Thirty-five works · 1639–1646 · dated where the printing dates itself
Thirty-five works of Jeremiah Burroughs read end to end, hunting one thing: the claim that stops a reader cold. Surprising permissions, surprising prohibitions, knife-edge distinctions, inversions, hard sayings, epigrams, exegetical surprises. He is remembered for one gentle book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, and the gentleness is real but it is not most of him. The largest single topic in this collection is the magistrate and the right to resist one. Every quotation below was checked verbatim against the printed text, and on the hand-keyed sources no quote crosses a page break, a damaged passage, or a marginal note.
He published no collected Works, and he died at forty-six. Burroughs preached these between 1639 and 1646 and most of them were printed after his death, some of them decades after, so every take is cited to its own title and printed page rather than to a volume number. Where a printing dates itself, by a colophon or a dated marginal note or a fast-day heading, that date is given. Roughly a third of the takes carry a date anchored in the book itself rather than inferred.
Read him in order and something moves. The 1639 work was written from exile after he was silenced; the last was published in the year he died, with his own side holding power. What does not move is his doctrine of coercion: the magistrate may act in religion within limits, the church and private men may never use force, and that is as true in 1639 as in 1646. What moves is how much difference among the godly he can bear: from “Antipathies are irreconcileable” to a whole book pleading forbearance, in which he concedes in print that the bishops may not have been the vile men they thought. The same argument, aimed at whoever is holding the whip.