Thomas Shepard, Pilgrim Father and Founder of Harvard

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“Thomas Shepard has been one of my favourite authors ever since the year 1861 when my honoured friend Dr. Williamson of Huntly wrote my name on his own copy of the Parable of the Ten Virgins. I think I must have read Shepard quite as often as Spurgeon had read Bunyan; quite as often at any rate as Jowett had read Boswell. And I am still reading Shepard as if I had never read him before. As a proof of that take this little confidence of mine. The week before my last short holiday I had read Professor Churton Collins’s delightful paper on The Tempest that appeared in the Contemporary Review for the month of January last. And so impressed was I with the learned Professor’s paper that I took to the country with me Dr. Furness’s variorum and monumental edition of that exquisite work, promising myself a great revel over the great text and over the rich mass of explanatory and illustrative notes. But would you believe it? with such a temptation lying on my table all the time I never once opened the seductive volume. For as God would have it, as John Bunyan was wont to say, I had taken Thomas Shepard also with me and I read the Parable, and the Sound Believer, and the Sincere Convert, and the Saint’s Jewel, and the Select Cases, and the Spiritual Experiences over and over again; execrable English and all. And instead of repenting myself for my neglect of Shakespeare and his monumental editor, I came home thanking God again for His notable servant Shepard. And more than that, I came home more settled and resolved than ever to do all I can to make you know something of Shepard’s matchlessly pungent lessons in spiritual and experimental religion.”

This classic work contains the following chapters:

I. Introductory
II. Introductory: Evangelical
III. Introductory: Experimental
IV. ‘No One Who Ever Came Under My Shadow Prospered’
V. ‘The More I Do the Worse I Am’
VI. ‘It Is Sometimes So With Me That I Will Rather Die Than Pray’
VII. ‘My Own Idle Words in My Preaching, in My Praise, and in My Prayer, and the Account I Give of Them to God’
VIII. ‘I Did Not Remember the Sins of My Youth; Nay, the Sins of One Day I Forgot the Next Day’
IX. ‘I Learned From the Apostle How to Compare Spiritual Things With Spiritual’
X. ‘I Came to See How God Is Having His Name in Me’
XI. ‘For Thy Sake I Am Killed All the Day Long, I Am Accounted as a Sheep for the Slaughter’
XII. ‘I Kept a Private Fast for the Conquest of my Pride’
XIII. ‘The Thought of My Fast-Coming Death Often Makes Me Very Unhappy’
XIV. ‘My Sins Are Sometimes Crucified But They Are Never in This World Mortified’
XV. ‘I Was Salted With Suffering’
XVI. ‘Bring Forth the Best Robe and Put It on Him’
XVII. ‘Fiat Experimentum in Corpore Vili’
XVIII. ‘Pectus Facit Theologum’
XIX. ‘I Abhor Myself’
XX. ‘My Mind Is a Bucket Without a Bottom’
XXI. ‘You Ask Me What Cured Me of Being an Infidel’
XXII. ‘Thou Art My Hiding Place’
XXIII. ‘Some Remorses of an Old Minister’
XXIV. ‘When I Read Christ Prays’
XXV. ‘Surely I Have Laid My Pipe Far Short of the Fountain’

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