A Biography

LANCELOT ANDREWES was born the son of a sea- Andrewes. faring man at Allhallows Barking, London, in 1555, and he died Bishop of Winchester at Southwark in 1626. Andrewes was born one year after Hooker, four years before Isaac Casaubon His and Robert Bruce, six years before Bacon, nine years before Shakespeare, eleven years before James the First, and eighteen years before Laud and Donne. Lancelot Andrewes lives to us and shines to us to this day in his Private Devotions. All our interest in Andrewes is centred The Devoin his Private Devotions. Andrewes was a great wn5’ scholar and a great patron of poor scholars, he was the most popular preacher of his day, in his hospitality he was the pattern of an apostolic bishop, and he was a great favourite with his king; but all that would have been forgotten by us long ago had it not been for his one incomparable and immortal book, the Private Devotions. We carry Andrewes’ s Private Devotions in our mind as we read of his birth, of his education, of his talents, of his industry, of his rise in life, and of all his after-career. Our interest in Andrewes’s scholarship and wide reading, in his churchmanship and in his statesmanship, in his single life, in his friends and in his opponents, in his great opportunities and in his great temptations, both as a minister of Jesus Christ and as a privy councillor of King James, — our interest in all that is awakened and is intensely quickened as we A study, and much more as we ourselves employ, his Private Devotions. With that entrancing book open before us we search the histories and the biographies of his time; the home and the foreign politics of his time; the State papers, the Church controversies, and not least the Court scandals and the criminal reports of his time, with the keenest interest and the most solicitous anxiety. ‘I am wonderful curious, says Montaigne, ‘to discover and know the mind, the soul, the genuine disposition, and the natural judgment of my authors; but much more what they do in their chambers and in their closets than what they are in the senate and in the market-place.’ And that is just what we discover and know of our author in his Private Devotions. We have preserved to us in that priceless book what Andrewes was in his chamber and in his closet as we have no other author preserved to us in any other book that I know. To Andrewes more than to any other man that I know has this assurance of our Saviour been to the letter fulfilled, — But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. For, what Andrewes prayed for in his closet, and how he prayed for it, all the world now openly knows and openly has the reward of.

At School As soon as young Andrewes had a book put into fege h*s nands he began to show a quite extraordinary

aptitude for the acquisition of languages. All his days Andrewes never could write the English language with any beauty or purity or good taste, but there seems to have been no language under heaven that he could not read. Andrewes proved himself a perfect genius and paragon as often as he had another grammar and another dictionary put into his hands, but when he took up a pen to compose in his own language all his talent would seem to have forsaken him and fled. There is scholarship, and there is the sense of beauty and the taste for letters that should surely come from all sound scholarship, and some men have the excellent taste without the scholarship, while other men have all the scholarship with nothing whatever of the fine taste or the sweet sensibility for good writing. Shakespeare in that day had little Latin and less Greek, but what English Shakespeare wrote! While Andrewes had all the Latin and all the Greek and everything else that his great contemporary had so little of, and yet what poor work he made in the noble tongue of Cranmer and North and Shakespeare and Hooker and Bacon. But what we have to do with at his present stage is Andrewes’s wonderful facility in mastering the ancient languages as well as the foreign languages of his own day. From his tender years, Isaacson, his secretary and biographer, tells us, Andrewes was totally addicted to the study of languages; and in his youth there appeared in him such aptness to learn, answerable to his endeavours, that his first two schoolmasters contended who should have the honour of his breeding. By his extraordinary industry and admirable capacity he soon outstripped all his school-fellows, having become an excellent Grecian and Hebrician. When he came home to London from Cambridge for the Easter holiday, he was wont to bespeak a tutor for those vacant weeks till he went back to his college after a month’s absence a much better scholar than he had been when he left it. Isaacson had often heard the reverend and worthy prelate say that when he was a young scholar at the University, and so all his time onwards, he never loved or used any games or ordinary recreation, either within doors, as cards, dice, tables, chess, or the like: or abroad, as butts, quoits, bowls, or any such; but his ordinary exercise and recreation was walking either alone by himself, or with some selected companion, with whom he might confer, argue, and recount their studies. He would often profess that to observe the grass, herbs, corn, trees, cattle, earth, waters, heavens, any of the creatures, and to contemplate their natures, orders, qualities, virtues, uses, and such like, was ever to him the greatest mirth, content, and recreation that could be: and this he held to his dying day. ‘He accounted all that time lost that he spent not in his studie, says Bishop Buckeridge, ‘wherein in learning he outstript all his equals, and his indefatigable industry had almost outstript himself: he studied so hard when others played, that if his parents and masters had not forced him to play with them also, all the play had been marred.’ And then Fuller follows Isaacson and Buckeridge with this, — that ’ the world wanted learning to know how learned this man was; so skilled in all (especially Oriental) languages, that some conceive he might, if then living, almost have served as an interpreter-general at the confusion of tongues.” His admirable knowledge in the learned tongues, adds Buckeridge, ‘Latine, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriack, Arabick, besides other modern tongues to the number of fifteen, as I am informed, was such, and so rare, that he may well be ranked to be in the first place, to be one of the rarest linguists in Christendom.’

