PURITANS' PROGRESS (Part 2 of 2)

A 350th Anniversary Commemoration of the Norwich & Norfolk Ministers Ejected from their Churches by the Act of Uniformity, 1662.
Dr Alan C. Clifford
Norwich Reformed Church  (used here with his permission).

Remember those ... who have spoken the Word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct - Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and for ever.  (Hebrews 13: 7-8)

Another and more well-known Puritan is Jeremiah Burroughs. This faithful servant of Christ was born in 1599. Having graduated from Emmanuel College, the ‘Puritan seminary’ at Cambridge, Jeremiah Burroughs
commenced his ministry as colleague to the influential Puritan Edmund Calamy at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. (Calamy, of Huguenot descent, was to be one of the ‘Amyraldian’ members of the Westminster Assembly). In 1631, Burroughs became the Rector of Tivetshall in Norfolk. In this rural setting, he faithfully preached the Gospel of Christ according to Puritan principles. When Bishop Wren’s articles and injunctions were issued in 1636, Burroughs was suspended and deprived of his living for ‘nonconformity’. Leaving for London, he temporarily found refuge under the hospitable roof of the Earl of Warwick. Increasing intolerance from the ecclesiastical authorities made this refuge insecure, so, to escape persecution, he fled to Holland, and settled at Rotterdam. Here in the English Congregational church, Burroughs ministered alongside William Bridge (who had escaped from Norwich in 1636).

Besides being a victim of certain false political accusations, Burroughs was ater severely criticised by the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards for deserting his ministry (even though Christ permits avoiding persecution where possible, see Matthew 10: 23). His testimony to the Lord’s leading is full of interest:

It was four or five months after this accusation before I went to Rotterdam.  Had not the prelatical faction been incensed against me, for standing out against their superstitions, I should have ventured to have stood to what I had spoken, for all I said was by way of query, affirming nothing. I knew how
dangerous the times then were. I knew what the power of the prelatical party at that time was, who were extremely incensed against me. A man’s innocency, then, could not be his safety. A mere accusation was enough then, to cause me to provide for my security. I was, by Bishop Wren, deprived of my living in Norfolk, in which, I believe, I endured as great a brunt as almost any of those who stayed in England; though Mr Edwards is pleased to say, we fled that we might be safe upon the shore, while our brethren were at sea in the storm. I believe neither he, nor scarcely any of our Presbyterian brethren, endured a harder storm at sea, than I did before I went out of England. Yet, I bless God, he stirred up noble friends to countenance and encourage me in my sufferings; for which I will not cease to pray that the blessing of God may be upon them and their families. For some months I lived with my lord of Warwick; with whom I found much undeserved love and respect, and was in the midst of as great encouragements to stay in England, as a man deprived, and under the
bishop’s rage, could expect; when I set myself in as a serious a manner as ever I did in my life, to examine my heart about my staying in England; whether some carnal respects, that countenance I had from divers noble friends, the offers of livings, did not begin to prevail too far with me. My spirit was much troubled with these thoughts: why do I still linger in England, where I cannot with peace enjoy what my soul longs after? Did I not formerly think, that if ever God took me clearly from my people, I would hasten to be where I might be free from such mixtures in God’s worship, without wringing my conscience any more? Why do I, therefore, now stay? Am I not under temptation? God knows these were the sad and serious workings of my spirit, and these workings were as strong as ever I felt them in my life.

Burroughs then explains an amazing providence that occurred while he struggled with his thoughts in the Tivetshall rectory:


While I was thus musing, thus troubled in my spirit, and lifting up my heart to God to help me, and set me at liberty, leaning upon my chamber window, I spied a man, in a citizen’s habit, coming in the court-yard towards my chamber; and upon his coming near, I knew him to be formerly a citizen of
Norwich but, at that time, one of the church at Rotterdam. When this man came near to me, he told me that he came lately from Rotterdam; and that he was sent there by the church to give me a call to join with Mr Bridge in the work of the Lord, in that church. When I heard him say this, I stood awhile
amazed at the providence of God; that, at such a time, a messenger should be sent to me upon such an errand. My heart, God knows, exceedingly rejoiced in this call. I presently told the man I saw God much in it, and dared not in the least to gainsay it. My heart did much close with it yet I desired to see the hand of God a little further. I required him to return my answer to the church, with a desire, that, as most of them knew me, they should give me their call under their own hands; then there would be nothing wanting, but I should be theirs; and thus we parted.” [The messenger from Rotterdam eventually returned with confirmation of Burroughs’ call].

