1663 · Suffering & providence
A Divine Cordial
Thomas Watson wrote this in 1663, the year after he was put out of his London pulpit with some two thousand other ministers. As Paul wrote letters when prison kept him from preaching, he says, he hoped to be useful by writing: to make the godly joyful, and to show them that their crosses would be turned into blessings.
He shows how the best things (God's attributes, promises and mercies) and the worst (affliction, temptation, desertion, even sin) work together for the good of those who love God and are called, and then what it is to love God and to be called. Short chapters, homely pictures and a great deal of comfort. It is better known today as All Things for Good.
- About 3 hours to read (45,000 words)
- Easy, friendly reading
- Anyone in a hard season, or wondering how God can be good to them in it.
Read it your way
Free to read and download. Paperbacks are coming soon. They will be printed on demand and sold at cost: we make nothing on them.
For churches, schools and local printers: the print-ready files are exactly what we send to Lulu, with the cover's spine sized to the page count. Print as many as you like.
Then & Now
What did 1663 look like?
Here is a paragraph from “Chapter VI,” as it was first printed and as you'll read it in this edition.
As printed in 1663
Learn to adore Providence Providence hath an influence upon all things here below; ‘tis this that mingles the Ingredients, and makes up the whole Compound.
Today
Learn to adore Providence Providence hath an influence upon all things here below; ‘tis this that mingles the Ingredients, and makes up the whole Compound.
About this edition
Faithful, and easier to read
Thomas Watson's A Divine Cordial (1663), in modern spelling from the EEBO-TCP transcription of the first edition; Greek, Hebrew and illegible letters restored, and transcription slips corrected, from the 1663 page images, with the 1678 edition where the 1663 film is lost.
96.1% of the words are exactly as in the source. The rest are small corrections, each one recorded.
Open Then & Now- First published
- 1663
- Made from
- The 1663 London first edition (EEBO-TCP A65292)
How this edition was made
Sources
- EEBO-TCP A65292: A Divine Cordial, or, The Transcendent Priviledge of Those That Love God and Are Savingly Called (London, for Thomas Parkhurst, 1663)
- Corrections to the TCP transcription from the 1663 page images ("out" for "our", "dejected", Latin misprints in the TCP, among others)
- CCEL's text of A Divine Cordial, a reworded later modernization, kept as a check only
Checked against
- The 1663 printing, archive.org scan (the copy TCP was keyed from), local OCR (Kraken and Tesseract) collated with the TCP; gaps, Greek and Hebrew, and the proofread's questions read on its page images
- The 1678 edition, archive.org scan: letters and Greek the 1663 film lost (the Chrysostom note on p. 161)
- Source files
- This edition on GitHub
- Licence
- Public domain (CC0): copy and share freely
- Found a mistake?
- Tell us
About the authorThomas Watson c. 1620–1686Rector of St Stephen's, Walbrook, and a nonconformist preacher after 1662.