² The Workes of the Reverend and Faithfull Servant of Jesus Christ M. Richard Greenham, Minister and Preacher of the Word of God (London: Felix Kingston, 1599), 92. I estimated the sermon's hour length using a formula provided by Primus, John in Richard Greenham: Portrait of an Elizabethan Preacher (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998), 35Google Scholar.

³ For a comprehensive statement of the godly's focus on assurance, see Wallace, Dewey, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar in which Wallace places assurance within the wider context of a reformed “theology of grace” and argues that the godly focus on predestination was in the service of religious experience, “a theology related to the everyday religious experience of a growing lay clientele who were continually instructed in it by zealous Protestant preachers,” 43.

⁴ Puritans and Predestination, xi. For a wide-reaching definition of the term “puritanism,” see Collinson's, PatrickThe Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967)Google Scholar, in which he offers and builds on an understanding of “puritan” as referring to anyone who desired further reform of the church after the Elizabethan Settlement (within such a model, estrangement or separation from the larger religious community need not occur). Lake, Peter concurs that many puritans operated well within the boundaries of the established church in Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and joins Wallace in understanding puritanism as a style of piety, “a distinctively zealous or intense subset of a larger body of reformed or Protestant doctrines and positions”: see “Defining Puritanism—Again?” Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Francis J. Bremer (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 4. Collinson also espouses this aspect of puritanism in his later works. In particular, see The Birthpangs of Protestant England, in which he refers to puritanism as “the full internalization of Protestantism” (London: MacMillan, 1988), 95. Many scholars who concentrate on the experiential aspect of puritanism eschew the term altogether. Tom Webster prefers the term “experimental Calvinist” to describe “those who made more than intellectual assent to the dogmas of Calvinist soteriology, predestination, election, and assurance, who made the search for the marks of election central to a practical divinity” (36), in “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” The Historical Journal 39:1 (1996): 33–56. Likewise, R. T. Kendall regards the term “puritanism” as “generally not very useful” and settles on “experimental predestinarians” in Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 6, 9. For a comprehensive history (and historiography) of the debates over the meanings of “puritanism,” see Durston's, Christopher and Eales's, Jacqueline introduction to their edited volume, The Culture of English Puritanism (New York: Saint Martin's, 1996), 1–31Google Scholar.

⁵ Workes, 92–93.

⁶ The Repentance of Peter and Judas (London: William Stansby, 1611), 53–54.

⁷ Perkins, William, A Treatise Tending Unto a Declaration Whether a Man Be in the Estate of Damnation or in the Estate of Grace (London: R. Robinson, 1590)Google Scholar, Letter to Reader. For a summary of Perkins's publishing career, see Patterson, W. B., “William Perkins as Apologist for the Church of England,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57:2 (April 2006), 252–269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ From 1560–1570, 9 sermons were published in London; from 1570–1580, the number increased to 69. One hundred thirteen sermons were published between 1580 and 1590, and 140 sermons were published in the final decade of the sixteenth century: see Herr, Alan Fager, The Elizabethan Sermon: A Survey and Bibliography (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylania, 1940), 27Google Scholar. I. M. Green's statistics on the publication of “catechisms or catechetical works, or new translations of the same” shows a total of 217 works published between 1560 and 1609. The 1580s proved the most prolific decade, with 68 new publications appearing. But business remained brisk; in the 1590s, 40 new works were published, and 49 new works saw the light of day between 1600 and 1609. These statistics do not reflect reprints, which were frequent. Watt's, TessaCheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar remains a valuable resource for understanding the relationship between print and religious culture.

