Early in 1646, an intriguing little book came forth from Giles Calvert's press. Free-Grace, or, The Flowings of Christ's Blood Freely to Sinners by John Saltmarsh—at that time rector of Brasted in Kent and shortly to assume a chaplaincy at headquarters of the New Model Army—evoked caustic rebuttals from divines of high caliber and prominent profile, each sporting a nose for troublemakers and a willingness to controvert and condemn. This, prima facie, is mildly perplexing. For the demeanor of Saltmarsh's book is not obviously contentious. Rather, Free-Grace is studied in its disinclination to engage argumentatively with specific protagonists; it is neither thunderous nor acidulous, and makes scant effort to situate itself in the to-and-fro of the paper wars conducted in the mangled mid-century terrain of English practical divinity.
And yet Saltmarsh, having sent forth his little book, would make his name on a national stage as heretic, blasphemer, impugner of the godly ministry, and paragon of antinomian error. Opponents would treat his name as a byword for theological perversity. The “antinomian,” as wrongful speaker and immoral doer, offered a template for early-modern connoisseurs of the perverse. In mid-century controversies over grace and works, various proponents of antinomian grace—that is to say, of a grace so “free” in its dispensation that it either severely diminishes or altogether cancels the operational competence of divine law—had stated their case with ferocious commitment, displaying in their polemics an ominously combative disposition. One thinks of John Eaton and Tobias Crisp, preachers who linked the moral law with sin, death, and Satan, and who made plain their audacious message that the law's tyranny was being propped up in anti-Christian days by the very agency that purported to dedicate its every resource to the promulgation and ministration of the grace of Christ—namely, the puritan pastorate. Antinomians were spoiling for a fight, and the defenders of orthodoxy were spurred by the vigor of their adversaries' language, and the egregious consequences of their adversaries' doctrines, to resist the contemptible irresponsibility of antinomian aggression. At issue, for the pastorate, was no ephemeral eruption of strained sensibilities, no flash-in-the-pan quarrel over incidentals. Subtle theological differences had too often eluded the brokers of peace and unity and instead escalated into unmanageable divisions within the community of faith. As early as 1615, a preacher had been so alarmed by the circulation of antinomian and Familist doctrine as to identify his own times as “perillous times, that is, such wherein Satan will most busily strive to stirre up Sects and heresies, strange, grosse, blasphemous and devillish doctrines.” The puritan pastorate would be sorely challenged in London in the 1620s and early 1630s, and in New England in the mid-1630s; Eaton and Crisp would become posthumously embodied in heavy tomes in the early 1640s, by which time the antinomian tide appeared to be rising to an uncontainable level.Footnote 1
There was plenty of baggage, then, that Saltmarsh could be made to carry as he let fall his suspicions about the moral law and articulated his understanding of the primacy of grace. Saltmarsh, though, had inched his way toward antinomianism. Truth might be “discovered” in the settlement of controversy, but discourse need not proceed in fire and earthquake. Heat and dust, Saltmarsh averred, were impediments to truth. But diffidence of this stripe could be massaged, by an unsympathetic audience, into a pillar of dissimulation: to his enemies, the theology of Saltmarsh was all the more treacherous for its not being cast in the incendiary idiom of Eaton. Accordingly, Saltmarsh could appear a vector of faction precisely in his retreat from divisive and derisive manners; Free-Grace was too sophisticated a contaminant to bludgeon its targets with the sort of effrontery put forth by the likes of Eaton and Crisp. That, in any case, was one way in which to father antinomian credentials upon John Saltmarsh. The man, indeed, had become a victim of the intemperate clerical speech that had been bothering him for some time prior to the appearance of Free-Grace.
In 1644, Saltmarsh had registered distaste at the “intemperacy, and unnaturall heats” with which disputation was being conducted; the more “dust that we raise in arguing,” he admonished his reader, the “less discernable” truth becomes. But God had made an “engine for discovery” out of the clash of differences, and Saltmarsh proceeded to invoke, by way of illustration, “the case of the Antinomians,” whose “errour about free Grace hath drawn our Divines into more studying and preaching it then before, and stating it clearer.” Saltmarsh limned an agenda for further study. It would be necessary “to seeke out how the riches of free Grace are offered, and how the Law is established by the Gospel.” Christian “duties” and “graces” must not be looked upon as products of the law, but instead as effects of Christ the “fountain” and “cause.” Mysterious matters will dominate future seekings: how “our being” is “in” Christ and he is “in us,” and how this interpenetration enables the circuitry of duties and graces “that flow from Christ into his, and back again from his into Christ.”Footnote 2 By 1646, it was evident that English divines were minded more by matters of law than of gospel, and that Saltmarsh must himself serve as an agent of clarification. He entered the arena, for the subject at hand was controversial, but remained wary about raising dust and radiating heat.
One is struck by the serenity with which Saltmarsh administers his spiritual physic. To be sure, eyes and ears are receptive to the controversies over grace and duty that rang from the pulpits and poured off the presses of the age, but these are artifacts of division, and bring no credit to their sponsors. Discourse has become ugly, and Saltmarsh pleads for judicious restraint. “Uncomely” expressions fill the air, and “all sides” harbor “unwarrantable notions”; vivified by mutual “jealousies,” each “party” consumes itself in “over-suspecting the others doctrine.” Fragmenting suspicions are the sour fruit of party “names”—would that names “be laid down” for the sake of peace. The supplication, as we learn from Saltmarsh's book, does not portend a relaxation of the enterprise of discriminating truth from error or light from darkness, but it is indicative of weariness with disagreement that escalates into purposeful misrepresentation. Arguments among divines, Saltmarsh has determined, are nothing more than the “carnal suspitions” of mutually hostile parties.Footnote 3
Saltmarsh occupies a minor place, or several minor places, in scholarly treatments of the mid-seventeenth century. For William Haller, Saltmarsh was “that strange genius, part poet and part whirling dervish,” though Haller's pages were loaded with too many other presences to allow Saltmarsh an opportunity to put himself in motion. The whirls of Saltmarsh's career as pamphleteer and army chaplain were traced by Leo Salt and A. L. Morton, though neither man attended closely to matters concerning redemption and the care of the soul. In Geoffrey Nuttall's vivid exposition of puritan pneumatology, Saltmarsh jostles for space with a host of Spirit-minded contemporaries; John Coolidge passed interesting reflection on Saltmarsh's ecclesiology and soteriology, though again the scope of concern called for brevity of treatment. Christopher Hill's nation of prophets opened its doors to Saltmarsh—a small voice in a large and raucous crowd. Ernest Kevan assembled a puritan crowd in surveying the theology of the moral law, upon various topics in relation to which Saltmarsh can occasionally be heard, speaking both curiosities and commonplaces, from an antinomian terrace. Others have tended to deploy Saltmarsh for contextual purposes, requiring him to serve the truth-patrolling needs of the hunters of antinomians—in particular, Richard Baxter, Thomas Edwards, Samuel Rutherford, and Thomas Gataker.Footnote 4
The time is ripe, perhaps, to look at John Saltmarsh for his own sake and in his own terms. Accordingly, the present article focuses upon polemical style in the service of practical divinity, offering analysis of an agile mind's championship of “free redemption” as a remedy to the problems and predicaments of the puritan care of the soul.
Law, Grace, and Christian Freedom
One of the many virtues of David Como's important study of the antinomian controversy that raged in London during the 1620s and early 1630s is that it shows us how the ambiguities of puritan theology, and the crisis-harried forms of puritan sociability, could occasion the emergence of particular strands of heresy centered on the relative competencies of law and grace. On this view, a “deep internal fissure” opened up within puritan struggles to work through the tensions that complicated the interface of grace and curse, of faith and doubt; antinomianism, so conceived, takes its rise as a puritan subculture, and Como brings out, in particular, the consanguinity between puritan soteriology and the “imputative” strand of antinomianism whose most garrulous partisan was John Eaton.Footnote 5 John Saltmarsh, in the 1640s, offers further evidence that antinomian-minded theologians during the Caroline period were cut from puritan cloth, that theirs, as Michael McGiffert asserts, was the “characteristic and defining heresy” of puritanism.Footnote 6Free-Grace is the work of a man who esteemed the gracious inclinations of puritan theologians, but who had experienced the painful consequences of rigorous pastoral applications of puritan “legalism.” Saltmarsh's reaction was to put trust in a grace at once free and unconditional, and to hone a sensitivity to the vexatious effects of legalistic piety. He retreated from the “antinomian” label, but found little fault with antinomian theology. Antinomians, according to Saltmarsh, had exaggerated the operation of grace, but they had not erred in retrenching the Mosaic law. Antinomianism, by Saltmarsh's lights, was a theological rather than a behavioral phenomenon; accordingly, Saltmarsh could ignore the commonplace that the abandonment of Moses would precipitate a spoliation of morality. Grace effected freedom from Mosaic bondage, and with grace came an unstoppable outpouring of good works—spontaneous acts inspired by the gift of love, not mechanical requisites of a cudgeling law.
Saltmarsh might well have quoted amenable passages from antinomians; instead, he turned to masters of the mainstream in order to authenticate his law-renouncing message. He turned to Calvin and to puritan worthies—to scholarly pastors such as William Perkins and Samuel Bolton. His concurrence with such authorities was factitious because partial; no less interesting than the words that Saltmarsh quoted from the likes of Perkins and Bolton were the words that he found expedient to overlook and the ellipses that he saw fit to impose upon his texts. Saltmarsh in the 1640s, like Como's antinomians in the 1620s and 1630s, sowed in the fertile soil of puritan soteriology, but, like them, he harvested a product calculated to put puritan pastors on notice.
