Philological Quarterly, Fall 1994 v73 n4 p417(13)

Preaching pastor versus custodian of order: Donne, Andrewes, and the Jacobean church. Doerksen, Daniel W.

Abstract: John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes shared the Protestant and biblical traditions of the Jacobean Church of England. Although they agreed with the Puritans regarding the basic doctrine of the Thirty-Nine Articles, they were undoubtedly conformist because they adhered to the rites and forms of the church which are not specified in the Bible. The only difference between Donne and Andrewes was that the former sought fulfillment as a preaching pastor, while the latter perceived himself as a custodian of order.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Iowa

While many books have been written about puritans, the so-called Anglicans of the early seventeenth century have received much less historical attention until recently. It has often been assumed, by literary people especially, that those in the Church of England who welcomed conformity comprised a fairly coherent group that could be called "High Church Anglicans" or even "Anglo-Catholics." Without close examination for possible differences of outlook on the church, John Donne has regularly been associated with Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud.(1)

However, there are good reasons why this classification should be questioned. Such historians as Peter Lake and Kenneth Fincham have been looking afresh at the leadership of the Jacobean church, and clarifying its nature.(2) They confirm and proceed beyond the findings of Charles and Katherine George, Patrick Collinson, and Nicholas Tyacke that the church under James remained basically Calvinistic.(3) Fincham, for example, reports that only about eight of James's sixty-six bishops could be called Arminian (293). People like Neile and Andrewes were part of a tiny minority that rose to power only after 1625. Richard Hooker, who Lake claims "invented" what later came to be called Anglicanism (Anglicans and Puritans? p. 227), had relatively little influence until the small Arminian party, with the help of Charles I after 1625, managed to take control. When finally made Archbishop of Canterbury, two years after Donne's death, Laud felt embattled, and with his fellow bishops tried to force his view of the church on a largely unwilling populace. In effect they were trying to narrow the Jacobean via media so as to include only their views.

It is true that as Dean of St. Paul's, Donne certainly felt the pressures of change, especially when from 1628 on Laud was his immediate superior as Bishop of London. However, a careful study of the Sermons in light of the new historical understanding shows how much Donne identified with the Jacobean, pre-Laudian church.(4) It is doubtless a little unfair to blame older commentators on the Sermons for failing to distinguish Donne from the Laudians, but there is every reason nowadays for literary scholars to heed the discoveries and findings of the historians - people like Tyacke who have questioned the stock accounts, previously often repeated without fresh examination, and amassed convincing documentary evidence of a quite different picture.(5)

To avoid confusion, it is probably best to follow some of those historians in replacing the anachronistic word "Anglican" - never used until after Donne's death - with a word like "conformist." Unlike the puritans, also members of the same church, Donne was a "conformist" in the sense that he accepted all the forms and rituals of the church without any misgivings. "Anglo-Catholic" is a misnomer for the Donne of the Sermons, unless "Catholic" here is firmly dissociated from the Roman church and used in the sense of "universal." Donne's position in the Sermons is the unashamedly Protestant one of the Jacobean church: he frequently attacks the Roman church, but makes only respectful comments about Calvin.(6) For him as for the Jacobean church the via media is poised theologically between Rome and Amsterdam, not Rome and Geneva.(7)

One way to become clear about Donne's position in the church is to compare his sermons with those of Andrewes. After first noticing that they have much in common in terms of Reformed theology, and that their styles vary, it is possible to observe significant differences in their churchmanship. In his recent book on James I's episcopate, Prelate as Pastor, Kenneth Fincham distinguishes two styles of churchmanship, those of preaching pastor and custodian of order, the first most commonly associated with the Calvinist majority and the second more typical of the Laudians (pp. 248-93, esp. p. 293). A comparison of their sermons certainly puts Donne with the former and Andrewes with the latter.(8)

Donne's moderate Calvinism has not been much recognized because he is such an original writer,(9) and because Calvinism has often in the past been erroneously equated with presbyterianism and with predestinarian extremes. Donne definitely opposed both of the latter, but fully accepted the predestinarian position of the Thirty-Nine Articles.(10) In a sermon of 1621/2, which Potter and Simpson believe was preached at St. Paul's by the newly chosen Dean, Donne positively celebrates "the glorious Doctrine of our Election by Gods eternall Predestination" as a precious stone set in the middle of the ring that is the Book of Romans (3:377). Paul Sellin has presented evidence to show that Donne agreed with the Church of England position taken at the Synod of Dort, and it seems significant that Donne carefully preserved his gold medal of that synod, and left it to his non-Laudian executor, Henry King.(11) By contrast, although Lancelot Andrewes was required by James to remain silent about his anti-Calvinist views, he could not refrain from making sarcastic comments on the Synod shortly after the event.(12)

