Grace and Conformity: The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) 9780190084332, 9780190084356, 0190084332

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Grace and Conformity

OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N H I S T O R IC A L T H E O L O G Y Series Editor Richard A. Muller, Calvin Theological Seminary Founding Editor David C. Steinmetz Editorial Board Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-​Wilhelms-​Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia ORTHODOX RADICALS Baptist Identity in the English Revolution Matthew C. Bingham DIVINE PERFECTION AND HUMAN POTENTIALITY The Trinitarian Anthropology of Hilary of Poitiers Jarred A. Mercer THE GERMAN AWAKENING Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815–​1848 Andrew Kloes CATHOLICITY AND THE COVENANT OF WORKS James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition Harrison Perkins THE COVENANT OF WORKS The Origins, Development, and Reception of the Doctrine J. V. Fesko RINGLEADERS OF REDEMPTION How Medieval Dance Became Sacred Kathryn Dickason

REFUSING TO KISS THE SLIPPER Opposition to Calvinism in the Francophone Reformation Michael W. Bruening FONT OF PARDON AND NEW LIFE John Calvin and the Efficacy of Baptism Lyle D. Bierma THE FLESH OF THE WORD The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy K. J. Drake JOHN DAVENANT’S HYPOTHETICAL UNIVERSALISM A Defense of Catholic and Reformed Orthodoxy Michael J. Lynch RHETORICAL ECONOMY IN AUGUSTINE’S THEOLOGY Brian Gronewoller GRACE AND CONFORMITY The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England Stephen Hampton

Grace and Conformity The Reformed Conformist Tradition and the Early Stuart Church of England S T E P H E N HA M P T O N

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Hampton, Stephen William Peter, author. Title: Grace and conformity : the reformed conformist tradition and the early Stuart Church of England / Stephen Hampton. Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Series: Oxford studies in historical theology series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020049812 (print) | LCCN 2020049813 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190084332 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190084356 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: England—Church history—17th century. | Church of England—Doctrines—History—17th century. | Church and state—England—History—17th century. | Christianity and politics—England—History—17th century. | Great Britain—History—Early Stuarts, 1603-1649. Classification: LCC BR756 . H2554 2021 (print) | LCC BR756 (ebook) | DDC 274. 2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049812 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049813 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents Acknowledgements  Abbreviations 

Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety 

vii ix

1

1. The Act Lectures of John Prideaux 

28

2. John Davenant and the English Appropriation of the Synod of Dort 

68

3. Responses to Montagu 

110

4. The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation 

149

5. The Articulation of Justification by Faith 

177

6. The Lord’s Supper 

207

7. Episcopacy 

237

8. Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year 

268

Conclusion  Notes  Bibliography  Index 

300 311 393 403

Acknowledgements I should express my thanks, first of all, to the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse for affording me the time to undertake this research. It is a delightful irony that I have been researching Early Stuart Reformed Conformists from what was an enemy redoubt. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Anthony Milton for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project, his patience in reading draft material, and his willingness to share the fruits of his formidable learning. Richard Muller’s scholarship has been an inspiration, and his support and guidance in bringing the manuscript to publication have been a singular encouragement. I am grateful for many entertaining, challenging, and illuminating conversations with David Hoyle, John Adamson, Stephen Conway, and Michael McClenahan which have so often refreshed my interest in the topic. Mari Jones’s combination of academic experience and friendly advice have been a constant support. My colleagues James Carleton Paget, Magnus Ryan, and Scott Mandelbrote have frequently and graciously interrupted their own work to help me with mine. I should also express my thanks to Nicholas Rogers, Archivist of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, for his patience and help in accessing the Ward manuscripts, and to John Maddicott, who has generously shared the fruits of his own research on John Prideaux.

Abbreviations ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Hooker, Laws Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Aquinas, S.Th. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Introduction: The Reformed Conformist Style of Piety ‘My House Is the House of Prayer’ On 5 October 1624, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the resident doctors of Oxford University gathered in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, ‘clad in their scarlet robes’.1 The assembled academics then accompanied John Howson, Bishop of Oxford, in a solemn procession to Exeter College. They were met at the gate by the Rector, fellows, and scholars of the College, dressed in their surplices, with the rest of the College’s students in their academic gowns. To the sound of choral and instrumental music, the expanded procession then walked round the Quad to the recently completed College Chapel. The construction of this new building had been overseen by George Hakewill, Archdeacon of Surrey, the wealthy clergyman who paid for it. Two years previously, Hakewill had lost his place at Court and been briefly imprisoned for presenting the young Prince of Wales (later King Charles I), to whom he was then a Chaplain, with an unauthorized tract denouncing the Prince’s proposed marriage to the King of Spain’s daughter, the Infanta Maria Anna. In the interim, Prince Charles, accompanied by his father’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had travelled to Spain in an unsuccessful attempt to woo the Spanish Princess. So Hakewill’s insistence that his new Chapel be consecrated on 5 October, the anniversary of the Prince’s return to England, may have held some savour of vindication.2 Hakewill’s new chapel was undoubtedly a remarkable building. Unique among the chapels of Oxford and Cambridge, it was almost square, with two parallel aisles separated by a line of Perpendicular arches.3 The Chapel was distinguished by its broad, traceried windows, its delicate Mannerist woodwork, an ornamental plaster ceiling in the gothic style, and a great trompe l’oeil window painted on the east wall.4 Across every otherwise clear-​glazed light were inscribed the words ‘Domus Mea, Domus Orationis’: ‘My house is the house of prayer’.5 Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0001

2  Grace and Conformity Perhaps the Chapel’s crowning glory, though, was its striking pulpit, whose ornate, pinnacled canopy was held up by a pair of distinctive Solomonic columns.6 Legend had it that the Emperor Constantine had taken such pillars from the ruined Temple in Jerusalem and installed them in front of the altar of St Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. Raphael had consequently incorporated columns of that design in a tapestry cartoon depicting the healing of the lame man at the Beautiful Gate, a cartoon which entered the English royal collection in 1623. Their use in Hakewill’s chapel antedates their better known use in the porch of Oxford’s University Church by over a decade.7 Incorporating such pillars into a pulpit dramatically underlined the significance of preaching as the locus for a Christian’s encounter with God.8 The effect would have been particularly powerful when the Exeter pulpit was moved, as intended, to the centre of the main aisle. On entering the new chapel, Bishop Howson received an oration of welcome from a member of the College, before being led to his seat beneath the pulpit and close to the carpeted communion table.9 After formally enquiring whether it was the will of the College ‘to have this house dedicated to God and consecrated to his divine service,’ the Bishop knelt and began the rite with a prayer of dedication.10 The whole service, which included the ordinary Prayer Book office for the day and was again accompanied by elaborate choral and instrumental music, lasted nearly four hours.11 The sermon was preached by the Rector of Exeter, John Prideaux. Prideaux had been Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford since 1615 and was an internationally renowned exponent of Reformed orthodoxy. In 1624, he was already serving for the second time as Vice-​Chancellor to his powerful patron, the University’s Chancellor, William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke. Prideaux took as his text the words inscribed on the Chapel windows: Luke 19:46, ‘My house is the house of prayer’. Bishop Howson had published two sermons on the equivalent text from Matthew’s gospel in 1597 and 1598, and he cannot have missed the fact that, at significant points, Prideaux took a rather different line from his own. Both men certainly exhibited a profound reverence for sacred space. Prideaux began by underlining the anger that Christ had expressed in the Temple against the sacrilege perpetrated there.12 He then applied that dominical example to the proper use of church buildings in his own day: God will have a house; this house must appear to be his peculiar; this peculiar must not be made common, as an [gu]ild hall for plays or pleadings; or a

Introduction  3 shop for merchandise; or a cloister for idle walkers; or a gallery for pleasure; or a banqueting house for riot; much less a brothel for wantonness, or a cage for idolatrous superstitions but reserved as a sacred congregation-​ house, where penitent & submissive supplicants may learn their duty by preaching; assure their good proceedings by sacraments, obtain their graces by prayer.13

Howson had quoted Chrysostom to much the same effect, twenty-​five years earlier.14 Admittedly, Prideaux’s reference to the particular dangers of ‘idolatrous superstitions’ lent his idea of reverence for sacred space an anti-​ Catholic edge, which Howson’s remarks had not conveyed.15 Prideaux underlined that Christ and the Apostles had never spoken against the ‘Cathedral Temple’ or the ‘parochial synagogues’ of the Jews. On the contrary, they had set Christians an example, by using them for their proper purpose in preaching, prayer, catechizing, and disputation. Prideaux commended the generosity with which Christians of earlier ages had established their churches. He remarked, however, ‘That which true devotion first grounded, necessity urged, conveniency furthered, holy ability perfected, and God blessed: opinion of merit, false miracles, apish imitation of Paynims, superstition toward relics and saints departed; and perchance in some, an itching ambition to get a name; through Devil’s stratagems, and man’s vanity, quickly perverted and abused’.16 True religion was consequently reduced to a mere show; ‘And no marvel, for God’s word and preaching once laid aside, and reconciliation by faith in Christ little sought after, or mistaken; what May-​game and outward pomp, which best contented the sense, might not easily pass for the best religion’.17 For Prideaux, in other words, the neglect of preaching and a heterodox theology of salvation had led directly to a corruption of the medieval Church’s attitude to church buildings and liturgy. Howson had passed over such issues in silence, merely criticizing the medieval Church’s worldliness and excess.18 Even in the Patristic era, Prideaux pointed out, the Fathers had begun to express concern about the dangers of excessive devotion to church buildings. That said, Prideaux did not hide their appreciation of appropriate splendour, so long as it was combined with a sound theology of grace: Not that these good men . . . misliked decency, cost, or state, proportional to situations, assemblies, and founders, and the abilities of such houses for Gods worship; but desired to restrain excess, curb ostentation,

4  Grace and Conformity stop superstition, which at length began to be intolerable in images and relics: but especially to beat men off from the conceit of merit, and rectify their good minds, where circumstances so required in divers cases, to more charitable employments.19