No young man of that day ran a more brilliant In Holy career than that career was which Andrewes ran, and his Christian character kept full pace with all his attainments and all his promotions. Scholar and Fellow of Pembroke, Vicar of St Giles’, Cripplegate, Prebendary, first of Southwell and then of St Paul’s, Master of his College, Chaplain to Whitgift and to Queen Elizabeth, and Dean of Westminster: through all these upward steps Andrewes rapidly rose, leaving behind him on each successive stage a record of most excellent work accomplished, and carrying with him a most honourable and a much-beloved name. ‘The course of his studies,’ says Sir John Harrington, ‘was not, as most men’s are in these times, to get a little superficial divinity by reading two or three of the new writers, and straight take orders and up into the pulpit. Dr Andrewes gathered before he spent, reading both new writers and old writers, and not as tasting them, but as digesting them.’ Out of that great storehouse of that time, Hacket’s Life of Archbishop Williams, we gather abundant proof that as Dean of Westminster and superintendent of its famous school Andrewes was still the same scholar, and the same lover of scholarship, he had been when he was at school himself. Hacket, happily, was himself at Westminster at that time, and this is the fine tribute that he pays to the learned dean’s great industry and great care over his young scholars: ‘How strict that excellent man was to charge our masters,’ says Hacket, ‘that they should give us lessons out of none but the most classical authors; he did often supply the place both of head schoolmaster and usher for the space of a whole week together, and gave us not an hour of loitering time from morning to night: he caused our exercises in prose and verse to be brought to him, to examine our style and proficiency; he never walked to Chiswick for his recreation without a brace of this young fry; and in that wayfaring leisure had a singular dexterity to fill those narrow vessels with a funnel. And sometimes thrice a week, sometimes oftener, he sent for the uppermost scholars to his lodging at night, and kept them with him from eight till eleven, unfolding to them the best rudiments of the Greek tongue, and the elements of the Hebrew Grammar; and all this he did to us boys without any compulsion of correction, nay, I never heard him utter so much as a word of austerity among us. This great and good prelate,’ Racket gratefully adds, ‘was the first that planted me in my tender studies, and watered them continually with his great bounty.’

The Dean of Westminster had a leading hand in the production of the Authorised Version of The the English Bible, ’ a work,’ says Dr Perry, ’ which

English nas gone far to redeem King James from the contempt and reprobation of posterity.’ A new translation of the Bible had been moved for by Reynolds at the famous Hampton Court Conference in 1604, and though on all the other matters discussed at the Conference the king went against Reynolds and the Puritan side, yet in this matter, and in spite of Bancroft’s opposition, James accepted Reynolds’s proposal. The king, no doubt, had the assistance of some of the leading divines of that day in making the excellent arrangements for the work of the translation, and in drawing up the admirable instructions to the translators that were issued in his name; but to take the side he did take when the proposal was made, and to put his royal name to the arrangements made and to the instructions sent out, — all that greatly redounds to the king’s credit. Andrewes was one of the secretaries of the Translation Company, and it is more than probable that the rules and instructions that were issued to the translators came from his scholarly pen. Certain it is that an immense amount of correspondence, and of many other kinds of work, fell to the dean’s hands during the four years over which this great task extended. ‘But that this afternoon is our translation time, and that most of our company are negligent, I would have come to you, he writes to the secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, of which society he had at that time just been made a member. The whole Translation Company consisted of forty-seven of the leading scholars and divines of England, both prelatic and puritan. They sat in six committees, and the books of the Old and New Testaments were divided out among them. The first committee, which sat at Westminster, had the Sacred Books from Genesis to the end of Second Kings allotted to them, and the dean’s name stands at the head of the Westminster committee. ‘And now, says Fuller, writing of the year l6ll, ‘after long expectation and great desire, came forth the new translation of the Bible, most beautifully printed, by a select and competent number of divines, to whom by their industry, skilfulness, piety, and discretion the Church is bound in a debt of special remembrance and thankfulness. These, with a Jacob, rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well of life, so that now even Rachels, weak women, may freely come, both to drink themselves and to water the flocks of their families at the same. Leave we these worthy men, of whom, as also of that gracious king that employed them, we may say, Wheresoever the Bible shall be preached or read in the whole world, there shall also this that they have done be told in memorial of them.’

