Exceeding Great Negligence

Do we pray enough? Do we fast...at all? One Puritan wrote many years ago extolling the virtues of these spiritual disciplines, but acknowledging personally that his own practice was deficient. So it is that we know what to do, but too often, the putting into practice of what we know falls woefully short. God grant us the grace to walk according to the light that is given us.

John Yates, "To the Christian Reader," in God's Arraignement of Hypocrites (1616):

Prayer & fasting are of the same nature [as] that [of] preaching and administering the sacraments: they being conscionably used, worke where and whensoever God pleaseth....Fasting and praier are admirable meanes in the Church of God...to fill the soule with the spirit of grace, and goodnes. And here I tremble to speake, and charge mine own heart with exceeding great negligence...

Samuel Stone's Whole Body of Divinity

Samuel Stone, who arrived in the New World on the same boat with John Cotton and Thomas Hooker (that "glorious triumvirate" -- Cotton Mather) was an assistant to Hooker and, with him, one of the founding fathers of Hartford, Connecticut. He served as pastor there until his death. He is known for producing the first American colonial systematic theology, A Whole Body of Divinity, which was left in manuscript in 1650s and has never been published. Samuel Bellingham, son of Massachusetts Governor Richard Bellingham, proposed to do so, but did not follow through. Samuel Willard transcribed the work in 1697 (and later produced his own systematic theology, A Compleat Body of Divinity, which was an exposition of the Westminster Shorter Catechism). Stone's work, the fruit of his preaching in the 1630s and 1640s, was not an exposition of the Catechism, but rather a systematic theology in the vein of Alexander Richardson, John Yates and William Ames. Cotton Mather reports that Stone's work ("this rich treasure") was so highly regarded that ministerial candidates were required to copy the manuscript by hand. Willard's transcript is owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is being prepared for publication by Baird Tipson, president of Washington College, who notes that "Stone’s 540-page treatise is almost surely the first systematic treatment of any subject written in the new American colonies." In this reader's opinion, it will be a valuable contribution to the study of New England Puritan theology when it is published.