The Glorious Epiphany With The Devout Christian S Love To It

This is the story of Lady Sarah Cowper, based on a diary that she kept from 1700 to 1716. She reveals not only her personal life, but also her thoughts about religion, politics, and society, weaving her own words with unattributed quotations from conduct manuals, sermons, periodicals, and other sources.

History has not been kind to Symon Patrick. His fifty years of ministry spanned the closing years of Cromwell’s rule and the start of Queen Anne’s reign, and ranged from service as a Church of England minister in two fashionable London parishes to appointment as the “latitudinarian” Bishop of Ely. He influenced a major change in the character of the Established Church, as it moved from a confrontational fundamentalism to the broad tolerance that exists today. Patrick, recognised by his contemporaries as one of the three or four leading clergy of his generation, wrote over one hundred books that helped to define his Church, such as his pastoral work The Heart’s Ease, his devotional The Parable of the Pilgrim and his biting polemic against nonconformism, A Friendly Debate. This book assesses the significance and quality of Patrick’s contribution to the Church of England, carefully placing it against the background of the history and politics of the time and suggesting why his reputation faded after his death. Puritanism, Latitudinarianism, pilgrimage, women’s religion and spirituality, and prose style are all topics touched on here.