The term "Arminian," which I have already used as a synonym for Laudian, correctly suggests that such churchmen are anti-Calvinist. However this doctrinal difference does not generally matter to them so much as their distinctive emphasis on outward forms of worship such as kneeling at the reception of communion, in some cases required by the Book of Common Prayer but classed as "things indifferent" in the Thirty-Nine Articles because not spelled out in Scripture. All church officials had some responsibility to enforce conformity in ritual, so that even Archbishop Abbot, who thought this a relatively minor matter, called for greater order and reverence, and took action against persistent nonconformists (Fincham, pp. 234 and n. 121,225-26). The difference between the Laudians and the other conformists was in the degree of their commitment to such issues. Andrewes showed his deep concern about form of worship as early as the early 1590s, when he gave a stern challenge to the bishops of the church's southern Convocation to use the "whip of Christ and the keys of Peter"(13) to restore order, and preached a famous sermon on the false Imaginations that were threatening the English church after the abolition of images (Works, 9:29-51, 5:54-70). Indeed, Fincham (288) traces the Jacobean minority tradition of bishops as custodians of order to such events, as well as to Hooker.(14)

Andrewes can become rather insistent, in words that may have helped to inspire the Laudian program of "thorough" in the 1630s.(15) Speaking before the king in 1624, he gives a jaundiced view of the evangelical tone of sermons and the freedom in form of worship in the Jacobean church:

Nothing but Gospel now. The name of Law we look strangely at. . . . Religion is even come to be counted res precaria. No law - no, no; but a matter of fair entreaty, gentle persuasion; neither jura, nor leges, but only consulta patrem, "good fatherly counsel," and nothing else. All are Evangelical counsels now. The reverend regard, the legal vigour and power, the penalties of it are not set by [OED, XI.142 b, laid up for future use]. The rules - no reckoning made of them as of law-writs, none, but only as of physic bills; if you like them you may use them, if not, lay them by. (1:288-89)

Surprisingly, this is a Christmas Day sermon, but one in which gospel is largely eclipsed by law. On the same day in 1624 John Donne exemplified exactly what Andrewes was complaining about, by preaching at St. Paul's a sermon full of the mercy of God (6:168-85). This and many sermons of Donne embody the "fair entreaty, gentle persuasion," the "Evangelical counsels" typical of the Jacobean pastor of souls.

Andrewes is clearly manifesting great dissatisfaction with the late Jacobean church. Fincham says that such sermons by Buckeridge and Andrewes "were calculated [but unsuccessful] attempts to persuade the King, before whom they were delivered, to tighten ceremonial discipline and curb excessive preaching" (237-38). Donne's concern about external order in church services is notably more moderate. In his later years he takes up the subject of conformity occasionally, but his tone differs from that just noted in Andrewes. And in a long list of the qualities of a good minister he includes "a gentle, a supple, an appliable disposition, a reasoning, a perswasive disposition; That he doe not alwaies, presse all things with Authority, with Censures, with Excommunications" (8:42). In the 1627 sermon from which this is taken, Donne is calling for a preaching pastor, not a custodian of order. At a time when Charles I's alliance with the Laudians is starting to take effect, Donne reflects quite well the relative tolerance of the pre-Laudian church, resulting in large part from the deliberate policies of James.

Literary people have in the past not usually recognized the extent to which James I effectively defused the problem of puritanism,(16) so that during the decade when Donne took church orders puritans (other than the few who became Separatists) accepted episcopacy and wrote virtually nothing against liturgical practices.(17) Some conformed completely, and others were tolerated provided they recognized the king's and church's authority in principle. Puritans like Sir George More, Donne's father-in-law, (with whom he came to be on very good terms)(18) felt that they could pursue their goals well within the Jacobean church. In turn, moderate and conforming puritans became influential in the church, and got on with their real agenda - not presbyterianism or liturgical reform but the advancement of the spiritual life (Lake, Moderate Puritans, pp. 284-85). Donne, a moderate rather than a strident conformist of the Laudian variety, was well appreciated as divinity lecturer at Lincoln's Inn, where both his predecessor Thomas Gataker and his immediate successor John Preston were moderate, scholarly, conforming puritans.

