend, and at length, when personal discouragements drove Scott to Olney for help, that friendship became one of the means God used to make Thomas Scott a new man and a leading evangelical writer. The whole story is told by Scott in a piece of autobiography, The Force of Truth, An Authentic Narrative.²⁸

Conclusions

1. Men need to know themselves. Some by temperament are inclined to be pacifists in all disputes, and to decline controversy even when it is necessary. In that way errors and evils are often allowed to take root in churches unopposed. But much damage is also done by those who are too ready to take up issues, and even to enjoy strife. Thomas Scott, after his conversion, reflected on this problem, when he wrote, ‘Mr Newton is, I think, too much afraid of controversy; others are too fond of it.’²⁹ Certainly all preachers should be very sparing in taking up current controversies in the pulpit; a diet of criticism regularly delivered will produce a censorious people.

2. It is essential that time and energy be given to the main things. As Baxter wrote: ‘Unholiness is the great point of difference . . . our towns and countries have two sorts of people in them; some are converted and some unconverted; some holy and some unholy; some live for heaven and some are all for earth; some are ruled by the word of God and some by their own flesh and wills.’³⁰ ‘It is the principles and fundamental truths that life and death doth most depend upon, in which the essentials of Christianity do consist . . . Get well to heaven, and help your people thither, and you shall know all these things in a moment.’³¹

3. In all controversy unnecessary adverse comment on persons is to be avoided, and likewise the use of pejorative names and titles. After his early ministry, Spurgeon stopped describing fellow evangelicals as ‘Arminians’, while he continued to indicate his disagreement with their thinking. The use of offensive labels is more calculated to alienate brethren than to help them.

4. Brotherly love and humility are the great antidotes to wrong controversies. It is for the exercise of these graces that Paul entreats the disagreeing Christians at Philippi (Phil. 2:1-4). On which verses Charles J. Brown observed:

There would be very little fear indeed, of Christians differing from each other, in anything of material consequence,—anything which they would find it necessary to make a matter of controversy in the Church,—if only they were thoroughly joined together in love and mutual affection. No doubt even the most attached and endeared Christian friends might differ in minor shades of opinion. But they would infallibly come to an agreement in things important and vital, so as to be, to all practical purposes, ‘perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment’. It will be found to be the failure of love that principally, and in the first instance, gives rise to all formal and avowed differences and oppositions of sentiment among Christians.³²

5. This subject enforces our need of repentance. How great is the unrecognized damage done in this area! We may be looking for spiritual success and yet at the same time be grieving the Spirit of God in God-dishonouring controversies. We too often treat contention with brethren as though it were contention against the world, forgetting the words of Samuel Rutherford; ‘Why should we strive? For we be Brethren, the sons of one father, the born citizens of one mother Jerusalem . . . We strive as we are carnal, we dispute as we are men, we war from our lusts, we dispute from diversity of star-light and day-light.’³³ How much damaging, discouraging strife can be found alongside a profession of faith in Christian unity! We confuse man’s wisdom with the wisdom which is ‘first pure, then peaceable, gentle and easy to be entreated’ (James 3:17). How many of our words will be found as ‘wood, hay, stubble’ when ‘the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is’ (1 Cor. 3:12, 13)? Boldness in opposing serious error is a need of the hour, but prayer for peace makers has surely taken too low place in our priorities, and we suffer for it.

6. Wrong words arise from wrong thinking. Hence the concluding exhortation of the apostle to believers whose unity was in danger. After reminding them of how prayer is indispensable for the possession of the peace of God, he tells them what they are to do with their minds—some things are always to be thought about, to be pondered: ‘Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things . . . and the God of peace will be with you’ (Phil. 4:8, 9). ‘Finally, brethren . . . be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you’ (2 Cor. 13:11).

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Yet if we ask why God was moved to exercise his holiness and justice in such a manner, at such a cost, in the sacrifice of his own beloved Son for our sins, the answer is ‘God so loved the world.’ And it was love that led Jesus first to undertake his sufferings, and then to invite all men to enter into the love which his death proclaims. It is the Puritan Thomas Watson who quotes the words of Augustine, ‘The cross was a pulpit in which Christ preached his love to the world.’² On the same subject John Owen writes: ‘There is no property of the nature of God which he doth so eminently design to glorify in the death of Christ as his love.’³

This brings us inevitably to John 3:16, ‘God so loved the world …’ On this text Smeaton says: ‘These words of Christ plainly show that the biblical doctrine on this point is not duly exhibited unless love receives a special prominence. … If even justice were made paramount, the balance of truth would be destroyed.’⁴

But what is the love of God to which John 3:16 gives this prominence? Does it have reference to the elect only or to all men? Some have answered that its immediate purpose has to do with neither; because, they say, ‘the world’ here does not have numerical so much as ethical significance: it stands for ‘the evil, the darkness, the sinner.’⁵ God so loved those who are utterly contrary to himself that he gave his Son to die for them! As B. B. Warfield has written on the love of God in this text:

It is not that it is so great that it is able to extend over the whole of a big world: it is so great that it is able to prevail over the Holy God’s hatred and abhorrence of sin. For herein is love, that God could love the world—the world that lies in the evil one: that God who is all-holy and just and good, could so love this world that He gave His only begotten Son for it,—that He might not judge it, but that it might be saved.⁶

The same writer concludes: ‘The whole debate as to whether the love here celebrated distributes itself to each and every man that enters into the composition of the world, or terminates on the elect alone chosen out of the world, lies thus outside the immediate scope of the passage.’ But granting that the message of the cross is one of love to those who by nature are the enemies of God, we are still faced with the fact that the text provides no justification for limiting this love to elect sinners. For if the elect are the ‘world’ that God loves, why is it that only some out of that world (‘whosoever believes in him’) come to salvation? There is surely a distinction in the text between the larger number who are the objects of love and the smaller number who believe. It would be a strange reading of John 3:16 to make those who believe correspond exclusively with ‘the  world’ that God loves. Such a divine as John Calvin had no hesitation therefore in saying on John 3:16:

Although there is nothing in the world deserving of God’s favour, he nevertheless shows he is favourable to the whole lost world when he calls all without exception to faith in Christ, which is indeed an entry into life.⁷

If this is so, it is proof enough that there is a general proclamation of the love of God which comes to men in the preaching of the cross. Individuals everywhere may be directed, as Nicodemus was directed, to God’s love for the unworthy. We are by no means dependent on John 3:16 alone for this understanding. Surely the same truth shines throughout our Lord’s ministry. He, ‘the Friend of sinners,’ did not limit love to the disciples, nor yet to those whom he knew would become disciples. We read, ‘When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion for them’ (Matt. 9:36). Moreover we find this tender compassion individualized: of the rich young ruler, who turned away from Christ in unbelief, we are explicitly told, ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him’ (Mark 10:21). What but that same love can explain such words as, ‘You will not come unto me that you might have life’ (John 5:40)? Or the tears that accompanied, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!’(Luke 13:34; Matt 23:37)? ‘Love towards all mankind in general,’ John Owen wrote, is enforced upon us by the example of Christ’s ‘own love and goodness, which are extended unto all.’⁸ And Owen encouraged his hearers to dwell on the ‘love of Christ, in his invitations of sinners to come unto him that they may be saved.’⁹

Elsewhere the same writer says: ‘There is nothing that at the last day will tend more immediately to the advancement of the glory of God, in the inexcusableness of them who obey not the gospel, than this, that terms of peace, in the blessed way of forgiveness, were freely tendered unto them.’¹⁰

Some have sought to escape from the force of Christ’s example by referring it to his human nature and not to his divine. But as R. L. Dabney comments: ‘It would impress the common Christian mind with a most painful feeling to be thus seemingly taught that holy humanity is more generous and tender than God.’¹¹

Christ’s example, that reveals the very character of God, remains the permanent standard for the church. The same love of which he spoke to Nicodemus, and which he showed to the multitude, lies in his command that ‘repentance unto remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem’ (Luke 24:47). And the apostles understood it when they preached indiscriminately to the Jerusalem sinners, who had rejected the Son of God, the astonishing news that God has sent Jesus ‘to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities’ (Acts 3:26).¹²

Universal gospel preaching is proof of the reality of universal divine love. It is the same love of which we read in Ezekiel 33:11: ‘As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?’ When the Pharisees complained of Christ, ‘This man receives sinners, and eats with them,’ Jesus responded by speaking of the character of God: he is like the father of the prodigal son who ‘saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him’ (Luke 15:20).¹³ Christ’s unwillingness that men should be lost is the same as the Father’s. He desires that all men everywhere should turn and live. As John Murray has written:

There is a love of God which goes forth to lost men and is manifested in the manifold blessings which all men without distinction enjoy, a love in which non-elect persons areembraced, and a love which comes to its highest expression in the entreaties, overtures and demands of gospel proclamation.¹⁴

We conclude that the death of Christ is to be preached to all, and preached in the conviction that there is love for all. ‘In the gospel,’ said an eminent preacher of the Scottish Highlands, ‘the provision of God’s love for the salvation of sinners is revealed and offered…Faith is a believing God as speaking to me—a receiving of what is said as true, because it is the testimony of God, and receiving it as true in its bearing on my own case as a sinner because it is addressed by God to me.’¹⁵ Another Scots Calvinistic leader put it still more strongly in the words: ‘Men evangelized cannot go to hell but over the bowels of God’s great mercies. They must wade to it through the blood of Christ.’¹⁶

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EVEN though Farewell Sermons had been preached in many parishes on Sunday, August 17, there was a widespread feeling of uncertainty throughout the nation with regard to the direction and character of coming events. Something of this uncertainty can be detected in the words of some of the sermons that were preached on that day. We find, for example, Thomas Watson saying to his people in his morning sermon, “I will not promise that I shall still preach among you, nor will I say that I shall not, I desire to be guided by the silver thread of God’s Word, and of God’s providence.” But, on the other hand, speaking on the same day in another London church, Thomas Lye said, “It is most probable, beloved, whatever others may think, but in my opinion (God may work wonders) neither you nor I shall ever see the faces of, or have a word more to speak to one another till the day of judgment.” The variation between these two statements does not mean that Lye was more resolute than Watson in his decision not to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity, on that point they were both equally firm; but there lies behind the words of the preachers a differing degree of un­certainty whether or not the Act would actually be enforced against them.

