Excerpt from Memoirs of the Lives and Writings of Those Eminent Divines: Who Convened in the Famous Assembly at Westminister, in the Seventeenth Century Biography is highly useful and important. It hath been very generally esteemed: and it is commonly allowed to be, both a very pleasant and profitable method of conveying instruction unto the human mind. But here, I shall willingly borrow, from some celebrated writers, and gratefully acknowledge the debt. Montesquieu said, "What histories can be found, that please and instruct like the lives of Plutarch?" And Plutarch himself hath observed, "I live entirely upon history, and while I contemplate the pictures it presents to my view, my mind enjoys a rich repast from the representation of great and virtuous characters." Another celebrated writer says, "Among the smaller histories, biography, or the memoirs of the lives of great and good men, has a high rank in my esteem, as worthy of the perusal of every person who devotes himself to the study of divinity. Therein we frequently find our holy religion reduced to practice, and many parts of Christianity shining with a transcendent and examplary light. We learn there how deeply sensible great and good men have been of the ruins of human nature by the first apostacy from God; and how they have toiled and laboured, and turned themselves on all sides, to seek recovery in vain, till they have found the gospel of Christ an all-sufficient relief. We are there furnished with effectual and unanswerable evidences that the religion of Jesus with all its self-denials, virtues, and devotions, is a very practicable thing, since it has been carried to such a degree of honour by some wise and holy men. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.