⁹ Of course, one might wonder why these godly Protestants felt the need to evangelize at all; England officially had been Protestant from the time of the Elizabethan Settlement. Despite legislated reform, however, the godly never were convinced that the English people had embraced Protestantism with sufficient commitment. “Poperie denied with the mouth abides still in the heart,” lamented Perkins, in A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge: John Legat, 1598), 151Google Scholar. Many of the godly's evangelical efforts sought to dislodge lingering Roman Catholic religiosity from the hearts and minds of their audiences. For more on the Elizabethan Settlement—the name commonly given to a set of 1559 statutes nullifying Mary Tudor's efforts to reunite England with Rome, and establishing Elizabeth as the “Supreme Governour” of the English church, see Graves, Michael, Elizabethan Parliaments 1559–1601 (London: Longman, 1996), 24–27Google Scholar, and Jones, Norman, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1992)Google Scholar. See also Jones's, article on the Elizabeth Settlement in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hillerbrand, Hans J., 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2:36–38Google Scholar. Duffy's, EamonThe Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar is perhaps the best-known work to argue that the Protestant Reformation was an unwanted imposition on the English people. See also Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984)Google Scholar, and Haigh, Christopher, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Duffy's, article “The English Reformation After Revisionism” offers an astute analysis of the various current opinions on how, when, and why England did turn to Protestantism (Renaissance Quarterly 59:3 [Fall 2006]: 720–731)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Institutes, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970) 3.2.10. For a thorough treatment of temporary faith in Calvin's writings, see Foxgrover, David, “‘Temporary Faith’ and the Certainty of Salvation,” Calvin Theological Journal 15:2 (November 1980), 220x2013;232Google Scholar.

¹¹ R. T. Kendall maintains that Perkins and others derived their ideas about temporary faith from Theodore Beza, not John Calvin. According to Kendall, Calvin held that while Christ died for all, all do not receive him. Consequently, Christ does not advocate for all; those for whom he does not advocate are (preordained) reprobate. Beza modified this to argue that Christ died only for the elect. Consequently, under Calvin's system, faith in the efficacy of Christ's death and resurrection was tantamount to assurance of salvation; not so with Beza. This separation of faith from assurance results in an articulated doctrine of temporary faith, which stands, in Kendall's view, as “the embarrassment, if not the scandal, of English Calvinism”: Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 7, and passim. Richard Mueller offers a slightly different viewpoint, arguing that Calvin did embrace a doctrine of limited atonement, and that Perkins put Christology, rather than predestinarian doctrine, at the center of his theology in Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1988).

¹² Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, 50. For a discussion of the variations among the godly ministers, see Webster, Tom, Godly Clergy in Stuart England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 111–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pettit, Norman offers an analysis of the role of preparation in godly soteriology in The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar. For a full treatment of the godly ordo salutis, see Cohen, Charles, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, especially chapter 3, “The Way of Salvation, the Power of Faith,” 75–110. Cohen discusses regeneration in covenantal terms; a covenant of grace that God initiates and extends (only) to the elect facilitates salvation and ushers in a second covenant, the covenant of works (or sanctification). For more on the covenantal aspects of godly piety, see Ruhr, John von, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought, American Academy of Religion Studies in Religion 45 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Also, Peter Lake offers astute analysis of the godly's stages of faith in Moderate Puritans, especially 156–162.

¹³ Winship, Michael, “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” Church History 70:3 (September 2001): 462–481CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Winship argues that although earlier godly divines began to posit non-experiential evidence for faith, it was Perkins who bestowed a “precise ontological reality” (474) onto faith and allowed the individual to focus on sanctification. This was part of a larger strategy for dealing with “weak Christians,” whom the godly saw as impediments to their evangelical agenda.

¹⁴ Como's, David section on “Faith and Works” in Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 123–127Google Scholar, offers a useful overview for how sanctification worked in the godly's soteriology. For a variety of commentary, see Cohen, God's Caress, 115–117, Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 64–65, 209–213, and Lake, Moderate Puritans, 160–165. Cohen sees sanctification as the subject of the second covenant between God and the elect, “the covenant of works,” and argues that good works did not play a major role in ascertaining election, overshadowed as they were by the growing inner consciousness of God's mercy. Lake makes the case that good works, while essential to the godly discernment process, nonetheless could not be imbued with any absolute value, and could sharpen as well as allay anxiety. Kendall argues that godly emphasis on sanctification essentially re-introduced human will into the salvation equation, undermining the covenant of grace.