They were not without grounds for hopefulness, for although the Act had been passed by Parliament, the King could still exercise his clemency in an Act of Indulgence by which at least some of those who failed to conform might be allowed by the royal prerogative to retain their churches. For Clarendon, the King’s minister, had just promised such a favour to Manton, Bates, Calamy and other Puritans, provided they petitioned the King for it. This news would doubtless be circulated and discussed amongst the London ministers and word of it was carried to the country. The diary of John Angier, the Lancashire Puritan, carries this entry in the week preceding Bartholomew’s Day: “August 20 was a day of general seeking God in reference to the state of the Church; that very day several ministers were before some of the Council and received encouragement to go on in the ministry. A letter read to them from the King to the Bishops that no man should be troubled for Non­conformity at least till his cause was heard before the Council. The news came to Manchester by Saturday post and was that night dispersed by messengers sent to several places. By means hereof many ministers that intended not to preach fell to their work, which caused great joy in many congregations.” Similarly, Henry New­come of Manchester writes in his diary on Bartholomew’s Eve, “I received a letter from Mr. Ashurst which gave us an account that past all expectation there was some indulgence to be hoped for in some cases.”

Clarendon’s promise was not merely a device to ease the tension in the nation till Bartholomew’s Day was passed. [1] He and the King had also grounds for uncertainty. They were not sure what the political repercussions of a wholesale ejection of the Puritans might be; the number of the nonconforming clergy was still unknown, although it was evident they would include some of the most eminent names in the land; and there was the fear lest the powerful Presbyterian party might make common cause with the Indepen­dents and thus, in Clarendon’s words, “give a great shock to the present settlement.” Charles, however, was also busy with other affairs. The previous May he had married Catherine of Braganza, and Saturday, August 23, was the day appointed for her public arrival and welcome at Whitehall. Amidst a brilliant regatta of barges and boats, the King and his Roman Catholic Queen sailed down the river from Hampton Court; “music floated from bands on deck, and thundering peals roared from pieces of ordnance on shore”. “I was spectator,” wrote John Evelyn in his diary, “of the most magnificent triumph that ever floated on the Thames.” But there were many in London that day that had no heart for the festivities. Far removed in thought from the colour and pageantry of the Queen’s arrival, a great company of silent and mourning believers was gathered in the parish of St. Austin’s for the burial of Simeon Ashe. Ashe had long been one of the popular Puritan leaders and “he went seasonably to heaven,” says Calamy, “at the very time when he was cast out of the Church. He was bury’d the very even of Bartholomew-Day.” The historian’s grandfather, the veteran Edmund Calamy of St. Mary Aldermanbury, was naturally the preacher on such an occasion, and that day he preached a sermon that was to be spoken of and read over for many years to come. His text was Isaiah 57:1, “The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart, and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous are taken away from the evil to come.” The sermon is one of the finest examples of Puritan preach­ing, and though it does not strictly belong to the Farewell Sermons it is not surprising that it was given a place in the volume that was shortly to bear that title. Though Calamy packs his exposition with doctrines, he so blends his teaching with illustration, and his reproofs with exhortations, that he was in no danger of losing the attention of his hearers. Take the following example:

“Many of us deal with our Ministers as we do with a strange sight that is to be seen near our doors. We are not much concerned about seeing it, but a stranger that comes from a far country is curious and very careful to see it immediately. So do we in this city especially; I have had experience of it by being here many years. Strangers that come out of the country, many times got that good by a Minister that his own people do not, because they think their Minister is continually with them. But a stranger knows he is there but for a day and he hears so that he carries Christ home with him, and a great deal of consolation also. Beloved, this is a great fault; I beseech you remember the righteous must be gathered. Let us therefore do with them as we do with books that are borrowed; if a man borrows a book he knows he must keep it but for a day or two and therefore he will be sure to read it over, whereas if the book be a man’s own, he lays it aside because he knows he can read it any time. Remember your Ministers are but lent you, they are not your own, and you know not but God may take your Elijahs from you this night.”

Other restrained passages, similar to this, convey something of Calamy’s feelings on Bartholomew’s Eve. “God doth on purpose,” he says, “take away righteous men that they might not see the evil that is coming on a nation … thus Augustine died a little before Hippo was taken, and Pareus a little before Heidelberg was taken, and Luther a little before the wars in Germany began.” If our means of communication had existed in those times Calamy would also have been able to tell his congregation that on the very day previous to their gathering Edward Bowles, the north-country Puritan leader, had been buried at York. Calamy spent much time that August afternoon showing that the perishing of the righteous man “is nothing but his gathering to God, Christ, and the blessed company of saints and angels.” Behind his desire to emphasize that truth there lay a very practical concern; for he was not sure how soon his hearers might have need of this comfort. We can read between the lines in the following extract and appreciate something of what it meant to those who listened in the stillness of St. Austin’s church: “Whatever befalls a child of God in this life, though he be scattered by wicked men, from England into foreign countries, though he wanders up and down in deserts and wildernesses, though he be scattered from house to prison, yet there shall be a gathering time shortly. There will a time come when all the saints will be gathered to Christ, and to one another, never to part any more …. Comfort yourselves therefore with these words against the fear of death; look upon death as a gathering to Christ. You are here as Daniel in the lions’ den, as Jeremiah in the dungeon, yet there will come a gathering, and if you die in a good cause, you shall not perish but be gathered to Christ, to his saints and angels.”

With such thoughts as these in their hearts, men paid their last tribute to old “Father” Ashe, and while the Palace at Whitehall was to resound with revelry far into the night, in the Puritan homes of London there was the knowledge that Saturday evening, that not only in the parish of St. Austin’s but all over London there would be no sermons on the following day like the one that had been preached that afternoon by the rector of St. Mary Aldermanbury. At mid­night that night the Act of Uniformity came into force. As John Stoughton writes, “The feast of St. Bartholomew became a fast, as in the Valley of Megiddon, so in Puritan England, ‘The land mourned, every family apart’.” The great question in many minds was whether that 24th of August was to be the forerunner of many dark Sundays to come or whether the King would even now honour the promises he had given at Breda and grant the Indulgence of which Clarendon had spoken so confidently. Before another week had passed the uncertainty was to be finally removed.

On Wednesday, August 27, some of the London Presbyterian leaders presented their petition to the King, desiring compassion, “whereby we may be continued in our status to teach the people obedience to God and your Majesty.” The following day the Petition was laid before the Privy Council, Clarendon evidently expecting that the King would have little difficulty in imposing his will and granting the Indulgence. None of the bishops were able to attend the hastily summoned meeting, none save Gilbert Sheldon, the Bishop of London. But Sheldon was not the man to be dismayed by the lack of his fellow bishops to support him and with “a front of iron” he stood against the proposal. He knew the strength of the Puritans in London–the party “in whose jaws” he lived–and he was determined to break it. How could he unless their ministers were silenced? If the Indulgence was published, he threatened, he might choose to obey Parliament rather than the King and enforce the law despite the royal wish. The threat was too much for Charles. He had no wish to face the opposition of Parliament, on whose good-will he depended for so much of the revenue he was to exhaust upon his favourites and mistresses. As a man whose creed was that God would not damn a person for taking a little pleasure, it would be no loss to him to be rid of his Puritan clergy; and though it might have been more agreeable to the “good nature” with which he has been credited to have lessened the severity of the Act, Charles had no intention of suffering any hardship for a principle. Thus the Petition which Clarendon had urged the Puritans to present was thrown out. It only remained to be seen how they would face their defeat.

But it was not in the spirit of a defeat that the Puritans accepted the enforcement of the Act of Uniformity. Out-manoeuvred in a contest in which they claimed no skill, they knew at last where they stood, and with their hopes of relief from an earthly monarch smashed, they looked with surer confidence to Him in Whom “all the promises of God are Yea, and Amen.” The comfort of Baxter was one in which they all knew how to share:

Must I be driven from my books?

From house, and goods, and dearest friends?

One of Thy sweet and gracious looks

For more than this will make amends.

My Lord hath taught me how to want

A place wherein to lay my head;

While He is mine, I’ll be content

To beg, or lack my daily bread.

When the number of ministers who had not conformed to the Act gradually became known it was evident that the solidarity of the Puritan ranks had not broken in the crisis. A few who had been expected to come out had conformed, but the vast majority had never hesitated, and from all the counties of England there came news of the results of the Great Ejection. If we include the names of men who were silenced prior to the enforcement of the Act, the numbers of the ejected in the strongest Puritan areas reads thus:

In London, 76; in Essex, 99; in Kent, 62; in Lancashire, 61; in Norfolk, 60; in Devonshire, 121; in Yorkshire, 110 ; in Suffolk, 79; in Somerset, 62; in Wiltshire, 60; in Sussex, 65. These figures by no means convey a complete impression of the magnitude of the spiritual consequences involved in the Ejection. In Shropshire, for example, where only 36 men were silenced, we read that “almost all the more important towns of the county were left without ministers. From Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Bridgnorth, Wem, Ludlow, Whit­church and Newport the ministers were ejected.” [2]

The traditional figure of the number of ministers who ‘were ejected or silenced by the Act of Uniformity or by local authorities in the months preceding the legal and national enforcement of conformity was generally given as between 2,000 and 2,500. Recent scholarship has shown this estimate to be substantially correct; A. G. Matthews lists 1,760 ejections from churches in England, plus 149 Nonconformists–many of them preachers–from the two Universities and various schools; to this must be added the names of ministers who suffered in the same way in Wales–87 according to Calamy, 106 according to a later writer, Thomas Rees. The total is thus clearly over 2,000. Moreover Matthews’ figure do not include the number of Nonconformists who were not ministering in parish churches but who were nevertheless silenced by the terms of the law. These men belong spiritually to the number of the ejected (though they cannot strictly be given that description), for they belonged to a Puritan group whose considerable spiritual influence the authorities were equally determined to terminate. It included Independent ministers like the late Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Dr. John Owen, and “working-class” Puritans who were not ministers of congregations but who sometimes possessed preaching gifts of no mean worth. Among the latter was John Bunyan, of whom Owen once declared to Charles II, “could I possess that tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning.”

