In this sermon, the speaker discusses the factors that contributed to the distinctive nature of the Protestant movement. He identifies four main sectors that played a role in shaping the movement. The first sector is the legacy of Tyndale, which emphasized the lordship of the Bible and the importance of justified men in covenant with God. The second sector is the legacy of Branson, which prioritized repentance in both words and actions. The third sector is the legacy of Cooper and Frankfurt, which highlighted the reality of God's judgment and blessings throughout history. The fourth sector is the emphasis on the authority of the Bible, with Tyndale stressing the need to subject everything in church and faith to the rule of God's Word.

What we've done so far is to review the history of the word Puritan, and thereby to get a preliminary answer to the question, who were the Puritans? And we've also sketched out in a preliminary way the nature of Puritanism as a worldview. What I'm supposed to do now is to pose and try and answer a further question, namely this. Where did Puritanism come from? It's a fascinating compound product. It came to be in the second half of the 16th century. The interesting question to ask is the question about its roots and its sources. What was it that threw up to the surface in its features that gave it its distinctive character? Where did its dominant motif originate? What was it which, if you like, shrunk the sparks which burned in the movement and made the movement what it was? I propose to set before you what seemed to me to be the four main sectors which went to its making. That is, the four sectors which went to make it distinctive in the way that it was distinctive from other forms of Protestantism, such as that manifested in the Church of England at that time. And the four sectors I'm going to discuss with you are these. One, the legacy of Tyndale, which is a double legacy. Secondly, first, the lordship of the Bible, and second, the thought of justified man being covenant with God. Second, the legacy of Bradford, which I characterize as the piety of repentance, treat, live, and whistle about. Thirdly, the legacy of Hooper and Frankfurt. Frankfurt is the plane, Hooper is the stamp. You mustn't mind this. It's necessary to bracket them together. The legacy of Hooper and Frankfurt, which legacy I define as the passion for pastoral care and reformed church order. And the fourth is the legacy of John Fox. John Fox the meteorologist, which again is a double legacy. One, the thought of the calling of England to the ideal of the Puritan hero. Now let me set this material before you. First sector, the legacy of Tyndale. Let me tell you some facts about Tyndale. You should know right off the outset that though there were in the late, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, a number of editions of the scriptures in English, Coverdale's Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishop's Bible, the authorised version of 1611, there was in fact, and is in fact, only one English Bible, and that is Tyndale. For all these other versions of the scripture were nothing more than verbal revisions of Tyndale. Tyndale made the English Bible in the same way that Luther made the German Bible. He was born in 1484 and he was educated at Oxford and he was ordained and became a tutor in a nobleman's house at a place called Little Prospery near Bristol in the county of Gloucestershire, for which I come. He was a brilliant linguist and his mind turned to translation. He was a serious Christian man. According to his light, we are not quite sure just how much light he had at this time, his first thought was to translate a resume of the Enchiridion, Enchiridion Militia Christiani, the handbook of the Christian soldier. He planned to do that, we know, in 1522. But then in the next year, his mind had moved on and he had resolved to translate the Bible. These were the early days of Henry VIII's reign. There was nothing in principle to stop a man translating the Bible. It was the age of humanism. Luther was translating the Bible in Germany. Henry VIII was acting the part of a patron of humanistic learning. And Tyndale was convinced that this was something which he ought to do. Ought to do, because on the one hand he knew he could do it, he was, as I told you, a brilliant linguist with a fine literary staff. Ought to do, on the other hand, because Luther needed it. It's reported that he'd done, as many priests in those days did, he'd done philanthropy, or preaching, and he'd spoken in anti-traditional terms, probably just in terms of the kind of reforms that the humanists wanted in those days. And various priests, present at the sermon, had hops at what he said and he'd try to argue with them. And as a result of this encounter, as I've said, he became convinced that the thing he must do was to translate the Bible into English. Because, as here I quote him, I had perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to establish the lay people, it's interesting he's singled out the lay people, in any truth, except the scripture was plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue. That