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Thomas Goodwin

by Alexander Whyte

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[Reprinted from The Banner of Truth Magazine, no. 213, June 1981, with permission]


Gentlemen. I have long looked for a suitable opportunity of acknowledging an old debt to a favourite author of mine. But when I proceed to pay a little of that old debt today, I am not to be supposed to put any of you into that same author's debt. All I wish to do is for once to make full and heartfelt acknowledgement of my own deep debt to that author, and then to urge you all to get into some such indebtedness to some great authors of past days or of the present day.

It was in my third year at the University that I first became acquainted with Thomas Goodwin. On opening the 'Witness' newspaper one propitious morning, my eye fell on the announcement of a new edition of Thomas Goodwin's works. The advertised 'Council of Publication', as I remember well, made a deep impression upon me, and it will not be without interest to you to hear their honoured names even on this far-distant day. They were Dr Lindsay Alexander, of this city; Dr Begg, of this city; Dr Crawford, of the University of Edinburgh; Principal Cunningham, of this College; Mr Drummond, of St Thomas's Episcopal Church; Dr William Goold, of Martyr's Church. I entered my name at once as a subscriber to the series; and not long after, the first volume of Goodwin's works came into my hands. And I will here say with simple truth that his works have never been out of my hands down to this day.

In those far-off years I read my Goodwin every Sabbath morning and every Sabbath night. Goodwin was my every Sabbath-day meat and my every Sabbath-day drink. And during my succeeding years as a student, and as a young minister, I carried about a volume of Goodwin wherever I went. I read him in railway carriages and on steamboats. I read him at home and abroad. I read him on my holidays among the Scottish Grampians and among the Swiss Alps. I carried his volumes about with me till they fell out of their original cloth binding, and till I got my book-binder to put them into his best morocco. I have read no other author so much and so often. And I continue to read him till this day as if I had never read him before.

Now, if I was to say such things as these about some of the Greek or Latin or English classics you would receive it as a matter of course. But why should I not say the simple truth about the greatest pulpit master of early this century? Pauline exegesis and homiletic that has ever lived, and who has been far more to me than all those recognized classics taken together?

It was a great time, gentlemen, when I was attending the University and New College. The works of Dickens and Thackeray were then appearing in monthly parts. The Brontë family were at their best. George Eliot was writing in Blackwood. Carlyle was at the height of his influence and renown. Ruskin, Macaulay, Tennyson, and Browning were in everybody's hands. And I read them all as I had time and opportunity. But I read none of them as I read Goodwin. He is not to be named beside them as literature. No! But then they are not to be named beside him as religion. Masters in their own departments, as they all are, yet none of them laid out their genius upon Paul, nor upon Paul's supreme subject —Jesus Christ and his salvation! And therefore though I read them all and enjoyed them all in their measure, yet, as Augustine says about the best classics of Greece and Rome, since the Name of Jesus Christ was not to be found in them, none of them took such complete possession of me as did Thomas Goodwin the great Pauline exegete.

I frankly confess to you that I sometimes say to myself that I must surely be all wrong in my estimate of Goodwin's worth, else someone besides myself would sometimes be found to mention his name with some honour. But when I am led to open Goodwin again all my old love for him returns to me, and all my old indebtedness and devotion to him, till I give myself up again to all his incomparable power and incomparable sweetness as an expounder of Paul and as a preacher of Jesus Christ.


Thomas Goodwin was born October 5, 1600 at Rollesby, a little village in Norfolk. He was brought up with great care by his Puritan parents, who had from his birth devoted him to the Christian ministry. He was educated at Cambridge where he attained a great proficiency in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He kept up his reading in those three languages to the end of his life, and to the lasting enriching and adorning of his pulpit work. 'By an unwearied industry in his studies', says one of his biographers, 'Goodwin so much improved those natural abilities that God had given him, that, though so very young, he gained for himself a great esteem at the University. But all the time', adds the biographer, 'he walked in the vanity of his mind, and ambitious hopes and selfish designs entirely possessing him, all his aim was to get applause and raise his reputation, and in any manner to advance himself by preferments. But', adds his biographer, 'God, who had designed Goodwin to higher ends than those he projected in his own thoughts, was graciously pleased to change his heart and to turn the course of his life to the divine service and to the divine glory'. After his conversion, Goodwin attached himself openly and boldly to the Puritan party in the University, and he remained one of the great pillars of that party as long as he lived. He was wont to say that it was his deep reading of his own heart, taken along with his deep reading of his New Testament, that made him and kept him an evangelical Puritan through all the intellectual and ecclesiastical vicissitudes of his after life.

Owing to Archbishop Laud's persecution of the Evangelical party in the English Church, Goodwin was compelled to resign all his ecclesiastical appointments and to take refuge in Holland. By this time his scriptural and historical studies had made him a convinced Independent, both in politics and in church government. He was looked on and spoken of as the 'Atlas of Independency' all through the coming years of much debate and controversy in connection with church constitution and church government.

