The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

‘Seeing God hath given us such a treasure and so inestimable a thing as his word is, we must employ ourselves as much as we can that it may be kept safe and sound and not perish. . . . First of all let every man see he lock it up fast in his own heart. But yet it is not enough for us to have an eye to our own salvation, but the knowledge of God must shine generally throughout all the world and every one must be partaker of it, we must take pains to bring all them that wander out of the way to the way of salvation: and we must not only think upon it for our life time, but for after our death.’

JOHN CALVIN Sermons on the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus, 1579, 746-7

‘In Dr. Whyte’s opinion, at no time has any land for its size, save Palestine, produced “so many men and women of a profoundly spiritual experience, and of an adoring and heavenly mind, as Scotland possessed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”. In his ecstasy he exclaims. “What minds and what hearts those men and and women had! And how they gave up their heart to the life of godliness in the land and to the life of God in their own hearts! How thin and poor our religious life appears besides theirs!” To the causes which he suggests for this superiority the persecution, the new Reformation doctrines, the masculine and Pauline preaching — other two at least may be added, the solid and serious books then in favour and the place assigned to the inspired psalms, now too often usurped by frothy hymns.

DAVID HAY FLEMING ‘Dr. Whyte and Samuel Rutherford’, Critical Reviews Relating Chiefly to Scotland, 1912, 350

‘Now, Christians, the more great and glorious things you expect from God, as the downfall of antichrist, the conversion of the Jews, the conquest of the nations to Christ, the breaking off of all yokes, the new Jerusalem’s coming down from above, the extraordinary pouring out of the Spirit, and a more general union among all saints, the more holy, yea, the more eminently holy in all your ways and actings it becomes you to be.’

THOMAS BROOKS

The Crown and Glory of Christianity,1662 (Complete Works, 1867, 444)

IN the two preceding chapters we have sought to show how mainstream Puritanism believed that the Church despite all the odds set against her was yet to be an instrument of blessing on a scale far surpassing all that has been previously seen in history. It is our present purpose to show the consequences of this outlook upon spiritual character in the seventeenth century.

At the outset it has to be admitted that an interest in unfulfilled prophecy is not always conducive to Christian piety. The Christians at Thessalonica were only the first among many in the course of Church history whose witness was marred by a feverish and misguided expectation upon this subject. In 1620 Elnathan Parr complained of ‘certain foolish prophecies dispersed that the world shall end within these twenty years’, while two centuries and a half later C. H. Spurgeon had still to bewail the influence of ‘twopenny-halfpenny prophets all crying out as one man that He will come in 1866 or 1867’. It is plain that attention to prophecy, instead of producing a moral and sanctifying effect, can merely promote speculative curiosities and intellectual pride. Towards the end of his life Richard Baxter made the pithy observation: ‘We find it so easy to possess men with a fervent zeal for the Millenary opinion, and so hard to make them zealous in holy love to God and man, and in heavenly conversation, as may make us suspicious that both sorts of zeal have not the same original.’

Puritan pastors were alive to this danger and took steps to prevent aberrations developing in their own congregations. When they dealt with unfulfilled prophecy it was not as a ‘special subject’ of peculiar importance — as became the fashion in the nineteenth century — rather, their treatment almost invariably occurred in the ordinary course of expository preaching, and both by this example and by precept the people were warned of the danger of giving to prophecy a place disproportionate to its importance. Thus Peter Martyr says:

‘It is a miserable thing, that whereas we have so many clear and manifest things in the holy scriptures, concerning faith, hope, charity, and the bonds of other virtues, wherein there is nothing obscure, we will leave those utterly neglected and with so great superstition follow other things which are uncertain and serve less unto salvation. This doth the devil endeavour, that we should earnestly occupy ourselves in questions which be infinite and unprofitable; laying aside other things, which should be necessarily kept.’