Where such problems were not in evidence, Prideaux remarked, the Fathers had applauded investment in church buildings. As a result, he went on, ‘they are not worthy therefore to be confuted, (or scarce deserve to be mentioned) who in hatred of a nation, or religion, or in heat of faction, overthrow God’s houses’.20 Prideaux lamented the fact that a proper regard for church buildings was lacking among the Christians of his own day. ‘It were to be wished . . . ’ he remarked, ‘that in building, repairing, and adorning such religious houses, our devotion were as forward as our warrant is uncontrollable. The very Turks may shame us in this behalf, who neglect their private mansions, to beautify their profane mosques. Surely God hath need of no such Houses, but the benefit of them redoundeth to ourselves’.21 Howson had said much the same, though at considerably greater length.22 Prideaux had no truck, however, with the superstitious opinions about church construction prevailing within the Church of Rome. He ridiculed Bellarmine’s discussion of the subject in the De Controversiis Christianae Fidei, taking particular exception to the Cardinal’s specious reasons that churches should point east.23 Prideaux underlined that he was perfectly happy for church buildings to point east, but not on such preposterous grounds: ‘These are the great Cardinal’s reasons for church architecture:’ he wrote, ‘which I refute not, but leave, for their conversion, who affect to direct their prayers by the rhumbs in the compass. The thing we disallow not, as in itself merely indifferent; yet embrace it not, on such Jesuitical inducements, but in regard of a commendable conformity’.24 Prideaux then turned to the question of consecration.25 Under the Old Covenant, he pointed out, God had instituted special ceremonies to dedicate certain objects, persons, and places to his service, ‘the consideration whereof might breed a reverence in his worshippers that should use them; and vindicate them from miscreants that should employ them otherwise’.26 This practice had continued in the Early Church, and all the relevant Patristic authorities agreed that the consecration of church buildings was ‘an ancient and necessary Church-​constitution’. All agreed, too, Prideaux pointed out, ‘that no minister inferior to a bishop, might canonically consecrate it’.27 So there was therefore an episcopalian edge to his sermon, too.

Introduction  5 Originally, church consecrations had simply involved prayer and preaching, and Prideaux cited approvingly the Second Helvetic Confession’s stipulation that ‘on account of God’s Word and sacred use places dedicated to God and his worship are not profane’.28 Prideaux’s positive reference to the Second Helvetic Confession was a rejoinder to Howson, who had criticized the Confession in his 1598 sermon. It also served to anchor the Exeter rite of consecration firmly within the wider Reformed tradition. Prideaux complained that these innocent ceremonies had become unnecessarily elaborate over time and also been embroidered with specious legends. Prideaux offered several examples of these, ‘to acquaint the younger sort with these Romish mysteries; the notice whereof may give you a taste, how inclinable the Italian humours are always to play the mountebanks; and how blessed our case is, who so fairly are freed from them’. For, as Prideaux underlined, with yet another reference to the need for an orthodox soteriology, ‘As our Founders disclaim all merit, so our Reverend Bishops (as you see) pretend no miracles to credit their consecrations’.29 Prideaux believed that the consecration of church buildings had ample scriptural warrant. ‘Have we not this ground from the Apostle himself,’ he asked, ‘ “That every creature is sanctified by the word of God and prayer?” 1. Timothy 3.5. And what is sanctification, but that in general which consecration is in special, a severing of places, persons, and things, from common use, by deputing them through convenient rites, to Gods peculiar worship and service’.30 Such ceremonies, Prideaux pointed out, had ‘procured heretofore respect to the things, reverence to the persons, and an awful regard in men’s behaviours, as often as they entered into such sanctified places’.31 Sadly, this reverence for the sacred was much decayed: ‘In the looseness of these latter times: impudency pleads prescription for greater presumption, more commonly in such houses and assemblies, than would be tolerated before a Chair of State, or a common Court of Justice: nay, that pupil or servant, who in a College quadrangle will honour his Master, at least with a cap, in a Church at sermon time will make bold to affront him covered, howsoever he stand bare to deliver God’s message’. Prideaux encouraged his congregation to a different course: ‘Take heed therefore . . . not only to thy foot, but to thy head, hands, and heart, when thou enterest into the House of God. . . . Not for the inherent sanctity of the place (which our adversaries press too far) but through the objective holiness, adherent to it, by Christ’s promises, sacred meetings, united devotion, joint participating of the Word and Sacraments, lively incitements

6  Grace and Conformity through others examples’.32 For Prideaux, in other words, although a church building was not holy, in and of itself; it certainly was holy in a derivative sense, by virtue of its connection with holy things.33 As a result, it was a Christian duty to express suitable reverence in church buildings, both inwardly and outwardly. If any question was raised about whether church buildings should be dedicated, as Hakewill’s Chapel was, to departed saints; Prideaux’s response was clear: ‘We affirm, they may; not for their relics contained in them, or invocation directed to them, or graces expected from them; as the Papists contend to have, and the Puritans fondly cavil we give: but for certain notes of difference, the better to discern one church or chapel from another; and a religious retaining of those in memory, by whom God is honoured, and good men excited to imitation’.34 The printed version of the sermon included a marginal reference, at this point, to Richard Hooker’s discussion of the dedication of churches in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.35 Prideaux’s explicit condemnation of Puritanism here was significant: Puritanism was clearly one of the ‘others’ against which he was defining his own ecclesiastical identity. A second ‘other’ emerged, when Prideaux defined the main purpose of all church buildings. As he put it, these houses are not here Christened by the names of Concionatoria, or Sacramentaria; houses of preaching and administering the sacraments; (though preaching and sacraments be the ordinary and blessed means, for the begetting and confirming true faith in us, whereby our prayers may be effectual) but of . . . Oratoria, places of prayers, and Courts of Requests to the Great King of Heaven, as both the Greeks and Latins style them from the primary action; prayer . . . including, by a notable synecdoche, all other religious duties, which are ordered to it, and receive a blessing by it. And surely (beloved) public prayers and sermons, (for ought I find) never trespassed one upon another, till the itching humours of some men of late, would needs set them together by the ears. For what? must sermons needs be long to shorten prayers? or prayers be protracted or multiplied of purpose to exclude preaching? I pray God there be not a fault of both sides; of laziness in the one, and vain glory in the other: When those would excuse their slackness, or insufficiency, by a pretended devotion; and the other draw all devotion to attend on their discourses. Let preaching therefore so possess the pulpit, that prayer may name the church, as here it doth.36

Introduction  7 With these words, Prideaux pointedly distanced himself from Howson’s sermon on the same dominical words; because setting public prayers and sermons together by the ears was precisely what the Bishop of Oxford had done twenty years earlier. In 1598, Howson had taken exception to the injunction in the Second Helvetic Confession that ‘The greater part of meetings for worship is . . . to be given to evangelical teaching, and care is to be taken lest the congregation is wearied by too lengthy prayers’.37 Howson complained that ‘Though the Church of England hath no such constitution, yet the people entertain the practise of it, many of them condemning common prayer, but a greater part neglecting them, and holding it the only exercise of the service of God to hear a sermon’.38 ‘I complain not that our Churches are auditories,’ Howson underlined, ‘but that they are not oratories: not that you come to sermons, but that you refuse or neglect common prayer’.39 Prideaux’s words were therefore a public criticism of the man consecrating Exeter’s new chapel. That said, they also represented a distinct qualification of the liturgical attitudes of the Second Helvetic Confession; an attitude which many Puritans shared. One of the Puritan complaints against the Prayer Book expressed in the 1605 Abridgment was that ‘It appointeth a liturgy which by the length thereof, doth in many congregations oft times necessarily shut out preaching’.40 The Abridgment had been republished in 1617 and would be again in 1638. Prideaux was therefore carefully locating his view of sacred space, and of orthodox Conformist devotion, in contradistinction to the likes of Howson, on the one hand, and the Puritans, on the other. He was also passing over, in discreet silence, the fact that the tension which both Howson and the Puritans perceived to lie between preaching and praying was a tension acknowledged by the Second Helvetic Confession, of which Prideaux had earlier approved. Here was, in other words, an appropriation of Reformed theological reflection on sacred space, but nuanced by the particular polemical situation of a Conformist working within the English Church. The Consecration of Exeter Chapel was a memorable ceremony. It also presents a conundrum to historians of the Early Stuart Church, because it combines religious elements that have often been taken to be incompatible. Here was a stately liturgical ceremony, incorporating fine choral and instrumental music, taking place in a richly and symbolically decorated building, but a sustained hostility to the Church of Rome was also present. Here was a sermon extolling the spiritual significance of sacred space, the need for bodily reverence, and the legitimacy of costly church architecture

8  Grace and Conformity and furnishings, but also a sermon promoting orthodox Reformed soteriology, preached by one of Europe’s most celebrated Reformed divines. Above all, the event was an expression of Conformist devotion that was evidently as opposed to the more avant-​garde expressions of Conformity as it was to Puritanism. The Consecration of Exeter College Chapel therefore stands as an eloquent testimony to what Peter McCullough has referred to as ‘a peculiarly Jacobean ecclesiastical culture which seemed increasingly comfortable with church beautification, both architectural and musical—​as long as that did not threaten the inherited Elizabethan commitment to the ministry of the Word through preaching’.41 The purpose of this book is to explore the religious tradition within which this distinctive combination of religious impulses made sense.

Neither Puritan nor Laudian In Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England (2015), Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens have forcefully reiterated the case that the Early Stuart Church was shaped by the interaction between a number of distinct, identifiable, and self-​conscious religious identities. The identities around which Lake and Stephens primarily focussed their analysis were Puritanism and Laudianism. Their central contention, based on a close, intertextual reading of public and private sources, was that these two identities were not ‘the product of ideology and false consciousness, merely factitious constructs, generated by contemporaries in self-​interested pursuit of polemical and political advantage’. Rather, ‘Founded on positions, both publicly canvassed and privately held, these terms effectively encode and characterize what a considerable number of centrally placed and influential groups and individuals were doing throughout the 1620s and 1630s’. But Lake and Stephens also underlined that ‘we cannot simply accept the mutually reinforcing, bi-​polar vision of the Laudians and Puritans as anything like an adequate account of the contemporary religious scene’. 42 In their study, they pointed to a 1637 sermon by the moderate Puritan Edward Reynolds and to Elizabeth Isham’s Book of Remembrance as evidence for a much richer spectrum of religious cultures.43 The consecration of Exeter College Chapel, and Prideaux’s sermon at it, is another case in point: a prominent religious ceremony that was neither Puritan nor Laudian, but explicitly and self-​consciously distinct from both.

