II.English Sermons 1500-1660
It is a well-established and only partly confounded myth that the English sermon was a product of the Protestant Reformation in England.In fact,sermons were an integral part of traditional religious life in fifteenth-century England,and sixteenth-century sermons built upon these foundations.As Susan Wabuda has demonstrated,sermons in both Latin and English appeared routinely in three different manifestations:the sermon or homily that could form part of the Mass each Sunday,the quarterly sermons required by canon law,and the outdoor sermon.[28]Attendance at sermons was of great importance;on this too there was agreement between late medieval and early Reformation thinking.In 1530,Richard Whitford,Brigittine monk and humanist,published A Werke for Housholders,a devotional guide for the laity.He instructed the householder to keep members of his household nearby on Sundays,in case a sermon was preached:
For yf there be a sermon any tyme of the day/let them be there present all that ben not occupyed in nedeful and lawful busynes/all other layde on parte/let them euer kepe the prechynges/rather than the masse/yf(by case)they may not here bothe.[29]
This would seem like a reforming emphasis,and indeed Whitford was friend to Erasmus and More.Yet it was no more than an endorsement of late medieval attitudes.The fifteenth-century manual Dives and Pauper had also insisted that it was more beneficial for a man's soul if he heard a sermon rather than attending mass.[30]The arrival of humanism,therefore,involved no sharp break with late medieval preaching.Humanist influences insinuated themselves into a sermon tradition which was already strong,which took the duty of popular religious instruction seriously,and which already made good use of the vernacular.John Fisher,whose sermons‘encompassed the learning of both the middle ages and the renaissance’,was a leading example.[31]His biblicism was profound and demonstrated the increasing trend towards using several pieces of scripture to illustrate each point.In a sermon of 1509,for example,Fisher made the point that‘oftentymes in scrypture the vertuous and holy faders maketh lamentable exclamacyons agaynste almyghty god/for that he semeth to be more indulgent and favourable unto the wycked persone then unto the good lyver’.This assertion was then supported by careful scriptural quotation from the Old Testament,first in Latin,then English,from David,Jeremiah,Habbakuk,and Job.[32]All of Fisher's sermons contain large amounts of biblical exegesis,yet also retain the formal structures of the medieval period.[33]
The single most important transforming influence on the early sixteenthcentury sermon was the invention and implementation of Henry VIII's Supremacy over the church in England.The humanist rediscovery of scripture was not enough to prompt a Protestant Reformation in the English church.It was to take the particular,peculiar,and ingenious application of scripture by a headstrong monarch to turn English sermons firstly into an arm of the state,and only secondarily—and in large part inadvertently—towards a Protestant future.The true revolution in sixteenth-century preaching,therefore,was to be as much political as religious.There was no single ideological platform for supporters or detractors of the king,no straightforward contest between‘Protestant’and‘Catholic’,nor even between‘evangelical’and‘conservative’.Religious identity was in a state of flux,and Henry's piecemeal approach to reformation meant a range of responses was possible,from martyrdom to enthusiastic conformity,with every variation in between.
Henry's programme of gradual reform was succeeded by an accelerated and wholesale attempt at Protestant conversion in the reign of Edward VI(1547-53).As a top-down movement,the Edwardian theological agenda succeeded,not because of overwhelming popular support,but because the national leadership worked in concert with committed Protestant cadres‘to undermine unreliable elements in positions of authority,and radically reconstruct the outlook of the people as a whole’.[34]The touchstone for these efforts at religious reorientation was archbishop of Canterbury,Thomas Cranmer's first clearly Protestant formulary,Certayne Sermons or Homelies,popularly known as the Book of Homilies,published barely sixth months into the new reign on 31 July 1547.The Book of Homilies was designed to be a manifesto of the regime's theological agenda and the means of its revolutionary implementation.Its sermons established an official epitome of scriptural teaching on the way of salvation by which all received and future doctrinal formulations were to be judged.As required reading in parish churches every Sunday,the Homilies were also intended to harness the persuasive power of the local pulpit to foster the populace's embrace of its new religious beliefs and rhythms.Yet,this dual purpose had but one end:the nurturing of a better,more godly society through a successful reordering of the national spiritual consciousness.Although the Marian regime would repudiate Cranmer's book for its message,they responded to its effectiveness by emulating his method for national change.Hence,when Elizabeth's accession brought another alteration in religion,the Edwardian Homilies were reintroduced in 1559 and augmented by a second book in 1563.These two volumes embodied both the continuity and divergence between the innovative,revolutionary aspirations of the Edwardian regime and Elizabeth's determination to make an unchanging,final settlement of religion.[35]
The Elizabethan settlement of 1559 has often been seen as an attempt,after see-sawing between Reform and Roman Catholicism in the reigns of Henry,Edward,and Mary,to navigate a via media between Rome and Geneva.Yet this model of compromise is largely a fabrication by later Anglican historians.With the advent of the Second Book of Homilies,the people of England,even in thoroughly traditionalist parishes such as Morebath,were forced to hear week after week unequivocal condemnation of Roman Catholic beliefs and faced constant encouragement to adopt,or at least adapt to,the distinctly Protestant religious culture now mandated by their government.[36]The queen left no doubt about her own unstinting support for this anti-papism.In her famous confrontation in 1576 with archbishop Grindal over the movement for local preaching clinics known as prophesyings,Elizabeth made it quite clear that she thought the official homilies were more than sufficient for the normal instruction of the people.Indeed,in 1585 she told a group of bishops that there was more learning in one of the homilies than in twenty of some of theirs.[37]