In the same vein of warning John Howe taught his people to observe:

‘That to have our minds and hearts more set upon the best state of things that it is possible the church should ever arrive to on earth, than upon the state of perfect felicity above, is a very great distemper, and which we ought to reckon intolerable by any means to indulge ourselves in. We know none of us can live in this world but a little while, and that there is a state of perfect rest, and tranquillity, and glory remaining for the people of God. We have, therefore, no pretence for being curious in our inquiries about what time such or such good things may fall out to the church of God in this world. It is a great piece of fondness to cast in our own thoughts, Is it possible that I may live to see it? For ought we know, there may be but a hand’s breadth between us and glory, if we belong to God; tomorrow may be the time of our translation. We ought to live in the continual expectation of dying, and of coming to a better state than the church can ever be in here.

It argues a great infirmity, a distemper in our spirits, that we should reflect upon with severity, if we should be more curious to see a good state of things in this world, than to see the best that can ever be, and infinitely better than we can think, in heaven.’

By such cautions as these the Puritans checked the kind of unbalanced spiritual character which prophetical interest has too often encouraged. At the same time their general view of unfulfilled prophecy was conveyed sufficiently to give a distinct tone to the spiritual character and outlook of the Church three hundred years ago. Their beliefs on this subject were not speculative areas of thought, disconnected from the everyday fundamentals of the Christian faith on the contrary they were connected with that faith at some of its most vital points, as, for instance, with the Person of Christ, with the Church, and with prayer. These are the main themes which we shall now consider in their relation to what we have called the Puritan hope. Puritan piety, in its essentials, was of course no different from true Christian piety of all ages, yet in some respects it was distinctive; it possessed certain pronounced features which, in turn, gave to Puritan Christianity not a little of the force which it exercised upon the course of history. There can be no question that belief in regard to unfulfilled prophecy contributed significantly to this distinctiveness and, as we shall see, it was the way in which that belief combined with fundamentals that made it so influential.

In this chapter, therefore, we shall seek to show how their belief concerning Christ, the Church and prayer stood related to their understanding of unfulfilled prophecy.

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Puritan beliefs as related to the work of Christ stood in direct succession to the beliefs of the Reformers and particularly to those of John Calvin. It was Calvin who recovered from the New Testament the whole concept of Christ’s lordship and sovereign glory in the carrying out of man’s redemption, and he brought to the fore the truth that the mediatorial work of Jesus did not cease at his death and resurrection; that work, for the gathering and perfecting of his Church continues, and its ultimate success rests securely upon the position which Christ now occupies. Lordship is his present possession (Rom. 14.9); he has been given ‘power over all flesh’ (John 17.2), further, ‘all power in heaven and in earth’ (Matt. 28.18), so that in the interests of his mediatorial kingdom he governs the universe. Thus Ephesians 1.22 affirms that the Father ‘hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body’. All this is richly expounded in the Westminster Shorter Catechism beginning with the statement, ‘Christ, as our Redeemer, executeth the offices of a prophet, of a priest, and of a king, both in his estate of humiliation and exaltation.’ (Answer to Question 23.)

The advancement of Christ’s kingdom stands directly related to the work of his exaltation, in which he now exercises his rule by the Holy Spirit: thus the conversion of three thousand on the day of Pentecost, the ‘great number’ who believed at Antioch, and the whole magnificent success of the gospel in the apostolic era are spoken of as things which ‘Christ hath wrought’ (cf. Acts 2.33, Acts 11.21, Rom. 15.18, 19). These successes of the gospel were proofs that Christ’s reign had begun. How triumphant that reign is to be in the earth before the end was the subject of many Old Testament prophecies. According to Psalm 2, the enthronement of the Messiah would lead to his receiving ‘the uttermost parts of the earth’ for his possession. Another psalm, after speaking of the vicarious sufferings of Christ, speaks in this way of the glory which was to follow:

‘All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. For the kingdom is the Lord’s: and he is the governor among the nations’ (Psa. 22.27, 28). In the New Testament, the realization of the Old Testament hope has commenced, Christ is now going forth ‘conquering and to conquer’ (Rev. 6.22), and it is his coming by his Spirit, among his enemies, in converting power, which explains all the revivals of Christian history. To this same activity of Christ, as we have already noted in Romans 11 Israel’s future salvation is attributed: ‘All Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer . . ’