Bishop of With his elevation to the bench of bishops that sad er’ drop and deterioration of Andrewes’s character began which cannot be kept hid from any unprejudiced reader of his life, and which stands written out in a sea of tears the bitterness of which every reader of sensibility must surely taste on every page of his penitential Devotions. A more servile and short sighted body of men than the bench of bishops under James the First never set a royal house on the road to ruin; and with all his saintliness, and with all his unworldliness, Lancelot Andrewes at last consented to sit down among them. ‘He contrived to live at Court while contemning the world.’ George Herbert writes of the same court: ‘I now look back upon my aspiring thoughts, and think myself more happy than if I had attained what then I so ambitiously thirsted for. And I now can behold the court with an impartial eye, and see plainly that it is made up of fraud, and titles, and flattery, and many other such empty, imaginary, painted pleasures.” A main cause of all the misery and mischief in our land is the fearfullest of flattery of our prelates and clergy,’ says one of the Rev. Joseph Mead’s correspondents in 1623. It is only those who truly love Andrewes, — and as Buckeridge who had known him for thirty years says, ‘I loved him, but yet my love doth not blind or outsway my judgment, — it is only those, I say, who have long known and who truly love Andrewes, and who have his Devotions day and night in their hands till they come to owe him their own souls, it is only they who will feel the full pain and shame of Lancelot Andrewes’s position as a minister of Jesus Christ, and at the same time a Privy-Councillor and a Court favourite of James the First. The truth is, no man could remain a man at all, and much less a man of Christian honour and uncompromised integrity, at the Court and in the favour of James. What a system of things that was which placed the Church of Christ and her chief ministers, as well as the whole people of a great and growing nation, under the heel of a man like James Stuart! The strongest men bent and broke under the dreadful incubus of that abominable system. It was only one outstanding man here and another outstanding man there who could remain true and upright and honourable men under that abominable system. It was only a statesman like Bristol, and a judge like Coke, and a bishop like Abbot, and a minister like Robert Bruce who could live through such an atmosphere. The best and the most blameless men became compromised, corrupted, and demoralised. And that a man of Andrewes’s goodness and beauty of character was so compromised, corrupted, and demoralised is surely of itself sufficient condemnation of James and of the life of his Court, and of that whole abominable system of things that had grafted the sword and the sceptre of England upon the crook of Jesus Christ, and then had put all three into the hand of James the First. The time had been when you would have seen Lancelot Andrewes rather have his right hand but off than that it should countersign any king’s command in The Essex such an infamous affair as the divorce case of the Earl and Countess of Essex. But ten years at a Stuart Court had brought even Lancelot Andrewes down to that. If you cannot so much as touch pitch without being defiled, how could you expect to wade about in a pit of pitch for half a lifetime and come out clean? The Essex case is much too loathsome to be more than merely mentioned here, and I do not wonder that Mr Gardiner protests that nothing short of direct evidence will suffice to convince him that Lancelot Andrewes knew what he was doing when he took the side he did take in the Essex case. Mr Gardiner has had all the evidence before him, and he is

both an able and a just judge; but, much as I would like to see Andrewes cleared, or even given the benefit of a doubt in the Essex case, I despair of ever having the relief of mind of seeing that done. I have read far too much direct evidence against Andrewes for my own full faith and perfect pride in Andrewes. The successive state trials connected with that longlasting, wide-spreading, and utterly loathsome case, supplemented and aggravated as they are by the powerful Memorial and outspoken Speech of Archbishop Abbot, to all of which I shall always be compelled to add some of the most agonising pages of the Private Devotions — all that is nothing short of overwhelming evidence to me. Had Bishop Andrewes kept a private diary, and had he kept his diary as his disciple and friend Archbishop Laud kept his; that is to say, had Andrewes entered his ‘unfortunatenesses’ and his ’ ill-haps’ under fast days and in cyphers and in initials as the Archbishop did, I cannot doubt what some of those cyphers and initials would have been, nor how ’ slubbered ’ they would have been ’ with his pious hands, and watered with his penitential tears, ‘Some great calamity happens to you, you do very well to make it an occasion of exercising a great devotion, says William Law.

Much as I should like to agree with Mr Gardiner in the hesitation and judicial doubt of which he gives Andrewes’s memory the benefit, I am compelled in this matter to side rather with Mark Pattison and with many other students of that time as to the depth of the infamy into which Bishop Andrewes slipped and fell when James summoned him to vote, and pursued after him and compelled him to vote on the King’s side, which was also the wanton’s side, of the Essex case. I would not have come near that noisome ditch unless I had seen Bishop Andrewes’s footsteps being dragged up toward it in a leash of servility till he all but sank out of sight under it. Shall I, to please King James and to shelter and satisfy his vile favourites, — shall I send my soul to hell! shouted Archbishop Abbot to one of the king’s emissaries. No! I will not do it. But Bishop Andrewes did it. And Bishop Andrewes’s soul is still in hell to the end of his life, and a hundred times in his remorseful Devotions, because he did it. There is no other word for it. For a man like Lancelot Andrewes to have to look back all his days, and that too from an episcopal throne, to that scandalous Essex case, and to see himself in the society, if not in the secrets, of James, and Rochester, and the Countess of Essex, and Mrs Turner, and Bishop Neill, — out of the belly of hell cried I! As whoredom and wine take away the heart, so do servility and party spirit, the fear of kings and the respect of great men. But as David’s heart came back to him from adultery and murder in the Fifty-first Psalm, so did Bishop Andrewes’s heart come back to him from servility and sycophancy and the sale of justice in many a confession and in many a commendation of his Private Devotions. If I did not believe absolutely in the sincerity and the truthfulness of Andrewes’s repentance in every literal syllable and down to the blackest bottom of his Private Devotions, I would not have opened my mouth or taken up my pen about him. But, absolutely and utterly believing that Andrewes means all that he says when he is on his knees clothed in sackcloth and with dust on his head and a rope round his neck, I am not afraid at the worst thing that I meet with in his previous life. ‘Come,’ says Andrewes, ’ and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what He hath done for my soul. Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor His mercy from me.’ Visit to Continuing thus fearlessly to trace all Bishop