Introduction  9 Lake and Stephens are certainly not the only historians who have tried to move beyond the binary opposition of Puritan and Laudian, in their analyses of the Early Stuart Church. As long ago as 1973, Nicholas Tyacke identified a ‘mainstream of Calvinist episcopalianism,’ in which he placed John Davenant.44 In The Early Stuart Church (1993), Kenneth Fincham underlined the significance of the conformist Calvinists within the Church of James I and Charles I, arguing that ‘we urgently need more studies of such conforming Calvinists, who are usually lost sight of between the more visible extremes of Puritan and Arminian’.45 In Catholic and Reformed (1995), Anthony Milton extensively discussed the views of those ‘Calvinist Conformists,’ among whom he numbered Prideaux.46 In Conforming to the Word (1997), Daniel Doerksen celebrated the fact that ‘Historians are at long last studying the Calvinist conformists,’ among whom he located John Donne and George Herbert.47 In Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (1998), Judith Maltby established a significant bedrock of popular Conformity that was staunchly Protestant, attached to the Book of Common Prayer, and yet neither Puritan nor Laudian in sympathy.48 In other words, the use of ‘Calvinist Conformist’ as a category and the recognition that ‘Calvinist Conformity’ was a distinct and significant expression of English Protestantism during the Early Stuart period are well established in the literature. That said, scholarly interest in the tradition has generally been confined to studies of individual ‘Calvinist Conformists,’ rather than attempting to engage with the tradition as a whole.49 This is in marked contrast to the way historians have approached both Puritanism and Laudianism. The study of Puritanism is so well established as to be virtually a subdiscipline in its own right. Laudianism has also attracted a number of dedicated studies.50 Calvinist Conformity has not. Doerksen is arguably an exception here. His book sets out to answer the question ‘What kind of conformity characterized the Jacobean Church?’51 However, he does not engage in depth with the theology that was deployed to defend conformity or with the writers who deployed it. His aim was rather to contextualize the writings of George Herbert and, to a lesser extent, John Donne, by reference to a broadly drawn conformist hinterland. Fincham is another scholar who engages with Calvinist conformity as a distinctive tradition. In Prelate as Pastor (1990), he made the case that a number of Jacobean bishops whom he describes as ‘evangelical Calvinists,’ or simply ‘evangelicals,’ embraced a practical theology of episcopacy—​a ‘churchmanship’ as Fincham

10  Grace and Conformity calls it—​that was demonstrably distinct from that of their Arminian and Laudian contemporaries and yet cannot meaningfully be described as puritan.52 Fincham’s study certainly engages with the theology of ministry that underlay the pastoral approach of these men. He does not, however, seek to engage with contemporary discussions about the doctrine of grace or with the theological underpinnings of liturgical conformity. His primary focus is also on the reign of James I, when such evangelical Calvinists were clearly on the front foot, rather than on the reign of Charles I, when their religious tradition came under pressure. Debora Shuger accounts for the relative neglect of Calvinist Conformity by ‘the extent to which the historiography of belief still depends on the arma virumque model, in which the primary task is to identify the two sides and then trace their conflict through its various stages’.53 Certainly, if an adversarial model of ecclesiastical history is assumed, the opposition between Puritanism and Laudinism is more obvious, and more thoroughgoing, than the opposition between either and Calvinist conformity. Another factor may be the assumption that Laudianism and Puritanism had an afterlife in the Restoration Church, in High Churchmanship and Nonconformity, respectively, whereas Calvinist conformity did not. That is an assumption which I have sought to challenge elsewhere.54 The phenomenon of post-​Restoration Reformed Conformity only reinforces the need to understand its Early Stuart antecedent. The result of this relative neglect is that the only work offering an in-​ depth analysis of the theology of Calvinist conformity remains Peter Lake’s Anglicans and Puritans? (1988), which was a study of its Elizabethan, rather than its Stuart expression. There, Lake drew a sharp distinction between the conformity exhibited by John Whitgift and that exhibited by Richard Hooker. ‘Whitgift,’ Lake wrote, ‘certainly made no attempt to develop a positively and distinctively conformist style of piety’. ‘He never claimed that the ceremonies in question had any religious significance at all,’55 rather, ‘They were proffered as aids to order and uniformity, their value derived from the authority of the prince who enjoined them’.56 ‘Nor is there any sign in his thought of a sacrament—​rather than a word-​centred style of piety . . . . The word read, but particularly preached, remained the only way to edify the flock of Christ’.57 As a result, Lake suggested, Whitgift’s religion or style of piety remained a pallid, one-​dimensional version of the puritan one. Centred on . . . an impoverished understanding

Introduction  11 of edification as the mere transfer of knowledge, it was backed up by a rather wintry and fatalist Calvinism. Those who wanted a religious or emotionally compelling alternative to puritan divinity were not going to find it in Whitgift’s works. The search to fill the resulting vacuum at the heart of the conformist position was to occupy anti-​puritan polemicists for the remainder of the reign.58

Lake contrasted Whitgift’s uninspiring, Erastian style of conformity with Hooker’s much richer offering. For Hooker, religion was fundamentally a matter of worship, and worship involved more than the preaching of the word. It involved church ceremonies, prayer, and, above all, the sacraments. ‘Church ceremonies, [Hooker] claimed (in direct disagreement with previous conformists) could and should edify’. As a result, Hooker’s style of conformity entailed ‘little short of the reclamation of the whole realm of symbolic action and ritual practice from the status of popish superstition to that of a necessary, indeed essential means of communication and edification; a means, moreover, in many ways more effective than the unvarnished word’.59 Furthermore, ‘Prayer, for Hooker, was of at least equal importance with preaching in the life of the church. Indeed the two activities perfectly complemented each other.’60 Church ceremonies and prayer provided the proper context for what Hooker conceived as the most important element of worship—​the sacraments. For Hooker, Lake underlined, ‘The sacraments were the major instruments through which we are incorporated into Christ’s mystical body’.61 As a result, he argued, Hooker’s agenda was effectively to replace a word-​centred view of Christian ministry, which Whitgift shared with the Puritans, with a sacrament-​centred one. In this, he was emulated by a number of ‘Arminian or proto-​Arminian divines,’ including Lancelot Andrewes, John Overall and John Buckeridge.62 Lake’s analysis of conformist thought, in which the two poles are the Erastian, word-​ centred Calvinism of Whitgift, and the ceremonious, sacrament-​centred piety fostered by Hooker and embraced by the anti-​ Calvinists, continues to shape perceptions of English conformity.63 That may be why, in Altars Restored (2007), Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke include Prideaux’s Consecration sermon among a range of sermons that they suggest illustrate ‘just how far the ecclesiological views of Richard Hooker and John Howson still were from winning general acceptance’ at the end of James I’s reign.64 Yet as has been indicated, Prideaux’s concerns actually echoed Howson’s on a number of points, and the marginal reference to

12  Grace and Conformity Hooker’s discussion of the dedication of church buildings, that appears in the printed version of the sermon ‘Vid. Hookerum l.5 sect. 12, 13, 16’ suggests a more positive engagement with Hooker’s style of conformity than Fincham and Tyacke seem to allow. This is not entirely surprising because, as Michael Brydon has shown in The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker (Oxford, 2006), there was a concerted effort amongst conforming Calvinists to redeem Hooker from the suspicion of crypto-​Catholicism raised by his early detractors65 and to reclaim him as a sound Reformed authority for conformity.66 As a result, it became possible for orthodox Reformed theologians to quote Hooker in defence of the established Church and so to absorb, selectively and critically, Hooker’s style of conformist piety.67 In the Early Stuart period, in other words, conforming Calvinists were in a position to move beyond the Erastian conformity of Whitgift and offer a richer articulation of conformist practice, without thereby abandoning their Reformed doctrinal credentials.68 It follows that Lake’s analysis of conformist thought under Elizabeth I, in which doctrinal Calvinism and an appreciation for ceremony and symbolism were alternatives, is less well-​adapted to the situation under the Early Stuarts. By then, a richer mode of Calvinist conformity had become possible. Prideaux was one exponent: this study will show that there were others. As a result, this study will raise a question mark over a key contention of Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013). There, Ryrie attempted to demonstrate that Early Modern British Protestantism was a ‘broad-​based’ religious culture, in which ‘the division between puritan and conformist Protestants, which has been so important in English historiography, almost fades from view when examined through the lens of devotion and lived experience’.69 In order to display this homogeneity, Ryrie focussed exclusively on works that he defined as devotional, rather than ‘works of doctrinal definition and controversy’.70 He also excluded works by separatist Protestants and, more controversially, those written by ‘Laudians, and other 17th-​century prophets of ceremonial revival’.71 Lake and Stephens have decisively rebutted Ryrie’s argument, at least with regard to Puritans and Laudians. However, since Ryrie explicitly excluded the Laudians from his discussion, a full response to his thesis requires the discussion, not of the anti-​Calvinist conformists, who populate Lake and Stephens’s study, but of Calvinist conformists such as Prideaux. Lake and Stephens were, of course, restricted by the range of religious identities documented in relation to the 1637 case that was their centrepiece. Their discussion

Introduction  13 consequently lacks the Calvinist conformist voice, which is as necessary as the Puritan voice, if Ryrie’s thesis of a broad-​based Protestant consensus is to be challenged. The present study allows that voice to be heard. Thus far, the terms ‘Calvinist Conformity’ and ‘Calvinist conformists’ have been used, since they are the terms most widely adopted by most scholars of the British Church. However, as Philip Benedict explained, in Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed (2002), ‘Reformed is . . . for several reasons a more historically accurate and less potentially misleading label than Calvinist to apply to these churches and to the larger tradition to which they attached themselves’. This study will follow his lead, and refer rather to ‘Reformed Conformity’ and ‘Reformed conformists’.72 It will also embrace the scholarly approach articulated by Richard Muller, in ‘Directions in the Study of Early Modern Reformed Thought’ (2016). There, Muller underlined that ‘The study of early modern Reformed thought has altered dramatically in the last several decades’. In particular, ‘The once dominant picture of Calvin as the prime mover of the Reformed tradition and sole index to its theological integrity has largely disappeared from view, as has the coordinate view of ‘Calvinism’ as a monolithic theology’.73 This development has prompted a significant shift of emphasis within Reformed studies. ‘Given what can be called the demotion of Calvin from the place of founder and norm for the whole Reformed tradition,’ Muller has pointed out, ‘studies of later sixteenth and seventeenth-​century Reformed writers have examined their thought in its own right as representing forms of contextually located theology, or, indeed, theologies’.74 As Muller has pointed out, however, the field is far from exhausted: quite the contrary: ‘Further study . . . is called for—​particularly with a view to uncovering further the diversity of the tradition and the nature of its debates’.75 The Reformed Conformity of the Early Stuart English Church is precisely the kind of distinct and contextually located expression of Reformed theology that students of the Reformed tradition need to explore. As a result, the present study will make a significant contribution to Reformed studies as a whole, not simply to the historiography of the English Church. Of course, ‘Calvinist’ is not the only adjective that has been problematized in the scholarship, ‘conformist’ has as well. In Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church (2000), Peter Lake and Michael Questier argued that both conformity and orthodoxy should be understood not as ‘stable quantities, but rather . . . the sites of conflict and contest’.76 This point is well made. In his Consecration sermon, Prideaux was evidently making the