they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text. But Tyndale was a determined man, and once he put his hand to this particular cloud, he never halted. Not for the next thirteen years until his martyrdom. He went to London. And he went to the Bishop of London, Custer Tomstall, and offered to do this job in Tomstall's household. That means under Tomstall's patronage. The pattern in those days was that rich men would take poor scholars into their household, let them live there, provide them with bed and meals, and give them the run of the place to do their work. That was the way that Erasmus lived on the continent, going from great man's house to great man's house. And that was the way that Tyndale asked that he might live while he was translating the Bible. But the Bishop of London told him politely that his household was full. There was no room for Tyndale there. And he would look elsewhere. Tyndale did look elsewhere, and he found himself a patron named Humphrey Monmouth, a cloth merchant, and a man who we know had links, by reason of the cloth trading he was doing with the continent, with the Luceran world. Remember, Lucer had posted his theses on the door of Wittenberg Church six years earlier, 1517. And all over the continent now they were discussing the teaching of Lucer, and reading Lucer's books. And it was via the cloth trade, we know, that these books came into England, though they were officially banned by authority. And Humphrey Monmouth had connections with the Lucerans, and he was implicated in bringing in the Luceran books, and he was interested in Luceran ideas. Also, we know, Humphrey Monmouth was linked with the Lollard tradition in England. The Lollards were the tag-end, you might say, at least the people called Lollards in the 16th century, were the tag-end of the Wycliffe-like movement of the 14th century. Wycliffe had raised an anti-papal flag, and he translated the Bible into the English of those days, and he brought into being an order of preachers called Lollards, who went around the country, preaching against the Pope, and advising people to read the Bible. And those who maintained the practice of reading Wycliffe-like translations of the Bible, which still existed, very much hidden away, and hidden away from authority, and they existed at the late of the early 16th century, they were still in general called Lollards after their first order of preaching. So Monmouth had links with both these worlds. He sent Tyndale, after six months, to Wittenberg to meet Lucer, to confer with Lucer, and to complete his work there. And to Wittenberg, Tyndale went, matriculated at the university in 1524, and met Lucer, and learned from Lucer the finer points of the doctrine of justification by faith. Meanwhile, Monmouth and other merchants sent money over to Germany to finance the printing of this translation. They knew, you see, that the printing couldn't be done in England, and therefore, as the manuscript began to advance towards conclusion, and Monmouth could see that Tyndale was making a job of it, it became necessary to send him to some place where he could get it printed, and hence there was another reason for this journey to Wittenberg. Tyndale got on with the job, and in 1526, he had the English New Testament in print. And in 1513, he followed it with a pendicute. And later, he prepared manuscripts and translations of Jonah, he even published Jonah, and then manuscripts of Judges and Chronicles, which were afterwards included in the so-called Matthew's Bible, which was produced by one of his followers in the year after his death. But in 1535, he was betrayed to the authorities in Antwerp. The authorities were anxious to keep in with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The Emperor was against any support of Protestant enterprises. Tyndale, by then, had come to be known as a Protestant pamphleteer, and so the authorities in Antwerp arrested him, he was actually betrayed, and he was burned in the following year at a place in Holland, Vilvoorde, V-I-L-V-O-R-D-E. And that was the end of Tyndale, but the English Bible, which he produced last year, was completed, and as they're completing, the first complete English Bible was brought out in the next year, and then there were a series of revisions of it, culminating in our authorised version. Meanwhile, Tyndale's works, his theological expositions and texts, they were printed separately and smuggled into England, despite the fact that by the 1530s, Henry VIII was forbidding their circulation, and they were all of them published together in 1572 by the Protestant printer John Day, in a big folio edited by the martyrologist John Fox, of whom you're going to hear under heading four, in this section of the notice. If we look through Tyndale's pamphlet, we find the following four themes standing out. First, the authority, the lordship of the Bible. Tyndale was thoroughgoing in his insistence that everything in church and faith must be subjected to the rule of the word of God. That it's in this way and in no other that we honour God and honour Christ. Here he expounded this in very general terms. He didn't get down to the detailed problems