Saltmarsh's Free-Grace spends its first half in dramatic discussion and tutelary observation. An Answerer responds, sometimes monosyllabically, sometimes with insightful elaboration, to the probes of a knowing Questioner. These exchanges dramatize the afflictions of the soul in its passage through the course of salvation; they set forth the “frame of the spirit” as it experiences conversionary comings and goings in the competitive arena of law and gospel. The Answerer is a veteran of “the work of nature and grace, and spirit and Satan”—presumably a mouthpiece for the author's recollection of personal experiences and professional cares. Law-wrought doubts and temptations set the sin-minded Answerer on edge. Put to rack by fear of damnation, haunted by recidivistic flaws, “enlightned” to discernment of sin yet “dark” in gospel “conceivings,” violently tempted and “full of terrour,” the Answerer is ready-made for the liberating ministry of free grace.Footnote 7 And Saltmarsh, guiding witness to the proceedings, intervenes from time to time to intermit discussion and draw practical conclusions from the interlocutors' discourse. The second half of the book turns from interrogatory drama to doctrinal collection, where a string of numbered topics fall, article-like, into place to “clear the way of Salvation a little further.” Enquiries conducted “in this present” age into free grace are then given hasty treatment in a penultimate section; and the final dozen pages, dedicated to authoritative “sparkling” of free grace, deliver apposite “truths” from Calvin's Institutes and the works of various luminaries of the puritan brotherhood.Footnote 8
As early as the prefatory apparatus the reader is introduced to a “legal” ministry that plagues the ignorant under the gospel no less than under the law itself. Moses threatens to supersede Christ even “in the divinity of these later times,” and the Mosaic inflection of “Preachings for REFORMATION” bears consequences for spiritual health requiring urgent remedial attention. As the law is permitted to discharge its regulatory ways into the precincts of the Reformation, so there arises—to occasion singular problems for soul physicians—the hybrid species of “legal believers.” These, the law-bound faithful, are rabid self-tormentors; attuned more readily, Saltmarsh contends, to “the voice of Moses” than to “the voice of Christ,” they are subject in their apprehensions as much “to death and bondage … under the Gospel, as they were before, under the Law.”Footnote 9 The law worked its misery by trammeling and burning: by rolling stones upon the heart and kindling fires in the wounded soul.Footnote 10
Such misery, Saltmarsh knew, was endemic to the puritan schooling of the penitent wayfarer. It was an experience fostered by a particular strain of Perkinsian ambiguity.Footnote 11 William Perkins had found it necessary to explain that our being “bound” in “service of God” was not a return to Hebraic “bondage”; rather, our obedience is “voluntary,” and in being bound by obligations of godly duty we manifest our “perfect liberty.” This is not to say that we are saved by the rectitude of our service: “Christs merit, and the merit of our workes, agree even as fire and water.”Footnote 12 We bind ourselves to the law without reducing ourselves to bondage, but we must grasp the truth that this voluntary commitment to obedience is not essentially connected with our salvation. Indeed, we jeopardize our blessedness by wrongfully esteeming our obedience, by relying on good works as though they were agents of saving grace. The law's “curse and condemnation” would be defused through spiritual grace, not through legal works.Footnote 13 And so Perkins and his heirs turned to the task of alerting sinners to the perils of the law—to the rigor of its precepts and the ferocity of its penalties, culminating in the eternal disinheritance of such as would invest hopes in its works at the point of justification.Footnote 14 But Perkinsian pastors had also enlisted the law, as “schoolmaster” and “rule of good life,” into the disciplines of conversion and sanctification. Perkins himself had offered plain, stark lessons—though Saltmarsh, eyeing Perkins on the law of the Spirit, declined to quote Perkins on the legal difficulties bedeviling the sinner.Footnote 15 The law was to be dreaded, but on no account could it be avoided. With this truth established, horrors as well as benefits tumbled from Perkins's pen. The Perkinsian law might chaperone the unrepentant to execution; equally, the affectivity that it stimulates might serve a contrary turn—operating as schoolmasterly rod to deflect the sinner from the path of damnation. As “horrible curse,” the law presided over “eternall woe and misery.” To be endured in the present life, at the law's instigation, were “manifold accusations, terrors, and feares, … flashings (as it were) of the fire of hell”; and, rounding out the legal curse, the “second death” looms in the afterlife, this being “separation of body and soule from God, with a full apprehension of the wrath of God.”Footnote 16 Torments, Perkins announced, will then be applied to “all the parts of body and soule.” But the law's “stripes and correction” could be viewed in a more consolatory light than this. Accusing and convincing us of our sins, teaching us that we deserve damnation, arraigning us “at the barre of Gods judgement,” inspiring terror, and threatening perdition—these are the law's works as author of therapeutic “despaire.” The law thus employed is schoolmaster, not executioner; the soul is driven to seek refuge in Christ by the stinging consciousness of its failure to meet the law's remorseless demands. Faith, now, is reposed in Christ: this, for Perkins, was the blessed “end” of the law-wrought humbling that constituted the “preparation to thy salvation.”Footnote 17
Free-Grace is a lament to, and a remedy for, the robustness of the law's pastoral presence. Saltmarsh detected flaming darts of free grace in Perkins's commentary on Galatians, but this appropriation of Perkinsian celebrity obscured the truth that the Galatians commentary had placed the law squarely at the heart of preparation for conversion. It was possible for Saltmarsh to quote Perkins to the effect that the gospel requires “nothing but the receiving of that which is offered”; this, doubtless, was for Perkins a treasured staple in the discourse of grace.Footnote 18 But one would not glean from Saltmarsh's quotations another of Perkins's unequivocal standards—that it was from the experience of legalistic terror that the despairing soul took flight to the gate of mercy.Footnote 19 Perkins would erect his own “inquisition” over “corrupt hearts”; he would “set our hearts upon the racke of Gods Law,” would use the law, as a “sure foundation for the good worke of grace,” to “search and winnow our hearts and lives.”Footnote 20 Perkins, as master of the idiom of unconditional grace, was a hero for Saltmarsh, who recruited him into Free-Grace's gallery of latter-day truth-bearers; but equally, Perkins can be imagined as one of Saltmarsh's unacknowledged villains—a pastor who, for all that he appreciated the fatality of the law, showed himself too inclined to apply preparatory hammer blows to the tremulous soul.
Saltmarsh, wary of the predatory motives driving preparatory devices, set sight not on the law's ancillary blessings, but on the damage caused by the heat of its torch and the “power” of its “burdens.” In order to maintain the soul's servility, the law rules by purposive indirection: its commands enunciate a standard of righteousness, but its jurisprudence is a dark science—essentially, the ministration of a curse.Footnote 21 It evokes duties, yet the dutiful are encumbered by self-deception and hypocrisy—faults compounded by the enervating disciplines of their pastors. Ultimately, the law plays a diabolic game: it presides over the atrophy of its own righteousness by undermining the very obedience that it propounds. It does this by dotting the psychic terrain that it governs with deep pits and concealed traps. A duty, by turns, becomes an ordeal, for the law of Moses is also the law of sin, and a trap opens when one is led to see the sin that answers the legal call to duty.Footnote 22 The law-bound soul will cultivate “seeming-graces” and profess “carnal” religiosity; it will summon “a kinde of sorrow for sin,” “a kinde of joy in the Gospel-Ordinances,” “a kinde of reforming,” “a kinde of faith,” “a kinde of frequenting the Word Preached.”Footnote 23 Votaries of such works are soiled by the formality of the “outward obedience” that consumes their energies, are given to self-condemnation, and are blinded by ignorance.Footnote 24 Ultimately, they drive their piety to the point of redundancy upon realizing that the law-wrought righteousness they desire to sustain is no match for the equally law-wrought sins they wish to vanquish.
The True Bounds of Christian Freedome, by Samuel Bolton, puritan pastor of St. Saviour's, Southwark, appeared shortly before Saltmarsh's Free-Grace. “Freedom,” it is evident from the trajectories of their writings, meant different things for Bolton and Saltmarsh. Where the one, assailed by antinomians, felt the pressure to set fierce Sinaitic “bounds” around Zion's mount, the other, more receptive to expungers of nomistic severity, showed his world what unbounded spirituality might achieve. Thus, whereas Bolton obliged the free to unleash the law upon their lusts and to appreciate that “the mountaine of grace” was to be climbed on the steps of a rigorous holy walk, the law of which “remained still of force to direct us in our lives,”Footnote 25 Saltmarsh had resolved that the law's force was interminably in the nature of a curse and a bondage—troublesome, ponderous, an impediment to spiritual and affective deliverance, an instrument more of coercion than of freedom.
Antinomians, for Bolton, severed the reciprocal cords that ran from the law to the grace of evangelical justification and then from the gospel to the law-directed disciplines of sanctification. This was to calumniate the structure and process of divine governance; antinomians won themselves dubious distinction as casters of “contempt and disgrace” on the moral law. And the upshot was that vulnerable souls were sent hurtling into a state of appalling indirection: “wee say wee are freed from the curses,” Bolton declared, but antinomians embrace freedom as permissible indiscipline—“they would have us freed from the conducts; from the commands of the law: wee say wee are free from the penalties, but they would abolish the Precepts, &c.” Insofar as “the Law was given with Evangelicall purposes,” so then did it oblige believers to keep it “with Evangelicall principles.” Honoring this premise, True Bounds delivers a lengthy set-piece exhortation upon the making of “a right use of Moses.” Bolton attended doggedly to the law's necessary role in ensuring that “the deluge of lust and corruption in men, doth not break forth to the overflowing of all banks.” He turned his pen to the law's purgative and quickening offices as revealer and corrector of sin, and as director of, and spur to, a regime of holy and humbling duties.Footnote 26
Saltmarsh paid Bolton the compliment of reading and quoting True Bounds, but the lesson that Saltmarsh acknowledged diverged from the teaching that Bolton had imparted. Saltmarsh refused to label himself an “antinomian,” but was fully aware that free grace as he appreciated it had decoupled itself from the preceptive and preparatory piety of the clerical hammers of antinomians—from the religion of the Samuel Boltons of the age. Not only this, but he made the decoupling a central message of enticing discourse, and even used Bolton himself to authenticate the message.