14  Grace and Conformity case for a particular vision of conformity, one that excluded both Puritans and Laudians and was evidently rooted in the theological instincts of the Protestant Reformation. The same is true for the other figures that are the focus of this study. Their conformity was an argued and evolving case, defined against, and in tension with the various constructions of conformity being advanced by their moderate Puritan or Laudian colleagues, and indeed by those Reformed Conformists who still adhered to something closer to Whitgift’s model of conformity.77 This becomes particularly clear in their discussions of English Church polity. It is worth making a final point about the sources that inform this study. Lake and Stephens took exception to Ryrie’s decision to exclude academic and controversial texts from his study of the period. ‘It is never a good idea,’ they pointedly remarked, ‘on the basis of some a priori value judgement about the appropriate hierarchy of sources or about what real Christianity is all about, to decide, in advance, what really mattered and what did not, what was really central or ‘mainstream’, and what merely peripheral’.78 Quite the contrary: an examination of private texts ‘almost perfectly replicates and confirms the contents and purport of the public polemical sources’.79 What is more, the doctrinal issues that divided the Arminians from the Reformed were clearly central to the contemporary interpretation of this case.80 The need to attend more to academic and controversial theology, rather than sidelining it as irrelevant to the majority of the population, has been a growing theme in the historiography. Julia Merritt has observed that the sharp dichotomy between the worlds of university and parish, which is assumed in much of the scholarship, needs to be overcome.81 Martin Bac has underlined that ‘recent interest in Puritanism is focussed on its piety apart from its theology . . . and therefore loses sight of its fundamental structures’.82 Arnold Hunt has noted that historians often find excuses for avoiding a detailed discussion of academic theology, particularly in relation to the debates about predestination, suggesting that the questions it raised were too rarefied to have been of great interest to the wider lay population.83 Hunt forcefully challenges the idea that these academic debates were not of interest to people outside the theological academy. As he puts it, ‘A survey of English sermon manuscripts . . . warns us against drawing too sharp a contrast between academic theology and popular religion,’84 for, as he underlines, ‘even the academic debates on predestination were of interest to many people outside the universities’.85 Indeed, ‘lay people in the parishes were surprisingly well informed about debates in the universities’.86 Leif Dixon has recently explored

Introduction  15 how preachers from various ends of the Reformed spectrum worked hard to ensure that the doctrine of predestination became a source of comfort for their parishioners, rather than anxiety, and has demonstrated how pastoral purpose was by no means incompatible with the search for theological precision.87 By suggesting that pastoral theology can be distinguished from, and should be preferred to, academic and controversial theology, Ryrie is therefore swimming against a powerful tide, and this study will not follow him. Instead, it will focus on the very academic and controversial texts that Ryrie passes by; using them to illustrate that, for the English Reformed Conformists, as for most other seventeenth century theologians, neither academic nor polemical theology was uninformed by practical and pastoral concerns.

Representative Voices John Prideaux offers an excellent way in to an important network of prominent Reformed Conformists working within the Early Stuart Church. As indicated above, Prideaux was Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1612, and Regius Professor of Divinity from 1615; a position he did not relinquish until he became Bishop of Worcester in 1641. His was consequently the leading voice of the Oxford Divinity Faculty for most of the Early Stuart period. A Reformed theologian of international reputation, who narrowly missed being appointed to the British Delegation at Dort,88 Prideaux was a magnet for foreign scholars and well-​connected pupils alike. As Anthony a Wood later remarked, these who knew him reckoned him ‘so profound a divine, that they have been pleased to entitle him columna fidei orthodoxae [pillar of the orthodox faith], and malleus heresecus (sic) [hammer of heresy], Patrum pater [father of the Fathers], and ingens scholae & academiae oraculum [the prodigious oracle of the school and university]’.89 It was Prideaux’s eminence as an exponent of Reformed orthodoxy that led Joseph Hall to request his support, shortly after Hall’s appointment as Bishop of Exeter, in 1627. Hall was a former member of the British Delegation at Dort, though illness forced him to leave the Synod early. He was accused of Popery for suggesting, in The Old Religion (1628), that the Church of Rome might be considered a true Church; so he turned to a number of impeccable Reformed authorities for their endorsement, among them the Regius Professor at Oxford. ‘Worthy Master Doctor Prideaux:’ Hall wrote, ‘All our

16  Grace and Conformity little world here, takes notice of your worth, and eminency; who have long furnished the Divinity Chair in that famous University, with mutual grace and honour. Let me entreat you . . . to impart yourself freely to me, in your censure; and to express to me your clear judgement, concerning the true being, and visibility of the Roman Church’90 Hall may well have known Prideaux from their time as chaplains to the late Prince Henry of Wales,91 and they both enjoyed the patronage of William Herbert;92 but Hall’s appointment to Exeter had made him ex officio Visitor of Exeter College, bringing them into more regular contact. Prideaux’s reply was everything that Hall could have wanted: ‘As often as this hath come in question in our public disputes, we determine here no otherwise, then your Lordship hath stated it. And yet we trust to give as little vantage to Popery, as those that do detest it; and are as circumspect to maintain our received doctrine and discipline without the least scandal to the weakest, as those that would seem most forward’.93 The pillar of the orthodox faith therefore gave Hall a welcome imprimatur, and it was not long before the Bishop of Exeter’s sons began making their way to Exeter College for their education.94 As Regius Professor, one of Prideaux’s duties was to determine the academic disputations offered by doctoral candidates in divinity. Anthony a Wood records that, in 1617, one such candidate, Daniel Featley, who had recently been appointed as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, ‘puzzled Prideaux the King’s professor so much with his learned arguments, that a quarrel thereupon being raised, the Archbishop was in a manner forced to compose it for his Chaplain’s sake’.95 Abbot’s intervention was clearly successful. Featley and Prideaux worked together closely during the controversy surrounding Richard Montagu, and Featley became a good enough friend to be imparting both gossip and advice to Prideaux in the late 1620’s.96 In one letter, Featley spoke of ‘my love to you my most honoured father’ and signed himself ‘your affectionate son’.97 Featley’s appointment as chaplain to the Archbishop came to a sudden end in 1625 and he spent the rest of Charles I’s reign as an incumbent of three churches in the diocese of London, publishing his sermons and revising his celebrated devotional work, Ancilla Pietatis (1626). Featley was himself close to another Reformed Conformist grandee, Thomas Morton. Morton was a distinguished Cambridge scholar, who became successively Dean of Gloucester in 1607, Dean of Winchester in 1609, Bishop of Chester in 1616, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield in 1619, and Bishop of Durham in 1632. Morton first met Featley when Morton

Introduction  17 incorporated his Cambridge degrees in Oxford in 1606. Morton’s biographer recorded that Featley had performed his academic exercises ‘with such applause as made Dr Morton carry a great friendship towards him ever after, which was answered with a proportionable reverence on the other side’.98 Morton commissioned Featley to produce an abridged biography to John Jewel, to preface Jewel’s republished works, in 1609,99 and the two men became regular correspondents.100 Like Prideaux, Morton was one of the Reformed authorities to whom Hall turned during the Old Religion controversy, and Hall clearly believed that they were theological fellow travellers. ‘I suffer,’ he wrote, ‘for that wherein yourself, amongst many renowned orthodox doctors of the Church, are my partner . . . . I beseech your Lordship, say, once more, what you think of the true being, and visibility of the Roman Church, your excellent and zealous writings have justly won you a constant reputation of great learning, and no less sincerity, and have placed you out of the reach of suspicion’.101 Morton responded to Hall’s letter with evident warmth: ‘Right Reverend, and as dearly beloved brother . . . . In that your Lordship’s tractate, I could not but observe the lively image of yourself; that is (according to the general interpretation of all sound professors of the Gospel of Christ) of a most orthodox divine’.102 So Morton and Prideaux both recognized Hall as a theological fellow-​traveller. Morton corresponded regularly with Samuel Ward, Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1610, and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity from 1623. Morton sought Ward’s advice on various theological matters,103 and they were sufficiently close for Morton to invite Ward to stay with him, when he was Bishop of Durham.104 Ward had been one of the translators of the Authorized Version, and a Chaplain to the King from 1611. James Montagu, then Bishop of Bath and Wells, made Ward first a Prebend of Yatton in Wells in 1610, and then Archdeacon of Taunton in 1615.105 Like Hall, Ward was a member of the British Delegation at Dort. Like Prideaux, his long tenure of the Lady Margaret Chair in Cambridge ensured that he shaped the flavour of university divinity for much of the Early Stuart period. Another Cambridge Conformist who benefited from the patronage of James Montagu was George Downame. Downame had actually preached the sermon at Montague’s consecration in 1608. This went down so well with King James I, that Downame was made a Royal Chaplain; soon to be joined in that position, of course, by Ward and Prideaux. When Ward was made Archdeacon of Taunton in 1615, and acquired a different prebendal stall, it was to Downame that Montagu gave Ward’s Prebend of Yatton. Downame

