William Perkins (1558-1602) was an important Puritan preacher and theologian. To make a very long story short, Puritans were heavily influenced by Calvinist theology, although they went beyond Calvin in several ways. In particular, Puritans took the doctrine of limited atonement and predestination to its natural conclusion: double predestination. Not only did God predestine some to be eternally saved, but that meant He predestined everyone else to be eternally damned. The other doctrine you will find in this chart is supralapsarianism ("before the fall"): God decreed who would be sent to heaven or hell before Adam was even created or committed the first sin.
{Aside: this is counter to the other view, infralapsarianism/sublapsarianism, which says that after Adam committed the first sin, God decreed that He would save some of those fallen and leave the rest to suffer their just condemnation.} In other words, before you were born (actually, before God created the universe), He had already determined whether you would go to heaven or hell. For obvious reasons, this created a great deal of angst among Puritan church members. There was nothing they could do to affect their eternal destination, and because it was God's choice alone there was also no way to know what God had chosen for you! This is a pastoral counseling nightmare. Anyway, because this theology was so frightening to common church members, pastors like William Perkins created elaborate charts describing the process of salvation so that concerned church members could find themselves on it, and that's what you have below. About the chart. I traced this from the standard Perkins chart to make it easier to read (which it's still not easy enough to read). The colors are my own, added so I could explain the groupings of things.
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