No More Learning

The poet who, in the sincerities of a sick bed confession, can spin
such ingenious webs for his thought is one of those who, like
Baudelaire, are 'naturally artificial; for them simplicity would be
affectation. ' And as Donne is the first of the ‘metaphysical' love
poets, he is, likewise, the first of the introspective, Anglican, religious
poets of the seventeenth century. Elizabethan, and a good deal of
Jacobean, religious poetry is didactic in tone and intention, and,
when not, like Southwell's, Romanist, is protestant and Calvinist but
not distinctively Anglican. With Donne, appears for the first time
in poetry a passionate attachment to those Catholic elements in
Anglicanism which, repressed and neglected, had never entirely
disappeared; and, from Donne, Herbert and his disciples inherited
the intensely personal and introspective tone to which the didactic
is subordinated, which makes a lyric in The Temple, even if it be a
sermon, also, and primarily, a confession or a prayer; a tone which
reached its highest lyrical level in the ecstatic outpourings of
Crashaw.
Donne's earliest prose writings were, probably, the Paradoxes
and Problems which he circulated privately among his friends.
The Burley MS contains a selection from them, sent to Sir Henry
Wotton with an apologetic letter, in which Donne pleads that they
were made 'rather to deceive time than her daughter truth, having
this advantage to escape from being called ill things that they are
nothings,' but, at the same time, adjures Wotton 'that no copy
shall be taken, for any respect, of these or any other my composi-
tions sent to you. ' It was Donne's son who first issued them in 1633,
printed so carelessly as, at times, to be unintelligible. Like every-
thing that Donne wrote, they are brilliant, witty and daring, but, on
the whole, represent the more perverse and unpleasant side of his
genius. His other prose works are: a tract on the Jesuits, very similar
in tone and temper to Paradoxes, entitled Ignatius his Conclave:
or, His Inthronisation in a late Election in Hell, which was
published anonymously, the Latin version about 1610, the English in
1611; the serious and business like Pseudo-Martyr, issued with
6


## p. 219 (#241) ############################################

Prose Works
219
the author's name in 1610; BIAOANATOS A Declaration of that
Paradoxe or Thesis that Self-Homicide is not so Naturally Sinne
that it may never be otherwise; the Devotions upon Emergent
Occasions, and Several Steps in my Sickness, digested into
Meditations, Expostulations and Prayers, published in 1624; the
Essays in Divinity, printed by his son in 1651; and the sermons.
All Donne's minor or occasional writings, except the rather
perfunctory Essays in Divinity, partake of the nature of para-
doxes more or less elaborately developed. Even Pseudo-Martyr
irritated the Roman Catholic controversialist who replied to it by
its 'fantastic conceits. Of them all, the most interesting, because
bearing the deepest impress of the author's individuality, his
strange moods, his subtle reasoning, his clear good sense, is
BIA ANATOE. It is not rightly described as a defence of suicide,
.
but is what the title indicates, a serious and thoughtful discussion
of a fine point in casuistry. Seeing that a man may rightly, com-
mendably, even as a duty, do many things which promote or
hasten his death, may he ever rightly, and as his bounden duty,
consummate that process——may he ever, as Christ did upon the
cross (to this Donne recurs more than once in the sermons), of
his own free will render up his life to God?
But Donne’s fame as a prose writer rests not on these occasional
and paradoxical pieces, but on his sermons. His reputation as a
preacher was, probably, wider than as a poet, and both contributed
to his most distinctive and generally admitted title to fame as the
greatest wit of his age, in the fullest sense of the word. Of
the many sermons he preached, at Whitehall, at St Paul's as
prebendary and dean, at Lincoln's inn, at St Dunstan's church, at
noblemen's houses, on embassies and other special occasions, some
five were issued in his lifetime; and, after his death, three large
folios were published by his son containing eighty (1640), fifty
(1649) and twenty-five (1660/1) sermons respectively. Some are
still in manuscript.
In Donne's sermons, all the qualities of his poems are present
in a different medium; the swift and subtle reasoning; the powert
a
ful yet often quaint imagery; the intense feeling; and, lastly, the
wonderful music of the style, which is inseparable from the music
of the thought. The general character of the sermon in the seven
teenth century was such as to evoke all Donne's strength, and to
intensify some of his weaknesses. The minute analysis of the text
with a view to educing from it what the preacher believed to be
the doctrine it taught or the practical lessons it inculcated, by


## p. 220 (#242) ############################################

220
John Donne
legitimate inference, by far-fetched analogy, or by quaint metaphor,
was a task for which Donne’s intellect, imagination and wide range
of multifarious learning were well adapted. The fathers, the
schoolmen and 'our great protestant divines' (notably Calvin, to
whom, in subtlety of exposition, he reckons even Augustine second)
are his guides in the interpretation and application of his text;
and, for purposes of illustration, his range is much wider-classical
poets, history sacred and secular, saints' legendaries, popular
Spanish devotional writers, Jesuit controversialists and casuists,
natural science, the discoveries of voyagers and, of course, the
whole range of Scripture, canonical and apocryphal. It is
strange to find, at times, a conceit or allusion which had done
service in the love poems reappearing in the texture of a pious and
exalted meditation. In the sermons, as in the poems (where it
has led to occasional corruptions of the text), he uses words that,
if not obsolete, were growing rare-bezar,' 'defaulk,' 'triacle,
'lation'-but, more often, he coins or adopts already coined
‘inkhorn' terms-omnisufficiency,' 'nullifidians,' 'longanimity,'
'exinanition. '
Breadth and unity of treatment in seventeenth century oratory
are apt to be sacrificed to the minute elaboration of each head,
and their ingenious, rather than luminous and convincing, inter-
connection. But Donne's ingenuity is inexhaustible, and, through
every subtlety and bizarre interpretation, the hearer was (and,
even today, the reader is) carried forward by the weight and
force of the preacher's fervid reasoning. Much of the Scriptural
exegesis is fanciful or out of date. The controversial exposure
of what were held to be Roman corruptions and separatist
heresies has an interest mainly for the historian. In Donne's
scholastic, ultra-logical treatment, the rigid skeleton of seven-
teenth century theology is, at times, presented in all its stern-
ness and unattractiveness. From the extremest deductions, he
is saved by the moderation which was the key-note of his
church, and by his own good sense and deep sympathy with
human nature. But Donne is most eloquent when, escaping from
dogmatic minutiae and controversial 'points,' he appeals directly
to the heart and conscience. A reader may care little for the
details of seventeenth century theology and yet enjoy without
qualification Donne's fervid and original thinking, and the figura-
tive richness, and splendid harmonies of his prose in passages of
argument, of exhortation and of exalted meditation. It is Donne
the poet who transcends every disadvantage of theme and method,


