• 1 Here I draw on the approach outlined in Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford (...)

1In this essay, we will stand back from the political, social and theological controversies that inevitably dominate most discussions of this subject, and venture into the interior of puritan experience. My approach is driven by my conviction that an essential frame – maybe the essential frame – for the history of religion is the history of emotions.1 Belief, identity, culture, politics, all of the things that make the history of puritanism important: none of these things make any sense unless we understand the motives of puritans (and of antipuritans), what actually made them care about these issues enough to reshape their lives around them. As they themselves would have said, the difference between the godly, the “hotter sort of protestant,” and the mere carnal protestant who assumes that identity but sits loosely to it, is a difference not of doctrine but of intensity. So the question of what it actually meant to live one’s life as a puritan is not a closing curiosity, but an issue which underlies everything else. In this short essay we will explore how puritans understood their lives and the meaning of those lives, and what consequences that might have had.

• 3 Thomas Wilcox, A right godly and learned Exposition, vpon the whole Booke of Psalmes (RSTC 25625. L (...)
• 4 Arthur Dent, A Sermon of Repentance (RSTC 6649.5. London, 1582), sig. B7r; John Brinsley, The True (...)

6This meant that the redeemed sinner’s life should have a very distinctive shape. As the puritan agitator Thomas Wilcox put it: “if you be not now, as in regarde of spirituall graces, in better estate then you were longe a go, feare your condition.” Those who are not growing are as good as dead. “Standing water,” it was said, “putrefies and rots.”3 Stagnation was potentially even worse than a spectacular fall into sin, which might at least spark appalled repentance. It was a commonplace that Christians should “leaue euery daie some synne,” “daily procede further and further, from vertue to virtue,” “euery day grow vntil we come to perfection.”4 Daily progress was accepted as a sign of election. This is, in other words, unremittingly relentless.

• 5 Nicholas Byfield, The Marrow of the Oracles of God (RSTC 4220.5. London, 1622), pp. 464-5; Richard (...)

7The obvious result was fear of backsliding into sin, but that is not all. Nicholas Byfield insisted that the Christian must “carefully perseuer in his first loue,” that is, maintain the spiritual and emotional heights of conversion undimmed throughout life, and that emphasis on preserving “our first love” (the phrase was picked up from Revelation 2:4) was very widely cited. To “waxe cold” in our love, the Essex puritan Richard Rogers wrote, is “an intollerable trecherie.”5

• 6 [Thomas Tymme], A siluer vvatch-bell. The sound wherof is able (by the grace of God) to win the mos (...)

8The problem of course was that steady, progressive sanctification was a poor fit with real life. Squaring this circle was a major preoccupation of Reformed Protestant piety. There were several possible resolutions, the most obvious being to set the right pace. Progressive sanctification was a lifetime’s work, not a day’s or a year’s. Saints could afford to take their time, and might even be wise to do so. “If wee had learned but euery yeare one vertue since we were borne,” Thomas Tymme lamented, “we might by this time haue bin like saints among men.” That at least seems a manageable tempo.6 It could make sense to avoid tackling your sins too quickly, so as to leave yourself some headroom in the future.

• 7 John Dod and Robert Cleaver, Ten sermons tending chiefely to the fitting of men for the worthy rece (...)

9Another possibility was to distinguish between perception and reality. If you feel yourself to be far from God, you should remember the perseverance of the saints and trust him. John Dod comforted those who felt “their corruptions stirring more violently, and temptations rushing vpon them more fiercely then euer before.” It was not a sign of backsliding, he said, but the opposite: “now that their sinne hath had a deadly blow, it beginneth (like a madde Bull in the same case) to rage more furiously.”7 The Devil only pays attention to those who are threatening to escape him.

• 8 Robert Bolton, A discourse about the state of true happinesse (RSTC 3228. London, 1611), p. 94; Joh (...)
• 9 Dorothy M. Meads (ed.), The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 (London, George Routledge, 1930) (...)

10But for all the arguments, backsliding was an unavoidable lived experience. It was a commonplace that the once-fervent were all too likely to grow “formall and cursory,” “cold and heauy.”8 The sense of being becalmed during the long years of middle age was particularly prevalent. Margaret Hoby expressed her frustration with it: “I Continewe in my accostomed exercises but my increasinges in goodes waies is not as I thirst for.”9 The experience of sanctification did not match the theory.

• 10 John Preston, The Saints Daily Exercise. A Treatise concerning the whole dutie of prayer (RSTC 2025 (...)
• 11 For example, John Andrewes, The Conuerted Mans New Birth: describing the direct way to go to Heauen(...)

