071. To The Reader

TO THE READER That I might not be wanting to your satisfaction, I have here added some sermons of the author, preached on several occasions. I have chose them, rather than other of his treatises, because more congenial to the foregoing parts of the book; the first four especially had a right to their place in it, being sermons on some verses of the second, third, and fifth chapters of the Ephesians. They do not indeed complete the exposition of it; nor were they designed so by the author, who pursued the exposition in his lecture-sermons, which you had before; but being called from it by Providence, he stopped at the 11th verse of the second chapter, and never proceeded further afterwards. But these sermons that follow were preached on other occasions. This I thought necessary to inform the reader, lest he should think that the author had gone through the whole Epistle, and that having lost part of the Exposition, I had set before him the remaining broken pieces; but I can assure him that here is all that ever was preached by him on that Epistle. To satisfy any one that is so curious as to inquire when the following sermons were preached, since the title of them tells him it was on several occasions, he may know that the first of them, on Ephesians 2:14-16, was preached at St Mary’s in Oxford, and was formerly printed, and may be found added very often to his works published before. The other sermons on several texts of Scripture were preached in his younger time at Cambridge in his lecture at Trinity Church. Those two on Colossians 1:26-27, an. 1625. The first sermon on Zephaniah 2:1-3, was preached on a solemn fast, 1628, and the other in the following course of his lecture.

T. G. The above address “To the Reader,” by Dr. Goodwin’s son, is given as it appears in the folio edition, though it partly refers to some discourses which, with a view to a more perfect classification of subjects than was originally observed, will be given in another volume of this series.