Scotland. Andrewes’s footprints to the end of his life, I was led to open the eleventh volume of Professor Masson’s Privy Council Register of Scotland, which is full of His Most Sacred Majesty’s long-promised visit to his native land. And what has burned itself most bitterly into my memory and my heart out of that visit was not his royal determination that Scotland should there and then set aside her accustomed and conscientious forms of public worship and of Church government at his kingly word; what made my blood boil as I read it was the way that the gentry and the farmers and the poor labourers were requisitioned and robbed right and left by the royal progress through this country. James had now been for fourteen years the absolute owner of a land so rich that the poverty of Scotland was a proverb and a jest at his dissolute and ribald Court; but, with all that, James at that moment was up to the lips in public and in personal debt: and that not by building cathedrals and fitting out fleets, but by fattening his favourites and making rich and licentious men of all who fawned on him and flattered him. Those were the days of the loyal benevolences. ‘A benevolence,’ says Dr Murray, ’ was a forced loan levied without legal authority. First so called in 1473 when astutely asked for by Edward iv. as a token of goodwill towards his rule.” A benevolence,’ said Lord Digby, in the Long Parliament, ‘which is a malevolence indeed.’ But before we blame James and his impoverished ministers too much for their benevolences in England and for their requisitions in Scotland, let us hear all that they had been doing of late in order to raise money. ‘Everything,’ says Dr Perry, ’ was sold that could be sold, everything that could attract a buyer. Patents, monopolies, offices, dignities were all in the market. Knighthood had become such a drug that it could be had for sixty pounds. Even church dignities were to be had at a cheap price.’ And now to return to Scotland. You cannot imagine the misery that the king’s visit caused the poor country on which James descended, not indeed with the six thousand of a train he had so royally requisitioned for, but still with sufficient to drive the poor people mad who had to transport and feed the king and his enormous retinue wherever he signified his royal will to go, and as long as he honoured them with his stay. From Berwick to

Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to Perth, from Perth to St Andrews, from St Andrews to Stirling, and from Stirling to Glasgow; every name calls up the most tyrannical acts on the part of the king and his ecclesiastical abettors. But what has burned itself still more into my indignation was the Privy Council demands on the people, the same Privy Council of which James did Andrewes the honour to make him a member. As I read the council papers with my eye upon the object, I found myself calling out, What, in the name of his Divine Master, was Bishop Andrewes doing away from his proper work, and travelling about in the train of this royal freebooter? He has some pungent passages in his Devotions about defrauding the poor of their wages. Were those passages set down as he remembered in remorse how he and his king had been carried about and feasted and amused from place to place in Scotland, where Laud complained that he found no religion, but where the poor heathen had to find James and Andrewes and Laud and all the rest in horses and carriages and in royal board and lodging on pain of the halter?

His Ser- Andrewes preached one of his least pedantic

sermons, and one with less than usual of his ’ ingenious idleness ’ in it, before James in Holyrood Chapel during that royal visit to our city. The Edinburgh people even in that day were severe judges of sermons, and the king’s favourite preacher did not escape the searching climate he had come to. ‘How did you like the sermon this morning? ‘James was still Scotsman enough to ask of a Presbyterian lord who had been present at the service. ‘No doubt your Majesty’s bishop is a learned man, but he cannot preach. He rather plays with his text than preaches on it.’ And I must say that I entirely agree with my outspoken fellow-countryman against all the adulation that has been lavished on Andrewes’s preaching from that day to this. Canon Mozley, who came to be one of the clearest-headed and profoundest writers of our generation, has a preposterously extravagant paper on Andrewes’s Sermons, in the British Critic for January 1842. The whole paper is a set and a highly elaborated eulogy in which such overworked words are applied to Andrewes’s sermons as these: — force, animation, depth, fertility, felicity, admirable decision and completeness, quickness, variety, dexterity, richness, rapidity, ubiquity, clear-headedness, manifoldness, what he is going to say occupies him, what he is saying he only says and no more, — language which, were it distributed upon Hooker’s sermons and Taylor’s and Newman’s and Robertson’s, would yield a sufficiency of epithet for all the four. After Mozley has written himself out of breath, he settles down to say that ’ these characteristics of Bishop Andrewes are not plainly discernible, we allow, at first sight.’ No, they are not. Nor, I am sincerely sorry to say, have they been discerned at all by one who has looked for them longer and oftener than he would like to confess. My sight and experience of Andrewes’s sermons was at first and still is rather that of one who is said to have set a high value upon some others of Andrewes’s writings, but who, at the same time, had the detachment from party spirit and the intellectual integrity to say, — ‘I own that however clear-headed I might be when I sat down to read one of his sermons, I invariably rose at the conclusion of it with my brain bewildered and confused.’ But the British Critic and its young Anglo-Catholics were all engaged in that day in writing up, without rhyme or reason, the churchmen of James’s and Charles’s day; and with much of a high, a fine, and a quite singular distinction, at the same time less theological openness, less true catholicity, and less fair and just judgment you will scarcely meet with anywhere than just in their sectarian and reactionary writings. Archdeacon Hare is the only writer of any authority and eminence I know on whom the good sense and sound judgment of that ancient Scottish lord has descended. I have read a good many sermons in my time, and there are some sufficiently High Church sermons that I have continually in my hands. It cannot then be their church doctrine, or their church tone, or their exclusive temper that has turned me so often away from Andrewes’s sermons. And still as I read again about Andrewes, and as his editors and biographers and fellow-churchmen praise his sermons, I go back to his five volumes, accusing myself that I cannot have done them and myself proper justice, — but always with the same result. I tried to read the Gowrie series again one Sabbath morning above the fiord of Mandal in Norway during my late holiday time till I could read no longer, I so felt as I read that I was wasting and desecrating the Lord’s Day. I threw down the eight maledictory sermons preached before James on the long dead and buried Gowrie brothers, and took up to give it another trial the much-praised sermon on