Just as Calvin first recovered the New Testament emphasis on Christ as king and head of his Church, exercising his power by the Holy Spirit, so he also struck the note of confidence which was to sound through coming centuries. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1536, he addresses the Preface to King Francis I of France, in an appeal for respite from the bitter persecution then being inflicted upon the scattered French believers. The gospel was then everywhere spoken against; and what would be its prospects if Francis I disdained all relief and the kings of the earth continued their rage against the cause of Christ? Of the answer to that question Calvin tells his sovereign he has not the slightest doubt. The outcome is certain:

‘Our doctrine must stand sublime above all the glory of the world, and invincible by all its power, because it is not ours, but that of the living God and his Anointed, whom the Father has appointed king that he may rule from sea to sea, and from the rivers even to the ends of the earth; and so rule as to smite the whole earth and its strength of iron and brass, its splendour of gold and silver, with the mere rod of his mouth, and break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel; according to the magnificent predictions of the prophets respecting his kingdom (Dan. 2.34; Isa. ii.4; Psa. 2.9).’

A consideration of such texts as these quoted by the Reformer awakened afresh in the sixteenth century zeal for the world-wide acknowledgment of the claims of Christ and taught men to look with assurance for the progressive realization of his kingdom. Thus we find Calvin himself repeatedly using language which, were it not for the testimony of Scripture, might be judged as wildly beyond the realm of possibility. For example, in a prayer following a lecture on Malachi, chapter 1, he concludes, ‘Undoubtedly Thy name shall be magnified and celebrated throughout the whole world’, and again, after speaking on Micah, chapter 7: ‘May we daily solicit thee in our prayers, and never doubt but that under the government of thy Christ, thou canst again gather together the whole world, though it be miserably dispersed, so that we may persevere in this warfare to the end, until we shall at length know that we have not in vain hoped in thee, and that our prayers have not been in vain, when Christ shall exercise the power given to him for our salvation and for that of the whole world. Amen.’

On the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come’, Calvin writes: ‘As the kingdom of God is continually growing and advancing to the end of the world, we must pray every day that it may come: for to whatever extent iniquity abounds in the world, to such an extent the kingdom of God, which brings along with it perfect righteousness, is not yet come.’ While the completion of what is involved in this petition awaits the final advent, as Calvin recognized, he also saw that the words warrant an expectation that much more of the kingdom of God is to be realized in history and on earth.

If Calvin did not consciously focus attention upon unfulfilled prophecy he certainly laid foundations in regard to the understanding of the mediatorial reign of Christ which governed Puritan thought in this area. The success of the gospel for which they yearned was bound up with their trust in Christ. They never gave way to the feeling that because the condition of the world was so deplorable the Second Coming of Christ was the only hope for mankind; in their mind, to have done so would have been to fall into unbelief in regard to the promised results of his first coming. If what was predicted seemed impossible, the remedy was to contemplate more closely the authority and glory which now belongs to the Head of the Church.

Innumerable examples could be given at this point from Puritan expositors, but I confine myself to two. First, let us hear George Newton (1602—1681), senior colleague of Joseph Alleine at Taunton, Somerset. After expounding the words of Christ in his great High Priestly prayer, ‘I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it’ (John 17.26), Newton concentrates on the significance of the promise, and will declare it: ‘Let our hearts be full of hope in reference to this business. Since Christ hath undertaken it, let us expect the execution of it. Our Saviour’s words are a promise to the Father, what he will do in after times for his people: saith he, ‘I will declare thy name’ to them. And therefore as it is our duty to believe the promise, so to expect the good things promised. To be continually in a waiting frame, looking and hearkening after the accomplishment of this excellent work of his, spying if we can see the daybreak, and the Father’s name shine forth to other nations who never had a glimpse of it by any gospel revelation, till in the end, “from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same, his name be great among the Gentiles,” according to that prophecy relating to these latter times and ages of the world, Mal. 1.11.

‘Let us strive with Christ in prayer that he would make good the word that he hath spoken to the Father before so many witnesses. O my beloved, when ye look on many heathen nations that yet are overwhelmed in ignorance and Egyptian darkness, that yet know nothing of the Father’s name ...go to Jesus Christ and say, O Lord, thou hast professed that thou wilt declare the Father’s name to other persons, and to other nations, to the end of the world...

