Triumphing Over Sinful Fear
T
John Flavel was well-acquainted with the things that most men fear. His first wife died in childbirth, along with their child. He was ejected from his pulpit in Dartmouth, England, in 1662 by the Act of Uniformity. Over the following decade he ministered secretly to his parishioners, under danger of arrest, in the woods and at Salstone Rock, an island in the Salcombe Estuary that is submerged at high tide, where the people would “linger in devout assembly till the rising tide drove them to their boats.”