18  Grace and Conformity had to resign it a few months later, when he was made Bishop of Derry. He continued to publish theological works from his Irish See, until his death in 1634; works that Ward commended in his lectures.106 Ward’s predecessor as Lady Margaret Professor was John Davenant, and the two men were close friends, regular correspondents, and editorial collaborators throughout their lives. Like Ward, Davenant was a member of the British Delegation at Dort; indeed the two travelled out together.107 Prideaux clearly took an interest in Davenant’s theological views, since he had acquired a manuscript copy of Davenant’s opinions on the issues to be debated at Dort, which George Hakewill asked to see, around the time the Synod was meeting.108 Shortly after returning from Dort, in 1621, Davenant was made Bishop of Salisbury. Like Prideaux and Morton, Davenant received a request for support from Hall over The Old Religion, a request reinforced by the remembrance of their brief time together at Dort.109 Once again, the tone is evidently familiar: Hall signed himself ‘Your much devoted and faithful brother’110 and Davenant responded with equal warmth, ending his letter with encouragement and solicitude: ‘be no more troubled with other men’s groundless suspicions, then you would be in like case, with their idle dreams. Thus I have enlarged myself beyond my first intent. But my love to yourself, and the assurance of your constant love unto the truth, enforced me thereunto’. Alongside Morton and Hall, Davenant was one of the Reformed bishops, to whom John Dury turned for support in his efforts towards Protestant unity, following the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631.111 Ward and Davenant both knew George Carleton well, since he had been their leader in the British Delegation at Dort. Admittedly, they and Carleton had not always seen eye to eye;112 but they were united in their defence of the Synod when it later came under attack.113 Carleton lobbied for the Synod’s canons to be endorsed by Convocation.114 He also collaborated with Ward and Davenant over the publication of the British Delegates’ defence of their conduct at the Synod in 1626, and of Carleton’s reply to their attacker, Richard Montagu. Carleton was already Bishop of Llandaff when he went to Dort, and he was promoted to the bishopric of Chichester on his return to England, in 1619. He died in 1628. Ward and Davenant were also familiar with another member of this Reformed Conformist connexion, John Williams. Educated in Cambridge, Williams became Dean of Salisbury in 1619, Dean of Westminster in 1620, and Bishop of Lincoln in 1621, In 1621, he was also became the last clergyman to hold the Great Seal of England, serving as Lord Keeper from 1621 until 1625.

Introduction  19 Davenant knew Williams from his time as Lady Margaret Professor. When the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, visited Cambridge in 1613, he was entertained with a display disputation, which Davenant moderated, and for which Williams was specially summoned back to Cambridge to be the primary opponent.115 Williams’s performance was apparently so impressive that it brought him the lasting admiration of Ward and Downame’s patron, James Montagu, ‘who from henceforth was the truest friend to Mr. Williams of all that did wear a rochet to his last day’.116 Montagu later secured Williams a royal chaplaincy. Williams’s biographer suggests that it was actually Williams who ‘spake and sped for Dr Davenant to be made Bishop of Salisbury’.117 The relationship between the two men was sufficiently enduring that, mere days before he lost his position as Lord Keeper, Williams was expected at Davenant’s house.118 Thereafter, Davenant is said to have become one of Williams’s episcopal role-​ models, as he engaged more fully with his duties as Bishop of Lincoln.119 Williams’s episcopal palace was at Buckden, which was close to Cambridge, and he was regularly visited there by members of the University, not least by Samuel Ward. Indeed, as Williams’s biographer recorded, ‘when Dr. Ward and Dr. Brownrigg . . . came to do him honour with their observance, it was an high feast with him. These were Saints of the red letter in the calendar of his acquaintance’.120 Williams’s contacts were not limited to Cambridge, however. He was in close enough contact with Prideaux to join with him in an attempt to prevent William Laud becoming Chancellor of Oxford, in 1630. All the Colleges of which Williams was Visitor supported Prideaux’s candidate, Philip Herbert, Fourth Earl of Pembroke. Williams had been a good friend of Prideaux’s patron, the Third Earl;121 and following Williams’s demonstration of his ongoing loyalty to the Herbert family during the chancellorship election, the Fourth Earl sent his sons to be educated at Williams’s palace at Buckden.122 Three sons of Philip Herbert subsequently moved from Williams’s household to study under Prideaux, at Exeter College; reinforcing the link between Buckden Palace and Exeter College. As Bishop of Lincoln, Williams’s patronage was extensive. Among those Reformed Conformists who benefited from it was Richard Holdsworth. Holdsworth was a celebrated London preacher and also Professor of Divinity at London’s Gresham College from 1629. Williams made Holdsworth Prebend of Buckden in 1633123 and Archdeacon of Huntingdon in 1634.124 These appointments were significant, not merely because they placed Holdsworth close to William’s palace, but also because, in 1633, Holdsworth

20  Grace and Conformity had been elected Master by the Governing Body of Williams’s old College, St John’s; only for the election to be overruled, and a prominent anti-​Calvinist, William Beale, imposed by royal mandate instead. Samuel Ward had actively supported Holdsworth’s candidature for St John’s,125 and was deeply suspicious of Beale.126 By promoting Holdsworth, Williams was making very clear where his own loyalties lay. Holdsworth was eventually elected Master of Emmanuel, in 1637, and proved an ally of Ward within the University thereafter.127 It was later alleged that Holdsworth had corrected Williams’s Holy Table, Name and Thing for the press.128 These ten clergymen, Prideaux, Hall, Featley, Morton, Ward, Downame, Davenant, Carleton, Williams and Holdsworth were not the only prominent Reformed Conformists working with in the Early Stuart Church. Indeed, the very fact that they were not, is part of what makes this study interesting. However eminent they may have been, they were merely the tip of the iceberg.129 Furthermore, the relationships which have been noted between them were not invariably the strongest relationships which they had with other Reformed Conformist colleagues. Ward’s relationship with Davenant and Prideaux’s relationship with Featley were undeniably strong. But Prideaux was at least equally close to George Hakewill, and Ward was equally close to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Williams has relationships with Ralph Brownrigg and John Hacket, just as warm as those he had with Ward or Holdsworth Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of the other members of this network. The reason for selecting these ten theologians as representatives of Reformed Conformity is not, therefore, that the connexions that linked them were the most conspicuous or close-​knit within the Early Stuart Church; although it is significant, in terms of their coherence as a group, that they were all connected. The reason for selecting them as representative Reformed Conformists is rather that they all made important contributions to the articulation and defence of Reformed Conformity within the Early Stuart Church, contributions which enable us to examine the Reformed Conformist agenda across a range of theological issues, in a variety of polemical circumstances. This study will be shaped by those contributions.

The Distinctiveness of the Tradition This study will argue that the ten writers at its heart were united by more than bonds of friendship, correspondence and collaboration. It will argue that

Introduction  21 they were also united by their adherence to a common theological tradition, a common style of piety and a common religious identity which is aptly described as Reformed Conformity. Considered as a theological tradition, Reformed Conformity exhibited a resolute adherence to the soteriological principles of Reformed orthodoxy, combined with a positive estimation of the institutions which distinguished the English Church from most other Reformed churches in Europe. To the Reformed Conformist mind, these distinguishing institutions, above all episcopal government and the liturgical ceremonies enshrined in the Prayer Book, were of positive religious value and consequently instruments of God’s grace. Episcopacy guaranteed that the faithful were guided and taught by legitimate pastors; and that, in turn, ensured the outworking of God’s plan of salvation for the elect through the authorized preaching and faithful reception of the Word. The Prayer Book’s characteristic liturgical provisions, such as the liturgical calendar, the surplice, the cross in baptism, and kneeling at communion, were, when rightly used, conducive to the edification of the elect, and consequently capable of furthering God’s saving will. It is this positive estimation of the Church of England’s distinctive patterns of church order and worship which distinguish Reformed Conformists from their ‘moderate’ or ‘conformable’ puritan counterparts, for whom those distinctive patterns were tolerable defects that could be accepted for the sake of the Gospel.130 For Reformed Conformists, true Conformity involved a doctrinal commitment to Reformed soteriology because that was the teaching which they derived from the Scriptures, observed in Catholic Antiquity, and read from the Church of England’s Articles and Homilies. Conformity also involved a practical commitment to the idiosyncratic order of the English Church, as the most fitting vehicle for, and complement to, that teaching. As a result, Reformed conformists were ready to defend the Reformed vision of grace and salvation, whenever that vision came under attack, whether in England or abroad. They were also prepared to defend the established liturgy and hierarchy of the Church of England, even when this put them at loggerheads with those who shared their view of grace.131 Peter Lake has encouraged scholars to analyze the religious life of Early Stuart England, not merely in terms of the explicit theological commitments of those studied, but also in terms of what they have called their distinctive ‘styles of piety’. The religious instincts that Lake associates with the puritan style of piety are a commitment to double predestination; the cultivation of

22  Grace and Conformity a sense of assurance; active membership of the godly community; an emphasis on the preached Word and on worthy reception of the Lord’s Supper; and strict Sabbath observance.132 Lake underlines that the Puritan style of piety ‘is made up not so much of distinctive puritan component parts, the mere presence of which in a person’s thought or practice rendered them definitively a Puritan, as a synthesis of strands, most or many of which taken individually, could be found in non-​puritan as well as puritan contexts, but which taken together form a distinctively puritan synthesis or style’.133 Lake has applied this kind of analysis to the Laudian style of piety, as well. The strands he associates with Laudianism are a strong sense of sacred space, and an anxiety about its misuse; a concern for the material fabric of the church and for ecclesiastical ornamentation; a desire for uniformity and reverence in worship; an appreciation of the positive value of distinctive religious ceremonies and bodily devotion; an emphasis on the importance of prayer and the sacraments, as opposed to preaching, in public devotion; an attachment to and celebration of the liturgical year.134 Once again, Lake underlined that ‘scarcely any of the constituent parts of Laudianism as it is here discussed were novel in the 1630s, and not all of them, viewed in isolation from the others, constituted exclusively Laudian opinions’.135 Once again, it is the bringing together of a number of these elements that counts, not the presence of any specifically ‘Laudian’ characteristic. Approaching Reformed Conformity in a similar way, this study will provide compelling evidence that there was a distinctively Reformed Conformist style of piety. The Reformed Conformist style of piety involved a synthesis of strands some of which could also be found in a puritan, and some of which could also be found in a Laudian context. It shared with the puritan style of piety the conviction that saving grace was sovereign and utterly free; the conviction that the primary instrument used by the Spirit to kindle such a faith in the heart of the elect was the Word preached; the conviction that it was proper to the faithful, except under grave temptation, to be certain about their present faith and assured of their ultimate salvation; the conviction that a rightly ordered Christian life involved a devout observance of the Sabbath. It shared with the Laudian style of piety a concern for reverence, order, and decorum in Christian worship; a concern to ensure a proper balance in that worship, such that prayer took its proper place alongside preaching; a concern for the identification and beautification of sacred space; a celebration of the Apostolic derivation of ministerial authority, legitimately handed down through the personal succession of bishops.

