Spiritual Progress

As the great English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter put it: "Man's fall was his turning from God to himself: and his regeneration consistith in the turning of him from himself to God. . . . [Hence,] self-denial and the love of God are all [one]. . . . . The very names of Self and Own, should sound in the watchful Christian's ears as very terrible, wakening words, that are next to the names of sin and Satan."

And Thomas Hooker, the most articulate of the New England Puritain ministers, spoke for all of them when he identified their primary adversary as not Satan but self. "Not what Self will, but what the Lord will!" declared Hooker. self was "the great snare" and "the false Christ," "a spider's web [spun] out of our bowels, the very figure or type of hell." . . . The Puritans did not need to be overly concerned with the devil; if they directed their energies toward Christ and against self, Satan would have little enough access to them. (The Light and The Glory - God's Plan for America, Vol 1, p.186)