Bolton was enlisted, at the end of Free-Grace, to speak Saltmarsh's script. Passages from True Bounds appear in a brief concluding convocation of authoritative quotations: a section of Free-Grace given to the doctrinal “sparkles” of venerable authors. Bolton is not the only author whose testament is qualified by ellipses craftily imposed by Saltmarsh, here polemicizing with a very soft editorial touch; Thomas Gataker, we shall see, would be roused by Saltmarsh's selective quoting from Gods Eye on His Israel. What Saltmarsh omits from one of his True Bounds quotations are several references that Bolton had made to the law's perpetuity as a set of sanctificatory “commands” delivered at Sinai and renewed by Christ. A further ellipsis obscures Bolton's endorsement of Christ's mediation of Mosaic regulation—an endorsement that Bolton rounds off in the completion of a sentence whose near assimilation of Moses and Christ is not recorded in Free-Grace, which reproduces only the first six words of the following passage: “I shall not much dislike this, acknowledge the morall law as a rule of obedience and Christian walking, and there will be no falling out, whether you take it as promulgated by Moses, or as handed to you, and renewed by Christ.”Footnote 27
In accepting Christ, Bolton's holy-walking believer must by necessity accept Moses too; the one was tied to the other by the unbreakable bond of the moral law. But the holy walk pressed upon Saltmarsh's consciousness only as a conveyor of needless harms; Moses, for Saltmarsh, was evocative of curses and troubles. Bolton would minister freedom from the law as “curse,” but unbounded freedom would deprive its partakers of necessary moral bearings. The law would anchor the soul to scriptural directives, thus liberating it from the snare of licentiousness. Hence Bolton's refusal to retrench the law as “command,” but Saltmarsh recruited Bolton's text and performed the necessary retrenchment for him. Eliding the conceptual space between curse and command, Saltmarsh tossed out the one when he tossed out the other. And because, with other swimmers in the rising antinomian tide, he repudiated Moses, he could claim to see more readily than law-dimmed sights how free grace sparkled, even in places, such as Bolton's text, where Moses was diminishing Christian freedom by tightening his grip on Christian expectation.
The soul is weighted like the “strong byas” of a bowling ball; the ball “runs freely, yet all the motion is on that side that the byas lies.” And so it is, Saltmarsh observes, with the unregenerate soul: corruption is the determinant of motion. Irresistible inclination “to lust, or drunkennesse, or covetousness … is the misery of men in their sin, and not set free by the Son Jesus Christ.” Saltmarsh will not, with Samuel Bolton, summon the law to remediate lust, for this was to evoke a flawed technique to supersede a promised freedom. The law is freedom's impediment, and the law-bound soul, held in servitude to sin, is paralyzed by piety: the more it performs its devotions the clearer is its perception that damnation looms as the reward for its sin. Such is the misery of the Belshazzars of the age, “afraid in their time of feasting and most formal profession, because of the handwriting of Ordinances upon the wall, or the law, unto which they are yet in bondage upon every sin, and falling, being ever awakened by the curse and condemnation due to sin.”Footnote 28
A fine piece of creative reportage will enflesh the dry bones of theological conception.Footnote 29 In the dialog staged by Saltmarsh, the Answerer—a soul “puzzled” and “questioning,” beset by “temptation” and anguished by “perplexity,” and desirous of puritan care—bears poignant witness to the disintegration of psychic poise. For the Answerer, a sin—performed inadvertently, and recognized only in retrospection—puts trouble in motion. Large spiritual consequences crowd into a small cleft in the Answerer's moral make-up. The breach of a word given in good faith causes “distraction,” a consciousness of living in sin. There follows a confronting testament to the decay of a being. Rhythms of piety are altered, warped by emergent legality. Sermons are no longer occasions of “delight”; rather, “I was even loth to hear.” As duties are performed in the all-consuming context of sin, so preachers appear to mantle themselves in law: “I thought every Sermon would rise in judgement against me.” The Answerer's “sad condition” defines itself as the malady of a distempered conscience. Upon the matter of whether or not to hear the word of God preached, the Answerer cannot but lodge an appalling damned-if-I-do-and-damned-if-I-don't adjudication: “I was … in a strait betwixt hearing, and not hearing; for if I did not hear, I was afraid that I contemned the Ordinance; and if I did hear, I was afraid of judgement.”
The Questioner proceeds with the discussion, and extracts a narration of the experience of the law's burden. Terror invaded the Answerer's mind “suddenly, and very violently”; seeking “comfort” from God, “I sought much by prayer”; preachers were consulted, but such were the “temptations of fear and shame” that candid conference was stifled; but the desire persisted for “some soul-saving comfort,” and when preachers were once more approached “I would have done any thing, and desired that they would prescribe me any means that I might finde Christ.” So intense is the “desire after salvation,” and so profound the consciousness of sin, that the former could be contemplated only as fortified by a legal backbone that answers—though without ameliorating—the presence of the latter: “I earnestly desired after holinesse of life, and doing the will of God”; but this is frustrated by sin-induced paralysis: “I could neither think, nor speak, nor do, but in fear of sin.” Preachers prescribe duties, but “I could not pray” and “I could not repent.”
The Answerer has absorbed enough of the gospel to know that “fear of hell and damnation” was merely “a legal sorrow, and slavish terrour,” but such was the nature of the Answerer's fear. The law continues to grip the heart and choke the urge to pray and repent. Fear distracts the sinner, contaminating the penitential urge and repelling the comings of Christ, who “did witnesse to my soul, yet but seldom.” Anticipation of judgement recoils upon the vulnerable self, provoking infernal thoughts and stifling Godward devotion. Accordingly, “brokennesse” and “meltingnesse” of heart could not be had, nor could the need for Christ be apprehended other than “for my self-ends”—“love to Christ” was absent.
Finally, the Answerer speaks with retrospective clarity on the difference between unrequited effort and unearned blessing. It was the salutary revelation that “we are pardoned freely” that changed all for the Answerer, but this was a contrapuntal lesson. For in “those dayes” of unregeneracy, “I seldom desired pardon of sin till I were fitted for mercies.” To strive to be “fitted” was to risk exposure to pietistic regimentation, against the harms of which Saltmarsh admonished: “O rest not therefore in your own duties, lest you perish in the sparks you kindled.” Redemption freed the soul from legalistic piety. Because this liberating operation is a blessing of divine grace, it can be shown to bear a strong measure of inscrutability; free grace is a gift of a God whose freedom to act knows no bounds and tolerates no conditions. Redemption, inherently mysterious, cannot be obtained by means of penitential praxis. The mystery of grace was in itself an earnest of God's transcendent generosity; it also presented itself as a circumvention of puritan uses of the law. One need not be “fitted for mercies” in order to be “pardoned freely,” particularly if the latter is taken to be somehow contingent on satisfactory completion of the former.
The Mystery of Redemption
An abiding appreciation of “mystery”—a word that litters the pages of his divinity—attuned Saltmarsh's mind to the wonder of God's ways. The “mystery of redemption” is revealed in a patchwork of scriptures, each constituting its own “part” of the record of the communion of divine persons and the execution of divine purpose. Saltmarsh insisted, felicitously, on referring to God's soteriological purpose as a “mystery.” For the whole is never disclosed to us: “We know but in part.”Footnote 30 Of what we do know, Christ is the beginning and the end.