‘Let our hearts be full of joy while we are looking forward to the accomplishment of this work. Oh, let it cheer our spirits under all the sinking damps and deep discouragements that are upon them in relation to the church, to think in what blessed state and glorious posture she will be, when Christ shall have declared his Father’s name to all the nations under heaven, when the Jews shall be converted, and when the fulness of the Gentiles shall come in. O my beloved, that will be a joyful time indeed! It is true, those times, my brethren, shall be very comfortable and full of gladness many ways. And this is not the least, that people shall be brought in to the knowledge of the Lord out of all quarters of the world, and that by heaps and multitudes.... There was never such a time since the foundation of the world, nor shall be till that blessed season come: and therefore let out souls rejoice in the foresight of it, though we never live to see it’. For a second example I quote Richard Sibbes. Preaching to students and townsmen at Cambridge, where he ministered with so much success until his death in 1635, he gives this application to the truth concerning Christ’s power:

‘Let no man therefore despair; nor, as I said before, let us despair of the conversion of those that are savages in other parts. How bad so ever they be, they are of the world, and if the gospel be preached to them, Christ will be “believed on in the world”. Christ’s almighty power goeth with his own ordinance to make it effectual... . And when the fulness of the gentiles is come in, then comes the conversion of the Jews. Why may we not expect it? They were the people of God. We see “Christ believed on in the world”. We may therefore expect that they shall also be called, there being many of them, and keeping their nation distinct from others.’

With convictions such as these on Christ’s present and future reign in the world English Puritanism was necessarily hopeful in outlook. This was a feature noted by the outstanding secular historian, S. R. Gardiner, who contrasts the difference between the Puritans and their religious contemporaries in the troubled years leading up to the Civil War of 1642. ‘Like the other Puritans,’ he writes, ‘Sibbes is distinguished by his triumphant confidence in the issue of his activity. Herbert’s melody, in its happiest tones, has always something sad and plaintive about it. Even Laud and Wentworth acknowledged to themselves, that the chances were against them. Eliot in his prison, Sibbes in his pulpit, are jubilant with exultation.’

Before leaving this consideration of Puritan belief on Christ’s work and kingdom, it needs to be pointed out that the same belief gave rise to the first major missionary endeavour of English Protestantism. The persecution of the Puritans in England in the period prior to the Civil War led to the emigration of some 15,000 persons to the shores of New England between 1627 and 1640. Among the number were many ministers who had been at Cambridge in the time of Sibbes and, they were not slow to see their spiritual responsibility towards the heathen in the New World. The seal of the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who arrived and settled in 1628, had on it a North American Indian with the words proceeding from his mouth, ‘Come over and help us’. ‘This device on the seal of their colony,’ observes Nehemiah Adams, ‘published to the world the fact that they regarded themselves as foreign missionaries to North America. This was also the case with their brethren of the Plymouth Colony who arrived eight years before.”

Best known of the missionaries to the Indians was John Eliot (1604— I690), whose biography, written by Cotton Mather, was to have far-reaching influence. Eliot crossed the Atlantic in 1631 to minister to English settlers. He was more than forty when he began to study Algonquin — the difficult language of the Indians of Massachusetts. At the end of his notebook, in which he had mastered the intricacies of the Indian grammar, he wrote, Prayers and pains through faith in Christ Jesus will do anything’. Mather comments, ‘Being by his prayers and pains thus furnished, he set himself in the year 1646 to preach the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ among these desolate outcasts.”

Eliot’s work — its thoroughness, hardships and Christ centredness — became an epic story. Of his preaching, Mather says, ‘there was evermore much of Christ in it’. He became also a pioneer Bible translator, completing Genesis in 1661. Answering the charge that Roman Catholics had been more diligent than Protestants in missions, his first biographer comments: ‘Eliot was very unlike to that Franciscan who, writing into Europe, gloried much how many thousands of Indians he had converted; but added, “that he desired his friends would send him the book called the Bible for he had heard of there being such a book in Europe, which might be of some use to him”. No: our Eliot found he could not live without a Bible himself; he would have parted with all his estate, sooner than have lost a leaf of it; and he knew it would be of more than some use unto the Indians too; he therefore with a vast labour translated the Holy Bible into the Indian language.”

