John Brown on Adams

This is from John Brown's book Puritan preaching in England; a study of past and present by John Brown (1830-1922). Having spoken of William Perkins and Henry Smith he moves on to Adams

Alongside of Henry Smith, and to be accounted even greater than he as a Puritan preacher, must be placed that Thomas Adams who has been called the Shakespeare of the Puritans. Southey seems to have been the one to start the comparison when he pronounced him to be the "prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians, scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy." This judgement of Southey's may be qualified and at the same time extended by saying that while Adams is not so sustained as Jeremy Taylor nor so continuously sparkling as Thomas Fuller, he is surpassingly eloquent and much more thought-laden than either. He is like Shakespeare in one thing at least; while we have his works we know extremely little about the man himself. In 1612 he was a ''preacher of God's Word at Willington," a village in Bedfordshire, four miles from Bedford town. And it may be noted by the way that a walk of twenty minutes from his vicarage door would have brought this Puritan Shakespeare to Cardington village, where, in the previous century, George Gascoigne, our earliest English satirist, was born, and that if he had extended his walk some fifteen minutes more he might have looked in at the cottage in Elstow parish where sixteen years later John Bunyan, our greatest English allegorist, first saw the light.

Adams was afterwards vicar of Wingrave in Buckinghamshire and then preacher in one or two London churches, and when we have said this we have said nearly all that can be said to purpose about the man himself. It is with his work as ''a preacher of God's Word," as he styles himself, rather than with his own personal history we are now concerned. As such we may describe him as one of the doctrinal Puritans, though he differed widely from many of the Puritans on the ecclesiastical and political questions of the time. Many of his sermons, like others of the period, were sermons on manners rather than on doctrine and lead us to think of him as a divine moralist rather than as a theologian. Yet a theologian he was, his theology being Calvinistic and Evangelical. He has a great belief that God will make that sure which we cannot make sure. He was not far wrong there, though we may not always be able to accept his way of stating this conviction of his as when he says that the Church is a number of men whom God hath set apart by an eternal decree. Still, he tempers even this when on the other side we find him saying:

"It was not one for one that Christ died, not one for many: but one for all ... and this one must needs be of infinite price."

"Some affirm," says he, "that I have made the gate of heaven too narrow, and they hope to find it wider; God and the Scriptures are more merciful. True it is that heaven-gate is in itself wide enough and the narrowness is in respect of the man who enters; and though thy sins cannot make that too little to receive thee, yet they make thee too gross and unfit to get in."

As for the preacher himself, he would have him consecrate to the service all gifts and the ripest scholarship: "Learning," says he, "as well as office, is requisite for a minister. An unlearned scribe, without his treasure of old and new, is unfit to interpret God's oracles. The priest's lips shall preserve knowledge, is no less a precept to the minister than a promise to the people."

Then, too, the life must correspond to the teaching:

"He that preaches well in his pulpit but lives disorderly out of it, is like a young scribbler: what he writes fair with his hand, his sleeve comes after and blots."

He who serves Christ must not be too eager after the applause of man:

"I do not call thee aside to ask with what applause this sermon passeth, but (it is all I would have and hear) with what benefit ? I had rather convert one soul than have a hundred praise me."

In a sermon on the Fatal Banquet to which Satan invites his guests, he has, he says, many bidders to his feast. Take a short muster of these inviters, these bidders to this banquet of vanity: they have all their several stands. In the Court he hath set Ambition to watch for base minds, that would stoop to any villainy for preferment, and to bring them to this feast. This is a principal bidder. In the Law Courts he sets inviters that beckon contention to them, and fill the world with broils. I mean the libels of the law, pettifoggers, Satan's firebrands which he casteth abroad to make himself sport, and wlio do more hurt among the barley, the commons of this land, than Samson's foxes with the fire at their tails. "Oh," says he, "that they were shipped out for Virginia, for they cannot live without making broils " - which is a little hard upon Virginia, as we cannot but think. Pride is another bidder, and keeps a shop in the city. You shall find a description of her shop and take an inventory of her wares from the prophet - "the tinkling ornaments, the cauls, and the moontires." "She sits upon the stall, and courts the passengers with a What lack ye?"

"Making a corner " in the market seems not to have been so modern an invention as we had supposed, for Adams tells us that Engrossing is another of Satan's inviters and hath a large walk; sometimes he watcheth the landing of a ship; sometimes he turns whole loads of corn besides the market. This bidder prevails with many a citizen, gentleman, farmer, and brings in infinite guests. Bribery too is an officious fellow, and a special bidder to this feast. He invites both forward and freward: the forward and yielding, by promises of good cheer, that they shall have a fair day of it; the backward honest man, by terrors and menaces that his cause shall else go westward. This kind of talk from Puritan books is now three centuries old, but I think you will feel with me there is a very modern ring about it and that it would not be much out of place even in some of the pulpits of to-day.

We remember how Shakespeare makes Hamlet exclaim, "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!" Here is an exclamation by this other Shakespeare - this Shakespeare among the Puritans, not unworthy to stand beside it. "Oh, how goodly this building of man appears when it is clothed with beauty and honour! A face full of majesty, the throne of comeliness wherein the whiteness of the lily contends with the sanguine of the rose; an active hand, an erected countenance, an eye sparkling out lustre, a smooth complexion arising from an excellent temperature and composition. Oh, what a workman was this, that could raise such a fabric out of the earth, and lay such orient colours upon dust!"

Yet on the other hand this same preacher has to pour forth his sorrowful lament that a being so nobly formed as man should yet spiritually be so insensible. "Isaiah," he says, "had not more cause for Israel than we for England to cry - 'We have laboured in vain, and spent our strength for nought.' We give God the worst of all things that hath given us the best of all things. We give God measure for measure, but after an ill manner. For His blessings 'heapen and shaken and thrust together,' our iniquities 'pressed down and yet running over.'" With his pleading words we will close our words to-day: "Come, then, beloved to Jesus Christ, come freely, come betimes. The flesh calls, we come ; vanity calls, we flock; the world calls, we fly; let Christ call early and late. He has yet to say: ' Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.'"