of exegesis in applying the Bible to particular situations in church and faith. He wrote particular pamphlets, to be sure, on particular abuses, but it's all pretty rough and ready stuff. But on the general principle, it's vivid, it's strong, it's clear, and it became part of the Tyndale legacy. The insistence that the Bible must rule and there must be no half measures in allowing it to direct what is done in the church and in the community. Second theme, justification by faith. Tyndale faithfully echoes Luther. Tyndale indeed translates a good deal of Luther into English and publishes it under his own name. From one standpoint, the best thing that Luther ever did was to publish his own introduction to the Epistle to the Romans, which is taken almost entirely, word for word, from Luther's introduction to the Epistle to the Romans in his own German Bible. The emphasis is the Lutheran emphasis, namely that the gospel is God's promise to men who are under the law and doomed to perish by the law because they are unable to provide the good works which the law requires. But the promise is of pardon and the grace of the Holy Spirit to enable them to fulfill the law. So that the Christian man, justified by faith in the promise of forgiveness through Christ, spontaneously keeps the law and does righteousness. Faith works. And through his coming to faith, he enters into the light of his spirit, the indwelling spirit energizing him, energizing his faith. And so his good works, as Tyndale writes in a little tract called A Pathway to the Holy Scripture to be published in 1530, our good works, quote, certify us that we are heirs of everlasting life and that the spirit of God who is the earnest thereof is in us. The evidential value of good works, another good Puritan theme. But as a second of the two emphases that you find in Luther's text, biblical authority, justification by faith, thirdly, and very interestingly, the thought of justified men in covenant with God. Tyndale came to justification by faith in the context of his work translating the New Testament. Help, of course, by Luther. Tyndale came to the thought of justified men in covenant with God through translating the Pentateuch, first part of the Old Testament. Particularly, Deuteronomy seems to have influenced his thinking at this point. And the thought that he develops is that the justified man who puts faith in the free promise of salvation through Christ, he now stands in covenant with God, just as Old Testament Israel did, and he must walk before God in holiness, seeking to keep all God's laws, seeking to fulfill all righteousness in daily life. This, of course, in fact, is a thoroughly biblical development of the thought of justification by faith. It's simply putting the truth of justification in what really is its biblical context. The context, namely, of a covenant obligation which binds man to God. And Tyndale, in his writings on the covenant scene, did, as the Old Testament leads him to do, draw out the corporate and the social context which this covenant notion yields. That is, that it's not simply one justified man who's in covenant with God, but all the people of God together as a community, a fellowship. And so they must be a holy and law-keeping fellowship, just as Israel was called to be a holy and law-keeping nation. Now, the interesting thing about this is that in later Puritan theology, the cause of a covenant relationship between God and man was, in truth, the fundamental, one might say the architectonic concept into which the whole revelation of God and the whole doctrine of grace was fitted. In recent years, Puritan scholars, namely L.J. Kinterod, in an article in Church History from March 8, 1961, and a scholar who has followed him closely at this point, W.A. Klebsch, B-L-E-B-S-C-H, in a book called England's Earliest Protestants, published only a year ago, they have affirmed that it's here in Tyndale that you find the origins of this Puritan doctrine of the covenant. Now, that, I think, is an overstatement. It needs to be qualified, rather, before it's true, because it's not completely true. So far as the thought of God in covenant with man is concerned, well, I could be telling you later in more detail, I think there's no doubt that the Puritans learned it from the first covenant theologians on the continent, people like Olavian and Athenus, and then Harkin, the great Puritan divine at the end of the Elizabethan period, popularized it in English, and so it went on from there. To be sure, it hadn't earlier in the Continental Reformation. You find the thought in Zingley and you find it in Bullinger and you find it in Palantavius, the Zurich reformer, but there's no evidence that I can discover of a link between Tyndale and them, and in fact, Tyndale doesn't expound the thought of God in covenant with man in the way that the later Puritan covenant theologians actually do. For Tyndale makes much of the thought that God will cast off those who are in covenant with him if they're not faithful. Don't blame Tyndale too much here. He hadn't been brought up on the reform doctrines of race in the way that we have. Transfigurance hadn't become an issue in