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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Thomas Watson
1620–1686EnglishPuritan
The Puritan who could say more in one sentence than most preachers say in a paragraph.
Summary
- Lived 1620–1686, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Puritan / Nonconformist.
The life
Thomas Watson preached at St Stephen's Walbrook in London for about sixteen years, and his hearers packed the place. He was jailed in the Tower in 1651 for his part in a plot to bring Charles II back to the throne, a Puritan who wanted a king, which tells you he was harder to categorize than the label suggests. When the Act of Uniformity came in 1662 he was ejected anyway, and went on preaching in private houses and halls wherever he could gather people quietly. After the Great Fire he took a hall in Crosby House and preached there for years.
His writing is the reason he is still read: short, plain, and packed, with images a farmer or a shopkeeper could carry home. A Body of Divinity, gathered from his lectures on the Westminster Shorter Catechism, was published after his death and has never been out of print for long since.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1600–1730
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Thomas Watson at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Wrote so plainly and so densely that ordinary people carried his sentences home and kept them.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
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.