The Puritans as Guides of Conscience — J.I. Packer

Instead of attempting, what in fact I couldn't do in under an hour, to introduce you to Richard Baxter, as I hoped to do in this last lecture, I'm just going to finish off, as well as I can, what I began to say to you two days ago about the Puritans as guides of conscience.

This is partly because I judge that the Puritan teaching about conscience is extremely important, and partly because you can get all the stuff about Baxter quite easily by simply reading the section on him in Hugh Martin's Puritanism and Richard Baxter, recommended to you at the beginning of the course.

There's also, incidentally, in the library, the first volume of F .J. Powick's Life of Baxter, which is very good, I judge, P-O-W-I-C-K-E, by the way, if you want to take it down, and there's also a new biography of Baxter based on Powick by G .F. Nuttall, N-U-T-T-A-L-L, and between those books you can get the complete Baxter story without the least difficulty.

There's one book which I wish the library contained, but which unfortunately isn't there, that is G .H. Wilkinson's reprint of a book Baxter published in the year of his wife's death, entitled Abbreviate of the Life of Mrs. Margaret Baxter.

I really should have brought this in yesterday. It was republished by Wilkinson with the subtitle A Puritan Love Story. It is, in fact, a most charming and moving tribute by the bereaved husband to a woman who must have been a very remarkable saintly Christian woman indeed.

It's one of the, I don't use the word here in a sentimental sense, but in a strong sense, it's one of the sweetest things to have come out of the whole Puritan period. If you can ever get hold of it, do.

The title under which Wilkinson reprinted it was Richard Baxter and Margaret Chelten, A Puritan Love Story. And if you still have your doubts as to whether the Puritans were really human in areas like this, well, this is the book to put you out of doubt.

There's a bit about it in Hugh Martin, but you really ought to read Baxter's own treatise, not treatise, narrative. Breviant, he called it, a short account. So, in fact, it's written in style. No Puritan could write anything except in treatise style, you know, with numbered subdivisions and so many points about Mrs. Baxter and this, that or the other.

However, as I read Hugh Martin, and you will at least get the beginning of the story, it shouldn't take me more than half an hour, I think, to finish what I have to say about the Puritans as guides of conscience, and that will give us a little time to discuss this or anything else arising out of this course that you want to discuss before we finally bid each other farewell.

Conscience Bound to God's Word and the Gospel

I was speaking of the place of conscience in Puritan Christianity when we packed up two days ago, and I had just made the first of three points designed to show how central the concept of conscience was to the Puritan understanding of what it meant to be a Christian and live the Christian life.

Point number one, the Puritan insistence that conscience must be linked to the Word of God, connects this theme with Puritan Biblicism. Point number two, that it is this, that the blessing of a good conscience is the essence of Christianity.

This links up the Puritan teaching on conscience with their whole view of what it meant to be a child of God and to serve God. This point needs to be developed a bit. We've got to realize that to the Puritans, godliness was essentially a matter of conscience.

It was essentially a matter of getting and keeping a good conscience through the application of gospel truth. As long as a man is on regenerates, of the Puritans, his conscience operates, oscillates rather, between being bad and being asleep.

A lot of the time it's asleep, sometimes it wakes up, and when it wakes up then it's bad. The first work of grace, they went on to say, is for God to quicken a man's conscience and make it thoroughly bad, by forcing him to face God's demands on him, and so making him aware of his guilt and his impotence and his rebelliousness and his alienation in God's sight.

This is picking up Paul's theme of the law working wrong. Luther's theme too. But then the gospel brings him knowledge of pardon and peace through Christ, and this makes his bad conscience good. And a good conscience, said the Puritans, this is the, subjectively, at the very heart of God's gift of salvation.

It's God's gift to all those whom, like Bunyan's pilgrim, he enables to look with understanding at the cross. And it's maintained through life, on the one hand by seeking to do God's will in all things, as his child, and on the other hand by constantly keeping the cross in view, so that you don't lose sight of it in all the daily ups and downs of your life.

Let's quote a bit from William Fenner, who's explaining this in his treatise on conscience. Suppose a man has peace of conscience, says Fenner, what must he do to keep and maintain it? I answer, three things.