his day. Calvin, indeed, hadn't written the Institute while Tyndale was doing his work. But this, of course, is a line of thought which would absolutely vanish from the covenant theology of later Puritanism, which insistently grounded the covenant relationship on God's eternal election and insisted that once God had brought men into covenant with him, well, he would certainly keep them in the covenant relation from that time on. And there's really no evidence to warrant the supposition that the later Puritan doctrine of God in covenant with man came from Tyndale or was picked up from Tyndale. Tyndale never quoted for it and, in fact, it was expanded differently. But, and this is the half-truth that there is in this suggestion of Prince Reuben Klench, it is, I think, true to say that Tyndale was the founder of the Puritan thought of man in covenant with God, the human side of the covenant relationship. And, in other words, it was a real case of picking up Tyndale's emphasis when later Puritans who had read the folio, folio edition of Tyndale's works in 1572, took up and began to develop on their own account the thought of the English church and the English nation as a community in covenant with God, particularly the English church, the company of believers in England, of a community in covenant with God who must walk faithfully before the Lord and fulfill all his laws or else they will bring down heavy judgments upon them. To suggest that there is a link at this point seems much more plausible. I spoke of heavy judgments as a threat which God declares towards those who are unfaithful to his covenant. This actually is the fourth point of emphasis that you find in all Tyndale's writings. Tyndale, like many medieval preachers before him and like all the Puritans after him, insisted on the reality of judgment and blessing to groups in history. Insisted, in other words, on the fact that God was the same God who had cursed and blessed groups in Old Testament times. In fact, most Protestants believed him. It was a prominent motive in all Protestant preaching in the 16th and the 17th centuries. I labour it a little here because, of course, we hear very little of it today. But Tyndale, one of the pioneer English Protestant writers, made a great deal of this thought threatening England, threatening the bishops, threatening the king, threatening the If the gospel was not heeded and the law not obeyed. In the practice of Prelate, one of his texts, he really goes to prone in the closing pages foretelling doom for England. It doesn't repent of its disregard of the Bible and its little moral tenders. And that's only one of the places where this line of thought is developed. And this too is something, well, all these emphases that I've mentioned are things which later a Puritan writer took up which became part of the fateful intellectual furniture, if I may put it this way, of all of Puritan thinkers and Puritan theologians. Here, right at the beginning, you've got Tyndale expounding in a very vivid and intense way these basic thoughts. As I say, the most the most significant of all are the two that I mentioned in the heading to this section of the note. The lordship of the Bible and the thought of justified man in covenant with God. Here you've got part of the intellectual seabed under which Puritanism grew. Clemson, page 199 of his book of his book, Writes the Sorrows, thus Tyndale first among English writers gave literary expression to the major theological themes of law, covenant, and reward, upon which the Puritan tradition within English-speaking Christianity built. And with the one qualification regarding Tyndale's covenant teaching that I made a moment ago, that statement seems to me to be true. And Tyndale, the martyr, thus stands as one of the grandfathers, if we may put it this way, of the Puritan movement. Well, there's element number one in this list of formative influences on Puritanism. Go to section number two. Unless there are questions about Tyndale which you want to ask before we go on, are there? He used the phrase righteousness being reckoned to a man, but he used it in just the same way that Luther had used it, namely of the actual reckoning to a man of a status, the actual bestowing upon a man of a status, a status of forgiveness and acceptance, as neither Luther nor Tyndale worked it out in terms of the righteousness of Christ being reckoned to us. That you find in Calvin's Institute, but again, not worked out in any very great detail. The really elaborate statements of it belong to later and essentially later Reformed divines, well, and Lutheran divines too. But here we are right at the beginning of Reformation theology, and this particular point had not yet been clarified. So when you read Tyndale speaking of righteousness being imputed to a man, his thought is just of his being given a justified status for Christ's sake on the grounds of the atonement because of the bloodshedding of Christ by reason of the cross. That's the way Luther said it and that's the way that Tyndale said it. That's as far as they got. No more? Onward to Bradford. Second element in the making of Puritanism, the legacy of Bradford, which