Richard Sibbes

Richard Sibbes was a wheelwright's son who went up to Cambridge, and he never really left that world: he was a lecturer at Holy Trinity, master of St Catharine's Hall, and preacher to the lawyers of Gray's Inn in London, which put him in front of the men who ran England. His contemporaries called him the heavenly doctor, and his preaching was warm where much Puritan preaching was severe — he was known for pressing the tenderness of Christ toward weak and failing believers. His short book The Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax, built on Isaiah 42:3 as Matthew quotes it, is the one that traveled: a young Richard Baxter read a battered copy his father had been given by a peddler, and dated his conversion to it. Baxter in turn shaped generations of pastors, so a great deal of later English Christianity traces back through a cheap book handed to a boy at a door.