According to Dr Mark Dever, ‘This little booklet is a devotional classic.’ It contains a ‘gospel map’ that reveals the way to the ‘riches of the covenant.’ With great skill and an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Scripture, Joseph Alleine (c.1634–68) conveys the ‘exceeding great and precious promises’ of God, and sets them forth in such a way as to bring encouragement and delight to the Christian believer. He demonstrates how, by embracing these promises, the believer is enabled to overcome all the assaults of unbelief. ‘Faith,’ he says, ‘makes its claim to all the benefits of the covenant, and stirs up the soul to joy and thankfulness.’ It is little wonder to learn that Alleine’s treatment of God’s precious promises has proved an effective balm to countless weary souls for more than 300 years.
Joseph Alleine (1634 - 1668)
Joseph Alleine was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, in 1633. He loved and served the Lord from childhood. From eleven years of age onward, “the whole course of his youth was an even-spun thread of godly conversation,” wrote one observer. The times, however, are perilous. Charles I was beheaded and his son, Charles II, at the head of a Scottish army, is defeated by Cromwell’s Parliamentarians at Worcester as young Joseph Alleine sets off for Corpus Christi College. At Oxford, Alleine would sit at the feet of such divines as John Owen and Thomas Goodwin.Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted, the best known of his nineteen treatises, was first printed in 1671 (subtitle: A Serious Treatise on Conversion) and subsequently printed as A Sure Guide to Heaven in 1675—the title given to the latest Banner of Truth Trust editions. It is a powerful manual on conversion and the call of the gospel, as the chapter titles reveal: Mistakes about Conversion; The Nature of Conversion; The Necessity of Conversion; The Marks of the Unconverted; The Miseries of the Unconverted; Directions to the Unconverted; The Motives to Conversion.
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