The years marked biographically by the emergence of Lancelot Andrewes as a famous London preacher and the death of John Donne,1588-1631,are instinctively considered the heyday,in literary terms,of the English sermon.The achievements of great Elizabethan and Jacobean preachers as diverse as Andrewes,Donne,Joseph Hall,Thomas Gataker,Thomas Preston,and Richard Sibbes are well attested in literary studies of their works,from E.C.Dargan to Horton Davies and beyond,but a host of questions remain to be answered about this flowering of pulpit oratory.What specific cultural factors produced it?Was it the result of a stable national religious identity,or the free-play of tremendous diversity within a church which only professed uniformity?As with other literary genres practised at the time,is the very notion of a‘high renaissance’,or‘golden age’,more the construction of modern literary history than historical reality?
The crucial role that sermons played in Elizabethan and Jacobean political life has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent years.In particular,historians have made the case that political comment was regularly and successfully smuggled into sermons,so that at times of national crisis,typological speech could circumvent the policing of criticism,with regard especially to foreign policy,through its‘Aesopian’language.Christopher Hill depicted a discursive landscape in which this evasive‘veiled speech’ constituted a well-formed political sub-language,and David Appleby has explored the preaching culture of the excluded ministers following the Restoration and the ways in which their valedictory sermons were infused with political presence.[38]Similarly,the rich sermon culture at the Jacobean court under the watchful patronage of the king,together with the Paul's Cross pulpit as a parallel Jacobean forum,have provided ample evidence of the engagement,more or less direct,with contemporary events,particularly in the crises surrounding the Spanish Match and the Palatinate wars of the 1620s.[39]
And yet,it is vital to state that biblical exemplarity did not intrinsically need to be transposed into a language of secular politics to be understood.On the contrary,the nature of early modern religious culture was such that the biblical idiom was its own and sufficient political comment,a measured,subtle and precise medium of criticism whose force is at times obscured for modern readers,who are less submerged in the intricacies of Old Testament exemplarity.The early modern sermon presents a phenomenal scriptural lattice-work,a fleet-footedness with the text and a presumption of its familiarity.Such a dense weave of examples across the scriptures is what Thomas Jackson calls a‘cloud of witnesses,out of the old and new Testament’.[40]The politics is constituted not in the often isolated contemporary references,but in the biblical copia itself,in the piling up of examples from biblical history of those who are not sufficiently alert to God's warnings.
One example will have to suffice.Thomas Gataker's A Sparke toward the Kindling of Sorrow for Sion(1621),delivered‘at Sergeants Inne in Fleet-Street’by the occasionally combative Rotherhithe preacher,makes a certain amount of explicit comment on the outbreak of confessional hostilities in Bohemia and Germany(which would come to be seen as the beginning of the Thirty Years’War).Yet the sermon derives its force rather from a juggling of texts on the wrath that ensues from neglect of duty,and from its dexterity with a familiar theo-political vocabulary.The sermon,on Amos 6.6(‘[they]drink wine in bowls,and anoint themselves with the chief ointments:but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph’),uses the occasion of those failing in their fellow feeling towards Joseph as the lynchpin for a thick trawl through biblical acts of omission,the numerous failures of magistrates to carry through their appointed judicial tasks,and God's frequently brutal response.This is the leitmotif of sermons in the era—neglect of corporate responsibility,within the international body of Protestantism:‘wee observe that there are privative sinnes as well as positive…It was the not slaying of Agag,that lost Saul his Crown’.[41]Saul,neglecting to slay the Amalak king,Agag,inflames the generally mild-mannered Samuel to hack the king to pieces;the inference of the sermon is that this is all too applicable to contemporary acts of pacifism,such as James VI＆I's policy of inaction with regard to events on the European continent.God's commands are,Gataker notes,not subject to negotiation:‘Goe and speak to them,saith God to Jeremy,all that I command thee,or else I will destroy thee’(Jeremiah 1.17).Gataker builds upon this idea to emphasise how a minister may not neglect his prophetic duty to warn,nor a king his Protestant alliances.[42]There is,in such an urgent historical moment,a distinct political weighting to statements on how‘we ought to have a fellow-feeling of our fellow-members afflictions’,a comment which might at other times be an exhortation to moral neighbourliness.Gataker exemplifies the point with a number of examples,showing the afflictions that may rebound upon the nation as a consequence of the omissions of its leaders:
For Achans sinne,many of the hoast of Israel were slain and yet Achan still untouched.Abimelechs whole houshold were plagued for this oversight:and thousands of Davids subjects destroyed for the trespasse of their Soveraigne.Jeroboams deare sonne died for his Fathers offence.[43]
The implied threat to the audience merely bubbles under the surface,without any direct parallel being made to contemporary events.Gataker proceeds to quote 2 Samuel 11.11,in which the reluctance or apathy of the Israelites angers God in Uriah's complaint to David:‘The Arke of God,and Judah and Israel abide in tents,and my Lord Joab and my Lords servants are encamped in the open fields’.This is both provocative and unambiguous.It is not necessary to think of it as a timidity or an Aesopian gesture.On the contrary,its meaning,the tardy hanging back in tents while the battle is raging,is clear.