None of the ejected ministers attempted to publish a list of their number and it was not until 1702 that Edmund Calamy, the younger (1671-1732), was provoked by the misrepresentations of opponents who took “a liberty strangely to diminish” the number of the ejected, to prove that the number was in fact above 2,000. [3] Even so, Calamy’s concern, as he says in his Preface, was not in numbers–they being of little account “in a case of this nature”­–but in giving a true record of the men of 1662 in answer to writers who had laboured to blacken their memory, “bespattering these worthy men whose names rather deserved embalming.”

Concerning the character and worth of the ejected ministers there has been much written in former days, the evaluation being frequently determined by the viewpoint of the writer. John Walker, the Anglican historian who attempted to answer the publication of Edmund Calamy, regarded not a few of the ejected as “Mechanicks, and Fellows bred to the meanest Occupations”; many of them, he believed, had never been at either of the Universities and had no degrees, “Besides which, some of them had run in with, and vented many of the distinguished Enthusiasms, Errors, Heresies, and other monstrous Opinions (not to say Blasphemies) of the Times.”

John Richard Green, the English secular historian, reached a very different conclusion in his assessment of the ejected. “The rectors and vicars who were driven out,” he writes, “were the most learned and the most active of their order. The bulk of the great livings throughout the country were in their hands. They stood at the head of the London clergy, as the London clergy stood in general repute at the head of their class throughout England. They occupied the higher posts at the two Universities. No English divine, save Jeremy Taylor, rivalled Howe as a preacher. No parson was so renowned a controversialist, or so indefatigable a parish priest, as Baxter. And behind these men stood a fifth of the whole body of the clergy, men whose zeal and labour had diffused through­out the country a greater appearance of piety and religion than it had ever displayed before. But the expulsion of these men was far more to the Church of England than the loss of their individual services. It was the definite expulsion of a great party which from the time of the Reformation had played the most active and popular part in the life of the Church. It was the close of an effort which had been going on ever since Elizabeth’s accession to bring the English Communion into closer relations with the Reformed Communions of the Continent, and into greater harmony with the religious instincts of the nation at large.” [4]

Among Nonconformist writings there is perhaps no better description of the men who went out than that given by Dr. John Taylor. “The Bartholomew divines, or the ministers ejected in the year 1662,” he writes, were “men prepared to lose all, and to suffer martyrdom itself, and who actually resigned their livings, which with most of them were, under God, all that they and their families had to subsist upon, rather than sin against God, and desert the cause of civil and religious liberty; which, together with serious religion, would, I am persuaded, have sunk to a very low ebb in the nation had it not been for the bold and noble stand these worthies made against imposition upon conscience, profaneness, and arbitrary power. They had the best education England could afford; most of them were excellent scholars, judicious divines, pious, faithful, and laborious ministers; of great zeal for God and religion; undaunted and courageous in their Master’s work; keeping close to their people in the worst of times; diligent in their studies; solid, affectionate, powerful, lively, awakening preachers; aiming at the advancement of real vital religion in the hearts and lives of men, which, it cannot be denied, flourished greatly wherever they could influence. Particularly, they were men of great devotion and eminent abilities in prayer, uttered, as God enabled them, from the abundance of their hearts and affections; men of divine eloquence in pleading at the throne of grace, raising and melting the affections of their hearers, and being happily instrumental in transfusing into their souls the same spirit and heavenly gift. And this was the ground of all their other qualifications; they were excellent men, because excellent, instant, and fervent in prayer.”

It was because the Nonconformists of 1662 had commended their cause and persons to God in prayer that they could be so little con­cerned about how their reputations fared in the hands of men. Many of them had left this world before Calamy’s defence had appeared forty years after “Black Bartholomew’s Day.” If a man like Thomas Watson had cared to write an Apologia for the Non­conformists, what a sparkling book we might have had, but Watson, who died while engaged in secret prayer many years after 1662, was content to leave these things unchronicled on earth. Old Richard Sibbes had long since spoken counsel which they were happy to follow: “Let us commit the fame and credit of what we are or do to God. He will take care of that: let us take care to be and to do as we should, and then for noise and report, let it be good or ill as God will send it …. If we seek to be in the mouths of men, to dwell in the talk of men, God will abhor us …. We should be carried with the Spirit of God and with a holy desire to serve God and our brethren, and to do all the good we can, and never care for the speeches of the world …. We shall have glory enough, and be known enough to devils, to angels, and men, ere long. Therefore as Christ lived a hidden life–that is, He was not known what He was, that so He might work our salvation–so let us be content to be hidden ones. There will be a Resurrection of Credits, as well as of bodies. We’ll have glory enough by-and-by.”

Citations

1 John Evelyn’s Diary reflects something of the tension in London. On August 20 he writes, “There were strong guards in the City this day, apprehending some tumults, many of the Presbyterian Ministers not conforming.”

2 T. Gasquoine, who gives an outline of some of the ejected in Salop and Northants in his book John Penry and other Heroes, pp. 113-4⁶.

3 An Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s History of His Life and Times, the sub-title gives a truer idea of the main contents of the book, “With an Account of many others of those Worthy Ministers who were Ejected, after the Restoration of King Charles the Second.” Calamy’s work is much more than an abridgment of Baxter’s Autobiography (Reliquize Baxterianre) which had been published posthumously in 1696. Calamy later revised and enlarged his work; it was reprinted, with modifications and additions, by Samuel Palmer (1741-1813) under the new title The Nonconformist’s Memorial and has reached probably its final form in the carefully edited edition by A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised, 1933. The latter volume is unfortunately out of print, but the valuable Introduction to it was reprinted separately in 1959, Introduction To Calamy Revised.

4 A Short History of the English People, pp. 622-3.

This article first appeared in the June 1962 edition of the Banner of Truth Magazine (Issue 26).

The Banner of Truth is pleased to publish a selection of the ‘Farewell Sermons’ of the Great Ejection divines as a Puritan Paperback.

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THOUGH many of the Puritan ministers were far removed from the intrigues and disputations going on in London, they were never­theless deeply concerned in their outcome and throughout the land they waited for word from the capital. For many months before the Act of Uniformity was published rumours were circulating, and even amidst the peaceful beauties of far-off Flintshire we can hear their echoes in the diaries of Philip Henry. “Great expectations,” he writes in July 1661, “about a severe Act about imposing the Common prayer and Ceremonies passed both houses of Parliament but not signed by the King.” Again, “News from London of speedy severity intended against the Nonconformists. The Lord can yet, if he will, break the snare. If not, welcome the will of God.”

Although news of an Act of Uniformity had thus been heard of well in advance, it was not, as has already been said, until May 1662 that its terms were made known. Three months only were given the Puritans for deliberation and that in spite of the fact that the revised Prayer Book to which they must give unfeigned assent was not to be ready for publication till August 6–only three weeks before St. Bartholomew’s Day. In an age in which books had to be despatched and circulated in a manner far different from what we are accustomed to today, this meant that in certain parts of the country such as Lancashire, ministers could not obtain copies before August 22, and in some cases not even then. We hear of one ejected minister who was subsequently to complain that he was silenced for not declaring his consent to a Book which he never saw or could see.

The shortness of the interval allowed to the Puritans before the Act was enforced also hindered the assembling of any national Conference to formulate a joint decision. It is true, of course, that much correspondence circulated in these three months of trial and anxiety, and those who could do so met together for mutual con­sultation, but, in general, it was in the quietness of their own homes that they arrived by prayer and thought at the individual decisions they were to make. The diary of Oliver Heywood, the faithful minister of Coley in Yorkshire, gives us a glimpse of what was being felt within men’s hearts all over the land. After noting the threats he had already received from ecclesiastical authorities, Heywood goes on to encourage himself in the thought that he was not alone in these trials: “Hitherto God hath helped: and now I am but in the same predicament with the rest of my brethren in the ministry since the passing of this fatal act of uniformity, which we are waiting for the execution of, which commenceth from the 24^th of August, which if not prevented will strike dead most of the godly ministers in England.” Heywood was in no doubt whether or not he should comply with the Act: “the conditions are too hard to be accepted. Woe be to us, if we preach not the gospel! but a double woe to us, if we enervate the gospel by legal ceremonies …. Our work is dear to us; but God is dearer, and we must not do the least evil to obtain the greatest good. There are worldly advantages enough to sway us to conformity, if conscience did not answer all the pleas of flesh and blood. The bargain will be too hard to provide a livelihood by making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience. God can advance his work without our sinful shifts, and rear up monuments to his glory without our complying pre­varications: suffering may benefit the gospel as much as service, when God calls to it.”

