Peter Sterry

He was chaplain to Parliamentarian general Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke and then Oliver Cromwell, a member of the Westminster Assembly,[1][2] and a leading radical Puritan preacher attached to the English Council of State.

His sermons, widely allusive,[8] were considered opaque: David Masson quotes a contemporary opinion: Of Sterry's preaching, already notoriously obscure, Sir Benjamin Rudyard had said that "it was too high for this world and too low for the other" […][9]After the Restoration, he retired to a community in East Sheen.

[12] Literary historian Vivian de Sola Pinto observes that Sterry "had exactly the qualities that Puritans like Bunyan lacked: intellectual freedom, flexibility of mind, imagination, tolerance and loving-kindness.

"[13] Sterry "united with this tenderness a wide culture, a true humanist's delight in learning and a love of beauty in all its manifestations.

[27] Robin Parry summarizes: "In many ways Sterry is an anomaly—a Puritan who was a lover of the arts and poetry, a Platonist who was a theological determinist, a deeply rational mystic, and a Calvinist universalist.