## p. 221 (#243) ############################################

Sermons and Letters
221
and an outworn fashion in wit and learning. There are sentences
in the sermons which, in beauty of imagery and cadence, are not
surpassed by anything he wrote in verse, or by any prose of the
century from Hooker's to Sir Thomas Browne’s:
а
The sonl that is accustomed to direct herself to God upon every occasion;
that, as a flower at sun-rising, conceives a sense of God in every beam of his,
and spreads and dilates itself towards him in a thankfulness in every small
blessing that he sheds upon her; that soul that as a flower at the sun's
declining contracts, and gathers in, and shuts up herself, as though she had
received a blow, whensoever she hears her Saviour wounded by an oath, or
blasphemy, or execration; that soul who, whatsoever string be strucken in her,
base or treble, her high or her low estate, is ever tun'd towards God, that
soul prays sometimes when it does not know that it prays.
The passage on occasional mercies (LXXX. 2); the peroration of the
sermon on 'a better resurrection' (Lxxx. 22); the meditations on
death, as the leveller of earthly distinctions, or the portal to a
better life; the description of the death of rapture and ecstasy'
(LXXX. 27) are other passages which illustrate the unique quality,
the weight, fervour and wealth, of Donne's eloquence.
Donne's letters to his friends and patrons were as much
admired in and after his life-time as everything else he wrote. A
few of them were issued in the first editions of the poems; a larger
collection, carelessly edited and in no order, was published by his
son in 1651; the interesting letters written to Sir George More and
Sir Thomas Egerton were first published in Kempe's Losely Manu-
scripts; the Burley MS contains one or two of an earlier date. Thus,
they cover, though much more lightly at some parts than at others,
the whole of his life from the Cadiz expedition to the year of his
death. Like his poems, they paint the brilliant and insolent young
man; the erudite and witty, but troubled and melancholy, suitor
for court favour and office; the ascetic and fervent saint and
preacher. And this is their chief interest. For some time, Donne
.
held the position, almost, of the English épistolier, collections of the
'choicest conceits' being made, in common-place books, from his
letters as well as his poems. But they were not well fitted to
teach, like Balzac's, the beauty of a balanced and orderly prose,
though they far surpass the latter in wit, wisdom and erudition.
Their chief interest is the man whom they reveal, the characteris-
tically renascence 'melancholy temperament,' now deep in despond-
ence and meditating on the problem of suicide, now, in his own
words, kindling squibs about himself and flying into sportfulness;
elaborating erudite compliments, or talking to Goodere with the


## p. 222 (#244) ############################################

222
John Donne
utmost simplicity and good feeling; worldly and time-serving, noble
and devout—all these things, and all with equal sincerity.
The relation of Donne to Elizabethan poetry might, with some
justice, be compared with that of Michael Angelo to earlier Floren-
tine sculpture, admitting that, both as man and artist, he falls far
short of the great Italian. Just as the grace and harmony of earlier
sculpture were dissolved by the intense individuality of an artist
intent only on the expression in marble of his own emotions, so
the clear beauty, the rich ornament, the diffuse harmonies of
Elizabethan courtly poetry, as we can study them in The Faerie
Queene, Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, Astrophel and
Stella or Englands Helicon, disappear in the songs and satires
and elegies of a poet who will not accept Elizabethan conventions,
or do homage to Elizabethan models, Italian and French; but puts
out to discover a north-west passage of his own, determined to
make his poetry the vivid reflection of his own intense, subtle,
perverse moods, his paradoxical reasonings and curious learning,
his sceptical philosophy of love and life. It cannot be said of
Donne, as of Milton, that everything, even what is evil, turns to
beauty in his hands. Beauty, with him, is never the paramount
consideration. If beauty comes to Donne, it comes as to the
alchemist who
glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal.
From the flow of impassioned, paradoxical argument, there will
suddenly flower an image or a line of the rarest and most
entrancing beauty. But the tenor of his poetry is witty, passion-
ate, weighty and moving ; never, for long, simply beautiful; not
infrequently bizarre; at times even repellent.
And so, just as Michael Angelo was a bad model for those who
came after him and had not his strength and originality, Donne,
more than any other single individual, is responsible for the worst
aberrations of seventeenth century poetry, especially in eulogy
and elegy. The 'metaphysical' lyrists learned most from him-the
conquering, insolent tone of their love songs and their splendid
cadences. In happy conceit and movement, they sometimes
excelled him, though it is only in an occasional lyric by Marvell or
Rochester that one detects the same weight of passion behind the
fantastic conceit and paradoxical reasoning. But it is in the
complimentary verses and the funeral elegies of the early and
middle century (as well as in some of the religious poetry and in


## p. 223 (#245) ############################################

The Influence of his Poetry
223
6
the frigid love poems of Cowley) that one sees the worst effects of
Donne's endeavour to wed passion and imagination to erudition
and reasoning.
And yet it would be a mistaken estimate of the history of
English poetry which either ignored the unique quality of Donne's
poetry or regarded its influence as purely maleficent. The influence
of both Donne and Jonson acted beneficially in counteracting
the tendency of Elizabethan poetry towards fluency and facility.
If Donne somewhat lowered the ethical and ideal tone of love
poetry, and blighted the delicate bloom of Elizabethan song, he
gave it a sincerer and more passionate quality. He made love
poetry less of a musical echo of Desportes. In his hands, English
poetry became less Italianate, more sincere, more condensed and
pregnant in thought and feeling. The greatest of seventeenth
century poets, despite his contempt for our late fantastics,' and his
affinities with the moral Spenserians and the classical Jonson, has
all Donne's intense individuality, his complete independence, in the
handling of his subjects, of the forms he adopts, even of his borrow-
ings. He has all his 'frequency and fulness ’of thought. He is not
much less averse to the display of erudition, though he managed it
more artfully, or to the interweaving of argument with poetry. But
Milton had a far less keen and restless intellect than Donne; his
central convictions were more firmly held; he was less conscious
of the elements of contradiction which they contained; his life
moved forward on simpler and more consistent lines. With powers
thus better harmonised; with a more controlling sense of beauty;
with a fuller comprehension of the science of his art,' Milton,
rather than Donne, is, in achievement, the Michael Angelo of
English poetry. Yet there are subtle qualities of vision, rare
intensities of feeling, surprising felicities of expression, in the
troubled poetry of Donne that one would not part with altogether
even for the majestic strain of his great successor.
&


