The Puritans are quoted for their comforts and their warnings. This library
hunts something else: the claim that stops a reader cold. The permission you assumed
was forbidden. The respectable habit named as sin. The benefit treated as a danger.
Whole collected works are read cover to cover, not sampled. Boilerplate is
thrown out. Every quotation is checked back against the printed text before it is listed,
and every page number comes from the running header above the passage.
Authors scanned
1
Verified takes
1,319
Volumes read
22
Pages read
~11,000
The Library
Scanned and verified
Complete22 volumesNisbet, 1870–75Scanned August 2026
Manton preached verse by verse for years at a stretch, and the length is
exactly why he is worth mining: he had room to say the unguarded thing. The richest veins
are the Psalm 119 series, the exposition of the Lord's Prayer, and the treatises on the
life of faith and on self-denial.
Verified takes
1,319
Rated 5 of 5
169
On prayer
195
Volumes
22 of 22
“When Satan, who is usually a libertine, pretendeth to be a saint, he
will be stricter than Christ himself. Over-doing in externals is usually an undoing in
religion.”
Works, vol. 2, p. 96 · inversion
“To be without afflictions is a sign of bastards. God hath no
illegitimate children, but God hath degenerate children, who are left to a larger
discipline.”
Works, vol. 1, p. 274 · inversion
“Better to be denied in mercy, than to have our requests granted in
anger.”
Works, vol. 6, p. 431 · hard saying
Name an author with a complete works in the public domain and it can be added here.
What counts as a hard saying
Seven shapes
A quotation earns its place only if it takes one of seven shapes. Everything else, however
well written, is left out.
Permission
Something readers assume is forbidden, and the author allows it.
Prohibition
An ordinary, respectable practice named as sin.
Distinction
The knife-edge "X but not Y" that flips the common reading.
Inversion
The benefit treated as a danger, or the danger as a mercy.
Hard saying
God's dealings described in a way that stings.
Epigram
A vivid one-liner carrying a non-obvious idea.
Exegetical
A reading of a verse nothing like what a modern reader expects.
Method
How the list is built
Read everything. The complete works are split into chunks and read in full, not
searched for keywords. A keyword search finds what you already knew to look for; the whole
point here is the thing you did not know to look for.
Quote verbatim, cite exactly. Each entry carries the author's own words with the
optical-character-recognition damage repaired but the wording untouched, plus the volume and
the page printed in the running header above the passage.
Verify, then publish. Every quotation is matched back against the source text
automatically. Anything that cannot be found is discarded rather than listed. This is not
ceremony: in the Manton scan roughly twenty candidate entries turned out to be invented,
complete with plausible page numbers, and were caught and removed by this step.
Rate the heat. Each take carries a 1 to 5 estimate of how hard the idea lands on a
modern reader. It is a judgement about the reader, not about the author.