Understanding Puritan Meditation

Practical results of Puritan meditation

General Introduction

The Puritans believed that as a Christian meditates on truth long enough for it to lastingly affect the intellect and the affections, this will necessarily impact that individual's actions. As in all of life, what someone thinks and feels impacts his or her daily activities. Because of this, these Puritan authors encouraged individuals from all walks of life of strive to improve their meditations, and also to intentionally search for ways to apply the fruits of meditation to specific, everyday situations.

Further Explanation

General application of meditations to the mind and heart are only part of this discipline's importance. It also applies directly and specifically to each area of a believer's life, and may have different applications for different believers. There are generally two ways in which writers on meditation focused on application to individuals.

First, they often would enumerate different groups who have need of meditation, particularly if they felt, as Puritan author Nathanael Ranew did, that as one grows in spiritual maturity one should also grow in the discipline of meditation. Second, they would remind their readers to apply the fruits of their meditations to everyday life by a continuing sanctification of their actions and desires.

Ranew spends much of Part III of his book addressing certain specific groups of individuals which he divides into groups based upon conversion/lack of conversion, previous participation in divine meditation/lack of participation, and level of spiritual maturity based upon whether one is a younger or a more mature Christian. Similarly, Puritan Calamy takes time to address the need for meditation in the lives of young gentlemen, kings, nobles, great persons, soldiers, generals, captains, learned men, scholars, and women. Other Puritans have stressed meditation's particular usefulness to ministers; this was a typical thought due to its usefulness to many specific functions within this vocation. As scholar Tom Webster notes,

John Rogers stressed: 'to Preach painfully, what preparation is required hereto? What Reading, Meditation, Prayer, Labour of the minde &c?' Thomas Taylor took the same position. To preach effectively, the minister 'must by Study, Prayer and Meditation store himself with things new and old, for a vessel must receive in before powreth out'."

The manner of application to the self in Protestant meditation also distinguishes it from Ignatian or Salesian meditation. In these continental kinds, the meditator typically seeks to apply himself to the subject, so that he participates in it; he imagines a scene vivdly, as if it were taking place in his presence, analyzes the subject, and stirs up emotions appropriate to the scene or event or personal spiritual condition. The typical Protestant procedure is very nearly the reverse: instead of the application of the self to the subject, it calls for the application of the subject to the self...

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