Preparing for the Lord’s Supper presents practical instruction from two Puritans. William Bradshaw’s contribution explains the dangers of taking Communion unworthily and how to prevent it. His work concludes with a set of questions to aid Christians in self-examination as they prepare for the Lord’s Supper. Bradshaw’s piece is supplemented with Arthur Hildersham’s thorough catechetical tool for understanding and properly partaking of the sacred meal. These treatises exemplify what Puritan ministers taught to common people in ordinary, obscure towns and villages as they prepared to take the Lord’s Supper. They are a similar challenge to us today to prepare ourselves thoughtfully and prayerfully before coming to the Lord’s Table. In the broadest sense, they supply a helpful guide for proving our faith through self-examination. As Bradshaw says, “The duty of trying and examining a man’s self is of use to the best of Christians.”Endorsements:“Those questions and answers wherein Hildersham has comprised the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper ... have been of singular good use to many poor souls for their worthy preparation to that ordinance. And in very deed they do more fully furnish a Christian to that whole spiritual duty than any other, in any language that I know, in so small a compass.”—John Cotton (1628) on Hildersham’s Doctrine of Communicating Worthily in the Lord’s Supper“Bradshaw’s book, and that part of it more especially wherein are laid down certain marks and signs of faith and repentance, has been, as far as I am able to deem, the only outward instrument[al] means of my conversion, through the gracious cooperation of God’s Spirit working powerfully and efficaciously upon my heart in the reading thereof.”—Thomas Foster, a seventeenth-century Bedfordshire mercer, on Bradshaw’s A Preparation to the Receiving of the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood
