Please remember to mention that you saw this offer at 
A Puritan’s Mind.  

If you mention my site, SWRB will donate a small bit of the proceeds to the furtherance of this ministry.  When ordering by phone tell them verbally, and when ordering on the Internet use the “Type Requested Items In The Space Below” box to note that you saw this offer here, as well as the CDs you are ordering.  Thanks for your help!

5 Stars
Reformation Bookshelf CD set and Puritan Bookshelf CD set
1624 works, 101 free books, 
made available by Still Waters Revival Books
62 CDs total 

This review concerns two CD sets that Still Waters Revival Books has made available to the public.  Though I usually review books, this particular set of CDs required a review based on the extensive nature of the CDs and the information contained on them.  This will not be a formal review, in the sense of reviewing each book on the CDs as to whether they are good or bad, or whether I agreed with them or not.  Rather, this review concerns itself with the information attainable through the CDs and the format they are published in, as well as ease of use.

There are many book publishers today that have taken up the task of publishing old Puritan and Reformed books for the glory of Jesus Christ.  For instance, Banner of Truth Trust, Soli Deo Gloria, International Outreach, Sprinkle Publications, Reformation Heritage Press, Old Paths Publications, and others, are among those who are serving the Christian community with books that need to be published and read.  The revival of Puritan and Reformed literature in the last 50 years, beginning with the popularity of the Banner of Truth, is something every Christian reader should be grateful for.  The expertise and theological precision that the Reformers and Puritans possessed in exegeting the Word of God can only be rivaled by men like Augustine or Aquinas.  Reformation and Post-Reformation dogmatics provide the Christian community with tools to study and interpret the Bible, as well as refresh the Christian through sound exposition and godly sermons of the Reformers and Puritans of old.  It is no doubt, then, that the greatest revival in the history of the church other than the coming of Jesus Christ in the fullness of time and the expansion of the Gospel through the apostolic witness, was during the time of the Reformation and the Post-Reformation through the Puritans. 

It cannot be denied that Reformation theology took root and grew even after the Reformers and Puritans had gone to their heavenly rest.  Certainly men like Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Davies, and the Princeton Theologians at the turn of the 20^th century continued to cultivate Reformed Theology after the manner and exegetical prowess of their theological forefathers.  So it is with thankfulness that such publications have been made available to the Christian community.  However, if the Christian were to buy all of these works, those at least that are available, they would certainly have to purchase thousands and thousands of dollars of books over a long period of time in order to gain a substantial library (especially if they were in pastoral ministry or some academic circle) unless they were providentially wealthy.  For example, a library of about 1000 books in today’s Christian market, if one was to buy the choice volumes of puritan and Reformed literature, would cost anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000. Martin Luther’s works alone run $1400 (and that is a bargain in many ways).  So what does the serious theological student, or the church-going laymen do?  How can they instantly attain a large library of choice theological works without going into financial debt?

Though the smell of a plastic CD can never replace the smell of a new theological book delivered to your home, software today has opened up the ability to increase a student’s library by exponential amounts.  Still Waters Revival Books has offered the professors, pastors, theological students and church laymen one of the most valuable CD sets of Reformed and Puritan literature to date.  Certainly Christians should be grateful for all the software providers already digitizing published books on CD.  These are a wonderful help toward exegetical  study.  However, SWRB has compiled over 1500 Reformed and Puritan works on 62 CDs that, for the most part, are not available anywhere else but in an extensive theological library, or a rare and antiquitous book room.  In fact, many of the books that are on this CD collection are not in Seminary libraries at all because the works have never been transcribed or modernized for the public.

