The Whole Works · 6 volumes · London, 1820
Every volume of John Flavel 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. Flavel preached to sailors, fishermen and merchants at Dartmouth and wrote in a fixed frame of Doctrine, Reason and Use, which generates a great deal of routine application; that scaffolding was thrown out. Every quotation below was checked verbatim against the printed text, and every page number comes from the running header above the passage.