The Form of the Art of Suffering in the Second Part of the Seventeenth Century

The godly life art of suffering is based on the principle of movement out of the time of the text into real time, into time before and time during affliction. The change in the form of the art of suffering is intimately connected with a change in the writer's mode of communication. In the second part of the seventeenth century the sermon-derived form transfers the responsibility for the reasoning process, on the whole, to the writer, and the principal task of the reader now is to listen, to understand, to absorb and ultimately to assent. In the art of suffering in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the mode of communication is essentially 'imperative'. In the group of three texts such as god, man and world directly influenced by Bernard's The faithfvll shepheard, the writer engages rather more directly with the reader's affections, and there is a rather more obvious dependence on rhetoric, or 'the art of persuasive communication'.