Thomas Hooker, excerpt from The Application of Redemption By the Effectual Work of the Word, and Spirit of Christ, for the bringing home of Lost Sinners to God, Ninth and Tenth Books, Second Edition
Thomas Hooker was born in 1586, probably in Marfield, Leicestershire (England). He earned his B.A. from Emmanuel College in 1608 and his M.A. in 1611. Hooker gained a reputation as a great teacher, preacher, and conspicuous leader of the Puritan sentiment, and he eventually migrated to New England to become a pastor at Newtown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1636, against the wishes of the Massachusetts authorities, Hooker led his people to Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained a powerful figure for the rest of his life. Hooker was known as one of the most eloquent and dominating of the Puritan preachers. His sermons were animated and ornamented, as well as effective in their dialect and argument for maintaining orthodox religious and political opinions.
Excerpt from The Application of Redemption By the Effectual Work of the Word, and Spirit of Christ, for the bringing home of Lost Sinners to God,Ninth and Tenth Books, Second Edition
It’s one thing to say sin is thus and thus, another thing to see it to be such; we must look wisely and steadily upon our distempers, look sin in the face and discern it to the full. The want whereof is the cause of our mistaking our estates and not redressing of our hearts and ways: (Gal. 6. 4) “Let a man prove his own work.” . . . There is great odd betwixt the knowledge of a traveler, that in his own person hath taken a view of many coasts, passed through many countries and hath there taken up his abode some time, and by experience hath been an eyewitness of the extreme cold and scorching heats, hath surveyed the glory and beauty of the one, the barrenness and meanness of the other—he hath been in the wars, and seen the ruin and desolation wrought there—and another that sits by his fireside and happily reads the story of these in a book, or views the proportion of these in a map. The odds is great, and the difference of their knowledge more than a little: the one saw the country really, the other only in the story; the one hath seen the very place, the other only in the paint of the map drawn. The like difference is there in the right discerning of sin. The one hath surveyed the compass of his whole course, searched the frame of his own heart, and examined the windings and turnings of his own ways. He hath seen what sin is and what it hath done, how it hath made havoc of his peace and comfort, ruinated and laid waste the very principles of reason and nature and morality, and made him a terror to himself. . . . “To the pure all things are pure; but to the unbelieving there is nothing pure, but their very consciences are defiled.” It is a desperate malignity in the temper of the stomach that should turn our meat and diet into diseases, the best cordials and preservatives into poisons, so that what in reason is appointed to nourish a man should kill him. Such is the venom and malignity of sin, makes the use of the best things become evil, nay, the greatest evil to us many times: (Psal. 109. 7) “Let his prayer be turned into sin.” That which is appointed by God to be the choicest means to prevent sin is turned into sin out of the corrupt distemper of these carnal hearts of ours. Hence then it follows that sin is the greatest evil in the world, or indeed that can be. For, that which separates the soul from God, that which brings all evils of punishment and makes all evils truly evil, and spoils all good things to us, that must needs be the greatest evil. But this is the nature of sin, as hath already appeared.
Responding to Thomas Hooker, excerpt from The Application of Redemption by the Effectual Work of the Word, and Spirit of Christ, for the bringing home of Lost Sinners to God
Answer the following questions in your notebook—this will be collated so that you can print or e–mail your work when you are finished.
2. Does Goodman Brown’s transformation to a “stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” mean that he recognizes others’ hypocrisy and has become more pious himself? Or has he become one of the “unbelieving” that Hooker describes—people for whom “there is nothing pure, but their very consciences are defiled”?
Thomas Hooker was born in 1586, probably in Marfield, Leicestershire (England). He earned his B.A. from Emmanuel College in 1608 and his M.A. in 1611. Hooker gained a reputation as a great teacher, preacher, and conspicuous leader of the Puritan sentiment, and he eventually migrated to New England to become a pastor at Newtown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1636, against the wishes of the Massachusetts authorities, Hooker led his people to Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained a powerful figure for the rest of his life. Hooker was known as one of the most eloquent and dominating of the Puritan preachers. His sermons were animated and ornamented, as well as effective in their dialect and argument for maintaining orthodox religious and political opinions.
