An Interpretation

The THE Book of Psalms is by far the oldest and it is

Psalter. y far tjje best of ajj te kooks of public or of

private devotion that we possess. The Book of Psalms is the model also as it is the mother of all the excellent books of devotion that we possess in addition to itself. In the Early Church and in the Latin Church of the middle ages a great body of liturgical and other devotional matter grew up and lay scattered about throughout Western Christen-The dom of which the Roman Breviary is a compilation

Breviary. an(j a condensation, — its own name and title tell us as much. And taken as a whole, — in its immense size and in its very real riches, as well as in its militarylike order and method and dramatic movement, — with all its grave and obvious faults, the Roman Breviary is not wholly unworthy of its great name. The Eng- And then the Book of Common Prayer is just a RSh ,^rayer” purer and a more portable English Church Breviary. The Bible, the Breviary, and the ancient liturgies, both Greek and Latin and Anglo-Saxon, were the authoritative and acknowledged sources out of which the Book of Common Prayer was compiled at first, and time after time improved. In the first edition of Bishop Sparrow’s Rationale of the Book of Common Prayer there is an old print representing the twelve compilers of the English Prayer-Book sitting at work around a table. At the head of the learned company Archbishop Cranmer is seen with his hand on an open Bible. Bishop Ridley sits at Cranmer’ s right hand with the Fathers open before him, and on the archbishop’s other side Bishop Goodrich sits with the ancient Liturgies spread open. ‘These learned Bishops and Divines, says Downes in his preface to Sparrow, ‘proceeded to inspect and examine the missals, breviaries, rituals, pontificals, graduals, psalters, antiphonals, and all other service-books then in use.’

The Eastern Churches have a very noble devotional literatui’e, which has been made accessible to the English student in the works of Maskell, Palmer, Neale, Littledale, Hammond, Bright, and Robertson, as well as in the Prayer-Books of Edward and Elizabeth. And such heirs of such riches are we, and such joint-heirs with all the Churches, that we possess yet another great treasure in the more private and more personal devotional books of all ages and all nations. We have the Confessions of Augustine, the Prayers and Soliloquies of Anselm, the unfinished Holy Week and other great prayers and praises of Jacob Behmen, the Golden Grove of Jeremy Taylor, the Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes, and William Laud, and Thomas Wilson, and many other suchlike precious possessions. But, for its peculiar purpose and for its special use, Andrewes’s Private Devotions stands out at the The head of them all. There is nothing in the whole range of devotional literature to be set beside Andrewes’s incomparable Devotions. Its author’s public and private life; his intense conscience of his past sins and of his abiding sinfulness; his keen, all-realising faith in God and in the grace of God; his soaring and adoring love; his universal scholarship, especially in the sacred schools; his so original method and so peculiar plan in the conception and in the composition of his book; and the long lifetime of profoundest penitential and importunate prayer that he has put into his book, — all these and many other things combine to make Bishop Andrewes’s Private Devotions to stand alone and unapproached in the literature of the closet and the mercy-seat. To myself one of the chiefest compensations and off-sets for the reign of James the First is this, that the Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes were being continually composed and were being continually employed, — were being continually wrung out of him, — during the whole course of that so mischievous and insufferable reign. As the chief interest of the reign of this and that king of Judah and Israel lies in such and such prophets and psalmists and righteous men who lived and wrote in the reigns of those kings, so is it with us in our own national history. Kings and queens, protectors and presidents, and the times of their rule, are ultimately memorable and honourable still by nothing so much as by the good and the great men they had among their subjects, the progress that the Kingdom of Heaven made in their day, and not least by the number and the quality of the books belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven that were written in their day. And that the English Bible, the Five Sermons on the Sacraments, Donne’s Sermons, and the Private Devotions — not to speak in this place of Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Lear, and the Essays, and the Advancement — have all come down to us out of James’s day, that covers a multitude of the sins of his day, and that will make his day to remain rich and illustrious to all time in the estimation of the Church of Christ in our land, and in all other English-reading lands. It is to James’s insight that we owe it that John Donne ever was a minister, — of whom Professor Saintsbury says that in the strength and savour of his quality he has no rival in English, no rival indeed anywhere but in the author of the. Confessions.

I shall not take time to enter on the Bibliography Biblioof the Private Devotions. I shall not stay to tell graphy’ how in 1648, twenty-two years after Andrewes’s death, Richard Drake published a translation of the Devotions ’ out of a fair Greek manuscript of the bishop’s amanuensis’: how the Greek original on which Richard Drake worked was printed at the Oxford University Press in 1675: how Stanhope, and Hall, and Newman, and Neale, and Venables have all followed Drake with their own translations and transcripts of the Devotions: how at Newman’s hands ’ the Devotions,’ to borrow Dean Church’s words, ‘has received in our own times one of those rare translations which make an old book new’: and how, by a fortunate purchase, Mr Livingstone of Pembroke College, Oxford, came into the possession of a small manuscript volume, bound in white vellum much discoloured, and tied with four strings of green silk ribbon, on the cover of which the faded inscription is still to be read — My reverend Friend Bishop Andrewes gave me this Booke a little before his death. W: Bath et Welles. ‘Had you seen the original manuscript,’ writes Drake, ’ happy in the glorious deformity thereof, being slubbered with its author’s pious hands and watered with his penitential tears, you would have been forced to confess, that book belonged to no other than to pure and primitive devotion.’ Canon Medd has published a careful edition of this precious relic, and we only wait now for another Newman to arise and to put it into fit and final English for us.