¹⁵ Kaufman, Peter Iver, Thinking Of the Laity in Late Tudor England (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 17Google Scholar. Scholars disagree on whether the godly's strategies actually offered pastoral comfort. Kendall deems the whole approach “pastorally insensitive” (7) and blames the theory of limited atonement that crept (but not from Calvin) into English Calvinism for emptying the godly message of any real solace. Theodore Dwight Bozeman attributes “an elaborate preoccupation with the self and its conflicted passage through a lifelong, often anxious venture of transformation, self-reproach, and -control” to the godly penitential program in The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 72. In contrast, in “The Logic of Assurance in English Puritan Theology” (The Westminster Theological Journal 52 [1990], 247–261), R. M. Hawkes argues that “the continuing application of the work of Christ in the life of the believer” was a process of self-discovery, understood by its practitioners as a “developing communication with God” (251–252). Likewise, Cohen maintains that divine love, not divine wrath, fueled godly piety: God's Caress, 21–22. The seventh chapter in Lake's Moderate Puritans, “Puritan Practical Divinity,” 116–168, gives a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of how the bond between God and humans “provided a major element in the subjective experience of the godly,” 123. Lake reminds us that Christ, not the divine decree of election, was what the godly yearned to know, and what provided mediation between the “objective realm of right doctrine and the subjective realm of true belief”: 168.

¹⁶ Gifford, George, A Countrie Divinitie (London: Richard Field, 1598), 56Google Scholar. Alliston, Joseph, The Exercise of True Spirituall Devotion (London: Felix Kingston, 1610), 116Google Scholar.

¹⁷ “Secret sinnes” is from Greenham's Workes, 126. Countrie Divinitie, 104. “Hidden corruption” is from Greenham's, Two Treatises for the Comforting of an Afflicted Conscience (London: Bradocke, 1598), 95Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Workes, 90.

¹⁹ Countrie Divinitie, 57.

²⁰ Two Treatises for the Comforting, 284.

²¹ Burton, William, Conclusions of Peace, Betweene God and Man (London: John Hardie, 1594)Google Scholar, ii. For a thorough analysis of how sorrow figured in godly piety, see Kaufman, Peter I., Prayer, Despair, and Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

²² Workes, 96.

²³ Perkins, William, Two Treatises I. Of the Nature and Practise of Repentance. II. Of the Combat of the Flesh and Spirit (Cambridge: John Legate, 1593), 4Google Scholar.

²⁴ Dent, Arthur, The Plaine Man's Path-Way to Heaven (London: Robert Dexter, 1601), 123Google Scholar.

²⁵ Burton, William, Certaine Questions and Answeres, Concerning the Knowledge of God (London: John Windet, 1591), 68Google Scholar.

²⁶ Some historians argue that the distinction between godly sorrow and reprobate despair was lost on most people, which plunged well-meaning Christians into paroxysms of hopelessness. See Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991)Google Scholar. Peter Kaufman argues to the contrary, maintaining that godly sorrow was not a self-annihilating experience but a performative and purgative episode, a mechanism by which the penitent might “reach the other side” and reside in God's grace: Prayer, Despair, and Drama, 41–92. See also Foster, Stephen, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 12Google Scholar.

²⁷ Workes, 173.

²⁸ Burton, William, Ten Sermons Upon the First, Second, Third and Fourth Verses of the Sixt of Mathew (London: Thomas Man, 1602), 12–13Google Scholar.

²⁹ Cole, Nathaniel, The Godly Man's Assurance (London: Richard Woodruffe, 1615), 149Google Scholar.

³⁰ Perkins, William, “A Graine of Mustard Seed,” in The Works of That Famous and Worthie Minister of Christ (Cambridge: John Legat, 1603), 782Google Scholar. Burton, Certain Questions, 68.

³¹ A Salve for a Sicke Man (Legate: Cambridge, 1595), 58.

³² The Christian's Heavenly Treasure (London: Thomas Man, 1608), 74–75.

³³ Perkins, “Mustard Seed,” in Workes, 781. Timme, Thomas, A Silver Watch-Bell (London: William Jaggard, 1608), 100Google Scholar.

