Quaker Heritage Press > Historical Essays > Miserable Comforters

I thought them miserable comforters, and I saw they were all as nothing to me, for they could not reach my condition. -- George Fox, Journal [Nickalls ed.], p. 6

For I saw that Christ had died for all men, and was a propitiation for all, and had enlightened all men and women with his divine and saving light, and that none could be a true believer but who believed in it. -- Ibid., p. 34

One sometimes makes the most interesting discoveries while looking for something else. Last year, while taking a course on English Puritan piety, I unexpectedly found evidence bearing on early Quaker understanding of the atonement. QRT has published articles on this topic twice in the last five years, [1] but I was not pursuing that subject. I was just seeking a Quaker angle on the Puritans I had to read. But in the process I found that Fox's statements that "Christ had died for all" and "had enlightened all" were connected in a surprising way, which answered the problems that many Friends had experienced in their Puritan youth.

Puritan Counseling: Spiritual Depression as Lack of Assurance

One of the assigned books made much of "Puritan pastoral theology . . . shiningly displayed . . . in their treatment of Christians suffering from spiritual depressions." [2] On the same shelf stood an example of this genre, a 1648 series of sermons by William Bridge called A Lifting Up for the Downcast. When I brought it home, my wife asked whether George Fox as a seeker might have heard Bridge preach. The date was a few years late, but she had given me my research topic: to compare Bridge's sermons, and similar Puritan writings, with the journals of early Friends who had found Puritan ministers to be "miserable comforters."

Spiritual depression, to Puritans, meant feeling unsure of one's salvation. [3] The 1648 Westminster Confession says, "such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus, and love him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before him, may, in this life, be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace," though "This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it." It was "the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure, that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." [4]

This approach was the aim of Puritan manuals on depression. Thomas Goodwin's A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, a set of sermons on Isaiah 50:10, explains the text as follows: "When, therefore, here he says he hath no light, the meaning is, he wants all present sensible testimonies of God's favour to him; he sees nothing that may give sensible present witness of it to him." [5] William Bridge, in A Lifting Up for the Downcast, addresses various setbacks such as "great sins," "weak grace," "desertion," and "affliction," trying to show that none of them is a reason to doubt one's salvation. [6] Thomas Brooks' Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices explains that the devil tries "to keep saints in a sad, doubting, questioning & uncomfortable condition," "persuading them that their estate is not good, their hearts are not upright, their graces are not sound, because they are so followed, vexed, and tormented with temptations" and "suggesting to them, That that conflict that is in them, is not a conflict that is only in saints, but such a conflict that is to be found in hypocrites and profane souls." [7]

Brooks' phrase "that their estate is not good" is a key to the problem. The Calvinist ordo salutis (salvation process) posited a fixed series of steps in an individual's salvation. Those whom God had chosen from eternity would at some point in life be called by the gospel of Christ and thereby converted from their natural depravity to saving faith, which would result in their justification with God, leading on to sanctification of life and eventual glorification in the next life. If a person could find any of these steps happening to him, he could know that his "estate" was good and that he would go to heaven. Unfortunately some of the stages could be counterfeited by hypocrites. So in counseling those with spiritual doubts, Puritans usually tried to persuade them that their faith (or other "grace" in their lives) could be shown to be real, or at least that it need not be regarded as the self- deceiving faith of a hypocrite.

The doctrine of assurance was supposed to reinforce the certainty of justification by faith. Those who trusted in Christ's death as the satisfaction for their sins could be assured that, because they did so trust, they must be among the elect for whom Christ died and whose salvation was foreordained. But as it was not always easy to tell real faith from presumption or mere acceptance of doctrine, and as all graces in a Christian's life, being works of the Holy Spirit, were evidence of a converted state, Puritan counselors drew on as many as possible, explaining in each case how the real thing could be distinguished from counterfeits.

Lists of criteria of a state of grace emphasized the Christian's singled-minded desire to overcome all sin and be entirely pleasing to God. Brooks says that a true Christian "labours in all duties and services to be approved and accepted of God" and "labours to get up to the very top of holiness"; such persons "desire and endeavour that sin may be cured, rather than covered," and "do in sincerity endeavour universally to be subject to all that Christ their Head requires, without any exception or reservation . . . . constantly, unweariedly." [8]

Thus although saving faith, as in all classical Protestantism, did not depend on works, the assurance that one had such faith was apt to depend heavily, if not on good works themselves, at least on the sincerity of one's effort to perform them. This could be agonizing to those who conceived perfect sincerity more radically than the Puritan preacher anticipated.