Introduction  23 Individual Reformed Conformists undoubtedly struck their own balance within this synthesis, just as individual Puritans or Laudians did. As a result, not all the strands making up this style of piety were equally present in all its adherents.136 Nevertheless, they all shared the conviction that the distinctive institutions of the English Church did not detract from, but rather sustained and promoted the spiritual life of the elect, a spiritual life that they conceived in the terms of orthodox Reformed soteriology. This confidence in the positive religious value of the Church’s established polity was what sets the Reformed Conformists apart from most of their puritan colleagues; just as their Reformed theological convictions set them apart from most of their Laudian colleagues. This is, of course, the point at which the Reformed Conformist theological tradition and style of piety became a religious identity. This Introduction began with Prideaux’s sermon for the consecration of Exeter College Chapel. In that sermon, he explicitly defined the religious position he was commending against both the Laudian tendency to set up prayer and preaching in opposition to each other, and the Puritan disrelish of naming church buildings after the saints. He was, in other words, promoting a sense of religious identity that was neither Laudian nor Puritan. Other Reformed Conformists delineated their position in a similar way. Carleton condemned Montagu’s reading of grace, but was outraged by the suggestion that his divinity made him a Puritan. Featley denounced the Popery of the Gag and the Appello Caesarem; but he was equally scathing about the liturgical prejudices of the hotter sort of Protestant. In the Consecration sermon for Robert Wright, Featley made both his Reformed and his conformist loyalties very clear: Gestures in religious actions are as significant, and more moving than words. Decent ceremonies in the substantial worship of God are like shadowing in a picture, which if it be too much (as we see in the Church of Rome) it darkeneth the picture, and obscureth the face of devotion; but if convenient, and in fit places, it giveth grace and beauty to it. Superstition may be, and is as properly in such, who put religion in not using, as in those who put religion in using things in their own nature merely indifferent. Christian liberty is indifferently abridged by both these errors about things indifferent. And as a man may be proud even of the hatred of pride, and contempt of greatness; so he may be superstitious in a causeless fear, and heady declining of that which seems, but is not superstitious. Which is the case of some refined reformers (as they would be thought) who according to their

24  Grace and Conformity name of Precisians, ungues ad vivum resecant, pare the nails of pretended Romish rites in our Church so near, that they make her fingers bleed. For fear of monuments of idolatry, all ornaments of the Church (if they might have their will) should be taken away: for fear of praying for the dead, they will not allow any prayer to be said for the living at the burial of the dead: for fear of bread-​worship, they will not kneel at the Communion: for fear of invocating the Saints deceased, they will not brook any speech of the deceased in a funeral Sermon . . . for fear of overlaying the Queen’s vesture with rich laces of ceremonies, they rip them off all, cut off the fringe, and pare off the nap also.137

Reformed Conformists were aware, in other words, that they were neither Puritans nor Laudians, and they were conscious that their own religious instincts were, in significant respects, opposed to both groups. The distinct religious identity of the Reformed Conformists was also clearly recognized by their contemporaries. Even an observer as unsympathetic to Reformed Conformity as Peter Heylyn conceded it. In his biography of Archbishop Laud, he distanced himself from the polemical suggestion that ‘Puritan and Calvinian are terms convertible. For though all Puritans are Calvinians, both in doctrine and practise, yet all Calvinians are not to be counted as Puritans also; whose practises many of them abhor, and whose inconformities they detest, though by the error of their education, or ill direction in the course of their studies, they may, and do agree with them in some points of doctrine’.138 For Heylyn, in other words, the Reformed theological tradition in England had both puritan and conformist expressions, and they were not to be confused.

Outline of the Study The first two chapters explore how Reformed Conformists articulated their understanding of grace before they faced significant public challenge from within the English Church. Chapter 1 focuses on the Act Lectures that Prideaux delivered in Oxford between 1616 and 1624. The series exhibits the breadth, interconnectedness, and pastoral orientation of the Reformed Conformist vision of grace. As the teaching that Oxford’s senior theology professor delivered on the most public occasion in the University calendar, Prideaux’s Act Lectures represent something close to an official statement

Introduction  25 of English orthodoxy. They are useful both in terms of the range of topics that they cover and because they offer a coherent account of Reformed Conformist teaching on grace that locates specific debates on the topic within their wider theological context. Chapter 2 builds on the previous chapter’s emphasis on the breadth and pastoral orientation of the Reformed Conformist approach to grace, with an examination of the Collegiate Suffrage of the British delegates at the Synod of Dort (1618–​19). It underlines that the Suffrage was drawn up to make room for Davenant and Ward’s distinctive reading of the death of Christ, a reading shared by influential clerics at home. The chapter then shows how the positions adopted in the Suffrage were echoed but also given a different inflection in the lectures that Davenant delivered in Cambridge, when he returned from the Synod. Davenant’s lectures on Predestination and the Death of Christ show how he adapted the teaching of Dort to suit his own reading of the Church of England’s confessional position, whilst offering extensive advice on the pastoral application of that teaching both in the pulpit and in the spiritual lives of the faithful. The next three chapters extend the study by exploring how Reformed Conformists reacted, when their vision of grace came under public attack, first in the works of Richard Montagu and then through the official restriction of theological discussion during the reign of Charles I. Chapter 3 discusses the immediate responses to Montagu’s undertaking by a number of Reformed Conformists. It exhibits the range of polemical approaches they used and establishes that Reformed Conformists were in the vanguard of the public opposition to Montagu. Daniel Featley’s Parallels illustrate how Reformed Conformists brought the teaching of the academy to bear within the public sphere. His Ancilla exhibits the use of devotional literature to advance the Reformed Conformist cause. Ward’s Gratia Discriminans sets out the Reformed Conformist case that their theology of grace did not undermine human free choice, as its opponents claimed. His Joint Attestation then emphasized the loyalty of the British delegates at Dort to the polity of the English Church. Carleton’s Examination took up the theme of the Attestation, rejecting Montagu’s suggestion that a Reformed view of grace was a manifestation of Puritanism and asserting its consonance with the Thirty-​nine Articles. Hall’s unpublished Via Media, by contrast, advocated an irenic and moderate reading of English orthodoxy, but one in which there was still no room for any teaching that made salvation ultimately dependent on the human will.

26  Grace and Conformity Chapter 4 establishes the ongoing promotion of the Reformed Conformist approach to grace during the 1630s, in the face of an attempt to stifle such opinions by royal proclamation in 1626. Using Ward’s professorial determinations at the Cambridge Commencement, the chapter shows how Ward ensured that the Reformed vision of grace still held a prominent place within Cambridge and defended its compatibility with English Church polity. The chapter also explores Ward’s editorial collaboration with Davenant, in the publication of Davenant’s academic works. It underlines that the work of Ward and Davenant ensured that the University press remained a vehicle for Reformed Conformity throughout the 1630s. Chapter 5 develops this theme of Reformed Conformist resilience during the reign of Charles I. Drawing on Ward’s determinations, Davenant’s Praelectiones, and Ward’s treatise on justifying faith, it establishes that the doctrine of justification by faith alone was likewise the subject of regular defence and articulation in Cambridge throughout the 1630s. As Prideaux’s lectures and Montagu’s remarks on the subject demonstrate, this doctrine was integral to the Reformed vision of grace. With the last three chapters, the focus of the study becomes the Reformed Conformist understanding of what it meant to conform—​an understanding that was not divorced from, but informed by their reading of grace. Taken together, the chapters argue that Reformed Conformists offered a vision of Conformity in conscious rivalry with that promoted by the Laudians. Chapter 6 charts the hostility of the Reformed Conformists to the language and liturgical innovations, promoted by some Laudians, that supported the idea that the Eucharist might be understood as a real sacrifice. Drawing particularly on the writings of Williams and Morton, it shows that the Reformed Conformist understanding of Conformity was decisively shaped by their rejection of the Roman Catholic teaching on the sacrifice of the Mass. This rejection informed the Reformed Conformist reading of canon law, and inspired their opposition to the erection of altars within English churches. The chapter also returns to Prideaux, whose 1631 Act lecture on the Mass represented a very public attack on Laudian language and church furnishings at the heart of Laud’s own university. Chapter 7 analyzes the Reformed Conformist attitude to the Church’s hierarchy. It uses Carleton’s Consensus to establish the high regard in which Reformed Conformists held episcopacy, and reinforces that point through the writings of Ward and Davenant. On that basis, it presents Hall’s notorious work, Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, as in fundamental continuity

Introduction  27 with the Reformed Conformist tradition, despite the editorial interventions of William Laud and Matthew Wren. The chapter then establishes, through Downame’s Two Sermons and Prideaux’s 1624 Oratio, that episcopal ordination played a significant role within Reformed Conformist soteriology. Chapter 8 extends this analysis of the conformity of the Reformed Conformists, by establishing that they found spiritual value in the distinctive liturgical provisions of the Prayer Book. The chapter shows that Morton’s defence of three controversial English liturgical provisions did not merely defend them on the grounds of obedience, but also ascribed positive religious value to them, as aspects of God’s worship. Featley’s Ancilla made the same point in relation to the liturgical year, as did Holdsworth in relation to the Lent Fast, an institution that distinguished the Church of England from the other Protestant churches of Europe. The chapter then uses Featley and Prideaux’s polemically inspired collections of sermons to demonstrate that Reformed Conformists believed that the liturgical year might be profitably used by the faithful, and so become an instrument of divine predestination and a vehicle for Christian assurance. The final section of this study demonstrates, in other words, that for the Reformed Conformists, grace and conformity went hand in hand.