The “parts and degrees” of the biblical mystery perform the function of turning attentions to Christ. It is Christ, Saltmarsh contends, whom the biblical texts “hold forth” in treating of the mystery of redemption.Footnote 31 Scripture relates that God, by virtue of his sheer mercy, chose the elect in Christ “before all time.”Footnote 32 A plan is hatched in the divine counsels; sin, if not decreed, is foreknown, and it serves, with other “parcels” of the wider mystery, God's purpose of “ordering man to the praise of his free-grace” and of constructing the “Body of Christ the elect.” A work “manifested in many parts to us” holds a single outcome: “our Redemption in Jesus Christ.”Footnote 33 For the sake of which, the changeless God superintends the change of dispensations: the passage from law to gospel or darkness to light, the suffering of bondage and the gift of liberty, the appearance first of sin and death and then of righteousness and life, the propagation of a curse and the retraction of its danger, and the foretelling and incarnation of the Son—the one who, though “given” in time, is “ever with God, being God himself, and everlastingly present, both as God, and as God and man in the election of grace, being the elect in whom we are chosen, and whose body we are.” The incarnate Christ “was love, mercy, and riches of free-grace manifested in the flesh,” and he was sent forth as mediator in order that “they might flow out more abundantly upon our nature, on the vessels of mercy, chosen in this Christ before the foundations of the world.”Footnote 34
It is a signature of Saltmarsh's mind that a section in Free-Grace headed “the mystery of Christ” begins with the observation that the “whole businesse of Christ” was “begun in love.”Footnote 35 Christ reveals “unspeakable love” to the world; bearing “all the sins of believers,” he “perfectly” obeys the “whole Law” and offers satisfaction to divine justice.Footnote 36 To love is to liberate, so that now, under the dispensation of grace, it can be said that “the severity of the Law, the Schoolmaster, hath done whipping us.”Footnote 37 In terms redolent of John Eaton's Honey-Combe, Saltmarsh proclaims the termination of the law's punitive competence and of the subjective pathology coupled with it: “The Spirit of Christ sets a beleever as free from Hell, the Law, and bondage here on Earth, as if he were in Heaven.” Not, it is confessed, that fleshly, infernal, and diabolic threats are anywhere but “neer” and “about,” but the tenor of the discourse is clear: united with Christ, the believer is safe in the here and now, and will be, too, in the hereafter.Footnote 38 Our debts of sin have been “paid and cancelled by the blood of Christ; and by this all bondages, fears and doubtings are removed.”Footnote 39 Christ alone “brings the prisoners out of prison”; his nature, office, and work constitute the “ground” of the believer's “exemption from the Law, sin, and the curse.”Footnote 40
That multiform exemption is the glorious outworking of the mystery of redemption. It is the heart of the gospel. “Where ever there is any appearance of God in mercy, or grace, or love,” Saltmarsh declares, “there is Gospel; and where ever there is any Gospel, there are such expressions and appearances of God.” Saltmarsh chooses a language, and in so doing commits to a theology. “We have onely to do with [God] now in the Gospel-appearances and expressions.”Footnote 41 God, undertaking to effectuate “a Promise,” and to do so “more freely, and more by grace and mercy” under the gospel than had been done under the law, covenants with Christ. Articles are struck by the two parties, and the result is a determination and a proclamation of the responsibilities attaching to Christ's gospel work. By the terms of the covenant of free grace, “all the conditions” of salvation would be on Christ's part. Christ “stood for us, and articled with God for us, and performed the conditions for life and glory.” God, accordingly, is not interested in “any conditional righteousnesse” on our part.Footnote 42
By degrees, as love and grace and mercy are shown in the full extent of their influence, Saltmarsh uncovers a fine launching pad for theological revision. Because we are “ever under grace,” we are “no more under the Law.”Footnote 43 Saltmarsh turned this commonplace into such a rethinking of piety as to inspire his critics to draw the heresy and blasphemy from his script. Few departures from orthodoxy were more nauseating to puritan divines than the doctrine that the gospel differs so utterly from the law as to require of Christ the discharge of all “conditions” of righteousness. But prophets knew better than pastors. Let Jeremiah and Ezekiel disabuse the uncomprehending: “lest we should think some conditions were on our parts, as in the first, it is added, I will write my Law in their hearts, I will put my spirit within them.”Footnote 44 Could there be better warrant for requiring us to turn away from “a questionable assurance” of God's favor to us, from a persuasion fixed “upon marks and signes of our own sanctification”?Footnote 45 Others, notably Tobias Crisp, had felt the urge to forsake the signs and marks and to look, instead, to Christ alone. In this respect, Saltmarsh and Crisp share in the revisionist work of “exalting” Christ. Indeed, Saltmarsh confesses just such an inclination. He acknowledged a “preference” for so-called “Antinomians” over “legal Teachers”—though full endorsement is withheld on grounds that the former have overplayed their doctrine of grace. Antinomians give “lesse then is fit” to faith and works “lest free-grace should lose her due”; and yet the drift of their divinity suggests, to Saltmarsh, a purpose kindred to his own: “I had rather cry down men to exalt Christ, then Christ to exalt men.”Footnote 46
One way of exalting Christ, and of revising divinity, was to signal the obsolescence of Moses and his law. The gospel is its own law, a perfect law of life and grace; and now that Christ has come forth as the risen “Sun of righteousnesse” to cast beams of light upon his own mystery, what point our lighting “a Candle for the children of the day to see by?” With antinomians, Saltmarsh could revise by assimilating the unwanted to an antiquated standard. Does it befit the glory of Christ for us “to be beholding to any of the light upon Moses face”?Footnote 47 To see by Mosaic light was to miss the message that the work of salvation has been concluded, on our behalf and for our benefit, and that no outbreak of sin can effect reversal of such a mercy.Footnote 48 Free grace, at a stroke, disassembles the demands and conditions of an older way, and, if only inadvertently, threatens—by suggesting its ultimate irrelevance—our disposition to keep ourselves pure of sin. Christ has paid the price of sin, and his gift of grace renders us righteous in God's sight. Correlatively, our righteousness does not earn us grace, and it is not for us to be “compounding and bargaining with God” in order to purchase our own redemption.Footnote 49
Such theological positions were heavy with implication for the practice of piety. It could be said of the new covenant that “on mans part” it requires “nothing.” The antinomians Crisp and Eaton had said this, but so too had puritan worthies—men such as Perkins, Sibbes, Preston, Hooker, and Robert and Samuel Bolton—for whom God's requiring of “nothing” could comport with human involvement in fulfillment of the “conditions” that he will continue to solicit through the application of prevenient grace. The Lord, Hooker counseled, “makes” the faith that he requires of the conditioned soul. The condition cannot but be fulfilled by a performance that, though ours, is in the Lord's “making” and “keeping.” Grace, so conceived, answers grace. More might be given to “him that hath, and useth that he hath to the glory of God.” But, as Sibbes put it, “we”—the beneficiaries of the gifts that we use—“give nothing.” God fulfils the conditions that he requires, views as “lovely” the gracious dispositions that he works within regenerate souls, and so gives further blessings, thus crowning “grace with grace.”Footnote 50 Such gracious operations are regulated by righteous standards that they themselves enact, are answerable to the moral purposes by which evangelical holiness acquires its structure; and this, in turn, creates a calling for the law, its sharper edges now blunted by redemptive blood, its judicial hegemony now evangelically mitigated.
Unconvinced, antinomians cut through the idiomatic equipoise too long maintained. A venerable “moment” of English divinity, persisting several decades past its “Perkinsian” formation, begins to suffer eclipse.Footnote 51 Uncompromising proponents of free grace contend that the requirement of “nothing” imports a gracious cancellation of conditional means of entry to salvation, and with this Saltmarsh concurs. A “condition” is a performance in compliance with a standard, and regardless of whether or not it is the product of grace, it entails the operation of human resources disposed, in pursuit of salvation, to obedience. How is this not a work? It is to “sinners as sinners” that Christ's promises are held forth, not to the repentant or the humble, not to those who can point to “any condition in us upon which we should chalenge Christ.”Footnote 52
Reveling in the subtleties of the language, Saltmarsh concedes all initiative to God's “promise and grace, and free-love to a sinner.” He will not permit works to arrogate what rightly belongs to grace, so he resituates the conditions into the covenant of Moses.Footnote 53 But nor will he have “nothing” denote lassitude; only in a technical sense—incomparably important, since it follows on from Christ's love-formed business of redemption—is the believer emptied of responsibility. The believer does nothing because salvation has already been purchased: one brings nothing of one's own to Christ's completed redemptive performance. But in a practical sense, the believer is a powerhouse of activity; the redemption previously applied will turn love into a motor of righteous undertakings. Saltmarsh dwells eloquently upon the commanded soul. In the waves of his prose, in the rushing incantations of his “gospel expressions,” we see a man in love with work. Having set off the gospel's love from the law's bondage, and called us to cleanse ourselves from filthiness, Saltmarsh unleashes his vision of piety. “Christs yoke is easie, and his burden light, and his Commandments are not grievous,” he begins,
for they are Commandments that carry life and power, and quicken to that duty they command, like the Sun who warmeth us in the very shining upon us; and we work, and walk, and live under the Gospel, as being saved already, and redeemed, and bringing forth the power of this redemption and salvation, through the spirit of adoption, freely working to the praise of that free-grace, and freely obeying for such free redemption, and doing every thing in love, because of the love shed abroad in our hearts.Footnote 54
Where gospel law holds sway, Saltmarsh will happily walk, or be carried along in the flow of love. Having taken leave of Moses, he sees himself working from life, not for it.Footnote 55 Duty becomes easy when it is not conceived as a condition of grace. And yet this conception, penned by such a one as Saltmarsh—swept almost off his feet by the gospel's quickening—bears a controversial corollary. The region in which Saltmarsh will not muster for duty is that of preparation for Christ. He will not suffer the incipient stages of the puritan holy walk, which calls for contrition and humiliation, for self-abasing grief and sorrow, and for deeds of righteousness issuing from the repentant heart. And, at a later stage in the journey, he will put little energy into examination of the “marks and signs” that sanctification has inscribed upon his being. We can see why this should be so if we consider how Christ, according to Saltmarsh, alters spiritual lives.
Saltmarsh, again with the antinomians, is a keen proponent of forensic grace, more attentive to the justification won on the cross than to the sanctification rendered visible by infused graces. Blessedness, he notes, resides more in the removal of sin's “curse” than of its “corruption,” and as justification is “more glorious” than sanctification, so is the glory of “our cleansing from sin” exceeded by that of “our forgivenesse from sin.”Footnote 56 Indeed, if we are to consider ourselves “cleansed” from sin, this should not be on account of “any change in the outward man”; rather, it is Christ's blood that cleanses—not the “particular acts” of our own sanctification. Appreciation of this requires understanding that the “transaction” of the atonement is a direct substitution. God lays all of our iniquities upon Christ, who stands in our place in fulfilling the mediatorial office, so much so that it can be said, improperly and yet truly, that we do such deeds as he has done for us. This is the unique virtue of the God-man: the incarnate sufferer enables human nature to be activated for the sake of satisfying divine justice, and the holy act of substitution—which opens out into the community of the mystical body—renders other bearers of human nature able to partake, by virtue of a generous “reckoning,” in the field of redemption. Christ's righteousness purifies the sinner “in the sight of God”; it is only “in Christ” that God sees the sinner. Saltmarsh, in consequence, allows himself to be weak on inherent righteousness; the graces that the puritan might expect to find infused in the heart, and available for interrogation, bear little value for the man who can say that God “accounts, reckons or imputes all that is done in our nature, as done by us, calling things that are not, as if they were; and in his person, as in our person: And thus he is made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousnesse of God in him.”Footnote 57 Mystery gathers, for Saltmarsh's reader, around the notion of being made righteous “in him.”