Many Friends, in their Puritan youth, were taught this type of self-examination. John Crook describes "The ministers then commonly preaching by marks and signs, how a man might know himself to be a child of God, if he were so; and how it would be with him if he were not so; which made me sometime to conclude I had saving grace, and by and by to conclude I was but an hypocrite." [9] Much of Stephen Crisp's pre-Quaker pilgrimage focused on the hope of finding "so many signs and marks of an elect soul, as might bring me to quiet." [10] A difficulty for such seekers was the Puritans' teaching on the limits of the atonement.

Puritan Teaching on the Atonement

Surprising as it may seem, the Puritans did not believe that Jesus had died for everyone. They held the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement: that Christ died to save only the elect, whom God had chosen before creation and had predestined to salvation. The rest, predestined to hell, had never been intended as possible beneficiaries of Christ's death. [11]

Bridge and Brooks both held that this doctrine provided theological underpinning for assurance. Those whom Christ intended to save would infallibly be saved by the merits of his death. These, and only these, would at some time be brought to a genuine Christian faith. So if one could know oneself a true believer, one could know that one was among the elect and would never fall away so as again to be liable for the penalty of one's sins. It was those who denied this doctrine that were in Puritan eyes the "miserable comforters," for if a believer could not rely on being preserved to the end, then God might yet decide to punish him eternally for the sins Christ had died to forgive, a consequence the Puritans could not accept. [12]

Despite this reasoning not everyone would find the doctrine of limited atonement reassuring. The doctrine was supposed to comfort those who already had reason to count themselves believers. But for those who were struggling with lack of assurance, the effect would be to add, to their doubt about their conversion, the further doubt about whether Christ had ever intended to save them. And this could undermine the attempt to place faith in the merits of Christ's death, for they might not apply to oneself. Puritan preachers and those counselees who later turned Quaker both understood this point and tried to deal with it in different ways.

Spiritual Quandaries

In applying this doctrinal orientation to the problem of counseling the depressed, the Puritans and those they counseled ran into several problems.

First, the conflation of all the steps of salvation in the term "good estate" seems to have contributed to some people's failure to grasp the interrelations among the stages. Technically, all that could be evidenced by the presence or absence of faith or other graces was the question of whether the person was converted. If he was converted, it followed that he was elect. But if unconverted, this was no proof that he might not attain saving faith later. The counselee was being told to look for signs of a state of grace; but it was easy for the laity (and perhaps for some ministers) to imagine that the search was really for signs of election.

This confusion appears in some Quaker journals. Crook writes, "I was tossed up and down, from hope to despair; and from a sign of grace in me one while, and then presently to a sign of an hypocrite and reprobate again." [13] Note that he seems to assume that if his state fit a preacher's description of a hypocrite, he was also a "reprobate" (predestined to hell). Crisp may show the same confusion when he refers to seeking "signs and marks of an elect soul": [14] for though a converted soul would be also "elect," to think of the signs mainly as showing election could lead to thinking that a lack of signs showed reprobation, not merely unconversion.

Second, in their emphasis on finding assurance that saving faith was already present, the Puritans may sometimes have overlooked the possibility that such faith was in fact absent. At any rate some of their counselees felt that they had made this mistake. Crisp speaks of:

conferring with them that were counted experienced Christians, how peace and assurance might be attained; some would say by reading and applying promises, but that way I had tried so often and so long, that it took now but little with me, for I saw I was in another state than that unto which the promises were made. [15]

Similarly Dewsbury:

neither could I apply the promises which they told me belonged to me, for I found no promise belonging to that nature; but the wrath of God abode upon me, for my disobeying his Counsel in me, the Light in my Conscience. . . . [16]

Sedgwick, in The Doubting Beleever, tries to answer difficulties of this type:

If you look for grounds of beleeving in and from your selves, it cannot be that ever your hearts should be free from doubtings; If either you make your own worthinesse the cause of beleeving, you shall never come to beleeve: This were not to receive good from God, but to buy and purchase it . . . . As he cannot deserve any good from God promising, so he cannot bring any good to Gods promises. [17]

But this argument does not really come to grips with the difficulty experienced by our Quaker authors. They knew that God's grace was unearned, but they did not know whether they themselves had received God's unearned grace. Finding that sin had more hold on them than seemed consistent with the promise of a sanctified life, they suspected that they had not.

