The Reasons and Use of This Book
People are born without knowledge, but with the capacity and ability to know. This is their excellence and an essential part of their nature. Nature, experience, and God’s Word tell us how necessary knowledge is. The soul’s essential nature consists in the united powers of living activity, understanding, and will. Likewise, holiness consists in holy life, light, and love united. The wisest people are the best, and the best are the wisest. But counterfeit knowledge is the world’s great deceiver.
Millions mistake knowledge of mere words, together with their grammatical and logical meaning, for knowledge of the things those words signify. It is as if a glass could nourish us without the wine, or a dish without the food, or clothing or skin were the whole person. Many earnest Christians without formal learning, who cannot debate these matters precisely, know God, holiness, and heaven better than many learned people. Those learned people can speak excellently about things with which their souls are unacquainted. The hypocrite’s religion is only a skill; the true Christian’s is a settled disposition, a divine nature.
Yet words are signs that help us know things, and we must diligently learn them for that purpose. Although people cannot reach the heart, God has appointed parents, household heads, and teachers to instruct those under their care through words. He has also written Scripture for this purpose, so that through these words his Spirit may teach or enlighten the mind and renew the heart. God works upon human beings according to their human nature. We must know through signs until we know by direct perception.
Everyone knows that the church has abundant catechisms and systems of theology. Does it still need more? Their purpose and substance are the same. They differ chiefly in these respects:
1. Their selection of material: nothing necessary should be left out, and unnecessary uncertainties and disputes should not be put in.
2. Their method or order: it should suit the subject and agree with sacred Scripture.
3. Their freedom from error: they should not be stained by any trace of disgraceful error.
These are the requirements for desirable catechisms.
Certainly, catechisms should be arranged in three levels suited to Christians in childhood, youth, and maturity.
1. The essentials of Christianity are all contained in general form in baptism. Its meaning must be understood and therefore explained. From the beginning, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments were considered a good explanation for those preparing for baptism. They summarize what we must believe, desire in hope, and practice. These three, as explanations of baptism, are themselves a good catechism, with an explanation of the Lord’s Supper added for those who receive it.
2. Yet here too children will act like children, learning the words without attending to their meaning. Explaining these things in other words has therefore always been considered a major part of a minister’s teaching work. This is why the ancient Christians left us their explanations of the Creed and other such writings.
But the learner’s lack of readiness makes the difficulty insurmountable. If such a catechism is short, expressing much in few words, ordinary people cannot understand it. If it is long, using many words, they cannot learn and remember it.
3. To remedy this, a still larger catechism is needed. It is not intended to be memorized, but to explain fully the shorter one that learners memorize. They can then consult it for a fuller and more detailed understanding of the shorter catechism, whose general statements they can remember.
Accordingly, having written two catechisms of the earlier levels in my Poor Man’s Family Book, I now add the third for those who have learned the first two. I am far from thinking that I have perfected any of them. I have never yet seen a catechism without some notable imperfection, and undoubtedly mine have their own. But as I avoid what I see wrong in others, I hope God will enlighten some people to do still better and avoid what is wrong in mine. I have provided a further level, which claims greater precision of method, in a Latin work, Methodus Theologiæ.
I have written this book for the following uses.
1. For household heads, who should seek to bring their children and servants to a good level of knowledge. I have divided it into short chapters so that on the Lord’s Days, or in the evenings when they have time, the household head can read them one chapter at a time. That is, they can read the explanation of one article of the Creed, one petition of the Lord’s Prayer, or one commandment.
2. For schoolmasters to have their more mature students learn. I have no doubt that the schoolmasters of England commit a grievous sin when they devote only an hour or two each week to learning the catechism. They devote all the rest of the week to learning Lily, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Livy, Terence, and others like them. Besides the loss and sinful neglect, this misleads young people into thinking that general learning, which has only a supporting and ornamental role, is more excellent or necessary than knowing God, Christ, the gospel, duty, and salvation.