Method of In the composition of his Devotions, Lancelottion!POS1” Andrewes had anticipated and had already fulfilled all William Law’s best counsels. ‘When at any time, Law advises us, ’ either in reading the Scriptures or any book of piety, you meet with a passage that more than ordinarily affects your mind, and seems as it were to give your heart a new motion toward God, you should try to turn it into the form of a petition, and then give it a place in your prayers. By this means you would be often improving your prayers, and storing yourself with proper forms of making the desires of your heart known unto God.’ And, again, returning in another place to the same subject: ’ if they were to collect the best forms of devotion, and to use themselves to transcribe the finest passages of Scripture-prayers; if they were to collect the devotions, confessions, petitions, praises, resignations, and thanksgivings, which are scattered up and down the Psalms, and range them under proper heads, as so much proper fuel for the flame of their own devotions; if their minds were often thus employed, sometimes meditating upon them, sometimes getting them by heart, and making them habitual as their own thoughts, how fervently would they pray, who came thus prepared to pray! ‘Now, this was exactly and to the letter what Andrewes had already done a hundred years to a day before Law so pleaded with his readers. When Andrewes met with a verse or a clause or so much as a word in any scripture that specially suited into his own case; when David, or Asaph, or Job, or Paul said anything, or hinted at anything, that went to Andrewes’s heart, on the spot he took that word down, and that too in its own native Hebrew or Greek, as the case might be. And he did the same thing when he would be reading any of the ancients of the Latin or Orient Kirks, as Robert Bruce called them. Such is the labour of those who write the masterpieces in any branch of letters. Andrewes made such a constant practice of this, and had formed such a settled habit of it, that as his life went on his book of secret prayer came to be filled with all the best passages in the Psalms, in the Prophets, in the Gospels, and in the Epistles, as also in the sermons and litanies and liturgies of the Fathers and the Saints, till we have a perfect portrait before us of Andrewes’s inmost soul, and that too in lines and in colours borrowed from those hands which could best draw such deep lines and best mix such strong and lasting colours. Every verse, every clause of a verse, every single word and syllable, indeed, that Andrewes quotes has some special and inspired reference to himself alone. It is not quotation with him, it is assimilation; it is appropriation; and it is the recovery and the reappropriation of that which is indisputably his own wherever he comes across it. He passes over whole chapters and whole books in silence and with a dry pen. Only this one word in this whole Psalm is his, and he straightway takes this one word out of the whole Psalm and leaves to its author and to its other readers all the rest of the Psalm. He takes but what is demonstrably his own, and what has no such interest and no such value to any one else, and he hides it ever afterwards in his heart. He steals it down from all eyes into the book which he never opens till after his door is shut. And thus it is that all formality, all insincerity, all mere lip-service, and all multiplying of sacred words for the sake of their sound is excluded from this severe, sincere, and serious little book. The author’s method with himself and with his Bible excludes all that, and protects him and his readers from their constant temptation to all that.

Andrewes carried out the same method of selection and assimilation as he read the devotional books of the Greek and the Latin Fathers. Only, I feel sure that a great deal too much has been made of what Andrewes owes to the Greek and the Latin litanists and liturgists. Now and then you will come on a passage that is plainly borrowed from Chrysostom, or Basil, or the ‘Liturgy of St. James, but for one word that Andrewes owes to Chrysostom he owes a hundred to David. The truth is, the Devotions are far more original, so to call it, than has ever been allowed even by those who are tempted to sacrifice the plain truth to their partiality and their praise of Andrewes. All that Mozley says so uncritically and so extravagantly about Andrewes’ s sermons, with some chastening and some selecting, could then be very well and very truly said about his Devotions. And I venture to prophesy that when the genuine and original Laudian text has been translated, and when all the scriptural and liturgical and other quotations, references, and allusions have been traced up to their sources, the bishop’s book will nevertheless be seen to be absolutely his own.

The main sources from which he drew were the Holy Scriptures and his own life. The Institutiones Pice is a little volume of clear, simple, sweet English writing, not at all equal in depth or in strength to the Devotions, but a great improvement on the style of the sermons. This and the Manual for the Sick are excellent little books, and were the product of Andrewes’s personal religion and of his pastoral work when he was as yet an obscure and a single-hearted young minister with his whole time and his whole strength given up to his pulpit and to his pastorate.

