IV.Sermons in Scotland,Ireland,and Wales
Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century preaching in Scotland,Ireland,and Wales took different courses to that in England.Preaching was central,and was believed to be central,to the reformation of the Scottish church.In 1560,the Scots Confession had described‘trew preaching’as one of the elemental characteristics of the‘trew church of god’,a vital signifier of its difference from Rome.[69]One century later,the Westminster Assembly's Directory for Publique Worship of God(1645),which was most enthusiastically received by the Church of Scotland and regularly included in editions of its subordinate standards,described the‘preaching of the Word’ as being‘the power of God unto Salvation,and one of the greatest and most excellent Works belonging to the Ministry of the Gospell’.[70]Salvation was believed to be channelled through preaching.[71]
Preaching's significance has been signalled in recent scholarship on the religious history of early modern Scotland.While much scholarship of the Scottish reformation retains the political emphases of earlier generations,David Mullan's Scottish Puritanism(2000)provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of preaching in the earlier part of the seventeenth century;[72]Margo Todd's The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland(2002)similarly pushes preaching into the foreground,as a vital conduit and medium of religiously inspired change;and R.Scott Spurlock's Cromwell and Scotland:Conquest and Religion,1650-1660(2007)situates the preaching of the Presbyterians and their new antagonists within the polemical and performative contexts of the Cromwellian invasion,as Presbyterian preaching came to terms with the loss of socio-disciplinary compulsion in the new legal context of toleration and the consequent marketplace of innovative religious ideas.
What of Scottish preaching itself?As Lollard nonconformity gave way before and evolved into Lutheran and Calvinist reform,Protestant preaching was pioneered by such controversialists as Patrick Hamilton(1504-28),George Wishart(1513-46),John Knox(c.1514-72),his disciple,and Andrew Melville(1545-1622).Their preaching proved essential to their wider programme of ecclesial reform.Knox's preaching,for example,was modelled on that of the Hebrew prophets and followed Calvin's technique of preaching consecutively through biblical books—which introduced to Scotland the method of the‘ordinary.’Knox,always interested in shaping a public persona,included texts of his own sermons in his History of the Reformation,but his prophetic mode contrasts with and seems to overwhelm the warmer pastoral mode of,for example,John Erskine of Dun.By the early seventeenth century the activity of preaching was being emphasised across the ecclesiological spectrum.Recent scholarship,though,has warned us that the religious spectrum of early modern Scotland may have been less varied that the polemical publications of the period might suggest.David Mullan is perhaps the most able exponent of the theory that the divinity of early modern Scotland conformed to an essentially Reformed consensus.[73]Preaching may therefore have been more generally supported than denominational historians have imagined.Thus we can confirm the existence of‘puritan bishops’—from the period of William Cowper(1568-1619),bishop of Galloway,who preached twice on Sundays,as well as on Wednesday,Friday,and Saturday evenings,with extra sermons on Sundays and Mondays during communion seasons and church fasts,[74]to that of Robert Leighton(1611-84),archbishop of Glasgow,whose surviving sermons confirm Owen Chadwick's impression that their preacher was perhaps‘the most attractive and persuasive of all the Calvinist devotional writers…of any country’.[75]
In early modern Ireland,despite the importance of preaching to public life,both the words of and the reactions to sermons have been poorly preserved.Probably the most distinguished preacher of early seventeenthcentury Ireland,James Ussher,archbishop of Armagh,had left almost no trace of his Irish preaching activities although a number of the sermons that he preached in England were printed at the time.Those clergy who did not preach extempore were not good about preserving their sermon notes;most of those that survive are so laconic that they tell us little.[76]What the surviving material does show,however,is that anti-Catholicism was,predictably,a powerful theme in Irish Protestant sermons of this period;a lesser theme was the unity of Protestantism.Preachers at visitation,for instance,tended to play down the differences between the various strands of Protestantism.In particular the things that divided Scottish settlers with a Presbyterian background in Ulster from the established church were minimised at these formal events in an attempt to build a broad Protestant consensus against the Catholic majority.[77]That broad consensus went further than simply anti-Catholicism.Almost all,as far as can be determined,held fast to one of the strands of predestinarian Calvinism which emphasised preaching as the key to man's relation to God.[78]
It is clear that preaching in early modern Ireland was a central feature of the experience of the varied forms of Protestantism on the island.On Sundays,and to a lesser extent weekdays,sermons could be heard in many parish churches over the kingdom and,in many cases,heard enthusiastically.Those sermons fulfilled many needs.Perhaps typical of what most preachers thought they were doing is the comment of the godly minister of Tralee in the 1630s,Devereaux Spratt.As Spratt commented‘by the persuasion of friends I entered into the function of the ministry and chose for my first text Pro[verbs]xi,the latter part of the 30 ver[se]out of which I shewed I.The manner of out sermons,etc the word of God.II the manner of preaching,etc.III The end,God's glory in the wining of souls.This way of preaching I followed and continued a few years in the town,joining myself to the people of God…’.[79]Here Spratt caught the essence of preaching for clergy:the salvation of souls.Perhaps more important was the other function of preaching,that of joining of preacher and people together into one community.In the first aim of the sermon Irish Protestant clergy had limited success.Evangelical or controversial preaching to convert Catholics to what contemporaries regarded as the truth of Protestantism was singularly lacking,a fact reflected in the failure of Irish Protestants to engage with the Irish language which was a necessary precondition for this sort of preaching and proselytizing activity.Yet in their use of sermons to create Protestant communities in Ireland clergy were remarkably successful.The development of distinctive preaching styles by the various confessional groups on the island made a vital contribution to the emergence of the Protestant religious cultures in early modern Ireland.
