The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation

by Michael Reeves

in Grace Abounding

But one day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, is my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was a-doing, God could not say of me, He wants my righteousness, for that was just before Him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, and today, and for ever (Heb. 13.8). Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed, I was loosed from my affliction and irons, my temptations had fled away; so that, from that time, those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me now; now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.

John Owen,

It was not just that the move made the nonconformists second-class citizens, incapable of social advancement and influence; the real problem for them was that Cambridge

and Oxford had been the Puritan seminaries and training-grounds.

Puritanism, after all, had been a movement concerned with words (and the word of God), and so when Puritans were no longer educated, the muscle of the movement wasted away.