The gospel delivers “commands for obedience, as well as tydings of forgivenesse.” The Spirit's office is to “form” the commanded holiness, and Saltmarsh will even contend, in reverent puritan idiom, that the gospel “fits man,” who must observe Christ's “spiritual” law.Footnote 58 But the “fitting” that occurs under the auspice of evangelical command occupies a delimited space. Saltmarsh proposes to make “short work” of salvation.Footnote 59 The purpose of such language is to exalt Christ's grace at the expense of preparationist discipline. Saltmarsh and Crisp reflected damagingly upon the “length” of the legalist's performative path to salvation; its interminable and complicated trial of the soul needlessly evoked “troubles” and “puzzles.”Footnote 60 The counterpoint, then, is that “salvation is not the businesse of our working, and doing.”Footnote 61 If, moreover, salvation is the destiny of chosen sinners, as Saltmarsh is certain that it is, then the strains of preparation lose their point. Simply put, an unregenerate sinner is “unprepared and unfit” for Christ, for gifts, and for graces.Footnote 62
To say that Christ brings repentance and faith, rather than that they bring him, or that he is made ours by God's “act” rather than by an act of our own, suggests impatience with the commonplace of salvation by grace through faith. More provocative is the attendant reformulation of the same doctrine: Christ comes to us by virtue of an “infinite” power—by that which transcends faith. He is ours, then, “without faith”—one wonders if the author's heart missed a beat as he penned this. Saltmarsh has found an audacious way of saying that faith is not rightly viewed as a condition of salvation, and that it serves neither to operate instrumentally in order to apply Christ's righteousness nor to qualify us for covenant membership or for consequent blessings; he seems also to be saying that we are not agents in the production of our own faith. The crucial point is that it is only by entering upon belief that we know Christ to be ours.Footnote 63 Faith, so conceived, has become dissevered from spiritual process and human activity; it does not sit at the culmination of a set of techniques designed to ready the soul by fitting it and sweeping it clean. It seems unlikely that human agency has a part to play in the generation of faith, although reference is made at one point to the “degrees” of faith and to the retarding effect that preparation has upon the “act” of believing, suggesting likelihood at least of human bearing upon faith's intensity.Footnote 64 But Saltmarsh is little interested in the anthropology of faith. He beholds faith as something that happens to us: a divine act of revelation whereby Christ, its “author and finisher,”Footnote 65 serves immediate notice that he is ours and we are his.
It is to be expected that toward such matters of repentance and faith the question of assurance of salvation should gravitate. Saltmarsh has done little to clarify the mystery of faith's presence in the soul, nor is he expansive on the manner in which faith is responsible for “persuading” the soul of Christ's love, for manifesting its “interest and right” in Christ's righteousness, or for constituting a “grounds” or a “channel” of assurance.Footnote 66 Through the mystery of faith, Christ dwells in the heart and reveals that his is the righteousness by which believers are blessed—occurrences of a unilateral nature.Footnote 67 But is there anything that the believer may do in order to gain assurance of God's favor?
Here, the relevant field of enquiry is that of sanctification, denoting the entire production of holiness—both visible and invisible, deeds of the sociable body and dispositions of the veiled heart—that can be said to come forth as the good fruits of a living faith. Masters of puritan divinity had taught that sanctification is notionally divisible into two phases, namely, those of “mortification” and “vivification.” In the phase of mortification, the grace-assisted believer pursues purity of life by means of the “abatement” or “death” of sin—a technique of Spirit-enabled self-management enacted in replication of Christ's self-offering on the cross. We “take paines” in performing our “acts of mortification,” John Preston had taught; the “inveterate hatred” with which we mortify our sins must be applicable both to sin as a generality and to particular expressions of defilement—“grosse sinnes.” Affective gain would repay the rigor: “Mortification is painfull and laborious, and yet pleasant withall.”Footnote 68 Christ's resurrection sets the standard for the believer's vivification, wherein a transformative quickening begins and augments the life of “inherent holiness” undertaken in accordance with the divine will, knowledge of which presents itself as one of the blessings of this second phase of sanctification. Both phases are viewed as perceptible effects of estimable causes—Christ as “meritorious” and “exemplary” cause, the Spirit as “cause principally working,” and faith as “administering” cause—and could be called before spiritual sights as the stuff of pious interrogation. “Notes and marks” are inscribed on the wayfarer, whose sanctification proceeds in zeal and watchfulness, in cheerful and sincere dedication to the Lord's works and ways.Footnote 69 One might track one's progress along the route to salvation by drawing up accounts, drafting ledgers of sins and deeds, laying bare the heart in order to discover its animating principles. Works and dispositions thus reveal themselves as signs, so that sanctification, when examined as a harbinger of destiny, becomes a semiology of divine intent. A harvest of good works, gathered in from the inseminating presence of a living faith, might serve to assure the soul of God's favor.
The category of “vivification” is not encountered in Free-Grace, though Saltmarsh's witness to love's catalytic agency perhaps indicates a residual presence of its energy. Of “mortification,” however, Free-Grace has much to say. Saltmarsh's discussion of mortification is governed by two articles of faith that cast the shape of his soteriology, namely: 1) we are righteous on account of the righteousness of Christ, and 2) we are, nevertheless, irreducibly sinful. Together, these two principles cut the cord of value that might be attributed to, or discovered within, human doings. With eyes fixed on the righteousness of Christ that makes us righteous “in him,” Saltmarsh retreats from the discipline of spiritual accounting. Why fill ledgers with sin-ridden deeds of my own doing when Christ, bearing each and every item of my stock of iniquities, has shielded me from wrath, “implanted” me into membership of his body, made his righteousness a substitute for my own? So where does this leave the pursuit of purity?
It might be left in its customary place—that is, mortification “as it is commonly taken for dying to particular acts.” Saltmarsh, more comfortable as mystagogue than as penitent, offers an alternative rendering—mortification, he declares, is the “higher mystery” of the soul's ingraftment into, or fellowship with, Christ in his death. The “ingrafting” is described as a “mystical” occurrence, and so too is the “spiritual” death to sin that is the essence of its blessing. Intelligibility, at this point, is not in the pen's gift, and seemingly must be deferred until the soul enjoys immediate experience of the “power and efficacy, and mighty working in this mystical union and fellowship with Christ.”Footnote 70 The mystical communion with Christ answered an affective need within puritan divinity, though authoritative users of such language were careful to populate its discursive field with designators of “inherent righteousness”: corruption purged, purity restored, repentance enacted, obedience pursued, renovation effected.Footnote 71 Preparation will have played its part: the soul, like a graft, is “cut off” and then “pared”—works, respectively, of contrition and of humiliation. Then, Thomas Hooker explained, comes “the ingrafting into the Lord Jesus,” for only when the heart “is thus prepared” is it “implanted into the true vine, the Lord Christ.”Footnote 72 Suspicious of claims to the cleansing virtues of human agency—the gracious activation of such agency notwithstanding—Saltmarsh rejoiced in the unilateral offerings and enveloping flows of Christ and Spirit. Preparations and conditions were governed by the law, which required the “self” to author its own purity. Common usage, Saltmarsh averred, credits neither the higher mystery of union with Christ nor the irreducibility of human sinfulness. Minds controlled by the law and manipulated by Satan would be cozened into acts of self-mortification.
Christ removed the need for self-applied pains. It was, for Saltmarsh, a practical effect of the mysterious mortification “in Christ” that we ought not be discouraged by sight of our sins, for these are to be considered, courtesy of the redemptive blood, as debts paid and cancelled.Footnote 73 But nor, Saltmarsh is quick to counsel, do we gain from our salvation a “liberty to sin” or a license to “cherish” corruption. Sin, however, cannot be removed from our being, for all that we have no right to connive at its spread; and the commitment that it can be removed—and removed in the conduct of pious endeavor—stands as the “great deceitfulnesse” in mortification “as it is commonly taken.”Footnote 74
The “legally” converted seek to devise sin-eradicating disciplines to “cut out” and “root up” the very nature of sin. This is to underestimate the depth of corruption's rootage in the human heart. Recidivism is understood to be prevented by repentance, a “strange power,” it is said, that restrains the soul. Saltmarsh professes a liking for the “notion,” if only it did not “cast a snare” upon the weak and backsliding. The power of repentance is no match for Satan, who engenders “anguish and terrour” by presiding over the relapses of assurance-seekers. Papists and legal professors commit themselves to punctilious surveillance of particular sins, to the endless application of an “inchoative sanctification”; but theirs is a twofold failure of understanding—of Christ's blessing and of sin's nature. It is mystical union with Christ, not the watchful playing of keeper to chained lion, that sanctifies the soul. And the effect of this sanctification accommodates the reality of ongoing human corruption—properly understood, mortification “is a dying to the dominion of sin, more then to the nature of sin.”Footnote 75
The sacred harnessing of human agency, then, cannot be deemed a “way of putting true beleevers upon a method for assurance.”Footnote 76 Assurance, rather, comes through the Spirit's witness to faith and through the believer's implantation into Christ's body, but these are elements of the mystery of redemption that appear to exult in their own mystification. Saltmarsh makes effective use of his mystagogic role, principally because his speech is constantly in range of the gospel and its gifts of liberty and imputed righteousness; if something numinous like faith or fellowship with Christ can vanquish the claims of the law by vesting the gospel's better claims in robes of “higher mystery,” then so much the grander the shape of the conquering vision. The mystery relays its blessings in contemplation of the soul's “bias”; and as Saltmarsh adverts, once more, to our death with Christ, to the hidden life that we share with Christ, to the victory that Christ wins over sin, “being the life, power, vertue, and energy of the spirit,” so he commends a mystery that “would be well observed by those that are a little legally biassed, or carried to mortifie sin by vows, promises, shunning occasions, removing temptations, strictnesse and severity in duties, fear of hell and judgements.” Fortifying their bias, legalists take the long and low road toward an assurance that is never attained, “scarce rising so high for their mortification as Christ.”Footnote 77
Pilgrims of the low road “look for something in man.” Experiences of sanctification are taken “too low, and carnally” by the analysts of “infallible signes.”Footnote 78 Saltmarsh himself is not above a little expedition into practical semiology, but the performance is perfunctory, and riddled with equivocation. “Glimmerings” of “new obedience, and love, and repentance, and self-denial” may refresh, comfort, and cheer, but “they cannot assure by themselves.” In Free-Grace, sanctificatory signs are passed over a bare moment after they are picked up; and Saltmarsh, attuned to the ambiguities of holy marks, returns his attention to the soteriological centerpiece of his book: Christ's love, light, and grace.Footnote 79
Any turn to the self, or to the self's manifestation of the fruits of the Spirit, is permissible only to the extent that it proceeds in a scriptural way. The evocation of scripture brings with it an invitation to consider Christ as “our sanctification,” and Saltmarsh ascends to the lofty business of Christ's righteousness, giving voice, as he flies, to a profound setting aside of the “filthy rags” of human agency.Footnote 80 Human deeds cannot rightly be said to serve as a “ground” upon which God justifies or forgives, and it is with a view to remedying this misconception that Saltmarsh invokes Christ's perfect faith, repentance, sorrow for sin, obedience, and mortification. In this we encounter the scriptural way of assurance, which requires the believer “to see every thing in himself as nothing, and himself every thing in Christ.” Against legalists, bidding us to set sight of things “in self” rather than “in Christ,” Saltmarsh deploys the perfections of the substitute, intimating that since we are righteous in Christ, our own forms of obedience to God must be superseded by his.Footnote 81 The question is begged; Saltmarsh, as we have seen, lived from the works of love, but to what extent are these works self-performed? Are we so deeply implanted into Christ that one set of agencies is extinguished by the supervention of another? Or is the substitution more forensic than inherent, more a matter of God's “reckoning” Christ's righteousness to be ours than of accepting ours as instantiated by our own works?
