The Great Cloud of Witnesses · Gallery
The Puritans & Pietists
The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you. 19 witnesses hang on this wall, era by era down the line.
What Was Happening
1600 to about 1730, with a few of its last writers, Isaac Watts among them, still working into the 1740s.
The Reformation had put a Bible in ordinary hands. This generation asked the harder question behind that gift: had reading it actually changed anyone? English Puritans pressed to remove what they saw as leftover Catholic ceremony and structure from the Church of England, and to make personal godliness, not just correct doctrine, the test of a real Christian. In Germany, where decades of war had left the church exhausted and its theology dry, Philipp Spener and August Francke built small groups, schools, and orphanages instead.
Puritan meant exactly what it sounds like: a push to purify the English church of practices its critics judged unbiblical. Pietist comes from the Latin word for devotion, marking a movement that measured faith by a changed daily life rather than by doctrinal precision alone. At Herrnhut in Saxony, refugees called Moravians began a prayer meeting in 1727 that ran, in shifts, for more than a hundred years.
The cost
In 1662, England's Act of Uniformity forced out roughly two thousand ministers who would not conform to the required prayer book, ending their income and their pulpits in a single year. John Bunyan spent twelve years in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelaces to feed his blind daughter and writing The Pilgrim's Progress in his cell.
In Scotland, the Covenanters who refused to accept bishops over their churches were hunted and killed on the open moors through the years remembered as the Killing Time.
19 witnesses on this wall
The Puritans & Pietists1600–173017 on this stretch
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.
Listed the exact lies that talk a believer into sin, and gave the exact answer to each one.
Found God as near among the pots and pans of a monastery kitchen as he was at the hour of prayer.
Visited every family in his town one hour at a time, then wrote the book that still teaches pastors how.
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Wrote so plainly and so densely that ordinary people carried his sentences home and kept them.
Wrote down the night God met him, sewed the paper into his coat, and carried it until he died.
Searched every church in England for a living faith, then gathered the Quakers and went to jail for it eight times.
Locked out of his church, he gathered his people on a rock that the tide uncovers, and preached there.
Started small Bible-study groups in his own house, and Pietism grew out of them.
Rose at four every morning to write a whole-Bible commentary that a farming family could read at the table.
Built an orphanage, schools and a Bible press at Halle by praying for the money and writing down every answer.
Complained that church singing was dull, was dared to do better, and gave English Christians about 750 hymns.
The Great Awakenings1730–18001 on this stretch
The Church Under Fire & Into All the World1930–today1 on this stretch
Portraits: Wikimedia Commons and resident public-domain plates: full attribution and license on every witness page.