But not all who were to arrive at the same decision as Heywood were able to determine their duty so immediately, and there were many reasons that at first inclined some to conform. Heywood’s own brother, Nathaniel, who was vicar of Ormskirk, confesses the struggle he had: “I have a loving, though poor, docible, though ignorant people; they flock in very great numbers to the Ordinances, and I have hopes of doing some good (it may be already begun) amongst them: I had some notion to Conform, but I will not change upon any account whatsoever; let me have your prayers, help me for this poor people which I love as my own child, and long after in the bowels of Christ.” The wife of Joseph Alleine of Taunton relates her husband’s similar experience: “Before the Act of Uniformity came out my husband was very earnest day and night with God, that his way might be made plain to him, and that he might not desist from such advantages of saving souls with any scruple upon his spirit. He seemed so moderate, that both myself and others thought he would have conformed, he often saying that he would not leave his work for small and dubious matters; but, when he saw those clauses of assent and consent, and renouncing the covenant, he was satisfied.” Edmund Calamy, the original historian and biographer of the ejected Puritans, tells us of Joshua Whitton, the rector of Thornhill, in Yorkshire, who being eager to know the contents of the Act of Uniformity, rode with two other ministers to York for that purpose to obtain an early sight of it, “with their cloak-bags full of distinctions, hoping they might get over it and keep their places.” But the reading of the Act silenced them, and “though they were all prudent and learned men, yet they returned with a resolution to quit their places rather than comply.”

Though the spiritual burden of leaving their congregations was generally uppermost in the minds of the Puritans, they were also in many cases tried by the threat of the material hardships to which those who failed to subscribe were to be suddenly exposed along with their families. As the corn ripened and the summer of 1662 wore on there were many spending their last weeks in the homes ­fragrant for their memories of those happier days when, as Philip Henry put it, “godliness was on the face of the nation”–and conscious of the pressing alternative, “we must either conform or leave all this by Bartholomew’s Day.” Moreover the Act of Uni­formity was not only armed with powers to exclude any who did not conform from their churches and parsonages, but also to exclude them in great measure even from a means of livelihood. An occupa­tion in any of the learned professions, whether law, medicine, school-teaching, private chaplaincies or tutorships, was henceforth to be legally confined to conformists. The Act thus threatened not merely to silence ministers and terminate their usefulness but, as Calamy said, to bury them alive. Is it any wonder then, that we find men like Edward Lawrence, vicar of Baschurch, Shropshire, declaring, “I have eleven arguments for conformity,” meaning his wife and ten children, “but Christ hath said, ‘Whoso loveth wife or children more than me, is not worthy of me’.” When asked how he meant to maintain them all he cheerfully replied that his family must live on the 6th of Matthew, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.” The Puritans had long been exponents of the doctrine of living by faith, but under the shadow of Bartholomew’s Day some of them began to plunge more deeply into the riches of that truth. When asked how he should provide for his family if he did not subscribe, John Hickes, of Saltash, replied, “Had I as many children as that hen has chickens” -pointing to one with a numerous brood-“I should not question that God will provide for them all.” In the same spirit another said, “God feeds the young ravens and He will feed my children.”

It was not, however, only in the homes of the Puritans that men spent an uneasy summer. Possibly Charles, lounging amongst his lords and mistresses at Hampton Court, was far more uneasy, and Hyde (created Earl of Clarendon in April 1661) felt that events were grave enough to give him no repose from his schemings. As August approached, the reports which agents and informers sent to the government were far from assuring. Sir Edward Nicholas, a Secretary of State, was informed that the coast towns of the south were determined not to allow the reintroduction of the Common Prayer. Another report warned that the people would not submit to the “Act of Conformity.” “The Lancashire ministers,” wrote another, “talk little less than treason, and none intend to conform.” From various parts of the country came rumours of the raising of trained bands and of gunsmiths preparing arms. In July an idea was current that Cromwell’s soldiers–Independents–were waiting to learn what the Presbyterians would do, being themselves ready to take part in a general rising. In London people began to speak of the gravity of the situation. As August 24 drew near, Pepys wrote, “I pray God the issue may be good, for the discontent is great.” De Wiguefort, the Dutch Minister, informed his government that Parliament, “which had been the idol of the nation, was now sinking in popular respect.” The Roman Catholic Signor Giaverina was even more fearful in the warning he sent the Venetian Senate:

“Things are moving exactly as they were when the war began in the time of the late King.” It was in keeping with all these reports that we find the King’s men busy in the summer of 1662 demolishing fortifications at such places as Northampton and Gloucester and circulating instructions to lieutenants of counties to take pre­cautions against rebellion.

In actual fact there was no foundation for the government’s scare.

There was no danger of the King being again sent on his travels. It was an entire misjudgment of the men with whom they were dealing for the government ever to imagine Presbyterian homes as centres of insurrection against the very monarchy which they had done so much to restore. Rather the Puritans were taken up with matters about which Charles II had never dreamt; it was not the politics of England that was the issue around Puritan firesides, but rather the affairs of that realm where, as the dying James Buchanan had once told the King’s grandfather, “few kings or great men ever come.” The days of Puritanism as a political power were over, the genera­tion of Pym and Hampden was in the grave, and the troops “who had dashed Rupert’s chivalry to pieces on Naseby field, who had scattered at Worcester the army of the aliens, who had renewed beyond the sea the glories of Crecy and Agincourt, had mastered Parliament, had brought a King to justice and the block,” [1] were now farmers and traders again with piety enough to recognize in the sad events of the Restoration their need of bowing to the inscrutable will of God, and content henceforth to be “known among their fellow-men by no other sign than their greater soberness and industry.” Cromwell’s Ironsides were never to march again.

Not all the nonconforming Puritans who were to be silenced by the midnight preceding “Black Bartholomew’s Day” terminated their ministry on the same Sunday. Some continued in their pulpits beyond the last hour allowed by law and made Sunday, August 24, their day of farewell. Others either voluntarily or under compulsion from local authorities closed their ministry at an earlier date. Richard Baxter, for example, wishing his brethren to under­stand that he did not mean to conform, preached for the last time on May 25, anxious lest if he “stayed to the last day” some might suppose he meant to submit. Many used the intervening period before the enforcement of the Act to prepare their people for the blow from suitable Scriptures. James Creswick, rector of Fresh­water, Isle of Wight, preached for “some months” beforehand from Hebrews 10:34, “And took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in Heaven a better and an enduring substance.” Being thus armed for suffering, Creswick, who was a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, continued in his pulpit after August 24 until the Bishop of Winchester finally had the church doors shut against him and there was no preaching at all. We read of Thomas Ford of Chesterfield that “he saw the Bar­tholomew storm arising, and therefore gave his people some warm and affecting Sermons on Isaiah 5:6, ‘And I will lay it waste: it shall not be pruned, nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it’.” Similarly we are told of Joseph Alleine that he finished his burning ministry at Taunton with a course of sermons on the words, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”

It was one week before the feast of St. Bartholomew that most of the Puritans stood for the last time in their pulpits. The experiences of Sunday, August 17, the “Farewell Sunday” as it became known, were among the darkest which Christians in England have ever had to endure. The memory of it stayed with the ejected all their days and they regarded it as an event which believers in this land should never forget. “The dismal transactions that have befallen the Church of God this day,” declared William Lock of Maidstone in his last words to his congregation, “deserve to be engraved in deep and in indelible characters, on pillars of the blackest marble, that the ages and generations to come may read and weep and bewail England’s loss.” “No Sunday in England,” writes the Church historian John Stoughton, “ever resembled exactly that which fell on the 17th of August, 1662. In after years, Puritan fathers and mothers related to their children the story of assembled crowds, of aisles, standing-places and stairs, filled to suffocation, of people clinging to open windows like swarms of bees, of overflowing throngs in churchyards and streets, of deep silence or stifled sobs, as the flock gazed on the shepherd–’sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more’.” [2].

Happily for us many of the words that were spoken on that Farewell Sunday have been preserved in the two volumes of Farewell Sermons, which in defiance of the King’s attempt to control the press were speedily issued after the event. The brown and worn pages of these now rare volumes bring near the thoughts of three centuries ago and by their help we can almost take our place to listen amidst the throngs that assembled on that distant summer’s day. Let us hear, for a moment, Richard Alleine ending his twenty-one years’ ministry at Batcombe, Somerset:

“The sun is setting upon not a few of the prophets; the shadows of evening are stretched forth upon us; our work seems to be at an end; our pulpits and our places must know us no more. This is the Lord’s doing; let all the earth keep silence before Him. It is not a light thing for me, brethren, to be laid aside from the work, and cast out from the vineyard of the Lord …. Since matters so stand that I must either lose my place or my peace, I cheerfully suffer myself to be thrust off the stage. And now, welcome the cross of Christ; welcome reproach; welcome poverty, scorn, and contempt, or whatever else may befall me on this account. This morning I had a flock, and you a pastor; now, behold a pastor without a flock, a flock without a shepherd: this morning I had a house, but now I have none; this morning I had a living, but now I have none. ‘The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’.”

