William Perkins was born in 1558 to Thomas and Han­nah Perkins in the village of Marston Jabbett, in Bulkington Parish of Warwickshire. His youth was given to recklessness, profanity, and drunkenness. In 1577, he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, as a pen­sioner, suggesting that socially he stood “on the borderline of the gentry.”¹ He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1581 and a master’s degree in 1584.

While a student, Perkins experienced a powerful conversion, which possibly began when he overheard a woman, while chiding her naughty child, allude to “drunken Perkins.”² Most likely that incident initiated the kind of conviction and humiliation that Perkins would often write about, in which pride is stripped away and a poor sinner is confronted with his own depravity and helplessness before an angry God. At any rate, Perkins gave up his wicked ways, fled to Christ for salvation, and began to bear fruits of holi­ness. He also gave up the study of mathematics and his fascination with black magic and the occult, and took up theology.³ He soon joined Laurence Chaderton (1536-1640), his personal tutor and lifelong friend who was called “the pope of Cambridge Puritanism,”⁴ as well as Richard Greenham, Richard Rogers, and oth­ers, in a spiritual brotherhood at Cambridge that espoused Calvinistic, Puritan convictions.⁵

Cambridge was the leading Puritan center of the day. Perkins’s formal training was thus Calvinistic within a scholastic framework.⁶ The strict scholastic training had been modified, however, by the inroads that Peter Ramus’s (1515-1572) “method” had made at Cambridge since the 1560s when it won the support of the Puritans, due to its practicality.⁷ Ramus, who con­verted from Roman Catholicism to Calvinism, reformed the arts curriculum by applying it to daily life. He pro­posed a logic and method to simplify all academic subjects, proposing a single logic for both dialectic and rhetoric. The task of the logician was to classify con­cepts in order to make them understandable and memorable. That was done by method, the orderly presentation of a subject. Chaderton first introduced Ramus’s Ars Logica to Cambridge students and partic­ularly to Gabriel Harvey, a lecturer who used Ramus’s methods for reforming the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

Perkins was impressed with Harvey’s presentation of Ramus’s method in rhetoric and applied it to his manual on preaching, The Arte of Prophecying, or a trea­tise concerning the sacred and onely true manner and methode of preaching.⁸ Perkins’s Ramist training at Cambridge oriented him toward practical application rather than speculative theory and gave him skills for becoming a popular preacher and theologian.⁹

From 1584 until his death, Perkins served as lec­turer, or preacher, at Great St. Andrew’s Church, Cambridge, a most influential pulpit across the street from Christ’s College. He also served as a Fellow at Christ’s College from 1584 to 1595. Fellows were required to preach, lecture, and tutor students, acting as “guides to learning as well as guardians of finances, morals, and manners.”¹⁰

Perkins resigned his fellowship to marry a young widow, Timothye Cradocke of Grant Chester, on July 2, 1595. His resignation moved Samuel Ward, later Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, to respond in his diary, “Good Lord, grant ... there follow no ruin to the college.” Men such as Ward counted it a great blessing to sit under Perkins’s teaching and to witness his exem­plary living.¹¹

Perkins served the University in several capacities. He was Dean of Christ’s College from 1590 to 1591. He catechized the students at Corpus Christi College on Thursday afternoons, lecturing on the Ten Command­ments in a manner that deeply impressed the students.¹² On Sunday afternoons, he worked as an adviser, counseling the spiritually distressed.

'The balm which he applied most commonly to the walking wounded who shared with him their spiritual insecu­rities was the doctrine of divine predestination,' writes Mark Shaw.¹³

Perkins had exceptional gifts for preaching and an uncanny ability to reach common people with plain preaching and theology. He pioneered Puritan casu­istry – the art of dealing with “cases of conscience” by self-examination and scriptural diagnosis.¹⁴ Many were convicted of sin and delivered from bondage under his preaching. The prisoners of the Cambridge jail were among the first to benefit from his powerful preach­ing. Thomas Fuller said that Perkins “would pronounce the word damne with such an emphasis as left a dole-full Echo in his auditors ears a good while after ... Many an Onesimus in bonds was converted to Christ.”¹⁵

Samuel Clarke provides a striking example of Perkins’s pastoral care. He says a condemned prisoner was climbing the gallows, looking “half-dead,” when Perkins said to him, “What man! What is the matter with thee? Art thou afraid of death?” The prisoner con­fessed that he was less afraid of death than of what would follow it. “Saist thou so,” said Perkins. “Come down again man and thou shalt see what Gods grace will do to strengthen thee.” When the prisoner came down, they knelt together, hand in hand, and Perkins offered “such an effectual prayer in confession of sins ... as made the poor prisoner burst out into abundance of tears.” Convinced the prisoner was brought “low enough, even to Hell gates,” Perkins showed him the freeness of the gospel in prayer. Clarke writes that the prisoner’s eyes were opened “to see how the black lines of all his sins were crossed, and cancelled with the red lines of his crucified Saviours precious blood; so gra­ciously applying it to his wounded conscience, as made him break out into new showres of tears for joy of the inward consolation which he found.” The prisoner arose from his knees, went cheerfully up the ladder, testified of salvation in Christ’s blood, and bore his death with patience, “as if he actually saw himself delivered from the Hell which he feared before, and heaven opened for the receiving of his soul, to the great rejoicing of the beholders.”¹⁶

Perkins’s sermons were of many “colours,” writes Fuller. They seemed to be “all Law and all gospel, all cordials and all corrosives, as the different necessities of people apprehended” them. He was able to reach many types of people in various classes, being “sys­tematic, scholarly, solid and simple at the same time.”¹⁷

As Fuller says,

His church consisting of the university and town, the scholar could have no learneder, the townsmen (no) plainer, sermons.