Brooks thought taking communion helped to feed assurance. [18] Though Howgill had trouble believing that Christ had died for him since he was still "a servant of sin, while I committed it," he was urged to receive the sacrament "for thereby strength was confirmed, and faith added." But participation only brought him to fear he "had sinned against the Holy Ghost" by partaking unworthily. [19] Dewsbury had a similar experience. [20]

Of course those who advised people like Crisp, Howgill, and Dewsbury to apply the promises and take the sacrament may have estimated these people's spiritual condition differently. As J. B. Phillips has pointed out, people of different temperaments may differ greatly in their concept of total sincerity. Some "may talk glibly enough of being 'one-hundred-per-cent pure, honest, loving, and unselfish.'" "But the conscientious, sensitive, imaginative person who is somewhat lacking in self- confidence and inclined to introspection, will find one-hundred- per-cent perfection truly terrifying." [21] And as John Coolidge comments,

The preacher appeals to an anxious self-interest to motivate an intense self-scrutiny, to which he promises the reward of assurance if it reveals a motive that is not self-centered. . . . It is like straining every nerve in an effort to relax. [22]

As an example of this "intense self-scrutiny," we may note Crisp's reaction when, as late as his Baptist period, he discovered a self-centered motive behind his upright behavior:

The reasons that kept me [from outward sins] were not the operation of the pure love of God in my heart, and his grace prevailing in me, to teach me, but rather an eye to the reputation of my religion, and that I might not seem to have run and acted all in vain . . . . so that I sufficiently saw I . . . had grasped but at a shadow, and catched nothing but wind . . . . [23]

When the Puritan demand for pure motives (along with a dogma that perfect conduct was impossible!) was urged on people who did not know whether God even desired their salvation, the combined effect could smother hope and sap motivation. Crisp "heard the teachers . . . daily saying, none could live without sin," which he says "made my prayer almost faithless, and so without success." Crisp could not believe that even his desire to overcome sin was pure enough, for "I was captivated with a corrupt and rebellious nature . . . I remembered the words of Christ, He that committeth sin is the servant of sin, and that I knew was I." [24]

Crisp could not believe in an "imputed" righteousness that would reconcile God to him while he continued in sin. "The pure witness . . . pursued me night and day, and broke my peace faster than I could make it up." So when he "heard men dispute that God sees no sin in his people," he thought, "surely I am none of them; for he marketh all my transgressions." [25]

Even if the Quaker-to-be had been able to believe in an imputed righteousness promised to a condition like his, he would still wonder if the promise was addressed to himself in particular. Crisp was glad to find "a people that held forth, the death of Christ for all men":

I went to hear them, and after some time I came to see that there was more light, and a clearer understanding of the scriptures among them, than among the former; so I . . . came to be established in that belief, that there was a dear Son of hope, and way or means of salvation prepared for all people, and none positively by any eternal decree excluded, as by name or person, but as unbelievers and disobedient. So this ministered comfort a while . . . . [26]

In one of his sermons for the downcast William Bridge tried to deal with the psychological problems posed by the doctrine of limited atonement. Yet his handling of it only shows the dangers that lay in wait for Puritan ministers and those who went to them for help.

Bridge begins with a careful exposition of the doctrine and its intended practical implications. He distinguishes "a faith of reliance," which believes in "a may be of mercy," from "a faith of assurance," which believes in "a shall be of mercy." A person can resolve to rely on Christ for salvation when he knows only that Christ might save him. Only afterwards, perceiving his own "faith of reliance" (which can exist only in the elect) will he recognize that Christ will save him, for "the act of reliance, is before the act of assurance." [27]

On hearing this, a listener might possibly take heart and conclude that he could exercise reliance in the absence of assurance. But just as the poor seeker is deciding that he can manage to have faith after all, Bridge announces a few minutes later that he will now say "something by way of application." Turning from his minority of depressed parishioners to the congregation at large, he urges all "to look into our condition and to consider whether we be in Christ or no . . . and whether we have faith, aye or no." Nearly everyone there would claim to have faith, and yet Bridge is convinced that "few there be that believe." So Bridge warns his hearers not to fool themselves: "It is a harder thing to believe than to keep the ten commandments. . . . I do not know any thing in all the world that is so hard as to believe." [28]

