The Poetry of Samuel Slater collects all of the author's verse into one volume. Included is "A Discourse Concerning the Creation, Fall, and Recovery of Man", which is modeled on John Milton's "Paradise Lost", yet in a much more approachable style and length. "A Dialogue Between Faith and a Doubting Soul" was written for the comfort of a troubled woman who frequently came to the author for counsel and reassurance. Also included are an elegy for Oliver Cromwell and several biblical songs put to verse. Even readers unfamiliar with Elizabethan poetry will find these works both engaging and encouraging. They are useful for both devotional reading and academic study.

A Sure Guide to Heaven is a thorough and compelling argument for the necessity of conversion. In it the author presents the nature of true conversion and common mistakes about conversion, so the reader can be assured he is not deceived into believing he is converted when in reality he is not (Matthew 7:13–14). Alleine outlines the marks of an unconverted soul, so the reader may make an accurate self-inventory (2 Corinthians 13:5–6). He forewarns the fence-sitter of the miseries of the unconverted state, both in this life and hereafter, and gives motives for conversion. The book concludes with “directions to the unconverted” so that the reader may take hold of the saving faith Christ offers. This Digital Puritan reprint, based on the Banner of Truth edition, includes the biographical preface of Iain Murray. Over four hundred Scripture references (in the English Standard Version®) are hyperlinked and embedded into the book. No internet connection is required.

In The Mortification of the Flesh, Puritan pastor Christopher Love shows believers who are raised to new life in Christ how to remove the residue of sin which once reigned over us. With keen insight, Love teaches us to discern the genuine marks of true mortification from self-serving and counterfeit motives that lie camouflaged as grace. He then provides a wide array of practical helps for cooperating with the Holy Spirit's work of subduing the vitality and vigor of our worldly corruptions. Pastor Love concludes with additional counsel for rooting out the troublesome sins of lust, pride, and anger. Originally published in 1654, this classic work has been meticulously edited to benefit a new generation of Christian readers. Archaic language has been gently modernized, and helpful footnotes have been added to aid the reader. This edition includes a biographical preface and review questions designed to facilitate group discussion or personal reflection.

God defines himself in Scripture as the very embodiment of love (1 John 4:16). As his children, he commands us to imitate him by loving one another deeply and authentically—a command that is second only to love for God and belief in his Son Jesus Christ. In Love One Another, John Rogers delivers the definitive playbook for Christians who want to love in this manner. Armed with Scripture and a keen intellect, he begins by discriminating between genuine and counterfeit marks of love, then diagnoses common spiritual ailments that manifest as a lack of love within us. Pastor Rogers then concludes by illustrating how Christians can show the love of Christ to their enemies, unbelievers outside the church, the poor, and finally to fellow believers. Originally published in 1629, this timeless text has been meticulously edited to benefit a new generation of Christian readers. Archaic language has been gently modernized, and helpful footnotes have been added to aid the reader. It includes a biographical preface, many helpful footnotes, and review questions designed to facilitate group discussion or personal reflection.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-1780, originally published in 1981, considers poetry written between 1660 and 1780, a period which, although largely recovered from its nineteenth-century reputation, still attracts widely varying critical responses. Abandoning the old labels such as ‘neoclassicism’, ‘romanticism’ and ‘sensibility’, the author focuses on descriptions of genres and their formal elements and traces the broader patterns of literary and historical change running through the period. Eric Rothstein describes different poetic modes- panegyric, satire, pastoral and topographical poetry, the epistle, and the ode- to suggest their aesthetical possibilities as well as their process of change. He also considers style and the uses of the past, topics which have often caused particular problems for the students of the period. What becomes clear is the extraordinary originality, flexibility and power with which Restoration and eighteenth-century poets handles the stylistic assumptions and the body of poems they inherited and employed in their own works.

The Cromwellian Protectorate was a period of innovation in poetry and drama, as well as constitutional debate. This new account of the period focuses on key cultural institutions - Parliament, an embassy to Sweden, Oxford University, Cromwell's state funeral - to examine this poetry's relationship with a culture in transformation and crisis. Edward Holberton shows that the Protectorate's instabilities helped to generate lively and innovative poetry. Protectorate verse explores the fault-lines of a culture which ceaselessly contested the authority of its own institutions, including the office of Protector itself. Poetry by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, William Davenant, and John Dryden, contributed to a vibrant poetic culture which embraced diverse forms and occasions: masques for the weddings of Cromwell's daughters, diplomatic poems to Queen Christina of Sweden, naval victories, civic pageants, and university anthologies in celebration of a peace treaty. Many of these texts prove difficult to align with established ideas of the political and cultural contests of the age, because they become entangled with cultural institutions which could no longer be taken for granted, and were in many cases transforming rapidly, with far-reaching historical consequences. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate asks how poetry confronted questions that were complicated by institutional practices, how poets tried to square their wider cultural sympathies with their interests in a particular parliamentary or university crisis, and how changes in institutions afforded poets critical insights into their society's problems and its place in the world. The readings of this book challenge previous representations of Protectorate culture as a phase of conservative backsliding, or pragmatic compromise, under a quasi-monarchical order. Protectorate verse emerges as nuanced and vital writing, which looks beyond the personality of Oliver Cromwell to the tensions that shaped his power. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate argues that it is precisely through being contingent and compromised that these poems achieve their vitality, and become so revealing.