## p. 224 (#246) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE ENGLISH PULPIT FROM FISHER TO DONNE
The reformation, like every other popular religious movement
-the crusades, lollardy, the rise of nonconformity or the methodist
revival-owed much to preachers and preaching. But it cannot
be said that, in England, any more than in Germany, preachers
originated the reformation, or that the reformation originated
popular preaching. A new day had dawned for preaching, before
Luther's influence was felt. The reproach of the neglect of
preaching, which, in spite of some exaggerations, must still rest
upon the fifteenth century in England, was already being rolled
away in the opening years of the sixteenth, and the instigation
came from orthodox quarters. For instance, in 1504, the king's
mother, the lady Margaret, countess of Richmond, doubtless upon
the advice of her confessor, John Fisher, established by charter
a preachership. The preacher was to be a resident Cambridge
fellow, with no cure of souls, and his duty was to preach once
every two years in each of twelve different parishes in the dioceses
of London, Ely and Lincoln. Fisher himself signalised his elevation
to the see of Rochester in this same year by preaching a course of
sermons upon the penitential psalms. While some of his colleagues
were seldom or never heard, bishop Fisher continued to preach
unremittingly, till old age obliged him to 'have a chair and so
to teach sitting. When he was vice-chancellor of Cambridge, he
obtained a bull, allowing the university to appoint twelve doctors
or masters to preach in all parts of the kingdom, 'notwithstanding
any ordinance or constitution to the contrary. It was Fisher,
too, who advised that the Lady Margaret's Readers should give
attention to preaching, and who urged Erasmus to write his
treatise Ecclesiastes, sive concionator Evangelicus.
The renascence, also, with the marked religious character which
it bore in England, could not fail to rouse interest in the pulpit.
If Colet could hold the attention of doctors and students, as he
expounded the Pauline epistles in an Oxford lecture-room, he


## p. 225 (#247) ############################################

The Power of the Pulpit
225
might dream of a future for expository preaching from the church
pulpit. His opportunity came in 1504, when Henry VII called
him 'to preside over the cathedral of that apostle, whose epistles
he loved so much. As Erasmus tells us, Colet set about restoring
the decayed discipline of the cathedral body of St Paul's, 'and-
what was a novelty there-began preaching at every festival in
his cathedral. ' Among the many statutory duties of the dean,
there was none obliging him to take any part in preaching.
Colet pursued his Oxford plan of delivering courses on some
connected subject, instead of taking isolated texts; and what
Colet did at St Paul's perhaps inspired another dean to do the
like at Lichfield. Ralph Collingwood, who may have known Colet
at Oxford and must certainly have known of his doings, instituted
a weekly sermon in his cathedral.
The practice of set preaching, as distinguished from the in-
formal instruction which was the duty of every parish priest, had,
therefore, received some impetus before the reformation. Yet
that movement was to affect the pulpit more profoundly than the
renascence and Catholic reformers were able to do. It was impatient
of the 'unpreaching prelates' who had not followed bishop Fisher's
lead, and it afforded the preacher an audience greedy to hear him:
the more controversial he was, the better they liked him. In an
age when men read few books and had no newspapers, the sermon
at Paul's cross or the Spital was the most exciting event of the
week. Authority, whether ecclesiastical or civil, could not afford
to ignore the power of the pulpit, and, therefore, sought to control
it by a rigorous system of licensing. At every political crisis,
general preaching was silenced and the few privileged pulpits
were closely supervised by the government. At Mary's accession,
her chaplain preached at Paul's cross with a guard of two hundred
halberdiers ; upon the very day of Mary's death, Cecil was taking
steps to ensure that the next Sunday's preacher should not ‘stir
any dispute touching the governance of the realm. The result
of this strict supervision was that, in the country at large,
the pulpit was often reduced to silence or to the dull fare of
homilies. 'A thousand pulpets in England are covered with dust,
said Bernard Gilpin in a court sermon of 1552, ‘some have not had
four sermons these fifteen or sixteen years, since friars left their
limitations, and a fewe of those were worthie the name of sermons. '
In London, however, there was throughout the century an abundance
of preaching, and it is London preaching which, almost alone,
finds any place in literature.
E. L. IV.
CH. XII.
15


## p. 226 (#248) ############################################

226 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
From Fisher to Donne, almost all great preachers preached
without book. William Perkins, in his Art of Prophesying, first
published in 1592, can still speak of 'the received custom for
preachers to speak by heart (memoriter) before the people. ' To
print a sermon gave it a second life, but it commonly entailed
all the pangs of a new birth. Donne speaks of his spending eight
hours over writing out a sermon which he had already preached.
It was at the lady Margaret's request that Fisher's Penitential
Psalms, and his sermon preached at king Henry's lying in state
were printed. Appropriately enough, the patroness of Wynkyn
de Worde helped to establish the custom of committing sermons
to print. The prejudice against publishing theological writings of
any pretension in English had diminished since Pecock's day, but
,
was not to disappear till Hooker's great work made a precedent.
Even sermons originally delivered in English, like bishop Longland's
Tres Conciones, were translated into Latin for publication. For
another half century, divines would have to experiment with the
English language before they found it a more natural medium
for theological thought than the traditional Latin, with its stock
of technical terms. It is, therefore, a real gain to English
literature that Fisher did not count it below his dignity to issue
some treatises in the vernacular, while he continued to use Latin
for his larger efforts.
Fisher's literary skill is visible in his many comparisons and
imageries. At times, they are homely and almost humorous,
as when he recommends that men should become as familiar with
death as with these grete mastyves that be tyed in chaynes,'
which 'unto suche as often vysyte theym be more gentyll and
easy. At times, the comparisons are far fetched and over elabo-
rated, as when he compares the Crucified to a parchment which
is stretched and set up to dry; the scourging has left ruled lines
across, and the five wounds are illuminated capitals. The actual
technique of sentence construction still causes him some difficulty.
Long sentences do not always come out straight. The paragraph
is neglected, and, owing to defective punctuation, sentences
are sometimes wrongly divided, and the connection in thought
between one sentence and another is obscured. Again, he cannot
be acquitted of overworking the words 'so' and 'such,' till they
give a feminine tenderness to his writings. Defects of this rudi-
mentary type are least frequent in the two funeral sermons upon
Henry VII and his mother. Here, Fisher is at his best, and
displays a noble and sonorous rhetoric with all the charms of
6
6


