The Bedsore Club

PURITAN BOOKS & LITERATURE: KNOWING THE LORD JESUS CHRIST Of what value is it to read the Puritans? Here is what Dr. C. Matthew McMahon had to say in his article, “Take and Read Book Reviews” McMahon writes, Do you like to read the Puritans? I love reading them and cannot express enough how important it is to read some of the great works of these most noble divines. It is not just an exercise in reading, but an adventure in practical and theological piety that procures as a result. How excellent is it to read the best writers on a given subject. The puritans were no doubt the best. Between the reformers and the Puritans, nothing even comes close to true Christian piety outside of the Bible. All the major revivals were executed by God under the guise of the same Puritan theological stance, and the same reformed theology as what you will find in the pages of these books.

Drink deep for the well is almost inexhaustible in our day. How wonderful it is that God had providentially seen the reprinting of many of these great classic works and tomes of learning. Come, let us sit together at the feet of the Puritans that we may see Christ better and more intimately in the scriptures. The words of Dr. C. Matthew McMahon on the importance of reading the Puritans. For much more information on the Puritans, including free and discounted Puritan books, Puritan mp3s, Puritan digital downloads, and Puritan videos, as well as the Puritan Hard Drive, please visit Still Waters Revival Books at PuritanDownloads.com.

Introductory Video for SWRB Puritan Hard Drive Hello and welcome to this introductory video for the Puritan Hard Drive by Still Waters Revival Books. You will soon see why the Puritan Hard Drive is a technological revolution in Puritan, Reformation and Covenanter studies. For over 25 years, Still Waters Revival Books has provided the worldwide Christian community with the finest in Puritan and Reformation resources, including classic and contemporary printed works, inspirational sermons, audio books and videos. In recent years our collection of great Christian works has more than doubled, growing to a library that would occupy nearly 130 CD’s! The Puritan Hard Drive is a tremendous library of over 12,500 Christian resources on an external hard drive that fits easily in your pocket or purse! It features the works of more than 800 classic and contemporary authors, including John Bunyan, Matthew Henry, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Manton, Samuel Rutherford and Charles Spurgeon… Timeless works, like The English Hexapla, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Sketches of the Covenanters… and from the Puritan Divines, the complete 34 volume set of the Puritan Fast Sermons. Many of these books are rare and classic titles unavailable anywhere else! Over 25 years in the making, the Puritan Hard Drive is simply the most extensive Christian collection ever released!

The puritan hard drive comprises – More than 12,500 Puritan and Reformation resources – Over half a million pages of great Christian books! – More than ten thousand sermons and audio books in mp3 format, providing years of listening enjoyment! – Over 70 videos… – All in all, a library of thousands of exceptional works, accessible and affordable to everyone! Included on the Puritan Hard Drive is a custom search engine that makes it easy to find, browse and organize the resources in your library… and much easier than trying to wade through a typical file directory on your computer! Connect the Puritan Hard Drive to any available USB port on your PC or Mac. The drive is self-contained, so there’s no software to install or configure! Within moments you can begin exploring the library by running the custom search interface. It’s also a knowledge base with information about each work, including the author, title, description, keywords and subject category. For you techies, this database contains over four and a half million records of information!

For all of us, that means we have an extremely powerful search and study tool! A list of all resources on the Puritan Hard Drive is available for viewing at any time. Here we see that the list of print materials contains over 2100 works. This view is ideal for browsing all documents or media files in alphabetical order, by title or by author. The list is rather long, so using the ‘search’ function of the knowledge base is the easiest way of finding resources of interest to you. For example, let’s say that my pastor recommended a book by James Henley Thornwell. I can search the knowledge base by author by typing his name in this field or by selecting it from the complete list of nearly 800 authors provided at the click of a button. Clicking the ‘search’ button executes the search and immediately returns a list of all resources by this author. In this case, I’ve quickly found the book that was recommended to me. Clicking on the green icon opens the resource, allowing me to begin my reading. Further details about any resource can be found by clicking on the book cover icon, which opens the ‘resource detail page’. From here I can browse the details of this work… I can add and save my own notes about it… and open the resource for reading, listening or viewing. Your search capabilities don’t end there.

The majority of the rare, classic works on the Puritan Hard Drive now contain an embedded index. This means that the actual text of these resources is now fully searchable for the first time in history! Enter a search term in Adobe Acrobat Reader. In this case, a search for the word ‘scripture’ yields instant results. Having searchable text also makes it possible to highlight, copy and paste the text into another document, such as a sermon, a lesson plan or a school paper. Less time spent on research means more time for reading, studying and appreciating the resources in your library… Just another reason why the Puritan Hard Drive is a technological revolution in puritan, reformation and covenanter studies! Thank you for watching this introduction to the Puritan Hard Drive by Still Waters Revival Books, serving Christians worldwide for over 25 years! Join us in our other videos as we demonstrate even more features and functionality of the Puritan Hard Drive. For more information, visit us on the web at PuritanDownloads.com. Until then, be well and god bless! “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” (Proverbs 4:7)

Additional Benefits of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) There are additional benefits to the Puritan Hard Drive as a result of having so much book material in searchable (text) format. Because we now have the text for all the books that are OCRed, we have produced indices for every book that is OCRed. In a number of cases this is the first time indices are available for some of the most important Puritan and Reformed writings that have ever been available! All the extensive programmatically produced indices for the OCRed books are also appended to the actual PDF (book) files on the Puritan Hard Drive, giving you the ability to quickly and easily dig deep into this treasure trove of classic and contemporary Puritan and Reformed books using these sizable and substantial indices. Moreover, the SWRB produced indices often contain many more references than most indices you would find in books that may already have indices (from the original publisher). The new SWRB generated indices also have the advantage of referring to the page in the PDF, rather than the actual page in the book, which makes it much easier for you to speedily access any indexed word or phrase in the book (and you are still able to see the original book page number when you arrive at your destination — if you need that reference for any purpose). Because having searchable and copy/cut/pastable text available to you (with additional and complimentary indexing search features) will be so valuable to your studies, we have added some great new features to the SWRB KnowledgeBase program on the Puritan Hard Drive — related to the many new indices that will be available. You are able to search for indexed words or phrases using a built-in “help screen” that will present all indexed words or phrases related to your search term. The most amazing thing about this screen/function is that once you click on an indexed word or phrase, you are presented with a Search Results screen that will show you every book on the Puritan Hard Drive that contains the indexed word or phrase you choose!

This is phenomenally helpful for getting right to the most specific of indexed words or phrases in every text-based book (which is most of the books on the Puritan Hard Drive), across the complete Puritan Hard Drive. Pastors are able to quickly research whole sermons (or even series of sermons) using this feature, from many of the best Christian books ever published. Seminary students may use this feature to almost instantly locate all the best Puritan and Reformation source material for papers and other course requirements. Fathers and mothers can learn about all the most scriptural methods for raising godly children with just a few mouse clicks. And the uses go on and on for just this single, unprecedented, new feature on the Puritan Hard Drive!