American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
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      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

PRESTON, JOHN

(October, 1587, Upper Heyford, Northamptonshire, England-20 July 1628, Preston-Capes, Northamptonshire, England). Education: B.A., Queens College, Cambridge University, 1607; M.A., Queens College, 1611; B.D. Queens College, 1620; awarded D.O. while Master of Emmanuel, 1623. Career: fellow, Queens College, 1609-11; tutor, preacher, Queens College, 1611-21; preacher, Lincoln's Inn, 1622-28; Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1622-28.

John Preston's career illustrates the degree to which lives were changed by the division between Puritans and Anglicans. In another time Preston might have become one of the darlings of the court and risen through the church hierarchy to become bishop, and even archbishop. He won the attention of King James in 1615 when he presented a disputation at Cambridge on the question, "Whether dogs could make syllogisms." Preston argued that they could, to the delight of the King, who then told a dog story of his own. A contemporary of Preston's remarked that "It was easy to discern that ye king's hound had opened a way for Mr. Preston at ye court." Later Preston was summoned to preach to the king and delivered a condemnation of Arminianism, which also impressed His Majesty. In 1620 Preston was appointed chaplain-in-ordinary to Prince Charles. Five years later, on the death of King James, Preston accompanied Charles to Whitehall, and saw him proclaimed King.

All of these events might have led to greater and greater preferment, except that Preston's life was otherwise developing in directions that made him suspect to the crown and especially to William Laud, whose anti-Puritan policies would soon hold sway. Preston's life had been skewed in a Calvinistic direction in 1611, when he heard a sermon at Cambridge by John Cotton*, then a fellow of Emmanuel. Cotton was reputed to be an elegant preacher, of a type favored by the Anglicans. But on the day that Preston heard him, Cotton delivered a simple, evangelical sermon in a form known to the Puritans as the plain style. His audience disapproved, and Cotton returned to his Cambridge rooms crestfallen. Then came a knock at his door; Preston had come to tell Cotton how much the sermon had moved him. That began a close association of the two men in promoting the sort of "heart religion" favored by the Puritans. Cotton went to Boston to preach, and Preston rose at Cambridge, becoming master of Emmanuel College. Preston sent his most promising divinity students to Boston, for seasoning under the guidance of Cotton.

While flirting with royal preferment, Preston was deeply involved in promoting Puritanism, as a teacher, a preacher, and a writer. His posthumous works, particularly The New Covenant, were among the most influential statements of Puritan doctrine. They had the virtue of profundity and simplicity and are still among the best statements of the Puritan faith. When Preston began his career it was possible to hope that a man with strong Calvinist sensibilities might become a power in the Anglican Church. But by the late 1620s the church was increasingly divided, and opportunities for men like Preston were few.
He might have taken his tremendous talents to America and stood with men like Cotton and Hooker as one of the great early leaders of American
Congregationalism. But he was weakened by a lung disease and died at the age of forty, two years before the Winthrop migration. Because of his friendship with Cotton, however, and many other early immigrants to America and because of the enduring influence of his books, John Preston was one of the founders of American Puritanism.

Bibliography
A: The New Covenant (London, 1629); The Saint's Daily Exercise (London, 1629); The Breastplate of Faith and Love (London, 1630); Life Eternal (London, 1631); Sinnes Overthrow (London, 1633); The Saint's Qualifications (London, 1634); Sermons Preached before His Majesty (London, 1637); The Saints Submission (London, 1638); The Fulnesse of Christ for Us (London, 1640); An Abridgment of Dr. Preston's Works (London, 1648).
B: DNB 16, 308-12; Thomas Ball, The Life of the Renowned Doctor Preston [published in part in Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie, London, 1651, edited and published by E. W. Harcourt, Oxford, 1885]; Irvonwy Morgan, Prince Charles's Puritan Chaplain (London, 1957).