Digital Logos Edition
In this classic account, John Brown provides an insightful overview of the lives and influence of the Puritans. Brown seeks to show how the Puritans affected politics and the social climate of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in addition to outlining their ideology and key characters. This volume documents how the word “Puritan” came to be used and applied, as well how the term changed over the course of history. Brown points out the impact of Calvin, Luther and the Reformation on the Puritan fathers. This edition includes an index and a bibliography, including a preface by the author.
The English Puritans is an excellent resource for students, professors, and anyone wishing to understand more about the Puritans and their effect on religion and politics. With the Logos edition, you can study the Puritan fathers right alongside your other resources.
“For puritanism was not so much an organised system as a religious temper and a moral force, and being such it could enter into combinations and alliances of varied kind.” (Page 1)
“Both in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the leaders of the puritans were among the foremost of their age in learning and intellectual force. They were, for the most part, university men, and for culture and refinement of taste had no need to fear comparison with their opponents either in Church or State. It may be true that there were small men among them, men bitter and narrow and rude, but so there were among those on the other side; and when all abatements have been made, and all has been said that can be said in the way of caricature and depreciation, it still remains true that the sacred cause of liberty owes much to these men, and that the puritan strain has entered into much that is best in our national life and literature.” (Page 4)
“It has been truly said that her cruelties, her martyr-fires by ‘the loathing which they produced in the minds of Englishmen did more to establish the Reformation than any other single cause.” (Page 8)
“Thus in protestantism there was at this early stage a right and a left wing, not unlike the differences sometimes found in a modern political party.” (Page 24)
“Turning now to the protestants and to the way in which the Act of Uniformity affected them, we find them already dividing themselves into two parties which we may describe as court reformers and puritans.” (Page 23)
John Brown's account of the political history of the Puritans up to 1660 has not lost its freshness. It is a heroic, inspiring story and Brown tells it well.
—J. I. Packer, author of A Quest for Godliness