The following words by Rev. Andrew Thomson from 1850 conclude the short biography of John Owen (1616–1683) that accompanies Owen’s collected works:

John Owen belonged to a class of men who have risen from age to age in the church, to represent great principles, and to revive in the church the life of God. The supreme authority of the Scriptures in all matters of religion,—the headship of Christ,—the rights of conscience,—religion as a thing of spirit, and not of form, resulting from the personal belief of certain revealed truths, and infallibly manifesting itself in a holy life,—the church as a society distinct from the world;—these principles, often contended for in flames and blood, were the essence of that Puritanism which found one of its noblest examples in Owen. Puritanism, it has been finely said, was the feeling of which Protestantism was the argument. But even then, it as an old spirit under a new name, which, heaven-enkindled, has ever borne the two marks of its celestial origin, in blessing the world and being persecuted by it. It was the spirit which breathed in the Lollards of Germany; in the Hussites of Bohemia,—in those saints, who

“On the Alpine mountains cold,
Kept God’s truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp’d stocks and stones;”

in the Huguenots of France; and in the stern Scottish Covenanters;—and which God has sometimes sent down since, like a benignant angel, when the church at any time has begun to stagnate in a cold orthodoxy, to trouble the waters of the sanctuary, that the lame might be healed. It is a spirit which the inert orthodoxy and the superficial evangelism of the church even now greatly needs to have breathed into it from heaven. And the laborious and prayerful study of the writings of the Puritans might do much to restore it. Only let the same truths be believed with the same faith, and they will produce the same men, and accomplish the same intellectual and moral miracles. A due appreciation of the most pressing wants of our age, and a timely discernment of its most serious perils, would draw from us the prayer which is said to have once escaped the lips even of the cold and calculating Erasmus,—”O, sit anima mea cum Puritanis Anglicanis!”