³⁴ Alliston, The Exercise of True Spirituall Devotion, 30. Frank Luttmer sees temporary faith in godly literature not just as a rhetorical threat the godly aimed at recalcitrant Christians, but also as a trope designed to offer weak Christians something with which to compare themselves, and thereby relieve their anxiety, in “Persecutors, Tempters, and Vassals of the Devil: The Unregenerate in Puritan Practical Divinity,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51:1 (January 2000): 37–68. Winship sees the rhetoric of temporary faith rising from practical attempts on the part of the godly, not only to threaten “carnal gospelers,” but to account for them to the rest of the godly community, 468–469. Kendall's section titled “William Perkins's Doctrine of Temporary Faith” in Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 remains one of the most comprehensive reviews of temporary faith's theological underpinnings, 67–78.

³⁵ A Discourse of Conscience (Cambridge: John Legatt, 1596), 112.

³⁶ Certane Questions and Answeres,^sig K 4.

³⁷ Countrie Divinitie, 111.

³⁸ Workes, 88.

³⁹ Workes, 95.

⁴⁰ Perkins, William, A Golden Chaine: Or the Description of Theologie Containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation (Cambridge: John Legat, 1600), 572Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Playfere, Thomas, The Pathway to Perfection (London: Andrew Wise, 1597), 58Google Scholar.

⁴² A Golden Chaine, 580.

⁴³ Workes, 82–83.

⁴⁴ A Golden Chaine, 581.

⁴⁵ A Treatise Tending …, The Epistle Dedicatorie.

⁴⁶ Greenham, Workes, 15.

⁴⁷ Rogers, Richard, Seven Treatises (London: Thomas Man, 1603), 13, 69Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ For an analysis of godly introspection as a tool for social control and self-regulation, see Bozeman's The Precisianist Strain, in which he highlights the godly's “zest for regulation” in their attempts to curb lingering social expressions from the pre-Reformation era, 5, 41–43. Michael Winship makes a more tempered claim, acknowledging the godly's interest in managing social behavior but allowing that “Puritan practical divinity was an assortment of not-entirely-consistent techniques, doctrinal emphases, and affects intended to meet not-entirely-consistent goals”: 480.

⁴⁹ Perhaps the best known victim of unrelenting despair in this period was Francesco Spiera (known as “Francis Spira” in English descriptions). Spira died in 1548 in Cittadella, Italy, apparently convinced that he was damned to hell because God had not forgiven him for recanting his Protestant beliefs before the Inquisition some six months before he died. This story caught the imagination of English Protestants who used Spira's story to illustrate, among other things, the horrors of a reprobate death. Primary sources include Bacon, Nathanial, A Relation of the Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira in the Yeare 1548 (London: John Legat, 1638)Google Scholar; and Nathaniel Wood's play The Conflict of Conscience (London: Richard Bradocke, 1581)Google ScholarPubMed. For modern comment on Spira and his place in English Protestant discourse, see Overell, M. A., “Recantation and Retribution: ‘Remembering Francis Spira,’ 1548–1638” in Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation: Papers Read at the 2002 Summer Meeting and the 2003 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, eds. Cooper, Kate and Gregory, Jeremy, Studies in Church History 40 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2004)Google Scholar, and Overall, M. A., “The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera” The Sixteenth Century Journal 26:3 (Fall 1995) 619–637CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see MacDonald, Michael, “The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 31:1 (January 1992): 32–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ Two Treatises, 11.

⁵¹ A Golden Chaine, 184.

⁵² Perkins, William, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience Distinguished into Three Bookes (Cambridge: John Legat, 1606), 104Google Scholar.

⁵³ Cowper, William, A Conduit to Comfort (London: W. White, 1606), 171, 174–175Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Adams, Thomas, The Blacke Devil or the Apostate Together with the Wolfe Worrying the Lambes (London: William Jaggard, 1615), 28Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Greenham, Workes, 16.