It would be an interesting study, but beyond the scope of this present work, to examine the texts chosen for the Farewell Sermons and the main emphasis which the ejected ministers wished to leave with their hearers. Daniel Bull and John Cromwell took words of comfort and encouragement from Christ’s own farewell discourse and preached respectively from John 14:6 and John 16:33. Three eminent Puritans preached from Christ’s words to Sardis, Matthew Newcomen and John Whitlock from Revelation 3:3, “Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard and hold fast … ” and Joseph Caryl, a veteran of the Westminster Assembly and Rector of St. Magnus, London, from the verse which follows, “And they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.” Two of the leading London ministers, Lazarus Seaman and William Bates, closed their ministries with an exposition of the glorious Benediction in Hebrews 13:20–21, “Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do his will …. ” Edmund Calamy, who was “reckoned to have the greatest interest in Court, City and Country, of any of the Ministers,” preached his farewell to the vast congregation of St. Mary Aldermanbury–which he had taught since the summer of 1639–from 2 Sam. 24:14, “And David said unto Gad, I am in a great strait; let us fall now into the hand of the Lord; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the hand of man.” Few more solemn words were heard in England that day than Calamy’s as he expounded the doctrine that sin “doth bring Nations and Persons into external, internal, and eternal straits.” The man who had refused the diocese of Lichfield and Coventry and who had not spared the King when called to preach before him [3] was certainly not the man to flatter his hearers now; having pressed home the fact that “there is no way to avoid a national desolation but by a national reformation,” he concluded with an application from which we give the following extract:

“You have had the Spirit of God seven and thirty years in the faithful ministry of the Word, knocking at the door of your hearts, but many of you have hardened your hearts. Are there not some of you, I only put the question, that begin to loath the Manna of your souls and to look back towards Egypt again? Are there not some of you having itching ears, and who would fain have preachers that would feed you with dainty phrases, and who begin not to care for a minister that unrips your consciences, speaks to your hearts and souls, and would force you into heaven by frighting you out of your sins? Are there not some of you that by often hearing sermons are become sermon proof, that know how to sleep and scoff away sermons. I would be glad to say there are but few such; but the Lord knoweth there are too many that by long preaching get little good by preaching; insomuch that I have often said it, and say it now again, there is hardly any way to raise the price of the Gospel­ Ministry but by the want of it.”

Several of the Farewell sermons sought to anticipate the danger of the sufferings of the Puritan leaders becoming a discouragement and stumbling block to believers–their afflictions perhaps being held up by the ungodly as marks of God’s disapproval. Thus John Oldfield preached on, “Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord God of hosts, be ashamed for my sake; let not those that seek thee, be confounded for my sake, 0 God of Israel” (Psalm 69:6); the fearless William Jenkyn, later to die in Newgate prison, reminded his congregation at Christ Church, London, of the former sufferings of the Church from the words in Hebrews 11:38, “Of whom the world was not worthy”; and Samuel Shaw preached on the afflictions of believers resulting in the furtherance of the Gospel from Phil. 1:12. The eminent Thomas Manton, Rector of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, sought to strengthen his people for the coming storm by reminding them that they would not be alone in their sufferings; his text was Heb. 12:1, “Wherefore seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses .… ” The burden of not a few sermons was the necessity of adhering to the truth and avoiding the danger of apostasy. Ralph Venning preached on “Let us hold fast the profession of our faith” (Heb. x. 23), John Collins on “Earnestly contend for the faith” (Jude 3) and John Cradacott on “The Great Benefit of a Godly Ministry” from Phil. 4:9. Cradacott warns his people of England’s sin in pro­curing the removal of “a conscience-ransacking, conscience ­searching ministry” which had preached close-walking with God and the necessity of getting to Heaven, and he entreats them to beware of the danger of being given over to a worldly ministry which would preach “peace, peace,” and poison the people both by doctrine and example so that, the blind leading the blind, “both may perish together everlastingly.”

As we might have expected, the most common of all the texts taken by the nonconforming ministers was the message in Acts 20 which relates Paul’s farewell to the elders of the Church at Ephesus. There are sermons extant on this passage by Daniel Bull, George Swinnock, William Lock, William Beerman and Matthew New­comen (being his second Farewell Sermon preached on August 20). Nor was it only the sermons that brought to mind the scene on the shore at Miletus; from the few records that survive we can oc­casionally gather the impression of partings hardly less affecting than that of the Ephesians with their apostle. We read of John Flavel, preacher at Dartmouth and Townstall in Devon, that “all his people followed him out of the town, and at Townstall church­yard they took a mournful farewell of each other, when the place might be truly called Bochim, for they were all in tears, as if they had been at his funeral.”

Lest we should have given an impression otherwise, it needs to be said that probably the most striking feature of these Farewell Sermons is the almost complete absence of anything inflammatory or “topical”; there is an obvious desire neither to offend the authorities nor to excite the crowds. Equally evident is a lack of resentment or vindictiveness. There is nowhere an attempt to prejudice the congregations they were to leave against conforming ministers who might fill their places within a few weeks, rather we find exhortations to hear such men provided they preach the GospeL Typical of such exhortations are the words of John Whitlock, vicar of St. Mary’s, Nottingham, who, due to the hostility of local authorities, was compelled to terminate his ministry on July 26, 1662:

“I hope that for those many praying, believing, hungry souls sake that are to be found in this place, God may provide you in His due time with some such Teachers as may give you some whole­some food, and not feed you with stones instead of bread …. If sound truth be powerfully preached, make use of and improve that, though you cannot approve everything the Minister doth. I well know while the best of men are on earth, there is likely to be variety of apprehensions; and some men of sound judgments in the main, and of holy lives, may satisfy themselves in the lawfulness of some things which others judge sinfuL And if God send such to you, though I do not bid you approve their practice, or justify what they do, yet bless God for them and improve their gifts and graces.”

The inoffensive spirit of these words is general throughout the Farewell Sermons which are extant, and it needs to be remembered that what we have in the majority of cases is the verbatim shorthand notes of hearers, not the edited publications of the preachers them­selves. Very few of the preachers take any space at all to justify their nonconformity, not because it was a matter of indifference to them, but because their immediate concern was the spiritual welfare of their hearers. There is indeed a strange atmosphere of calm in the sermons; the sad contemporary circumstances which surround the preacher are hardly in view and the reader is conscious of men who were absorbed with higher cares. It is true there are occasional passages, such as the one already quoted from Richard Alleine, which express the personal feelings of the preachers, but such references are rare and brief. To the last the ejected ministers remained pre-eminently expositors of the Word of God. Many of the sermons contain practically no reference to the Act of Uni­formity at all; and when occasionally the points which made the preachers Nonconformists are mentioned, the reference is only a subsidiary part of the sermon and never the main theme. As far as their own vindication is concerned, if they refer to it at all it is in such brief words as those used by John Barret, Rector of St. Peter’s, Nottingham, “The Lord knows and will manifest to the world one day, whether it was a mere humour, or whether indeed it was not Conscience that would not suffer us to comply with the things now imposed.” Like Paul, it was with them a very small thing that they should be judged of men, yea, they judged not their own selves, and it was both their spur and their comfort to know with the apostle that “He that judgeth me is the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:3–4).

If any think of the Puritans as men with scrupulous consciences, stumbling over niceties, obsessed with forms of church government, possessing legal hair-splitting intellects, and contentious in their zeal for their party’s progress, they will meet in the pages of the Farewell Sermons men of a very different stamp. They will find, as Samuel Pepys found when he stepped into St. Dunstan’s in the West to hear William Bates deliver his farewell to his people, that instead of getting a rousing harangue they are brought under the power of a careful and convicting exposition of Scripture. Mar­velling at Bates’s seeming unconsciousness of the seething agitation of many Puritan sympathizers in London, Pepys records that the preacher merely pursued his exposition as usual, “Only at the conclusion he told us after this manner:

‘I do believe many of you expect that I should say something to you in reference to the time, this being possibly the last time I may appear here. You know it is not my manner to speak anything in the pulpit that is extraneous to my text and business; yet this I shall say, that it is not my opinion, fashion, or humour, that keeps me from complying with what is required of us; but something, which, after much prayer, discourse, and study, yet remains unsatisfied, and commands me herein. Wherefore, if it is my unhappiness not to receive such an illumination as should direct me to do otherwise, I know no reason why men should not pardon me in this world, and am confident that God will pardon me for it in the next’.”

The Farewell Sermons reveal their authors as men whose supreme concern was the salvation and sanctification of their hearers. They had their convictions and they were strong ones, as we shall later see, but the dimension of eternity kept them from being diverted in the heat of the moment to the matters which were tending to claim the foremost place, with varying degrees of sympathy or hostility, in the minds of many Englishmen in the summer of 1662. The Puritans made their hearers look well beyond August 24; indeed one would not be surprised if those listening to sermons like that preached by Thomas Watson at St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, were made to feel that Eternity was more near and certain than even Black Bartholomew’s Day. “O Eternity, Eternity!” cried Watson, “all of us here are ere long, it may be some of us within a few days or hours, to launch forth into the Ocean of Eternity. Eternity is a sum that can never be numbered, a line that can never be measured; Eternity is a condition of everlasting misery or everlasting happiness. If you are godly, then shall you be for ever happy, you shall be always sunning yourselves in the light of God’s countenance. If you are wicked you shall be always miserable, ever lying in the scalding furnace of the wrath of the Almighty. Eternity to the godly is a day that hath no sun-setting; Eternity to the wicked is a night that hath no sun-rising. O, I beseech you my Brethren, every day spend some time upon the thoughts of Eternity. Oh how fervently would that man pray, that thinks he is praying for Eternity. Oh how accurately and circumspectly would that man live that thinks, upon this moment hangs Eternity. What is the world to him that hath Eternity always in his eye? Did we think seriously and solemnly of Eternity, we should never over-value the comforts of the world, nor over-grieve at the crosses of the world. What are all the sufferings we can undergo in the world to Eternity? Affliction may be lasting, but it is not everlasting. Our sufferings here are not worthy to be compared to an eternal weight of glory.”

Whatever men may think of such words as these, they are a far cry from the caricature we previously mentioned. It was not the external allegiance of men to their party that the Puritans cared for; they earnestly warned their hearers not to judge the state of their souls, nor of the souls of others, by their adherence to forms or opinions of church order. “We need to have more to show for our Christianity,” said Richard Alleine, and he spoke for his fellow Puritans, “than that we are Presbyterians, Independents, Ana­baptists, Episcopals, or Erastians.” “Labour for oneness in love and affection with everyone that is one with Christ,” exhorted Thomas Brooks, “let their forms be what they will; that which wins most upon Christ’s heart, should win most upon ours; and that is His own grace and holiness. The question should be, What of the Father? What of the Son? What of the Spirit shines in this or that person?”

