The Story From Elizabeth to Herrnhut
England, New England and the German lands, from their own records.
In 1559 Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity bound every minister in England to the services of the Book of Common Prayer. Thomas Fuller says that ministers who refused the bishops' demand to subscribe were "branded with the odious name of puritans", a name that began about 1564.
William Perkins defined theology in 1591 as "the science of living blessedly for ever". Richard Sibbes built The Bruised Reed (1630) on Christ's gentleness with the weak.
A bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not extinguish, till He leads justice to victory.
Sibbes set this verse at the head of The Bruised Reed.
Some would not wait for the national church to change. At Norwich in 1580 or 1581 Robert Browne formed what Williston Walker calls the first Congregational church of the long series.
A company from Scrooby went to Holland, and in 1620 part of it sailed from Leyden. Bradford wrote that "they knew they were pilgrimes" and lifted their eyes to heaven, "their dearest cuntrie". Of the hundred and more who came over, he says, scarce fifty were alive two or three months later.
Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.
Bradford's margin sets "Heb. 11." beside his account of the leaving from Leyden.
John Winthrop's discourse on Christian charity (1630), headed "Written on board the Arbella" in its printing of 1838, warned, "wee shall be as a citty upon a hill". Jerome McGann calls the status of this famous work "now quite unsettled".
Six years later the General Court voted money toward "a schoale or colledge". New Englands First Fruits (1643) says the founders were "dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches".
You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.
Winthrop's city upon a hill is the city Jesus named in the Sermon on the Mount.
Matthew 5:14BSB
Parliament's assembly at Westminster, by Schaff's count 121 divines and 30 lay assessors, first sat on 1 July 1643.
Its Shorter Catechism begins with the question "What is the chief end of man?" and answers, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever."
So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.
The catechism's first answer rests on Paul's charge to do all to the glory of God.
John Owen's Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656) expounds Romans 8:13. The same year Richard Baxter printed The Reformed Pastor, an exposition of Acts 20:28 for the ministers of Worcestershire.
Baxter and his helpers took fifteen or sixteen families a week for instruction, so as to go through the whole parish of Kidderminster in a year.
Keep watch over yourselves and the entire flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood.
Baxter took this charge to the Ephesian elders as the text of The Reformed Pastor.
Acts 20:28BSB
Edmund Calamy printed the names of the ministers put out in 1662 but would not total them. Samuel Palmer counted 2,257 in 1775 from a manuscript catalogue.
In Grace Abounding (1666) Bunyan likened parting from his family, his blind child among them, to "the pulling the flesh from my bones".
But Peter and the other apostles replied, “We must obey God rather than men.
Peter's answer to the council is the answer of the ministers who would not assent and of the preacher who would not stop.
Acts 5:29BSB
Massachusetts sent Roger Williams out in 1635 for opinions against the authority of the magistrates. In The Bloudy Tenent (1644) he asked that every conscience, pagan, Jewish, Turkish or antichristian, be free in every nation. The same year Milton asked Parliament, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
The London Baptists' confession of 1644 made baptism "dipping or plunging the body under water". Their confession of 1677 says "God alone is Lord of the conscience". The Toleration Act of 1689 let dissenters meet in places certified to the bishop or the justices.
Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
The confession of 1677 cites this verse beside its line that God alone is Lord of the conscience.
Romans 14:4BSB
The Friends gathered around George Fox's preaching in the English Midlands from 1647, as his Journal tells it.
The true Light who gives light to every man was coming into the world.
The Friends read the true Light that gives light to every man as Christ's light within.
John 1:9BSB
In the Thirty Years' War, Peter H. Wilson counts at least five million dead in the Empire, "about a fifth" of its people. Johann Arndt's True Christianity (1605) called true divinity "a living experience and a practical exercise of the soul".
Philipp Jakob Spener, a Frankfurt pastor, held meetings at his house to go over his sermons, and from them the Pietists took their name. In 1695 the Wittenberg theologians printed their charges against him.
Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.
Spener cited this verse for the meetings in which believers taught one another from the Word.
At Halle August Hermann Francke set an alms box in his parlour. A gift of eighteen shillings and sixpence became the fund for a charity school, begun about Easter 1695.
The Canstein Bible institute at Halle printed 5,224,670 Bibles, Testaments and Psalters from 1712 to 1862, by the count of its inspector Oswald Bertram.
If anyone with earthly possessions sees his brother in need, but withholds his compassion from him, how can the love of God abide in him?
Francke wrote this verse over his alms box.
1 John 3:17BSB
Count Zinzendorf, a godson of Spener and a pupil at Francke's school, let refugees from Moravia build on his estate. They felled the first tree on 17 June 1722 and named the place Herrnhut, the Lord's watch.
Its statutes of 1727 bound the village to "a constant bond of love with all Children of God" of every confession. From 27 August that year men and women took the hours of the day in prayer; Hutton writes that the watch "is said to have lasted without interruption for over a hundred years."
that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.
Herrnhut's divided settlers became one people at the Lord's Supper, as Christ prayed His people would be.
John 17:21BSB
Matthew 5:14, 1 Corinthians 10:31, Acts 20:28, Acts 5:29, Romans 14:4, John 1:9, Colossians 3:16, 1 John 3:17 and 1 more