The English Reformation was an anomalous aspect of a European movement. For convenience we can distinguish three main areas with which Protestant reformers of whatever nationality or persuasion were concerned: organisation (the source and distribution of authority in the church), worship and discipline (preaching, the administration of the sacraments, prayers, ceremonies, the furnishing of churches), and doctrine. There was much more dispute between Catholics and Protestants and among Protestants themselves about the first two, although the last was most important. The reformation of the English church was not a sudden and final event, but a slow and uneven process lasting over a hundred years. From the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke with Rome, to the 1660s, when with the Restoration of Charles II Anglicanism was re-established, the church underwent various metamorphoses. Anglicanism, praised by its supporters as the via media, the path of moderation between the extremes of Catholic Rome and Calvinist Geneva (13,14, 21), was regarded by its Puritan critics as an ineffectual compromise, an incompletely reformed system (18). Twice in the period Anglicanism was defeated: in the 1550s, when the church for the duration of Mary’s reign reacknowledged the authority of Rome, and in the 1640s and 1650s, when in the period of the Puritan revolution the distinctive features of the Anglican church were abolished. Yet ultimately it was the Anglican compromise, however unsatisfactory, that survived.
The chief architects of the continental Reformation towards whom the English reformers looked with various degrees of approbation were Martin Luther in Saxony and Ulrich Zwingli and Jean Calvin in Switzerland. In some respects the continental reformers were not original, but drew on and developed existing criticisms of the Church of Rome. The fourteenth-century English reformer John Wycliffe and his Bohemian follower John Huss anticipated many of Luther’s teachings. The hostility of many states towards the temporal political power of the papacy had long been expressed. There was widespread condemnation of notorious abuses in the medieval church: the unchastity of the supposedly celibate clergy, the luxury and extravagance of the monasteries whose inmates were vowed to lives of poverty, pluralism (the holding of several benefices) and absenteeism among the clergy, the dubious financial dealings of the papacy, such as the sale of offices (simony) and indulgences (which promised remission of time to be spent in purgatory). Indeed Luther’s attack on the sale of indulgences in 1517 first brought him notoriety. More important than these specific criticisms, however, were the weapons provided by humanism (see Chapter 9) against the traditional authority of the church. Humanist insistence on the recovery of the past and the return to original texts directed attention away from the work of medieval theologians and back to the Bible and the early Fathers (especially Jerome and Augustine); it also revealed how far removed the medieval church was in its practices from the primitive church of the first centuries and the Christianity of the gospels and epistles. Further, humanist philological methods revealed serious weaknesses in the claims of the church. Thus the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the so-called Donation of Constantine giving temporal power to the papacy was a forgery, and Erasmus in his edition of the New Testament of 1516 pointed out errors in Jerome’s Latin translation, the Vulgate, which had been used by the church for centuries. However, though humanism can be seen to have done a good deal to prepare the ground for the Protestant Reformation, there were fundamental differences between the two movements. Erasmus and Luther disagreed violently over the question of the dignity or depravity of human nature (see Chapter 8), and Erasmus remained uncomfortably within the Church of Rome (his writings were, however, to be condemned by Rome after his death). Above all it was Luther’s theology, added to longstanding political, social and moral criticisms of Rome, and armed with humanist literary and historical techniques, that made Protestantism a revolutionary force.
There was much disagreement in the sixteenth century between continental Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) churches over secondary questions of church government and worship, paralleled by that in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries between Anglicans and Puritans. But such disagreement is insignificant compared with what the Protestant churches held in common, which can be summarised as follows. The source of authority for Christians is the Bible (2–4), and the central doctrine taught in the Bible is that of justification by faith alone (see Chapter 8). On these tenets the remaining articles of Protestantism depend. The Bible must be available in the vernacular for each individual to read (6–9); worship must be conducted in the vernacular so that the individual can take part. Neither the pope nor the traditions of the church have any divine claims to authority. The seven Catholic sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Ordination and Matrimony) are reduced to two (Baptism and the Eucharist). The Eucharist (the Lord’s Supper or Communion) is not a sacrifice as in the Catholic mass, but a visible sign of invisible grace (10); the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine is denied (there was however much disagreement among reformers about the exact meaning of the Lord’s Supper). Since the Christian is saved by faith alone, not by good works, a number of Catholic beliefs, practices and institutions are irrelevant and unchristian: the intercession of saints, masses for the souls of the dead, purgatory, penance, indulgences, monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, self-mortification (11). The role of the priesthood is diminished: Protestant Christianity is a priesthood of all believers, each of whom can interpret the Bible for himself (1). The Protestant minister is above all a teacher and exhorter; he is not set apart as an intermediary between God and man like the Catholic priest. His function as preacher is stressed more than his function as administrator of the sacraments. Hence the coming of reform to a European city or state meant immediate, visible changes in the life of the church: monasteries were dissolved, monks, nuns and priests were free to marry, churches were stripped of many images, the pulpit became the focal point, clerical dress was simplified, liturgies were altered, the congregation participated actively through the singing of hymns (in Lutheran churches) and metrical psalms (in Reformed and Anglican churches).