One point on which James I agreed with both puritans and most conformists was the importance of preaching. Although Hooker had written that the Word could be simply read to be effective, most leaders of the Jacobean church did not agree. As Peter Lake puts it, Hooker sought to replace the existing "word-centred" piety with one that was "sacrament-centred." He was thus a forerunner of Laud, who wanted to supplant the pulpit with the communion table, redesignated the altar, as the focal point of worship in the English church,(19) and his views were kept alive by his friend Lancelot Andrewes, whose works were eventually printed by Laud and Buckeridge.

On preaching, Donne was no Laudian. Though perhaps most English church leaders (in agreement with Protestant theologians like Calvin) repeatedly spoke of Word and Sacrament as the essential features of a true church, and the means by which God works in the lives of his people,(20) it is interesting to watch Donne's use of these terms. Whereas Hooker says that the Word does not have to be preached, but can just as well be a bare Scripture reading or a read Homily, Donne maintains a notably different attitude. Repeatedly he refers to the "Word preached [my emphasis], and . . . Sacraments administered" in the church; in fact, at one point his phrasing is "Sermon or Sacrament," and at another he omits his usual mention of the Sacrament altogether in his assertion that "We inherit not this Kingdome if we possesse not the preaching [Donne's emphasis] of the Word."(21)

By contrast, Andrewes and other Laudians felt that preaching was getting too much emphasis in the Jacobean church. They liked to recall that Jesus himself had called the temple a "house of prayer":

Our Saviour Christ did therefore tell them that it was domus orationis, to teach us that the chief end of our meeting there should be not to make it a public school of divinity and instruction, but to pour out our prayers to God. . . . it were to be wished, that in the Church there were minus oratorum et plus orantium. (Andrewes, 5:357)

When Donne cites the same biblical phrase in a 1623 sermon to make clear that Protestant churches including the English do not and should not neglect prayer, he adds a qualification that no Laudian would: "without prejudice to the other functions too, (for as there is a vae vpon me, Si non Euangelizavero, If I preach not my selfe, so may that vae be multiplied upon any, who would draw that holy ordinance of God into a dis-estimation, or into a slacknesse,)" (4:374). In fact, that warning seems directed at the Laudians.

Donne shares the puritan distaste for the Homilies as a poor substitute for live sermons, declaring that "God hath delivered us in a great measure . . . from this penury in preaching, we need not preach others Sermons, nor feed upon cold meat, in Homilies" (3:338).(22) Unlike Laud and Andrewes, Donne calls attention to Christ's own command to the Apostles in Matthew 28:19, to go and "preach," following his own example ("preach" is the word Donne uses, although the Bishops' Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the King James version say "teach"). Donne further applies Paul's warning not to quench the Spirit specifically to preaching: "Preaching then being Gods Ordinance, to beget Faith, to take away preaching, were to disarme God, and to quench the spirit" (4:195). This is not how Laud saw things about ten years after this sermon was preached when he dissolved the Feoffees for Impropriations, a group including Richard Sibbes whose purpose was to buy up lay impropriations (the fights of lay people to appoint clergy to specific positions) with a view to appointing only ministers well qualified to preach.(23) Donne's views were shared by such non-Laudian bishops as Gervase Babington, who said, "a minister should not be dumbe, but heard ever in his church preaching and teaching the gospel of God: for woe be unto me, saith the blessed Apostle, if I preach not." Any regular reader can recognize that Pauline quotation as a recurrent refrain in Donne's Sermons.(24)

Though himself a fine preacher, Andrewes repeatedly minimizes preaching and sermons as Donne never does.(25) Their attitudes spring from different views of the church's task. Potter and Simpson correctly assert that "Donne is first and foremost an evangelical preacher" (10:295); and he himself says that "A preachers end is . . . a gathering of soules to God" (7:329). Both puritans and Calvinist conformists would agree with that, but Arminian Andrewes instead prefers to emphasize the "beauty of holiness,"(26) which he interprets as outward order in church worship.