First, we must labor to prevent troubles of conscience by taking heed that we do nothing contrary to conscience. Nothing that we get in any evil way will cheer and comfort us in a time of need. Wretched is he that alloweth himself in any course which his conscience findeth fault with.

It is a good rule the apostle giveth. Blessed is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth, Romans 14 .22. That is, writes Fenner, blessed is he that hath not a condemning conscience. So that's point one.

Do nothing contrary to conscience. Secondly, if we will maintain our peace, we must labor to have our hearts grounded in the assurance of the love of God. This is the point of keeping the cross in view.

The third point is an application of the second. Third, we must use the assurance of faith in applying the blood of Christ. We must labor to purge and cleanse our consciences with it. If we find that we've sinned, we must run presently, that means at once, that's the old English sense of the word, we must run presently to the blood of Christ to wash away our sin.

We mustn't let the wound fester or exulcerate, we must presently get it healed. We must every day eye the brazen serpent. Oh let us sew out every day a daily pardon. Let us not sleep one night without a new pardon.

Better sleep in a house full of adders and venomous beasts than sleep in one sin. Oh then be sure with the day to clear the sins of the day, and then shall our consciences have true peace. And the context of all this is Fenner's insistence that this is vital for healthy, standard, normal, New Testament Christianity.

There must be this conscious exercise of heart and conscience in keeping the conscience good once God has made it, once grace has made it good. Labouring not to do anything contrary to conscience and constantly going back to the cross for the forgiveness of each day's sins.

Send the Puritans a good conscience is the greatest blessing that there is. Says Sebbes, conscience is either the greatest friend or the greatest enemy in the world. There's no better friend, says Fenner, than a conscience which knows peace with God.

No better friend in all this world for, once again it's firstly, secondly, thirdly, oh and fourthly. First, it is the very head of all comforts. A worthy divine calls it Abraham's bosom to the soul. That's rather nice.

Secondly, a quiet conscience makes a man to taste the sweetness of things heavenly and spiritual. Makes the word of God to be to him, as to David, sweeter than honey. And what's the next thing David says?

I have not departed from thy judgment, O Lord. That's Psalm 119, 102, 103. Again, says Fenner, a good conscience maketh a man taste sweetness in prayer and in a Sabbath and in the sacraments. What is the reason so few of you taste sweetness in these things?

The reason is this, because ye have not the peace of a good conscience. Thirdly, a good quiet conscience makes the man taste sweetness in all outward things, meat, drink, sleep, the company of friends.

Only the healthy man can take pleasure in recreations, walks, meat, sports and the like. They yield no comfort to people who are bed rid or half dead. So when the conscience is at peace and the soul is all in good health, all things are enjoyed with sweetness and comfort.

Fourthly, it sweetens evil to a man. Trouble, crosses, sorrows, afflictions. If a man has true peace in his conscience, it comforteth him in these things all. And so on. The conscience is God's echo of peace for the soul.

In life, in death, in judgment, it is unspeakable comfort. The greatest blessing God can give, a good conscience. Again, don't sentimentalize, by the way, Fenner's use of the noun sweetness and the verb sweeten.

This is not sugary sentimentality. You know what it's like when sour drinks or sour food is sweetened. Previously the sourness was positively unpleasant to you. Now the food is pleasant to you and it's delightful.

You enjoy it. You're content. This is the thought that Fenner is expressing here. Whatever comes, life is sweet. Life under God. Lived in the consciousness that you're right with God. That your conscience is good and so, as you, as consequently you know and are certain, God is at peace with you.

They go on to tell us a man with a good conscience can face death with equanimity. Do you remember Bunyan's Crossing of the Jordans, Pilgrim's Progress Part Two? Bunyan tells us how Mr Honest, in his lifetime, had spoken to one good conscience to meet him there, the which he also did and lent him his hand and so helped him over.

A good conscience, said the Puritans, further point this, is a tender conscience. The consciences of the godless may be so calloused that they scarcely ever act at all. But the healthy Christian conscience of the Puritans, that is the conscience renewed by grace, will be constantly in operation.