If sermons carried a political charge in the 1620s,this charge was magnified and intensified in the period between 1640 and 1660.During Civil Wars,the commonwealth,and protectorate,there was a shift from a religious culture of orthodoxies versus heresies,to one marked by the proliferation of heterodoxies with little common ground of engagement,and with an insufficiently rooted or accepted mode of governance to deliver a stable,authoritative judgment.After Charles I's abandonment of Whitehall,the Long Parliament swiftly assumed the role of the most prominent patron of preaching in the revolutionary capital.[44]With the benefit of hindsight,the earl of Clarendon observed of preaching in these years that‘the first publishing of extraordinary news was from the pulpit;and by the preacher's text,and his manner of discourse upon it,the auditors might judge,and commonly foresaw,what was like to be next done in the Parliament or Council of State.’Specific to the fasts or‘days of public humiliation’or thanksgiving staged by the Long Parliament,Clarendon complained that‘the archbishop of Canterbury had never so great an influence upon the counsels at court as Dr Burges and Mr Marshall had them upon the Houses’.[45]Indeed,it was Cornelius Burges,an elderly and established reformer,and the moderate Presbyterian Stephen Marshall who opened the first fast in November 1640,setting out the need for the completion of the Elizabethan Reformation,and the building of stronger bulwarks against the dual threat of popery and tyranny.Marshall made plain the place of preaching in this task:
The preaching of the Word is the Scepter of Christs Kingdome,the glory of a Nation,the Chariot upon which life and salvation comes riding….[I]f all the good Lawes in the world were made,without this,they would come to nothing.[46]
The lengthy debates in the Westminster Assembly,the primarily clerical organ charged with reforming the church,meant that parliament could choose from across the spectrum of godly ministers for likely preachers of the fast sermons.The attractions(and difficulties)of the breadth of choice are captured in the account of Anna Trapnel,later to be known as a visionary prophet.In the early 1640s,in the depth of doubt and insecurity,she‘ran from Minister to Minister,from Sermon to Sermon,but I could find no rest;I could not be contented to hear once or twice in the week,but must hear from the first day to the last’,fearing that she might miss the best source of spiritual guidance.[47]
To turn to the devotional content of the sermons of the 1640s and 1650s would,to most of those who delivered them,be finally to get round to the real business,away from the exclusively worldly concerns of government and organisation.It will become clear that this is not to abandon politics completely,but it should be stressed that this period saw a flowering of puritan practical divinity in the pulpit.The lasting heritage of the English Reformed tradition would not be the same without the works of Richard Baxter and John Owen.At its heart was preaching.Owen made this clear when he preached on the duty of pastors:after distinguishing them from priests,whose inappropriate claims to authority inherent in the office merely revealed them to be‘shavelings of Antichrist’,he identified the work of the ministry as‘the slaying of men's lusts,and the offering up of them,being converted by the preaching of the gospel,unto God’.[48]As Vavasor Powell,prominent in the propagation of the gospel in Wales,put it:‘I would not neglect for the Printing of a thousand Books,the preaching of one Sermon’.[49]To put it succinctly,John Bunyan built his reputation as a preacher rather than as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress.
It would be unwise to suggest strongly determinative links between shifts in practical divinity and the new political and religious context,but suggestive connections between the relative freedom and empowerment of the moderate radicals,alongside the threat of Antinomianism,are present.Owen,for instance,remained a staunch defender of orthodox Calvinism throughout his career.His piety,however,has a strong sense of human agency,working with the Holy Spirit,to promulgate and strengthen assurance of election.Richard Baxter took this further,building upon the hypothetical universalism of John Preston to create what would formerly have been seen as anomalous puritan Arminianism.John Goodwin arrived at similar conclusions,preaching to his gathered church and his parish in Coleman Street,London of greater human agency in the salvific process.[50]