For Donne and most of his Calvinist fellow churchmen, the minister was a preacher who also administered the sacraments. Donne was notably less sacerdotal than the Laudians, and never, to my knowledge, asserted like Andrewes that "The people reap as great benefit by the intercession of their pastors . . . as they do by their preaching" (5:355). True, Donne warns we should not "undervalue God in his Priest"; but he suggests that this is especially so when the priest is a preacher who "continues watchfull in meditating, and assiduous in uttering, powerfully, and yet modestly, the things that concerne your salvation"; and he goes on to admit that priests must earn reverence by their personal holiness (3:289-90). Elsewhere he exclaims, "God forbid the name of Priest should priviledge any man otherwise obnoxious from just censure" (4:111). By contrast, Andrewes insists (differing here, too, with George Herbert, and falling back on the minimum standard of Article 26) that holiness is not an essential feature of the priest: ordination signifies "no inward holiness, or ability to govern by, but the right of ruling only. . . . Good it were, and much to be wished, they were holy and learned all; but if they be not, their office holds good though" (3:277). The office is all-important; Andrewes speaks here as a custodian of order defending officialdom, while Donne when dealing with the sins of leaders speaks as a pastor trying to help his flock (9:158).

That Donne was not personally a stickler for following all the rules is one indication of how well he fitted in with the pre-Laudian English church. In the 1603 Canons Ecclesiastical, the fifty-fifth specifies in detail the "form of a Prayer to be used by all Preachers before their Sermons." Preachers must pray "in this form, or to this effect, as briefly as conveniently they may" - but the list of items is rather long. In particular the prayers are to name "the King's most excellent Majesty, our Sovereign Lord James, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and Supreme Governor" as well as other members of the royal family, and the clergy, including archbishops and bishops? In 1619 the king, annoyed that even some preachers in his chapel omitted his titles in such prayers, had Archbishop Abbot write to the bishops to have their archdeacons warn the clergy about adhering to the details of this canon. A few years later (1622) we find Donne praying a "Prayer before Sermon" which conforms to the general but not the detailed stipulations, omitting most of the king's titles and not referring to the bishops specifically at all (4:235-36). At the dedication of the new Lincoln's Inn chapel in 1623, Donne uttered a beautiful prayer that in its printed form makes no mention at all of king or clergy - its only royal reference being to the kingdom of God (4:363). Another such prayer that apparently violates the requirements of Canon 55 prefaces the commemorative sermon for Lady Danvers, George Herbert's mother.(28)

The Laudians viewed things very differently. None of Andrewes' prayers before sermons apparently survive, but in 1636 Matthew Wren, who had been chaplain to Andrewes (Fincham, 198), ordered as Bishop of Norwich that

the prayer before the sermon or homily be exactly according to the LVth canon, "mutatis mutandis," only to move the people to pray in the words there prescribed, and no otherwise, unless he desire to interpose the name of the two universities, and of a patron. . . .(29)

While Donne and the non-Laudian conformists concentrated on matters they considered more important, Andrewes and the Laudians at times seemed to care most about the keeping of church rules.

The difference is nicely reflected in the way Andrewes and Donne saw the Psalms. Andrewes seems well aware of the intimacy and boldness of some of those biblical poems, and cautions against their dangerous quality of encouraging what he calls "presumption":

The Law, we know, is a great cooler to presumption. If one tamper much with the Psalms, being in case of confidence, he may make the fire too big. Faith is the fire which Christ came to put on the earth, and it is seated between two extremes, distrust, and presumption. Distrust is as water to it, which if it be poured on in abundance, it will make it to be smoking flax, or utterly quench it. Presumption, on the other side, is as gunpowder to it, which being thrown into it will blow it up, and make it fly all about the house. (5:527-28)

That picture of faith out of control could hardly be more distressing to a conformist of Andrewes' stripe. His comment on Jesus' temptation on the pinnacle, from which the above excerpt is taken, aptly cites Luther on the dangers of misapplying Psalm 91, which the devil had quoted, but Andrewes' generalization about the Psalms,(30) and his comment that even Christ "was to take heed of overheating his faith" (p. 528), are marks of his own zeal against what he felt to be misguided zeal.(31) By contrast, Donne's attitude toward the Psalms, which he calls "the Manna of the Church" (7:51), is completely positive. In fact, he confesses that the Psalms are his personal favorite among the Old Testament scriptures, as the Pauline epistles are among the New, and that accordingly he presents these "oftnest . . . to Gods people" in his sermons (2:49).