I described as the piety of repentance, preached, lived out, written out or written up. The first chapter of Terry Lillow's book The New England Mind speaks of the, indeed this is his title, the Augustinian strain of piety which marks all the purity. A strain of piety which derives, says Lillow, very rightly, from the prominence in men's minds of three thoughts, the thought of God, holy and gracious, the thought of sin, damning and potent, and the thought, Lillow says, of regeneration. I think it's truer if you're characterizing the Puritan movement as a whole to say the thought of turning to God from sin. That turning to God which of course all the Puritans knew could not be without regeneration but which was specifically regeneration expressed in action. God, sin, turning to God from sin, that's the, those are the three elements which make the Augustinian strain of piety. Calvin has put in this tradition, and you will remember that in Institute Book Three he tells us in his chapter on repentance that the whole of the Christian life from one standpoint is repentance. It is a matter of continually turning to God, turning away from sin and sin's allurement. And the pioneer in setting before Englishmen a model of this particular strain of piety, this particular understanding of the Christian life, this particular understanding that is to say worked out in a reformed context, worked out on the basis of the doctrine of justification by faith, was John Bradford. You probably know his name as one of the Marian martyrs. Here are the basic facts about him. He was born in Manchester about 1510 of a wealthy family who first of all sent him into the army. After a short military career he decided to become a lawyer. In 1547, when he was 37, and when he was studying law in London, he was converted. Converted quite strikingly and dramatically probably through his friend who at that time was also studying law, a man named Thomas Sampson who later, like Sampson with a P by the way, S-A-M-P-S-O-N who later, like Bradford, was ordained and was in exile under Mary and after Elizabeth's reign began became a leader in the Vesparian Controversy. He became, that is, a leading Puritan campaigning for the abolition of the surface. Sampson came to be the means of Bradford's conversion. And Bradford, having once come to a living faith, manifested immediately a very intense piety and he made very rapid progress both in Christian sanctity and in Christian understanding. And he decided almost at once to become a minister. We are told that immediately on his conversion he sold his chains, rings, brooches and jewels of gold to distribute the proceeds for the poor. He went to Cambridge to study the scriptures and equip himself to preach. He was ordained in 1560. He became a fellow of a Cambridge college. He became a friend of Martin Dueser, a Dueser of Strasbourg reformer who had come to Cambridge to be professor of divinity at that time. And in 1551, only four years after his conversion, he was chosen to be one of Edward VI's six itinerant chaplains who were to thump the country preaching the faith of the Reformation and teaching Englishmen the gospel. Well, it was a rapid rise that he was that sort of man. He'd grown in grace very rapidly and he'd won praise on all hands for sanctity and also for theological skill and power of utterance. His writings, as a matter of fact, reveal this. He is one of the most pointed and powerful writers, one of the clearest writers of all the reformers. In his work as a preacher during the two years in which he was at liberty to fulfill this ministry, and I'll quote the words of John Fox, the martyrologist, quote, sharply he opened and recruited sin, sweetly he preached Christ crucified, tiffany he impugned heresy from error, earnestly he persuaded to godly life. During that period he had one famous sermon that he preached on more than one occasion, a sermon of repentance which people asked him to publish. And in 1553 he did publish it and it was the first reformed Protestant sermon of repentance, sermon on the subject of repentance, that England had had in print ever. Then that sermon, I may say, was reprinted in 1574 because of the popular demand for it. Then the year 1553, about the time when the sermon came out, Bradford was arrested. Edward VI had died and Queen Mary had come to the throne. She was determined to bring England back to Rome as soon as she could and she set to work to inhibit, by fair means or foul, all the major Protestant preachers who remained in the country, and of course a lot of Protestants in fact didn't remain in the country, no less than 800 of them fled abroad for the period of Mary's reign, they saw what was coming. But Bradford stayed and was arrested and was condemned, as all the Marian martyrs were condemned, for unorthodoxy regarding the mass. Transubstantiation was the test question. A man who on examination professed that he didn't believe in transubstantiation went to the stake for heresy. That was the principle of the Marian barons. Anne Bradford was burned in 1655. He was burned with a young man, an apprentice, named Leif. And it's recorded that almost his last words were