Beyond the extent to which it helps or serves this knowledge, all learning is mere folly and foolish infatuation. It distracts and corrupts the mind as dangerously as the coarser pleasures of the senses. A man does not deserve the name of a Christian schoolmaster unless he makes it his chief work to teach his students the knowledge of Christ and everlasting life.
3. But suppose students leave local schools before they can understand the larger catechisms, as most do in their excessive haste, to their great loss. Why should their next tutors not make it their chief work to train their pupils as disciples of Jesus, while also attending to Aristotle and all the light of natural reason?
I am not so vain as to offer such instructions to our present universities, although I addressed my Methodus Theologiæ to a small part of them. I did not learn from them, and I do not presume to make myself their teacher. Their recent leaders, their worldly interests, and their prevailing spirit have made my writings hateful to many. They will not read even what they would like.
But I have often wondered with grief why godly ministers do not do more for their own sons of the work now reserved for universities. There are men whose zeal for the church would ruin nonconformists if they taught many students, whether boys or grown men. Yet those men have no law against parents teaching their own children.
(1) Are you yourselves fit for the ministry? If so, can you not teach others what you know? If you lack some useful knowledge, let your sons learn it elsewhere afterward.
(2) Is anyone under so great an obligation as you are to care for them? Will you be like parents who appoint godfathers at the baptismal font to vow and promise to do the parents’ part? And how do those who undertake this usually fulfill it? Or will you be like the women of this unnatural age who have children but disdain to nurse them? They do this because of wealth, pride, and fastidiousness, rather than inability. They hand the task to hired women, as though money placed those women under a greater obligation to provide all that care than nature places upon the mothers themselves.
(3) Can you not at least do more to give your sons a firm grounding in religion before sending them away for other learning? Or do you think that mechanically reciting the catechism is enough theology before they have read Aristotle or studied the sciences? Must they become proficient in logic and philosophy before making sure of their salvation? Must they read Smiglecius, Ariago, Zabarel, and Suarez, or be deceived by Descartes, Gassendi, or Hobbes, before studying the gospel and the cross of Jesus Christ?
I do not undervalue any academic advantages. When the stream flowing from institutions of learning is pure and holy, they are blessed aids to people’s salvation. When that stream is sensual, worldly, corrupt, and hostile to godliness, they are training grounds for hell and the devil’s schools. They train his most powerful soldiers to fight against earnest godliness while wearing Christ’s own uniform and using his name. Sending young people there is worse than sending them to a brothel or a house infected with plague.
(4) Are there not fewer temptations in your own homes than your sons are likely to find out in the world? You can keep them from the company of sensual, pleasure-loving young men and of learned, respected enemies of earnest Christianity. You can also keep them from worldly men who treat godliness as a means of gain. Such men would stir their ambition to pursue advancement and marry them to the world they renounced in baptism. If you cannot keep them from such snares, how will they be protected where those snares abound?
(5) One of the greatest reasons for keeping them at home long enough is that you will have time to judge whether they are likely to become fit for the ministry. Oh, how many good men send plagues into the church by dedicating untested boys to the ministry! They hope that God will later give them grace and make them fit, although he has never promised to do so.
When you send them to the university at fifteen or sixteen, beyond your own observation, you are unlikely to know what they will become. The exceptions are a few who are sanctified by grace very early. After a few years at the university, however unfit they may be, they will push their way into the ministry. Miserable men, they will take responsibility for souls to obtain a paid church position. But if you keep them with you until they are twenty, you can see what they are likely to become and direct them accordingly.
If you say that they will lose the advantage of their degrees, that objection is unworthy of a Christian’s mouth. Will you prefer names and empty titles to wisdom, piety, people’s salvation, and the church’s good? Must they leave their course to pursue a peacock’s feather when they are running a race with life or death at stake?
If you say that they will waste their time at home, then the shame is yours, or they are likely to waste even more time away. Teach them to read the Scriptures, at least the gospel, in the original languages. Teach them to understand and practice what is necessary to salvation, which all arts and sciences must serve. Then they will not be wasting their time. At a mature age, they will gain more other learning in a year than they would previously have gained in many. What they learn will truly be their own, whereas boys learn words without understanding their meaning.