First, note should be taken of the format of the CDs.  There are two CD sets – the Reformation Bookshelf CD Collection and the Puritan Bookshelf CD Collection.  The Reformation Bookshelf Collection contains a total of 769 works, and the Puritan Bookshelf Collection contains a total of 855 works.  They come on 62 CD’s.  The Reformation Bookshelf CDs contain over 20,000 pages of text on the largest CD, and on the smallest about 9500 pages.  For the Puritan Bookshelf CD the largest contains 13,000 pages and the smallest about 4600 pages.  They are in the Adobe Acrobat format, and the Adobe Reader is found free for those who can download it off the Internet.  Each CD launches Adobe Acrobat as you place them in the drive and a main contents page for each CD is readily available.  SWRB has created a special “table of contents” page for each CD, and has arranged the CDs by both topic and commentary exposition.  One CD may contain all of the information pertinent to the Gospels, and another to Covenant Theology.  The main “table of contents” page for each CD allows for a user-friendly interface so that the title of the work, the author and a brief explanation of the work appear with hyperlinks to each work.  This means that as long as the user can place the CD into a working computer that contains the Adobe program, his difficulty in utilizing the CD is minimal.  If one can browse the internet, he will be able to browse these CDs with no problem whatsoever.

On the last CD of each set SWRB has created a comprehensive index containing all the books found in the entire CD collection for each set.  There are two indexes, then, listed by author for the two sets, and two indexes also listed by title for each set.  Personally, I printed these out.  You can certainly look at these on the computer, but I make notes on the index as to what I have read, or information I want to retrieve again.  So having a hard copy of the entire collection can be very helpful.  These indexes are in text form, not image form, and are searchable in Adobe (I will explain the important difference of text verses image format later). 

It seemed awkward to me to continually place in and take out each CD as I desired to use the materials after looking them up in the printed index I had made.  The set is immense, housing 62 separate CDs packed with information.  And, also, I did not want to wear out the CDs by continually placing them in and out of the drive.  CDs, after continual use, begin to get scratched.  If you are a computer user, and have some technical skill, here is what I did to make the experience of using these CDs even more user-friendly.  Each CD contains 600 megs of information at the most.  That runs about 40 gigabytes of information total.  I bought a 100 gigabyte drive and installed this in my computer as my “F” drive.  I then copied each individual CD onto this drive in its own folder marked Puritan CD 1, Puritan CD 2, etc.  Now, instead of having to load in a CD every time I want to see information on it, I can simply access them on the drive.  I have stored the CDs in a safe place in case of a computer crash to reload them if necessary.  This has made working with the CDs much more efficient and easy to use.  I simply open up Adobe’s program, point to a given CD, and then click on the book I would like to read or use for research based on my hard copy of the printout I made of all the works on all the CDs.  In essence, I have a 1500 volume library of the choicest Reformed and Puritan books at the click of a mouse. This only cost me an extra $100 for the hard-drive and was well worth it. 

Let us look for a moment at the “worth” of the CDs.  Both sets contain material that ranges from contemporary papers, to works over 500 years old.  For instance, the Reformed Bookshelf CDs contain works by William Cunningham (such as his Historical Theology set), much older works such as Williams Ames’ Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies in Worship, and very old works such as the complete Works of John Knox.  Cunningham’s works are available to buy in book form for about $40 through various book-sellers.  Ames’ works are not found anywhere except by Xeroxed copy from SWRB.  Knox’s works were once reprinted, but have been out of print for quite a long time.  Yet, all three of these are available on the Reformation CD collection, and are at the fingertips of the user.  To give you an example, the first CD of the Reformation Bookshelf Collection contains authors such as John Knox, John Calvin, the Westminster Divines, the Covenanted Church of Scotland (General Assembly), the famous Synod of Dort (1618-1619), Thomas Manton, George Gillespie, Samuel Rutherford, Matthew Henry, C.H. Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, John Brown (of Wamphray), John Brown (of Haddington), Francis Turretin, James Durham, John Howie, William Hetherington, David Steele, Samuel Miller, John Girardeau, Edward Fisher, Robert Shaw, A.W. Pink, Loraine Boettner, Augustus Toplady, Andrew Symington, Patrick Fairbairn, William Roberts, Richard Baxter, William Cunningham, John Anderson, Andrew Clarkson, David Scott, John Cunningham, George Smeaton, Larry Birger, Francis Rouse, Dr. F. Nigel Lee, Bill Mencarow, Thomas M'Crie, Hugh Latimer, David Calderwood, Andrew Melville, David Hay Fleming, John Welch, J.C. McFeeters, A.F. Mitchell, Peter Lorimer, P. Hume Brown, Taylor Innes, James Kerr, and William Morison (and there are 29 more CDs in this collection!).  On the first CD of the Puritan Bookshelf Collection we find John Arrowsmith, Oliver Bowles, Anthony Burgess, David Dickson, William Gouge, Alexander Henderson, George Hutcheson, Augustine Marlorate, Steven Marshall, George Newton, George Petter, Robert Rollock, Thomas Shepard, and John Trapp.   Most of the works available throughout these CDs are not available except on these CDs, or the privileged few that deal in rare and antique books which would run in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to obtain.  To collect these works alone would be practically impossible because of the rarity of most of the works in the collection.  The worth of these to the soul is even more important than their affect to your wallet.