Support for this missionary work increased steadily in England after the first of a series of missionary tracts had been published in 1643. In I649 Parliament itself took action by establishing the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in New England, and between that date and the Restoration of 1660 no less than £15,910 15s. 6½d. was contributed from all parts of England towards this first evangelical missionary society. Many set-backs were to occur after this commencement of missionary endeavour, but the Puritans had given a lead which was not to be forgotten and the missionary appeal with which Cotton Mather closed his book, The Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America. Or, The Life of the Renowned John Eliot, published in 1702, was to be heard and acted upon by men who were not yet born: ‘May sufficient numbers of great, wise, rich, learned, and godly men in the three kingdoms, procure well-composed societies, by whose united counsels the noble design of evangelizing the world may be more effectually carried on.”

What should be noted now is the way in which the Puritan hope was so influential in the origins of what was to become, a hundred and fifty years later, world-wide missionary endeavour. The hope is prominent throughout the missionary tracts published in the 1640’s and 1650’S. It is expressed in characteristic terms in the Preface to Thomas Shepard’s The Clear Sunshine of the Gospel Breaking Forth upon the Indians in New England, 1648, where twelve prominent English Puritans address their words ‘To the Right Honourable the Lords and Commons, Assembled in High Court of Parliament’. The initial blessing upon the work among the Indians, they write, is only a pointer towards what is yet to come:

‘The utmost ends of the earth are designed and promised to be in time the possessions of Christ. . . . This little we see is something in hand, to earnest to us those things which are in hope; something in possession, to assure us of the rest in promise, when the ends of the earth shall see his glory, and the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of the Lord and his Christ, when he shall have dominion from sea to sea, and they that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him (Psa. 22.27; Rev. 11.15; Psa. 72.8—li). And if the dawn of the morning be so delightful, what will the clear day be? If the first fruits be so precious, what will the whole harvest be? If some beginnings be so full of joy, what will it be when God shall perform his whole work, when the whole earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isa. I 1.9, 10) and east and west shall sing together the song of the Lamb?”

A recent writer, R. Pierce Beaver, in his Pioneers in Mission, comments upon this extraordinary confidence as it appeared among the New England Puritans:

‘Men living in a relatively small community on the edge of an unexplored continent, remote from the great population centers, having some contacts with remote lands by sea trade but closely related only to the British homeland, having converted only a few hundreds of Indians, with one voice proclaim their certainty that the whole wide world belongs to Christ and is being brought to him! It is the universalism of the prophets which sustains this view, and due to their conviction about the inerrancy of the Scriptures and the faithfulness of God’s promises, the New England Puritans were convinced as to the soundness of their expectation.”

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A second respect in which Puritan beliefs on prophecy gave a decided colour to their piety concerns their commitment to the Church. In our own day piety is too often thought of in a purely personal way and the Church is spiritualized into some vague concept of the communion of all believers each of whom is individually related to Christ; the Christian’s duty towards the Church is something which comes well down in the scale of priorities and is separable — in the common way of thinking — from loyalty to Christ.

The whole orientation of Puritan spiritual character was different at this point. The Church and her visible biblical structure, seen in her ordinances, her unity, her preaching and her discipline, was in the forefront of their thinking. Her strength and purity must take precedence over all other considerations because she is the Church of Christ. Her welfare is bound up with the honour of her Head in whose name, and according to whose will, all her work is to be performed. With the apostle Paul, the Puritans delighted to celebrate the truth that the power which is ‘able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think’, is to be exercised to his glory ‘in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end’ (Eph. 3.21). The Church is focal in God’s eternal design to bring glory to his Son. This concept inspired the passion with which the Puritans and Covenanters threw themselves into the work of Church reformation, and it also lay behind international concern for the unity of the Church in doctrine and discipline. Their piety had a strong corporate emphasis; for the individualistic type of evangelical living they had no sympathy whatsoever.