To the question why the best part of the Devotions Why in was written in Greek, I have no better answer to Greek? offer than that which honest Stationer Moseley offered to the Christian reader from his shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard in 1647. ‘He penned them in Greek, and in that language presented them to his God; the reason is not for me to determine; whether it were for that the evidences of our salvation are delivered to us in that tongue, or whether amongst those fifteen he was master of, he chose this language as the most copious to express the fulness of his soul.’ To which let me add this out of the Preface to Dean Stanhope’s translation: ‘Such of his prayers as were brought nearest to perfection he wrote in Greek, either because the New Testament, the Septuagint, and most of the ancient Fathers and Liturgies, whence he extracted a good deal, were in that language, or because that language had some advantage for devotion, as the many compound words it contains strengthen the ideas they convey to us, and make a more lively impression on the mind.’ The fulness of the Greek spirit also, in its form, order, elevation, taste, beauty, music, falls on Andrewes, and for the first time takes full possession of Andrewes, when he enters his closet. And thus it is that, when we take Andrewes’s method and manner of composition along with his sources and with the language he wrote in, we have before us in his Private Devotions a perfect portrait of that man of prayer. We have Andre wes, in his Devotions, if not altogether as God saw him, at any rate as he saw himself when he felt himself to be more immediately under the eye of God. And thus it is that it is not David we see even in the most Davidic of Andrewes’s prayers, nor Asaph in the most Asaphic of them, nor Paul nor James nor Chrysostom: but what we see there is what was true of Andrewes in them all, with some thing added that was in none of them all, and is in no one else but in Lancelot Andrewes in all the world.

His Week The First Chapter of Genesis supplies to Andrewes the mould and the framework upon which he shapes and constructs his book, and a right noble use he makes of the majestic movement and the splendid scenery of that superb chapter. With that superb and splendid chapter open before him, Andrewes addresses himself to prepare a week of prayer and praise somewhat corresponding to the week of creation. And he opens and begins each successive day of his devotional week with an entranced and adoring meditation on the divine work of each successive day, as that divine work is described to him in The First the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis. And Dayp God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called

Night. Andrewes reads that on the morning of the First Day. He tarries over what he reads. He meditates upon it. He is present at it. He sees it. He hears it. And or ever he is aware his heart has burst out of him with this adoration, — Glory be to Thee, O Lord. Glory be to Thee, Thou Creator of the light, Thou Enlightener of the world. Creator of the visible light, the sun’s radiance, the flame of fire. Creator also of the light invisible and intellectual, — the revelation of God, the writings of the holy law, the oracles of sacred prophecy, the music of sacred psalmody, the instruction of the sapiential books, and the experience of Scripture history — on all of which a light shines which shall see no night. As it is sung every First Day of the Week in the Roman Breviary:

Father of Lights, by whom each day

Is kindled out of night, Who, when the heavens were made, didst lay

Their rudiments in light.
Thou, who didst bind and blend in one

The glistening morn and evening pale, Hear Thou our plaint, when light is gone,

And lawlessness and strife prevail.

In his magnificent adoration for the First Day Andrewes is above himself. On the First Day he stands beside Hooker and Milton. Here Andrewes is as good as Hooker is at his seraphic best. This is Hooker’s immortal First Book set to temple music. This is Bacon also in his great prayer after his fall: in that great prayer of which Addison says that it is the devotion of an angel rather than a man. ‘Thy creatures have been my book, but thy scriptures much more. I have sought Thee in the courts, in the fields, and in the garden, but I have found Thee in Thy holy temple.’ Andrewes’s First Day will always be written on the margin of the First Chapter of Genesis and on the margin of the Nineteenth Psalm in my Bible.

The Second On the morning of the Second Day Andrewes opens Moses again. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters: and it was so. And as he reads and sees what he reads, he recollects what he had seen written in the ‘divine liturgy of St. Clement,’ and he turns to the ancient devotional writer and thus meditates with him and thus prays with him: ‘My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning, O Lord. Blessed art Thou Who didst create the firmament of heaven, and the powers of the intellectual heaven, the angels, the archangels, the cherubim, and the seraphim: the waters above the heavens, mists and vapours, for showers, dew, snow as wool, hoar frost as ashes, ice as morsels, clouds from the ends of the earth, winds and waters out of Thy treasuries and out of Thy chambers.’ And then the liturgy continues: ‘Thou didst establish the great deep also, and didst cast a mound of sea-shore round about it, till a world of salt water stands up as an heap bounded on every side with Thy great barriers of rock and sand. Sometimes Thou dost swell the sea with a wind so as to lift it up into great mountains, and sometimes Thou dost smooth it out into a plain for the ease and the delight of mariners.’ And after much more of that same elevated and eloquent kind, all the people answer in a chant: ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Sabaoth: the heavens, and the earth, and the seas are all full to us of His glory. Blessed be the name of the Lord for evermore. Amen.’

And on the Third Day God said, Let the earth The Third bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit, whose seed is in itself: and it was so: and God saw that it was good. And straightway Andrewes sees all creation with a sacramental eye, in the light and in the unction of which he sings, ‘O God, Thou art my God. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who gatheredst the water into the sea, and broughtest to sight the earth, and madest to sprout all herbs and all fruit-bearing trees. There at Thy word are the oceans and the seas with their lakes and rivers and fountains. There also are the mountains, the hills, and the vales; glebe lands, meadow lands, and glades; there are pastures, and corn fields, and grass for cattle; herbs for food and for medicine; flowers for beauty; and fruit trees, and vines, and olive trees, and spices; trees for timber also, and stones for building, and metals for all arts, and coal, and fire, and vapour of smoke.’

