Hard
Sayings

Complete 35 works No collected Works Scanned August 2026

Jeremiah Burroughs

c. 1600–1646 · silenced, then exiled to Rotterdam · dissenting brother at Westminster

Burroughs 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 scan is the magistrate and the right to resist one. He argues that a man may subject his body and his estate to another but never his reason, that the cause and not the departure is what makes a schismatic, and that the principle of compelling belief “seldome prevails with any but those who have got power into their hands, or hope to get it.” Even the contentment book is harder than its reputation: prosperity is the thing God conveys most wrath through, and murmuring is a greater evil than any affliction that provokes it.

He published no collected Works and died at forty-six, so every take is cited to its own title and printed page. Most of these books were printed after his death, some of them decades after. Where a printing dates itself, by a colophon or a dated marginal note or a fast-day heading, that date is given, and about a third of the takes carry a date anchored in the book rather than inferred. Read in order they show something: his doctrine of coercion barely moves between 1639 and 1646, but what he can bear among people who differ from him moves a long way.

Verified takes

2,722

Rated 5 of 5

584

Unverifiable

0

Works

35 of 35

Complete 34 volumes Works & Posthumous Works Scanned August 2026

Thomas Chalmers

1780–1847 · converted 1810–11 · led the Disruption of 1843

Chalmers is the opposite kind of writer to Manton: magnificent, rolling, enormously verbose, and the sharp idea is usually buried inside a ninety-word sentence. His recurring move is to correct his own side, telling Scottish Calvinists that total depravity is overstated, that wanting a reward is not a corrupt motive, and that over-defining the atonement muzzles the free offer of Christ. The richest veins are his private Scripture Readings and the discourses he preached to Glasgow merchants.

Verified takes

778

Rated 5 of 5

110

Unverifiable

0

Volumes

34 of 34

Complete 5 volumes Works Scanned September 2026

Stephen Charnock

1628–1680 · ejected 1662 · Thomas Watson’s co-pastor in London

Charnock is read for one enormous book on the attributes of God, and the reputation that comes with it is exhaustiveness. The reputation is earned and it is also misleading. The long orderly proofs of an attribute yield very little; the heat is in the application, where he turns the attribute on the reader and it bites. The largest single discourse here is not an attribute at all but the efficient of regeneration, and the sharpest pages in five volumes are the ones arguing from the size of a man’s sin rather than against it. He died before publishing the work he is known for.

Verified takes

2,778

Rated 5 of 5

335

Unverifiable

0

Volumes

5 of 5

Complete 6 volumes London, 1820 Scanned August 2026

John Flavel

1627–1691 · preacher at Dartmouth · ejected 1662

Flavel preached to sailors, fishermen and merchants in a Devon seaport, and wrote in a fixed frame of Doctrine, Reason and Use that manufactures routine application by the yard. That scaffolding is the trap, and most of the six volumes is scaffolding. What survives it is unusually concrete: what providence is actually doing to a particular life, blunt counsel about wages and trade and drink, and the ejected minister writing on persecution, religious coercion and his own silencing.

The largest scan on this site, and the messiest edition. The 1820 catalogue is incomplete for every volume: the six carry a coronation sermon for William and Mary, a thanksgiving sermon for the Glorious Revolution, and the whole of Flavel's Antinomian and antipaedobaptist controversy. They also bind in a good deal he did not write, including a certificate signed by John Howe and Increase Mather and a seaman's own shipwreck narrative. None of that is quoted here.

Verified takes

3,578

Rated 5 of 5

434

Unverifiable

0

Volumes

6 of 6

Complete 22 volumes Nisbet, 1870–75 Scanned August 2026

Thomas Manton

1620–1677 · Westminster Assembly clerk · ejected 1662

Manton preached verse by verse for years at a stretch, and the length is exactly why he is worth mining: he had room to say the unguarded thing. The richest veins are the Psalm 119 series, the exposition of the Lord's Prayer, and the treatises on the life of faith and on self-denial.

Verified takes

1,319

Rated 5 of 5

169

On prayer

195

Volumes

22 of 22

Complete 7 volumes Nichol, Edinburgh, 1862–64 Scanned August 2026

Richard Sibbes

1577–1635 · Master of St Catharine’s Hall · preacher at Gray’s Inn

The gentlest of the Puritans, and the hardest to mine because of it. Sibbes was called the Heavenly Doctor for a reason: the consolation runs for thousands of pages and almost never qualifies itself, so a reader hunting edges can go a hundred pages nodding. The edge sits in the casuistical passages where he answers people who suspect their own repentance, and above all where he fences his own comfort. The author of The Bruised Reed warns you not to flatter yourself that Christ will not quench the smoking flax; the great consoler rules that comfort must not be preached to everyone.

The largest scan on this site: 2.6 million words across seven volumes, read in 108 chunks. Grosart’s contents lists proved wrong for nearly every one of them, and volume 5 alone holds fifteen works where the catalogue names four. Thirteen other signatures are bound into these volumes, every one of them writing in the first person about Sibbes in a voice close enough to pass for his. None of them is quoted here.

Verified takes

5,152

Rated 5 of 5

681

Unverifiable

0

Volumes

7 of 7

Complete 15 works No collected Works Scanned August 2026

Octavius Winslow

1808–1878 · Baptist, then Anglican · the preacher of the inner life

Winslow is the tender one, and that is exactly the trap. He writes to the anxious believer, and page after page consoles beautifully while surprising nobody. The edge shows up where he is hardest: decline that is gradual and invisible, indwelling sin in the converted, religious self-deception, and the uses of God’s deliberate withdrawal. He is also stranger than his reputation, arguing that God does not foreknow because God has no “before,” that Christ leaned on the Spirit as much as the feeblest believer does, and that a man may lead the vanguard of God’s elect unconverted.

He published no collected Works, so each take is cited to its own title, year and printed page. Several of the titles he is best known for today, among them Morning Thoughts and No Condemnation in Christ Jesus, survive online only as modernised texts with no pagination, and are therefore not in this scan. This is a large reading of Winslow, not a complete one.

Verified takes

1,775

Rated 5 of 5

175

Unverifiable

0

Works

15 of 15

Complete 28 works London, 1654–1692 Scanned September 2026

Thomas Watson

1620–1686 · rector of St Stephen’s Walbrook · ejected 1662

Watson never received a collected edition. The first complete one appeared in 2025 and is in copyright, so this corpus was built a quarto at a time from twenty-eight separately printed books and read as 105 sermons and treatises, ten of them buried inside a single volume that catalogues list under one title. He is remembered as the most quotable of them all, and that is the trap: the similes are what get anthologised, and a vivid picture attached to a doctrine nobody disputes is fine writing and a bad entry. What is left when the pictures are stripped out is a plainer and harder writer than his reputation.

Verified takes

3,154

Rated 5 of 5

552

Unverifiable

0

Works

28 of 28