Answers are occluded by Saltmarsh's exquisite circle of mystery. It is enough that we know ourselves to be “in Christ”; once we are there, the responsibilities of piety will be enacted—somehow. A believer may “have” the righteous issues of faith—repentance, humiliation, love, godliness, and so on—but the spiritual eye is enjoined not to look within: the believer “will not behold them in himself, but in Christ.”Footnote 82 We may know that Christ's sanctification precedes, both temporally and causally, our own wretched equivalent that, in and of itself, cannot but give rise to “doubts, fears, and distractions.” Such needless perturbations of soul dominate the exchanges between Questioner and Answerer, which showcase the plight of those whose righteousness is not “in Christ.” We cannot escape the “rottennesse” that vitiates our substitutable deeds; in Christ, the doer of perfect deeds, we cannot but be righteous.Footnote 83
Controversy
Saltmarsh depicted puritan “strictness” and “severity” operating disastrously upon fragile souls. The “long” way to salvation, formulated by legalists and exploited by Satan, sidetracked the pious by stalling them in the mire of their own anxiety, encouraging them to gaze, in attentive “watchfulness,” upon the fruits of their sin-suppressing endeavors—these being, so they were told, the means for a method that will win them the assurance they desired. One must assess one's control over sin by calling to mind former ways and times, by comparing the seasons of iniquity, by weighing one's spiritual estate in the scales of mortification as it is “commonly taken.” The prospect was mournful; the more searching the introspection the greater the likelihood of falling victim to the law's punitive conviction. One was likely, “at length,” to be carried away by “very sad temptations.”Footnote 84
In meditating on the mystery of redemption, Saltmarsh offered a radiant, if elusive, alternative. He recognized that “strict” mortifiers underappreciated the virulence of sin, deeming themselves to be in possession of the wherewithal to restrain its effects. Consequently, he called attention to their neglect of the blood of Christ, which, he knew, was truly and uniquely the agent of cleansing. Saltmarsh became a provocation to various contemporaries. At the heart of this was the fashion of his coupling of sin and Christ; as that coupling led him to exalt the efficacy of the latter, so it prompted him to abandon the procedures of piety set in place, by “legal teachers,” for the restraint of the former. Mindful of the “strength” of sin, Saltmarsh resorted to the “free promises” of the gospel.Footnote 85 This was the way in which to acquire assurance. It was also a flint for the sparking of controversy.
In the dialog staged between Questioner and Answerer, and in Saltmarsh's attendant observations, the puritan pastorate is shown up for culpable incompetence. Spiritual authorities are encountered, spinning “fine threds in divinity”; but always they disappoint. Their spirituality is formal and regimented; their horizons are sin-fixed and law-locked, unwetted by the flow of Christ's blood. Pastoral acts of commission and omission condemn the preachers who troop through the drama; at every turn, their faults and failings compound the dangerous complexion of the Answerer's spiritual predicament. As Saltmarsh depicts him in the mirror of his imagined proxies, the puritan preacher of the day is more Mosaic priest than Christian minister, more the “voice of the Law” than the “voice of Grace.”Footnote 86
Throughout his time of trouble, the Answerer is a committed acolyte, content to do—or attempt to do—as instructed, submissive to the obligations of puritan sociability and spirituality. But, as sin firms its hold on the narrative of a life, the Answerer's gadding to preachers betokens desperation rather than zeal; the need to peregrinate lays bare the depth of a dilemma. Keen to seek out professional help, the Answerer must take advice from a crowd of confessors. No single soul physician stands out as one into whose care the Answerer's needs may safely be entrusted. Hopes are invested in conferences with preachers, who credential themselves as masters of the “something in man” that the law demands from each of its penitents. Preparatory maneuvers are prescribed, duties recommended. From the staged techniques of pastoral management, however, Christ is distinguished by his absence—a circumstance that draws, at one point, bewildered notice from the increasingly distracted Answerer.Footnote 87 Invested hopes are dashed, and the Answerer is left to embark, unassisted, upon his journey to Christ.
Gospel light was dawning, but puritan pastors dwelt in legal darkness. Their legality was a bequest; their culpability stretched into the past. “I know the Divinity of some former ages to these present times,” Saltmarsh observes—intimating that faults accumulate across generations and congeal into a heritage. But why kick against the pricks now that light is being shed as never before? Divinity, as handed down from legalist forbears, made “receipts for distempered souls of so much Law, and so much Gospel, and usually but a grane or dram of Gospel to a pound of Law; not being then clear enough in judgement, to unmingle things which Antichrist had confounded and put together, as the two Testaments, and two Covenants.” Nor had “right discerning” extended to Christ's and the apostles' preaching of law and gospel.Footnote 88 Those who make the law into a ministry of life, Saltmarsh contends,
are not of such spiritual discerning as the Lord hath now revealed: and such put a soul upon a legal method of conversion, or coming to Christ. First, they must be kept so long under the Law for humiliation, and contrition, and confession, and then brought to the Gospel … But now we are under a better Law, … now in the Gospel, the righteousnesse of God, is brought forth in more glorious and spiritual Commandments; and for ten, there are scores; and with this righteousnesse of God, the righteousnesse of Christ is brought forth, which makes the condition of Gods people a blessed condition.Footnote 89
The “condition,” considered here as a spiritual estate, is one of liberation from the press of legal “conditions,” considered as devotional prerequisites for a contingent reward. Saltmarsh authenticates his divinity by viewing the condition of “a soul that is not informed by a pure Gospel-light.” As is often his way, he divulges horror by stringing a list: the abandoned soul “is ever unsettled, unstable, full of fears, doubtings, distractions, questionings.” The soul must scrutinize every “spiritual working” by which its “legal condition” is maintained, but the arrangement is unsustainable for want of affective security. The affections, unsupported by grace, are in turmoil: the governing law falls upon the conscience as a judge, flush with more power to “accuse” than to “acquit”; and Satan, stirring up “jealousies” and “doubts,” adds malice to judgement. The soul finds itself obliged to satisfy for the breach of the law, but awareness of its debility leaves it “unquiet like a debtor that hath nothing to pay. … It is no marvel that such souls should be troubled for sin, and unpacified.”Footnote 90
Saltmarsh's rush from law to gospel must be seen both as practical and as polemical divinity. In a sense, the two styles are inseparable: practical divinity reveals how gospel blessings will accrue only to those set free of their legal thralldom, and polemical divinity complements this purpose by measuring the weight of the stones that law-loving brethren have rolled upon vulnerable hearts. At one point, Saltmarsh nicely integrates the two styles, recommending a regimen that is drawn in self-conscious counterpoise to prevailing technique. Asked how he would deal with a puzzled and questioning soul, Saltmarsh declares: “I shall not dare to place them on any bottom of their own righteousnesse, or to satisfie themselves by something onely in themselves; that were to take the disease for the Physitian, and to give them no oyntment but blood of their own wound to heal them.” Nor would he apply Christ in such a way as to hedge the soul about with needless conditions. Having side-swiped the puritan ministry, he sets forth his own “way,” which, of course, begins and ends with Christ “the foundation, and corner-stone, and rock, for sinners.” Christ's righteousness has ensured that no sin need now “be satisfied for,” and that no new righteousness need “be wrought by any for salvation.”Footnote 91
So why is this gospel message ignored by those most responsible for propagating it? Why does the law continue to be preached, and why are deeds of satisfaction still expected of poor souls? One possibility was sheer ignorance—the unknowing of the benighted was an impediment to truth.Footnote 92 If not ignorance, then perhaps parsimoniousness: just as the host, wishing to “seem very free to his Neighbours,” had ordered his servants to burn the wine, “that it should be too hot for any of them to drink,” so some among the ministry, professing free grace, were overheating the wine of the gospel with the “conditions” and “qualifications” of the law, “that poor souls cannot taste of it freely.”Footnote 93 A more disagreeable possibility centered on acquisition of good repute—puritans were self-interested proprietors of the world's “admiration.” Here was an idea chiseled for denunciatory intent. Saltmarsh hit his finest polemical notes in setting forth puritan preachers as self-cultivating celebrities, both making and unmaking the spiritual health of their charges for the sake of drawing attention to the scale of their achievements. In a mischievous reworking of a devotional commonplace, Saltmarsh likened such preachers to surgeons who delay due treatment of their patients' wounds in order to arouse greater adulation once hard-won cures are finally effected. And so the preachers prescribe law rather than gospel, lengthening the healing and pacification of wounded souls, and leaving the latter scarred and “lame in their consciences a long time after, like some poor Patients that have had as much of the sound flesh cut away as the rotten.”Footnote 94
It is not to be expected that Saltmarsh's punchy reflections, however imaginary or hypothetical the form of their devising, would be ignored or taken on the chin. Members of the brotherhood reacted stormily to Free-Grace. Within a few months of the book's appearance, one distinguished scholar had ventured into print to settle a score with Saltmarsh, whom he took to be a “dissembling” member of the “antinomian party,” no less than Eaton redivivus. Thomas Gataker, confined to his chamber by a relapsing sickness, had been notified that he himself had been “produced,” and therein “traduced,” in Saltmarsh's antinomian “treatise.” Free-Grace, Gataker discovered, had “miserably corrupted” the gospel, and so he set about the task of clearing himself and his savior from the doctrinal misconstruction that Saltmarsh had put abroad.Footnote 95