The number of surviving Welsh sermons—Welsh in language,or delivered in English but Welsh in origin—is small,and any discussion of them has to negotiate the differences between the oral and printed format,and between the intentions of their creators as preachers and authors.The dominant strain of the Welsh sermon to emerge in these years was a vigorous,populist style which bore the hallmarks less of formal learning and more of homespun idiom,pointing the way to the explosion of sermons both as oratory and literary artefacts in the Calvinistic Methodist revival of the following century.From the earliest inroads by the Reformation into Wales,there was an official awareness that meaningful evangelization could only be expected when it was delivered in the language of the majority.In 1538 it was ordered that the gospel be preached in Cardigan‘in the mother tongue’,and that the people should be weaned from devotion to the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary by explanations in Welsh of the evils of idolatry.[80]
The Stationers’Register records only three printed sermons of Welsh provenance before 1640.To quantify the volume of sermonic literature in print alone,however,is unrealistically restrictive.A significant amount of material in manuscript format circulated in early modern Wales as a result of the efforts of a generation of copyists whose activities kept a pre-Reformation tradition of sermonizing in the consciousness of the Welsh people.These were manuscripts(in Welsh or sometimes in a macaronic mix of Welsh and English)of free-metre poems called in south Wales cwndidau,aptly described by their early twentieth-century editors as‘Welsh sermons in song’.Elsewhere in Wales,similar verses were known as carolau,‘carols’.The authors of this free-metre verse might be laymen but also included clergy such as‘Sir’Huw Dafydd,the parish priest of Gelligaer in Glamorgan whose Christmas carol has been dated to 1520.[81]One of the most celebrated of the cwndidau is The Dream of Tomos Llewelyn Dio ap Hywel,which takes the form of an extended lively dialogue between church and alehouse,in which the former is derided as unfrequented:‘Tydi hen eglwys fraithlwyd/di ymgeledd i’th adwyd/Ni ddaw nymmor o ddynion/i’th gilfacheu gweigion’[You old grey mottled church/built with care/hardly anyone comes to your empty nooks].[82]
The civil war and interregnum can be seen as providing a fulcrum for a discussion of the Welsh sermon.During that period,a critique of the Welsh church as inadequately provided with preaching moved through parliamentary discussion to the centre stage of British public life.A new form of preaching,by itinerant ministers,was given statutory authority and bolstered the confidence of the most talented of them into writing and publication.No war on Welsh popular culture was waged by these preachers,who tried instead to work with the grain of the Welsh literary legacy.Printing of Welsh language and Welsh-related material may not have exploded in quantity as London printing generally did,but the uses of print expanded to include controversialist literature in which critiques of sermons and preaching formed a prominent part.While so many warring tribes competed in the religious field for the loyalties of the Welsh people,it was inherently unlikely that uniformity or common purpose would emerge in the parochial,beneficed ministry.The stimulus to publishing visible in the later years of the interregnum was inherited by the stars of the pulpit after 1660,whose sermons were delivered under a regime of which uniformity was a hallmark.Printing may have helped narrow the diversity of competing models of the Welsh sermon,so that by 1700 its dominant qualities were simplicity and vigour.