Packer on Puritan Devotional Writing

The second sentence strikes home.

[T]his devotional literature, though popular in the sense of being expressed simply and not presupposing any technical knowledge, is not popular in the sense of being crude, or frothy, or theologically inept, or ill-informed, or ill-ingested, or incompetent in any other way.

The modern snobbery of learning whereby professional scholars refuse to popularise and popularisers are expected to apologise for not being professional scholars was not a seventeenth-century syndrome. Puritan authors were learned, strong-minded, well-read, scholarly men.

--J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Crossway 2010), 63