## p. 227 (#249) ############################################

Fisher's Sense of Style 227
rhythm and cadence. It is impossible to doubt that, even better
,
than Malory, he knew what he was doing and delighted in it.
Perhaps to him first among English prose-writers it was given
to have a conscious pleasure in style. Here is something more
than the naïve charm of the old-world story-teller; here is the
practised hand of the artist. It is no chance that arranged the
order of words in the inventory of the dead king's treasures ;
al his goodly houses so rychely dekte and appareyled, his walles and galaryes
of grete pleasure, his gardyns large and wyde with knottes curyously wrought,
his orcheyards set with vines and trees moost dilicate.
And in his description of the weeping of the countess of Richmond's
household at her death, Fisher makes as varied and skilful use of
inversion, as any writer has ever made. Her most loyal ad er
could wish the lady Margaret no fitter commemoration than the
sculpture of Torrigiano, the prose of Fisher and the founts of
Wynkyn de Worde.
In formal arrangement, as in subject-matter, Fisher belongs to
the old school of preachers. Colet already suggests the type of
the future. In his fondness for critical exposition of the Scriptures,
he is more modern than Fisher with his allegorical interpretations;
in his unsparing exposure of abuses, he sets the tone to later
preachers. Colet has not Latimer's liveliness, but he has the
same courage and directness. The man who could preach humility
to Wolsey at his installation as cardinal, and the injustice of war
to Henry VIII and his soldiers, just setting out for the French
campaign, had, at any rate, the first essential of the preacher,
conviction. His very earnestness is so conspicuous that it has
led some critics to think that it alone gave power to his preaching.
But there was probably more art in his method than has been
commonly allowed. According to Erasmus, Colet had been long
preparing himself for preaching, especially by reading the English
poets : ‘by the study of their writings he perfected his style. '
Some grace of expression might reasonably be expected from the
man who could write the ‘lytelle proheme' to the grammar-book.
The convocation sermon of 1512, which is the only complete
specimen of Colet's preaching, was delivered, according to custom,
in Latin, but there appeared almost at once an English translation,
which has been assigned with some confidence to Colet himself.
Its theme-the reform of moral abuses in the church-does not
lend itself to imaginative or poetical treatment, but Colet shows
that he quite understands how to secure variety by an inversion,
and to use an effective refrain. His final appeal to his hearers,
15-2


## p. 228 (#250) ############################################

228 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
that they shall not let this convocation depart in vain, like many
of its predecessors, is dignified and yet touched with feeling. Few
sermons of the sixteenth century are more famous or have had
a more interesting history. Thomas Smith, university librarian at
Cambridge, reprinted it at the Restoration with an eye to his own
times, and added notes and extracts from Andrewes and Hammond.
Further reprints followed in 1701 and 1708. Burnet thought of
prefacing his History of the Reformation by a reprint of the
sermon, “as a piece that might serve to open the scene. ' No
doubt, the theme, in all these cases, counted for more than any
literary charm, but a merely bald and uninspired scrmon could
never have enjoyed so long a life.
When Colet died, Erasmus lamented 'in the public interest the
loss of so unique a preacher. ' At the court, Colet had already
before his death made way for John Longland, dean of Salisbury,
afterwards bishop of Lincoln and chancellor of Oxford university.
Sir Thomas More spoke of him as a second Colet, if I may sum
up his praises in a single word. ' He had considerable reputation
as a preacher, but it hardly outlived his day, or the day of the
unreformed faith, and his printed sermons have long been very
scarce. His sermons at court were delivered in English, but they
were rendered into Latin before publication. The only works
printed in English were two Good Friday sermons preached before
the court in 1536 and 1538. There is much which recalls Fisher in
their style. It is evident that Longland, too, takes pleasure
in his English writing, and can make skilful use of repetition,
cumulative effects, interrogations and strings of sounding words.
Where are your taberettes, your drunslades and dowcymets? where are your
vialles, your rebeckes, your shakebushes; and your sweet softe pleasaunt
pypes ?
Nor can he resist the charm of alliteration, when he speaks of
Christ's 'mooste pityous paynefull Passyon' and commends his
hearers' 'submysse softe and sobre mournynge voyces. ' Some-
times, he falls a victim to such a jangling trio as 'multiloquie,
stultiloquie, scurrilytye. ' But, if Longland has much in common
with Fisher, he also anticipates Hugh Latimer in his raciness, his
use of colloquial terms and his spirited indictment of the fashions
in dress. Who, he asks, are they who mourn and lament in this
tabernacle of the body? The jolye huffaas and ruſſelers of this
wolde ? the yonge galandes of the courte ? . . . noo, noo, noo. ' Why,
they study to make this body better in shape than God made it,
‘now with this fashon of apparel, now with that; now with this
6