In England the Reformation was the fusion of three separate forces: native Lollardy (the Wycliffite movement), continental Protestantism, and the constitutional conflict between Henry VIII and the church, resulting from the pope’s refusal to allow Henry to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. In the 1530s Henry broke with Rome, made himself the Supreme Head of the church, divorced Katherine, dissolved the monasteries and appropriated their wealth. However, Henry remained hostile to Protestant theology (he gained his title of Fidei Defensor, defender of the faith, from the pope for writing against Luther). Lutheranism spread rapidly in Henry’s reign among Lollards and especially at Cambridge, but it was not until the reign of Edward VI that the Church of England, under the direction of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, took recognisable shape. Cranmer was responsible for creating a new liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer (15), which was first issued in 1549 and revised in 1552. This revised edition was reissued in 1559 as part of the Elizabethan Settlement of the church; Puritan hostility brought about its abolition in 1645, but it was reissued in what has been its most lasting form in 1662. Cranmer was also responsible for the formulation of Anglican doctrine. His Forty-Two Articles of 1553 formed the basis of the Thirty-NineArticlesadoptedinfinalformin 1571 (3, 10, 16; Ch. 8.16, 19, 31). In addition Cranmer was the principal author of the first Book of Homilies (or sermons to be read in churches) of 1547; a second book (largely by John Jewel) was issued in 1571. The Homilies (no longer in use, unlike the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer) provide clear expositions of sixteenth-century Anglican theological, political, social and moral teaching (4, 7, 11; Ch. 8.13). These works, together with the English translations of the Bible, form the literary basis of the Anglican church.
The version of the Bible used by the Catholic church was the Vulgate, St Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation. The uneducated could not understand it, and the church controlled its interpretation. The primary aim of the reformers was to translate the Bible into the vernacular. Two Wycliffite versions had a limited circulation in manuscript in the fifteenth century, but a layman required a bishop’s licence to read them. The invention of printing and the development of humanist linguistic scholarship were decisive factors in the spread of knowledge of the Bible in the sixteenth century. The Spanish Cardinal Ximenes’ edition, known as the Complutensian Polyglot (1522), printed the original Hebrew and Greek alongside the Vulgate. Erasmus’ several editions of the Greek New Testament with his own Latin translation contained important prefatory material on the study of Scripture. The preface to the first edition of 1516, the ‘Paraclesis’ or exhortation, urged that the words of Christ should be on the lips of all Christians from childhood (6). Luther translated both New and Old Testaments into German (1522 and 1534), not from the Vulgate, but from Erasmus’ Greek edition and the Hebrew, and wrote commentaries on specific books (Romans, Galatians, Hebrews, and Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, Habbakuk and Jonah). Luther’s own preference (for St John, I Peter, Romans, Galatians and Ephesians) and dislike (for the Epistle of James) strongly influenced Protestant interpretation of the New Testament. The work of both Erasmus and Luther was drawn on by William Tyndale, the most important individual in the corporate creation of the English Bible. Tyndale received no support for his projected translation in England, and so worked on the continent. The first edition of his New Testament, published in 1525, reached England in 1526; because of its Lutheran phraseology and ideas (some of the prefaces were translations of Luther’s commentaries (Ch. 8.15, 26)) Tyndale’s translation was attacked, notably by Sir Thomas More in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies. More wished the church to safeguard interpretation and was prepared to envisage only a limited circulation of a vernacular Bible. Tyndale also published part of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and left further parts translated but unpublished at his death (he was executed for heresy in 1536).