words of encouragement to young Leif. Be of good comfort, brother, for we shall have a merry supper with the Lord this night. From that you can gather the kind of men he was. And we're told that his very last words as he died in the fire, that they were continually repeated, repent, England. Repent, England. Repent, England. What about John Bradford? A man who, as his biographer, Samson, Samson became his biographer, and Samson wrote of him that he fulfilled a great ministry in a very short time. His particular legacy, that legacy which became part of the intellectual heritage of Puritanism, was along the line of devotional literature explicating and enforcing the piety of repentance. There was this sermon of which I've already spoken to you. And there was another volume of his work, Meditations on the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and the Commandments, plus A Defense of Election. An interesting little volume. Published in 1562, after Elizabeth's reign had begun, and often reprinted, found very acceptable, therefore, evidently, by the people of God in England at that time. All that he wrote is on the wonder of grace for sinners, on humility for sins, and on the life of faith and repentance. These were his staple themes. They have come out, too, in certain letters that he wrote from Britain, which were published in 1564, in a compendium that Miles Coverdale, the one-time bishop of Exeter, the one-time agent, well, the one-time successor of Wycliffe, in publishing translations of the Bible, had got out, a compendium called Godly Letters of the Martyrs. The sermon itself is what we would call an evangelistic sermon, and an exceedingly powerful one. It defines repentance in terms of sorrow for sins, together with trust in God, through Christ, for pardon, together with a purpose to amend, or conversion to a new life. That phrase is actually quoted from Britain, a purpose to amend, or conversion to a new life. And having swept away the errors of Rome about the meaning of repentance, poietentia, penance, just something formal that you do after you've been to confession, he goes on to speak, first of the way in which the law shows us our sin and our need of repentance, he dwells on the reality of the curse and wrath of God against sin, and then he gives model prayers for repentance and faith, just as modern evangelists do. He said a little about Christ's invitation in Matthew 11, 28 and following, come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, even the worst of you. And he ends up finally with a strong exhortation to conversion to a new life, holiness, obedience to the law of God, obedience to the lordship of Jesus. All these things are there in Bradford, in Bradford's 1553 sermon of repentance. And something of the power of it still comes across, despite the fact that the colloquial language in which it's written inevitably reads a little bit cramped and quaint at the present time. Of this sermon, William Perkins, the leading Puritan theologian at the end of Elizabeth's reign, wrote as follows in the preface to his own little tract on repentance, published in 1593. I quote the words, you don't need to take them down. The interesting thing is the testimony which they bear. Whereas there have been published heretofore two sermons of repentance, one by Mr. Bradford, Marker, the other by Mr. Arthur Dent, sermons indeed which have done much good, my meaning is not to add thereunto or to teach another doctrine, but only to renew and revive the memory of that which they have taught. Which is simply to say that Perkins deliberately sits himself in the Bradford succession so far as teaching about repentance is concerned. And he's got no ambition for himself as a writer on this subject other than simply to echo and rethink what Bradford has taught. As we go on you'll have evidence of abundance set before you to enable you to see just how fundamental in Puritan piety this thought of repentance was. Repentance that is expounded in this large way as conversion to a new life, turning from all sin and every sin every day of your life. If Bradford inspired the Puritan tradition on this subject, then clearly he too makes his mark as a grandfather of Puritanism. Bradford in fact is a grandfather of Puritanism in more ways than this. For not merely did he sorry, not merely did he write about repentance but he also distinguished himself by the way that he practiced it. Now this, wait a minute, this is a book which ought to have the record of his practice on page 90, oh yes, here it is. I thought for a moment that I brought the wrong book. I would like to read to you from the way in which Samson in his Life of Bradford, Prefix to the 1574 Reprint of the Sermon describes Bradford's own practice of repentance. Because this too is Puritanism. This presents you in a strikingly intense form with the kind of piety that was characteristic of the Puritan leaders all through. His manner, Bradford's manner writes Samson was to make himself a catalogue of all the grossest and worst sins which in his life of ignorance he had committed and to lay the flame before his eyes when he went to private prayer that by the sight