Gataker recognized the appeal of Free-Grace. The title—“specious” in the context of its “dangerous” application—bespoke an estimable doctrine, one which faithful ministers ought preach, defend, and advance.Footnote 96 This was all the more worrying, for the book's content was “rats-bane.”Footnote 97 Alternatively, the book was meteor-like, its “blazing” wordplay able to attract followers who, looking skyward at false lights, “fall upon perilous and pernicious precipes to the ruine of their souls.” Saltmarsh's readers are bewitched by the “dazzling” proposal of a “shorter cut” to salvation, by “an easier and more compendious passage to heaven”; it is their destiny, however, to be deflected from the sure course of grace. They decline “those paths, because to flesh and blood they seem the more harsh and unpleasing, that Gods Ministers out of his word, have formerly chalked out unto them.”Footnote 98
Gataker rose to the challenge, keenly aware that he needed to sell the harder and longer road. He needed to show that Christ and the apostles had not muddied the doctrine of free grace in their preaching of self-denial and sorrow for sin. “Conditions” of salvation, such as faith, repentance, and obedience, were gospel requirements, ample authorization for which appeared in Gataker's crowded margins and effusive italics. What is more, conditions of this kind were “on mans part required”—there would be no weaseling out of duty by loading the conditions onto Christ, nor would Gataker stand for Saltmarsh's sly refashioning of the doctrine of evangelical conditions into “the odious and opprobrious brand of a deep and down-right Legalist.” Gataker abhorred Saltmarsh's abdication of responsibility: to Saltmarsh's contention that the gospel promises belong to “sinners as sinners,” Gataker replied that Christ was a savior of “penitent sinners”; and to Saltmarsh's refinement of his doctrine, namely, that whoever receives Christ must receive him in a “sinful condition,” and therefore without faith, Gataker resorted to the time-tested rendering of faith as a “habit or disposition,” upon the possession of which the “act” of receiving Christ is dependent. Clearly, Saltmarsh was contradicting the Apostle and hoodwinking the credulous in putting it about that Christ may be ours “without faith.”Footnote 99
The legerdemain of Free-Grace could not be left, without rebuttal, to run its course, for its deceptions would have the effect of sending “misled” readers “hedlong on toward hell.”Footnote 100 Nor could ministerial reputations afford to be sullied. Gataker spoke in the name of preacherly solidarity against one who makes the prophets of God and the ministers of the gospel “no better then meer mountebanks and deluders of Gods people.”Footnote 101 Gataker had been stung by Saltmarsh's “uncharitable censures.” The reproachful vein of Free-Grace accorded with “Mr. Eatons spirit,” though Gataker adjudged that Saltmarsh, concocting the subterfuge of disingenuous peace, had carried “the matter somewhat more covertly and cunningly then [Eaton] did.” Introducing his treatise in the tones of a peace-maker, and professing disdain for party labels, Saltmarsh undoes himself in “the body of his Book,” where, Gataker insists, his “principall mark and matter” is the disgrace and debasement of the ministry. The insolent author renounces the peace to which his preliminaries purport to aspire, choosing, instead, to be “ever and anon girding at our Ministers, under the name of tru Legall Teachers, and those that pas for Legall teachers, and that are of a legall strain, and that run in a legall way.”Footnote 102
Free-Grace had put Saltmarsh in the open ocean of printed divinity, and sharks were circling. In Shadowes Flying Away, Saltmarsh delivered his reply to Gataker, that maker of books who had penned “little of value to Christ crucified.” Saltmarsh now played his man; his polemic got personal and petulant. Gataker, an “old” man, was “forward” and “quarrelsome”; obscuring the gospel's glory, he shamelessly put Christ “under the cool shadow of the Law”; he pressed repentance and humiliation legally—why, then, should he wonder “at such words as Legall teachers?” Whereas the doctrine of free grace taught that the elect, who are already Christ's, “do beleeve, and repent, and obey,” Gataker approved an inadmissible way of conditions, of “do and live”—insisting that they who repent, believe, and obey do so in order that they may become Christ's. Gataker had scuttled the “free bottom” of the new covenant, putting salvation “upon a condition of works againe.” What was needed was a fuller revelation of salvation's “mystery.” Gataker was a “dark” spokesman of the “bare letter,” but Saltmarsh keyed Spirit to mystery in order to shed light; Gataker propounded the drawing of assuring inferences from our own works, but Saltmarsh conceived of no better source of assurance than the Lord's “voice,” the “breathing of Christ himself”; Gataker preached repentance and faith as though they were designed to “procure us God,” but Saltmarsh made these gifts “the fruits of the Spirit,” effects of Christ's “power.” Against Gataker's legal, conditional, and inferential piety, Saltmarsh commended unilateral grace, a blessing of love and mercy destined for the chosen, “be they never so sinfull.” Sins, indeed, could not prevent the opening of the heart's door to Christ, for he both knocks and opens at his pleasure.Footnote 103
Gataker quickly fired off an acrimonious rejoinder, pursuing the course previously adopted, which was to dress Saltmarsh as he deserved:Footnote 104 reprobating his seductive heresies and blasphemies, correcting his exegetical contradictions and novelties, disabling the “unchristian charges and vile calumnies” that he had poured upon the heads of faithful ministers, abominating his conditionless way to salvation, and bearing witness to the “necessity” of repentance and other sanctifying graces and to the “instrumentality” of faith.Footnote 105 A sardonic Gataker stood by the plain meaning of scripture, salvaging gospel graces from the jaws of Saltmarsh's unwarrantable mysticism: “the doctrine of repentance, and self-denyall, and obedience, is no allegoricall matter, that we need fancie or fish for some mysticall senses of, by some I know not what new forged lights.”Footnote 106 The title page of Saltmarsh's Reasons for Unitie, Peace, and Love adverted to the multiple fronts on which, in 1646, he was fighting. There was the joust with Gataker; two anonymous authors had pitched in, and Thomas Edwards had drawn Saltmarsh into the lurid world of Gangraena—that “Book of Jeeres and Stories.”Footnote 107 In progress, too, were replies to formidable protagonists over church government, the sacraments, and liberty of conscience.Footnote 108
Later in the decade, Richard Baxter and Samuel Rutherford scourged Saltmarsh for his theological crimes against responsible piety. Rutherford's Saltmarsh was a composite image of the many-layered heresies and blasphemies that had arisen to compromise the gains of the Reformation. It was no difficult task to fling cultural dirt by hitching Saltmarsh to antinomian and Familist enormities, but Rutherford expended theological energy in order to efface the errors of Free-Grace. Saltmarsh was sabotaging the gospel by obliterating its capacity to oblige the resources of human agency. Rutherford applied himself to damage control against the antinomian proclivity to make an oxymoron out of evangelical conditions. Thus, Rutherford could concede that a “condition,” considered as a legal term, is a work that issues from the free will in order to oblige another party to bestow a favor or reward in accordance with the terms of an agreement, and that faith, thus conceived, is no condition, since it is an outcome of God's “meere grace.” He proceeded, however, to admonish the likes of Saltmarsh to take a condition “Evengelically for a qualification wrought in us, by the grace of Christ, and without which we are not justified, nor saved.” Once this perspective is adopted, it follows that “to deny the Gospel to be a conditionall covenant, is to bely the Gospel.” Christ, in creating the new heart that dwells in the new covenant, brings “himselfe, his righteousnesse, his free grace, and the condition of Faith that receives him.”Footnote 109
To repudiate the conditionality of salvation was not only to overturn the association between grace and faith; it was also to retreat, in Christ's name, from personal acts of righteousness. Rutherford homed in on Saltmarsh's doctrine of mortification, which, since it is predicated on the conceit that Christ was mortified for us, can therefore no longer be considered a “reall or personall worke in us, but an imputative apprehension.” The upshot is that sanctification is “blown away,” and justification is made “all.”Footnote 110 Baxter, likewise, set alarmed sights upon “a monstrous piece of Antinomian doctrine” that affirmed Christ's exclusive performance of our evangelical righteousness. He invoked the “unsavory stuff” of Free-Grace, which blasphemously construed our believing, repenting, sorrowing, obeying, and mortifying as righteous undertakings already performed, perfectly, by Christ—so that, in consequence, “all is ours.” Were this the case, what remains for us to do? Is there need for us to attempt repeat performance of that which Christ himself has perfected? Such divinity carried the implication that the redeemed are “justified before they beleeve”—an implication that Saltmarsh formulated explicitly, in Sparkles of Glory of 1647, and upon the flagrant error of which Rutherford pounced the following year.Footnote 111