The subsequent history of English Bible translation is a complicated matter, but Tyndale’s version remained at the heart of it. After Henry VIII’s break with Rome the English church asked for an official translation. The first complete version was that of Miles Coverdale, published initially on the continent and then in England in 1537, drawing on Luther, Tyndale and the Vulgate. Coverdale’s translation of the psalms was included by Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer, and has consequently remained more familiar through use than the psalms in the Authorised Version. The Great Bible, the first official Bible to be supplied to all parish churches by an injunction of 1538, was Coverdale’s revision of Matthew’s Bible of 1537, itself a revision of Tyndale and Coverdale’s earlier version. The Great Bible was revised and reissued under Elizabeth in 1568 as the Bishops’ Bible. Although it was the official version read in churches, the Bishops’ Bible was never popular. Its rival was the Geneva Bible (8), largely by William Whittingham, issued in 1557 and 1560 by the community of Marian exiles (Protestants who had fled to the continent to escape persecution under Mary, and who returned following the accession of Elizabeth in 1558). The Geneva Bible, based on French as well as earlier English translations, was supplied with extensive Calvinist annotation. It was the first English Bible to be divided into numbered verses, and this practice was followed by the Authorised Version. The Geneva Bible (although officially frowned upon) remained popular well after the publication of the latter. A Catholic translation from the Vulgate was issued by the English College at Rheims and Douai in 1582 and 1609–10, to counteract the doctrinal tendentiousness of the English Protestant versions, and was quite widely known in England among Protestants as well as Catholics. Because of the uneasy coexistence of the Bishops’ and Geneva Bibles, James I was petitioned by the Puritans at the beginning of his reign for a new official translation. The Authorised Version or King James Bible (9), published in 1611 without doctrinal annotation, was the work of fifty theological and linguistic experts, whose task was to revise the Bishops’ Bible in comparison with the Geneva and in the light of the earlier versions of Tyndale and Coverdale. The Douai—Rheims Bible was also used. The Authorised Version was thus not a new Bible: rather it was the considered culmination of ninety years of biblical scholarship, translation and evangelism. Much of Tyndale’s original rendering remained. Thus stylistically the Authorised Version was an anachronism; in comparison with ornate and witty late Elizabethan and early Jacobean prose, its vocabulary and sentence structure were archaic and simple. This style itself came to exercise an influence on seventeenth-century prose.
Doctrinally the Church of England was unequivocally Protestant; in terms of worship and government its position was more ambiguous. In its liturgy and vestments the church retained Catholic features, and, more important, it continued to be governed by bishops (the system known as episcopacy or prelacy). This compromise was deplored by the Puritan members (also known as the godly or the precise), who wished to purify the church of these vestiges of popery (18). The Puritans, many of whom had adopted Calvinist ideas of church government in Germany or Switzerland during the Marian exile, argued that the Bible must be the only authority not only for doctrine but for every aspect of church life. Thus practices not sanctioned by the Bible (which included most of the Anglican liturgy and ceremonies) should be abolished, as should episcopacy; instead, the church should be governed by elected elders or presbyters (hence presbyterianism). The Puritans attached great importance to extempore preaching and prayer (though some set forms were allowed), and attempted in the 1580s to replace the prescribed Book of Common Prayer by Walter Travers’ Book of Discipline, so as to bring the Church of England into line with the continental Reformed churches. The classic defence of the Anglican system against Puritan attacks was made by Richard Hooker in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Books I—IV 1593, V 1597, VI—VIII posthumously) (5, 12). Hooker broadened the basis of Protestant thought by drawing on classical and medieval philosophies of natural law and reason (see Chapter 8). On the question of worship and discipline, Hooker used the Lutheran concept of ‘things indifferent’ against Calvinist rigidity. Human traditions and ceremonies, though not necessary for salvation, should not be destroyed if they have been found effective. Hooker conceded that episcopacy was not positively demanded by Scripture, but it was convenient.
