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PREFACE.

OUR Protestant predecessors, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have bequeathed to us a rich treasury of doctrinal and practical divinity. To a certain extent the value of their writings is known. Yet much of these important materials still moulders upon our shelves. The interesting memorials of many of the children of God, whose lives and sentiments were the ornaments of the age in which they lived, lie buried in obscurity.

It is a grateful task to rescue some of these spiritual relics from the oblivion to which they have been consigned, and to edify later generations by the testimonies once borne to the grace of God by those, who are long since gone to their rest. A link is thus formed between the past and the present ages,

between the departed and the living followers of God, which connects the chain of spiritual history in the Church of Christ, and establishes the faith and hope of the gospel in the hearts of many.

The similarity of feelings and affections by which real Christians have ever been exercised in regard to the things which belong to their everlasting peace, constitutes a bond of communion of a peculiar and affecting character. "As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man." Prov. xxvii. 19. These comparisons demonstrate an holy identity in the effects produced by the reception of the gospel into the hearts of different individuals; an identity which, whilst it comforts the trembling sinner in his first inquiries, "what he must do to be saved," confirms the more advanced believer in the grounds of his faith in the gospel of Christ. To know that others have been agitated by the same doubts, animated by the same hopes, alarmed by the same fears, comforted by the same promises, and

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