Christ declares, "Abide in me, and I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me" ( John 15:4). A branch derives life from the vine by virtue of its union with the vine. Similarly, Christ is the vine, and we are the branches. There is a vital, organic union between us. We draw on Christ's life through the Holy Spirit, who dwells in us. We must, therefore, abide in Christ by cultivating close and constant communion with him. We must continually look "unto Jesus the author and finisher of faith" (Hebrews 12:2). The present work seeks to explain what this looking implies. It does so by turning to the writings of two largely forgotten Puritans and Baptists from the seventeenth century - Thomas Wilcox and Vavasor Powell. Together, they teach us that to abide in Christ is to behold him in his manifold roles and relations. As we do so, Christ becomes our all in all.

Without minimizing the validity of the social, political and ecclesiastical approaches to this field of study, Yuille affirms that the essence of Puritanism is found in its spirituality. He demonstrates this by turning to a relatively unknown Puritan, George Swinnock (162773). At the root of Swinnocks spirituality was his concept of the fear of God as the proper ordering of the souls faculties after the image of God. This concept is pivotal to Swinnocks spirituality because he viewed it as the Christians true principle of practice. Yuille shows the prevalence of this paradigm among Swinnocks fellow Puritans and sets it in a historical tradition extending back through Calvin to Augustine.

In "The Inner Sanctum of Puritan Piety," J. Stephen Yuille demonstrates how the doctrine of the believer's union with Christ lies at the heart of the Puritan pursuit of godliness. He analyzes the whole corpus of Flavel's writing, showing how this mystical union is set upon the backdrop of God's covenant of redemption and established on the basis of the person and work of Jesus Christ. Chapters on the nature and acts of this union help readers gain a better understanding of what this union is, while chapters on the blessings, fruit, suffering, evidence, joy, practice, and hope associated with this union show more fully the experiential direction of Flavel's approach to theology.