## p. 229 (#251) ############################################

Latimer's Sermons
229
cutte and that garde. I cannot descrybe the thynge, nor I will
doo. ' The very serving-man must spend upon one pair of hose
as much as his half year's wages. It is farre wyde and out of the
nocke. ' If an orthodox bishop could preach before the king on
a Good Friday in this free strain, the way is already prepared for
Latimer's 'merry toys' eleven years later.
No complete sermons of Latimer's Cambridge days have sur-
vived. In the Sermons on the Card we have only the tenor
and effect of certain sermons made by Master Latimer in Cambridge
about the year of our Lord 1529. ' They are justly famous for
their originality and promise and for their outspoken denunciation.
But they do not compare, at least in the form in which they have
come down to us, with the sermons which he delivered before
king Edward VI twenty years later. Of the intervening period,
there remain only two sermons : a short one preached at the time
of the insurrection of the north, and the convocation sermon
delivered in 1536, just after he had become bishop of Worcester.
The latter shows a great advance on the Card sermons, and, in
consideration of the occasion, was probably composed with greater
care than any other sermon which we have. It contains the fine
contrast between dead images, covered with gold and clad with
silk garments, and 'Christ's faithful and lively images. . . an hungred,
a-thirst, a-cold. The rest of Latimer's surviving sermons, thirty-
eight in number, those upon which his true fame depends, belong
to his old age. In them, he describes himself as 'thoroughe age,
boethe weake in body and oblivious. Yet this 'sore brused man,'
as if to make up for the years of enforced idleness, since the Six
Articles had driven him out of active ministry, devoted the remain-
ing years entirely to the pulpit; he was happier there than in the
bishop's throne, and 'he continued all Kyng Edwardes tyme,
preaching for the most part every Sunday two Sermons. ' He was
a preacher first and last, and he achieved such popular success as
came to no other English preacher till Whitefield and Wesley.
Here, at least, was a ploughman who set forward his plough, and
ploughed manfully with all his strength.
It is characteristic of his entire absorption in his pulpit work
that even the business publishing his sermons does not seem to
have concerned him directly. Latimer's sermons have a place
in literature, but few books have had a less literary origin. These
free and easy discourses, good talking rather than set speeches,
have been written down by other hands, probably without revision
by their author. We recognise unmistakably the ready speech


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230
The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
>
9
of a debater, who can turn interruptions or unforeseen accidents
to account.
'I came hither to day from Lambeth in a whirry,'
and what the wherryman said serves for an argument. If, in the
course of a sermon, which he has threatened to continue for three
or four hours, his hearers grow impatient and try to cough him
down, he can make a joke of it at their expense. He goes
backward and forward with his subject, and does not hesitate
to be discursive ('I will tell you now a pretty story of a friar
to refresh you withal'), or to say a good thing while he can
remember it; ‘peradventure it myght come here after in better
place, but yet I wyll take it, whiles it commeth to my mind. '
Even when he has worked up to a formal peroration, and ended
with a text, he breaks in with ‘There was another suit, and I had
almost forgotten it. ' There are repetitions, sometimes of great
length, which must have been tedious even to hear. If he is
pleased with a word, he will work it to death ; in a Good Friday
sermon he uses the word ‘ugsome' eight times. He can be plain,
even to coarseness. Martin Marprelate might take a lesson from
him in calling names: 'those flattering clawbacks,' 'pot-gospellers,'
'these bladder-puffed up wily men,' 'flibberjibs,' 'upskips,' 'ye
brain-sick fools, ye hoddy-pecks, ye doddy-pols, ye huddes. ' The
Pharisees are represented as saying to Christ, ‘Master, we know
that thou art Tom Truth. The Father did not intervene to save
the Son but 'suffred him to bite upon the brydle a whyle. ' No
word or illustration is too homely for him to use. Latimer needed
to have no thought for the dignity of literature or the conventions
of reverence. He was not writing a book, but trying to keep the
,
attention of a boy of eleven and a crowd of idle courtiers. Latimer
the preacher cared for ‘no great curiousness, no great clerkliness,
no great affectation of words, nor of painted eloquence’; he
aimed only at ‘a nipping sermon, a rough sermon, and a sharp
biting sermon. '
These conditions were hardly favourable to the production
of literature, but Latimer did valuable service in testing the
possibilities of the language. None of his predecessors ever
carried the art of story-telling to a higher point. He can take
the most familiar narrative in the Bible and retell it with pointed
allusions to current events. During the weeks that Latimer
preached first before Edward VI, the lord high admiral, lord
Seymour of Sudeley, lay in the Tower under sentence of death.
Latimer hated the man and did not spare him. His hearers must
have recognised in an instant what was his purpose when he


## p. 231 (#253) ############################################

Latimer as a Preacher
231
>
began telling the story of Adonijah, 'a man full of ambition,
desirous of honour, always climbing, climbing. ' This stout-
stomached child'had Joab to help him,'a by-walker, that would
not walk the king's highway. ' And so he went on climbing till,
after David's death, he aspired to marry queen Abishag. The
story, as told by Latimer, fills several pages, and yet the interest
is throughout intense and dramatic, without ever a direct mention
of Seymour and queen Catherine Parr.
Latimer reveals very little of the poetry and imaginative feeling
which are conspicuous in Fisher's writing. There is seldom any
illustration from nature, or any flights of what can be called
eloquence. The personification which he makes of Faith—'a
noble duchess with her gentleman usher going before her, and
a train after her'-is not a characteristic feature of his style ; but
he is seemingly pleased with it, and uses it again a few weeks
later to the same audience. The allegories which had been the
stock-in-trade of earlier preachers he explicitly rejects; if he
wants illustration, he draws from his experience of the market-
place and the court. He prefers the wherryman's 'good natural
reason' to the arguments of the whole college of cardinals. Ever
since his conversation with little Bilney, he 'forsook the school-
doctors and such fooleries. At the end of his great Lenten course,
he claims that he has walked 'in the brode filde of scripture and
used my libertie. ' He has no taste for theological subtleties ;
'as for curiouse braynes nothinge can content them. ' There is
some rough sledge-hammer controversy with papists and ana-
baptists, but his real bent is towards practical questions; and
that is one reason why he continues to interest readers of a
later day. No one today stands where Latimer did in doctrinal
theology but bribery is still bribery. One cannot imagine a more
telling point in a discourse on bribery than when the preacher
said, 'He that took the silver basin and ewer for a bribe, thinketh
that it will never come out; but he may now know that
I know it'
It is his passionate desire to right social wrongs which gives
Latimer his highest claim to be called a great preacher. He is
never belabouring sin in the abstract but accurately diagnoses
and fearlessly exposes the injustices of his time. The decay of
discipline and reverence, and the wholesale spirit of greed, which
accompanied the breaking up of the old order, are faithfully
dealt with by the prophet of the new order. The lay landlords
who have supplanted monastic landowners he calls step-lords ;
6