The worried listener has now lost whatever comfort he may have been on the point of receiving. Apparently the "faith of reliance," even if one does not try to base it on a "faith of assurance," is still the hardest thing in the world to get! Worse yet, most of those who think they have it are fooling themselves; and since the depressed seeker has probably been through a few disillusionments already, he concludes that even if he does exert himself to exercise a "faith of reliance," the odds are that it will only be another counterfeit.

Yet Bridge is not through. Perhaps sensing that he has just discouraged the downcast again, he turns back to them: "Oh, you that are godly . . . why are you cast down and disquieted?" He urges them to consider what a great risk he has run for their sakes: "Do you not think that there are some wicked men in this congregation that have presumed, when they have heard these things preached . . . . and so have endangered their own souls . . . comforting themselves when they should not be comforted?" Therefore, since "there has been this hazard run, and all to comfort you . . . . will you now refuse this comfort?" [29]

To fully appreciate Bridge's rhetoric one should read the whole passage. But he has miscalculated the effect. Instead of solving the problem that his emphasis on the difficulty of faith has just created, he has piled a second burden on top of the first. His tactic is rather like that of the proverbial "Jewish mother": he, Bridge, has "run" all this "hazard" (i.e. the risk that some of his hearers may go to hell) purely for the good of his audience, and if they still won't take his advice they must be guilty of great ingratitude. The hearer must now consider that not only is faith likely to be self-deception, but even a prudent care to avoid self- deception is probably a covert, self-willed "refusal" to be comforted! He cannot win.

Bridge's remarkable tactics should not distract us from the dilemma he is struggling with. If a preacher believes that some of his audience must be told that their "faith" is hypocrisy, while others must be told that the obstacles to faith are far fewer than they imagine, he will have trouble getting each group to ignore what he says to the other. The Puritan strategy of seeking signs of sanctity as a basis for assurance, combined with the Protestant axiom that one must never rely on works for salvation, was bound to cause such problems. Bridge's rhetoric merely brings to attention a difficulty inherent in Puritanism. I do not see any solution within a Puritan framework. Neither did the Quakers whose journals I studied.

An Exceptional Case: Thomas Goodwin, John Crook, and Isa. 50:10

Before we see why some people found a solution in Quakerism, an unusual case should be noted. Crook, at one stage of his pilgrimage, "resolved one first-day afternoon . . . being full of trouble," to wander about London "as I should be led," in search of counsel. Arriving at an unfamiliar parish church, he heard a sermon on Isa. 50:10: "He that walketh in darkness, and hath no light, let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God." The young preacher described "who that man was that feared the Lord, and yet walked in darkness . . . as if he had known my condition and aimed at, and spake to me in particular." Crook "went away much gladdened, and continued so for some time." [30]

From the marginal dates in Crook's journal this incident happened between 1634 and 1637, probably nearer the latter. It happens that Thomas Goodwin's classic A Child of Light Walking in Darkness, based on Isa. 50:10, was published in 1636. Study of Goodwin's book makes me doubt that this is a coincidence. To be sure, it cannot have been Goodwin himself whom Crook heard in a parish church in London; the sermons on which Goodwin based his book were preached some eight years before, "probably at Cambridge or Ely." [31] But it seems likely that Crook's preacher had just read Goodwin's recently published book. [32]

The remarkable feature of this book, particularly as compared to those of Bridge and Brooks, is that it seldom uses the approach of seeking evidences. [33] For the most part Goodwin sticks to the remedy given in his text, "let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God." He says that this trust is to be exercised in the absence of assurance, and that God sometimes causes a sense of desertion in order to strengthen this trust. He advises a quiet, uncomplaining acceptance of the manifestation of God's judgments for sin. [34]

Naturally we cannot be sure of the connection between Goodwin's book and Crook's preacher. But since Crook had heard a lot of "preaching by marks and signs," he probably would have noticed a different approach. We shall see below that giving oneself up to God, in the face of his judgments, to do with as seemed good to him, was helpful to Dewsbury too.