Under Elizabeth the Puritan wing of the church was contained; under the Stuarts the disagreement between Anglicans and Puritans grew. The disagreement concerned both doctrine and discipline. Some Anglicans became attracted to Arminianism, the anti-Calvinist teaching of the Dutch theologian Arminius (see Chapter 8), particularly after the Dutch Synod of Dort of 1618–19 condemned Arminianism and reaffirmed Calvinism. Under Archbishop Laud the Church of England seemed to Puritans to be moving back to Rome (19). Laud placed great stress on ceremony (17) and the ‘beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 96:9), valued the administration of the sacraments above preaching, and argued that episcopacy was not simply convenient but scriptural and of divine right. This seemed like sacerdotalism, a return to the sacrificial view of priesthood. Laud’s strict censorship of his Puritan critics and enforcement of his views of church discipline hastened the Civil War.
In the 1640s the Long Parliament abolished episcopacy, and the Westminster Assembly (set up to reform the church) issued the Westminster Confession of Faith as a substitute for the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Directory of Public Worship as a substitute for the Book of Common Prayer. But a presbyterian system of church government was never achieved. This was because of the increasing fragmentation of Puritanism during the years of Anglican control. A tendency to fragmentation was implicit in the Protestant emphasis on the sole authority of Scripture combined with the individual’s right to interpret Scripture for himself. The Presbyterians were able to impose their discipline neither on the Independents, who wanted not a national church but a loose association of self-governing churches, nor on the many sects who expected toleration for a wide range of beliefs and practices. However, many Puritans had emigrated to America to escape Laud’s persecution, and in New England, as in Scotland earlier, theocracies based on Calvin’s Geneva were established.
The Protestant and especially Puritan view of the Church of Rome remained stereotyped in its prejudices. To the moderate Anglican the pope was the Bishop of Rome, to the Puritan he was Antichrist (19). This hostility was fed by Catholic political blunders (the burning of 300 Protestants in Mary’s reign, the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth and releasing her subjects from their allegiance, the abortive invasion by the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot to blow up James and the Houses of Parliament), and it was perpetuated by John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (or Book of Martyrs) (Ch. 5.14), which was officially placed in churches with the Bible. For many Protestants the Inquisition and the Index (prohibiting heretical books) characterised the CounterReformation. But the Counter-Reformation was much more than a movement to combat Protestantism; it was also an alternative Catholic Reformation concerned with correcting abuses in the church, improving the education and efficiency of the priesthood, clarifying doetrine and defining the conditions of the Christian life. Some of the required reform was achieved by the Council of Trent, which met at intervals from 1545 to 1563 to establish the church’s position on doctrine and discipline. The Council confirmed the Vulgate as the official Bible, affirmed the church’s sole right to interpret it, and assigned as much authority to the traditions of the church as to Scripture. Traditional teaching on the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, justification and merit were clarified and Protestant positions condemned. Clerical celibacy, confession, indulgences and the use of relics and images were retained. Seminaries for the education of priests were to be established in each diocese. Perhaps the most significant new institution of the CounterReformation was the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, founded in Rome by the Spaniard St Ignatius Loyola in 1540, which rapidly became the church’s chief instrument for education, propaganda and missionary activity, both in Europe and overseas. Jesuit priests from the English college at Douai were sent to England as missionaries in the 1580s, to support the recusants (Catholics who did not attend Church of England services) and convert the Protestants. Many were executed for treason, including the poet Robert Southwell. Two influential literary works of the CounterReformation were the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius (published 1548) and the Introduction to the Devout Life of St François de Sales (1609). Such spiritual handbooks stressed self-examination, asceticism, active commitment to good works, obedience, subordination of the will, and meditation on the life and passion of Christ (23). They were widely read in England by Anglicans as well as Catholics, and influenced the structure and subject matter of devotional poetry (24).