One last quotation and we must leave the contents of these Farewell Sermons; it is taken from the sermon of a comparatively unknown Puritan, Robert Seddon, Rector of Kirk Langley, Derbyshire, and it illustrates the kind of evangelism of which not only London but all England was deprived by the Act of Uni­formity:

“And are we parting? Suffer, I beseech you, this word of Exhortation. ‘In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink,’ John 7:37. The Apostle at Troas ready to depart on the morrow, preached long at his parting; how fervently did he preach and pray! Acts 20. Two of Luther’s wishes were, That he might have seen Christ in the flesh, and have heard Paul preach. But my Brethren, what tongue can express the worth of their Farewell-Sermons! … And am I leaving you? My Beloved and longed-for, how gladly would I leave you all in the arms of Jesus Christ! Shall I leave any of you wedded to your sins and lusts? Shall I leave any of you glued to the world, and not espoused to one Husband, even Jesus Christ? Shall my liberty to preach Christ to you cease before you can all say of Him, ‘My Beloved is mine and I am His?’ Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer for you is that you may be saved. My earnest request and suit to you this day is that you will come to Jesus Christ, and be married to Him for ever. Have pity upon me, o my people, have pity upon your afflicted, grieved, dying pastor. And this is the pity I crave at your hands, that you would none of you rest in a Christless condition, but expect blessings and blessed­ness only through Christ, that whether I come again to you, or be absent, I may hear of your affairs that ye prize and love Christ fervently, that ye obey Him sincerely, constantly, and universally, having respect to all His commandments …. O that this my dying sermon, might shake the rotten pillars on which souls have built their hopes of Heaven short of Christ; that more sins might be mortified, and more souls quickened and converted than ever by any sermon in the course of my ministry; that now at the end of the liberty of my public ministry, you might all be the seals thereof, being pricked to the heart, and feeling the weapons of our warfare mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds …. O that my civil death might minister occasion of your spiritual and eternal life! O that this divorcing day betwixt you and me, might be the day of your espousals to Christ!

“My loving people, I am this day going the way of all that will live godly in Christ Jesus, the way of tribulation. I charge you, keep the Lord’s way; as you expect any blessing and prosperity, look for them only through Christ the Way, the Truth and the Life. I charge you before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge both quick and dead, that ye rest not without interest in Christ; and I leave this sermon (as Joshua did the pillar) as a memorial, that I admonished and besought you to come to Christ and become His servants. O let not the Word I have spoken, to keep myself pure from your blood, condemn you in the day of Christ. You cannot plead, ‘We were not bidden to the Wedding-Feast, we were not called to Christ.’ No, if you will be found out of Christ at that great day, how will it torture you to consider, ‘How have we hated instruction and have not obeyed the voice of our teachers!’ In vain may you wish, O that we had the day of grace once again!”

When the Puritans left their pulpits for the last time on that August afternoon, it was the end of an age. The harvest was past, the summer was ended, and a winter, not of months but of many long years, was to be endured before England again heard the Gospel as it had heard it before Black Bartholomew’s Day, 1662.

Citations

1 John Richard Green, A Short History of The English People, p. 604.

2 Religion In England, vol. III, p. 267.

3 On August 12, 1660, he had preached before Charles II on the text, “To whom much is given, of him much is required.”

This article first appeared in the June 1962 edition of the Banner of Truth Magazine (Issue 26).

The Banner of Truth is pleased to publish a selection of the ‘Farewell Sermons’ of the Great Ejection divines as a Puritan Paperback.

Photo by Eduardo Goody on Unsplash

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ON August 30, 1658, Oliver Cromwell, at the age of 59, lay dying in the Palace of Whitehall. Outside a great storm was blowing across the red tiles and ancient spires of London’s roof-tops, such as had not been remembered for a hundred years, but within the soul of the Lord Protector of England there was peace: “The Lord hath filled me,” he murmured, “with as much assurance of His pardon and His love as my soul can hold …. I am more than a conqueror through Christ that strengtheneth me.” Four days later the greatest soldier and statesman of the age had fought his last battle and entered the land “where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.”

Cromwell had embodied in his own person the two great principles which had inspired the nation sixteen years before to rise against the absolutism of the Stuart monarchy–the right of the people to freedom from oppression and the duty of preserving Protestantism from error and spiritual tyranny. As long as Cromwell was alive he struggled for a settlement that would enable these two principles to exist harmoniously together. But if the constitutional difficulties that had arisen since the Civil Wars made the problem too great for Cromwell, it was certainly beyond the abilities of those to whose charge he left the nation. As long as the greater part of a nation remains unregenerate, political freedom may not lead to the advancement of the Gospel, and Cromwell, being forced by the course of events–as he interpreted them–to an unhappy choice between the two, chose the latter. The Protector’s death resulted in a political crisis which made the choice yet more difficult, and the Puritans, as a body, were divided in their reaction to it. The Independents, such as John Owen and Thomas Goodwin who had been closest to Cromwell, believed that the spiritual gains that had been made since the Long Parliament had broken the power with which the Bishops had cramped the nation’s religious life could best be preserved by a Commonwealth. But as the years of Crom­well’s Protectorate had already shown, such a form of government would have to rely, for a time at least, upon the army for its strength, as it would never be chosen by the general consent of the people, and what would then become of the political freedom which the Commons had fought to preserve? It was thus clear to the majority that the country could find no security against anarchy or military dictatorship save in the old constitutional government based upon a Monarchy and a free Parliament. This had, in fact, long been the conviction of the largest of the Puritan parties–the Presbyterians. Though they had resisted the absolutism of Charles I they had never been against monarchy as such, and after the turmoil that followed the death of Cromwell they were more convinced than ever of the political necessity of recalling Charles Stuart to his father’s throne. But if Charles returned what would become of the spiritual freedom which they cherished? They had not forgotten how monarchy and episcopacy had been combined since the Church settlement of Queen Elizabeth against the more thorough­going Protestantism of Puritanism. It is not surprising therefore that while the Presbyterians saw the need of restoring the monarchy they were conscious of the possibility that such a political settlement might lead to a spiritual defeat.

Charles was not ignorant of their fears and of his need to calm them. He knew that the co-operation of the strongest Puritan party, the Presbyterians, would be needed to accomplish a Restoration and that a full disclosure of his aims would be disastrous to his interests. Thus he carefully avoided any suggestions that his return would mean an Anglican triumph; his agents were busy in England creating an impression that the Presbyterians could expect a Church settlement comprehensive enough to satisfy their convictions; testimonies to his loyalty to Protestantism were secured from French Reformed ministers; and by the famous Declaration of Breda in April 1660 he promised “a liberty to tender consciences and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom.” In such ways a general impression was given to the Presbyterians that Charles’s return would not be spiritually disastrous. The impression was deepened when a delegation of Presbyterian ministers was cordially received by Charles at The Hague and given, says Richard Baxter, “encouraging promises of peace” which “raised some of them to high expectations.”

But there were those whose misgivings were not removed. The Independents, as a body, did not share in the spirit of hopefulness. “The Presbyterian ministers,” writes Daniel Neal, “did not want for cautions from the Independents and others, not to be too forward in trusting their new allies, but they would neither hear, see, or believe, till it was too late.” Amongst some of the Pres­byterians there was also uneasiness. In Parliament, Sir Matthew Hale attempted to prevent an unconditional recall of Charles and proposed that some terms of religious settlement should be agreed upon before his return. General Monk, however, knowing Charles’s anxiety for a Restoration free from conditions, resolutely opposed Hale’s proposition, warning the House of the dangers of possible social or military anarchy if the recall of the King was delayed, and asking, “What need is there of it, when he is to bring neither arms nor treasure along with him?”

After a day of fasting and prayer, upon which Baxter told the House in a sermon that “it was easy for moderate men to come to a fair agreement, and that the late reverend Primate of Ireland and myself had agreed in half an hour,” Parliament unanimously voted the King home, and on May 25, 1660, amidst a thunderous welcome Charles II landed at Dover. A Bible was immediately presented to the King by a Presbyterian minister and warmly received. Surely if “half an hour” was sufficient for Baxter and Archbishop Ussher of Ireland to settle differences, would it not be enough for a monarch who could declare that Scripture “was the thing that he loved above all things in the world”?

Unhappily both Baxter’s words to the Parliament and the King’s at Dover were, as we now know, tragically misleading as far as being a reliable indication of the future course of events is con­cerned, but nevertheless they are worth examining for they do reveal something of the policy that both parties were pursuing at this stage. Baxter and an important section of his Presbyterian brethren for whom he increasingly became the spokesman believed that with the Restoration of Charles the reinstatement of episcopacy was inevitable and that therefore their best hope was to seek for a revised form of episcopacy–not the despotic form that had ham­mered Puritanism before the Civil Wars, but a less powerful and more primitive order such as had been advanced by James Ussher, Primate of Ireland. Behind this policy was, of course, the desire, long since jettisoned by the Independents, of preserving a single national Church of which all Englishmen might be members. Baxter believed that if a tolerant and modified Episcopacy, sufficiently agreeable to many of Presbyterian convictions, were introduced, the majority of the Puritans would be able to continue side by side with those whose views of Church government were more Episcopalian. His hopes were thus pinned to a policy of com­prehension, and, as his words to Parliament indicated, he believed that if moderation was pursued on both sides and the King was willing to grant concessions concerning the Liturgy and the Prayer Book, then there were good hopes of a satisfactory Church settlement.