However, Goodwin's book does not resolve the tensions inherent in Puritan piety; it merely removes some elements of those tensions from the limelight. The sermon Crook heard helped him cope temporarily but did not provide a permanent solution.

Why Quakerism Helped

William Dewsbury, recounting the last stages of his pre-Quaker pilgrimage, tells (with typical Quaker use of Old Testament imagery to describe inner experience) how he finally gave himself up to God's judgments, having little hope as to the outcome:

Then I returned to my outward (Habitation and) Calling I had in the World . . . my minde being turned within, to wait upon the Lord in the way of his judgments; and this I witness, the Administration of Moses, in which Cain is banished, Esau reprobated, Pharoah plagued, the first born of Egypt slain, and my will brought in subjection, for the Lord to do with me what his will was, if he condemned me he might, and if he saved me it was his free Love; and in this condemned estate I lay crying in the depth of misery, without any hopes of deliverance by anything I could do to pacifie the Wrath of God, till the Administration of the Prophets, that witnessed to my Soul there was free redemption laid up for me in the Lord Jesus, and by the power of the Word of their Testimony, there was a secret hope raised up in me, to wait for the coming of Christ Jesus, who in the appointed time of the Father appeared to my Soul, as the Lightnings from the East to the West, and my dead Soul heard his voice, and by his voice was made to live, who created me to a lively hope, and sealed me up in the everlasting Covenant of life, with his Blood. [35]

This giving up to judgment, with the resulting discovery of mercy, is similar to part of what Goodwin recommends and what Crook may have heard in the sermon on Isa. 50:10. The choice to face an overwhelming inner judgment is of course a well-known feature of early Quaker experience. Dewsbury does not say how he came to this attitude. It may have been the result of sheer exhaustion, since he had been through many unsuccessful efforts to find peace with God. In Crisp's case, however, we have seen that a doctrinal change from limited to universal atonement preceded his arrival at the Quaker encounter with the Light. [36]

Hugh Barbour devotes a chapter of his classic study The Quakers in Puritan England to the experience of "The Terror and Power of the Light." Here he asserts that

the Quaker message was like that of Jonathan Edwards, who was content to drive men to despair of salvation, with no mention of universal mercy, so that men might find the goodness and power of God directly for themselves.

Somewhat inconsistently, he also says "The early Friends could not have faced God at all if they had not believed that the God of Truth was loving and that they themselves were God's children, bought at the price of Christ's blood." [37] It appears to me that once one grasps the role of the limited atonement doctrine in the predicament of spiritually depressed persons within Puritanism, certain passages in early Quaker literature take on a meaning which calls in question Barbour's idea that Quaker preaching made "no mention of universal mercy."

There is a key passage in Fox's Journal where he defines his mission: it begins "Now I was sent to turn people from darkness to the light that they might receive Christ Jesus," and subsequent paragraphs repeat the theme in varied terms. It is surely significant, in light of the issues discussed in this paper, that in the first of these paragraphs Fox states:

For I saw that Christ had died for all men, and was a propitiation for all, and had enlightened all men and women with his divine and saving light, and that none could be a true believer but who believed in it. [38]

The connection, in this passage, between Christ's having "died for all men" and his having "enlightened all" is not obvious to the modern reader. But to a depressed person in Puritan England, the light within that testified of God's judgment on sin must have appeared a sinister unknown quantity. To one who doubted his own election, it was uncertain whether God sent this witness to guide him in the right way or only to leave him without excuse as a fit object of damnation. Hence if Fox could teach his hearers that Christ had died for all, a major obstacle to trusting God would be removed. It is thus not surprising that Fox makes the same connection later: "and so I declared largely the way of life and Truth to them and directed them to their teacher that had died for them and had bought them with his blood." [39] It was because Christ had "bought" them that he could be counted on as their teacher. [40]

The same connection is implicit when Fox says, in an early printed tract, "for the first step of peace is to stand still in the light (which discovers things contrary to it) for power and strength to stand against that nature which the light discovers." [41] Fox does not explicitly list, as "step zero," believing that salvation is available through Christ's death. Yet this is presupposed in the very fact that "to stand still in the light" is described as "the first step of peace." The light can be faced because it is the light of people's "teacher that had died for them." Once it is resolutely faced, the accumulated terrors of a person's earlier attempts to avoid it can (if not without a certain amount of inner apocalypse) at length be drained away.

