Obadiah Sedgwick

Biography

Of Magdalen Hall Oxford under William Pemble, then chaplain to Sir Horace Vere on his Dutch campaigns (a formative experience of Reformed Netherlands devotional practice). Sedgwick was rector of Coggeshall in Essex (1633) and then St Mildred Bread Street in London. At the Assembly he was one of the steadiest doctrinal Presbyterians, less polemical than Calamy but with a more popular pulpit, and a steady drafter of the Assembly's papers on doctrine. His treatises — The Doubting Believer (1641), The Anatomy of Secret Sins (posthum. 1660), The Bowels of Tender Mercy Sealed in the Everlasting Covenant (1661), and The Riches of Grace (posthum. 1657) — circulated widely as Puritan devotional reading into the eighteenth century. Died in January 1658, four years before the Great Ejection.

Principal works

• The Doubting Believer (1641)
• The Bowels of Tender Mercy Sealed in the Everlasting Covenant (1661)