The Complete Works · 7 volumes · Nichol, Edinburgh, 1862–64
Every volume of Richard Sibbes 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. Sibbes is the gentlest of the Puritans, and that is the whole difficulty. His consolation runs for thousands of pages and almost never qualifies itself, so a reader hunting edges can go a hundred pages nodding. The edge is somewhere else: in the casuistical passages where he answers people who suspect their own repentance, and above all in the places where he fences his own comfort. Every quotation below was checked verbatim against the printed text, and every page number comes from the running header above the passage.