1642 EDWARD CORBETT. Westminster Assembly Puritan on God's Sovereignty at Outbreak of Civil War.

Rather rare and sensibly desperate sermon preached by Westminster Divine, Edward Corbett, during the opening months of the English Civil War. His distress is sensible and the sermon reads almost as a meditation and prayer, uttered we imagine through tears, at the state of the England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.  But he ends hopefully: It was a pious speech of Luther in an Epistle to Melancton, God is able to preserve his own cause form falling, or to raise it when it is fallen. God is never more near his people than when deliverance seems furthest off. They can be in no condition where he is at a stand and cannot help them. This war which, we think, will devour us all, may be an Instrument of preservation as the whale which swallowed up Jonas, was a means to bring him to the shore. The depths of mercy are beyond the depths of misery, and God hath his own ways of helping his Children, when all things else deny them help. . . [But] say that our sins are many and our transgressions gr