And then on the morning of the Fourth Day The Fourth Andrewes offers this adoration: I have meditated on thee, O Lord, in the night watches, for Thou hast been my help. Or as it is in a Breviary Matin:

Be Thou the first on every tongue,

The first in every heart;
That all our doings all day long,

Holiest! may from Thee start.

Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who madest the two great lights, sun and moon, and the stars also, for light, for signs, and for seasons: for spring, summer, autumn, winter: for days, and weeks, and months, and years. The sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night. ‘O Lord,’ so runs the Breviary Hymn for Wednesday, a hymn which has received one of those rare translations that make an old hymn

new

Who didst on the Fourth Day, in heaven, Light the fierce cresset of the sun,

And the meek moon at even,

And stars that wildly run;

That they might mark and arbitrate
‘Twixt alternating night and day,

And tend the train sedate

Of months upon their way;

Clear, Lord, the brooding night within, And cleanse these hearts for thy abode,

Unlock the spell of sin,

Crumble its giant load.

The Fifth ‘Thursday, next to Sunday, says Dr Cazenove in ayp a valuable paper of memoranda that my revered

friend has favoured me with, ‘is the most jubilant day of the week. There is the intense triumph of our fallen nature having been renewed and exalted in the person of the ascended Lord above all angels and archangels to the right hand of the Father. Moreover, it is the day of the institution of the sacred feast of Holy Communion. Christ’s advocacy for us, the graces taught in the beatitudes, the gifts bestowed upon His saints, especially upon His holy mother, are blended with intercessions, and that day’s prayer is concluded with a wonderful list of thanksgivings.’

The Sixth And God said, Let us make man in our image, Dav- after our likeness: so God created man in His own

image, in the image of God created He him: male and female created He them. I have always thought Andrewes’s extraordinarily compressed meditation on that passage to be one of his finest things. In a few noble words he rises to the full height of Moses’ great argument: ‘In the morning shall my prayer prevent Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who broughtest forth the beasts of the earth, and cattle, and creeping things, for food, for the clothing and for the assistance of man. And then Thou madest man himself after Thine own image, and blessedst him, and didst put all things under his feet. The fore-counsel concerning man; the- hand that fashioned him; the image of God within him; the putting of all things under him; and the charge to the angels to guard him, to cherish him, and to minister to him. His heart, his reins, his eyes, his ears, his tongue, his hands, his feet, his life, his reason, his spirit, his free will, his memory, his conscience, the revelation of God made to him, the written law put into his hands, oracles of prophets also, melody of psalms, instruction of proverbs, experience of histories, worship and sacrifice. Blessed art Thou also for Thy great and precious promise made on this day concerning the life-giving seed, and for the fulfilment of that promise in the fulness of time on this day.’

And then under each successive day of creation, Heads of and after the proper meditation and adoration for Devotlonthe day, there comes a series of devotions arranged under the five heads of Confession of sin, Prayer for mercy to pardon and grace to help, Confession of faith, Intercession, and Thanksgiving; ’ so universal,’ as Stationer Moseley says, ‘was Lancelot Andrewes in all holy dimensions.’ Every day of his holy week begins with a meditation and an adoration on the creation of the world till all creation is crowned on the sixth day with the creation of man. And then immediately after each day’s proper meditation there follows a most Confession poignant confession of sin: ‘They continue this of sin§ day according to Thine ordinances: for all are Thy servants. But, adds Andrewes, ‘I have destroyed myself. For, two things I ever see in myself, human nature which Thou hast made in Thine own image, and my sin by which I have depraved and destroyed myself. My sin and my self-destruction are new again every morning before me.’ Scripture completely ‘disables our nature,’ as Andrewes says in his first sermon on Prayer, and the Devotions follows hard after Scripture in that. Andrewes confessed every morning with Bacon, ’ thousand have been my sins, and ten thousand my transgressions. As Thy favours have increased upon me, so have Thy corrections; and ever as my worldly blessings were exalted, so secret darts from Thee have pierced me, and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before Thee.’ When Racket praised Andrewes for his extraordinary kindness and attention to the students of Westminster, their old dean only the more remembered the many young men of promise who had gone astray owing to his forgetfulness and neglect. He had taught them to read and to write in Latin and in Greek, but he had overlooked to teach them to pray and to know them selves. When Bacon fell, and when Andrewes had to sit in judgment upon the Lord Chancellor’s distractingly sad case, he remembered how that great man had been used to call him his inquisitor, but Andrewes had secret remorse to the day of his death that he had not early enough and often enough been Bacon’s intercessor. When men talked everywhere of his hospitality and of his bountifulness, Andrewes remembered how much of that of which he was only the steward he had spent upon himself, and how much upon masks and feasts and progresses to his over-feasted, overamused, and over-flattered king. And as scandal after scandal leaped to light out of the wide-spread corruption and crime of the Essex case, Andrewes took all the condemnation of that miserable case home to himself. Had I acted like Abbot I should certainly have shared with Abbot in the hatred and the revenge of the king and the court, but I should have stopped that dreadful crime, and I should have saved the souls of all concerned in it. Who can understand the reach and the longevity of his errors? Andrewes cried out all his days, Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned! There is nothing that has ever been felt by any of God’s saints that Andrewes feels so much as that he is the chief of sinners. Paul must have felt that, else he would never have said it. Bunyan also must have felt it, else he would never have penned the title-page of his Grace Abounding. But Andrewes’s Devotions convinces me that he felt that as much as any great saint of God of them all. There is something about the way that Andrewes says it that makes me believe what he says, out to the uttermost stretch and strain of it. ‘God be merciful to me a sinner, the chief of sinners.... Lord be merciful to me a sinner, even unto me, O Lord, of sinners chief, chiefest and greatest.... The just man falleth seven times a day, and I, an