Even when Charles was safely home on English soil his testimony to the Presbyterian minister at Dover indicates that he had not abandoned the policy which he and his minister, Edward Hyde, had been carrying on across the Channel. He had been on English soil before and had had to leave it very hurriedly in flight from Cromwell’s troops. That same army had not yet been disbanded; the Convention Parliament that sat at Westminster could still command a Puritan majority if the Presbyterians and Independents acted together; and the Royalist reaction in the country at large had still to make itself felt. A crisis with the powerful Presbyterians at this stage might still be disastrous to his interests, and conse­quently many of the King’s words and actions in days following the Restoration were by no means intended as genuine negotiations with the Presbyterians, but simply as sops till his own position was secure. “I had rather trust a Papist rebel than a Presbyterian,” he told the faithful Hyde, but such words at this stage were confined to a very small circle. A member of that circle was Gilbert Sheldon (by profession a divine, by practice a politician), who was to become one of the King’s closest ecclesiastical advisers. The night after Charles left Dover he was at Canterbury and there, as R. S. Bosher writes, “It is not improbable that, in the shadow of the mother Church of England, a discussion took place between Charles, the Lord Chancellor (Hyde), and Sheldon that was to have lasting consequences in the religious history of the nation” [1] Certainly whatever was discussed in secret at Canterbury was not the well­being of the Puritans, and it was no good omen for them when Sheldon was shortly made Bishop of London–their spiritual stronghold.

The royal aim, schemed by Hyde and inspired by the Laudian clergy who were all-powerful at the Court, was to re-establish the old Establishment intact, as it had been before the Long Parliament’s Root and Branch Bill had applied to the hierarchy the Scriptural principle which the English Reformers had not been willing, or perhaps able, to apply in the previous century. But from the moment of the King’s arrival in London on May 29, 1660, the intention was skilfully hidden. Twelve Presbyterian ministers had the honour of walking in the procession-no Episcopalian clergy taking part­ and soon the Merry Monarch had even appointed ten Puritan divines [2] amongst his chaplains, several of whom were invited to preach at Court during the summer without being required to use the Prayer Book. Hyde was likewise busy wooing some of the most influential Presbyterian lay leaders, and by giving them posts in the new government he sought to anticipate the danger of Puritan power in the House of Commons being brought to bear against the new regime.

It was against this well-hidden background of intrigue and duplicity that Baxter and his colleagues hopefully entered into negotiations with the King. In a meeting between leaders of the Presbyterian party and the King in June Baxter urged a union between Episcopalians and Presbyterians, professing that it could easily be procured “by making only things necessary to be the Terms of Union, by the true Exercise of Church Discipline against Sin, and by not casting out the faithful Ministers that must Exercise it, nor obtruding unworthy Men upon the People.” Charles professed his readiness to reach such a union “by abating somewhat on both sides and meeting in the midway,” and the Presbyterians were asked to set out on paper the concessions they were prepared to make. The request was carried out by July, but the Presbyterian ministers soon learned that no Episcopalian representatives had been called on to draw up concessions on their side. There were some that could already see in these events the real direction in which Hyde and the King were going. James Sharp, the Scottish observer of church affairs in London, reported home, “Episcopacy will be settled here to the height. The managing this business by papers will undo them (the Presbyterians); those motions about their putting in writing what they would desire in point of accom­modation are but to gain time, and prevent petitionings (to Parlia­ment), and smooth over matters till the Episcopal men be more strengthened.’

Amongst the English Presbyterians there were not a few eminent ministers who did not share the hopefulness of the group Baxter led, and who viewed the comprehension plan and modified Episcopacy proposal as compromising the old Puritan position. Lazarus Seaman and William Jenkyn were outspoken in their disagreement with the scheme of reconciliation advanced by Baxter, and they appear to have had the backing of such men as Cornelius Burgess, Arthur Jackson, and Giles Firmin. The story that has been handed down of a conversation between Thomas Case, one of the King’s Puritan chaplains, and Daniel Dyke will illustrate the differing outlook amongst the Puritans at this point. Soon after the Restora­tion Dyke voluntarily resigned the living of Hadham-Magna in Hertfordshire. Case attempted to persuade him to continue in it and argued “the hopeful prospect” which the King’s words and behaviour gave them; to this Dyke replied, “that they did but deceive and flatter themselves; that if the King was sincere in his show of piety and great respect for them and their religion, yet, when he came to be settled, the party that had formerly adhered to him, and the creatures that would come over with him, would have the management of public affairs, would circumvent them in all their designs, and in all probability not only turn them out, but take away their liberty too.”

The King’s advisers were, of course, well aware of the divided counsels within the Presbyterian ranks, and there can be little doubt that it was with a view to disrupting them still further that several of the more moderate party were offered preferments in the early autumn of 1660. The see of Hereford was offered to Baxter, Lich­field and Coventry to Calamy, Norwich to Reynolds, Carlisle to Richard Gilpin, and deaneries were offered to Manton, Bates, and Bowles. The offers might appear imposing, but Hyde well knew what would be the effect of “taking off the leading men amongst them by preferring of them.” “If some few,” he wrote, “are separated and divided from the herd . . . they are but so many single men, and have no credit and authority (whatever they have had) with their companions, than if they had never them, rather less.” At the same time as these offers were being made the King was further attempting to lull the suspicions that were being voiced by enumerating the concessions he was willing to make in a Declaration concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs. After discussions with the moderate Presbyterians the Declaration was published on October 25 and it contained much that was of encouragement to the Puritans. Liberties were given to them such as had never before been conceded by the national Church, and questions regarding the Prayer Book and ceremonies were to be referred to a future synod of divines “of both persuasions.” The only flaw (and that a fatal one) in the document was covered up with skilful ambiguity, namely, it was not said whether these concessions were to be final or merely temporary. The moderate party, however, received it with “humble and grateful acknowledgement” and in the light of the fair promise it held out for a comprehensive settlement Edward Reynolds accepted the bishopric of Norwich. But he acted alone, and had he waited for a few more months to pass it is highly probable there would not even have been one acceptance of the preferments that were offered.

All the time the King and Hyde were seeking to pacify the Presbyterians with words they were quietly by their actions re­capturing the Establishment for the Laudians. All the vacant bishoprics of importance were given to this party, and even if all four Puritans had accepted bishoprics their weight would have been negligible on the episcopal bench. The royal policy through the autumn only suffered one severe scare, and that was in November when the Presbyterians in Parliament introduced a bill to give the force of law to the concessions contained in the King’s Declaration. “This was undoubtedly,” says Bosher, “the crucial moment in the history of the church settlement.” But the breach of nearly twenty years between the Presbyterians and the Independents had done its sad work; they did not vote unitedly, and by a margin of 26 votes the Anglican party managed to prevent the King’s temporary expedient becoming a stumbling block in the way of the entire re­-establishment of the old system. Soon the King could breathe more freely. In December the Convention Parliament was dissolved and in the following February the army was disbanded. Caricatures of the Puritans, later to become so universal as to colour much English literature right down to the present time, were already popular both on the stage and in pamphlet propaganda. Ballads were coming into fashion which expressed the sentiment that:

A Presbyter is such a monstrous thing

That loves Democracy and hates a King.

With the tide running thus in his direction, and everything going according to plan, Charles was gradually preparing for the final settlement he had long since agreed upon with the Laudians. It was in March 1661 when four royalist candidates for Parliament were outvoted in London and four Puritans returned–this time the Presbyterians and Independents acting together–that his old fears were reawakened. Feeling against the bishops was clearly mounting in London, and fearing that London’s example might be followed by those parts of the country in which the elections were still proceeding, the King immediately proposed to ease the religious tension by fulfilling his promise of five months earlier and calling a synod of divines of both persuasions. Thus on April 15 the famous Savoy Conference began its four months’ deliberations. But the crisis was over before that date; the nation had voted into power a strongly Episcopalian and Royalist Parliament, and though in some cases it was questionable whether the elections were perfectly free, there could be no doubt that the era of Puritanism’s political power was finally at an end.

The tedious and fruitless discussions of the Savoy Conference followed the same pattern as the previous discussions. The Pres­byterians, represented by the moderate party once more, had to state their case on paper and were thus put into the position of suppliants. The only difference was that now their opponents could consider them as the defeated party with much more confidence. By the time the Savoy Conference was in session the recapture of the Establishment was already a fait accompli; there was no longer any question of the representatives of both parties meeting on an equal footing, as had been originally expected, and while the Episcopalians under Sheldon’s leadership may not have entered the Conference with the determination to oppose all concessions, they certainly were not interested in a new liturgy such as Baxter suggested, still less in a modification of Episcopal powers in the direction of Presbyterianism. The Conference was futile and while we may think that Baxter was more gifted as the zealous pastor of Kidderminster than as the spokesman of the Puritans, there is no doubt that even had there been present at the Conference a Pres­byterian leader of the calibre of Alexander Henderson the issue would have been the same, only more speedily reached. It was already too late. Even before the Savoy Conference was over, in Scotland, where events had been moving faster, James Guthrie had died on the scaffold true to the faith which the nation had owned in happier days: “I take God to record upon my soul,” ran his parting testimony, “I would not exchange this scaffold with the palace or mitre of the greatest prelate in Britain.”

With the breakdown at Savoy the Church settlement was left to Parliament and Convocation. The former, “the Cavalier Parlia­ment,” had met on May 6, 1661, and was to continue in power for eighteen years. From the start it was its obvious intent to break the power of Puritanism. By a vote of 228 to 103 the Covenant [3] was ordered to be burned by the common hangman; all members of the House were required to receive the sacrament according to Anglican rites; the bishops were restored to the House of Lords (though they never regained the political importance they had had before the Civil Wars); and by the Corporation Act passed on December 20 all persons desiring to qualify for office in any town corporation must submit to the Episcopalian position. The Act was “a direct and heavy blow at the very heart of Dissent,” for a great part of the strength of the Puritans lay in their hold of corporate towns. It was not merely out of the resources of a fertile imagination that Bunyan relates in his Holy War how Diabolus confined the Lord Mayor to his own house, and how the recorder Conscience gave place to Forget-good, and new aldermen were appointed such as Haughty, Whoring, No-Truth and Drunkenness. It was, at least in part, the work of the Corporation Act that the way was prepared for the future sufferings of the Puritans and also for the social corruption that was to become characteristic of the Restoration Period.