It is impossible to appreciate fully the work of the religious poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without paying some attention to the conflicting versions of Christian doctrine and discipline that shaped their lives. A poet’s religious affiliations or disaffections, his conversion to or withdrawal from a particular church or movement, are not merely reflected in the doctrinal core of his work but condition his vocabulary, the structure of his arguments, his patterning of Christian experience. Many poets (Southwell, Donne, Giles Fletcher, Herbert, Crashaw) were in holy orders; many changed their allegiances (Alabaster from Anglicanism to Catholicism and back, Donne from Catholicism to Anglicanism, Milton from Anglicanism to Presbyterianism to Separatism, Crashaw from Anglicianism to Catholicism). Spenser’s triumphant marriage of Red Cross Knight to Una (Faerie Queene I xii) can only be understood in the light of the success of the Elizabethan settlement, Greville’s paradoxes in Caelica in the light of the Puritan separation of the realms of nature and grace, Herbert’s stress on the Eucharist in The Temple in the light of Laudian sacramentalism, Milton’s sense of history in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in the light of the collapse of the Puritan revolution, Crashaw’s adulation of St Teresa in Carmen Deo Nostro in the light of Counter-Reformation devotion (25, 26).
Bible translation and the liturgical innovations of the Protestant churches were themselves productive of certain kinds of poetry. Whereas Lutheran congregations sang hymns (many by Luther himself), Reformed and Anglican congregations sang only metrical versions of the psalms. Three official versions were very widely used: in England, that of Sternhold and Hopkins (first complete edition 1562); in Massachusetts, the Bay Psalm Book (1640); in Scotland, the second Scottish Psalter (1650). Yet many individuals made paraphrases of the psalms for their own use, among them Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney and his sister the Countess of Pembroke (the most technically innovative version), Sandys, Carew and Milton. The Bible is present in poetry in many other ways: some of Herbert’s poems are modelled on the parables (see Introduction 2), and some of Vaughan’s are meditations on specific verses of the New Testament. The writing of metrical psalms and devotional poetry can be seen both as kind of spiritual exercise, and as an extension of liturgy.
1 All Christians are truly of the spiritual estate… We are all consecrated priests through baptism… A priest in Christendom is nothing else but an officeholder… If we are all priests…and all have one faith, one gospel, one sacrament, why should we not also have the power to test and judge what is right or wrong in matters of faith?
Luther To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation
2 Unless I am convicted by the testimony of Scripture or plain reason (for I believe neither in Pope nor councils alone, since it is agreed that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.
Luther ‘Answer before the Emperor and the Diet of Worms’ 1521
3 Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.
The Thirty-Nine Articles VI ‘Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation’
4 Therefore forsaking the corrupt judgement of fleshly men, which care not but for their carcass; let us reverently hear and read Holy Scriptures, which is the food of the soul. Let us diligently search for the weil of life in the books of the New and Old Testament, and not run to the stinking puddles of men’s traditions, devised by men’s imagination, for our justification and salvation.
The Book of Homilies I ‘A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture’
5 Two opinions therefore there are concerning sufficiency of Holy Scripture, each extremely opposite unto the other, and both repugnant unto truth. The schools of Rome teach Scripture to be so unsufficient, as if, except traditions were added, it did not contain all revealed and supernatural truth, which absolutely is necessary for the children of men in this life to know that they may in the next be saved. Others justly condemning this opinion grow likewise unto a dangerous extremity, as if Scripture did not only contain all things in that kind necessary, but all things simply, and in such sort that to do anything according to any other law were not only unnecessary but even opposite unto salvation, unlawful and simple… We must…take great heed, lest in attributing unto Scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly to be less reverently esteemed.
Hooker Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity II viii
6 Truly it is one degree to good living, yea the first (I had almost said the chief) to have a little sight in the Scripture, though it be but a gross knowledge, and not yet consummate. (Be it in case that some would laugh at it, yea and that some should err and be deceived) I would to God, the ploughman would sing a text of the Scripture at his ploughbeam. And that the weaver at his loom, with this would drive away the tediousness of time. I would the wayfaring man with this pastime, would expel the weariness of his journey. And to be short, I would that all the communication of the Christian should be of the Scripture… If any man being inspired with the Holy Ghost do preach, and teach these and such other things, if any man exhort, entice, and bolden his neighbour unto these things, he is a very and true divine, though he be a weaver, yea though he dig and delve.
