Life of Dr Owen

Translation

John Owen, D.D., born in the county of Oxford, the son of an eminent minister, himself more eminent, and worthy to be enrolled among the first divines of the age; furnished with human literature in all its kinds, and in its highest degrees, he called forth all his knowledge in an orderly train to serve the interests of religion, and minister in the sanctuary of his God. In divinity, practic, polemic, and casuistical, he excelled others, and was in all equal to himself. The Arminian, Socinian, and Popish errors, those hydras, whose contaminated breath and deadly poison infested the church, he, with more than Herculean labour, repulsed, vanquished, and destroyed. The whole economy of redeeming grace, revealed and applied by the Holy Spirit, he deeply investigated, and communicated to others, having first felt its divine energy, according to its draught in the holy Scriptures, transfused into his own bosom. Superior to all terrene pursuits, he constantly cherished, and largely experienced, that blissful communion with Deity he so admirably describes in his writings. While on the road to heaven, his elevated mind almost comprehended its full glories and joys. When he was consulted on cases of conscience, his resolutions contained the wisdom of an oracle. He was a scribe every way instructed in the mysteries of the kingdom of God. In conversation he held up to many, in his public discourses to more, in his publications from the press to all, who were set out for the celestial Zion, the effulgent lamp of evangelical truth, to guide their steps to immortal glory. While he was thus diffusing his divine light, with his own inward sensations, and the observations of his afflicted friends, his earthly tabernacle gradually decayed, till at length his deeply-sanctified soul, longing for the fruition of its God, quitted the body. In younger age, a most comely and majestic form; but in the latter stages of life, depressed by constant infirmities, emaciated with frequent diseases, and above all crushed under the weight of intense and unremitting studies, it became an incommodious mansion for the vigorous exertions of the spirit in the service of its God. He left the world on a day dreadful to the church by the cruelties of men, but blissful to himself by the plaudits of his God, August 24, 1683, aged 67. — Translated by Dr Gibbons.