Adams Quotes 03

Grace comes into the soul, as the morning sun into the world; first a dawning, then a light; and at last the sun in his full and excellent brightness. (From the sermon Heaven made sure on Ps 35.3) The devil makes his Christmas-pie of lawyers' tongues and clerks' fingers. Oh, be ashamed, Christians, that worldlings are more studious and industrious to make sure of pebbles, than you are to make sure of pearls. Solomon tells us that it is the glory of man to pass by an offence. Herein God is most glorious, in that he passes by all the offences of his children. Lord, who can know thee and not love thee, know thee and not fear thee? We fear thee for thy justice, and love thee for thy mercy; yea, fear thee for thy mercy, and love thee for thy justice; for thou art infinitely good in both. Despair is hope stark dead, presumption is hope stark mad. Our mind is where our pleasure is, our heart is where our treasure is, our love is where our life is, but all these, our pleasure, treasure, and life, are reposed in Jesus Christ. Repentance is a change of the mind, and regeneration is a change of the man. Passion costs me too much to bestow it on every trifle. Generosity Let us make the poor our friends by our alms, not our enemies by our scorns. We had better have the ears of God full of their prayers, than heaps of money in our own coffers with their curses. Humility Humility wrestleth with God, like Jacob, and wins by yielding. Law and Gospel The Law gives menaces but the Gospel gives promises. Marriage There is no such fountain on earth as marriage. Woman takes her being from man, man takes his well-being from woman. As God by creation made two of one, so again by marriage He made one of two.

Sense of sin Sense of sin may be often great, and more felt than grace; yet not be more than grace. A man feels the ache of his finger more sensibly than the health of his whole body; yet he knows that the ache of a finger is nothing so much as the health of the whole body. Temptation Satan like a fisher, baits his hook according to the appetite of the fish. Virtue Half our virtue arises from our being out of the way of temptation. These culled from various sources

Adams Quotes 02

Heaven He that will be knighted must kneel for it, and he that will enter in at the strait gate must crowd for it - a gate made so on purpose, narrow and hard in the entrance, yet, after we have entered, wide and glorious, that after our pain our joy may be the sweeter. Even the tired horse, when he comes near home, mends pace: be good always, without weariness, but best at last; that the nearer thou comest to the end of thy days, the nearer thou mayest be to the end of thy hopes, the salvation of thy soul. Judgement Both in thy private sessions, and the universal assizes, thou shalt be sure of the same Judge, the same jury, the same witnesses, the same verdict. How certain thou art to die, thou knowest; how soon to die, thou knowest not. Measure not thy life with the longest; that were to piece it out with flattery. Thou canst name no living man, not the sickest, which thou art sure shall die before thee. That which a man spits against heaven, shall fall back on his own face. Alas! that the farthest and of all our thoughts should be the thought of our ends. Patience The patient man is merry indeed.... The jailers that watch him are but his pages of honour, and his very dungeon but the lower side of the vault of heaven. He kisseth the wheel that must kill him; and thinks the stairs of the scaffold of his martyrdom but so many degrees of his ascent to glory. The tormentors are weary of him. the beholders have pitty on him, all men wonder at him; and while he seems below all men, below himself, he is above nature. He hath so overcome himself that nothing can conquer him. Source: Eternal life ministries

Adams Quotes 01

The ambitious climbs up high and perilous stairs, and never cares how to come down; the desire of rising hath swallowed up his fear of a fall.
- [Ambition]

Ahab cast a covetous eye at Naboth's vineyard, David a lustful eye at Bathsheba. The eye is the pulse of the soul; as physicians judge of the heart by the pulse, so we by the eye; a rolling eye, a roving heart. The good eye keeps minute time, and strikes when it should; the lustful, crochet-time, and so puts all out of tune.
- [Eyes]

Conscience is God's deputy in the soul.
- [Conscience]

The covetous man is like a camel with a great hunch on his back; heaven's gate must be made Higher and broader, or he will hardly get in.
- [Covetousness]

The covetous man pines in plenty, like Tantalus up to the chin in water, and yet thirsty.
- [Covetousness]

Death is as near to the young as to the old; here is all the difference: death stands behind the young man's back, before the old man's face.
- [Death]

His father was no man's friend but his owne, and he (saith the prouerbe) is no man's for else.
- Diseases of the Soul (p 53) [Enemies]

He who sends the storm steers the vessel.
- [Providence]

Source: GIGA

Contemporary London

Seventeenth Century London illustrated

Southey Quotations

Robert Southey quotes from Adams in his commonplace book,

pp 132ff.