exceeding sinner, seventy times seven, a fearful and a horrible thing, O Lord. Thine unspeakable and unimaginable goodness, and Thy pity toward sinners and unworthy, and toward me of all sinners far the most unworthy, — an unworthy, wretched, and abject sinner. ... Be merciful to me a sinner, be merciful to me of all sinners the greatest and the most wretched.... Have mercy on me a sinner, the greatest of sinners, and for that very reason in need of the greatest mercy.... I then, trusting in Thy mercy, that forgiveth at the least seventy times seven, stand afar off, and bowed to the very dust I say again and again, God have mercy on me a sinner, on me a most wretched sinner, on me the chief of sinners, on me who am altogether made of sin, on me, who am a very hyperbole of sin.’ There is no doubt about language like that. That is not imitation. That is not repetition. That is not so many words. That is the very sacrifice with which God is well pleased. With that man will I dwell, saith the Lord, wherever he sees or hears the like of that. You would think that was surely enough. But no. The grave, and the two daughters of the horseleech, may say, That it is enough; but not Bishop Andrewes’s sinful heart. ‘I need more grief, he cries. ‘I plainly need more grief. I am far from that grief which I ought to have. I can sin much, but I cannot repent much. O my dryness and my deadness! Woe unto me! Would that I had more grief and sorrow of heart. But of myself I cannot obtain it. I am dried up like a potsherd. Open in me, O Lord, a fountain of tears. Give me a molten heart. ... I despise and bruise myself that my penitence, O Lord, is not deeper, is not fuller. Help Thou mine impenitence, and more, and still more pierce Thou, rend, and crush my heart. I am a burden to myself in that I cannot sorrow more. I beseech from Thee therefore a contrite heart, groanings that cannot be uttered, tears of blood. More and more bruise, and wound, and pierce, and strike my heart.

Thou canst turn even the hard rock into a pool. Give tears then: give the grace of tears. Give me,

0 Lord, this great grace. Tears such as Thou didst give to David, to Jeremiah, to Peter, and to Mary Magdalene.’ ‘Tears gain everything,’ says Santa Teresa in her Autobiography, and Andrewes would seem to have been of her belief. And because he had such sin, so much sin, and so little sorrow for so much sin, he cursed himself, he spat in his own face, and he cast himself into the ditch. ‘Despise me not utterly, O God, who am an unclean worm, a dead dog, a body of death.’ You will remember the prayer that was found in William Law’s handwriting among his papers: ‘Sanctify, O Lord, I beseech thee, this punishment to the benefit of my soul. That by Thy blessing it may heal my sores, take out the stains, deliver me from the shame, and rescue me from the tyranny of sin. But, O my God,

1 am an unclean worm, a dead dog, a stinking carcase, justly removed from that society of saints who this day kneel about thine altars. Let me be blessed and sanctified, as thou blessest and sanctifiest those that lament in sackcloth and ashes.’ Lancelot Andrewes and William Law would seem to have been well read in the Missal of Matthias Illyricus; or rather, all three were well read in their Bible.

There is a very remarkable argument carried on in the early part of the Eighty-sixth Tract for the Times, — a Tract which could only have been written by one of two men. And the argument is to the effect that the Reformation was the outcome of a universal call to repentance on the part of God, and that on the part of the Church of England it was a response to that call in a great act of national humiliation and sorrow for sin. And the subtle and skilful writer of the Tract, having taken that thesis in hand, goes on to trace the proof of that and the effect of that in the changes made in the Collects of the English Prayer-Book at the time of the Reformation. And he points out what he calls a lowering of the voice, a descent of the mind, and a humbling of the heart of the Church from the high choral tone of the missals and the breviaries and the early liturgies, till the Book of Common Prayer has become the cry of a returning prodigal rather than an expression of the liberty and the joy of obedient children. And it cannot be denied that Bishop Andrewes is a true son of the English Church in this respect. He is at his best in repentance and confession. He prays and praises in many places like a son also. But like volcanic rock thrusting itself up through a harvest field, so does Andrewes’s acute and abiding remorse for sin pierce up through his finest and fullest psalms of thanksgiving. Andrewes comes again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him, but all his harvest field has been sown in tears, and so reaped, and so gathered in, and so garnered, till it is the bread of tears. ‘His piety has not softened his heart,’ says Mark Pattison in a cruel and revengeful passage. But Andrewes would have said with John Foxe that what his piety had not done his impiety had completely accomplished. I owe far more to my sins, says the old martyrologist, than I owe to my good works. Andrewes has three Acts of Confession in his Latin Devotions, and all three are out of the same still broken heart. But the second of the three, beginning with — ‘O God, Thou knowest my foolishness,’ — it exceeds. I shall not touch it. I shall not attempt to give examples out of it. The page would run blood if I broke off a single sentence of it. Only, if ever God got at the hands of a sinful man a sacrifice that satisfied Him and made Him say on the spot, Bring forth the best robe, it was surely in Lancelot Andrewes’s closet, and after that great Act of Confession.