If you say that they will lack the benefit of academic debates, I answer that if reading fills them with material, nature and ordinary practice will teach them how to express it. The world has too many debaters. Books can soon teach them the proper order of debate, and a few days’ experience can show them the rest.
If you say that you have no time to teach them, I answer that you have no greater work to do. A little time will suffice with willing, teachable young people, and no others should be intended for the ministry. Boys often put little effort into absorbing what they hear from their tutors. They settle for mere words and abstract concepts. But when they are required to learn from books for themselves, harder study helps them absorb it better. They must spend much time; the teacher need not spend very much.
Local schools can teach them Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Let them remain there until they have learned those languages. You can then teach them the basic principles of logic and see that they are firmly grounded in theology and earnest religion. Then, if institutions of learning prove safe and necessary, they will go out better fortified against all the temptations they must expect.
It is certain that inconveniences are less harmful than destructive evils. It is also certain that our corrupt natures are dark, ruled by the flesh, and hostile to good, and that they need Christ’s sanctifying grace. Just as grace uses everything to grow stronger, this serpent-like nature will turn study, learning, and everything of that kind to its own service.
Too often, this fleshly, sensual, malicious nature, cultivated by human learning, matures and is refined into devilishness, producing the devil’s most powerful servants against Christ. If this corrupt nature is merely gilded with sacred ornaments and titles, and with claims to serve the church’s peace and order, it is entrenched and fortified. It becomes a stronger fortress for sin and Satan than open vice.
It is also certain that drunkards’ rage increases in their riotous gatherings. In the same way, unity, example, and noise give armies more courage than their members have separately. So organized bodies of learned and respected people hostile to good strengthen their individual members and raise them to the height of wickedness. Thus universities, if holy, are an image of paradise. If hostile to good, they are the chief fighting force of humanity’s malicious enemy, except for a malicious church hierarchy or clergy. Such a hierarchy or clergy is itself a malicious academy grown to maturity.
If anyone says that no great and solid learning can be gained elsewhere, let them consider where the great Augustine and most of the church’s great lights during its first four hundred years gained their knowledge. Let them consider whether the Scaligers, Salmasius, Grotius, Selden, and others like them gained more through laborious private reading than through academic tutors and debates. And did not such famous men as John Rainolds, Blondel, and others, even while at universities, gain their great learning by searching the same books that can be read elsewhere?
If anyone says that I speak against something I myself lack, I ask only that this accusation not come from those who reject my Catholic Theology, Methodus Theologiæ, and other writings. Their only accusation against those works is that they are too scholastic, precise, and difficult for them.
I lament here, as my great sin against God, that in the early years of my ministry pride often made me blush with shame because I lacked academic degrees. But ordinarily God will not have us bring our own human honor into his service. Instead, we must receive honor from him through faithfully serving him. Fringes and lace must be added last, after the garment is made. They must not be its foundation or its warp threads.
Some men have wanted their sons to learn all the Eastern languages, unusual antiquities, and the kind of scholarly learning that wins applause. They wanted this for the advantage of preaching the gospel with a greater reputation and honor, rather than for the learning’s own worth. But this course has so occupied those students and shaped them in the character of their studies, at a time when their souls should have been occupied with faith, love, and heavenly desires and hopes, that it has defeated its intended purpose. It has made such students unfit for the sacred ministry and caused them to turn to other things.
Others, such as Ussher, Bochart, and Blondel, first absorbed a well-understood body of saving truth. They afterward added these scholarly studies at full maturity and became exceptional blessings to the church.
Let those who think all this a digression, or unsuitable for the preface to a catechism, pardon what the world’s failures and needs call for.
If household heads, at least, will diligently use helps like these to maintain knowledge and religion in their homes, neither the public failures of ministers nor the lack of what is desirable in church gatherings will uproot religion from the land. But if the faithful turn out to be few, they must be content with their own comforts and rewards. Nothing is wrong in the heavenly community and the world we are entering. Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.
London, October 3, 1682.