Listening for God's voice in his word, seeking to discern his will in everything, active in self-watch and self-judgment. The healthy Christian knows this frailty and he always suspects and distrusts himself, lest sin and Satan should ensnare him unawares.

So regularly he grills himself before God. That's not a Puritan word but it's a Puritan thought. Thorough self-examination in the presence of God as a man scrutinizes his deeds and his motives in the light of God's word and ruthlessly condemns himself when he finds within himself moral deficiency and dishonesty.

Distinguish, by the way, between self-examination and introspection. Introspection is just looking at yourself, period. Self-examination is looking at yourself in the light of God. That is, looking at God and his word, looking at yourself to measure yourself up by it, and then looking back to God to deal with him about what you find.

It's a basic distinction. Introspection is abominably unhealthy, thoroughly morbid. Self-examination is absolutely basic to healthy Christian living. It's important that we should learn to draw this distinction.

It's only on the basis of regular self-examination, keeping the conscience active and tender, in measuring our lives, our motives, our doings, our attitudes by the word of God, that we can expect to keep that glowing piece of conscience which sweetens life in the way that Fenner was just describing.

This was a kind of self-judging, said the Puritans, that Paul urged upon the Corinthians of communion time, and he told them that for want of it they'd come into a great deal of trouble. The degree of sharp-sightedness which your conscience shows in detecting your real sin, as distinct from the imaginary ones on which, as the Puritans knew, Satan encourages us to concentrate rather than the real ones, this is an index of how well we really know God and how close to him we really walk.

An index, in other words, of the real quality of our spiritual life. Said the Puritans, the sluggish conscience of what they called a sleepy Christian or a drowsy saint. This is a sign of spiritual malaise.

This is emphatically a case of sleeping sickness. The healthy Christian is the man who has the sense of God's presence stamped on his soul. He trembles at God's word. His conscience is always in exercise in the area of the application.

This is what God has said. How does it apply to me? What does it say about the life I have been living and what does it say about the life that I've got to live today and tomorrow and the next day? I think this is good doctrine.

I commend it to you. We can begin to assess our real state in God's sight by asking ourselves just how much exercise of conscience along these lines goes into our own daily living and it's a good test.

Thus the Puritans expounded the theme of the good conscience as the greatest blessing that God can give and the very essence of the godly life. And then third point, the Puritans teaching on conscience was reflected in their view of preaching.

Applicatory Preaching and the Search of Conscience

This picks up something which we've seen from another angle at an earlier stage in this course. When we talked about preaching, I stressed how much emphasis the Puritans put on the application. Now we are talking about conscience.

And from this standpoint also it's necessary to stress how much emphasis the Puritans put on the application. As by now you know the most characteristic feature in the Puritan ideal of preaching was the stress they laid on the need for a searching application of the truth to the hearer's consciences.

One mark of a spiritual preacher, that's their word, or a powerful preacher, their word again, was the closeness and faithfulness of application whereby, to use their phrase, he would rip up and dive into men's consciences to make them face themselves as God saw them.

See they knew that sinful men are slow to apply truth to themselves, although they're quick enough to see how it bears on the lives of others. That's our natural hypocrisy, that's the way we are. But to see how it bears on ourselves, no we are not so good, we are not so quick.

Therefore, said the Puritans, unapplied general statements of evangelical truth are not likely to do much good. The preacher must see it as an essential part of his job to work out the applications in detail so as to lead the minds of his hearer step by step down the avenues of practical syllogisms, if we may coin that phrase, which will bring the word right home to the hearer's hearts to do its judging and healing and wounding and comforting and guiding work.

So, writes Ames, there is a necessity laid on all ministers not only to declare God's will generally, but likewise publicly and privately to further the application of it. Application, you might say, is the preacher's highway from the head down into the heart.

The applicatory part of preaching, says the Westminster Directory, is a work of great difficulty, but it's not to be dodged. It requires much prudence, zeal and meditation, says the Directory, until a natural and corrupt man will be very unpleasant.

