Puritan of the Week: Thomas Boston (1676-1732)

Thomas Boston is a fairly well know puritan because of his writings. His biographical information is convicting and should bring joy to any believer’s heart. Thomas did not have a life of ease, free from pain. His trials tested the root and practice of his faith. As a young boy his father was put in prison for some time for his faith, even though he was not a minister. “One of Thomas’s earliest memories was visiting his father in prison.” Eventually Presbyterians were allowed to legally meet in homes. The Bostons would walk 5 miles each Lord’s Day to go to hear the preaching of God’s Word. Saved when he was 11, Thomas remembers making this walk in his youth regardless of the weather and sometimes by himself “to obtain food for his soul.”

“In the winter sometimes it was my lot to go alone, without so much as a horse to carry me through Blackadder water, the wading whereof in sharp frosty weather I very well remember. But such things were then easy, for the benefit of the Word, which came with power.” (from Meet the Puritans, quoted from Memiors, p.10)

His hunger for the word, and counting trials and hardships as joy did not change as he grew older.

“Boston did not have an easy life. He lost his mother at age 15 and his father a decade later…Thomas married Katharine Brown…in whom Boston saw “sparkles of grace.” Boston considered his marriage a gift of the Lord, even though his wife suffered repeated bouts of depression and insanity. From 1720 on, she was often confined to an apartment which she called “the inner prison.” She spent months and years without relief…Boston had to bury six of ten children…Then, too, Boston himself was not a healthy man. He struggled often with pain and weakness…Boston viewed these trials as discipline from his heavenly Father’s hand. He continued to describe his wife as “a woman of great worth, whom I therefore passionately loved, and inwardly honored”

He wrote, “It is a very sweet view of affliction, to view it as the discipline of the covenant; and so it is indeed; and nothing else to the children of our Father’s family. In that respect it is medicinal; it shines with many gracious purposes about it; and, end as it will, on may have the confidence of faith, that is shall end well.”