The Best Christian Classics (Pre-1900)

The Mortification of Sin

4.8★  Banner of Truth (originals); Crossway (Overcoming Sin and Temptation modernized); Christian Focus

The 1656 Puritan handbook on fighting indwelling sin - still the most rigorous spiritual diagnostic in print, four centuries on.

The Imitation of Christ

4.7★  Various (Penguin Classics, Vintage Spiritual Classics, Aeterna Press, Ignatius Press)

A 600-year-old devotional that has outsold almost every Christian book ever written - and still rearranges the modern reader who is willing to sit with it.

Spurgeon spent two decades on a verse-by-verse commentary on all 150 Psalms - his own exposition, centuries of collected commentators, and notes for preachers - and the result is still the first book many turn to when they open the Psalter.

Spurgeon's short 1886 book explaining salvation by grace through faith - written for the anxious and the seeking, given away by the millions, and still the booklet people press into a searching friend's hands.

Richard Sibbes built an entire book out of half a verse - "a bruised reed he will not break" - and four centuries on it is still the tenderest page the Puritans ever wrote.

Humility

4.6★  Various / Public domain

Andrew Murray's twelve-chapter meditation on humility as the root of every virtue - a hundred-page Victorian classic that readers across traditions still reach for when self keeps getting in the way.

Augustine's thousand-page answer to the question 'who broke Rome?' - and the book that taught the West to read history as the story of two loves, if you can find your way through it.

The unfinished masterpiece of Christian apologetics that gave us the wager and "the heart has its reasons" - fragments and flashes from one of the great minds of the seventeenth century.

Jonathan Edwards's 1746 attempt to tell genuine, Spirit-wrought religion from mere emotion - still the most searching book in print on what a real conversion actually looks like.

The 1656 Puritan charge to ministers to know and personally shepherd every soul in their care - still the most convicting book on pastoral work in print, four centuries on.

Luther’s short 1520 treatise on faith, works, and love - built around one of the most quoted paradoxes in Christian history: the Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, and a perfectly dutiful servant of all.

Bunyan’s second great allegory - the town of Mansoul, built by a king, captured by a rebel, retaken by the king’s son - denser and stranger than Pilgrim’s Progress, and overshadowed by it ever since.

The 1650 Puritan classic on heaven and the disciplined daily meditation that prepares you for it - written by a man who expected to die before he finished it.

A 14th-century English anchoress’s account of sixteen visions of Christ’s Passion and love, and the first book in English known to be written by a woman - six centuries on, still the gentlest of the great mystical classics.

The Bondage of the Will

4.5★  Various (Baker, Revell, CPH American Edition, Crossway)

Luther’s 1525 reply to Erasmus is the book he said he wanted preserved above almost everything else he wrote - a brutal, brilliant, polarizing argument about grace, freedom, and what the human will can actually do.

Confessions

4.5★  Various (Oxford Chadwick, Modern Library Ruden, Penguin, Hackett)

The book that invented spiritual autobiography and still anchors Western Christian thought sixteen centuries later - if you can pick the right translation.

The most famous sermon in American history - Edwards on the precariousness of the unconverted and the open offer of mercy, still anthologized nearly three centuries on.

An anonymous 14th-century English monk’s counsel to a young contemplative - God cannot be grasped by thought, only reached by love - and one of the strangest, most influential short classics in the Christian contemplative tradition.

A tiny, anonymous 14th-century German treatise on letting go of self-will so God can work - the medieval mystical book Martin Luther printed and praised, still read across Catholic and Protestant lines.

The Pilgrim’s Progress

4.4★  Various publishers (Penguin Classics, Crossway, Banner of Truth, Christian Focus)

The 1678 allegory that has outsold every English book except the Bible - still the strangest, sturdiest, most-quoted spiritual road map in the language.

The Practice of the Presence of God

4.0★  Various (Whitaker House, HarperOne, Aeterna Press, Carey Brothers updated translation)

A 17th-century Carmelite kitchen monk’s short, plain talks and letters on staying aware of God in the middle of ordinary work - the smallest devotional classic that keeps outlasting bigger books.