except its negative characteristic remained constant: only its desire to
purify the Church of England from within. What the desired purity
was, never was determined.

The Puritans whose careers are discussed and whose writings are
to be found here were controversialists, propagandists, theologians,
moralists, preachers, satirists, and philosophers. The book focuses on
individual men in the conviction, stated above, that synthetic discus-
sions are apt to be misleading. All those chosen are important for their
writings or their activities or both. All of them attacked the established
Church, and nearly all met trouble with the authorities for their
Puritanism. Others of course were important: Dod, Baynes, Sibbes,
Gouge, the two Goodwins, to name a few. But it has seemed best to
consider only twenty men with care instead of looking at others
more casually.

The writings reprinted here were chosen because of their historical,
religious, and literary interest. The selections reflect frequent Puritan
concerns: piety, the corruptions of episcopacy and Roman Cathol-
icism, predestination, problems of conscience, the need for a stricter
morality and a different church polity, the place of religion in the
family, the process of salvation, the spiritual life. Many of these selec-
tions speak to the human condition, speak to man now though cen-
turies have passed since they first appeared. I address this volume to
whoever is interested in the history, literature, and religion of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century England, and to those who want to know
more about the context of our earliest American literature, that of
the New England Puritans. Because some of these Puritans still have
something to say, I offer their writings in modernized form. I have
used modern spelling and punctuation and have broken up some inter-
minable sentences and paragraphs. But in removing what are for most
readers impediments, I do not believe that I have essentially altered
what was said or the way in which it was said. All dates are in new
style.

Any choice of selections is likely to offend many readers. To pro-
vide only a portion of a sermon delivered at a time when the prepara-
tion and organization of a sermon was a carefully cultivated art may
seem very improper. But many published sermons, such as the one of
Chaderton's excerpted here, are very long, and some, such as the
one of Hooker's presented in part, seem to have been combined with
others on the same text when prepared for publication. If only com-
plete or fully unified writings were offered, this volume would be
more than twice its present size.

In the preparation of this book I was aided by the Lehigh Univer-
sity Institute of Research, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Florida
Presbyterian College, all of which provided me with grants-in-aid.

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