C.H. Spurgeon, the "Prince of Preachers," first published in weekly installments over a twenty-year period in the periodical The Sword and the Trowel. Originally published in seven volumes all of which are included here.

Without minimizing the validity of the social, political, and ecclesiastical approaches to this field of study, Yuille affirms that the essence of Puritanism is found in its spirituality. He demonstrates this by turning to a relatively unknown Puritan, George Swinnock (1627-1673). At the root of Swinnock's spirituality was his concept of fear of God as the proper ordering of the soul's faculties after the image of God. This concept is pivotal to Swinnock's spirituality, because he viewed it as the Christian's true principles of practice. Yuille shows the prevalence of this paradigm among Swinnock's fellow Puritans, and sets it in a historical tradition extending back to Augustine through Calvin.

Just as museum exhibits of plastinated corpses, television dramas about forensics, and books about the eventual fate of human remains provoke interest and generate ethical debates today, anatomy was a topic of fascination-and autopsies a spectator pastime-in England from the mid-Elizabethan era through the outbreak of civil war. Rather than regard such preoccupations as purely macabre, Richard Sugg sees them as precursors of a profoundly new scientific and cultural discourse. Tracing the influence of continental anatomy on English literature across the period, Sugg begins his exploration with the essentially sacralizing aspects of dissection—as expressed, for instance, in the search for the anatomical repository of the soul—before detailing ways in which science and religion diverged from and eventually opposed each other. In charting this transition, Sugg draws his evidence from the fine detail of literary language, moving from sermons to plays, medical textbooks to sonnets, and from sensational short tales to Thomas Nashe's proto-novel The Unfortunate Traveller. As Sugg shows, the study of anatomy first offered to positively revitalize many areas of religious rhetoric. In time, however, the rising forces of early scientific enquiry transformed the body into an increasingly alien and secular entity. Within this evolution the author finds a remarkably rich, subtle, and unstable set of attitudes, with different forms of violence, different versions of the interior body, and implicit social, religious, and psychological stances variously cooperating or competing for supremacy.

Much of evangelicalism has forsaken a Word-based approach to Christian spirituality, so to help us recover a model of biblical piety, J. Stephen Yuille examines Thomas Manton’s sermons on Psalm 119. Following a brief account of Manton as a leading Puritan committed to the ministry of the Word, Yuille leads us on a careful investigation of Manton’s understanding of blessedness, the instrumentality of God’s Word, and the practice of spiritual duties. At the foundation stands the conviction that as we love and obey God’s Word, the blessed God communes with us by His Spirit, conveying sweet influences on our soul through His Word. Manton’s spirituality of the Word is a timely remedy for the subjective mysticism that expects God to speak through inner urgings apart from His Word. Let us learn from Manton how to listen to the Bible as if we heard God speaking to us from heaven, rejoicing like those who find “great spoil” (Ps. 119:162).

England on Edge deals with the collapse of the government of Charles I, the disintegration of the Church of England, and the accompanying cultural panic that led to civil war. Focused on the years 1640 to 1642, it examines stresses and fractures in social, political, and religious culture, and the emergence of an unrestrained popular press. Hundreds of people not normally seen in historical surveys make appearances here, in a drama much larger than the struggle of king and parliament. Historians commonly assert that royalists and parliamentarians parted company over issues of principle, constitutional scruples, and religious belief, but a more complex picture emerges from the environment of anxiety, mistrust, and fear. Rather than seeing England's revolutionary transformation as a product of the civil war, as has been common among historians, David Cressy finds the world turned upside down in the two years preceding the outbreak of hostilities. The humbling of Charles I, the erosion of the royal prerogative, and the rise of an executive parliament were central features of the revolutionary drama of 1640-1642. The collapse of the Laudian ascendancy, the splintering of the established church, the rise of radical sectarianism, and the emergence of an Anglican resistance all took place in these two years before the beginnings of bloodshed. The world of public discourse became rapidly energized and expanded, in counterpoint with an exuberantly unfettered press and a deeply traumatized state. These linked processes, and the disruptive contradictions within them, made this a time of shaking and of prayer. England's elite encountered multiple transgressions, some more imagined than real, involving lay encroachments on the domain of the clergy, lowly intrusions into matters of state, the city clashing with the court, the street with institutions of government, and women undermining the territories of men. The simultaneity, concatenation, and cumulative, compounding effect of these disturbances added to their ferocious intensity, and helped to bring down England's ancien regime. This was the revolution before the Revolution, the revolution that led to civil war.