Puritan concerns sometimes led to excesses. On the one hand, Thomas Watson (1620–86) urged people to press into the kingdom with little mention of faith in Jesus Christ. On one occasion, he even misstated the role of Christ’s blood as the ground of Christian hope, and later amended his statement, in his work on the Beatitudes.³¹

31. Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1989), 67, 98, respectively. Stressing the necessity of tears of repentance he wrote, “A ship that is always sinking must have the water continually pumped out. While the soul leaks by sin, we must be still pumping at the leak by repentance. Think not, O Christian, that your sins are washed away only by Christ’s blood, but by water and blood” (67). Later he partly retracted this statement, noting that many falsely placed hope in their tears of repentance instead of in Christ: “They go to their tears when they should go to Christ’s blood. It is a kind of idolatry to make our tears the ground of our comfort. Mourning is not meritorious. It is the way to joy, not to the cause” (98) . . . .

Ryan M. McGraw | Reformed Scholasticism: Recovering the Tools of Reformed Theology (New York: T&T Clark, repr. 2020), 188.

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