But nevertheless, the preacher is to endeavour to perform it in such a manner that his auditors may feel the word of God to be quick and powerful and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, because it's actually discerning the thoughts and intents of their hearts.

Well, this is necessary, this kind of preaching is necessary, says the Puritans, if the word of God is to do good. Why? Because it's only through this kind of preaching that the word of God really homes, homes on and hooks into the conscience.

And not till it's really hooked itself into the conscience will it have a transforming effect on the life. So the Puritan view of conscience, undergirded, indeed justified, required this insistence, so characteristic of them, that preaching should be applicatory, that truth stated from the word should be applied in detail to the hearts and the lives of congregations.

Thus we see the place of conscience in the Puritan understanding of Christian living and the philosophy of attention to the scriptures, self-examination and applicatory preaching that was connected with it.

And these things are so characteristic of Puritan Christianity, not to say Bible Christianity, that I wanted to stress them and underline them a bit. A further heading now, law-keeping and legalism. That the Puritans believed in a precise God is something that you all know because I've told you.

That the Puritans were extremely detailed in their exposition of the law of God is notorious. That they had principles for expanding and applying the Ten Commandments and the New Testament moral law to every area of human life is something which at least Presbyterians among you ought to know, because it's carefully set out in question 99 of the larger catechism.

The Ten Commandments, Legalism, and the Second Use of the Law

Question, what rules are to be observed for the right understanding of the Ten Commandments? And the following eight rules are given. And when you consider what the application of these rules will mean, I think you'll see as we go along just how broad a thing, how exceedingly broad a thing, the Puritans believe the commandment of God to be.

Answer, for the right understanding of the Ten Commandments, these rules are to be observed. One, that the law is perfect and bindeth everyone to full conformity in the whole man unto the righteousness thereof, and unto entire obedience forever, so as to require the utmost perfection of every duty and forbid the least degree of every sin.

Second, that the law is spiritual and reaches the understanding, will, affections, and all other powers of the soul, as well as words, works, and gestures. In other words, the law of God covers the heart as well as the outward action.

Three, that one and the same thing in divers respects is required or forbidden in several commandments. Four, that as where a duty is commanded, the contrary sin is, by implication, forbidden, and where a sin is forbidden, the contrary duty is, by implication, commanded, so where a promise is annexed, the contrary threatening is included, and where a threatening is annexed, the contrary promise is included.

Fifth, that what God forbids is at no time to be done. What he commands is always our duty, and yet every particular duty is not to be done at all times. And so on, and we can skip a little bit of this, but listen to number seven.

That what is forbidden or commanded to ourselves, we are bound, according to our places, to endeavor that it may be avoided or performed by others, according to the duty of their places. This one comes up, if I may just interpose a comment, this issue comes up in England, where it's solemnly agitated among evangelical Christians, ought we to exert our influence in our predominantly non-Christian community to try and have the fourth commandment observed and Sunday kept as a day holy to the Lord?

If we are to take seriously the witness of the larger catechism, there's no question about the answer. The law of God is for man as such, and part of our keeping of it is that we should do everything we can, within the sphere of our own influence, to ensure that others do the same.

And eighth and final point, that in what is commanded to others, we are bound, according to our places and callings, to be helpful to them, and to take heed of partaking with others in what is forbidden them.

This is a matter, of course, of attitudes. What you smile on, what you try to discourage people from. Well, it's obvious that the law expounded this way is going to be pretty broad. And perhaps it would be helpful to underline this, if I just read you what are the duties required in the first commandment, and the sins forbidden in the first commandment, so that you may see just how broad it comes when you expound the commandments, positively and negatively, in terms of general principle.

What are the duties required in the first commandment? The duties required in the first commandment are, the knowing and acknowledging of God, to be the only true God, and our God, and to worship and glorify Him accordingly, by thinking, meditating, remembering, highly esteeming, honoring, adoring, choosing, loving, desiring, and fearing of Him, believing Him, trusting, hoping, delighting, rejoicing in Him, being zealous for Him, calling upon Him, giving all praise and thanks, and yielding all obedience and submission to Him with the whole man, being careful in all things to please Him, and thoroughful when in anything He is offended, and walking humbly with Him.

That, in terms of headings, is what it means to have no other God but the Lord. Question, what are the sins forbidden in the first commandment? The sins forbidden in the first commandment are, atheism, idolatry, and having or worshipping more gods than one, or any with or instead of the true God, the not having and avouching Him for God, and our God, the omitting or neglecting of anything due to Him required in this commandment, ignorance, forgetfulness, misapprehensions, false opinions, unworthy and wicked thoughts of Him, bold and curious searching into His secrets, all profaneness, hatred of God, self-love, self-seeking, and all other inordinate and immoderate setting of our mind, will, or affection upon other things, and taking them off from Him in whole or in part, vain credulity, unbelief, heresy, misbelief, distrust, despair, incorrigible-ness, insensible-ness under judgment, hardness of heart, pride, presumption, carnal security, tempting of God, using unlawful means, trusting in lawful means, carnal delights and joys, corrupt, blind, and indiscreet zeal, lukewarmness and deadness in the things of God, there's another inch and a half of it, but I think that because we have a certain amount more to get through, I'll stop there.

This is simply to introduce you to the thorough way in which the Puritans expounded the law of God. All these things are involved when you come to think that the Puritans are what's involved in not having any other gods but the Lord.

And all the commandments, in fact, are expounded in equal detail in the larger catechisms. And you could hardly have a better compendium of Christian moral teaching than is given you in the questions dealing with the law of God in the larger catechism.

Now, many these days criticize the larger catechism, in particular, for being legalistic and moralistic by virtue of this detailed exposition of what the law of God requires. But it must be said that this criticism is, well, it tells you more about the critics than it does about the larger catechism.

It shows that, in fact, they know very little about Puritan theology. In the 1640s, when the larger catechism was being drawn up, at that very time, Puritan theologians in England were engaged in controversy with the antinomians.

One of the works that came out of that controversy has been reprinted by the Trust, The Bones of Christian Freedom by Samuel Bolton. There was a lot more writing along the same line. And the thrust of all this writing was to show that, though the law of God is extremely full and detailed and exacting, yet we are not, emphatically not, to revert to legalism and come into bondage to it, believing that we've got to keep it all for salvation and that our relationship with God depends upon our keeping the details of it, any more than we are to fall into antinomianism and suppose that, now that we are Christians, the law of God has nothing to say to us.

No, said the Puritans, what we've got to do is to hold fast to what the reformers called the second use of the law. The first use is to convince sinners of their sin. The second use is to act as an ideal, a pattern and a spur and a summons to the Christian as to how he's to please and glorify his God.

And this is the thrust of all this Puritan writing. They are not legalists. They insist that the basis of our obedience to the law as children of God is freedom from the law as a system of salvation. But that, having been freed from the reading of the law as a system of salvation, we are now to read it as a revelation of the things that our Heavenly Father loves and, as good children, we must recognize that it's our business to provide these things and to learn from the law what these things are.

We can't trust the Spirit to prompt us rightly from within if we don't study the law as it comes to us from without, said the Puritans. The Spirit teaches through the written word, not apart from it. So though the Puritans labored the need to keep the law, they did not do so on legalistic grounds.

It was not a reversion to justification by works. It was not a reversion to legalistic bondage of conscience. If you want to see this all set out in detail, incidentally, it has been written in a book, E. S. Kevin's book, The Grace of Law, which I find you can get in the seminary book room.

He examines all this argument against the antinomians in very great detail and the point becomes abundantly plain from the evidence he produces. Having clarified that then, may we go on to a further issue concerned with the Puritans and the conscience?

Comfortable Walking With God

New heading, and this is a phrase that I quote, comfortable walking. It's a Puritan phrase. It comes from the title of a book by Robert Bolton, Some General Directions for a Comfortable Walking with God.

By comfortable, of course, he doesn't mean easy. He does mean a walking, a life with God that is a life of peace and contentment and joy. We can't deal in detail with the way that the Puritans expounded this theme, but here we are coming to an area in which they were constantly giving instruction.

The points that I'm going to mention here come out again and again and again in their preaching and their teaching. They believed that Christians were, not merely had a right to be, in their sense of the word, comfortable.