## p. 232 (#254) ############################################

232 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
6
rent-raising, enclosures, idleness, covetousness and all the other
faults of the rich are denounced to their faces : 'be you never
so great lords and ladies,' the preacher will rub you on the gall. '
The impoverishment of schools and universities, the corruption
of judges, and the tricks of the trades are unsparingly treated, and
Latimer has the preacher's best reward of seeing some wrongs
redressed as a result of his agitation. The poor and the op-
pressed have had no truer friend at court than Latimer preaching
before Edward VI.
Bishop Hooper, who succeeded Latimer as court preacher, had
equal courage, but less human sympathy. For his Lenten course
in 1550, he chose a very suitable subject, namely the prophet
Jonas, which will enable me freely to touch upon the duties of
individuals. ' His chief aim was to urge the king to use the art
of the law against unpreaching clergy, covetous lawyers, thieves,
adulterers, swearers and other offenders. The king must show no
'preposterous pity. ' The ship of the commonwealth cannot sail in
quiet waters, until the mariners cast out all Jonases. Into the
sea with them,' cries this vehement orator. There is a native
vigour about his denunciations, but he takes no pains to make
his message attractive. His grammar is often faulty and his
illustrations are trite: he uses the stock story of Cambyses and
the judge's skin, which Latimer used to the same audience the
previous Lent, and which Fisher used before either of them. His
humour, when he shows any, is of the broadest kind; if the newly-
ordained priest according to the first reformed ordinal is to be
given the chalice to hold, why do they not as well give him the
font?
The older generation of reformers was soon finding valuable
recruits for the work of preaching. Bishop Ridley had particular
success in discovering able men and promoting them. In 1550, he
ordained two Lancashire and Cambridge men-John Bradford
of Pembroke, the converted lawyer, whom he made his chaplain
and a prebendary of St Paul's, and Thomas Lever, fellow and,
afterwards, master of St John's college. Ridley grouped Bradford
and Lever with Latimer and Knox as the most incisive preachers
of the age. Bradford's short career was ended by his imprison-
ment and martyrdom in 1555. Lever lived on far into Elizabeth's
reign, and was among the most distinguished of the first non-
conformists. Three fruitful sermons of the year 1550 remain to
vindicate his right to be remembered as a preacher to Edward VI.
The 'yonge simple scholar,' as he describes himself, shows remark-


## p. 233 (#255) ############################################

Lever's Sermons
233
6
6
able self-confidence, and is prepared to be thought 'sumwhat
saucye' for his hitting out freely. "Thus hath God by Esaye in
his tyme, and by me at this tyme, described Rulers Faultes, with
a way how to amend them. ' Parsons who do not reside on their
cures, covetous landlords who let their labourers' cottages go into
decay and turn all to pasture,''covitous carles' who ‘forstall the
markettes and bye corn at all tymes, to begynne and encrease a
dearth,' judges who take bribes and give wrong judgments, all
come under Lever's lash, especially when he is preaching before
the king. It is particularly to his credit that he does not blink his
eyes to the evils which have grown up out of the reformation. If
the abolition of abbeys, chantries and guilds has only enriched
covetous men, and actually set back the condition of schools and
universities, then it is time to look to these Judases which have
the bag. Lever does not resemble Latimer only in his fiery de-
nunciation of social wrongs, but has also something of his rough
humour and racy vernacular. In such a passage as the following,
where he attacks those lay-rectors who put in an incompetent and
underpaid curate to serve the parish, we might believe ourselves
to be reading Latimer himself.
Yes, forsoth, he ministreth Gods sacramentes, he sayeth his servyce, and
he readeth the homilies, as you fyne flatring courtiers, which speake by
imagination, tearme it: But the rude lobbes of the countrey, whiche be to
symple to paynte a lye, speake foule and truly as they fynde it, and saye: He
ministreth Gods sacraments, he slubbers up his service, and he cannot reade
the humbles.
But Lever does not maintain our interest like his predecessor, and
he has some irritating affectations. Few writers before or since
can have abused more completely the habit of grouping words
in triplets. He will pursue this same trick through clause after
clause:
From whence shal we that be governors, kepers, and feders, bye and provide
with our own costes, labor and diligence, bread, foode, and necessaryes, etc. ?
John Bradford's preaching is represented by two sermons,
which afford an interesting contrast to one another. The first,
on repentance, unlike most of the other extant sermons of that
period, was not a London sermon, but was delivered 'as I was
abroad preaching in the country. ' He was with much difficulty
persuaded to print it. Once before, when he had been diffident
about his preaching, Bucer had counselled him, “If thou have not
fine manchet bread, give the pore people barley bread. ' He had


## p. 234 (#256) ############################################

234 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
considerable learning, but he was probably not a practised writer,
and he certainly gets into difficulties with long sentences. He
tries to satisfy the prevailing taste for alliteration, and produces
astounding examples with as many as eight words in sequence.
The most interesting literary feature is his free use of colloquial
and provincial words. More than any preacher of his age, he
requires a glossary for the modern reader. He has a plentiful
supply of similes and metaphors, but they are often tasteless and
undignified. Still, he is always forcible and, upon fitting occasion,
can be eloquent.
This death of Christ therefore look on as the very pledge of God's love
toward thee, whosoever thou art, how deep soever thou hast sinned. See,
God's hands are nailed, they cannot strike thee: his feet also, he cannot run
from thee: his arms are wide open to embrace thee: his head hangs down to
kiss thee: his very heart is open.
Bradford's other sermon was not published till nearly twenty years
after his death. It was, perhaps, preached to his fellow-prisoners
in queen Mary's reign before they took the Sacrament together,
as their gaolers suffered them to do. It was, at any rate, written
where he had no access to books, as he expressly says. The
sermon was sent in manuscript, with other of Bradford's writings,
to his friend Ridley for corrections. Whether the older writer
pruned away any extravagances of style, or whether Bradford had
himself learnt better, there are few traces left of the tricks and
provincialisms which had disfigured his first sermon. His theme,
the Lord's Supper, almost necessitated controversial treatment,
but he sets out his argument with clearness and learning and
religious feeling.
Another famous preacher made a single appearance at king
Edward's court, and, like many of his immediate predecessors,
found empty benches. Yet no one had arisen since Latimer who
deserved a hearing better than Bernard Gilpin. If the courtiers
had attended, they would have heard a sermon as free from
literary affectations and almost as entertaining as the sermon
on the Plough.
In the more settled times of Elizabeth's reign, there begin
to appear sermons of a different order. Hitherto, the typical
vernacular sermon has been a popular harangue. If it is to
make a hit, it must aim low. A sermon at Paul's cross before
a demonstrative crowd must use the methods of the hustings
rather than of the lecture-room. But, since the reformation began,
a generation had grown up which was habituated to theological
a


