The puritan response to poverty, which was, or should have been, the dominant concern of anyone with a liability or concern for social policy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, combined elements of utopianism and pragmatism, making it a subject especially worthy of inclusion in a collection of tributes to Barrie Dobson. But this is no new subject. Nearly half a century ago, Christopher Hill published an essay on the most representative of puritan divines, ‘William Perkins and the Poor’. Hill read Perkins selectively, and suggested that so did Perkins's original readers. They would have filtered out, as he filtered out, the hard things that Perkins, as a representative Puritan, had to say about the spiritual peril of riches, and about the obligation of those with means to do so to give without stint. Hill believed that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a drastic change in social attitudes, one which was favourable to the proto-capitalist ethic. 'To be sure he did not have to invent the fervour with which puritan preachers and writers castigated work-shy idleness. But this was not all that the Puritans had to say on the subject of poverty and how Christians should respond to it, and much of it, as John Walsh has remarked of John Wesley's doctrine and practice in the eighteenth century, was ‘not the stuff of which the capitalist ethic is easily constructed’.