Most of the sermons contained in this collection were delivered on the twenty-fourth of August, in the year 1662. On that day the act requiring a perfect conformity to the book of Common Prayer, and to the rites and ceremonies of the church took place, the effect of which enactment was the silencing of nearly two thousand five hundred ministers, the death of three thousand nonconformists, and the ruin of sixty thousand families. Such was the result of the restoration of Charles the Second of infamous memory. - Preface.

A fine introduction to Puritan preaching, this little book also recalls on of the great turning points I English Christianity-for these sermons were preached on 'the Farewell Sunday' in August, 1662, when two thousand ministers left the national Church for conscience' sake. Much has been written on the Great Ejection, but nothing is more important than to hear the ejected speak for themselves. Their watchword was: " I preach as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.

Jonathan Edwards was voted out of his congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, on June 22, 1750, because of his belief that the Lord's Super was not for the unconverted. A Farewell Sermon was preached on July 1, 1750 and addressed of how a pastor cares for his congregation, and how he will meet with them again in heaven at the Judgment when all truth will be known. Jonathan Edwards gives advice and warning to the congregation. He eventually moved to work among the Housatonic Indians at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

C.H. Spurgeon said, "Those great preachers whose names we remember, were men who counted nothing their own: they were driven out from their benefices, because they could not conform to the Established Church, and they gave up all they had willingly to the Lord. They were hunted from place to place, they wandered here and there to preach the gospel to a few. Those were foul times; but they promised they would walk the road fair or foul, and they did walk it knee-deep in mud; and they would have walked it if it had been kinee-deep in blood too. But now we are all little men, there is scarce a man alive now upon this earth." Iain Murray added, "The atmosphere of that day was electric and charged with emotion; the popular discontent was great and strong guards stood ready in London, but these sermons seem far removed from all that. There is a calmness, and unction and a lack of invective. Great though their sorrow was for their flocks and for their nation, they had a message to preach which was more than equal to the strain of the crisis. An eternal God, an Ever-Living Saviour and a glorious hope of heaven, carried them through this heaviest trial."