The spiritual diary of the seventeenth century is the first and most important precedent for the evangelical diaries. As observed in Ch. 1, self-examination and related forms of introspection emerged as significant devotional practices among English Protestants about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth in the context of new forms of personal discipline associated with experimental Calvinism.[13] Devotional manuals such as Richard Rogers's, Seven Treatises (1603) devoted a great deal of attention to the examen of conscience as 'a reckoning to the Lord at the end of the day', and he himself kept a detailed spiritual diary.[14] In the middle of the seventeenth century, Isaac Ambrose, a leading Puritan divine, likewise advocated self-examination in Media: the Middle Things (1649) as one of the 'means, duties, ordinances, both secret, private and publike, for continuance and increase of a godly life', and he explicitly added directions for the practice of keeping a diary or day-book or register (he uses all three terms) as a useful way to do this. In the diary the Christian was able to observe 'something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God'. Ambrose began keeping such a diary in 1641 and provided several excerpts for the reader from January 1641 to May 1649.[15] A few years later John Beadle introduced his Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (16560 by explaining that his practice of diary-keeping was something more like a treasury of praise. Just as Israel recorded the mighty acts of God, so might a Christian keep 'a rich treasury of experience'. And for this, one must needs 'keep a constant Diary...of all Gods gracious dealings with them'. There were in fact three leaves that one ought to read daily to make up this diary: 'the black leaf of thy own and other sins...the white leaf of Gods goodnesse..the red leaf of Gods judgments felt'.[16]
[13] See further, Tom Webster, 'Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality', The Historical Journal 39 (1996), 33-56.
[14] Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (1603), 399-404; M.M. Knappen (ed.), Two Elizabethan Diaries (Gloucester, Mass., 1966).
[15] Isaac Ambrose, Media: the Middle Things (1649), 69-85.
[16] John Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (1656), from the unpaginated Epistle Dedicatory by Beadle and the essay 'To the Reader' by John Fuller.
