1645 THOMAS GATAKER. Westminster Assembly Puritan Takes a Break from Military Civil War to Fight Theological Civil War.

This one fascinates me. Deep in the heat of the English Civil War, serving as a pastor at Rotherhith and a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, the aging Thomas Gataker [1574-1654] takes the time to engage in theological controversy. 

Gataker seemed always in the thick of it. He was a moderate in the Westminster Assembly, which made him fair target for both those in favor of more generous religious liberty and for those in favor of a Presbyterian-Parliament alliance for governance. He had supported episcopacy at one point in his life and found himself always defending accusations on that front as well.

But here he is, engaged in a public controversy with well-known Antimonians, Tobias Crisp and John Eaton. It's a solid piece of theological-pastoral writing. He is concerned with the idea that the "righteousness of Christ" prevents even the slightest defect in His children. Gataker was no dour person. In fact, one of his life-long pastoral concerns was proclaiming that all earth's joys were but shadows and ghosts of things to come and to be sipped as foretastes of the eternal kingdom. But he saw this doctrine as preventative of self-reflection in real saints, and liable to self-deception among the hypocrites. 

An excellent work, and quite scarce.  

Gataker, Thomas. Gods Eye on His Israel: Or, A Passage of Balaam, out of Numbers 23.21 Containing Matter very Seasonable and Suitable to the Times; Expounded and Cleared from Antinomian Abuse; with Application to the Present Estate of Things with Us. London. Printed by E. G. for Foulke Clifton, and are to be sold at his shop on New Fish-Street-Hill under Margarets Church, 1645. 99pp. 

Very nicely preserved complete English Civil War sermon from the Cromwellian era. Complete as issued, removed from a larger sammelband at some point with relevant flotsam on spine and in need of resewing. Textually crisp. Rare on the market.