William Perkins' LIfe & Ministry (Part 2)

Here is my second installment on the life and ministry of the great Elizabethan Puritan, William Perkins:

Synopsis of Personal Conversion: Youth

Perkins’ conversion is somewhat evocative of the apostle Paul’s Damascus Road experience, but in a much less shocking and frightening manner. Just as the apostle heard a voice, so did Perkins. Just as the apostle was made known of his sin, so was Perkins. Just as the Damascus Road experience was the first step toward conversion on the part of the apostle, so was a particular experience on the part of Perkins. What makes Perkins’ conversion less shocking and frightening is that the voice he heard was not the voice of a divine but a young mother chiding her child. His sin made known to him was not the persecution of Christ but more so an absence of Christ in his life. And although the Damascus Road experience of Paul outshines most conversion experiences, his experience was alarming enough to lead him to take his first step towards his own spiritual conversion. The following is a recount of this “first step” experience:

"He was much devoted to drunkenness. While he was walking through town, he heard a young woman say to her child, “Hold your tongue, or I will give you to drunken Perkins, yonder.” Finding himself as a byword among the people his conscience gripped him and became so deeply impressed by it that it was a first step to his conversion. After his conversion he became a strong exponent of Calvinism and always dealt sympathetically with those in spiritual need."

Fuller offers an interesting possibility as to why God may have allowed Perkins to persist in his godlessness for so long:

"Probably divine Providence permitted him to run himselfe with the prodigal Son out of breath, that so he might be the better enabled experimentally to reprove others of their vanity, effectually sympathizing with their sad condition, and be the better skil’d how to comfort and counsell them on their repentance. Why should God’s arme, which afterwards graciously overtook Master Perkins, be too short to reach others in the same condition."

Perkins’ new spiritual voyage had begun. He fled to Christ under the spiritual influence of the great Puritan leader Laurence Chaderton (1537-1635), also known as the pope of Cambridge Puritanism, his personal tutor and a lifelong friend. He heaved his debauched ways and began to bear spiritual fruits worthy of God. Moreover, he relinquished his quest for mathematical studies and fascination with the practice of magic. In their place, he took up what was to suffuse the remaining years of his life, theology and ministry, particularly in writing and preaching. In the words of Fuller: “True it is he was very wild in his youth till God… graciously reclaim’d him.”

Notes:

1. Dr. Willaim Perkins, www.apuritansmind.com/williamperkins/williamperkins.htm
2. Fuller, Abel Rendevivus or The Dead Yet Speaking, 432.
3. “Laurence Chaderton…lived to be almost a hundred years old and published little. He came from a wealthy Roman Catholic family by whom he was ‘nuzzled up in Popish superstition.’ He suffered disinheritance when he embraced the gospel and Puritanism. A well-known benefactor at the time was Sir Walter Mildmay, who founded Emmanuel College at Cambridge. Sir Walter chose Chaderton to be master of that college, a position which he filled for forty years. He was a lecturer for fifty years at St Clement’s Church, Cambridge. When he eventually came to give up his lectureship at St Clement’s, forty ministers begged him to continue, claiming that they owed their conversion to his ministry. There is a description of him preaching for two hours, after which he announced that he would no longer trespass on his hearer’s patience, whereupon the congregation cried out, ‘For God’s sake, sir, go on! Go on!’” (Erroll Hulse, Who Are The Puritans? [Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2000; reprint, 2001], 44).
4. Beeke, www.apuritansmind.com/williamperkins/beekejoelperkinspredestinationpreachin preaching.htm
5. Fuller, The Holy State, 81.