All Things for Good

An exposition of one verse — “all things work together for good to them that love God” — taken slowly enough to be worth something. Watson divides it into the best things working for good and the worst things working for good, and it is the second half that people remember: affliction, temptation, desertion and even sin's remainder pressed into service.

He published it in 1663 under the title A Divine Cordial. The year before, the Act of Uniformity had put some two thousand ministers out of their pulpits, Watson among them. A book arguing that all things work for good to those who love God is a different book when its author has just lost his living for refusing to sign, and his examples of affliction are not hypothetical.

The first half is not filler. Watson works through the best things — the attributes of God, the promises, the intercession of Christ, the ministry of angels, the communion of saints — and the effect of taking them slowly is that the second half lands on someone who has already been reminded what is on their side. He also insists on the verse's second clause: the promise is made to those who love God, and he spends a chapter asking how a person would know.

Watson is the most quotable of the Puritans — short sentences, hard images, no padding. If the length of the others has put you off, start here.