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Charnock's answer is decisive and comprehensive. Against every form of human self-sufficiency — whether the natural will, the unaided intellect, or the strength of moral resolution — he demonstrates that fallen man is utterly incapable of producing his own spiritual renewal. The arguments are drawn from Scripture, from reason, and from the whole tradition of Reformed theology, and they are pressed with a weight and an accumulation of evidence that leaves no room for complacency.
But the treatise does not end in mere diagnosis. Having established man's incapacity, Charnock turns to God as the sole efficient cause of regeneration — the one who, by the sovereign operation of his Spirit, awakens the dead soul, illuminates the darkened mind, and bends the stubborn will toward himself. This is not a cold doctrinal abstraction but a doxological conclusion: the glory of regeneration belongs entirely to God.
The prose is the prose of the great Puritans at their best: dense with scripture, precise in argument, warm in application, and marked throughout by that earnest desire to bring the truth home to the conscience which distinguishes the best Puritan divinity from mere scholasticism. This edition, compiled and edited by Essie Renae Mathenia, presents Charnock's text in clear, readable form for the modern reader.
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Stephen Charnock (1628–1680) was one of the most learned and theologically penetrating of all the Puritan divines. Born in London and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge — the great nursery of Puritan ministers — he served as a chaplain in Ireland under Henry Cromwell before returning to England after the Restoration.
Ejected from his living by the Act of Uniformity in 1662 along with two thousand other Nonconformist ministers, Charnock spent nearly two decades in relative obscurity before being called, in 1675, to co-pastor a Nonconformist congregation in London with Thomas Watson. He died in 1680, leaving behind a body of work that has never gone out of print.
His masterpiece, "Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God," is one of the monuments of English theological literature — exhaustive in its scholarship, elevated in its style, and deeply devotional in its orientation. But his shorter works, including the present treatise on regeneration and his discourses on the knowledge of God, show the same qualities in a more concentrated form: an extraordinary command of scripture, a rigorous logical mind, and a pastoral heart that never loses sight of the soul's need for God.
Charnock stands in the tradition of Augustine, Calvin, and Owen, but his voice is entirely his own: more expansive than Owen, more philosophical than Watson, and possessed of a rhetorical power that makes his densest pages readable by any thoughtful Christian. He is one of the great figures of the Reformed and Puritan inheritance.