It should be at once apparent that this viewpoint, connected with Puritan belief on unfulfilled prophecy, differs markedly in its practical effects from the view which, based on another scheme of prophetic interpretation, sees no future for the organized Church. The Puritans saw the Church as a divine institution, provided by her Head with laws, government and officers, sufficient by his blessing for the full realization in history of the promise that Christ ‘shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth’ (Psa. 72.8). If the Church is the God-appointed means for the advancement of this kingdom, then her future is beyond all doubt. ‘Unto this catholick, visible church,’ says the Westminster Confession, ‘Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints in this life, to the end of the world; and doth by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto.’

With this belief in the Church’s future the Puritans gained energy and resolution. Had they adopted the short-term view the problems of the Church in their day might justifiably have seemed hopeless, but they faced them with an unflinching sense of their duty towards posterity. Succeeding centuries would reap the advantage of an uncompromised witness to the Word of God. Their work could not be in vain for the testimony of Christ’s Church was yet to encircle the world. Jonathan Edwards was to epitomize this forward-look when he wrote, ‘It may be hoped that then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary.’ The Church, after all, would be victorious!

Many illustrations could be given from the seventeenth century of how much conscious concern for the Church appeared in Puritan piety. Witness, for instance, the words of Samuel Rutherford. Writing to Lady Jane Kenmure from Anwoth in 1633, he says:

‘Madam, think upon this, that when our Lord, who hath his handkerchief to wipe the face of the mourners in Zion, shall come to wipe away all tears from their eyes, he may wipe yours also, in the passing, amongst others. I am confident, Madam, that our Lord will yet build a new house to himself, of our rejected and scattered stones, for our Bridegroom cannot want a wife. Can he live a widower? Nay, he will embrace both of us, the little young sister, and the elder sister, the Church of the Jews; and there will yet be a day of it'

In a letter written on April 22, 1635, the Anwoth pastor, shortly to be sentenced to confinement at Aberdeen for his contendings for the Church, resumes the theme:

‘The Antichrist and the great red dragon will lop Christ’s branches, and bring his vine to a low stump, under the feet of those who carry the mark of the beast; but the Plant of Renown, the Man whose name is the Branch, will bud forth again and blossom as the rose, and there shall be fair white flourishes again, with most pleasant fruits, upon that tree of life...

‘In the name of the Son of God, believe that buried Scotland, dead and buried with her dear Bridegroom, shall rise the third day again, and there shall be a new growth after the old timber is cut down….

‘O to see the sight, next to Christ’s Coming in the clouds, the most joyful! Our elder brethren the Jews and Christ fall upon one another’s necks and kiss each other! They have been long asunder; they will be kind to one another when they meet. O day! O longed-for and lovely day-dawn! O sweet Jesus, let me see that sight which will be as life from the dead, thee and thy ancient people in mutual embraces.’

Twenty-six years later, when Rutherford lay dying at St. Andrews, in 1661, he spoke with the same anticipation. Though he had lived to see Christ’s covenanted cause in Scotland reduced to near ruin with the restoration of Charles II, and though for himself he could say ‘there is nothing now betwixt me and the resurrection but paradise’, he had not lost sight of promises respecting the Church on earth: ‘We cannot but say it is a sad time to this land at present, it is a day of darkness and rebuke and blasphemy. The royal prerogative of Christ is pulled from his head. Yet we are to believe, Christ will not so depart from the land, but a remnant shall be saved; and he shall reign a victorious conquering King to the ends of the earth. O that there were nations, kindreds, tongues, and all the people of Christ’s habitable world, encompassing his throne with cries and tears for the spirit of supplication to be poured down upon the inhabitants of Judah for that effect.’

