The Essential Puritan Bundle

Where do you start with the Puritans?

Six essential Puritan books, selected by Stephen Yuille

Reading the Puritans can be a daunting task. The language is old-fashioned, the writing style is archaic, some of their ideas are difficult to follow, and it’s easy to get bogged down on a single page.

That’s precisely why we created the Puritan Treasures for Today series. We’ve carefully abridged, edited, and modernized these books so that they’re enjoyable and profitable to read, without losing any of the rich content that made them worth picking up in the first place.

Where do you start? Which ones are the best? The most helpful? The most rewarding to the soul?

You’ll be glad to hear that I’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Start here:

1. Begin with Thomas Manton’s Holy Meditation, which walks you through the practice of biblical meditation. The Puritans believed this was indispensable to the Christian life.

2. Then open George Swinnock’s The Blessed and Boundless God. He will leave you in awe of our God’s matchless perfections and wondrous excellencies.

3. Thomas Watson’s Killing Sin and Denying Self exposes sin for what it really is, so you grieve over it and turn from it.

4. William Perkins’s A Perfect Redeemer exalts the beauty of Christ, so that you delight in His surpassing worth.

5. Obadiah Sedgwick’s Special Providence for Anxious Souls celebrates God’s incomparable power and wisdom, and His fatherly control over every detail in your life.

6. And finally, Thomas Manton’s A Blessed Hope provides a heart-warming glimpse of the glory that awaits believers, so you can abound in hope all the way to the end.

The Puritans had a great name for truths like these: “lively” truths. When they come alive in your heart, they stir up all the Christian graces, strengthen your resolve, and draw you closer to God. My prayer is that these six books will do just that for you.

—Stephen Yuille, editor of Puritan Treasures for Today