Peter Sterry's Magnum Opus

A Puritan universalist at his best

[The following is an “epistle” of Peter Sterry (1613-1672) to readers of his posthumously released Discourse of the Freedom of the Will. Sterry was a Puritan universalist, Cambridge Platonist, Westminster divine, and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. The work was published by John Starkey in 1675, and I have here transcribed, formatted, and partially ‘translated’ it into modern American English. As Vivian de Sola Pinto observes of this work, “It is full of subtle and profound thought, and also of noble poetic prose.” Enjoy!]

Benjamin Whichcote and Peter Sterry by Heaton, Butler & Bayne, 1883 Emmanuel College Chapel, St Andrew's Street, Cambridge. Photo by Simon Knott.

Christian and candid reader,

I entreat some few things of you, for your own sake and for mine:

The Nature of God as Love

1. Study the love of God; the nature of God, as he is love; the work of God, as it is a work of love. Moses, in his dying song, begins with God and the perfection of his work: “He is the rock, his work is perfect.” St. Paul, descended from the paradise in the third heavens, brings this with him down into the world as the sacred mystery and rich ground of all truth, from which all the beauties and sweetnesses of paradise, of all the heavens, spring: that “Love is the band of perfection.” It is love, then, which runs through the whole work of God; which frames, informs, unites it all into one masterpiece of divine love.

If God be love; the attributes of God are the attributes of this love; the purity, simplicity, the sovereignty, the wisdom, the almightiness, the unchangeableness, the infiniteness, the eternity of divine love. If God be love, his work is the work of love; of a love unmixed, unconfined, supreme, infinite in wisdom and power; not limited in its workings by any pre-existent matter, but bringing forth freely and entirely from itself its whole work, both matter and form, according to its own inclination and complacency in itself.