Good Thoughts in Bad Times

Thomas Fuller was a seventeenth-century pastor and, in the judgment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the “most sensible … great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men.” Fuller took the royalist side in England’s civil war and yet maintained wide popularity. His witty preaching in London on the Strand at the Chapel of Saint Mary drew overflow audiences. A selection of Fuller’s writings are included in Sherwood Wirt’s Spiritual Disciplines (Crossway, 1983). Most of the following are taken from Fuller’s Good Thoughts in Bad Times, published during England’s “bloodiest era.” (Archaisms have been altered or deleted.)

A Harsh Voice

Lord, my voice by nature is harsh and out of tune, and it is hopeless to lavish any art on it to make it better. Can my singing of psalms be pleasing to your ears when it is so unpleasant to my own? Yet though I cannot sing with the nightingale, or chirp with the blackbird, I would rather chatter with the swallow—even croak with the raven—than be altogether silent. Had you given me a better voice, I would have praised you with a better voice. Now what my music lacks in sweetness, let it have in sense, singing praises with understanding. Create in me a new heart in which to make melody, and I will be contented with my old voice, until in due time, being admitted into the choir of heaven, I have another more harmonious voice given to me.

Good Divinity

Lord, I confess that when in my writing I have occasion to insert the phrase “God willing,” I can barely prevent myself from putting it in a parenthesis, as if it may as well be left out as put in. But indeed, without these words all the rest is nothing. From now on, then, I will write those words fully and fairly, without any parenthesis. Let critics censure it for bad grammar: I am sure it is good divinity.

Fathers And Sons

Lord, I find the genealogy of my Savior strangely checkered with four remarkable changes in four immediate generations.

1. Rehoboam begat Abia; that is, a bad father begat a bad son.

2. Abia begat Asa; that is, a bad father a good son.

3. Asa begat Jehosophat; that is, a good father a good son.

4. Jehosophat begat Joram; that is, a good father a bad son.

I see, Lord, from this, that my father’s piety cannot be handed on; that is bad news for me. But I also see that actual impiety is not always hereditary; that is good news for my son.

The Best Chapter In The Bible

Lord, I discover a laziness in my soul. When I am to read a chapter in the Bible, before I begin, I look where it ends. And if it does not end on the same side, I cannot keep my hands from turning over the page, to measure the length of the text on the other side. If it swells to many verses, I begin to grudge. Surely my heart is not right. Were I truly hungry for heavenly food, I would not complain of more meat. Scourge, Lord, this laziness from my soul, make the reading of your Word not a penance, but a pleasure to me. Teach me that as among many heaps of gold, all being equally pure, that one that is biggest is the best, and so I may esteem as the best chapter in the Bible the one that is longest.

A False Witch

King James desired to discover those who falsely pretended to be possessed with a devil. A maid pretended such a possession, and for more color, when the first verses of the Gospel of Saint John were read in her hearing, she would fall into strange fits of fuming and foaming, to the amazement of the beholders. But the king ordered one of his chaplains to read the same in the original, and the same maid (apparently possessed with an English devil who understood not a word of Greek) was tame and quiet. I know a quarrelsome parish in which, if the minister in his pulpit had but spoken the word “kingdom,” the people would have been ready to throw him out. But as for “realm,” the same word in French, he might safely use it in his sermons as often as he pleased. Ignorance generally inflames, but sometimes by happenstance it abates men’s malice.

Pronouncing The Prayer

I saw a mother threatening to punish her little child for not pronouncing correctly the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.” The child tried as much as it could to utter it, trying to change its “tepasses” to “trespasses.” Alas! The confluence of the hard consonants were a block to the child’s tongue. Therefore if the mother had punished defect in the child for default, she deserved to have been punished herself; and deserved it even more than the child, because what the child could not pronounce the parents do not practice. Oh, how lispingly and imperfectly we perform the close of this petition: “As we forgive them that trespass against us.” It is well if, like the child, we try our hardest, though falling short in the exact observance.

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