‘An exhortation to the diligent study of Scripture, made by Erasmus Roterodamus’ (Erasmus’ ‘Paraclete’, trans. W.Roy, Tyndale’s amanuensis)
7 And concerning the hardness of Scripture; he that is so weak that he is not able to brook strong meat, yet he may suck the sweet and tender milk, and defer the rest until he wax stronger, and come to more knowledge [Heb. 5:12–14]. For God receiveth the learned and unlearned, and casteth away none, but is indifferent unto all. And the Scripture is full, as well of low valleys, plain ways, and easy for every man to use and to walk in; as also of high hills and mountains, which few men can climb unto… If we read once, twice, or thrice, and understand not, let us not cease so, but still continue reading, praying, asking of other, and so by still knocking, at the last the door shall be opened; as St Augustine saith, Although many things in the Scripture be spoken in obscure mysteries, yet there is nothing spoken under dark mysteries in one place, but the self-same thing in other places is spoken more familiarly and plainly, to the capacity both of learned and unlearned. And those things in the Scripture that be plain to understand, and necessary for salvation, every man’s duty is to learn them, to print them in memory, and effectually to exercise them. And as for the dark mysteries, to be contented to be ignorant in them, until such time as it shall please God to open those things unto him.
The Book of Homilies I (see p. 143)
8 We are especially bound (dear brethren) to give [God] thanks without ceasing for his great grace and unspeakable mercies, in that it hath pleased him to call us unto this marvellous light of his gospel, and mercifully to regard us after so horrible backsliding and falling away from Christ to Antichrist [i.e. in the reign of Mary], from light to darkness, from the living God to dumb and dead idols, and that after so cruel murder of God’s saints, as alas, hath been among us, we are not altogether cast off…but received again to grace with most evident signs and tokens of God’s especial love and favour. To the intent therefore that we may not be unmindful of these great mercies…it behoveth us so to walk in his fear and love, that all the days of our life we may procure the glory of his holy name. Now forasmuch as this thing chiefly is attained by the knowledge and practising of the word of God (which is the light to our paths, the key of the kingdom of heaven, our comfort in affliction, our shield and sword against Satan, the school of all wisdom, the glass wherein we behold God’s face, the testimony of his favour, and the only food and nourishment of our souls) we thought that we could bestow our labours and study in nothing which could be more acceptable to God and comfortable to his church than in the translating of the Holy Scriptures into our native tongue.
Preface to the Geneva Bible
9 Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water, even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well, by which means the flocks of Laban were watered.
Preface to the Authorised Version
10 The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather it is a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ; and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.
Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ; but it is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.
The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith.
The Thirty-Nine Articles XXVIII ‘Of the Lord’s Supper’
11 Let us rehearse some other kinds of papistical superstitions and abuses, as of beads, of lady psalters, rosaries…of purgatory, of masses satisfactory, of stations and jubilees, of feigned relics, of hallowed beads, bells, bread, water, palms, candles, fire, and such other; of superstitious fastings, of fraternities or brotherhoods, of pardons, with such like merchandise, which were so esteemed and abused to the great prejudice of God’s glory and commandments, that they were made most high and most holy things, whereby to attain to the everlasting life, or remission of sin: yea also vain inventions, unfruitful ceremonies, and ungodly laws, decrees, and councils of Rome, were in such wise advanced, that nothing was thought comparable in authority, wisdom, learning, and godliness unto them… Thus was the people through ignorance so blinded with the godly show and appearance of those things, that they thought the keeping of them to be a more holiness, a more perfect service and honouring of God, and more pleasing to God, than the keeping of God’ s commandments.
The Book of Homilies V ‘Of Good Works’
12 The Church of England being to alter her received laws concerning such orders, rites, and ceremonies, as had been in former times an hindrance unto piety and religious service of God, was to enter into consideration first, that the change of laws, especially concerning matter of religion, must be warily proceeded in. Laws, as all other things human, are many times full of imperfection; and that which is supposed behoveful unto men, proveth oftentimes most pernicious. The wisdom which is learned by tract of time, findeth the laws that have been in former ages established, needful in later to be abrogated. Besides, that which sometime is expedient doth not always so continue: and the number of needless laws unabolished doth weaken the force of them that are necessary. But true withal it is, that alteration though it be from worse to better hath in it inconveniences, and those weighty…
Hooker Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity IV xiv
13 There is no church whose every part so squares unto my conscience, whose articles, constitutions and customs seem so consonant unto reason, and as it were framed to my particular devotion, as this whereof I hold my belief, the Church of England, to whose faith I am a sworn subject, and therefore in a double obligation, subscribe unto her articles, and endeavour to observe her constitutions: whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason, or the humour and fashion of my devotion, neither believing this, because Luther affirmed it, or disproving that, because Calvin hath disavouched it. I condemn not all things in the Council of Trent, nor approve all in the Synod of Dort. In brief, where the Scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, ‘tis but my comment: where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.