One of the acknowledged masters of the spiritual life warns us against ‘an untheological devotion. True spirituality, he insists, ’ has always been orthodox.’ And the readers of the Grammar of Assent Confession will remember with what masterly power and with ° ’ what equal eloquence it is there set forth that the theology of the Creeds and of the Catechisms, when it is rightly understood and properly employed, appeals to the heart quite as much as to the head, to the imagination quite as much as to the understanding. And we cannot study Andrewes’s book, his closet confession of his faith especially, without discovering what a majesty, what a massiveness, what a depth, and what a strength, as well as what an evangelical fervour and heartsomeness his theology has given to his devotional life. Take in illustration this profound apostrophe — the sum of so much that is contained in the Devotiotis: ‘Essence beyond essence: Essence every where, and wholly everywhere! ‘Let the intellect and the imagination take that of God truly, fully, and long enough up, and forthwith Andrewes’s words will take rank not unworthily with John’s words, ‘No man hath seen God at any time, and with Paul’s words, ‘Dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto.’ To some minds those three words in which Andrewes describes the Divine Nature will flash a new light on many an old expression of the Scriptures and the Catechisms and the Creeds. Let any devout and thoughtful man take up Andrewes’s confession of faith for the Fourth Day imaginatively and affectionately, and let each strong heaven-laden word be meditated and prayed over, and he will experience in himself what is meant by the power and the profitableness of a theological devotion. ‘I believe in the Father’s lovingkindness; in the Almighty’s saving power; in the Creator’s providence for guarding, ruling, perfecting the universe; in Jesus, for salvation; in Christ, for the anointing of his Holy Spirit; in the only begotten Son, for adoption; in the Lord, for His care as our Master; in his conception and birth, for the cleansing of our unclean conception and birth; in His sufferings, endured that we, whose due they were, might not suffer; in His cross, for the curse of the law removed; in His death, for the sting of death taken away; in His descent whither we ought, that we might not go; in His resurrection, as the first fruits of them that sleep; in His ascension, to prepare a place for us; in His sitting, to appear and to intercede for us; in His return, to take unto Him His own; in His judgment, to render to every man according to his deeds; in the Holy Ghost, for power from on high, transforming unto sanctity from without and invisibly, yet effectually and evidently; in the Church, a body mystical of those called out of the whole world into a commonwealth of faith and holiness; in the communion of saints, members of this body, a partaking with one another of holy things, for assurance of the remission of sins, for hope of resurrection and translation to life everlasting.’ In the Grammar of Assent its author says that for himself he has ever felt the Athanasian Creed to be the most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth. We certainly feel something not unlike that when Andrewes takes up the Apostles’ Creed, or the Nicene Creed, or the Life of our Lord, or His Names, or His Titles, or His Attributes, or His Offices. When Andrewes takes up any of these things into his intellect, imagination, and heart, he has already provided himself and his readers with another great prayer and another great psalm. So true is it that all true theology is directly and richly and evangelically devotional.

No one can have any idea of the power and the intercesbeauty, the breadth and at the same time the par- Slonticularity of Andrewes’ s intercessions, who has not for long made use of them as the coal of this so much neglected altar in his own devotional life. William Law is always insisting on particulars, and instances, and specifications; on names of people, names of places, and names of things in all prayer, and especially in intercessory prayer. And, even with Law himself open before me, I know no master of instances and particulars in intercessory prayer like Andrewes. Those who have not discovered the Devotions have a great start forward still before them when they begin to make constant use of that great book. I shall rejoice if these weak words of mine shall succeed in persuading even one man to take Andrewes for his teacher and his pattern in his life of intercessory prayer.