In November 1661 Convocation reassembled, having been held up in its deliberations of the previous summer by the meetings of the Savoy Conference, and now it was left to this packed body to settle the matters which had been originally entrusted to a synod “of both persuasions.” Properly elected Puritan delegates to Convoca­tion, such as Calamy and Baxter, were not admitted. The most pressing task before the assembly was to amend the Prayer Book with a view to making it less objectionable to the Puritans. By December 20 their proposed revision was finally adopted. As far as promoting a reconciliation between the two parties is concerned, it was, as might have been expected, a complete failure. Convocation, complains Baxter, “made the Common Prayer Book more grievous than before.” In view, however, of the strong Laudian element within Convocation it is surprising that a Laudian influence was not more discernible in the revision, but, as Hyde records, “the bishops were not all of one mind” and, despite Baxter’s assertion, there is some evidence that a degree of moderation was exercised and certain small concessions were in fact made, evidently with the hope of retaining some of the Presbyterians within the national church soon to be fully re-established by law.

It now only remained for Parliament to accept the revised Prayer Book and to pass a new Act of Uniformity which would exclude from the national church the body of men to which England had been most indebted for its evangelical witness since the time of the Reformation. The only difficulty the Commons had was to get the Act framed as rigorously as they wished, but by the end of April the proposed bill “had been tightened to a satisfactory pitch of severity” and it was finally passed on May 8, with the date of enforcement given as St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1662. The terms of conformity required by the Act were as follows: Re­ordination for all who had not hitherto been episcopally ordained; a Declaration of “unfeigned assent and consent” to all and every­thing contained and prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer “in these words and no other”, and to the form of making, ordaining and consecrating of bishops, priests and deacons; an oath of canonical obedience; an abjuration of the Solemn League and Covenant and of the lawfulness of taking up arms against the King under any pretence whatsoever. All ministers, chaplains, school­masters, heads of colleges, fellows and tutors, who did not subscribe within the time appointed were to be deprived and “utterly dis­abled,” and the benefices of ministers to be considered void, as if their former occupants were naturally dead.

When the Earl of Manchester complained to Charles that the Act was so rigid that few would conform, Sheldon replied, “I am afraid they will.” As we shall see, Samuel Pepys was a better prophet than the Bishop of London; it will “make mad work among the Presbyterians,” he forecast.

Citations

1 The Making of the Restoration Settlement, Dacre Press, 1957, p. 136. Bosher quotes from Robert Baillie the account later in circulation in Scotland: “When the King was at Breda, it was said he was not averse from establishing the Presbytery; nor was the contrary peremptorily resolved till the Saturday at night, in the cabin council at Canterbury.”

2 Wallis, Baxter, Calamy, Manton, Case, Reynolds, Bates, Ash, Spurstow, and Woodbridge. Henry Newcome of Manchester declined the dubious honour.

3 The Solemn League and Covenant had been drawn up in Scotland at the beginning of the Civil Wars and was intended to form the basis of a spiritual union between the two nations; the oath, which was taken by the English Parlia­ment in 1643, included six points: they included the pledging of the subscribers to seek the reformation of religion in the kingdoms of England and Ireland according to the Word of God and the rooting out of popery, prelacy, and whatever is contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness. Cf. The Covenants and The Covenanters, James Kerr, 1895.

This article first appeared as The Background of the Great Ejection in the June 1662 edition of the Banner of Truth Magazine (Issue 26).

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‘Stand with Christ Jesus in this day of his battle, which shall be short and the victory everlasting! For the Lord himself shall come in our defence with his mighty power; He shall give us the victory when the battle is most strong; and He shall turn our tears into everlasting joy.’ One thing stands out above all else in the life of John Knox. At many different points in his life we have the comment of individuals who saw him, and the testimony most frequently repeated has to do with one point, namely, the power of his preaching. One of the first times we hear of Knox’s ministry is in a letter of Utenhovius, writing from London to Bullinger in Zurich, on October 12, 1552. He reported how a stranger in London has suddenly caught the public attention:

‘Some disputes have arisen within these few days among the bishops, in consequence of a sermon of a pious preacher, chaplain to the duke of Northumberland, preached by him before the King and Council, in which he inveighed with great freedom against kneeling at the Lord’s Supper, which is still retained here by the English. This good man, however, a Scotsman by nation, has so wrought upon the minds of many persons, that we may hope some good to the Church will at length arise from it.’

One other account of such preaching is too memorable to be omitted. As already noted, in July 1571 the Queen’s party had such power in Edinburgh that Knox was forced to stay in St Andrews for thirteen months. A student there at the time was fifteen-year-old James Melville, and he would see Knox walking to church from the old priory, a staff in one hand and held under his other armpit by a friend, with furs wrapped round his neck. It was the year before his death and his strength was gone. Melville wrote in his Autobiography:

‘Of all the benefits I had that year [1571] was the coming of that most notable prophet and apostle of our nation, Mr John Knox, to St Andrews . . . I heard him teach there the prophecy of Daniel that summer and winter following. I had my pen and my little book, and took away such things as I could comprehend. In the opening up of his text he was moderate the space of an half hour; but when he entered to application, he made me so grew [shudder] and tremble, that I could not hold a pen to write.’

Melville says further that Knox had to be lifted up into the pulpit ‘where it behoved him to lean at his first entry; but before he had done with his sermon he was so active and vigorous, that he was like to ding that pulpit in blads and fly out of it!’

What made Knox this kind of preacher? He had natural gifts, of course, but not more than some others who never made such an impression. ‘I am not a good orator in my own cause,’ he once wrote to his mother-in-law. When it came to preaching it was not his own cause. ‘It hath pleased God of his superabundant grace to make me, most wretched of many thousands, a witness, minister and preacher.’ His authority came from the conviction that preaching is God’s work, the message is His word, and he was sure the Holy Spirit would honour it. This was the certainty which possessed him. I do not say there were not moments of doubt, but at the great crises the Holy Spirit so filled him that nothing could deter him and the result was the transformations that occurred even in the most unpromising and hostile circumstances. In the summer of 1559 when he first returned to St Andrews, warning was sent to him by the bishop that if he dared to preach the next Sunday there would be a dozen hand guns discharged in his face. His friends advised delay, but he went ahead and took for his text Christ driving the buyers and sellers out of the temple. The famous painting of the scene by Sir David Wilkie captured something of that day, June 11, 1559, and the effect of it at the time can be seen in the number of priests of the Roman Church who confessed the faith.

It was due to a similar crisis that we have the only sermon Knox ever prepared for publication. The text was Isaiah 26:13-21 and it was preached on August 19, 1565, in St Giles. The previous month Lord Darnley had married Queen Mary and was declared King. Darnley has been described as a man who could be either Catholic or Protestant as it suited him, sometimes he went ‘to mass with the Queen and sometimes attended the reformed sermons’. On this particular Sunday he sat listening on a throne in St Giles and, while he was not directly mentioned in the sermon, it so infuriated him that Knox was instantly summoned before the Privy Council and forbidden to preach while the King and Queen were in town. Part of Knox’s response was to write down the sermon as fully as he could remember it. It is the only Knox sermon that has survived, and in its conclusion he has these memorable sentences:

‘Let us now humble ourselves in the presence of our God, and, from the bottom of our hearts, let us desire him to assist us with the power of his Holy Spirit . . . that albeit we see his Church so diminished, that it shall appear to be brought, as it were, to utter extermination, that yet we may be assured that in our God there is power and will to increase the number of his chosen, even while they be enlarged to the uttermost coasts of the earth.’

Then, at the end of the sermon Knox added this postscript which was also printed:

‘Lord, in thy hands I commend my spirit; for the terrible roaring of guns, and the noise of armour, do so pierce my heart, that my soul thirsts to depart. The last of August 1565, at four at afternoon, written indigestly, but yet truly so far as memory would serve.’

The only true explanation of Knox’s preaching is in words he applied to others of his fellow countrymen, ‘God gave his Holy Spirit to simple men in great abundance.’ To read Knox is to be convicted of the smallness of our faith in the power of the Word of God. Unbelief has had too much influence upon us. The modern church needs to relearn the words of 2 Corinthians 4:13; ‘We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak.’

The history of the church at the time of the Reformation is a singular reminder to us of how God is in history. Christ is in the church and on the throne – directing and governing all persons and all events. Standing where we do in time, we see Knox’s faith in this fact verified, but it was another thing for him to see it in the midst of poverty, when good men were being put to death, and when he endured his twelve years of exile. Yet the truth is that it was the storm of persecution which scattered Christians that was the very means God used to advance his purposes. If Knox had never been a refugee in England he would never have formed the friendships which became so significant in drawing the two long-hostile nations together.

When Knox came back to Scotland in 1559, with his English wife and the English tongue, the world for him was a much bigger place. And it was the exile of Knox and others in Calvin’s city which gave Britain the Geneva Bible, the version that was to be the most used through much of the next hundred years. So by persecution the gospel advanced and it was the means by which God forged an international vision and co-operation among his people. Samuel Rutherford surely stated history accurately when he wrote:

‘Christ hath a great design of free grace to these lands; but his wheels must move over mountains and rocks. He never yet wooed a bride on earth, but in blood, in fire, and in the wilderness.’

This is an extract from a new book by Iain Murray, A Scottish Christian Heritage (ISBN 085151930X, Banner of Truth, 416 pp., clothbound) and first appeared in article form on this website on July 6, 2006.

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