There is no need to exaggerate the differences between Donne and Andrewes. They both flourished as preachers in the Jacobean Church of England, and shared in its Protestant and biblical ethos. Unlike puritans in the church, who agreed with them in basic doctrine as set forth in the Thirty-Nine Articles, they were both undoubtedly conformist. This meant that they fully supported those rites and forms of the church unspecified in Scripture, such as kneeling at the reception of communion, or making the sign of the cross in baptism. But conformist views (in spite of what that term might suggest) were not all alike, and it is essential to recognize that Donne was not part of the disgruntled Laudian minority but participated wholeheartedly in the Calvinist Jacobean mainstream, where in fact he had much in common with the conforming puritans. While Andrewes and the Laudians tended to think of themselves primarily as custodians of order, Donne found his fulfillment as a preaching pastor.

University of New Brunswick

NOTES

1 For example, W. Fraser Mitchell's English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (1932; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), pp. 133-94, groups Donne with the "Anglo-Catholic" preachers, though he cannot help finding notable differences between him and the rest (p. 193).

2 See Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge U. Press, 1982); "Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635," Past and Present, 114 (1987), 32-76; Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, "The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I, "Journal of British Studies, 24, no. 2 (April 1985): 182-86; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

3 Charles and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation 1570-1640 (Princeton U. Press, 1961); Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge U. Press, 1992) challenges the by-now new standard views of Nicholas Tyacke, but White's focus on predestination as a supposedly central teaching of Calvin or his followers, and his equation of Calvinism with extreme Calvinism (in spite of his occasional recognition that Calvin and English Calvinists could be moderate) undercut the effect of his challenge. (See my review of White in SCN 51 [Fall-Winter 1993], 54-55.) The Calvinism with which I am concerned is moderate, and although marked by predestinarian teaching, not centered on it.

4 For a treatment of Donne that has some parallels to mine, see David Norbrook, "The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters: Donne's Politics," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine E. Maus (U. of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. pp. 19-25.

5 Ironically Tyacke himself has not yet questioned the old classification of Donne. One fault in Tyacke's generally strong book is the occasional tendency, as in this instance, to classify someone as either Calvinist or anti-Calvinist on the basis of one or two quotations.

6 For Donne's unmistakeable Protestantism, see Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (U. of California Press, 1953-62), 2:237, 3:240, 4:92, 137; for his anti-Roman polemic, see 2:270, 3:124, 132, 172, 4:272-73; for his attitude toward Calvin, whom he cites seventy-five times, consult the references in the name index in Potter and Simpson ed., Sermons, vol. 10. Further citations from the sermons will be from this edition.

7 See Daniel W. Doerksen, "Recharting the Via Media of Spenser and Herbert," Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme, n.s. 8 (No. 3, August 1984): 215-25); there is further evidence in my book manuscript currently under revision: "Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud."

8 Fincham notes Andrewes was a friend to Buckeridge and Laud, and a patron to Matthew Wren (286). Though unquestionably devout, he was a court prelate who unlike many Jacobean bishops probably did little preaching elsewhere (279) and spent only two months a year in his diocese (56, 113). Andrewes also became known for the elaborate furnishings in his private chapel.

Unlike Andrewes, Donne had no ties of friendship with Laud or his party, but instead with Archbishop Abbot and Calvinists like Bishop John King and Dr. Thomas Mountford, rector of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and member of the cathedral chapters of St. Paul's and Westminster (R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970!, p. 315, 373, 439-40; 13, 391, 525). I present evidence of Mountford's anti-Laudian position in my book manuscript mentioned in note 7 above. Donne had formal contacts with Laud when they both served on the Court of High Commission in the 1620s (as did Abbot, Sir George More, whom I mention below, and Mountford), and when Laud became Bishop of London in 1628.

9 As the Georges pointed out long ago, Donne is perhaps the most intensely original churchman of his time, as well as being intensely Protestant. If he departed from the accepted views of the Calvinist majority in his church, he did so without the belligerence of the Laudians (68-71 and n. 110). In her claim that Donne shares in the Calvinist milieu of his time, Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton U. Press, 1979), pp. 13-27, avoids seeing that milieu as monolithic (pp. 14, 16).

10 Terry Sherwood, Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne's Thought (U. of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 44-49, opposes Lewalski's general claim, but his much more detailed treatment of Donne's relation to Calvin seems to differ by degrees rather than radically from hers; both see similarities and differences. Sherwood's comparison of actual texts of the two authors and his knowledge of Calvin make his observations, focusing on reason, worth careful consideration. But despite denying free will, the Reformer follows Scripture in constantly appealing to his readers and hearers to make choices; and reasoning is an essential feature of his writing. In making similar appeals to choice and reason, Donne would not have wanted to be thought of as contradicting Article 10 of his church, "Of Free-Will," which reads in part, "The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God."