Justification; and to do it justice I took paper and pencil determined to bring something home to you out of it. But with the old result. The doctrine was all right, when I got at it. The doctrine was the Pauline, Lutheran, Puritan, Presbyterian, only possible doctrine on that text and on that topic, but the magnificent doctrine never kindled the preacher, never gave him wings, never carried him away, never fused nor took the slag out of his style, never made him once eloquent, never to the end of his sermon made him a great preacher of a great gospel. I felt sorry I had not brought with me the third volume of Keble’s Hooker, such was my hunger for Hooker’s greatest sermon after those twenty tantalising pages of his unimproved contemporary. But, happily, I had brought Mr Henry Craik’s English Prose Selections with me, the first volume of which contains ten pieces out of Hooker with Mr Vernon Blackburn’s perfect little paper prefixed. Ay, that is preaching, I exclaimed to myself as I read and read again the four golden pages taken out of Hooker’s golden sermon. That is writing. That is English. That is the best of gospels in the best of English. Yes, when I go back to Edinburgh, and have my classes again before me, I shall command them to master Hooker, at any rate on Justification, such is his style in that immortal sermon, his depth, his strength, and his sublimity. I shall also set Andrewes’s Devotions day and night before them, — but not his sermons. Bruce’s and Hooker’s and Donne’s and Taylor’s and Leighton’s, and many other sermons since their day, but not Andrewes’s. Whoever says otherwise, the blunt, uncourtly Scottish lord was right. We are assured on all hands that the bishop’s delivery was ‘inimitable.’ But substance and unction have always come before delivery in Scotland. Andrewes is a learned man, and, better than that, he can pray as no other man can pray,

B but he cannot preach, to be called preaching. That dissatisfied Edinburgh lord most likely was one of Robert Bruce’ s elders, and he must have heard that ‘stately Presbyterian divine’ preach his famous Five Sermons on the Lord’s Supper, and his Six Sermons on King Hezekiah’s Sickness, and his taste for a sermon must have been formed on the model of that preacher of such distinction. And if I had the ear of one of Bishop Andre wes’s descendants in church doctrine and in English preaching I should earnestly advise him to send to Edinburgh for Robert Bruce’s Sermons. He would find in that noble volume what we in Scotland believe to be the true New Testament teaching on the Lord’s Supper, and he would see that doctrine put forward in an ancient Scottish style not wholly unworthy of the great subject. Keble gives us at the end of his Hooker a sermon of Hooker’s which was found among Bishop Andrewes’s papers. Found in such company, it was as if a sermon of Newman’s had got in among Simeon’s skeletons. It is enough for one man that he can pray as Andrewes alone can pray, but let no beginner in the pulpit go to Andrewes to learn how to preach.

It is no blame to Andrewes that he cannot preach like Bruce or Hooker or Donne or Taylor; great preachers like them are born and not made. But no man has any business to tune and tamper with his pulpit to please either his king or his congregation, and a true preacher will never do it. I do not complain of Andrewes because I find his sermons unreadable and unprofitable, but I cannot excuse him for his Gowrie and Gunpowder Plot series, and too many other sermons like them. Could James not have got some other of his Court

Chaplains to curse the hanged and dismembered Gowries every fifth of August, and leave Andrewes to his proper work and to his private prayers? But no. James, born fool as he was in some things, was a shrewd enough sovereign in some other things, and he knew quite well what he was doing when he commanded Lancelot Andrewes in England, while never all he could do could command Robert Bruce in Scotland, to preach or to pray to his policy and to his passions. What a pity it is, I have sometimes exclaimed to myself, that anything of Andrewes’s has been preserved besides his Devotions I And yet, may it not have been so ordained in order to comfort and assure us every night when we have to go with a continual confession that is such a continual condemnation and such a continual contrast to our everyday life. ‘O God,’ prayed Andrewes in secret every night, ‘save me from making a god of the king.’ On this whole matter the simple truth is that the plainest facts of history and of biography in Andrewes’s case have been so twisted about and so covered up by party spirit and ecclesiastical pride that it is impossible to draw them out into any light of day without great pain and great regret. But what has here been said has this for it at any rate, that it was a very unwelcome and a very distressing discovery to the present speaker when he made it. It seemed to him like laying hands on one’s own father, as some one has said it somewhere in Plato.

