utilizes the image of the kisses of his mouth from Song of Songs 1:2.^155 In a letter to
John Gordon he wrote, “and now many a sweet, sweet, soft kiss, many perfumed,
well-smelled kisses, and embracements have I received of my royal Master. He and I
have had much love together.”^156 Sibbes devoted a full sermon to this text.^157 Thomas
Shepard employs yet another dimension of the Puritan use of sexual imagery in
sermons, “but now when laid in the bosom of Christ, when sucking the breasts of the
grace of Christ, when you can go no farther, though thou wert in heaven, for there is
no other happiness there, now sit still contented.”^158 By the end of the seventeenth-
century some scholars detect a growing trend to distance one’s self from the lush and
erotic language of Song of Songs and spiritual marriage.^159 Winship comments that
clergy “tended to focus more on the reasonableness of their version of Christianity
than upon its mysteries.”^160 However, Godbeer asserts that Winship is mistaken in his
reading of the sources and that from approximately the midpoint of the seventeenth-
century into the first quarter of the eighteenth-century the actual usage of erotic
language increased and became more personal, intimate, and loving.^161 William
Sherlock’s verbal attacks on John Owen and other Puritans who emphasized the
experiential centrality of union with Christ is another reflection of this. Sherlock’s
critique was against the subjective intimacy and emotional nature of a believers’
relationship with Christ through spiritual marriage. He maintained the metaphor of
155
examined in chapter 3. The language is prominent in Isaac Ambrose’s writing on experience and will be
(^156) Rutherford, Letters, 346. This language is abundant in Rutherford, see Letters,
87,164, 186, 226, 251, 336, 342, 443, 512, 572, 632, etc. 157
Sibbes, Spouse, Her Earnest Desire, 197-208. The use of kissing imagery
saturates Puritan writings. 158
159 Shepard, Parable of Ten Virgins, 592, cf. 66.^
160 Achinstein, “Romance of the Spirit”, 414 in reference to Isaac Watts.^
161 Winship, “Behold the Bridegroom Cometh!” 178. Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 56, 74, 76^ - 7, 355n58.