Browne Religio Medici I
14 To the churches of the Roman communion we can say that ours is reformed; to the Reformed churches we can say that ours is orderly and decent; for we were freed from the impositions and lasting errors of a tyrannical spirit, and yet from the extravagancies of a popular spirit too. Our reformation was done without tumult, and yet we saw it necessary to reform. We were zealous to cast away the old errors, but our zeal was balanced with the consideration and the results of authority: not like women or children when they are affrighted with fire in their clothes; we shaked off the coal indeed, but not our garments, lest we should have exposed our churches to that nakedness, which the excellent men of our sister-churches complained to be among themselves.
Taylor An Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy Preface (compare the image in 21)
15 Some [ceremonies] are put away, because the great excess and multitude of them hath so increased in these latter days, that the burden of them was intolerable… This our excessive multitude of ceremonies was so great, and many of them so dark, that they did more confound and darken, than declare and set forth Christ’s benefits unto us. And beside this, Christ’s gospel is not a ceremonial law (as much of Moses’ law was), but it is a religion to serve God, not in bondage of the figure or shadow, but in the freedom of the spirit; being content only with those ceremonies which do serve to a decent order and godly discipline, and such as be apt to stir up the dull mind of man to the remembrance of his duty to God, by some notable and special signification, whereby he might be edified.
The Book of Common Prayer ‘Of Ceremonies, why some be abolished, and some retained’
16 It is not necessary that traditions and ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word. Whosoever through his private judgement, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the traditions and ceremonies of the church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly (that others may fear to do the like), as he that offendeth against the common order of the church, and hurteth the authority of the magistrate, and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.
The Thirty-Nine Articles XXXIV ‘Of the Traditions of the Church’
17 For my own part, I take myself bound to worship with body as well as in soul, whenever I come where God is worshipped. And were this kingdom such as would allow no holy table standing in its proper place (and such places some there are), yet I would worship God when I came into his house. And were the times such as would beat down churches, and all the ‘curious carved work thereof, with axes and hammers’, as in Psalm 74:6 (and such times have been), yet would I worship in what place soever I came to pray, though there were not so much as a stone laid for Bethel. But this is the misery, it is superstition nowadays for any man to come with more reverence into a church, than a tinker and his bitch come into an ale-house.
Laud: Speech at the Censure of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne 1637
18 I thought it my duty even for the kind affection which I bear to that church in which I have been born and brought up and therefore love most dearly for good causes…to desire and beseech this church earnestly and carefully to think of this so great a benefit, whereby it may be established forever, and most earnestly to exhort and admonish it to abolish that popish tyranny which yet remaineth in the government thereof, and to restore again the most holy policy of ruling the church which our Saviour Christ hath left unto us, and to fear lest that the Lord will punish us and will be revenged of us if we continue still to despise his discipline… When [the supporters of episcopacy] understand the good cause that we have to reprieve the one and require the other, they may join together with us in earnest prayers unto God and humble suit unto her Majesty that, this popish tyranny being at the last utterly abolished and clean taken away, in place thereof a better and more holy government of the church according to God’s word may be established.
Travers A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline (trans. from Latin by Thomas Cartwright 1574; basis of later Book of Discipline)
19 Now I appeal to all wise men, what an excessive waste of treasury hath been within these few years in this land not in the expedient, but in the idolatrous erection of temples beautified exquisitely to outvie the papists, the costly and dear-bought scandals and snares of images, pictures, rich copes, gorgeous altar-cloths… What can we suppose this will come to? …The sour leaven of human traditions mixed in one putrified mass with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisy in the hearts of prelates that lie basking in the sunny warmth of wealth and promotion, is the serpent’s egg that will hatch an Antichrist wheresoever, and engender the same monster as big or little as the lump is which breeds him. If the splendour of gold and silver begin to lord it once again in the Church of England, we shall see Antichrist shortly wallow here, though his chief kennel be at Rome.
