William Perkins , Englands Calvin!

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Like his mentor, Chaderton, Perkins worked to purify the established church from within rather than join those Puritans who advocated separation. Rather than addressing church polity, his primary concerns focused on addressing pastoral inadequacies, spiritual deficiencies, and soul-destroying ignorance in the church.
In time Perkins—a rhetorician, expositor, theologian, and pastor—became the principle architect of the young Puritan movement. His vision of reform for the church, combined with his intellect, piety, book writing, spiritual counseling, and communication skills enabled him to set the tone for seventeenth-century Puritans—in their accent on Reformed, experiential truth and self-examination, and in their polemic against Roman Catholicism and Arminianism. Fuller said of Perkins, who was handicapped in his right hand, “This Ehud, with a lefthanded pen did stab the Romish cause.” By the time of his death, Perkins’s writings in England were outselling those of Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger combined.[xxvii][27] He “moulded the piety of a whole nation,” H.C. Porter said.[xxviii][28]

Perkins died from kidney stones in 1602, just before the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His wife of seven years was pregnant at the time and caring for three small children as well as sorrowing over three additional children recently lost to various diseases. When John Cotton heard the bell toll for Perkins’s funeral, he secretly rejoiced that his conscience would no longer have to smart under such powerful preaching.[xxix][29] Perkins’s closest friend, James Montagu, later Bishop of Winchester, preached the funeral sermon for Perkins from Joshua 1:2, “Moses my servant is dead.” Ward, deeply distressed, wrote on behalf of many: “God knows his death is likely to be an irrevocable loss and a great judgment to the university, seeing there is none to supply his place.”[xxx][30] Perkins was buried in the church yard of Great St. Andrews.[xxxi][31]

Eleven posthumous editions of Perkins’s writings, containing nearly fifty treatises, were printed by 1635. His major writings include expositions of Galatians 1-5, Matthew 5-7, Hebrews 11, Jude, and Revelation 1-3 as well as treatises on predestination, the order of salvation, assurance of faith, the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the worship of God, the Christian life and vocation, ministry and preaching, the errors of Roman Catholicism, and various cases of conscience. His writings, popularized for lay readership, are Bible-based in accord with the principles of literal and contextual interpretation established by the Reformers. They are practically and experientially Calvinistic, continually focusing on motives, desires, and distresses in the heart and life of sinners, ever aiming at finding and following the path of eternal life. To accentuate pietistic emphases, Perkins usually employs a Ramistic method that presents the definition of the subject and its further partition, often by dichotomies, into progressively more heads or topics, applying each truth set forth.[xxxii][32]

Perkins’s influence continued through such theologians as William Ames (1576-1633), Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), John Cotton (1585-1652), and John Preston (1587-1628). Perkins’s ministry is what Cotton considered the “one good reason why there came so many excellent preachers out of Cambridge in England, more than out of Oxford.”[xxxiii][33] Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680) wrote that when he entered Cambridge, six of his instructors who had sat under Perkins were still passing on his teaching. Ten years after Perkins’s death, Cambridge was still “filled with the discourse of the power of Mr. William Perkins’ ministry,” Goodwin said.[xxxiv][34]

The translation of Perkins’s writings prompted greater theological discussion between England and the Continent.[xxxv][35] J. van der Haar records 185 seventeenth-century printings in Dutch of Perkins’s individual or collected works,[xxxvi][36] twice as many as any other Puritan.[xxxvii][37] He and Ames, his most influential student on the continent, imfluenced Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) and numerous Dutch Nadere Reformatie (Dutch Second Reformation) theologians.[xxxviii][38] John Robinson (c. 1575-1625), the Separatist, was a disciple of Perkins. At least fifty editions of Perkins’s works were printed in Switzerland and in various parts of Germany.[xxxix][39] His writings were also translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Irish, Welsh, Hungarian, and Czech.[xl][40]

In New England, nearly one hundred Cambridge men who led early migrations, including William Brewster of Plymouth, Thomas Hooker of Connecticut, John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay, and Roger Williams of Rhode Island, grew up in Perkins’s shadow. Richard Mather was converted while reading Perkins, and Jonathan Edwards was fond of reading Perkins more than a century later.[xli][41] Samuel Morison remarks that “your typical Plymouth Colony library comprised a large and a small bible, Ainsworth’s translation of the Psalms, and the works of William Perkins, a favorite theologian.”[xlii][42] “Anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a towering figure in their eyes,”writes Perry Miller. Perkins and his followers were “the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts.”[xliii][43]

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