Good Counsell and Advice to all the Friends of Truth - Puritan William Ames

Early life and education
Ames was born at Ipswich, and was brought up by a maternal uncle, Robert Snelling of Boxford. He was educated at the local grammar school and from 1594 at Christ's College, Cambridge.[2] He was considerably influenced by his tutor at Christ's, William Perkins, and by his successor Paul Bayne. Ames graduated BA in 1598 and MA in 1601, and was chosen for a fellowship in Christ's College.[3][4]

He was popular in the university, and in his own college. One of Ames's sermons became historical in the Puritan controversies. It was delivered in the university Church of St Mary the Great, Cambridge on 21 December 1609, and in it he rebuked sharply "lusory lotts" and the "heathenish debauchery" of the students during the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Subsequently, Ames entered into a controversy in print with Grevinchovius on universal redemption and election, and cognate problems. He brought together all he had maintained in his Coronis ad Collationem Hagiensem (A Finishing Touch to the Hague Conference)[8]—his major book. At Leiden, Ames became intimate with Hugh Goodyear, pastor of the English church there. He was sent for to The Hague by Sir Horatio Vere, the English governor of Brill, who appointed him a minister in the army of the states-general, and of the English soldiers in their service. He married a daughter of John Burges, who was Vere's chaplain, and, on his father-in-law's return to England, succeeded to his place.[4]

It was at this time he began his controversy with Simon Episcopius, who, in attacking the Coronis, railed against the author as having been "a disturber of the public peace in his native country, so that the English magistrates had