1 The Act Lectures of John Prideaux Introduction On 6 July 1616, John Prideaux delivered his first Act lecture as Oxford’s new Regius Professor of Divinity. The annual Oxford Act was the highlight of the university calendar, drawing crowds of alumni and distinguished guests. Act lectures therefore offered the Regius Professor a very public opportunity to articulate the university’s orthodoxy on the disputed theological questions of the day. Prideaux took as his text Romans 9:10–​12,1 a passage that would be the starting point for every Act lecture he gave until 1624. The 1616 Act lecture was, in other words, the beginning of a lecture series, perhaps the most high-​profile lecture series in the country, and Prideaux used it to explore the nature and consequences of grace.2 Given the prominence and scope of Prideaux’s lectures, it is surprising that they have not attracted much scholarly interest.3 In Anti-​Calvinists, Nicholas Tyacke used them to demonstrate that ‘Calvinist’ orthodoxy prevailed at Oxford into the 1620s, but his discussion extended little further than a list of Prideaux’s topics: ‘During these years Prideaux lectured on conversion, justification, perseverance, and the certainty of salvation, all in refutation of Arminianism’.4 The same level of analysis prevails in the relevant section of The History of the University of Oxford, as well, where Tyacke says only that, ‘Between 1616 and 1622 Prideaux, as Regius Professor, had lectured regularly at the Act against Arminianism’.5 This last observation reveals the pitfalls of taking too broad-​brush an approach to these lectures. Prideaux’s 1623 lecture, De Salute Ethnicorum (‘On the salvation of heathens’) actually contains several attacks on Remonstrant thinking, which Tyacke would appear to have overlooked6; and Prideaux clearly envisaged his 1624 lecture, De Visibilitate Ecclesiae (‘On the visibility of the Church’) as the final instalment in the series, since it is based on exactly the same texts as all the others.7 Furthermore, Prideaux’s intention in these lectures cannot be reduced to refuting Arminianism. He certainly attempted to answer a number of Arminian writers: but he was consciously engaging across a broader front Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0002

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  29 than that. As he made clear in his first lecture, Prideaux identified as his adversary any theologian who echoed the dangerous opinions on grace, which had been condemned in the Pelagians and Semi-​Pelagians by Augustine, Fulgentius, Prosper, and their disciples. Prideaux discerned such heterodoxy in a wide range of writers, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. He saw it in late medieval writers, such as William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel. He saw it in many contemporary or near-​contemporary Jesuits: Luis de Molina, Gabriel Vasquez, Francisco Suarez, Leonardus Lessius, and Martin Becanus.8 He saw it among those he called the ‘Pseudo-​Lutherans’ of Upper Germany. And, of course, he saw it in those critics of Reformed orthodoxy, who had emerged from within the Reformed fold, such as Peter Baro, Jacob Arminius, Conrad Vorstius, Johannes Corvinus, Peter Bertius, and Nicholas Grevinckhoven.9 In a recent study of James’ Ussher’s soteriology, Richard Snoddy argued that Ussher lived and ministered in a context in which he and many others felt that the truth of the gospel was under attack. The threat came from Rome, from the Laudians, and from Arminian theology. These threats were not always neatly distinguished. Indeed, there was political mileage in blurring the edges. Whatever their differences, the common root was a Pelagianising tendency, a downplaying of divine initiative and the sheer gratuity of human salvation.10

This observation applies to Prideaux as much as it does to his friend and correspondent James Ussher. Prideaux’s list of adversaries bears this out, as does the substance of his lectures; he spent quite as much time engaging with Jesuit theology as he did engaging with Arminian theology. Take, for example, the second of Prideaux’s lectures, which focuses on the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. Middle Knowledge is an attempt to explain how God can have certain foreknowledge of human decisions that are both contingent and independent of God’s will. As such, it was an essential theological prop for the claim that the decrees of predestination and reprobation were motivated by God’s eternal foresight of human actions, whether in terms of good works (as the Jesuits suggested) or faith (as Arminians proposed). The concept of Middle Knowledge was elaborated by a number of Jesuit theologians and subsequently adopted by Arminius and the Remonstrants.11

30  Grace and Conformity In his lecture, Prideaux accurately charted the genesis of this idea,12 and in his discussion of it, he spent significantly more time engaging with Jesuit thinking13 than he did in responding to Arminius and Grevinckhoven. At the same time, Prideaux pointed out that a number of his objections to Middle Knowledge had been anticipated by Roman Catholic writers, particularly the Dominicans. He mentions Francisco Zumel, Pedro de Cabrera, Raphael Ripa, and Diego Alvarez14 and makes significant use of both Ripa and Alvarez in the formulation of his arguments.15 It is, therefore, an oversimplification to categorize Prideaux’s Act lectures as a refutation of Arminianism. Prideaux’s intention was to expose and counteract any theology that compromised the gratuity of salvation or exaggerated the role of human activity in redemption, wherever that theology was to be found. His lectures might therefore be more accurately described as Anti-​ Pelagian than Anti-​Arminian.16 It is also misleading to present these lectures as a straightforward example of ‘Calvinist’ orthodoxy. Prideaux undoubtedly felt the need to respond to those who vilified what they labelled ‘Calvinism,’ and he was evidently offended by those attacks.17 That said, he was quick to underline the foolishness of adhering doggedly to the views of any one theologian, no matter how respected18; and he certainly drew from a wide range of Reformed sources beyond Calvin. In his first lecture alone, he referred to Zanchi, Paraeus, Piscator, Beza, Kimedoncius, Junius, Hommius, Ursinus, and Polanus from the continental Reformed churches, as well as Hutton, Whitaker, and Perkins from the Church of England.19 In fact, Prideaux made a point of underlining the breadth of the tradition within which he was working, writing: ‘It is not therefore only Calvin against Pighius, or Beza against Castellio, or Perkins and his summists, sustaining our thesis; but almost all (that I know) the more perspicacious theologians, and those who stick closer to the text’.20 Prideaux was clearly not prepared to accept a narrow definition of the orthodoxy that he sought to defend. Prideaux drew, as most of his Reformed contemporaries did, from far too broad a range of Reformed authorities for him to be helpfully labelled a ‘Calvinist’.21 Antagonists such as Peter Heylyn undoubtedly tarred him with that brush22; but the label is only as helpful in Prideaux’s case, as the label ‘Arminian’ is in the case of William Laud or Richard Montagu. It expresses an aspect of the truth, in that Prideaux shared a number of Calvin’s theological and exegetical instincts, but describing Prideaux as a ‘Calvinist’ does no justice to Prideaux’s range of theological reference, nor to the ways

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  31 in which Prideaux’s theological agenda was shaped by his particular ecclesiastical situation. Furthermore, when Prideaux drew upon the Reformed tradition, he was always conscious of its relationship with the wider and older world of Catholic theology and of the insights that the Reformed shared with an earlier generation of Lutherans. Prideaux made the point that, in their defence of Absolute Reprobation, the Reformed were not merely following Calvin or Beza but were equally following Augustine and those whom Augustine cited, such as Cyprian, Ambrose, and Gregory Nazianzen. They were following Augustine’s immediate disciples: Prosper, Fulgentius, and Joannes Maxentius. They were following Peter Lombard and many of his commentators; they were following Thomas Aquinas and many of his commentators; and, finally, they were following Luther himself, as well as Johannes Brenz, ‘all of whom, if not truly, yet at least approximately, you might call Calvinists in this cause’.23 In fact, Prideaux remarks, Calvin himself never spoke as uncompromisingly of God’s absolute dominion over his creatures as Augustine had done.24 To put it another way, Prideaux saw himself as defending Catholic rather than Calvinist orthodoxy. The identification of Prideaux’s lectures as a ‘Calvinist’ attack on Arminian theology reflects the long-​established tendency within the historiography to treat the Reformed tradition as an intellectual monolith. An increasing number of scholars have cast doubt on this approach. Richard Muller has dedicated much of his career to demonstrating that the Reformed theological tradition was flexible, diverse and decisively shaped by its political and institutional context.25 This insight was applied to the Early Stuart Church of England by Sean Hughes, who rejects the use of ‘Calvinism’ in relation to English theologians of this period, both because it is too blunt an analytical tool for any discriminating purpose and because it subjects English Protestantism to a Genevan magisterium, ignoring the diversity of traditions among the Reformed Churches of Europe.26 Hughes writes: ‘What we must not do . . . is to assume that predestination was a particularly Reformed doctrine, or to treat any formulation of that doctrine, Bezan or otherwise, as the only serious expression of it . . . . We need to keep in mind the sheer range of the tradition . . . and the powerful but often unacknowledged contribution of Roman Catholic ideas’.27 In Prideaux, of course, the influence of Roman Catholic ideas was not merely recognized: in some areas of doctrine, it was positively celebrated. David Como has echoed Sean Hughes’s insistence on the diversity of the Reformed tradition in England, underlining that the

32  Grace and Conformity so-​called Calvinist consensus that ‘was neither simplistic nor monolithic’.28 Indeed, apart from a small number of ‘crucial and emotionally charged points . . . ’ Como argues, ‘there was space for a good deal of disagreement as to the finer points of predestinarian formulation’.29 More recently, Jonathan Moore made the same argument in specific relation to Reformed discussion of the death of Christ.30 Since Prideaux’s Act lectures were clearly intended to engage with more than just Arminian theology, and since the term ‘Calvinist’ is now widely acknowledged to be an inappropriate and imprecise way to describe any theologian working within the Early Stuart Church of England, there is a pressing need for their reappraisal. It could be argued that the same is true, and for the same reasons, of a number of the other theologians whom Tyacke and others have categorized as ‘Calvinist’. Since scholars effectively used the adjective ‘Calvinist’ to mean no more than ‘not Arminian,’ their discussion of those authors often overlooks the subtlety and diversity of that theological tradition.

