Love Quote by William Ames

Ames is doing something characteristically Reformed and quietly radical: he shrinks “spiritual communion” down to two ordinary, repeatable practices, and then treats them as the engine of religious life. Not ecstatic visions. Not a ladder of mystical achievements. Just hearing the word and prayer - a two-way traffic where God speaks and the believer answers. The intent is architectural: to show how faith, hope, and love don’t hover as private feelings but harden into a disciplined exchange that can be taught, tested, and organized.

The subtext is polemical. In the early 1600s, “communion with God” was a contested phrase, claimed by sacramental systems, monastic spirituality, and various mystical traditions. Ames, a Calvinist theologian shaped by Puritan priorities, relocates communion from sacred objects and priestly mediation into practices available to any attentive listener. “Hearing” signals the authority of preached Scripture, the idea that God’s primary mode is address, not spectacle. “Prayer” is the authorized reply: not bargaining, not performance, but dependence made verbal.

Context matters because this is a period when Protestant communities were building an identity around the sermon as the central public event and the household as a spiritual unit. Ames’s “double act” reads like a liturgy stripped to its load-bearing beams. It also carries an implicit psychological claim: the virtues named at the start (faith, hope, love) are sustained by rhythm. You keep them alive by returning, again and again, to being spoken to and answering back.