No abstract

Few early New England practices troubled European observers more than the attempt to restrict church membership to the regenerate. The requirement that each prospective church member give a “relation” of his experience of grace, a public declaration “of God's manner of working upon [his] soul,” won quick notoriety. In his list of sixteen questions designed to embarass the Independent party, for instance, the Dutch minister William Apollonius began by raising the issue of the qualifications of church members. “Is no one to be admitted into the communion of the external visible church,” he demanded, “unless he is endowed with the real internal holiness of regeneration and with justifying faith in Christ? Must such a person undergo a strict examination…?” Robert Baillie suggested that prospective members' obligation “to show to the whole congregation convincing signs of their regeneration” was the “capital and fundamental difference” between his position and that of the New Englanders. He and his fellow Scot Samuel Rutherford were convinced that by requiring such a test, the New England churches had so seriously deviated from traditional Christian practice that they had aligned themselves with the sectarians.

Using as examples the writings of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, founding ministers of the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, this article shows how influential thinkers in early seventeenth-century England and New England saw the world around them through the filters of the Ramist philosophy of Alexander Richardson. It argues that Richardsonian Ramism produced theology and preaching that was less "biblical" and more "Calvinist" than has been conventionally thought.

This chapter moves to England to examine the “conscience theology” of the Puritan William Perkins, who stands in here for countless of his Puritan colleagues. Perkins’s treatises outsold Shakespeare’s plays well into the seventeenth century. To read Perkins’s many treatises is to see the encounter between the divine and the human shifting from the sacraments to the human heart.

This chapter looks at the theology of three representative figures—Richard Baxter, Richard Allestree, and Richard Alleine—each of whom offered a particular theological option after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Characteristic of this period of time would be a tendency to conflate religion and morality. The Evangelicals would recoil from Allestree’s moralism and eventually discover they had much in common with the theology of Baxter and Alleine