“The patient man is merry indeed.... The jailers that watch him are but his pages of honour, and his very dungeon but the lower side of the vault of heaven. He kisseth the wheel that must kill him; and thinks the stairs of the scaffold of his martyrdom but so many degrees of his ascent to glory. The tormentors are weary of him. the beholders have pitty on him, all men wonder at him; and while he seems below all men, below himself, he is above nature. He hath so overcome hlmself that nothing can conquer him.”
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Thomas Adams was an English clergyman and reputed preacher. He was called "The Shakespeare of the Puritans" by Robert Southey; a Calvinist in theology, he is not accurately described as a Puritan.
Early sermons were Heaven and Earth Reconciled, and The Devil's Banquet. To Montagu he dedicated a work in 1618. In 1629 he collected into a massive folio his occasional sermons, a collection he dedicated to the parishioners of St Benet Paul's Wharf, and to the Lords Pembroke and Manchester. In 1638 appeared a long Commentary on the Second Epistle of St. Peter, dedicated to "Sir Henrie Marten, Knt."
His works have been republished in Nichol's Series of Standard Divines (3 vols, 1862), edited by Thomas Smith, and with a life by Joseph Angus, and his Commentary on the Second Epistle of St. Peter (1839) by James Sherman.