11Some puritans dealt with this by trying to complicate the narrative of sanctification. Perhaps God intends us to leave our first love behind as our faith matures, or expects that our progress will ebb and flow like the tides or the seasons, or trains us in holiness by withdrawing his felt presence. But the more common response was to focus, not on ephemeral feelings, but on actual sin. Sanctification, obviously, ought to mean becoming less sinful. While sin of some kind was inescapable in this world, puritans hoped that they were sinful in a different way from the reprobate. John Preston argued that “a particular offence doth not offend [God] so much … as if we grow to a generall rebellion against him.” In other words, when the elect sin it is out of character; the reprobate, on the other hand, make a habit of it.10 This is of course very close to the traditional Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sins, and in the seventeenth century we find that distinction creeping back into puritan usage, sometimes in those very words.11

• 12 Thomas Hooker, The Soules Humiliation (RSTC 13278. London, 1637), p. 68; cf. Samuel Torshell, The h (...)

12A variant to this approach emphasised repentance rather than sin. Everyone sins, but the elect match daily sin with daily repentance, whereas the reprobate simply pile sin upon sin. Believers may be surprised or tempted into sin against their better judgement, but failure to repent can only be deliberate obstinacy. Which is all very well, but it could become a fixed pattern: to repent, return to the same sins, and repent again was to be stuck “like a horse in a mill,” always turning but never really moving: Thomas Hooker called this “the mill of prayer.”12 To repent and repeat was simply to mock God. The author of one puritan commonplace book wrote:

• 14 Thomas Goodwin, The Works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D. (Edinburgh, James Nichol, 1861), II, pp. lviii-li (...)

13Thomas Goodwin remembered having been stuck in such a pattern in his own youth, and in retrospect he saw the whole cycle as steeped in sin.14 No-one wanted their life story to be a tale of a dog returning to its vomit.

• 15 George Abbot, Brief Notes upon the whole Book of Psalms (Wing A65. London, 1651), sig. A7r.

14There was only one approach which recognised the reality of recurrent sin but was also able to maintain a satisfying and plausible life narrative, and this was to make repentance a transformative rather than a routine event. For every step back, there must be two steps forward. Repentance must be an occasion of closing one chapter and opening another. If you fall, ensure that you always bounce back higher.15 And so this was the perennial struggle of the puritan life: to keep it from sinking into mere routine.

• 16 John Norden, A pensiue mans practise, verie profitable for all persons (RSTC 18617.7. London, 1598) (...)

15We can follow the battle in puritan prayer-books. One of their recurrent features is texts ostensibly intended for repeated use which would be almost impossible to use routinely. Take, for example, this prayer of John Norden’s from the 1590s: “I doe vnfainedly condemne all my former life to be most vile, determining in my heart, by thy grace to forsake sin, & cleaue vnto godlines.”16 That particular theme – asserting that the moment of prayer is a decisive turning-point in your life story, and that today is the first day of the rest of your life – is a recurrent one, in private papers as well as published books. Grace Mildmay’s manuscripts contain this prayer:

• 19 Thomas Tymme, A silver vvatch-bell (RSTC 24434. London, 1640), pp. 294-5.

17Thomas Tymme instructed his readers to review their sins every single night, “with this resolution in thy selfe, to spend the remainder of thy life after a better manner, (and with a better conscience) than heretofore thou hast done.”19 And then to make the same resolution the following night, and the night after that.

• 21 Dent, Sermon of Repentance, sig. C4r.
• 22 Gilbert Primrose, The Christian Mans Teares, And Christs Comforts (RSTC 20389. London, 1625).

20This does seem, often enough, to have worked: puritans who suspected they were settling into routine often used thoughts like this to shock themselves into religious earnestness. But while life is indeed both short and unpredictable, it is also full of false alarms. After some decades of life, of dangers escaped, any technique you might use to shock yourself into awareness of your spiritual state could be dulled by repetition. The repentance which is accompanied by hot tears one day can become part of the mill of prayer by the next. As preachers ratcheted up their rhetoric, audiences became progressively more inured to its effects. Arthur Dent urged, “although wee could neuer bee moued with any Sermon hetherto, yet let vs now bee moued once at last”: a powerful appeal, to be sure, but what then was the next preacher supposed to say?21 It was a commonplace to urge audiences and readers that now, the present moment, was the time for repentance, that it should and could be a moment of crisis in their lives. Throughout the published text of Gilbert Primrose’s 1624 fast sermon The Christian Mans Teares, the word “NOW” was capitalised to emphasise the urgency of his call to repent.22 But how many such calls could an audience hear before they suspected their preachers of crying wolf?

• 23 Samuel Ward, A Coal from the Altar, to Kindle the holy fire of Zeale (RSTC 25039. London, 1615), p. (...)

21There was no foolproof solution to these problems, but we may finish by noticing one of the most widespread attempts to solve them: that is, to borrow crises from the recent past, which for English puritans in particular meant the Marian persecution of the 1550s. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs needs to be recognised as one of puritanism’s most important devotional texts. Conventicles read it aloud to one another. The Essex puritan Samuel Ward promised readers that “the very pictures of the fires, and Martyrs, cannot but warme thee.”23 The early abridged versions of Foxe’s book do not concentrate on the cruelty of the persecutors or on the doctrines which Foxe documented so painstakingly, but on the martyrs’ constancy at their deaths, their prayers, their words of comfort, their readiness for suffering. To read these martyr-stories was almost inevitably to ask yourself: what if it were me?

• 24 Gervase Babington, A briefe conference betwixt mans frailtie and faith (RSTC 1082. London, 1584), p (...)

22This kind of vicarious suffering brought a thrill of fear to puritan readers. In the 1580s, Gervase Babington set out to dispel the anxieties with which he thought Protestants were most often troubled, the last of which was, “I feare my nature if persecution should arise for religion.” His description of how he dealt with it “whensoeuer I thinke of this matter” makes it sound like an almost everyday event, and for some it may have been.24 Satirists might lampoon those who wished “to become a martyr … like those in Foxe’s book,” but for some it was no joke. One seven-year-old girl in the early seventeenth century, finding herself tempted to deny her faith, consequently

• 27 Princeton University Library, MS RTC01 no. 62 (Elizabeth Isham’s Book of Rememberance), fo. 9r-v; B (...)

24In early seventeenth-century England, the real danger of such a fiery trial was pretty distant, but its value to puritans struggling against routine and hypocrisy was unmistakable. It could, indeed, be genuinely frightening. As an eight-year-old girl in 1617, Elizabeth Isham was alarmed by adults who she said were “of the presiser sort” talking about Catholic invasions and of the horrors that might follow. “Hearing of the joys of those Marters that suffered for the Prodistant Religion,” she remembered, “I was at this time very apprehensive of there Blessednes.” Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety, by far the most popular devotional book of the seventeenth century, covered all eventualities. If God calls believers to the “honour to suffer Martyrdome,” Bayly warned, it might be by “open burning” (as under Mary); by “secret murdering” (as under the Spanish Inquisition); by “outragious massacring” (as in France); or by “being blowne vp with Gun-powder” (which needed no explanation). However it came, what mattered was living in readiness for it, so “that wee may seale with our deaths the Euangelicall trueth which we haue professed in our liues.”27

• 28 John Foxe, The ecclesiasticall history contaynyng the Actes and monuments. Newly recognised and inl (...)
• 29 James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London, (...)
• 30 Tom Webster and Kenneth Shipps (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Rogers, 1634-1638 (Church of England Rec (...)

25Those who did not wish to contemplate being burned, massacred or blown up could use martyr-stories analogically. Foxe himself envisaged this, believing that the martyrs’ example ought to encourage readers “to stand more stoutly in battaile agaynst our aduersaries,” by which he meant temptations to sin and worldliness in the present.28 When Sessilia Dewes died in 1618, her husband wrote a long account of her exemplary pious death “at the beginning of a large Book of Martyrs,” setting her struggles and triumph alongside those of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley. Foxe himself described the victims of plague as martyrs. Not even death was necessary. Richard Sibbes said that simple struggles with temptation “make the life of many good Christians almost a Martyrdome.”29 But traditionally martyrdom requires a persecutor, and this mentality helped to make puritans unusually ready to interpret any opposition as persecution. Antipuritans, anyone who laughed at or disdained puritans’ practices or demeanours, even anyone who questioned their judgement on a particular religious question: such people were easily cast as persecutors, for the simple reason that puritans expected and needed persecutors. They revelled in such “persecution”; sometimes, they actively sought it out. “All the house against mee as too strict; but I have comfort in it,” wrote Samuel Rogers in his diary. In George Gifford’s dialogue between a puritan and a countryman, the countryman wishes mildly that puritans would become better subjects, and the puritan responds with disproportionate self-righteousness: “I must suffer your reproch, for if they haue called the good man of the house Beelzebub, howe much more those which be of his houshold.”30

• 31 Richard Baxter, A holy commonwealth (Wing B1281. London, 1659), p. 457.

26There are many other ways we could tell the story of how puritans lived their lives, but I have chosen this way through the material in the hope of persuading the readers that this emotional perspective on the puritan experience is both revealing and consequential. By beginning from the inner devotional experience, the problem of how puritans interpreted the shape of their own lives and dealt with the problem of sanctification, we can see how these apparently deeply inward struggles could lead to puritans constructing themselves and their lives in such a way as to accentuate their divisions with their conformist and antipuritan neighbours, to seek out and cherish anything that might be interpreted as persecution, and in the end to split English society down the middle, with a particular horror of settled religious peace, which no puritan whose life was consumed by the struggle with sin could see as anything other than a defeat. We cannot, quite, say that it was the devotional character of puritanism that tipped England into civil war in the 1640s. But we may perhaps recall Richard Baxter’s observation that “the Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies.”31 Puritans’ devotional life was part of what made them ready to expect such a war, and, when it came, to accept it, and to fight it and to win it. It was, we might say, a continuation of their prayers by other means.