Then, he says, “We agreed upon the day when, and the place where, we should meet in Norfolk, to make a full conclusion and prepare for our voyage."

Having enjoyed a fruitful ministry in the Netherlands, Burroughs returned to England at the beginning of the civil war in 1642. The Church of England having been abolished by the Puritan Parliament (the power of the bishops being terminated), Burroughs was determined ‘not to preach sedition, but peace; for which he earnestly prayed and laboured’. We must now briefly consider the religious context in which he ministered.

The Westminster Assembly
In 1643, Parliament adopted the Solemn League and Covenant and the Westminster Assembly was convened to reform the Anglican Church along presbyterian lines. The Assembly's proceedings were held from 1643-49. Their deliberations produced the Confession of Faith, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms, the Directory for Public Worship (a replacement for the Book of Common Prayer) and the Form of Church Government (the presbyterian alternative to episcopacy). These documents remain the doctrinal standards
for Presbyterians throughout the world.

For all that is truly biblical and commendable in these statements of the Reformed Faith (not without ultra-orthodox tendencies compared with Reformation Confessions), the entire Presbyterian programme was beset with coercive intolerance—the disease of Rome and Canterbury. Due to the procrastinations of earlier generations of Presbyterian Puritans, English nonconformity had grown into a wide spectrum of religious groups. The Presbyterian politicians and pastors, fearing anarchy and confusion, demanded prohibition with civil penalties of all the puritan sects—Independents, Baptists, Quakers and others. Now Cromwell—himself an Independent—and his Ironsides represented these more radical versions of Puritanism. They were predictably angered at Parliament’s proscribing tendencies especially before the war was even won! Presbyterian policy weakened the Army’s morale. Cromwell was happy whatever sectarian opinions his soldiers maintained so long as ‘the root of the matter’ was in them. Voices of protest within the Army were growing. Thus John Milton, destined to be Cromwell’s Latin secretary, wrote in one of his famous sonnets that ‘New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large’.

This disarray within Puritanism was a major contribution to its eventual collapse. In 1648, Parliament decreed in the Ordinance of May 2 that eight anti-trinitarian errors(including the denial of the two natures of Christ) were to be punishable by death. Sixteen opinions—including the denial of infant baptism—were to be punishable by imprisonment. Only the military power of Cromwell and the Independents prevented this harsh statute from coming  into effect. How tragic that the new Presbyterian establishment failed to see the counter-productivity of its intolerance. Indeed, all parties were tainted in this way. How often have persecuted groups persecuted others on acquiring political power! Human nature being what it is, doubtless Baptists and Quakers would have oppressed others had political power been in their grasp.

Truly, this was a tit-for-tat era. As intolerant Laud had driven Puritans out of the Church of England, so intolerant Presbyterians removed Laudian clergy (albeit for arguably more plausible reasons). The Restoration government was to have the last word in ejecting around two-thousand Puritans—mostly Presbyterians—in 1662.

Since it was our Dutch Reformed neighbours across the North Sea who provided the ultimate solution to our constitutional ills in 1688, the Anglo-Scottish Presbyterians would have done better to emulate them. Much
earlier, in the 1580s, the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (like the Huguenots in France, non-coercively Presbyterian), never forgetting their appalling sufferings at the hands of Spanish Catholics, decided to tolerate the Anabaptists. They acknowledged that failure to reach agreement in religious profession was God’s judgement on account of their sins. However, another factor must not be ignored. The Jesuits were by no means dormant in these turbulent years. According to information sent to the Jesuit
headquarters in Paris, they had successfully infiltrated Puritan ranks masquerading as Independent and Baptist radicals in order to foment divisions. Their objective—as ever—to discredit and destroy Protestantism.

Notwithstanding the disappointments of the times, the next century was to vindicate the essential case for Puritanism. Albeit born and nurtured within Anglicanism, the Methodist Evangelical awakening—in England and Wales—produced a dynamic movement which could not be contained within the confining forms and structures of the Established Church.

Dissenter at Westminster
Jeremiah Burroughs was one of several members of the Westminster Assembly who dissented from the Presbyterian programme. Benjamin Brook describes his London ministry and Assembly activities thus:
Mr Burroughs was a person highly honoured and esteemed, and he soon became a most popular and admired preacher. After his return, his popular talents and great worth presently excited public attention, and he was chosen preacher to the congregations of Stepney and Cripplegate, London, then accounted two of the largest congregations in England. Mr Burroughs preached at Stepney at seven o’clock in the morning, and Mr William Greenhill at three in the aftern oon. These two persons, stigmatized by Wood as notorious
schismatics and independents, were called in Stepney pulpit, by Mr Hugh Peters, one the morning star, the other the evening star of Stepney. Mr Burroughs was chosen one of the assembly of divines, and was one of the dissenting brethren, but a divine of great wisdom and moderation. He united with his brethren, Messrs Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, William Bridge, and Sydrach Sympson, in publishing their Apologetical Narration, in defence of their own distinguishing sentiments. The authors of this work, who had been exiles
for religion, to speak in their own language, “consulted time scriptures without any prejudice.” They “considered the word of God as impartially as men of flesh and blood are likely to do,” in any juncture of time; the place “they went to, the condition they wore in, and the company they were with, affording no
temptation to any bias.” They assert, that every church or congregation has sufficient power within itself for the regulation of religious government, and is subject to no external authority whatever. The principles upon which they founded their church government, were, to confine themselves in every thing to what the scriptures prescribed, without paying any regard to the opinions or practice of men; nor to tie themselves down so strictly to their present resolutions as to leave no room for alterations upon a further acquaintance
with divine truth. They steered a middle Course between Presbyterianism and Brownism: the former they accounted too arbitrary, the latter too rigid; deviating from the spirit and simplicity of the gospel. These are the general principles of the Independents of the present day.

Burroughs was therefore opposed to Presbyterian coercion, as Brook makes clear:

He was a divine of great piety, candour, and moderation; and during their debates, he generously declared, in the name of the independents, “That if their congregation might not be exempted from the coercive power of the classis; and if they might not have liberty to govern themselves in their own way, so long as they behaved themselves peaceably towards the civil magistrate, they were resolved to suffer, or go to some other part of the world, where they might enjoy their liberty. But,” said he, “while men think there is no way of peace but by forcing all to be of the same mind; while they think the civil sword is an ordinance of God to determine all controversies in divinity; and that it must needs be attended with fines and imprisonment to the disobedient; while they apprehend there is no medium between a strict uniformity and a general confusion of all things: while these sentiments prevail, there must be a base subjection of men’s consciences to slavery, a suppression of much truth, and great disturbances in the Christian world.”

Burroughs’ last years
‘After his return from exile’ says Brook, ‘he never gathered a separate congregation nor accepted of any parochial benefice, but continued to exhaust his strength by constant preaching, and other important services,
for the advantage of the Church of God. He was a divine of a most amiable and peaceable spirit; yet he had some bitter enemies, who, to their own disgrace, poured upon him their slander and falsehood. Mr Edwards, whose pen was mostly dipped in gall, pours upon him many reproachful and unfounded reflection’. Burroughs’ incessant labours, and his grief over the religious and civil disturbances of the times, are said to have hastened his end. Injured in a fall from his horse, he died from an infection on 14 November 1646, aged forty-seven.

