Digital Puritan Press is pleased to announce the release of The Christian in Complete Armor, by William Gurnall. This digital-only offering is the product of more than two years of editorial work. It is properly formatted (including extensive hyperlinking, and Greek and Hebrew words which display correctly), minimally modernized, and packed with hundreds of embedded Scripture references (no internet connection required) and many helpful footnotes. This volume includes J.C. Ryle’s biographical preface, and is appended with Gurnall’s two known sermons: “The Magistrate’s Portraiture Drawn With a Scripture Pencil” and “The Christian’s Labor and Reward.”
For those unfamiliar with the work, The Christian in Complete Armor is the definitive exposition of Ephesians 6:10-18 (the armor of God). It is meticulously organized and thoroughly executed. For me personally, this work was one of my five ‘bucket-list’ books (a book I wanted to be sure I had read on this side of eternity), so when the opportunity to produce a high quality digital edition arose, I leapt at the chance.
This is not a small work. At just over one million words (3,200 pages), it is not something you are going to read in a month. But I believe the one who is willing to commit regular time to it will be rewarded handsomely.
ISBN 978-1291717341.
eBook (Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Lulu), $9.99.
Edward Pearse (c.1633–1674) was a Puritan pastor in London during a period of immense political and social upheaval in England. He died at forty of tuberculosis, but during his final months, he wrote this book as a guide to his congregation, in order to direct them to life’s one ‘great concern,’ namely, “to have all things set right, well-ordered, and composed in the matters of the soul before leaving this world.” With wonderful clarity, the author shows how putting the spiritual concerns of the soul into the best posture possible for the hour of death is in actuality the key to living an abundant, God-honoring life. Or as Pearse explains:
Now reprinted for your enjoyment is The Heavenward Way, a collection of four treatises that helpfully outline the life of faith in a believer.
So this would really scratch my OCD itch… For quite some time I have had the idea of taking all the best PDFs I can find of the authors represented on these pages and putting them into an organized format, interlinked from a bookmarked PDF file which serves as a directory. This would allow us to have at our fingertips the works of the Puritans on a tablet or phone, with no internet connection or downloading. A real bonus would be to include the Scripture and topical indices as well. Running background OCR will allow searching for text phrases, to some degree. Certain tablets will allow highlighting, underlining, and other note-taking as well.