Different Puritan Literature?

[FivePointSpurgeonist]

I'm fairly new to reading the Puritans and this may be a dumb question, but could someone help me understand the differences in literature?

I have several complete works on Logos ie. Stephen Charnock, George Swinnock, John Flavel, Jonathan Edwards, and more volumes of other Puritans.

I can generally see which is a sermon, what about all the other writings? treatises, discourses, books etc. How can I know what is what, and can you give any advice on reading these works?

 

[psycheives]

Often the preface will tell you the context of the work. Reading these opening pages will probably help you get context and historical setting and understand who he is writing for or against.

Or Logos will tell you: Stephen Charnock: 64 theological discourses and sermons

Since the Works have 1,000s of pages, I usually pick a topic I'm interested in and read that. If you want to get a brief overview, you can set a time limit for yourself and speed skim a work. Sometimes I'll give myself 20 minutes or 1 hour to speed through a book, catching highlights and key points.

One of the main things I do is search the entire works by topic or key words. If I want to know what someone taught on a topic, I can search the whole works for key terms. Hope this helps!

 

[bookslover]

Generally speaking, a "discourse" is the same thing as a sermon.