Lancelot Andrewes was a fast-rising scholar of Bacon. Pembroke when Francis Bacon went up to Trinity in the ’ pregnancy and towardness of his wit,’ a boy between twelve and thirteen years of age. And Lord Bacon’s name comes afterwards to be the symbol of so much, that we like to think of two such men as Andrewes and Bacon being early and lifelong friends. And, though I do not know that we have documents for it, I like to think of the elder scholar selecting the younger and taking him out to those country walks and talks that Isaacson has told us so delightfully about. That the rising divine and the pushing young lawyer were intimate friends early in life we have abundant evidence. Mr Spedding, who has unearthed everything that exists about Bacon, has produced an invitation that Bacon sent to Andrewes when he was preacher in St Giles’, Cripplegate, asking him to come out to Twickenham to share a holiday with a party of young lawyers and other scholars. But Andrewes’ s pulpit duties detained him at home. Andrewes all his days loved good society and a hospitable table, but not till his day’s work was done. Throughout life, Bacon’s biographer assures us, the Lord Chancellor held the bishop in special reverence. Indeed, there is nothing either in Andrewes’ s best life or in his best work that gives us such a high idea of his intellect as the fact that Bacon submitted The Advancement of Learning and some others of his magnificent books to Andrewes, calling him his inquisitor, and asking him for his criticisms and corrections. ‘You were wont to make me believe that you took a liking to my writings; will you therefore mark what you think not current in my style, or harsh to credit and opinion, or inconvenient to the position of the writer. For to write at one’s ease,’ as Bacon said to Casaubon about another book of his, ’ that which others are to read at their ease is of little consequence. The contemplations I have in view are those which may bring about the better ordering of man’s life and business with all its turmoil. How great an enterprise is this, and with what small help I have attempted it.’ This of Bacon leads us into his Private Memoranda, where we see him laying his lines to ’ fish for testaments, for loans, for gifts, for bribes, and indeed for anything and everything that would bring in money to a poor man who had taken all knowledge for his province, a province, as he often sadly said, that would take a king or a pope to occupy and hold it. Bacon sets it down among other like secret plots against his best friends, — ’ not desisting to draw in Bishop Andrewes, he being single, rych, and sickly.” Bacon’s was a mind, says Dr Abbott, ’ unique and extraordinary; worldly, it is true, but not after the common fashion of worldliness; say rather an unworldly mind of superhuman magnanimity, gradually becoming enslaved by the world while professing to use the world as a mere tool. Bacon will place all the arts of worldliness at the feet of Truth, and will master them by first obeying them.” A man whose fall, as the same writer so truly and so finely says, ’ shook men’s confidence in humanity.’

Broken in health and broken in heart as Bacon might well be by a fall that shook the world, and the terrible shock of which we still feel to this day, Bacon died at his desk. And, though Andrewes had sat on his trial and had acquiesced in his sentence, Bacon continues to acquaint Andrewes with all his intended work, and consults him about it to the end. Bacon’s Holy War is not Bunyan’s book of the same name. ‘There cannot but ensue a dissolution of the state of the Turk, whereof the time seemeth to approach. The events of time do seem to invite Christian kings to a war in respect of the great corruption and relaxation of discipline in that empire.’ It would have been very interesting to us in our day to have been able to read the mature mind of Bacon on the rights and wrongs of a war to be carried on by England and the united West against ‘the enemy of Christendom.’ But Bacon only lived to overtake a few pages of his Holy War. Most happily, however, he had written the preface before he began the body of the book, and he had given to the preface the form of a Dedicatory Letter to Andrewes (now Bishop of Winchester), and a most important piece of Bacon’s mental autobiography it is. Dante and Bacon and Milton were three gigantic brothers in intellect, they were each sent into a world wholly out of joint, and they all three write about themselves in their disjointed worlds as only giants are enabled and permitted to write. Bacon’s Dedication and Advertisement to his Holy War stands beside Dante’s classification and comparison of himself with Homer and Virgil, and beside Milton’s magnificent proposals and preparations for the work of his life. After comparing his case with the cases of Demosthenes and Cicero and Seneca, Bacon goes on to say to Andrewes this, — ‘These examples confirmed me in a resolution to spend my time wholly in writing, and to put out that poor talent or half talent, or what it is, that God hath given me, not as heretofore to particular exchanges, but to banks and mounts of perpetuity which will not break. And therefore this work, not for the City, but for the Temple, I have dedicated to your lordship, in respect of ancient and private acquaintance, and because I hold you in special reverence.’ Great Bacon, and noble in all his ignobility! ‘In his great adversity I prayed,’ says

Ben Jonson, ’ that God would give him strength, for greatness he could not want.” The most exquisitely constructed intellect, says Macaulay, ’ that has ever been bestowed on the children of men.’ It is the fashion to-day to run down Macaulay, but let all gifted and ambitious young men read that great writer’s Essay on Bacon and lay it to heart once every year. As for Spedding and Ellis they should lie beside every young lawyer’s Bible and Private Devotions.

