The “Conscience Religion” of William Perkins

Abstract

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.