Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations: In Three PartsGilpin, Richard
Religion
Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations: In Three Parts
Gilpin, Richard
Devil -- Early works to 1800; Temptation -- Early works to 1800
abolition of Episcopacy demanded. The evidence of this, spite of the
wreck and loss of contemporary ‘records,’ is abundant; and it is the
next landmark in the Life we are telling.
It needeth not that in a necessarily brief Memoir such as this we
should enter on the _merits_ of the national change of Church ‘Polity’
which gave supremacy for the time to Presbytery over Prelacy. The
materials for judgment lie in fulness in every worthy Ecclesiastical
History of England; and the whole story has just been re-written with
fine candour and attractiveness by Mr Stoughton.[28] Presbyterianism
in England during the Commonwealth can hold its own,—lustrous as it is
with the names of Edmund Calamy and Bates and Manton, Richard Baxter
and William Jenkyn and Thomas Watson, Samuel Clark and Thomas Wilson of
Maidstone, and Thomas Hall of King’s Norton,—selecting a few, urban and
rural, almost at random.
Suffice it to recall that, outside of the more ambitious organisation
of London,—whose unpublished ‘Memorial’ lies all but unknown in Sion
College Library,[29]—there were various voluntary Associations which
took a semi-Presbyterian mould, in the counties of Chester, Cumberland,
Westmoreland, Dorset, Wilts, Worcestershire, and others. These
Associations embraced the ‘clergymen,’ and ‘ministers’ or ‘pastors,’
and laymen belonging to the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, and
the Independents, and sought to combine the presidency of the first
with the union and co-operation of the second, and the freedom
of the third; in short, a federated rather than organic oneness.
Subordinating everything else, was an intense yearning after nearness
to all who loved the one Lord Jesus, and heroic as devout endeavours
for ‘discipline,’ so as to vitalise and Christianise ‘the _masses_.’
It is pathetic to read of the days and nights of these good men’s
Fasting and Prayer ‘unto the breaking of the light,’ for one another’s
Parishes and Charges. Their ideal was lofty, their own practice
beautiful, their success marked in changing the face of erewhile
godless and heathen-dark communities. What RICHARD BAXTER was in
Worcestershire, RICHARD GILPIN was in Cumberland and Westmoreland; and
as the author of ‘The Saint’s Everlasting Rest’ was chosen to draw
up the ‘Agreement’ for his county, so the author of ‘_Dæmonologia
Sacra_’ was selected to execute the same office for Cumberland and
Westmoreland. The ‘Agreement,’—of which the title-page will be found in
the list at the close of our Memoir, must be studied by all who would
master the problems of the period. It is comprehensive, without being
general or vague; decisive in dogma, but not uncharitable; high in
aim, but most practical; earnest, but not fanatic; stern to offences,
but hopeful and tender toward offenders; richly scriptural, but also,
and because of it, most human, all a-glow with wide sympathies, and
unutterably wistful in its appeals for oblivion on all lesser matters,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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