There are three aspects that make this CD collection invaluable:  1) cost for worth, 2) availability, and 3) simplicity of use.  First, this is a CD collection that contains over 1500 works for under $700 (American Funds).  In seminary, we are told that the pastor would do well to have around 1000 books.  1000 books times $20 a book (on average) runs $20,000.  Who has $20,000 to drop into books at any one given time?  Maybe that is possible over the course of 20 years, maybe, but not all at once.  This collection alone contains one and a half times that amount and runs under $700.  Except for contemporary collections (like Hendricksen’s New Testament Commentaries for example) this CD collection contains the best literature you will find in reformed circles.  It is an entire theological library of experimental, theological and practical Reformed religion to date, with works penned and preached by the greatest theologians in the history of the Christian Church.  Upon that note alone, this collection is a must have for the pastor and theological student.  In knowing the value of this information for pastors and theological students, SWRB makes obtaining this collection for anyone financially stressed very easy.  If you cannot afford to pay for the whole set at once, they have a payment plan ($25 a month) that one can utilize in order to obtain the set.  In some cases they are even more charitable, so it would be well worth contacting them.

Secondly, the availability of the works provided on these CDs would be impossible to collect on your own, and it would take a lifetime to wait and see if Reformed and Puritan Publishers would ever get to all of them (the extensiveness of the collections make it, in my estimation of what has already been reprinted, impossible for them to get to all of them in my lifetime, if at all).  Some of the works are exceedingly rare and unavailable anywhere.  Some may be perused under glass in an antiquitous rare book room at a well-known university.  For example, The Works of William Twisse is unavailable.  You cannot buy the set anywhere, but they are on this CD.  The same can be said for the works of William Ames, or William Perkins.  No complete set is available anywhere, not to mention men like Robert Rolluck, or Daniel Cawdry.  If you have been exposed to printed works by Thomas Watson, or John Owen, then it is inevitable that the sweetness of such theological literature rubs off on you and you desire to read more of them.  How would you feel in obtaining 800 works of like-mindedness from Puritan divines, most of which could never be obtained in any other manner?  Thomas Manton’s works are available on this CD set.  They are out of print, but can be obtained for about $700-800 used.  For less than that amount you could obtain all the CDs, which include Manton, and just about every other good work by both Reformers, Puritans and many 18^th and 19^th century preachers and theologians.

Thirdly, the ease of use by way of the software makes rummaging through the voluminous sets simple.  The Adobe program is not difficult to use at all and makes scanning through these works very easy.  If you are technically savvy and have a Palm Pilot or handheld computer, these works can also be transferred to your palm for reading while on the bus, on a plane, on a train, on vacation, while working out – just about anywhere. 

Do you like listening to books? If you like MP3s, there are 205 of them on the CD sets.  They have the complete Westminster Standards on CD for you to listen to, as well as works by Calvin, Knox, Owen and others.

Though much has been said about the “pros” of the set, there are three “cons” that are worth noting, but ought not to deter the reader from obtaining such an invaluable library.  First, for the theological writer or pastor who wishes to use this software for “cutting and pasting” into a sermon or paper, this is not possible.  SWRB has made these old works available by scanning them in image format.  This means that most of the works on the CDs (except for some of the contemporary papers written by men from SWRB or others) are pictures.  They are scanned images of the pages of rare books.  That means that you cannot search the books by using Adobe’s Search function (because you cannot search a picture), and you cannot cut and paste from the works because they are pictures and not text.  Some of the contemporary papers written can be used in this way and can be copied and pasted.  But, for example, the works of John Knox, William Twisse, William Perkins, etc., are pictures of the pages of the books in successive order.  You can read them, but you have to type out by hand what you would want to use. (A Puritan’s Mind is in the process of making some of these works available in a typed out format and text form in Adobe.  Click here for more details.)  Or, you can print out the page you would like to use in a sermon, and simply highlight what you would read from the pulpit.