That is, at peace with God, at peace with themselves, joyful, contented, triumphant as they walked through life, as they went through life. They were believing that, they were anxious that none should be ensnared into courses of action that would rob them of their comfort, in this sense.

So they said things like this. First, cultivate humility before God, recognizing that a sinner like you has no claims upon him, other than the claims which he himself has given you by the covenant of grace, and cultivate with humility contentment in the ways of God with you.

Realize his love, realize that, as Newton's hymn puts it, all that I meet shall work to my good. You know the verse I'm quoting perhaps, if all that I meet shall work to my good, the bitter is sweet, the bitter grows sweet, the medicine is food, though painful a present will cease before long, and there know how pleasant the conqueror's song.

It may be only second-class poetry, but it's first-class Christianity. Cultivate humility before God, and contentment with his providential ordering of your lot. He knows what he's doing. You're a sinner, and he's loved you, and he'll love you to the end.

Be humble before him, therefore, and content with his ways. As, for instance, in the matter of money, bank balance, possessions, certain theorists, people like Weber and Max Weber and R .H. Tawny, have argued for a connection between Puritanism and Capitalism, and they describe to the Puritans the belief that if a man is godly, then it's a guaranteed fact, certainty, that God will prosper his ways financially and on the material level.

Love God and grow rich. This, in fact, is a caricature, as will be obvious if I read you a summary of Perkins' teaching about riches and our attitude to riches in the course of his whole sum of the cases of conscience.

Four principles to bear in mind. One, a man is accountable to God for everything he possesses. The principle, therefore, of stewardship. Nothing that I have in my last analysis is my own. God has lented me to use for him.

I'm a steward of it, not in any absolute sense its owner. Secondly, the rich man must, if necessary, be prepared to abandon all for Christ, and while he possesses his wealth, to possess it as though he possessed it not, ready at any time when the call comes to let it go.

So it may be, Perkins, in other words, is recognising that it may be a case of serve God and grow poor. Thirdly, well, this is the next, this is actually his next point. At the call of God, riches must be forsaken.

This call is given sometimes, as in the case of the apostles, for the spreading of the gospel. God calls you to be a poor man in the gospel ministry. Or the call may be given under persecution, when it's a case of abandon your profession, your Christian profession, or abandon this world's goods and become a fugitive or a refugee.

Sometimes the call is given when it's necessary for Christians to relieve the distresses of their suffering brethren. These providential summonses must be heeded. This is part of godliness. And fourth point, we must, I'm quoting his sentence, we must so use and possess the goods we have, that the use and possession of them may tend to God's glory and the salvation of our souls.

And that leads on to the second point for comfortable walking. Be temperate in your recreation and the use of God's good things. This picks up yesterday's point. God has given many good things in the created order.

Food, drink, amusements of different kinds, marriage. All these things are to be used for the purpose for which he gave them and recreational things are to be used to recreate. Avoid excess, avoid luxury, avoid making amusement your end or your goal.

If you're a rich man you are peculiarly tempted to do that, says the Puritans. Don't do it. Leading on to third point. Third rule for comfortable walking, work in your calling. The Puritans picked up the Reformation insistence that any sort of work that does good to your fellow men and involves the use of the creatures, the created order, for the purpose for which God gave it.

This is something that is holy, something that glorifies God, something that is just as truly service of God as the work of the minister. And they developed the doctrine by insisting, what the Reformers had not actually said, that it's part of God's calling to every man that he should have a calling, in this special sense of the word, that is a job, a particular responsibility to discharge, a particular piece of work to do, responsibilities given him providentially and the family, the church, the state, the work that he does to earn his living.

Every man should have some such work and to work in your calling, says the Puritans, is a means of grace. Nothing like hard work to keep you from the kind of temptations to which you'd be exposed if you were idle.

Well, that's obvious. In idleness you are exposed to temptation. In idleness your thoughts can go roving off in all sorts of directions. In continued idleness it's very easy to think of nothing but further amusements and further pleasures.