In the same year as Rutherford died in Scotland, Elizabeth Heywood died at Denton in Lancashire. Her station in life had been very different from that of the eminent Westminster divine, for she had been a housewife and mother, married to Oliver Heywood. But her husband’s record of her words gives us the same characteristic spirit:

‘On the Friday before she died, when she had been panting and struggling for breath, seeing the children of the family about her, she said, “Sirs, prepare for this time, for it will come to you that are young, as well as to me. I want breath to speak. O spend your breath well! not in idle and vain conversation but to God’s glory. . . . If God do suffer those lordly spirited men to afflict his church for a time, I believe it will not be long: the church is dear to the Lord, and he will not suffer it always to be trampled upon. O sirs, let the church of God lie near your hearts, it lies near God’s heart: ‘They shall prosper that love Zion’; prefer Jerusalem before and above your chief joy.”

‘Then, after praying for ministers of the Gospel, and for her own family, she petitioned “for the church of God, that the Jews might be converted, and that the gospel might be preached to the remainder of the Gentile nations”.’23

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These words of Elizabeth Heywood lead us to the third area in which Puritan piety and their prophetic beliefs coalesced, namely the exercise of prayer. As we have seen, they believed that the world-wide success of the gospel was promised in Scripture, that it would be realized by repeated outpourings of the Holy Spirit, and yet that the Church was the divinely appointed means for the fulfilment of this end. In connection with the Church’s responsibility in this regard, there was no duty higher in Puritan esteem than the duty of prayer. The seasons when the kingdom of Christ is rapidly to spread in the earth are not revealed, but they will come in answer to prayer.

We have already noted the place which the future of Jew and Gentile occupied in the directions for prayer in such representative church documents as The Larger Catechism and The Directory for Public Worship. A number of years before these were drawn up, the call to prayer for the conversion of the Jews and for the success of the gospel through the world was already a feature of Puritan congregations. At Plymouth, Devon, it was to be noted in the ministry of John Barlow, just as it was on the other side of the country at Palgraye, Suffolk, where Elnathan Parr preached his expositions of Romans from which we have already quoted.

As the century advanced, so the tide of prayer seems to have risen. William Gurnall, in the beautiful cloth-weaving town of Lavenham, where he ministered for thirty-five years following his appointment in 1644, would plead thus with his people for prayer for the world:

‘Let not the sea that divides thee and the other parts of the earth make thee think thou art not concerned in their happiness or misery. Let thy prayers walk over the vast ocean, and bring matter for thy devotions, like the merchant’s ship her freight from afar. Visit the Churches of Christ abroad; yea, the poor Indians, and other ruins of mankind, that lie where Adam’s sin threw them with us, without any attempt made as yet upon them by the gospel for their recovery, and carry their deplored condition before the Lord. Our Drake is famous for compassing the earth with his ship in a few years: Thou mayst by thy prayers every day, and make a more gainful voyage of it too than he did.’

Sometimes the call to prayer had special reference to the Jews. John Owen, preaching before the House of Commons in 1649, speaks of ‘the bringing home of his ancient people to be one fold with the fulness of the Gentiles . . . in answer to millions of prayers put up at the throne of grace, for this very glory, in all generations’. At the same period, days of prayer and humiliation were kept in Scotland, one particular object being ‘That the promised conversion of his ancient people of the Jews may be hastened’.

This same yearning is to be found scattered in the long-forgotten records of Puritan diaries and biographical accounts. We read of John Pinckney, a typical Puritan pastor ejected from his church at Longstock, Hampshire, in 1662, that ‘he ever discovered a most compassionate concern for the Jews, and did upon all occasions pray for their conversion with extraordinary earnestness.

Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan leader, notes in his diary:

‘This Day, from the Dust, where I lay prostrate before the Lord, I lifted up my Cries…. for the conversion of the Jewish Nation, and for my own having the Happiness, at some time or other, to baptise a Jew that should by my Ministry be brought home unto the Lord.’

Oliver Heywood on August 2, 1663, jotted down that his ‘soul mightily breathed after’ these petitions; ‘that God would promote his work in the world by subduing antichrist, converting Jews, enlightening blind nations’.