After Laud fell Goodwin was able to return to England. He settled in London where his unparalleled power in the pulpit soon gathered a large and influential congregation around him. In the porch of the City Temple there is a monumental tablet to the memory of the first minister of that famous congregation, which runs thus: 'The church assembling here was founded by the Reverend Thomas Goodwin, D.D.: Preacher of the Council of State; President of Magdalene College, Oxford; Member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines; and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell . . . This tablet is erected by this church to perpetuate the Hallowed Memory of her venerable and illustrious founder'. And his Latin epitaph, in Bunhill Fields Cemetery has been translated thus: 'Here lies the body of Thomas Goodwin, D.D. He had a large acquaintance with ancient, and above all, with Ecclesiastical History. He was exceeded by no one in the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. He was at once blessed with a rich invention and a solid and exact judgment. He carefully compared together the different parts of Holy Writ, and with a marvellous felicity discovered the latent sense of the divine Spirit who indited them. None ever entered deeper into the mysteries of the Gospel, or more clearly unfolded them for the benefit of others ... In knowledge, wisdom and eloquence he was a truly Christian pastor ... Till having finished his appointed course, both of services and of sufferings ' in the cause of his Divine Master, he gently fell asleep in Jesus. His writings that he has left behind him will diffuse his name in a more fragrant odour than that of the richest perfume. His name will flourish in far distant ages, when this marble inscribed with his just honour, shall have dropt into dust. He died February 23rd, 1679 in the eightieth year of his age'.

Goodwin's works, in their original editions, occupied five massive folio volumes. 'And', says Andrew Bonar, in one of his learned notes to Rutherford's Letters, 'they are five invaluable volumes'. In the Edinburgh edition the whole works fill twelve closely-printed octavo volumes.

The first volume of the Edinburgh reprint is wholly occupied with thirty-six sermons on the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. The Ephesians was the Apostle's favourite Epistle and it was also Goodwin's favourite Epistle. I know nothing anywhere at all to compare with this splendid exposition, unless it is Bishop Davenant on the Epistle to the Colossians, or Archbishop Leighton on First Peter. Goodwin cannot be said to have the classical compression, nor has he the classical finish that so delight us in all Leighton's literature. But there is a grappling power; there is 'a studying down' of the passage in hand; and withal, there is a height and a depth, and a fertilizing suggestiveness in Goodwin that neither Davenant nor Leighton possess.

For a specimen of this golden volume take the expository sermon on the words: 'Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ'; or the sermon on the words: 'Holy and without blame before him in love'; or the sermon on the words: 'Sealed with the Holy Spirit'; and in those great sermons you have noble examples of the height to which the Puritan pulpit could rise. Then there is Thomas Goodwin's twenty-six pages on 'The sealing of believers'. I know nothing deeper, nothing sweeter, nothing more captivating and enthralling in the whole range of exegetical and homiletical literature. I would almost venture to set those divine passages as the test of a divinity student's spiritual experience, spiritual insight and spiritual capacity for opening up to a congregation the deep things of God. To the wonderful sermon on 'Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith' you must bring your most disciplined theological mind, and your most deeply exercised Christian heart. For myself, when I am again reading that superb sermon, I always set it down in my mind beside Hooker's immortal sermon, 'Of Justification', as two of the greatest, if not the two very greatest sermons in the English language. But how Hooker's people or how Goodwin's people could have followed such powerful and such soaring sermons, I cannot imagine. It is hard enough work to follow them and to master them even when they are read or re-read in the leisure of the study.

1 will leave what I have said about the specimen sermons I have selected out of Goodwin's Ephesians with this fine saying of Hazlitt about Burke: 'The only adequate specimen of Burke', said Hazlitt, 'is all that the greatest of English statesmen has ever written'. And with this out of Coleridge: 'How Luther loved Paul! And how Paul would haveloved Luther!' So will I say: How he would have loved Goodwin! And that not without good reason. For not even Luther on the Galatians is such an exposition of Paul's mind and heart as is Goodwin on the Ephesians. I never open this great volume that I do not recall the words of my dear old friend, John More of Woolwich, who said on one public occasion that he owed all his divinity to Goodwin on the Ephesians.

Now, if only somewhat to justify Mr More's high appreciation of this volume and my own, I will give you what some of Goodwin's most learned contemporaries said about it. 'That person' they said, 'is the best interpreter, who (besides other helps) hath a comment in his own heart. And he best interprets Paul's Epistles who has Paul's spiritual sensibility, Paul's temptations, Paul's whole experience. Goodwin has a genius to dive into the bottom of the scriptures which he intended to treat of; he studied them down, as he was wont to express it; he always waded out into the depths of things.' Also he had intelligent congregations to minister to, a matter that draws out the best gifts of a preacher.

'After his return to London', his editors continue, 'he was made choice of to preach on this Epistle, to which great work he was eminently suited, upon all accounts, having seen into the deep mysteries of this Epistle even beyond the insight of these times. He makes use of a great variety of learning, though in a concealed way. Studying to bring his learning to Scripture — not Scripture to his learning. He breaketh open the mines of the glorious grace of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ, and the further he searches into those riches, the greater treasure he always finds: plenius responsura fodienti, as one saith in a like case. No man's heart was more taken with the eternal designs of God's grace than his; none more clearly resolves the plot of man's salvation into pure grace than Goodwin. That these discourses are all his own we need say no more than that they bear his own signature, he having in them drawn to the life the picture of his own heart by his own hand'. So speak two of the most eminent men of that day.

Goodwin's second volume contains his famous sermon on what he calls 'the strangest paradox ever uttered'. That strangest of paradoxes is the passage in which the Apostle James tells the twelve tribes to count it all joy when they fall into divers trials or temptations. Goodwin's loss of his valuable library in the great fire of London was the occasion of his remarkable discourse entitled 'Patience and her Perfect Work'. In that great calamity our author lost £500 worth of selected and cherished books; a greater loss to such a student than any number of pounds could calculate. 'I have heard my father say that God had struck him in a very sensible place. But that since he lost his books much too well, so God had sharply chastised him by this sore affliction'. This recalls to my mind what Dr Duncan of this college was wont to say: 'My Semitic books', he said, 'are my besetting sin'... (The remainder of the manuscript is missing).



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See also articles written by Whyte on the subject of Samuel Rutherford and His Correspondents


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