In the wake of Free-Grace, Saltmarsh quickly acquired a reputation for heresy. Sparkles of Glory shows him in the act of processing his new-found notoriety. He wishes to recapitulate and to expand, to clarify things said amiss, and to recover the equanimity of the peace-maker. A postscript to Gataker shows him impatient of confrontation, disinclined to engage the “passion” and “recrimination,” the “argumentation” and “confutation,” of point-by-point exchange. He would rather “rest” in truth than be drawn into “reproach,” though the self-imposed interdiction does not proceed without a parting jab at Gataker's self-serving motivation.Footnote 112 In self-defense, too, he self-effaces. A case of “pretended Heresie” is dismissed upon witness better served by a clearer tongue. “I never yet denied the Graces and Fruits of the Spirit of God,” Saltmarsh submits, “which appear in Faith, Repentance, new Obedience, Mortification of sin.” Measures of light differ from person to person: this may account for the wrongful accusation. But Saltmarsh has the good grace first to fault his own tongue: “It may be, my want of clearer explanation, made it to be taken for Heresie.” Little, however, is done to demystify: flush with organic metaphor, Saltmarsh resorts to the priority of Christ. The “truth,” he notes, is that “Christ hath done all for us” in fulfilling the righteousness both of law and of gospel, that all graces are in him “originally” and “primarily”—for he is the “fountain,” the “root,” the “seed”—and that our derivative performances are “in” ourselves but “through” Christ. Such clarity may not have appeased the heresy-hunters, but Saltmarsh was content: he was speaking divinity that should be believed by “all.”Footnote 113
He was also wishing to acknowledge, in 1647, that God is apprehended by all, disclosing himself, as is his manner, in varying degrees and by way of differing “administrations.” “Measures” of the divine presence may be perceived in all manner of “ordinances” and “attainments.” These are the buzzwords of an extended meditation. Sparkles of Glory, moreover, sustains the ambience of “mystery” that animated the divinity of Free-Grace, though in 1647 it operates in a more irenic way, adding evangelical hues to nuance the chiaroscuro worked up, to striking effect in the earlier book, by the intensity of the clash of law and gospel. The capacious Spirit energizes diverse levels of “dispensation.” Saltmarsh opens his mind to grades of spiritual “discovery.” He professes to “finde God in lower as well as higher, in purer as well as more corrupt administrations.”Footnote 114 Preparationists are spied, humbling and fitting the soul for Christ, though now Saltmarsh passes over the penitential torments that exercised his mind in Free-Grace.Footnote 115 Also brought to view are “common Protestants,” whose spirituality relied firstly upon the taking of Christ by faith's “instrumental” hand, and secondly upon the production of sanctificatory fruits to be discerned and collected in a harvest of inferenceFootnote 116—in 1647 he is content to intimate that there is something of God in this kind of religion, whereas 1646 found him worrying about works and curses, conditions and retributions. Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists commune in their own ways with God, though are shown to occupy a stage of soteriological understanding no more advanced than that formulated by the official mind of the episcopal church.Footnote 117 But Saltmarsh contends that even episcopalians can look forward to “more spirituall times” ahead, their fleshly and legal predilections notwithstanding.Footnote 118 And Seekers appear, looking back from their “upper room” in a time of apostasy to a lost apostolic dispensation in whose anticipated return they entrust their hopes—though Saltmarsh, eyeing a “brighter” future, casts doubt upon the propensity to set expectant sights upon superseded arrangements. The author directs his readership forward and upward, to a more glorious revelation of the Christ whose “fulnesse is already in the Saints.”Footnote 119 Light is being shed in a dawning age of Spirit, and minds are at work, straining to articulate the “mystery of salvation.”
In Sparkles of Glory, Saltmarsh demonstrates awareness of spiritual strata and doctrinal skirmishes that the mystagogic manner of Free-Grace had gestured at but palmed off. Thus, custodians of commonplaces are called forth, avouching unconditional election, law-based contrition and humiliation, and Spirit-wrought regeneration. Such as these ply their distinction between the “faith of adherence” and the “faith of assurance,” summoning the “habits,” “qualities,” and “graces” in which the latter faith delivers its “shadowed and clouded” testimony to the soul whose consciousness of its estate is borne by the signs of its sanctification.Footnote 120 Common Protestants and general redemptionists offer alternative approaches to the scope of Christ's work, but both kinds of apologist, while purporting to maintain a central place for grace, are said to cultivate a merely “fleshly spirituality.”Footnote 121 Others—attuned to the “immediate” operation of the deity—appear in Saltmarsh's text, their discoveries of God “more excellent,” their attentions passing from the semiological marks of dutiful doing to the spiritual sounds of divine “speaking” and “revealing,” their flesh offered up by the mortifying and vivifying Spirit so that “we live no more unto our selves but God or Christ liveth in us.”Footnote 122 The “free-gratians” assemble as well, declaring themselves practitioners of works authored by grace and love, proponents of “imputative” purity and righteousness, advocates of a justification that precedes faith and of a faith that “doth nothing, no not instrumentally as to justification,” and witness bearers to a Christ whose promises are “freely offered to sinners as sinners.” Imputed righteousness saves us in spite of ourselves, since God, choosing to call things “that are not as if they were,” grants us the grace that settles and reveals our fictive purity. And faith's work is eased by the fiction wrought in the giving of forensic grace: faith does not act, but rather is acted upon—it is a “way of revelation and manifestation” for a justification already effected. The free-gratian, of course, is a snug fit for the Saltmarsh of Free-Grace, though notes of self-correction are sounded: in their own way, free-gratians are “infants,” whose higher and more spiritual discoveries are as yet unmade, and, interestingly, they are depicted as being disposed to precipitate closure of mind—too hasty to condemn the legal ways of less advanced administrations.Footnote 123
Not that Saltmarsh, in 1647, presents himself as a reconstructed legalist. Legal religion continues to occupy shaky ground, for all that Saltmarsh gainsays those who conceive him as an enemy of law, repentance, duties, and ordinances.Footnote 124 Yet few moves are made to commend the value of the law's preparatory and penitential prescriptions. Still, even as he is captivated by the free-gratian's chiaroscuro, Saltmarsh identifies shades ranging between the darkness of the curse and the effulgence of free grace. He permits the law its “Protestant” place, acknowledging the disciplines of ministerial practice,Footnote 125 before privileging the law of the Spirit as the new evangelical fulfillment of old legal figures.Footnote 126 The point of privilege, indeed, becomes—for the “teaching” ministry—a point of obsolescence. Saltmarsh, at one climactic moment, sights the Spirit shooting past the ministry, superseding it as it goes. In the age of the Spirit, a man need no longer be taught by his brother or his neighbor, for “ye are all taught of God.”Footnote 127Free-Grace had parodied, and in so doing condemned, the Mosaic remedies of preparationist pastors, but not quite like this had it pulled at ministerial claws.
Conclusion
John Saltmarsh professed to embark upon a peace-making endeavor in 1646, but his critics excoriated the way in which the prefatory text of Free-Grace had so shamelessly indulged its dissimulation. The book's heresies and blasphemies, and its denunciations of the faithful brotherhood, had revealed the colors of the mischievous author. His mischief, as Thomas Gataker acknowledged, was doubly dangerous for the dazzling way in which he wielded his pen. All the more reason to set forth the blazing star by his true lights—a pen-pusher for the “antinomian party,” an eloquent denizen of the kingdom of the “spiritual Antichrist.”
What past and present darkness obscures can begin, in a dawning age of light, to be perceived; and in heralding this inchoative spread of knowledge, in opening mysteries of divinity, Saltmarsh could point a finger at spiritual practices due for retrenchment. For all the sweetness of their wording, Saltmarsh's mysteries were taken, by his critics, as the bitter fruits of an arch-dissembler. Sin is cleansed by Christ. This gospel treasure was Saltmarsh's principal provocation, for his rendering of Christ's grace appeared both to authorize the evaporation of moral responsibility and to undermine ministerial maintenance of the protocols of responsible piety.
But love itself, Saltmarsh said, would inspire the love of works. Works would flow, though not by way of penitential response to the season of sin. It was not the business of love, nor of free grace, to bend the soul's sights back upon its own defiled being and then to oblige it to attempt satisfaction for its individual defilements. Preparation for conversion was a predatory art, an application of the law that opened wounds and deferred cures. Saltmarsh, as polemicist, called attention to the wrongful conceptions and hurtful practices sponsored by the puritan ministry. It was necessary, in this context, to rethink the way of grace.
Free grace takes its name both from God's freedom to bestow its blessings upon whomsoever he wishes, and from the liberation that it nourishes in consequence of its conditionless bestowal. The soul, thus graced and liberated, need no longer call into view the concatenation of its enacted sins, nor need it respond to its apprehended plight by mobilizing regiments of dutiful deeds. To do so was simply to protract the needless toil of mortification “as it is commonly taken.” And eventually, in this course of pious endeavor, a point will be reached at which the magnitude of the task exhausts the self-cleansing agent, stalling the soul in its “puzzled” and “troubled” tracks. Christ might then be sought and accepted, but this was the hard way of stopping the sinner's long “run” in the fields of the law.Footnote 128
Saltmarsh advocated a shorter and less afflicted way. There was no warrant for dwelling upon Moses' law and postponing the arrival of Christ. It was never too soon to preach the gospel, to meditate upon the mystery of redemption. Christ, who came in an act of love in order to mediate a bounty of grace, was the only answer to sin's dominion. “In him” the sinner's righteousness would be revealed, and no more lightsome way to assurance was available. A user of the normative theological vocabulary, Saltmarsh found that words failed him when he turned to the relationship of redeemed and redeemer. Faith was the vehicle of assurance and of the believer's consciousness of union with Christ, but the nature of faith's engendering defeated the capacities of language; to be righteous “in Christ,” moreover, was a happening more to be experienced than enunciated—a mystery to be acknowledged and expected, but not explicated.