There is no finer picture of Andrewes to be seen Casaubon. anywhere than that which is painted in Mark Pattison’s classical, if somewhat cold and supercilious, Life of Isaac Casaubon. Though the Rector of Lincoln says some very severe things of Bishop Andrewes, at the same time, in no other book that I know is there such an altogether delightful glimpse given us of the beauty and attractiveness of Andrewes’ s private character. The truly episcopal hospitality, — his lordship, it was said, kept Christmas all the year, — the noble courtesy, the exquisite geniality and tenderness, and the whole graciousness and affectionateness of the bishop’s nature never came out better than all that did in his whole connection with Casaubon. It is true there were more things than one that went to attract and to attach those two men to one another. ‘Profound piety, says Pattison, ‘and great reading, common to both, placed them at once in sympathy.’ But, besides that, their ecclesiastical views also, their attitude toward those questions of Church order and public worship which were agitating and rending all the churches in Christendom at that day, drew the scholar and the bishop continually closer and closer to one another. ‘The Anglican ritual, says his able biographer, ’ exactly met Casaubon’s aspirations after the decent simplicity of primitive worship, though his Presbyterian sentiment was at first inclined to find a little too much pomp and pride mingling with some parts of the episcopal services. But, on the whole, he preferred the Anglican ceremonies to the bare and naked usages of his own communion. At the same time, he never forsook the French congregation of which he continued to be a member. He attended the preaching from time to time, though not seldom hearing doctrine from which he differed, and philology which he knew to be rotten.’ But, besides all that, the two scholars were continually thrown together at Court in carrying on those loyal labours to which the king had for so long yoked the bishop, and to assist the bishop in which with his omnipotent pen the greatest classical scholar in Europe had been brought over from France. Chained to his task, the best ecclesiastical scholar in England had been toiling for years past at those controversies in which the Crown and the Church of England had become involved with the great Catholic theologians and casuists of that day; and Casaubon’s arrival in London was hailed as the advent of a heaven-sent assistant to Andrewes and his cause. Long before they had seen each other’s faces Andrewes and Casaubon were already at one in their intense hatred of Bellarmine and Baronius, and no sooner had they shaken hands than they sat down to work to each other’s hands at a task which was to them at once the service of the Truth, of the Church, and of the State; the service of God, and of their king and patron James the First. Casaubon’s diary of those delightful days is full of Andrewes, and the admiration and the esteem are quite as much, to his honour be it said, on the great bishop’s side as on the poor scholar’s. ‘Come and shoot a buck with me. Throw aside your books this hot weather. Shut up your Drury Lane lodgings, and let me see your dear face. I am not well in my solitude, but a visit from you will set me on my feet. Come down at once if you would be in time for Stourbridge Fair, the finest thing of its kind in all England. But, if you have no taste for an English fair, then I have beside me at this moment a Matthew in Hebrew that will make your mouth water. Do be persuaded to come. Be so good as to remember that the hand which writes these lines is ill with the ague. Coming or going, God keep you long to be an ornament to letters.’ And then when Casaubon did find his way to the palace at