Milton Of Reformation II
20 Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse, so bright and clear.
What, is it she, which on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or which robbed and tore
Laments and mourns in Germany and here?
Sleeps she a thousand, then peeps up one year?
Is she self truth and errs? now new, now outwore?
Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore
On one, on seven, or on no hill appear?
Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights
First travail we to seek and then make love?
Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights,
And let mine amorous soul court thy mild dove,
Who is most true, and pleasing to thee, then
When she is embraced and open to most men.
Donne Holy Sonnet xviii
21 I joy, dear Mother, when I view
Thy perfect lineaments, and hue
Both sweet and bright.
Beauty in thee takes up her place,
And dates her letters from thy face,
When she doth write.
A fine aspect in fit array,
Neither too mean, nor yet too gay,
Shows who is best.
Outlandish looks may not compare:
For all they either painted are,
Or else undressed.
She on the hills, which wantonly
Allureth all in hope to be
By her preferred,
Hath kissed so long her painted shrines,
That even her face by kissing shines,
For her reward.
She in the valley is so shy
Of dressing, that her hair doth lie
About her ears:
While she avoids her neighbour’s pride,
She wholly goes on the other side,
And nothing wears.
But dearest Mother (what those miss)
The mean thy praise and glory is,
And long may be.
Blessed be God, whose love it was
To double-moat thee with his grace,
And none but thee.
Herbert ‘The British Church’
22 Avenge O Lord thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields where still doth sway
The triple tyrant: that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
Milton ‘On the late Massacre in Piedmont’ (of the Protestant Vaudois by the Catholic Duke of Savoy in 1655)
23 Colloquy. Imagining Christ our Lord present before me on the cross, to make a colloquy with him, asking him how it is that being the creator, he has come to make himself man, and from eternal life has come to temporal death, and in this manner to die for my sins. Again, reflecting on myself, to ask what have I done for Christ, what am I doing for Christ, what ought I to do for Christ. Then beholding him in such a condition, and thus hanging upon the cross, to make the reflections which may present themselves.
St Ignatius Loyola Spiritual Exercises First Week; First Exercise
24 Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss,
That yields, that streams, that pours, that dost distil,Untilled, undrawn, unstamped, untouched of press,
Dear fruit, clear brooks, fair oil, sweet wine at will:
Thus Christ unforced prevents [i.e. anticipates] in shedding blood
The whips, the thorns, the nails, the spear, and rood.
He pelican’s, he phoenix’ fate doth prove,
Whom flames consume, whom streams enforce to die,
How burneth blood, how bleedeth burning love?
Can one in flame and stream both bathe and fry?
How could he join a phoenix’ fiery pains
In fainting pelican’s still bleeding veins?
Elias once to prove God’s sovereign power
By prayer procured a fire of wondrous force
That blood and wood and water did devour,
Yea stones and dust, beyond all nature’s course:
Such fire is love that fed with gory blood
Doth burn no less than in the dryest wood.
O sacred fire come show thy force on me
That sacrifice to Christ I may return,
If withered wood for fuel fittest be,
If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will burn,
1 withered am and stony to all good,
A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood.
Southwell ‘Christ’s bloody Sweat’ (the poem refers to the Agony in the Garden, Luke 22:44; compare ‘The Burning Babe’, and Donne ‘Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward’)
25 It pleased the Lord that I should see this angel in the following way. He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire … In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share.
St Teresa of Avila The Life of Teresa of Jesus xxix
26 O heart! the equal poise of love’ s both parts
Big alike with wound and darts.
Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same;
And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame.
Live here, great heart; and love and die and kill;
And bleed and wound; and yield and conquer still
……
O sweet incendiary! show here thy art,
Upon this carcass of a hard, cold heart,
Let all thy scattered shafts of light, that play
Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
Combined against this breast at once break in
And take away from me my self and sin,
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be;
And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;
By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire
By the last morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee his;
By all the heavens thou hast in him
(Fair sister of the seraphim!)
By all of him we have in thee;
Leave nothing of my self in me.
Let me so read thy life, that I
Unto all life of mine may die.
Crashaw ‘The Flaming Heart upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa’ ll. 75–108