John Bunyan

1. 1620The Mayflower sailsRoughly a hundred passengers, about half of them from a separatist congregation that had already fled to Holland, cross to a cold New England coast in November. Close to half die before spring.
2. 1628John Bunyan is born at ElstowA tinker's son in a Bedfordshire village, baptized that November. He will have almost no formal schooling and will write the most-read book in English after the Bible.
3. 1636Harvard is founded to train ministersThe Massachusetts Bay colony votes money for a college because, as an early account put it, they dreaded leaving an unlearned ministry to the churches once the first pastors were in the dust. It is named in 1639 for John Harvard, who willed it his library.
4. 1643–1646The Westminster Assembly meetsCalled by Parliament, some 120 ministers and 30 laymen sit in Westminster Abbey through the English Civil War. They produce the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647).
5. 1675Spener's *Pia Desideria*Philipp Jakob Spener, a pastor in Frankfurt, publishes six plain proposals: more Bible in laypeople's hands, believers meeting in small groups, faith that shows up in life, gentler argument, ministers trained for godliness, preaching aimed at the heart. The book names a movement: Pietism.
6. 1678*The Pilgrim's Progress* is publishedBunyan had spent twelve years (1660–1672) in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelace tags to feed his family, including a blind daughter. Out of those years came the dream of a man with a burden on his back, running toward a distant light.
7. 1679–1688Scotland's Killing TimeCovenanters who kept preaching in open fields after outdoor worship was outlawed are hunted across the moors of the southwest. Richard Cameron falls at Airds Moss in 1680; James Renwick, the last of them executed, dies in 1688.
8. Oct 1685The Edict of Nantes is revokedLouis XIV cancels the protection French Protestants had held since 1598. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots flee France for England, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the American colonies, and the Cape.

The Puritans & Pietists: the whole era→