fore the House of Commons will not find much to reward his search, though he must admire the ingenuity with which the duty of reforming the Church on Presbyterian lines is extracted from the most unlikely texts. A man of very real literary power, however, and a good representative of the strength of Puritanism when directed to moral and not purely ecclesiastical questions, was Thomas Adams[1] (1612-1653) Puritans—Adams., a member of the Calvinist and Puritan wing of the Anglican Church. On matters of Church order his tone is quite moderate. He speaks of "the comely ceremonies" of the Church, and defends public prayer against the over-exaltation of preaching. Indeed he would seem to have been dispossessed by the Commonwealth. To attribute the poverty of his later days to Laud, as the Dictionary of National Biography does, hardly fits the dates. We know, indeed, comparatively little of his life. His sphere as a preacher included Bedfordshire, Bucks, and London.
Adams' strength lies in his vigorous and colloquial yet by no means unlearned denunciation of sin. He comes to much closer quarters with wrong-doing in its concrete manifestations, especially of injustice and oppression, than the refined and ideal Taylor. His style is the best example, till we come to Bunyan, of what could be done in handling effectively and artistically the colloquialism of the pamphlet writers. It is direct, pithy, racy, and full of felicitous, homely metaphors, but without any of the refined beauty of
- ↑ Works, Lond., 1629.
