Forty Centuries of Christian Writing

The Sermons

John Donne · 1572–1631

One hundred and sixty sermons from St Paul's, on death, resurrection, and mercy, delivered by a former poet and courtier who had come late to orders.

The Orthodox Confession

Peter Mogila · 1596–1646

A catechism written to answer Lucaris and to arm Orthodox clergy in Poland-Lithuania against Catholic and Protestant argument, structured like a Western catechism.

The Kirishitan Documents and the Fumi-e Records

The hidden Christians of Japan and their persecutors

Edicts of expulsion, apostasy registers, and the fumi-e images that suspects were required to tread on, alongside the prayers hidden communities memorised for seven generations.

The Huron Carol

Jesous Ahatonhia

Jean de Brébeuf · 1593–1649

A nativity carol in the Wendat language, with the child wrapped in rabbit skin, visited by hunters, and honoured with gifts of fox and beaver pelt.

Religio Medici

Thomas Browne · 1605–1682

A physician's private account of his own faith, full of paradox and curiosity, professing to love to lose himself in a mystery and to pursue his reason to an O altitudo.

A Key into the Language of America

Roger Williams · c. 1603–1683

A phrasebook of Narragansett with observations on their hospitality, government, and religion, and verses observing that the English are often the worse people.

On Frequent Communion

Antoine Arnauld · 1612–1694

An argument that communion should be approached only after real penitence, against confessors who admitted penitents again the same week.

Acts of the Saints

Acta Sanctorum

Jean Bolland and the Bollandists

A critical edition of the lives of the saints arranged by feast day, with the sources weighed and the legendary material identified as such.

Areopagitica

John Milton · 1608–1674

A speech to Parliament against licensing the press, arguing that truth needs no protection in a free and open encounter and that a good book is a precious lifeblood.

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution

Roger Williams · c. 1603–1683

An argument for a wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, and for liberty of conscience for pagans, Jews, and Turks alike.

The Spiritual Writings

Louise de Marillac · 1591–1660

Letters and rules from the co-founder of the Daughters of Charity, whose sisters took no solemn vows so that they could work in the streets and hospitals.

The Directory for Public Worship

The Westminster Assembly

A replacement for the Book of Common Prayer giving ministers the substance and order of worship without a fixed text to read from.

The Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations

Richard Crashaw · c. 1612–1649

Baroque religious poetry of extravagant imagery on the tears of the Magdalene, the wounds of Christ, and the ecstasy of Teresa, by an English convert to Rome.

The Westminster Confession of Faith

The Westminster Assembly

Thirty-three chapters of Reformed doctrine drafted by an assembly of divines during the English Civil War, accompanied by a Larger and a Shorter Catechism whose first question asks what the chief end of man is.

The Liberty of Prophesying

Jeremy Taylor · 1613–1667

An argument that few doctrines are clear enough to justify coercion, that the Apostles' Creed suffices for communion, and that error held honestly is not damnable.

The Death of Death in the Death of Christ

John Owen · 1616–1683

A sustained argument for particular redemption: that Christ died to secure the salvation of a definite people rather than to make salvation merely possible.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism

The Westminster Assembly

A hundred and seven questions and answers, opening with the chief end of man: to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.

The Doctrine of the Covenant and Testament of God

Johannes Cocceius · 1603–1669

The whole of scripture organised as a history of covenants — works, then grace — unfolding in successive periods rather than as a set of timeless topics.

Private Prayers

Preces Privatae

Lancelot Andrewes · 1555–1626

A private prayer book woven almost entirely from scripture and the liturgies of East and West, arranged by the days of the week and the hours.

Eikon Basilike

Attributed to Charles I and John Gauden

Meditations and prayers presented as the king's own, published within days of his execution and showing him at prayer amid his troubles.

Silex Scintillans

Henry Vaughan · 1621–1695

Poems of light, childhood, and the natural world, written in Wales after the death of a brother and the destruction of the church he loved.

The Annals of the World

James Ussher · 1581–1656

A chronology of the world from creation, dated by astronomy and by the reigns of kings, placing the first day in the evening preceding 23 October 4004 BC.

The Conferences and Letters

Vincent de Paul · 1581–1660

Talks to priests and to the Daughters of Charity on serving the galley slaves, the foundlings, and the rural poor, insisting that the poor are the masters.

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living

Jeremy Taylor · 1613–1667

A rule of life for laypeople written during the suppression of the English church — on care of time, purity of intention, sobriety, justice, and religion.

The Jesuit Relations

The Jesuits of New France

Annual reports from missionaries among the Huron, Iroquois, and Algonquian peoples, describing customs, languages, epidemics, torture, and their own deaths.

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

Anne Bradstreet · c. 1612–1672

Poems on faith, marriage, the deaths of grandchildren, and the burning of her house — published in London by her brother-in-law without her knowledge.

The Saints' Everlasting Rest

Richard Baxter · 1615–1691

Written while its author expected to die, on the heavenly rest and on the daily discipline of setting the mind on it deliberately.

Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes · 1588–1679

A theory of sovereignty by covenant, followed by two long books arguing from scripture that the sovereign must also govern religion and that most of the church's claims are unfounded.

Catechism in Eight Days

Cathechismus

Alexandre de Rhodes · 1593–1660

A catechism in parallel Latin and Vietnamese, published with a dictionary and grammar using a romanised script the Jesuits had developed.

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying

Jeremy Taylor · 1613–1667

How to prepare for death across a whole life rather than at the end of one, written after the deaths of his patron's wife and his own sons.

A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson

George Herbert · 1593–1633

A portrait of the ideal country clergyman — his house, his wife, his charity, his catechising, and his practice of walking his parish rather than staying indoors.

The Law of Freedom in a Platform

Gerrard Winstanley · 1609–1676

A commonwealth without buying or selling, in which the earth is a common treasury and clergy are replaced by weekly public teaching on any useful subject.

The Hymns

Paul Gerhardt · 1607–1676

Hymns of trust written through the Thirty Years' War and the deaths of four of his five children, including the passion hymn O Sacred Head Now Wounded.

The Relation of 1654 and the Letters

Marie of the Incarnation · 1599–1672

A widow who left her son to enter a convent, then sailed to Quebec to found a school, writing home about mystical states, Iroquois raids, and Algonquian grammar.

Men Before Adam

Prae-Adamitae

Isaac La Peyrère · 1596–1676

An argument that there were people before Adam, that Genesis records only the origin of the Jews, and that the flood was local rather than universal.

The Sermons

António Vieira · 1608–1697

Preaching in Brazil and Lisbon against the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and the cruelty of colonists, including a sermon preached to fish when the people would not listen.

The Christian Day and Spiritual Writings

Jean-Jacques Olier · 1608–1657

The spirituality of the Sulpician seminaries — adoration of the Word, union with Jesus, and a method of prayer taught to generations of French priests.

The Reformed Pastor

Richard Baxter · 1615–1691

A charge to ministers to catechise every family in the parish personally, house by house, and an unsparing account of the author's own failures at it.

Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers

John Owen · 1616–1683

An analysis of indwelling sin and its remedies, containing the instruction that a believer must be killing sin or it will be killing him.

Of Communion with God

John Owen · 1616–1683

Distinct communion with the Father in love, the Son in grace, and the Spirit in comfort — an experiential trinitarian theology rather than an abstract one.