It's a means of grace, therefore, to have a job to do, a responsible piece of work which you're doing as unto the Lord. A profession, a vocation in the modern sense, or mother in the home, making the home.

Everyone has some job, some calling, and one of the secrets of comfortable walking is that you should work hard in it. Point four. Avoid all occasions of sin. Know yourself. Be realistic about yourself.

Come to terms with yourself. If you've got particular weaknesses of character and temperament on which particular circumstances or influences play, well, avoid those circumstances and influences. If certain types of literature are not helpful to you, don't read them.

And so on. The principle is of wide application. And fifthly, keep your heart in heaven. Heavenly meditation. That is, meditation on God, on his glory, on his grace, on his love, on his goodness, on all the attractive and delightful things that the Word of God sets before us.

And on the hope of glory that he set before us. Richard Baxter was specially strong on this, as witnessed his great, though shapeless treatise, The Saints' Everlasting Rest, which is, oh, in most of the, most of the quarto, all the quarto editions of it I've seen, it's more than, it's more than 800 pages of exposition.

But the thrust of the whole thing is, have the goal, the goal of happiness that God has set at the end of the Christian's road, clearly before your mind, dwell on it, often think about it, have it glowing of a live coal at your heart, as Bunyan, the Mr. Great Heart puts it, and then live your life in the light of this hope, and by the scale of values, which, the scale of values, which the Word of God gives you, in the light of this estimation of, in the light of the estimation of this world as temporary, and that world with its glory as eternal.

It's really only a variation on the pilgrim theme, as you travel through a journey, just think of what awaits you at the end, and it will make your journey that much straighter, and that much, that much less burdensome as you go along, and you'll be less apt to be ensnared by the things that might divert you to the right hand or the left as you go along.

Keep your heart in heaven. Heavenly meditation on God, and His grace, and His glory. Some of the advice then, that that's some of the advice that the Puritans were constantly giving to the Christian, guiding him into the way of comfortable walking through the keeping of a good conscience.

You can see how all these points link up with the keeping of a good conscience. Keeping you out of harm's way, keeping you in the right path, in which your conscience will, your conscience will testify to you, to your sincerity, and not give testimony to your sin.

Pastoral Care for Troubled Souls

And now the clock is beating me, but I'm just going to put, to put this bit in. Final point about the Puritans as guides of conscience. The Puritans dealing with troubled souls. This is worth just a moment for those of us who are in, or who are going to be in, the gospel ministry.

A person comes to you and is not perhaps quite sure what's wrong, is just sure that there is something wrong. He has an indefinable sense that things are not well with him spiritually. He hasn't any joy.

He doesn't quite know what's wrong. He just knows that things aren't as they should be. What do you do with him? Well here the Puritans were great. They were, remember, physicians of the soul. They made it their business to know how to diagnose and deal with such cases.

Stage one, the Puritan asked himself, is this person converted? Is he a fallen or slipped Christian? Or is he perhaps the person who's never come into a living knowledge of grace at all? And so he would ask him.

He would ask him by probing questions two things. Whether on the one hand he'd been introduced to the reality of his own sin, as if a person hasn't got a realistic conviction of, a realistic awareness of his own sin, based on real God-given self-knowledge, then you can be pretty sure he isn't yet converted.

And secondly the Puritans would inquire, has he a sense of, indeed not only the sense, but the instinct and impulse within him of love to God and contentment with God's ways. That is, is he prepared to be saved God's way?

Is the mainspring of his life thankfulness to God for having redeemed him from sin? Is he heartily willing to go the way that Christ leads him, however rough it may be? To leave anything that Christ may call him to leave, however costly that may be?

To take up his cross and follow the Savior as he's summoned to do? Does he love God and is he out of love to God, content to go God's way and to be saved God's way? If the answers given to these questions were not satisfactory, then the Puritan would proceed with him on the assumption that though there might have been some general work of the Spirit in his heart, he'd not yet got to the point where he passed from death into true spiritual life.

But supposing it works the other way, supposing that these questions are answered satisfactorily, and yet the man complains of spiritual malaise. What's to be said of him? Well, the next thing to ask is whether perhaps his distress is not due to non-spiritual causes.