Secondly, book lovers often do not like to read books on computer.  Since these are scanned images you can either sit at your computer and read them, or you can print them out.  However, printing them out would cost you quite a bit of money in ink since these are not texts that can be printed in draft form, and need to be printed as pictures one page at a time. Manton’s works run 22 volumes, as an example.  That would be a lot of printing and a lot of ink just for that one set.  But if you can handle sitting at the computer to read them, then this should not be a problem at all, especially for research in academic circles.  And printing out sections of these works is certainly viable by printing standards in any case.  Printing important sections should not run up your ink bill too much.

Thirdly, about half the information on the Reformation Bookshelf CD is written in normal English, but about half that set and about the entire Puritan Bookshelf Set is written in old English.  Theological students usually do not care that a work is written in old English, but for some this can be difficult to read.  For instance, John Calvin’s Sermons on Timothy and Titus reprinted by Banner of Truth is a facsimile published in old English.  “V” is “U”, “S” looks like an “F”, “VV” is “W”, etc.  That is easily overcome after reading just one book in that format.  Most of the works on the Puritan CD are written in old English in this fashion and take some getting used to.  Some of the works, like Tyndale’s and Beza’s works, are written in old English calligraphy and make reading them much more difficult. (A Puritan’s Mind had made some of Tyndale’s work already available on their first CD – it is both in normal type and modern English.  Click here for more information.) In other words, these works are raw, old Reformed and Puritan writings containing all their barbarisms and old English calligraphy.  Personally, I do not mind this at all and, as a matter of fact, enjoy reading these old works in their old format.  It gives one a sense of the past. 

Also, in terms of their antiquated English style and verbiage, many scholars who have been using the CDs believe these are better than the retypeset works that are published by Reformed book houses because sentences are changed, whole paragraphs are often missing, and words are left out by the book publishers who are “modernizing” these works for the public.  In this format, the work is intact, and it is an image of the actual book itself.  Personally, I love reading them this way.

Though these three “cons” exist, this should not deter anyone from purchasing the CD set that is serious about Reformed and Puritan literature.  In my estimation, every pastor and theological student should obtain them.  The $25 payment plan (interest free) is more than reasonable to obtain this library of inestimable worth.  Those who read the Reformers, Puritans, and those who followed in their footsteps, know the depth and practical insights that these men had of the Bible and of Jesus Christ.  I am not prompting you to buy these CDs because you should venerate the Reformers or Puritan divines; no, not at all.  Rather, these men lead us to Christ.  Christ is glorified in their works.  They were master exegetes and theological redwoods.  In reading them, quoting them, and putting into practice what they say about the Bible, we come to know God and His only Son Jesus Christ all the more because they knew their Bibles so well.  We do not want to waste our time reading books that are only “good.”  We must “redeem the time”.  We ought to desire to have a library of books that are the best we can find on every topic we read.  Those are the works that glorify Christ the most, and present a clear picture of Him in His Word.  The Reformers and Puritans, and those theologians and pastors who followed, were such men.  So, if it is possible by any means, obtain these sets while they are readily available.  Do not let this opportunity pass you by.  I think they are fabulous, and I use them all the time.

Information about the sets, what is contained on them, and purchasing information, can be found here: Reformation Bookshelf Set, Puritan Bookshelf Set.

Please remember to mention that you saw this offer at 
A Puritan’s Mind.  

If you mention this site, SWRB will donate a small bit of the proceeds to the furtherance of this ministry.  When ordering by phone tell them verbally, and when ordering on the Internet use the “Type Requested Items In The Space Below” box to note that you saw this offer here, as well as the CDs you are ordering.  Thanks for your help!

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