Abstract
A godly life was the expression of holiness. As earlier chapters have emphasized, it was an indispensable part of being a puritan that one’s life displayed the fruits of a saving faith, and that this life was open to the scrutiny and admiration of other godly individuals, that it was a constant reproach to the profane, and a living tribute to God. But such a life was not possible independently of the brethren. Chapter 3 set out what it was to be a ‘visible saint’ — the gadding after sermons, the exercise of spiritual gifts in ‘conference’ with other saints or in the ‘closet duties’ of prayer and self-examination — and discussed the ‘community of saints’, the brotherhood of the spirit which sustained the godly few in the face of popular hostility or apathy. Individual puritans, I suggest, could hardly have existed in isolation from the puritan community and its life. But what was the relationship between the puritan and his or her brethren?
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Notes and References
See W. Stevenson’s chapters in M. Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 332–87.
Disney, Some Remarkable Passages, pp. 24–5.
Allaine, Most Familiar Explanation, p. 171.
Green, Christian’s ABC, p. 212.
Staunton, A Sermon …, p. 22.
Disney, Some Remarkable Passages, p. 19.
Trosse, Life, p. 81,
Janeway, Death Unstung, p. 67.
Staunton, A Sermon …, pp. 26–34.
Lake, ‘Feminine Piety’, 145.
Storey (ed.), Two East Anglian Diaries, p. 129.
Eyre, ‘Autobiography’, p. 90.
J. Eales, ‘The Continuity of Puritanism 1559–1642’, in Durston and Eales (eds), Culture of English Puritanism, pp. 196–7.
Baxter, Calendar, I, 401.
Baxter, Calendar, I, 334.
Baxter, Calendar, I, 345.
Collinson, Godly People, p. 548.
Fielding, ‘Opposition to Personal Rule’, 774.
McGiffert (ed.), God’s Plot, p. 47; Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, p. 52; Baxter, Calendar, I, 150.
See Spufford (ed.), World of Rural Dissenters, ch. 7.
The numbers of puritans before 1660 are incalculable because of the difficulties of definition; see M. Spufford, ‘Can We Count the “Godly” and the “Conformable” in the Seventeenth Century?’, JEH, 36 (1985).
For the better records after 1660 see Whiteman, Compton Census, and Spufford (ed.), World of Rural Dissenters’, but even the most detailed work is of necessity treating very small samples — Dr Stevenson, for example, has identified a sample of 759 dissenters of all kinds in Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire from the hearth tax records of 1671–4.
Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 98.
Disney, Some Remarkable Passages, p. 55.
Tibbutt (ed.), Minutes of Church at Bedford, p. 69; Underhill (ed.), Records of Broadmead, pp. 166, 186–7.
Trosse, Life, appended life by Gilling, pp. 61, 64.
Webster, Stephen Marshall, p. 17.
Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 106; Cross, Church and People, p. 199.
Hayden (ed.), Records of a Church in Bristol, pp. 85, 93.
Hayden (ed.), Records of a Church in Bristol, p. 117.
G. L. Turner (ed.), Original Records of Early Nonconformity under Persecution and Indulgence, 3 vols (1911–14), III, 587;
Newcome, Autobiography, p.13; Richardson, Puritans, p. 105.
William Gouge, A Funeral Sermon .. and the Life of Mrs Margaret Duck (1646), pp.26–7;
Greaves, John Bunyan and Nonconformity, p. 67;
J. Eales, ‘Samuel Clarke and the “Lives” of Godly Women in Seventeenth-century England’, SCH, 27 (1990), p. 367.
Richardson, Puritans, p. 108.
M. McGiffert, ‘Covenant, Crown and Commons in Elizabethan Puritanism’, JBS, 20 (1980), 51.
D. D. Hall, ‘John Cotton’s Letter to Samuel Skelton’, William and Mary Quarterly, 22 (1965), 484.
Tibbutt (ed.), Records of Church at Bedford, pp. 16–17.
Matthews (ed.), Savoy Declaration, p. 122, footnote;
also see The Axminster Ecclesiastica 1660–1698, ed. K. W. H. Howard (Sheffield, 1976), pp. 29–34.
S. Brachlow, The Communion of Saints (Oxford, 1988), p. 58.
Matthews (ed.), Savoy Declaration, p. 72.
Martindale, Life, pp. 67–8.
Baxter, Calendar, I, 344–5, 333.
Underhill (ed.), Records of the Churches at Fenstanton, p. 24.
Seaver, Wallington’s World, p. 103.
Richardson, Puritans, pp. 103–4.
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© 1998 John Spurr
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Spurr, J. (1998). The Puritan Life. In: English Puritanism 1603–1689. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26854-2_12
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