The Great Cloud of Witnesses · Era 6 of 10
The Puritans & Pietists
1600–1730
The Reformation had opened the Bible. Now came the harder question: has it opened you? This is the century of the examined heart, the family altar, and the prayer meeting that would not quit.
The story
The century opens with a book. In 1611, translators working under King James finish an English Bible built on Tyndale's foundation, and its cadences settle into the language for the next three hundred years. Meanwhile the Geneva Bible, with its study notes, is the one families actually carry.
In 1620 a small group of separatists who had already fled to Holland sail from Plymouth on the *Mayflower* — about a hundred passengers, roughly half of them from the church. They land in November on a cold coast, and half of them die that first winter. They had come, their own governor William Bradford wrote, hoping to advance the gospel in remote parts of the world.
Back in England the Puritans wanted the national church reformed further and their own hearts reformed first. They produced pastoral writing of extraordinary depth — Richard Baxter on the pastor's work, John Owen on killing sin, Samuel Rutherford's letters from exile — and in 1646 the Westminster Confession. When the monarchy returned in 1660, some two thousand ministers were ejected from their pulpits for conscience.
One of them was a tinker with no education. John Bunyan spent twelve years in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelaces to feed his blind daughter. In prison he wrote, and in 1678 published *The Pilgrim's Progress* — the story of a man with a burden on his back running toward a distant light. It became the most-read book in English after the Bible.
In Germany, exhausted by war and dead orthodoxy, Philipp Jakob Spener published *Pia Desideria* in 1675: gather believers into small groups, get the Bible into laypeople's hands, make ministry about godliness and not just correct doctrine. His student August Hermann Francke turned Halle into a machine of mercy — a school for poor children, an orphanage, a printing house that produced cheap Bibles by the tens of thousands.
Then, on a Saxon estate, it caught fire. Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf had given refuge to persecuted Moravians — spiritual descendants of Jan Hus — at a settlement called Herrnhut. The community was quarrelsome and divided. On August 13, 1727, during a communion service, something broke; the Moravians described it as a visitation of the Holy Spirit, and the bitterness was gone. They began a round-the-clock prayer watch that lasted over a hundred years, and within five years they were sending missionaries to the Caribbean. One of their number would soon meet a frightened young Anglican named John Wesley on a storm-tossed ship.