11 Paul R. Sellin, So Doth, So is Religion: John Donne and Diplomatic Contexts in the Reformed Netherlands, 1619-1620 (U. of Missouri Press, 1988); Bald, Donne, p. 563.

12 Lancelot Andrewes, Works, ed. J. P. Wilson and J. Bliss, 11 vols. (Oxford: Parker, 1841-54; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967), pp. 3.32, 328. Further references to the works of Andrewes will be to this edition. See also Fincham, p. 26; Tyacke, p. 103. White, p. 213, may be fight that Andrewes was critical of the Remonstrants as well as of their opponents. Andrewes' critique of the Lambeth Articles is by no means an outright rejection, and he seems to have preferred not to discuss the topic of predestination even in the Elizabethan period.

13 The sermon is in Latin; I am citing Fincham's translation, p. 288.

14 Neither Andrewes nor Donne mentions Hooker in a sermon, but Andrewes shows his deep respect in a letter written shortly after Hooker's death (Works, 11:xl).

15 For Andrewes as Laud's mentor, see Fincham, p. 236 and n. 129.

16 Fincham and Lake, "The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I." These historians note among other matters that James agreed with the puritans in calling for a new Bible translation and in giving support for a greater preaching ministry. See also Maurice Lee, Jr., Great Britain's Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (U. of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 164-74.

17 See Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources, pp. 1-47. Puritans and conformists enjoyed a harmony resulting from tolerance on both sides of minor differences regarding what each side recognized as secondary issues - in George Herbert's language (referring to church furniture), "externall and indifferent things" - Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, p. 246.

18 I cite evidence in "'Saint Pauls Puritan': John Donne's 'Puritan' Imagination in the Sermons," forthcoming in John Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances Malpezzi.

19 For Hooker, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, pp. 173, 177; for Laud, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 200-3.

20 For example Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman's Library, (London: Dent, n.d.), 5:50.1 (p. 200).

21 Hooker, Laws, 5.22 (pp. 80-105); Donne, Sermons, 3:302, 372, 4:105; 4:149; 3:128.

22 These remarks were made at Lincoln's Inn. Yet a few years later, as new Dean of St. Paul's, Donne recognized publicly that the Homilies were officially sanctioned by the Thirty-Nine Articles (Article 25), and defended them (4.206-7).

23 Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain, ed. J. S. Brewer, 6 vols. (Oxford U. Press, 1845), 6:86-87.

24 Babington is cited from his Workes, p. 388 in Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, p. 236. For Donne, see e.g. Sermons, 2:21.

25 For examples besides the passage already cited, see Andrewes 1:299, 4:377, and 5:186-87. Donne is not uncritical on the topic, and opposes extemporal preaching.

26 Unlike Andrewes (4:374), Donne never refers to this phrase from the Psalms and 1 Chronicles. Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (U. of Missouri Press, 1993), 159-62, cites Andrewes' Learned Discourse of Ceremonies Retained and used in Christian Churches (1653), to show that the bishop emphasized order in worship without the regard for usefulness and clarity found in Hooker.

27 Cited from Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical . . . 1603 . . . To which are added The Thirty-Nine Articles. . . . rpt. London: S.P.C.K., 1908.

28 It is possible that for the last two prayers I mention Donne might have included orally all the specified items in the "etc." portion at the conclusion. I think it highly unlikely that all the requirements of canon 55 would have been included, but omitting any or all of them from the printed text would have somewhat the same effect as omitting them from the spoken version.

29 Cited in Edward Cardwell, Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England (Oxford U. Press, 1844) 2.252.

30 In spite of his comments, Andrewes, as a good Protestant, constantly uses the Psalms in his sermons - see the Index to his Works.

31 As Jeanne Shami has pointed out, Donne too can show concern about excessive zeal ("Donne's Protestant Casuistry: Cases of Conscience in the Sermons," SP 80 (1983): 60-61). But the examples she cites do not involve the Psalms, which express the personal faith of which Andrewes is speaking; Donne is in these instances considering public situations, and in doing so he also cautions against excessive discretion as Andrewes never would (in the statement quoted above Andrewes balances presumption against "distrust").