And then his thanksgivings. Read them, sing Thanksthem, carry them about with you, drink in their giving spirit, and offer your own thanksgivings on their noble plan. The Thanksgiving for the Fifth Day is an absolutely unique piece of sacred song. It is an all-embracing, absolutely exhaustive, autobiographic psalm. It is written by a man of God for God alone to read and to hear. And as we are chosen and privileged to read it and to hear it we come to understand something of the secret life of a man who was said to spend five hours of the day sometimes over a prayer and a psalm. We ourselves will spend as many hours, and we will not be done with our praise, when we have learned Andrewes’s divine art of writing and reading our own autobiography to God. ‘O God, for my existence, my life, my reason; for nurture, protection, guidance, education, civil rights, religion; for thy gifts to me of grace, nature, worldly good; for redemption, regeneration, instruction in the truth; for my call, recall, yea, many calls all through life; for Thy forbearance, longsuffering, long longsuffering to ward me, even until now; for all good things received, for all successes granted to me, for all good deeds I have been enabled to do; for my parents honest and good, for teachers kind, for benefactors never to be forgotten, for religious intimates so congenial and so helpful, for hearers thoughtful, friends true and sincere, servants faithful; for all who have helped me by their writings, sermons, conversations, prayers, examples, rebukes, and even injuries; for all these, and for all others which I know, and which I know not, open, hidden, remembered, forgotten; — what shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits? ‘And, then, on an altogether other key, An Act of Thanksgiving in the Latin Part. ‘If I were compelled to make a choice,’ says Dr Cazenove, ‘I should select the Act of Thanksgiving.’ Before I knew Dr Cazenove’s choice, I find I had already spoken of it as ‘that magnificent Act of Thanksgiving. Surely the noblest service of that kind that ever rose from earth to heaven. Yes, it is wholly worthy to be taken up word for word by the great multitude that no man can number. They cannot sing a better song. It is in every word of it worthy of them and of the place where they stand.’ And if any man think that too much to say about a book whose very title he has never heard till to-night, let him begin from to-night to learn to thank God with Lancelot Andrewes. Those who are staggered and offended to be told that any man should spend hours upon hours alone with himself and with his Maker should study such prayers and psalms as those of Andrewes; and if they once enter into their genius, and come under their spell, they will have discovered a new way of redeeming and laying out the dregs of their days. In trying to account for Andrewes having composed single

the most finished parts of his Devotions in Greek. Mr. words and r t snort sen-Hutton, Dean Stanhope s editor, says that the com- tences.

pound and emphatic words of that language greatly strengthen the ideas they convey to us, and thus make a deeper impression on our minds. Now no adequate justice can at all be done to Andrewes’ s Devotions till attention has been called to the power and the impressiveness of some of his single words and short sentences. The weight, the concentration, the solidity, and the impact of the style is one of the foremost features of Andrewes’ s Devotions. I have never for gotten the impression that one word of his in one of his confessions of sin made on my own imagination and heart the first time it leaped out upon me. ‘I ‘I have have neglected thee, O God! ‘Andrewes cried, and I trembled as I heard him cry it. And I have never come upon that awful word from that day to this with out a shudder. That I should neglect God! A man who has all his life neglected God, — Andrewes has made me see that to be my true description. If I make my bed in hell at last Andrewes has made me hear them pointing me out and saying, That is the man lying there who neglected God! It is this neglect of God that makes so many men infidels and atheists and outcasts. You neglect God till you come to say, and that not without some reason, that there simply cannot be such and such a God else it would be a sheer impossibility that you could have neglected Him as you have done. You look within, and you look around, and you see yourself and all men absolutely pushing God aside till it is as good as demonstrated to you that there can be no God. ‘God, said John Donne in a sermon that Andrewes may very well have heard, ‘God is like us in this also, that He takes it worse to be slighted, to be neglected, to be left out, than to be actually injured. Our inconsideration, our not thinking of God in our actions, offends him more than our sins.” Pardon, cries Bishop Wilson in his Sacra Privata, ’ that I have passed so many days without admiring, without acknowledging and confessing Thy wonderful goodness to the most unworthy of Thy servants. Preserve in my soul, O God, such a constant and clear sense of my obligations to Thee, that upon every new receipt of Thy favour, I may immediately turn my eyes to Him from Whom cometh my salvation.’ And in an evening prayer that Andrewes draws out for a family, in the Institutiones Pice, he makes them all say, ‘We have fled from Thee seeking us: neglected Thee loving us: stopped our ears to Thee speaking to us: turned our backs to Thee reaching Thy hand to us: forgotten Thee doing good to us: and despised Thee correcting us.’ And then in the Manual for the Sick he makes the dying man say, — ‘I have not studied to seek and know Thee as I ought to do. Knowing Thee, I have not glorified Thee, nor given thanks to Thee accordingly, And again when Andrewes cries in another confession, — ‘I have withstood Thee, O God,’ that makes almost as terrible an impression on my mind, as well it may. ‘I will confess my iniquity, for I have transgressed, and neglected Thee, O Lord. Set not my misdeeds before Thee, nor my life in the light of Thy countenance. I have withstood Thee, Lord, but I return unto Thee. I take with me words, and I return unto Thee and say, Take away all iniquity, and receive me graciously.’ And still, after all that, we see Andrewes still struggling with some ’ relics of reluctancy,’ to the end of his seraphic old age.