Baxter’s assessment of Burroughs
Richard Baxter’s gracious and generous verdict on Jeremiah Burroughs could not be more different: ‘If all the Episcopalians had been like Archbishop Ussher; all the Presbyterians like Mr Stephen Marshall; and all
the Independents like Mr Jeremiah Burroughs, the breaches of the church would soon have been healed’. Consistent with his character, Burroughs preached and published his Irenicum: to the Lovers of Truth and Peace. It was a commendable attempt to heal the divisions among Christians.

Of Burroughs’ numerous books, Dr Daniel Williams wrote that his Exposition of Hosea ‘is a pleasing specimen, to shew how the popular preachers of his time applied the Scriptures, in their expository discourses, to the various cases of their hearers. He published several of his writings while he lived,
and his friends sent forth many others after his death, most of which were highly esteemed by all pious Christians’. The famous Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, first published in 1648, went through many editions.

We close with a brief extract from the Rare Jewel. Exhorting us to be content in the love and salvation of our Lord Jesus Christ, with a humble dependence on God’s merciful providence day by day, Burroughs urges us
to view all our needs from an eternal perspective:

Thus it should be with us in this world, for the truth is, we are all in this world but as seafaring men, tossed up and down on the waves of the sea of this world, and our haven is Heaven; here we are travelling, and our home is a distant home in another world. Indeed some men have better comforts than others in travelling, and it is truly a great mercy of God to us in England that we can travel with such delight and comfort, much more so than they can in other countries, and through God’s mercy we have as great comforts in our travelling to Heaven in England as in any place under Heaven. Though we meet with travellers’ fare sometimes, yet it should not be grievous to us. The
Scripture tells us plainly that we must behave ourselves here as pilgrims and strangers: ‘Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul’ (1 Peter 2: 11). Consider what your condition is, you are pilgrims and strangers; so do not think to satisfy yourselves here. When a man comes into an inn and sees there a fair cupboard of plate, he is not troubled that it is not his own. — Why? Because he is going away. So let us not be troubled when we see that other men have great wealth, but we have not.—Why? We are going away to another country; you are, as it were, only lodging here, for a night. If you were to live a hundred years, in comparison to eternity it is not as much as a night, it is as though you were travelling, and had come to an inn. And what madness is it for a man to be discontented because he has not got what he sees there, seeing he may be going away again within less than quarter of an hour? You find the same in David: this was the argument that took David’s heart away from the things of this world, and set him on other things: ‘I am a stranger in the earth, hide not thy commandments from me’ (Ps. 119: 19). I am a stranger in the earth - what then? - then, Lord, let me have the knowledge of your commandments and it is sufficient.

God grant we might all be content in Christ, the almighty Saviour who loved us and gave Himself for us. Amen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:  
 Edmund Calamy, An Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges and Schoolmasters, who were Ejected or Silenced after the Restoration in 1660. By or before, the Act for Uniformity. Design’d for the preserving to Posterity, the Memory of their Names, Characters, Writings and Sufferings (London, 1713).

James Reid, Memoirs of the Westminster Divines (1811; facs. Edinburgh, 1982)
Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans, 3 vols (London, 1813)
Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, 5 vols (London, 1822)
A. H. Drysdale, History of the Presbyterians in England (London, 1889)
C. H. & T. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1861)
John Brown, History of Congregationalism and the Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk (London, 1877)
A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1925)
Albert Peel & Leland H. Carlson, Cartwrightiana: Elizabethan Nonconformist Texts (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951)
J. Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (1648; Edinburgh, 1964)
M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago, Phoenix ed., 1965)
C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short, Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians: Fom Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London, 1968)
H. C. Porter (ed), Puritanism in Tudor England (London, 1970)
Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford, 1978)
M. E. Lonsdale, Hingham in History (Wymondham, n.d.)
Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford, 1991)
Muriel McClendon, The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich (Stanford, 1999)
Patrick Collinson, John Craig, Brett Usher (eds), Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, 1582-1590 (Woodbridge, 2003)
Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich c.1560-1643 (Woodbridge, 2005)