## p. 235 (#257) ############################################

Elizabethan Preachers
235
controversy, and was interested in its technicalities. Such men
as Jewel, Hooker, Perkins and Rainolds address their appeal, with
what success they may, to the best intelligence in the country.
Tirades and appeals to prejudice must make way for arguments
and appeals to antiquity. The fathers and doctors are cited, and
doctrinal statements are minutely analysed and discussed. The
effects of this change on literature are both favourable and un-
favourable. Undoubtedly, the progress of controversy taught men
to express themselves clearly upon difficult topics. It may occasion
surprise that men like Jewel and Sandys should have so soon
acquired facility of expression. Their style may lack distinction or
charm, but at least it is adequate. Latimer can keep straight with
his short sentences and concrete themes. Elizabethan preachers
have to grapple with deep points of theology, and yet can present
them lucidly and methodically, without losing their way in their
more involved sentences. On the other hand, the very weight of
the matter, its technical character and its array of authorities, are
unfavourable to the production of an attractive prose-style. There
is little room for grace or fancy in these learned and scholastic
performances. Still, it is much that they should have worked out
for themselves the means of expressing their thoughts in perfectly
clear and unmannered English. It is a pleasure, for instance, to
read anything which says what it means so exactly and so easily
as does Jewel's famous Challenge sermon. Sandys was induced at
the close of his life to write out for publication twenty-two of his
sermons. The literary ability which distinguished his sons is not
absent from the father's writing. His sentences are well-built,
with a strict avoidance of any mannerism or exaggeration. There
is never any excess of ornament, nor any lapse from good taste,
except when the Roman controversy proves too much for him.
His frequent quotations from St Bernard and St Chrysostom,
from Horace and Terence, indicate the newer style of literary
preaching
The friendship of Sandys and Jewel, who were once 'com-
panions at bed and board in Germany' had important consequences
for a greater than either, Richard Hooker. Jewel, himself a
Devonshire man, befriended the promising Exeter boy, and sent
him to his old college of Corpus Christi at Oxford, where another
Devonian and famous preacher, John Rainolds, was his tutor.
Jewel died when Hooker was in his nineteenth year, but he had
already commended him to the notice of bishop Sandys, who sent
his son Edwin to be under Hooker's tuition, and, afterwards,


## p. 236 (#258) ############################################

236 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
furthered his promotion to the mastership of the Temple. There
is no need to deal in detail with Hooker's sermons, because they
reflect the same great qualities, both in thought and expression,
which have been already discussed in another volume of the
present work? . But no account of Elizabethan preachers would
be complete without some mention of the only name among them
which has an assured place in the first rank. Hooker published
none of his sermons; as Izaak Walton says, it was only the felix
error of Travers's opposition which caused him to write out for
private circulation some of the sermons to which the Reader had
taken exception. Though Hooker's fame depends chiefly on his
Ecclesiastical Polity, we should have been immeasurably the
poorer for the loss of his sermons on the certainty of faith, justi-
fication and the nature of pride, which have more permanent
value than any sermons of the reign. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
wrote of the first:
I can remember no other discourse, that sinks into and draws up comfort
from the depths of our being below our own distinct consciousness, with the
clearness and godly loving-kindness of this truly evangelical and God-to-be-
thanked-for sermon;
and he declared that one paragraph should be written in letters
of gold. This testimony is valuable as showing that, in his
sermons, Hooker could appeal to the feeling and the conscience,
as successfully as in his book he appealed to the reason.
There is yet a further service which Hooker rendered to the
contemporary pulpit. Here, as in his book, he set the tone of a
controversialist who was not content to be barely just to an
opponent but sought to find common ground with him. Jewel,
for instance, though he abandons the scurrility of earlier pro-
testant champions, fights hard to maintain the scandal of pope
Joan, and even takes as an axiom, 'let us remember to do the
contrary' of what those before the reformation had done. The
puritan divine Edward Dering could say outright, 'Now we know
the Pope to be anti-christ, and his prayers to be evill’; and similar
bitterness mars the sermons of Rainolds. While such language
was still prevalent, Hooker had the courage and the breadth of
mind to assert that the Church of Rome is a true Church of
Christ, and a sanctified Church. ' He reverenced truth, as he
conceived it, wherever he found it. This attitude in itself could
not fail to affect the methods of the pulpit. When Hooker set
himself to persuade, and not to denounce or 'frighten men into
· See vol. III, pp. 405 ff.


## p. 237 (#259) ############################################

Henry Smith
237
piety,' it led him, as his biographer acutely observed, to use
another kind of rhetoric.
Probably Henry Smith, alone among Elizabethan preachers,
shares with Hooker the distinction of finding modern readers.
Hooker's sermons were as well suited to the learned auditory
of the Temple as Smith's were to the popular congregation of
St Clement Danes. But the silver-tongued preacher' knew that
'to preach simply is not to preach rudely, nor unlearnedly, nor
confusedly. ' He had no patience with the drones who 'by their
slubbering of the word (for want of study and meditation) do make
men think that there is no more wisdom in the word of God than
they shew out of it. ' We find ourselves in a different atmosphere
from that of the controversial sermon, and hear instead plain
moral duties set out with homely illustrations and playful turns:
"The devil is afraid that one sermon will convert us, and we are
not moved with twenty; so the devil thinketh better of us than
we are. ' Some of his sermons, printed during his life-time, are
described on the title-page as 'taken by characterie and after
examined. ' Whether in separate or in collected form, no sermons
of the age were more frequently printed.
The strict enforcement of the penal laws, and the limited and
furtive nature of their opportunities of church worship, prevented
Roman Catholics in England from contributing to the general
store of printed sermons. Controversial and devotional writings
exist in sufficient quantity to show that there were men who
might have made good use of happier times. Edmund Campion's
letters are attractive, Parsons's Christian Directory received the
compliment of many protestant editions, and the rich fancy of
Robert Southwell's tracts won the praise of Francis Bacon.
The puritan tendency to exalt the sermon was not without its
dangers to religious life, and had not an altogether wholesome
influence on the sermon itself. In the times when religion
flourished most, said Hooker, men ‘in the practice of their
religion wearied chiefly their knees and hands, we especially our
ears and tongues. ' Bishop Andrewes, in an earnest sermon on
the text, 'Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only,' urged
that St James's teaching was specially needed in an age 'when
hearing of the word is growen into such request, that it hath got
the start of all the rest of the parts of God's service'; 'sermon-
hearing is the Consummatum est of all Christianitie. ' It affected
the preaching of Andrewes himself adversely, when the pedantic
king James I and his courtiers crowded to hear a sermon as an
.