See here on Google Books.

He is apparently the one who fixed the Puritan Shakespeare label on Adams. This what A B Grosart says in the Dictionary Of National Biography, although the quotation has never been traced.

Aspects of Piety 18

Concluding Remarks Is this site advocating that we should we all rush to buy copies of Adams’ works for ourselves and for others? Should we be laying Bunyan, Goodwin, Owen and Watson on one side and taking up Adams? It probably would not do us any great harm, but Adams’ strength is in his aphorisms and illustrations not in his systematic treatment of doctrines and passages of Scripture. We would probably be wise to buy the Commentary on 2 Peter before the sermons. The sermons need to be put under a gentle heat until the aphorisms are distilled and then presented in something of the style found in I D E Thomas’s collection The Puritan Golden Treasury. This may sound sacrilegious but when we consider the wealth of talent that followed Adams, it should be no surprise to us that, stood on his shoulders, they produced superior work. Rather than completely neglecting Adams, however, let us make what use of him we can. Hunt down his The three divine sisters and his Crucifix or some of the other items mentioned and available through this site and store up his axioms as best you know how and let us be thankful for a man of God who preached faithfully and the power of the Spirit, who served his own generation and was then gathered to his fathers in glory.

Aspects of Piety 17

Other Aspects 02
Adams advocates the orderly piety that we associate with the Puritans. 'We must give the first hour of the day, the first work of our hands, the first words of our lips to the Lord'.

(Works 2, p 536)
'At night we must give account how we have spent our day; happy are we if we can make our reckoning even with God; a day misspent is lost. … I fear too many may say so of the whole day of their lives: I have lost my day.
'Time is precious; and howsoever our prise and lusts think it, God so highly prizeth it that he will punish the loss of a short time with a revenge beyond all times: the misspense of a temporal day with an eternal night. Every hour hath wings, and there is no moment passing from us but it flies up to the Maker of time, and bears him true tidings how we have used it. There I no usury tolerable but of two things, grace and time; and it is only blessed wealth that is gotten by improving them to the best. We brought with us into the world sin enough to repent of all our short day. There is no minute flies over our head without new addition to our sins and therefore brings new reason for our sorrows. We little think that every moment we misspend is a record against us in heaven, or that every idle hour is entered into God’s registry and stands there in capital letters till our repentant tears wash it out. …'. (Works 2, p 88).
He urges self-examination, another typically Puritan activity. He calls for a natural, moral and spiritual self-contemplation, remembering our souls and spirits, considering our frequent sins and searching our hearts so that we sound ‘the lowest depths of conscience’ and spy ‘blemishes in the face of whitest innocence'. (Works 2, p 384).
In his sermon on England’s sickness, Adams commends moderation, labouring in our callings, and abstinence. (Works 1, pp 426, 427). On the second of those subjects he says ‘Let the shoemaker look to his boot, the fisher to his boat, the scholar to his book’. (Works 1, p 383).

Finally, hear him on death.
'All are like actors on a stage, some have one part and some another, death is still busy amongst us; here drops one of the players, we bury him with sorrow, and to our scene again: then falls another, yea all, one after another, till death be left upon the stage. Death is that damp which puts out all the dim lights of vanity. Yet man is easier to believe that all the world shall die, than to suspect himself.' (Puritan Golden Treasury, p 69).
'Death is ready at hand about us, we carry deaths enow within us. We know we shall die, we know not how soon; it can never prevent us, or come too early, if our souls be in the keeping of God.'
(Works 3, p 32).
For the believer it is ‘nothing else but a bridge over this tempestuous sea to paradise’. Though evil in itself it cannot ultimately harm the good, as it is the door to eternal life. He likens the believer’s death to a clock mender dismantling and cleaning a time-piece to make it ‘go more perfectly’.'
(Works 2, pp 227, 228)
'… though the soul is gotten when man is made, yet it is, as it were, born when he dies: his body being the womb, and death the midwife that delivers it to glorious perfection. The good man may then well say … ‘Death shall be my advantage’ … His happiest hour is when … he can say ‘Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my soul’.