ABSTRACT
Puritan autobiographies were the product of a Puritan conviction that the highest art a man could practise was the art of living, that the only masterpiece worthy of the name was to be achieved in the most complex and difficult of all forms of creative endeavour: a human life. Puritan teaching on conversion and the Christian life was based on the Epistle to the Romans and the doctrine of justification by faith derived from it. The Puritans inherited without question and almost unchanged the scholastic model of human nature. In relating this to their concept of regeneration they were concerned mainly with the relations between the faculties of the rational soul: the reason, the will, and the affections. Spiritual autobiographies nearly all emphasize this twofold progress, and many of those who ‘wander long in darkness’ confirm a conclusion of Sibbes’s that ‘Nothing is so certaine as that which is certaine after doubts.’.
