Assertion of Grace

Assertion of Grace or a Defense of the Doctrine of Free Justification against the lawless, unjust and uncharitable imputation of Legalists & Pharisees, or the Favorites of Antichrist, who under a pretended zeal of the Law, do pervert, dispute and obscure the simplicity of the Faith of the Gospel. Containing an Answer to that book entitled, The Rule of the Law under the Gospel, &c., which book set forth by Dr. Taylor is showed to be full of scandal and danger, as it was sent to the said Doctor a little before his death.

Robert Towne, 1592-1664, entered Oriel College, Oxford, 1612 when he was said to be aged nineteen. He graduated in 1614 and was subsequently in London associated with the followers of John Eaton, {Eaton, John Denne and the writings of Tobias Crisp, were all condemned by the persecuting arm of the Presbyterians in their Westminster Assembly, in August of 1643, who attempted to enforce by Civil Law, a regulation convicting and imprisoning any who were accused of maintaining principles contrary to their poisonous admixtures of the Law & the Gospel,} who wrote the significant book, {for which he was imprisoned in the Gatehouse, Westminster,} “the Honeycombe of Free Justification by Christ Alone.” Sometime thereafter Towne engaged in controversy with Thomas Taylor, when Taylor produced his weak exposure of those whom he stigmatized as Antinomians in 1631, entitled “Regulae Vitae,” or “the Rule of the Law under the Gospel,” to which Towne’s, “Assertion of Grace,” written in 1632, was intended as a reply, though it remained unpublished until 1644.

The full title of the work is as follows, “a Defence of the Doctrine of Free Justification against the lawless, unjust and uncharitable imputation of Legalists & Pharisees, or the Favourites of Antichrist, who under a pretended zeal of the Law, do pervert, dispute and obscure the Simplicity of the Faith of the Gospel. Containing an Answer to that book entitled, the Rule of the Law under the Gospel, &c., which book set forth by Doctor Taylor is showed to be full of scandal and danger, as it was sent to the said Doctor a little before his death, by Robert Towne, Minister of the Gospel. Which may also serve for a full Answer to a late pamphlet entitled, Antinomianism Anatomized, under the name of John Sedgwick, being for the substance of it a mere extract out of the said Doctor Taylor.” By 1655, Towne was described as a constant preacher of God’s Word, and by this time had moved to Haworth, from where he was ejected for Non-Conformity in 1662. He continued to minister to a Dissenting Congregation there until his death in 1664.