ABSTRACT

Racked with anxiety about the state of his faith and suffering from what he feared was providential illness the young Cambridge undergraduate, Isaac Archer, reflected to his diary ‘I verily thinke I impaired my health by overmuch and unseasonable study’. Worried that others might overtake him in their studies, his greatest anxiety was that ‘I observed that in reading God’s word I could not frame by heart aright, and as I would, nor could I meditate on it, as was my duty, by reason of many idle and evill thoughts which came in, but were very unwelcome’. Despite this, Isaac had been ‘diligent in reading the scriptures every day, and read them once through in a yeare for the 3 first years according to Mr Bifield’s directions; yet gate I not much good for want of due meditation’. The young man assiduously noted his scriptural reading in a commonplace-book: ‘I took notes out of the Bible and putt it under such heads as might suit any state and although by such industrious wayes I had a gift of prayer, I knew that except the spirit of God helped my infirmityes with groanes unutterable, Romans 8:26, I could not pray in such a manner as to please God. I found it much better to use scripture phrase, on all occasions, then to trust to parts, and pray at random’.3 It is worth pausing to examine the language of this reflection: the phrases ‘due meditation’, ‘diligent in reading’, ‘industrious wayes’ combine to exemplify the sense of application and careful labour such a devout individual assumed was appropriate to encountering revelation. There are also important hints

of the physical disposition and activities Bible reading involved. One needed to approach the book with the correct frame of mind; one read with a purpose to gather scriptural injunctions and to prepare for prayer. Importantly, for our purpose, Isaac planned his reading according to the ‘directions’ from ‘Mr Byfield’. Earlier in his diary Isaac had described himself as ‘almost continually reading the Bible or other books’ desperate to catch up on his studies after an illness. Again using Byfield’s book he studied ‘hard to get up what I had lost in the reading of the Bible, stinting myselfe to many chapters a day’. Such intense reading, as Isaac noted, was ‘not very good for my eyesight’.4