A Puritan Sabbath

Thomas Coleman, The Two-Thousand Confessors of 1662, pp. 148-149:

It may now be proper to present one instance, to illustrate the manner in which the most devoted of the ejected ministers would conduct the services of the sanctuary, when they had liberty to attend to the public worship of God in the manner which they thought to be most agreeable to the Divine will, and best adapted to the edification of the people.

At Broad Oak, in Flintshire, there was an out-building very decently and conveniently fitted up for public worship. The people came from surrounding places, and assembled there at nine o'clock on the Sabbath morning, at which time the devoted minister commenced his public services both summer and winter. He began with prayer, and then sang the 110th Psalm, without reading the lines. Next he read and expounded a chapter in the Old Testament in the morning, and in the New Testament in the afternoon. He looked upon the public reading of the Scriptures in religious assemblies to be an ordinance of God, and that it tended very much to the edification of the people to have what is read expounded to them. The bare reading of the Word he used to compare to the throwing of a net into the water, but the expounding of it is like the spreading out of that net, which makes it the more likely to catch fish -- especially as he managed it, with practical, profitable observations. After the exposition of the chapter, he sung a psalm, and commonly chose one suitable to the chapter he had expounded, and would briefly tell his hearers how they might sing that psalm with understanding, and what affections of soul should be working towards God in the singing of it. He often said, "The more singing of psalms there is in our families and congregations on Sabbath-days, the more like they are to heaven, and the more there is in them of the everlasting Sabbath."

After the sermon in the morning, he sung the 117th Psalm. He intermitted at noon about an hour and a-half; on Sacrament-days not near so long. The morning sermon was repeated by a ready writer to those that stayed at the meeting-place, as many did, and when that was done, he began the afternoon service, in which he not only read and expounded a chapter, but catechized the children, and expounded the catechism briefly before sermon. The variety and vivacity of his public services made them, we are told, exceedingly pleasant to all that joined with him, who never had cause to complain of his being tedious. He used to say, "Every minute of Sabbath time is precious, and none of it to be lost, and that he scarce thought the Lord's-day well spent if he were not weary in body at night -- weary with his work, but not weary of it," as he used to distinguish. He would sometimes say to those about him, when he had gone through the duties of a Sabbath, "Well, if this be not the way to heaven, I do not know what is."

As to his constant preaching, it was very substantial and elaborate, and greatly to edification. Such were the public ministrations of the heavenly-minded Philip Henry.