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Herbert Thorndike's Of the covenant of grace is the centrepiece of his principal work, An epilogue to the tragedy of the Church of England, being a necessary consideration and brief resolution of the chief controversies in religion that divide the western Church: occasioned by the present calamity of the Church of England (1659). 'Brief' is euphemistic, for the Epilogue is a robust trilogy: Of the covenant of grace alone runs to more than 700 pages in its modern edition (helpfully inflated by the nineteenth-century editor's footnotes). This discourse stood in its day, and still stands in ours, as by far the most substantial piece of covenant theology by a churchman of Thorndike's loyal kind. Its moral emphasis recalls the work of early Stuart forerunners, but it breaks new ground, for a churchman, by keying on regeneration rather than baptism and by introducing into the fabric of federal divinity an Arminian and scholastic idea - scientia media , God's middle knowledge - for the purpose of safeguarding God's free grace while affirming man's free will. Pursuing this enterprise, Thorndike elevated the covenant of grace as 'the whole tenor of the Bible', 'the tender of Christianity' and 'the whole Treaty of God with man concerning his happiness'. 1
The work of predecessors in the Church offered little basis for such hegemonic claims. John Donne, it is true, had declared that 'all that hath passed between God and man hath passed ex pacto , by way of contract and covenant', but while Donne's sermons now and again illuminate this dictum, they do not give it much substance or coherence.2 Puritan preachers, on the other hand, developed the federal formula of works and grace with great energy and resource. Speaking of the 'new covenant' in the mid-1620s, John Preston told his Lincoln's Inn audience that 'all that we teach you from day to day are but conclusions drawn from this covenant'. Richard Sibbes in the early 1630s urged his Cambridge hearers 'above all, ... [to] labour to know and understand the covenant of grace'. In the 1650s such labouring brought forth Francis Roberts's 1,721-page folio celebration of God's covenants as the 'grand mystery and very marrow of all the Holy Scriptures'. 3 When Thorndike seized the evangelical...