and remembrance of them he might be stirred up to offer to God the sacrifice of a contrite heart to seek assurance of salvation in Christ by faith to thank God for his calling from the ways of wickedness and to pray for increases of grace to be conducted in holy life acceptable and pleasing to God. Such a continual exercise of conscience he had in private prayer that he did not count himself to have prayed to his contentation until in it he had felt inwardly some lighting of heart for sin and some healing of that wound by faith feeling the saving health of Christ with some change of mind into the detestation of sin and love of obeying the good will of God. Without such an inward exercise of prayer our Bradford did not pray to his full contentation as appears by this. He used in the morning to go to the common prayer in the college where he was that's when he was at Cambridge in 1550 and after that he used to make some prayer with his pupils in his chamber but not content with this he then repaired to his own secret prayer and exercise in prayer by himself as one that had not yet prayed to his own mind for he would want to say to his familiars that is his friends I have prayed with my pupils but I have not yet prayed with myself. And this Bradford described this Samson described as our Bradford's exercises of repentance. And there's more to come another of his exercises was this he used to make to himself an ephemeris or a journal that's 16th century language for a diary in which he used to write all such notable things as either he did see or hear each day of the month but whatsoever he did hear or see he did so tell it that a man might see in that book the signs of his slip and heart for if he did see or hear any good in any man by that sight he found and noted the want thereof in himself and added a short prayer craving mercy and grace to a man if he did hear or see any plague or misery he noted it as a thing procured by his own sins and constantly added Domine Miserere me, Lord have mercy upon me and he used of the same book to note such evil thoughts as did rise in him as of ending the good of other men or thoughts of unthankfulness of not considering God in his work of hardness and unsensibleness of heart when he did see others moved and affected moved and affected that is by the things of God and thus, Lord sent us in the quote thus he made to himself and of himself a book of daily practices of repentance and here you've got first the pioneer the pioneer example of a Puritan of prayer all Puritans when they went to God were concerned to feel the things that they prayed about all were concerned to pray about the things that Grandfather prayed about and all thought I shall not say but one has to say feelings I hate the word, I was trying to dodge it it's so inadequate for the real thing but they all thought to feel what they prayed they all thought feelings of hatred of sin love for Christ confidence in Christ revolution to serve God henceforth also, here in Brentford you've got the pioneer Puritan diary this became a standard devotional exercise among the Puritans namely to keep a diary and to record in the diary such things that when you read them would humble you for sin and stir you up to new revolution and zeal a diary was intended to be a record of one's own spiritual pilgrimage it was, as has been said the Puritan confessional not of course in the theological sense but simply the way that the Puritan kept stock kept stock of the way that his spiritual life was going if you want Puritan examples of this read at your leisure M. M. Natton the man who wrote on Puritanism M. M. Natton two Elizabethan Puritan diaries they're in the library they're the diaries of Samuel Ward and Richard Rogers the diary of Richard Rogers in particular it's fascinating Richard Rogers was one of the pioneer Puritan pastors of whom I'll be speaking later here then you've got Blaircliffe teaching repentance practicing repentance writing about repentance and hereby teaching this place as one of the ancestors of Puritanism one of the pioneers of the experimental piety to use the Puritan phrase which the Puritans always aspired after a piety of strong faith and strong repentance a piety of daily turning from sin knowing one's sins daily reckoning daily with the fate of indwelling sin turning from sin daily and seeking by the grace of God to keep clear of sin daily basic in the Puritan understanding of the life of saints and it was Bradford who more powerfully than anyone else of his generation set this before the minds of earnest godly Englishmen and there then you've got the second element in the making of Puritanism as a distinctive spiritual movement our time's gone, we must stop are there any questions about Bradford? I hope I've convinced you incidentally that Bradford is a man whose works are worth reading not everybody whose works were published in the Parker Society the Parker Society volumes is worth reading some of them are really rather secondary specimens of exposition but Bradford is so great and if ever you've read all your Puritan research and want something else to go on to you could do works and go on to Bradford goodbye