⁵⁶ Sibbs, Richard, The Soule's Conflict With It Selfe, And Victory Over It Selfe by Faith (London, 1615), 128Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Perkins, William, Satan's Sophistrie Answered by Our Saviour Christ (London: Richard Fields, 1604), 59 and passimGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Richardson, Charles, The Repentance of Peter and Judas (London: William Stansby, 1611), 33Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Countrie Divinitie, 107. Yarrow, Robert, Soveraigne Comforts for a Troubled Conscience (London: Ralph Rounthwaite, 1619), 277Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Richardson, 33.

⁶¹ Workes, 101.

⁶² Sibbs, 128.

⁶³ Workes, 187.

⁶⁴ Smith, Samuel, A Christian Taske: A Sermon Preached at the Funerall of Maister John Lawson (London: Nicholas Okes, 1620), 69Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Denison, Stephen, The Monument or Tombstone: or A Sermon Preached at Lawrence Pointes Church in London, November 21, 1619 (London: George Miller, 1631), 48Google Scholar. Denison (and his quarrels with John Etherington) is the subject of Peter Lake's The Boxmaker's Revenge: “Orthodoxy”, “Heterodoxy”, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. See 18–19 for Lake's summary of Denison's sermon at Elizabeth Juxon's funeral.

⁶⁶ Harrison, William, The Christian Life and Death, of Mistris Katherin Brettergh Late Wife of Master William Brettergh, of Bretterghoult, in the Countie of Lancaster (London: Felix Kyngston, 1634), 6Google Scholar.

^{67 sig} B 2.

^{68 sig} C 3.

⁶⁹ Denison, The Monument or Tombstone, 50–51.

⁷⁰ While we never can know Brettergh's state of mind, of course, we can be relatively certain that she did give voice to religious doubt during her last days. The occasion of her death prompted a pamphlet exchange in Lancashire between Protestants and the vocal Roman Catholic minority, in which the Catholics pointed to Brettergh's struggles to argue that the Protestant religion offered no comfort in one's final hours (the pamphlets have been lost). Even at her funeral, the preachers were at pains to refute that notion, and reprints of Harrison's account—which emphasized a diabolical onslaught successfully defended—continued into the 1630s. The sermons were originally published in Death's Advantage Little Regarded, and The Soule's Solace Against Sorrow Preached in Two Funerall Sermons at Childwal in Lancashire at the Buriall of Mistris Katherin Brettergh the Third of June, 1601 (London: Felix Kingston, 1602). See also Hindle, Steve, “Brettergh, Katherine (1579–1601),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Matthew, H. C. G. and Harrison, Brian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/view/article/3351.

⁷¹ Harrison,^sig B3.

⁷² Cases of Conscience, 105.

⁷³ “Mustard Seed” in Workes, 780.

⁷⁴ Two Treatises, 63.

⁷⁵ Treatise Tending Unto A Declaration, 138.

⁷⁶ Greenham, Richard, A Most Sweete and Assured Comfort for All Those That Are Afflicted in Consciscience [sic] (London: John Danter, 1595)Google Scholar. Short Rules Sent by Maister Richard Greenham to a Gentlewoman Troubled in Mind (London: T Snodham, 1612). For a perceptive analysis of the tension between doubt and faith, see Como, David, Blown by the Spirit, 120–123Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Greenham, Two Treatises, 90.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 92, 94.

⁷⁹ Sparke, Thomas, A Short Treatise (London: Ralph Newberry, 1580),^sig B6Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Denison, The Monument or Tombstone, 48.

⁸¹ Hume, Alexander, Ane Treatise of Conscience Quhairin Divers Secreits Concerning That Subject (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1594), 23, 32Google Scholar.

⁸² Playfere, Thomas, Hearts Delight (London: John Leggatt, 1617), 3Google Scholar.

⁸³ Alliston, The Exercise of True Spirituall Devotion, 122.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 116. The term “practical piety” originated with Wright, Lewis, “The Practical Piety of William Perkins,” Huntington Library Quarterly 3:2 (1940): 171–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁵ “Mustard Seed” in Workes, 781.

⁸⁶ Burton, Conclusions,^sig B 3.

^{87 sig} Aiii.

⁸⁸ Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 275.