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Sermons Before Parliament (1640–1649) As A Public Puritan Diary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

James C. Spalding
James C. Spalding
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, School of Religion, University of Iowa
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Extract

The publication thirty years ago by M. M. Knappen of the diaries of Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward called attention to the puritan diary as a means of understanding puritan character. These were two examples of rather frequently kept journals in which pious diarists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century made a careful account of both their moral successes and failures together with those events in their lives which were signs of God's judgment or favor. Such records provided for the authors a basis upon which meaningful decision could be made as they looked after the affairs of their mortal lives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 24 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1967

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References

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2. “I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and sunny land.” It is no accident that this poem of William Blake is in tribute to Milton, John. The Poems of William Blake. Edited by Yeats, W. B.. London, 1893, p. 207.Google Scholar

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22. Case, Thomas, God's Rising His Enemies Scattering: delivered in a sermon … Oct. 26, 1642. But through many occasions and hinderances not printed till this 25 of May 1644. London, 1644, p. 47Google Scholar. Some of these sermons seem to have been printed just a few days after they were preached. Case seems to have been the archetype of the procrastinating scholar whose work is never quite ready to go to press.