The same thing is to be found in the Scottish Christian leaders of that period, as we have already seen in the case of Rutherford. One long-to-be-remembered example occurs in the life of Richard Cameron, the ‘Lion of the Covenant’. On the open hills at Shawhead, Kirkcudbrightshire, Cameron preached on May 30, I680 from the text ‘And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life’. In the midst of this sermon, which has been described as one of the most remarkably blessed of the Lord preached in Scotland, Cameron fell into a ‘rap of calm weeping’, and his hearers wept with him. Compelled for the moment to stop, he ‘prayed for the restoration of the Jews, for the fall of Antichrist, and for the hastening of the day when the Stuarts would be swept from the throne’. Two hundred years later, John Herkless tells us, the memory of those services had not died out among the people of the districts where Cameron spoke.

Perhaps one of the most striking of these old records comes from the life of Walter Smith who died alongside Donald Cargill on the scaffold in Edinburgh onJuly 27, 1681: ‘as he did cleave to him in love and unity in life,’ writes Patrick Walker, ‘so he died with his face upon his breast’. In 1679, Smith, himself a minister of the gospel, had drawn up some rules for the meetings of the praying societies in the south-west. In these we read:

‘As it is the undoubted duty of all to pray for the coming of Christ’s kingdom, so all that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, and know what it is to bow a knee in good earnest, will long and pray for the out-making of the gospel promises to his Church in the latter days, that King Christ would go out upon the white horse of the gospel, conquering and to conquer, and make a conquest of the travail of his soul, that it may be sounded that the kingdoms of the world are become his, and his name called upon from the rising of the sun to its going down. (i) That the old offcasten Israel for unbelief would never be forgotten, especially in these meetings, that the promised day of their ingraffing again by faith may be hastned; and that dead weight of blood removed off them, that their fathers took upon them and upon their children, that have sunk them down to hell upwards of seventeen hundred years. (2) That the Lord’s written and preached word [may be sent] with power, to enlighten the poor pagan world, living in black perishing darkness without Christ and the knowledge of his name. (3) That the damnable delusions of Mahomet, and errors of Antichrist, Arian, Arminian, Socinian and Quakers, may be discovered; that the blind may no more lead the blind, and go to hell wholesale, living and dying so; and the many errors abounding among many other sectaries may come to light.’

It might seem today that the record of such prayers is no more than an historical curiosity, but the Puritans held no such view of prayer. For them prayers were ‘laid up’ with God to be answered in his time. ‘Let us remember’, says Lachlan Mackenzie, ‘that the Church was 4,000 years praying for the appearance of the Messiah. We have not been praying the half of that time for the conversion of the Jews and the fulness of the Gentiles.’ And Thomas Goodwin enlarges upon this theme in his work The Return of Prayers:

‘There may be some prayers which you must be content never yourselves to see answered in this world, the accomplishment of them not falling out in your time: such as those you haply make for the calling of the Jews, the utter downfall of God’s enemies, the flourishing of the gospel…..all which prayers are not yet lost, but will have answers: for as God is an eternal God, and Christ’s righteousness an “everlasting righteousness”, and therefore of eternal efficacy, Dan. 9. 24, so are prayers also, which are the work of the eternal Spirit of Christ, made to that God in his name, and in him are eternally accepted, and therefore may take place in after ages. So the prayer that St. Stephen made for his persecutors took place in Saul when St. Stephen was dead. So David’s prayer against Judas, Psa. 109.8, 9, took effect above a thousand years after, as appears, Acts 1.20. So the prayers of the church, for three hundred years, in the primitive times, that kings might come to the knowledge of the truth, and they “lead peaceable and quiet lives, in all godliness and honesty,” (which St. Paul, in Nero’s time, exhorted unto, 1Tim. 2.2) were not answered and accomplished till Constantine’s time….

‘There is a common treasure of the church, not of their merits, but of their prayers. There are bottles of tears a-filling, vials a-filling to be poured out for the destruction of God’s enemies. What a collection of prayers hath there been these many ages towards it! And that may be one reason why God will do such great things towards the end of the world, even because there hath been so great a stock of prayers going for so many ages, which is now to be returned.’

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Is it any wonder, with these convictions, that for the Puritans the future was charged with hope? How this hope was retained through the dreary early years of the eighteenth century and how it joined with a new age of revival and with world-wide missions originated by Christians in the Puritan tradition, will be the theme of our next two chapters.