When this initial hurdle has been passed and the light has been found trustworthy, it is remarkable how some themes of Puritanism turn up again in Quakerism in a new guise. Thomas Brooks' advice that people should not "mind their sins more than their Saviour" [42] is paralleled by Fox's "For looking down at sin, and corruption, and distraction, you are swallowed up in it; but looking at the light that discovers them, you will see over them." [43] Or again, the Puritan teaching that assurance will grow in proportion to sanctification and obedience is transformed in Quakerism into the teaching that justification (actual acceptance with God, not just the conscious awareness of it) will grow in proportion to sanctification.

As this last parallel shows, however, there are further soteriological differences between Puritanism and Quakerism. The Quakers dropped the Reformation dogma of justification by imputation of Christ's righteousness, to such an extent that Robert Barclay could write, "The imputed righteousness of Christ, is not to be found in all the bible, at least as to my observation." [44] A full account of the differences between Quakers and Puritans on salvation is beyond the scope of this paper, but a key factor was the Quakers' sense that there had to be more to a Christian faith, a faith that overcomes the world, than only to keep trying to believe one's sins forgiven. Even after accepting the idea of universal atonement Crisp had trouble in this area:

So this ministered comfort a while, and I set myself to believe, and to get faith in Christ, and to reckon myself a believer, and found it . . . too hard for me, though I cried aloud many times to have my unbelief helped: yet when I saw sin prevail over me, alas! said I, where is that faith that purifies the heart, and gives victory; mine is not such. [45]

So concerned were Friends, in fact, for this world-overcoming faith, that some hesitated to preach universal atonement, lest they be confused with such groups as Crisp had encountered. Edward Burrough, in a pamphlet which tries to address every religious faction in England, writes "to you who are called Free- willers, who say Christ died for all":

Herein you affirm that whereof you are ignorant, which may be true in Christ, but a Lye unto you; for you are not dead with Christ from the Rudiments of the World . . . . and [you] apply peace to that which is for condemnation. [46]

Since Fox, Barclay, and others did preach the doctrine publicly, I think we may take Burrough's "may be true in Christ" to indicate his real "theological" belief. By "a Lye unto you" he means that the "Free-willers" were misusing the doctrine to promote liberty of the flesh, applying the promises to the fallen nature the way Friends believed most Puritans did.

Much scholarship on early Quakerism gives the impression that Quakers paid little attention to the atonement. This may be partly due to the reticence of writers like Burrough, but I think the main reason is that readers unfamiliar with Calvinist doctrine easily miss the import of Quaker assertions that "Christ died for all." When read as mere affirmations of Christian orthodoxy it is easy to assume that these drew little attention at the time. In the perspective of centuries "the death of Christ for all" is a tenet of generic or mainstream Christianity. But in Puritan England, as an alternative to the reigning ideology, it must have been a conscious Quaker distinctive, and so is important for understanding what Friends meant in their better known doctrines. The compulsive anxiety with which people could view God's inward rebuke was mitigated, and the Light made easier to face, by the knowledge that it was the presence of one who had died for them and would raise them in his likeness if they would submit to his cross within.

Notes

1. Dean Freiday, "'Atonement' in Historical Perspective," QRT #62 (Spring 1986), pp. 13-32; Margaret J. Benefiel, "Atonement -- A Revisionist View," QRT #70 (Winter 1988-1989), pp. 21-25, with a response by Dean Freiday on pp. 26-27.

2. Peter Lewis, The Genius of Puritanism, 2nd ed. (Haywards Heath, Sussex: Carey, 1979), p. 66. In this paper I use the word "depression" as Peter Lewis does, to mean a sense of desertion by God or a continuing anxiety over one's state of acceptance with him.

3. John von Rohr excellently describes Puritan handling of this problem in The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), especially chapter 7.

4. Westminster Confession of Faith 18:1,3.

5. Thomas Goodwin, A Child of Light Walking in Darkness (1636; rpt. in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D., vol. 3 [Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1861], pp. 229-350), p. 239.

6. Sentences such as "Your spot [fault] is no other than what may be the spot of God's own people" and "Thus you see that it may be the condition of God's own people to be worse and worse" run like a refrain throughout the book. William Bridge, A Lifting up for the Downcast (1649; rpt. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1961), pp. 5, 166, 183.

7. Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices (1652; rpt. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1964), p. 142, 176, 162.

8. Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth (1654; rpt. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1961), pp. 161-169.

9. John Crook, "A Short History of the Life of John Crook," in Friends Library, vol. 13, edited by William Evans and Thomas Evans (Philadelphia, 1849), p. 209.

10. Stephen Crisp, The Christian Experiences, Gospel Labours and Writings, of that Ancient Servant of Christ, Stephen Crisp (Philadelphia, 1822), p. 20.

11. I refer to the doctrine of limited atonement as "Calvinist" in the sense that it is common among the followers of Calvin. Whether Calvin himself taught this doctrine is a matter of scholarly debate, as is the question of whether Calvin would agree with the Puritans' whole approach of looking for signs of grace in one's life.

12. Bridge, A Lifting Up, pp. 251-253. Bridge interprets biblical statements that Christ died "for all men" to mean only that he died "for the Jew and Gentile; but that he died for every particular man in the world, with intention to save him, is nowhere to be found in the Scripture." For "miserable comforters" see Brooks, Heaven on Earth, p. 31.

13. Crook, "A Short History," p. 209. Italics added.

14. Crisp, Christian Experiences, p. 20.

15. Ibid., p. 25.

16. William Dewsbury, "The First Birth," in The Faithful Testimony of that Antient Servant of the Lord, and Minister of the Everlasting Gospel William Dewsbery; in His Books, Epistles and Writings, Collected and Printed for future Service (London, 1689), p. 47.

17. Obadiah Sedgwick, The Doubting Beleever (London, 1641), pp. 276-277.

18. Brooks, Heaven on Earth, pp. 73-80.

19. Francis Howgill, "The Inheritance of Jacob Discovered, After his Return out of Egypt," in Early Quaker Writings 1650-1700, edited by Hugh Barbour and Arthur Roberts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), pp. 170-171.

20. Dewsbury, "The First Birth," p. 47.

21. J. B. Phillips, Your God is Too Small (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 27-28.

22. John Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 132, quoted in von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought, p. 161.

23. Crisp, Christian Experiences, pp. 25-26.

24. Ibid., p. 21.

25. Ibid., p. 20.

26. Ibid., p. 23.

27. Bridge, A Lifting Up, p. 257.

28. Ibid., p. 259.

29. Ibid., pp. 260-261.

30. Crook, "A Short History," p. 209.

31. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (1938; rpt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), p. 144.

32. There seem to have been few Puritan commentaries on Isa. 50:10 at this time. A 1668 bibliography of English-language Bible commentaries lists, for this verse, only Goodwin's Child of Light and a 1645 volume by John Shaw. The Catalogue of our English Writers on the Old and New Testament, Either in Whole, or in Part: Whether Commentators, Elucidators, Adnotators, Expositors, At large, or in Single Sermons, second impression, corrected and enlarged (London, 1668), p. 106. Calvin's commentary on Isaiah, familiar to the Puritans, interprets the "darkness" of Isa. 50:10 as referring only to outward afflictions.

33. Goodwin does devote two pages to this method (A Child of Light, pp. 320-322), but immediately goes on to give other directions in case this does not work.

34. Ibid., pp. 303-305, 333.

35. Dewsbury, "The First Birth," pp. 50-51.

36. Crisp, Christian Experiences, p. 23; the latter experience begins at p. 28.

37. Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 105-106.

38. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, edited by John L. Nickalls (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1975), pp. 34-36.

39. Ibid., p. 154.

40. Fox's expression is echoed in Robert Barclay's thesis that Christ's "universal and saving light" is "the purchase of his death, who tasted death for every man": An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (Philadelphia: Friends' Book Association, n.d.), p. 110 (prop. V).

41. Fox, Works (Philadelphia, 1831), vol. 4, p. 17.

42. Brooks, Precious Remedies, p. 142.

43. Fox, Journal, p. 348.

44. Barclay, Apology, p. 205 (prop. VII, sec. VI).

45. Crisp, Christian Experiences, p. 23.

46. Edward Burrough, "A Trumpet of the Lord Sounded forth of SION . . ." (1655), in Memorable Works of Edward Burrough (title page missing, but probably London, 1672), p. 107. Doug Gwyn pointed out the relevance of this passage to my topic.