‘I am made of sin,’ Andrewes cries out in one of I am made his great acts of confession. ‘I have sinned, and ° of a truth I am made of sin, and my whole life maketh it manifest.’ Only those out of whose broken heart the echo comes: And so am I! — only they will believe that Bishop Andrewes can be in honest earnest and in his sound senses when he says that. But they who feel that to be true of themselves, — literally and absolutely true and far short of the truth, — they will be drawn irresistibly to the man who first made such a discovery as that in himself, and who had the truth and the talent to put the discovery into such answering words. Andrewes belongs to the family of Abraham, and Isaiah, and Paul, and Neri, and Pascal, and Bunyan, and Law, and all the evangelical succession. ‘I am made of dust and ashes,’ Abraham said. ‘From the head to the foot I am made up of putrefying sores,’ said Isaiah. ‘In me there dwelleth no good thing,’ said Paul. ‘Begone, I am a devil, and not a man, said Philip. ‘I defy the devil himself to equal me, said the author of Grace Abounding. ‘We are made up of falsehood, duplicity, and in sincerity, said Pascal, ’ and we cloak up these things in ourselves from ourselves.” Man is only a compound of corrupt and disorderly tempers, says William Law. ‘I am made of sin, groans Andrewes, and with that one awful word he lets us down into the whole bottomless pit of sin and shame and pain and misery that is in his own evil heart. ‘I am a burden to myself, he continues, still on his face before God, ‘I am a ruined, wretched, excessive sinner.’ Nor are these the mere ink-horn terms of which our prayer-books are full, or the usual insincere devotions of which our public worship is full. It is the truth, it is the sincerity, it is the intensity, it is the absolute agony of Andrewes’s supremely sinful and supremely miserable heart that so fascinates us, and holds us, and makes us like clay in his hands.

Small is the blind man’s grief to theirs who see Nothing at all but their own misery.

‘But I have an Advocate with Thee to Thee, and may He be the propitiation for my sins Who is also the propitiation for the whole world.’ As much as to say that the whole world and Lancelot Andrewes together will complete the propitiation. As much as to say that Lancelot Andrewes is a whole guilty world in himself, and that to be the propitiation for Lancelot Andrewes is more than to redeem and restore the whole world apart from him. Whom God hath set forth to be the propitiation for the whole world and Lancelot Andrewes. His infamy. You will sometimes see in the wall of a church or in the wall of a house or in the wall of a garden a stone with the smooth mark of the boring-iron still upon it — the boring-iron by means of which the blast was let in which shattered the hard rock into a thousand pieces. And many such significant marks occur all up and down the Private Devotions. ‘I have perverted that which was right, and yet Thou hast not overwhelmed me with infamy, Now, f infamy, remarkably enough, is the very word that an able historical writer of our day has applied to Andrewes’s share in the Essex case. Sometimes one single sin will blast and ruin a man’s whole after-life to himself. Sometimes one single sin will still leave its mark on a man long long after it has been forsaken, repented of, atoned for, and forgiven. One single sin will so explode and shatter his conscience, it will so bruise and break his heart into a thousand pieces, that like one of the Children of Israel a true penitent will feel the taste of the dust of the golden calf in every cup he ever after drinks — in his sweetest as well as in his bitterest cup. The Essex case followed Andrewes about all his days, as his drunkenness followed Noah, and his adultery David, and the sins of his blasphemy and injuriousness Paul, and our sins us. ‘God often permits sin, even in the elect, says Bishop Wilson, ‘that He may make their fall instrumental to their conversion and salvation. We have reason to bless God for those sins that awaken us, lead us to repentance, and make us to love much because so much has been forgiven us.’ ‘Wherewithal a man sinneth, says the Son of Sirach, ’ by the same also shall he be punished. Thou, O God, tormentest men with their own abominations.’ Or as Andrewes has it, ‘Let not my ungodliness be for my punishment.

Destroy me not in mine iniquities, nor reserve evil for me, nor make me a public shame.’ We stare at the length and at the number of the hours that Andrewes spent every day with sweating hands, but when God begins to torment us with our own abominations, and to make our ungodliness our punishment, all Andrewes’ s hours will have flown past, and we shall neither have numbered them nor grudged them.

His power ‘I return to my own heart, and with all my over us. heart j return to TneCj Q God of penitents, O

Saviour of sinners. Evening by evening will I return in the innermost marrow of my soul. I turn back from my evil ways, I return unto mine own heart, and with my whole heart I return unto Thee, saying, I know, O Lord, the plague of my heart. Since the days of my youth have I been in a great trespass unto this day, and I cannot stand before Thee, by reason of this. I bear the brands of sin. I conceal nothing. I make no excuses. I have destroyed myself. I am without plea. Thou art just in all that has come upon me. Thou hast done right, but I have done wickedly. I remember my sins in the bitterness of my soul. I have no rest because of them. I turn away from them and groan. I despise and hate myself. Forgive me, for I knew not, truly I knew not what I did when I sinned against Thee. I can sin much, but I cannot return from my sins. Only, I will always remember my latter end. I will give myself up to prayer. I will give up the rest of my life to repentance, because Thou art waiting for my full conversion.’ How his words transfix us! How our past comes back upon us at his words! How our hearts melt in us as Andrewes takes us by the hand, and as we kneel beside him! The secret of

the Lord and His best power are with this penitent

in a most singular way, till that wonderful book

of his in every page of it pierces us, solemnises

us, and subdues us to tears and to prayer and to

obedience as no other book of its kind has ever

done. Every page, almost every line, of the Private

Devotions has some strong word in it, some startling

word, some selected, compounded, and compacted

word, some heart-laden clause, some scriptural or

liturgical expression set in a blaze of new light and

life, and ever after to be filled with new power as we

employ it in our own prayers and praises. It is true

genius; it is a gift of God and a grace of His

Spirit of no common kind to be able in this way

to make the old and familiar language of devotion

so new, so quick, so powerful, and so prevailing,

as Andrewes makes it in this fine book of his

which is now open before us.