The Practical Divinity of Universal Learning

‘Scottish and English Christians are greatly indebted to George Ella for reviving and greatly expanding their knowledge of the tireless and many-sided work of one of their own Christian scholars, who lived in troubled times and laboured in many parts of Europe as well as in his own country to expand learning and to foster international Protestant understanding.’ Roger T. Beckwith, M.A., B.D., D.D. Former Warden, Latimer House, Oxford. ‘George Ella has written a rich and compelling account of a seminal seventeenth-century figure. Scholars of puritanism and its intellectual contexts across the disciplines will be enormously in his debt.’ Prof. Dr. Crawford Gibben, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., F.R. Hist.S., F.T.C.D. Trinity College, Dublin George M. Ella, born February 1939 in Yorkshire, England, has lived most of his life on the European Continent. He is a retired Senior Civil Servant formerly employed in teaching, post-graduate teacher-training, chairing examination boards and curricula work. He holds degrees from London, Hull, Uppsala, Essen, Duisburg and Marburg universities with doctorates in English Literature and Theology. Dr. Ella has written regularly since the seventies for a number of magazines and newspapers and published numerous books on Church History, including biographies of William Cowper, William Huntington, James Hervey, John Gill, Augustus Montague Toplady, Isaac McCoy and Henry Bullinger besides works on doctrine and education. He is currently finishing the third volume of his series ‘Mountain Movers’; a biography of John Durie; a work on Law and Gospel and further study material for the Martin Bucer Seminar. Dr. Ella is still internationally active as a lecturer and is a Vice-President of the Protestant Reformation Society. He is keenly interested in missionary work and has written on the spread of the Gospel amongst the Samë people of Lapland, the people of India and the Native Americans. This present volume follows Dr. Ella’s ‘The Covenant of Grace and Christian Baptism’, also published by the Martin Bucer Seminar. George Ella is married to Erika Ella, née Fleischman, a former government administrator, and they have two sons Mark (41), Director of a Polytechnic College in Bremerhaven and Robin (39), Leading Senior Physician in a newly-built Geriatric and Psychiatric clinic in Dessau.