Downhamp — to see the two solitary scholars together is delightful. It is a rebuke and an inspiration to open Casaubon’s diary for those holiday weeks. The two book-lovers read more in the mornings of their holidays than other men read all the year round. They breakfasted alone to gain time and to keep the freshness of the day for their private devotions and their peculiar studies. And then they met, the best of company, at their early mid-day dinner. Andrewes ‘doubted,’ so Isaacson reports his master, ’ they were no true scholars who came to speak to a man before noon.’ Casaubon was happy in everything at Ely, the bishop’s present diocese, but in the distance of his books. The bishop had a fine library, as the catalogue of it still proves; but, unhappily, it was nearly all in London, where Andrewes spent the most part of every year in attendance at Court and in writing controversies for the king. Both Casaubon and Andrewes were of Pericles’ mind, and held that not a Greek’s best holiday only, but an Englishman’s and a Frenchman’s best holiday also, was that day on which he did most of his duty. And accordingly the Master of Peterhouse was largely requisitioned for the loan of his most learned books when Andrewes and Casaubon were at Ely. Books and manuscripts were the tools of Casaubon’ s life, and even if he was not working at his full strength while he was at Ely, at the same time he loved to be feeling the edge of his tools, and to have them and his whetstone always near him. When Casaubon was not composing he was always collecting materials for his next composition. His advice to all true students is this: ‘Remember that it is of no use to have read a thing, unless you retain it in your memory. Make notes therefore of everything you read, as aids to your memory.’ The books that Casaubon read at Downham and made copious notes of would stagger an ordinary student so much as even to hear their bare names, and he always put at the head of his sheet of notes this motto in Greek, ‘Alone and at work with God.’ After their mid-day dinner the two friends spent the afternoon walking, riding, visiting the parishes of the diocese, in specting the church fabrics, entertaining friends, trans fixing a buck, but always their best recreation and entertainment was to be talking of books together. Still, with all that, there was nothing that went so deep both into the hearts and into the characters of those two good men as their life of faith, of prayer, and of personal holiness. If there were two saints of God in England that summer, they were surely to be found under the roof of the episcopal palace of Ely. Writing of thirty years before, Pattison’s somewhat grudging words are these: — ‘The religious sentiment was ever suggesting to young Casaubon the futility of worldly knowledge, and the superior value of religious studies. This impression may be traced to the early years of the son of the Huguenot pastor who had to fly to the hills. From the first there were two men in Casaubon, the theologian and the scholar.’ And summing up his life, his somewhat too aloof biographer says: — ‘The habitual attitude of Casaubon’s soul was abandonment; not merely resignation, but prostration before the Unseen. He moved, thought, and felt, as in the presence of God. His family and friends lay near to his heart, but nearer than all is God. In all his thoughts the thought of God is subsumed.’ And again, ‘his diary is one prolonged litany.’ Yes: so it is. David’s Psalms were never out of Casaubon’s hands, and the best day he spent at Downham was not the day when he transfixed three bucks, but the day when all alone in the bishop’s copse he read the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm over again with a rapturous heart. Pleasantly as his holiday passed, and in

spite of the bishop’s ‘golden chains of courtesy,’ Casaubon began to be feverish for London and for his own books. But the great scholar’s life of books in this world soon after that came to an end. ‘In answer to your questions,’ writes Andrewes to Heinsius in 1614, ‘regarding the departure of that illustrious man. In the morning of the day on which he died he received the Holy Sacrament from my hand; and that because three days before he had begged it of me. After the sacrament he expressed a wish that Simeon’s Canticle should be chanted. There was nothing in the whole world of the slightest interest to that Christian man Casaubon, unless what related to piety and holiness, and that was most evident amid his last tortures. His remains were buried in Westminster Abbey in front of the doors of that chapel in which the monuments of our kings are seen.’

Summary. Lancelot Andrewes was born of honest and godly parents in 1555. We find him a scholar of Pembroke in 1571, and Dean of Westminster in 1601. Hooker died in 1600 at the age of forty-six, and on hearing of his death Andrewes wrote of him, ( He hath not that I know left any near him.’ Queen Elizabeth died in March 1603, and four months later Andrewes assisted at the coronation of James. In 1605 he was raised to be Bishop of Chichester, he was one of the translators of the Bible in 1607, and in 1609 he published his very learned Tortura Torti against Cardinal Bellarinine, an uncongenial task, imposed upon him by the king. In the end of the same year he was translated to Ely, where Casaubon spent part of the summer of 1611 with the bishop. In 1613 he sat as one of the judges on the Essex case. In 1617 he attended the king on his visit to Scotland, and in 1618 he was translated from Ely to Winchester. In 1621 Bacon fell, and Andrewes was one of the deputation of peers who attended on Bacon to receive his confession and submission. In 1621 he sat on Archbishop Abbot’s case also, and ‘the party,’ says Thomas Fuller, ’ whom the archbishop suspected his greatest foe, proved his most firm and effectual friend, even Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester.’ In 1625 James died. On his deathbed the king sent for Andrewes, but the favourite Bishop was so ill himself at the time that it was not possible for him to come to bid his royal master farewell. On the 2nd of February 1626 Andrewes was able to be present at the coronation of Charles the First, in which ceremony, both on account of his high office and his personal accept ability, he took a foremost place. This was one of the last public acts that Andrewes ever performed. ‘His gratitude to men, says his secretary, ‘was now changed into thankfulness to God. His affability to incessant and devout prayers and speeches with his Creator and Redeemer and Sanctifier. His laborious studies to restless groans, sighs, cries, and tears. His hands labouring, his eyes lifted up, and his heart beating and panting to see the living God, even to the last of his breath.’ Under Monday the 25th of September 1626 we read in Archbishop Laud’s diary this entry: ‘About four o’clock in the morning died Lancelot Andrewes, the most worthy Bishop of Winchester, the great light of the Christian world.’ Andrewes has left behind him five volumes of sermons, preached for the most part at Court, and on special occasions; two or three volumes of controversial matter, a volume of catechetical matter, and the Private Devotions. The Private Devotions, as the name indicates, was never intended for publication. Andrewes wrote the little book for his own use, and then, when he was done with it, he gave it to his great friend Archbishop Laud.