Most importantly, he lived his sermons:

'As his preaching was a com­ment on his text, so his practice was a comment on his preaching,' Fuller concludes.¹⁸

Like his mentor, Chaderton, Perkins worked to purify the established church from within rather than join those Puritans who advocated separation. Rather than addressing church polity, his primary concerns focused on addressing pastoral inadequacies, spiritual deficiencies, and soul-destroying ignorance in the church.

In time Perkins – a rhetorician, expositor, theolo­gian, and pastor – became the principle architect of the young Puritan movement. His vision of reform for the church, combined with his intellect, piety, book writing, spiritual counseling, and communication skills, enabled him to set the tone for seventeenth-century Puritans – in their accent on Reformed, expe­riential truth and self-examination, and in their polemic against Roman Catholicism and Arminianism. Fuller said of Perkins, who was handicapped in his right hand, “This Ehud, with a left-handed pen did stab the Romish cause.” By the time of his death, Perkins’s writings in England were outselling those of Calvin, Beza, and Bullinger combined.¹⁹ He “moulded the piety of a whole nation,” H.C. Porter said.²⁰

Perkins died from kidney stones in 1602, just before the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His wife of seven years was pregnant at the time and caring for three small children as well as sorrowing over three addi­tional children recently lost to various diseases. When John Cotton heard the bell toll for Perkins’s funeral, he secretly rejoiced that his conscience would no longer have to smart under such powerful preaching.²¹ Perkins’s closest friend, James Montagu, later Bishop of Winchester, preached the funeral sermon for Perkins from Joshua 1:2, “Moses my servant is dead.” Ward, deeply distressed, wrote on behalf of many: “God knows his death is likely to be an irrevocable loss and a great judgment to the university, seeing there is none to supply his place.”²² Perkins was buried in the church yard of Great St. Andrews.²³

Eleven posthumous editions of Perkins’s writings, containing nearly fifty treatises, were printed by 1635. His major writings include expositions of Galatians 1­-5, Matthew 5-7, Hebrews 11, Jude, and Revelation 1-3 as well as treatises on predestination, the order of sal­vation, assurance of faith, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the worship of God, the Christian life and vocation, ministry and preaching, the errors of Roman Catholicism, and various cases of conscience. His writ­ings, popularized for lay readership, are Bible-based in accord with the principles of literal and contextual interpretation established by the Reformers. They are practically and experientially Calvinistic, continually focusing on motives, desires, and distresses in the heart and life of sinners, ever aiming at finding and follow­ing the path to eternal life. To accentuate pietistic emphases, Perkins usually employs a Ramistic method that presents the definition of the subject and its further partition, often by dichotomies, into progressively more heads or topics, applying each truth set forth.²⁴

Perkins’s influence continued through such the­ologians as William Ames (1576-1633), Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), John Cotton (1585-1652), and John Preston (1587-1628). Perkins’s ministry is what Cotton considered the “one good reason why there came so many excellent preachers out of Cambridge in England, more than out of Oxford.”²⁵ Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680) wrote that when he entered Cambridge, six of his instructors who had sat under Perkins were still passing on his teaching. Ten years after Perkins’s death, Cambridge was still “filled with the discourse of the power of Mr. William Perkins’ ministry,” Goodwin said.²⁶

The translation of Perkins’s writings prompted greater theological discussion between England and the Continent.²⁷ J. van der Haar records 185 seven­teenth-century printings in Dutch of Perkins’s individual or collected works,²⁸ twice as many as any other Puritan.²⁹ He and Ames, his most influential stu­dent on the continent, influenced Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) and numerous Dutch Nadere Reformatie (Dutch Second Reformation) theologians.³⁰ John Robin­son (c. 1575-1625), the Separatist, was a disciple of Perkins. At least fifty editions of Perkins’s works were printed in Switzerland and in various parts of Ger­many.³¹ His writings were also translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Irish, Welsh, Hungarian, and Czech.³²

In New England, nearly one hundred Cambridge men who led early migrations, including William Brew­ster of Plymouth, Thomas Hooker of Connecticut, John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay, and Roger Williams of Rhode Island, grew up in Perkins’s shadow. Richard Mather was converted while reading Perkins, and Jonathan Edwards was fond of reading Perkins more than a century later.³³ Samuel Morison remarks that “your typical Plymouth Colony library comprised a large and a small bible, Ainsworth’s translation of the Psalms, and the works of William Perkins, a favorite theologian.”³⁴ ''Anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a tower­ing figure in their eyes,” writes Perry Miller.

Perkins and his followers were,

the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts.³⁵