Vilified by John Vicars in a 1647 Puritan tract as "a known profane pot-companion ... and otherwise a loose-liver, a temporizing Ceremony monger, and malignant against the parliament," Thomas Adams was acclaimed in the nineteenth century as the "prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians." His condemnation for presumed anti-Puritan leanings and his rehabilitation as an eminent Puritan divine suggest the ironies of politics and literary history. Like his better-known contemporary Bishop Joseph Hall, Adams, though Calvinist in his theology, cannot be called a Puritan in any strict use of that vexed term. He maintained a moderate position within the Church of England, suffering persecution for this stance amid the political and ecclesiastical controversies that racked England during the first half of the seventeenth century. And like Hall, whose works he admired and imitated, Adams could appease neither High Church Laudians nor Puritans during those crucial years that hurtled England toward civil war.
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