## p. 238 (#260) ############################################

238 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
intellectual entertainment. Andrewes spoke out of bitter ex-
perience when he said of Ezekiel's contemporaries,
they seemed to reckon of sermons no otherwise than of songs: to give them
the hearing, to commend the aire of them, and so let them goe. The Musike
of a song, and the Rhetorique of a sermon, all is one.
If this common attitude towards the sermon encouraged the
preacher to spend pains upon the literary workmanship of his
sermon, it also robbed him of that which gives wings to his
rhetoric and can alone make it tolerable, namely, the force of
conviction. Ingenious types and metaphors, paradoxical illustra-
tions, verbal conceits, grammatical subtleties, may be useful allies;
but, in the sermons of the period, they were apt to be valued for
themselves. Exquisite pains were lavished upon the exposition,
but the application was not pressed home.
Happily, there can be no question of bishop Andrewes's per-
sonal piety and earnestness. The witness of his contemporaries
agrees with the witness of his Private Devotions. In his preaching,
he gave in too much to the mannerisms of the day and the taste of
his audience, but the holiness of his inner life and the sincerity
of his aims were not doubted by the most frivolous, or without
influence upon a corrupt court. His life forms a link between
several ages. He was born in the year that Latimer was burnt,
he lived to see Charles I crowned and Milton wrote a Latin elegy
upon his death. Few men have owed more to their schoolmasters
and few have acknowledged their debt more handsomely. Samuel
Ward of Ratcliffe, to whom he afterwards gave the rectory of
Waltham, discovered his merit, and prevented his parents from
making a prentice of him. Richard Mulcaster, the first head-
master of Merchant Taylors' school, secured him for the new
school. Andrewes 'ever loved and honoured his Master Mulcaster
. . . and placed his picture over the doore of his Studie; whereas
in all the rest of the house, you could scantly see a picture. '
At Pembroke hall, Cambridge, he became, in succession, scholar,
fellow and master. He was always 'a singular lover and en-
courager of learning and learned men,' and his friendship with
Casaubon and their enthusiastic studies at Ely form one of the
most attractive pictures in the history of scholarship. His stores
of erudition and his knowledge of many languages were fitly
employed in the translation of the Pentateuch for the Authorised
Version; they were less felicitously used in his sermons, where
they sometimes cumber the ground. His knowledge of the fathers
was wider than his knowledge of men, and his one intrusion into


## p. 239 (#261) ############################################

Andrewes's Sermons
239
secular life, in the matter of the Essex divorce, was disastrous and
bitterly repented.
His sermons were collected for publication by the command
of Charles I, who was 'graciously pleased to thinke a paper-life
better than none,' though the editors, Laud and Buckeridge, were
well aware that the printed sermons 'could not live with all that
elegancie which they had upon his tongue. ' His preaching owed
as much to his perfect delivery as Hooker's lost by his diffidence.
After-ages will always find the contemporary opinion of Andrewes's
sermons extravagant, but, in spite of the most exasperating faults
of style, there is much to praise. He prefers to tread the well-
worn highway of common Christianity, and will not easily be
drawn either into the Roman controversy or into the insoluble
“deep points' of predestination and the like, in which puritan
preachers often lost themselves. The determination to extract
the most possible from the sacred text leads him into over-nice
distinctions, till he can only express himself with the help of
brackets, and even of brackets within brackets. Yet, notwith-
standing his clumsy apparatus, finicking exegesis and tortuous
language, he commonly rewards the reader's patience. The re-
mark of the presbyterian lord to James I at Holyrood, ‘No doubt
your Majesty's bishop is a learned man, but he cannot preach.
He rather plays with his text than preaches on it,' is not the
whole truth. The texts which Andrewes took for his great series
of Christmas and Good Friday sermons are permanently enriched
by the musings of his devout mind.
It is unfortunately easy to trace the influence of Andrewes
upon the younger preachers of his times. The Andrewes tradition
lasted far on into the century, and, in the hands of lesser men, it
lost the life which the genius of Andrewes had been able to infuse
into it. When, at last, it was superseded by preaching of a plainer
and sincerer style, bishop Burnet wrote its epitaph :
The impertinent way of dividing texts is laid aside; the needless setting
out of the originals and the vulgar version is worn out. The trifling shews of
learning, in many quotations of passages, that very few can understand, do
no more flat the auditory.
John Donne, although eighteen years younger than Andrewes,
survived him only six years. While Laud, Montagu, Ussher and
Hall were destined to preach to another age, Donne preached only
to the age which knew Andrewes. From the first, it must have
been inevitable to compare the two most famous preachers of
James I's reign. Both are deeply read in the fathers and love


## p. 240 (#262) ############################################

240 The English Pulpit from Fisher to Donne
6
to quote them in their original languages. Neither can resist the
fanciful imagery and verbal conceits that their age loved. Yet,
though they work with the same clay, the one achieves a success
in spite of his clumsiness, the other is a finished artist. Andrewes
is read with difficulty for the sake of his matter; Donne is read
by many who care little for his theology. Yet Donne was not
simply a man of letters caring more for his style than for his
matter. He impressed his own age, as he impresses the reader
of today, with his tremendous earnestness. Whether the reasons
which brought him to enter the ministry in his forty-second year
were adequate or not, he gave himself to his new calling with an
evergrowing sense of his responsibility. He took the most exacting
view of the preacher's office, and would excuse 'no man's laziness,
that will not employ his whole time upon his calling.