Absolute Reprobation Prideaux’s decision to defend the doctrine of Absolute Reprobation in his opening lecture was avowedly polemical. As he underlined, the Reformed had been accused by the Remonstrant Peter Bertius of teaching an esoteric doctrine that they did not dare to expound publicly or subject to examination. Prideaux was determined to show that this was not the case. That said, he acknowledged the perilous nature of such an undertaking.31 The question that Prideaux set out to investigate was straightforward: ‘Is there an absolute decree of reprobation?’32 Prideaux acknowledged that many people found it easier to accept an absolute decree of election than an absolute decree of reprobation. He insisted, however, that these two decrees are so interrelated that the election of some simply cannot be conceived without the simultaneous reprobation of everyone else.33 Prideaux began by defining his terms. In this question, he underlined, the word ‘absolute’ was intended to convey that the decree of reprobation has no external efficient cause: that it is not, in other words, elicited by anything outside God himself.34 The word ‘reprobation,’ he noted, actually expressed two quite distinct divine acts which should be distinguished. First, there is the negative act of reprobation, which is God’s decision not to elect someone

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  33 to eternal life, but rather to pass them by. Secondly, there is the positive act of reprobation, which is God’s decision justly to condemn that person for the sins of which they are guilty, an act more accurately expressed, Prideaux indicated, by the term ‘predamnation’.35 This distinction was fundamental to Prideaux’s discussion of reprobation. For as he underlined, whereas the negative act reprobation (i.e., non-​election or preterition) depends solely on the good pleasure of God, the positive act of reprobation (i.e., predamnation) invariably presupposes sin in its object, since it is an effect of God’s justice.36 So although the negative act of reprobation was absolute, as Prideaux defined the term, the positive act of reprobation was not, since the sins of the reprobate person were the reason God condemned them. Prideaux’s use of this distinction echoed its use by his predecessor in the Regius Chair, Robert Abbot. The distinction would also be deployed, a couple of years later, by the British Delegation at Dort.37 It had the advantage of showing that no one is ever sent to Hell, except because of sin, and that made it easier to demonstrate the compatibility of absolute reprobation with divine justice. Prideaux underlined that the divine decrees did not conform to human patterns of thinking. Human beings reason from the end of their action back toward the requisite means and then consider the relevant acts in order of priority. God does not. God conceives of all things, whether prior or posterior, means or end, in one infallible act of knowing. Properly speaking, therefore, the only order in the divine decrees lay in their execution, not in the decrees themselves.38 Prideaux was clearly discouraging any attempt to subject the divine decrees to an analysis derived from human modes of reasoning: there was mystery here, which he thought should be respected.39 Difficulties also arose in the discussion of reprobation, Prideaux indicated, if the different acts involved in the execution of the decree were not related to objects suitable for those acts. Such muddled thinking, he thought, was the main reason for the intra-​Reformed controversy about whether the object of predestination was man conceived as not yet fallen or man conceived as fallen and corrupted by sin.40 In order to avoid this problem, Prideaux delineated the various acts and objects of predestination with particular care. His nuanced approach to this issue vindicates Richard Muller’s observation that there was a ‘broader spectrum and . . . variety of Reformed thought beyond the simple (or perhaps simplistic) division of opinion between supralapsarians and infralapsarians’.41

34  Grace and Conformity The object of predestination in general, Prideaux underlined, was any intellectual creature, insofar as it was liable to fall and capable of either punishment or reward. Such intellectual creatures could be either angels or human beings. Human predestination, in turn, had either Christ as its object or the members of Christ. Although he was initially focussing on the elect, Prideaux underlined that the same kind of analysis could be applied to reprobation.42 Prideaux pointed out that since some of the angels did not fall at all, the decree of reprobation passed upon the fallen angels cannot have considered them as part of an already fallen mass. Furthermore, he pointed out, although Christ was undoubtedly an elect human being, he was never part of the fallen mass either, since he was without sin. So sin was not necessarily a factor in either reprobation or predestination as such. Christ’s situation was of particular relevance here, Prideaux thought, because, ‘If any believer (Augustine states) wishes thoroughly to understand this doctrine, let him consider the Head, and in him he will find himself also’.43 Turning specifically to the reprobation of those human beings who were not members of Christ, Prideaux deployed the distinction he had drawn between preterition and predamnation. Whereas the positive act of reprobation, predamnation, necessarily required sin in its object, he argued; the negative act of reprobation, preterition, did not.44 Prideaux consequently concluded that those who would not elevate the decree of reprobation any higher than the fallen mass of humanity had either to be talking about the positive act of reprobation or they had to be accommodating their speech to those of weaker comprehension. Prideaux therefore traced a path in this lecture that eludes straightforward characterization as either supralapsarian or sublapsarian. He was clear that the divine decision to condemn the reprobate is always the result of their sin. But by denying that sin was necessarily required for the (logically prior) divine decision not to elect them to grace, Prideaux left the way open for either a sublapsarian or a supralapsarian approach to decree. And although his own convictions were or, at least, would become sublapsarian, he clearly objected to incautious or exorbitant expressions of that opinion.45 In fact, he ranked as among the opponents of orthodoxy, on this point, those Reformed theologians who, although rejecting the teaching of the Jesuits and Arminians, still advanced sin ‘as necessarily required (as they put it) in the object . . . lest the divine justice in the decree of absolute reprobation should seem too harsh’.46 Prideaux was perhaps trying to support a common

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  35 Reformed front against the adversaries of orthodoxy and to prevent a technical intra-​Reformed dispute from becoming a distraction in that campaign. The final confusion that Prideaux felt needed to be resolved before tackling the question at issue was the confusion between an effect and a consequence and the related confusion between an efficient cause and a merely deficient cause. When the sun is absent, Prideaux suggested, ice may form as a consequence, but the sun is clearly not the efficient cause of the ice. When there are no props to support a precarious wall, it may fall down as a consequence, but the absence of the props is not the efficient cause of its fall. In the same way, Prideaux suggested, sin follows from reprobation, ‘not as efficient cause but as deficient, not by which what is present is taken away, but [by which] that which would have preserved is not supplied’.47 Sin is, therefore, a consequence, but it is not an effect of the decree. Once again, Prideaux had an eye to explaining how absolute reprobation did not entail any injustice on God’s part.48 Prideaux was now ready to express his thesis more precisely: ‘God’s eternal decree of reprobation,’ he asserted, ‘is absolute, not of means, not of final cause, but of motive, or cause, or external impulsive condition in the object; and this, with regards to preterition, or the negative act, even if the man be actually in the mass of sin after this separation, and [reprobation], with regard to the affirmative act, or predamnation, always presupposes sin’.49 This thesis, Prideaux suggested, was supported by almost all Reformed writers and had been maintained, in particular, by William Whittaker against Peter Baro. From that encounter the nine Lambeth Articles were born, which Prideaux saw as no more than an exposition of Article XVII of the English Confession. It is worth noting the significance that Prideaux ascribed to the absolute nature of the decrees. ‘Calvinism’ is often equated with the belief in double predestination.50 However, Prideaux’s opponents also believed in double predestination, as Prideaux himself acknowledged. The difference between them was not that Prideaux believed in double predestination and his opponents did not. It was that Prideaux believed in a double predestination that was absolute, whereas his opponents believed in a double predestination that was conditional upon the foreseen good works or faith of those predestined. The distinctive doctrine of the Reformed was not double predestination; Jesuits and Arminians believed that too: it was absolute double predestination. Having set out his thesis in a refined form, Prideaux then offered a series of supporting arguments, sticking by his resolution not to stray far from God’s word while handling such a daunting subject.51 If the decree of reprobation,

36  Grace and Conformity he pointed out, preceded any cause or condition in those rejected, then it could not depend on any such cause or condition. Romans 9:11, however, was clear on this point: God’s election of Isaac and rejection of Esau took place ‘before they had been born or had done anything good or bad’. So there is no suggestion in the text that any act or quality foreseen in those elected or rejected was the basis of God’s decision.52 Prideaux’s second argument was drawn from Romans 9:18: ‘So then, he has mercy on whomsoever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomsoever he chooses’. As Prideaux underlined, if there were some quality in human beings that explained why one person was chosen and another left, then Paul’s remark here would not have been an appropriate response to the question, which he himself had raised, about whether God’s choice in election was just. But the inadequacy of an Apostolic argument was not, of course, something that could be contemplated.53 This point, Prideaux suggested, was reinforced by his third argument, which he took from Romans 9:19–​20: ‘You will say to me then, “Why then does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God?’ Once again, Prideaux noted, Paul did not seek to justify the divine decision, by offering any kind of foundation for it in the objects of the decree; he simply asserted God’s unqualified dominion over what he has made.54 Prideaux could not then resist adding a further argument from the exclamation with which Paul concluded this section of Romans 11:33—​‘O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!’. There would be no cause for such admiration in the face of God’s mysterious will, Prideaux pointed out, if it were possible to point to a cause of election or reprobation in human beings beyond the purpose and good pleasure of God.55 Once again, Prideaux had an eye to preserving the mysterious character of predestination. Prideaux then turned to address the arguments of his adversaries. Their first objection was that absolute reprobation makes God the cause of sin. This could be answered, Prideaux thought, by deploying the distinction between a consequence and an effect that he had earlier outlined. An effect presupposes a cause, but a consequence only requires an antecedent; and between an antecedent and its consequence there is no causal link. The sun is not the cause of shadow merely because its absence necessarily leads to shadow. Nor is God’s decree of reprobation the cause of sin merely because sin follows

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  37 from it; because God was under no obligation to supply the grace that would have enabled the reprobate to avoid sin.56 Nor did the absolute decree impose a Stoic fate that removed all contingency from human action. This was an argument advanced by the Arminians, Prideaux indicated, that Augustine had answered centuries before. Here, Prideaux drew a distinction between the First Cause and second causes. The fact that all things happen by necessity, with regard to the First Cause, does not prevent second causes from acting contingently—​a contingency whose root lay in the efficacious will of God, which determines not merely the action of second causes but also the mode of their action, ‘such that necessary things are produced from necessary causes, and contingent things from contingent causes’.57 It was also wrong to suggest that the absolute decree undermines industry and makes warnings and exhortations pointless. This was an argument so well known to Augustine and his disciples, Prideaux remarked, that one might think they had been writing against the Arminians rather than the Pelagians. Predestination would only undermine industry, Prideaux pointed out, if a human being could arrive at the end of election without the means of election. That is not the case, however. Predestination is not simply a matter of one’s heavenly end, but it also includes the means to that end; if one neglects the latter, one cannot possibly hope for the former.58 As a result, industry, warnings, and exhortations all played a role in the working out of the divine decree. The final objection that Prideaux addressed was the objection that on the assumption of an absolute decree of reprobation, if one is reprobate, there is no point trying to do good, and if one is elect, there is no need to do good. Despair and presumption thus seem to be the natural consequences of the Reformed position. Prideaux responded that this would only be the case if the decree were known to the person presuming or the person despairing; and although the elect can indeed have certainty of their salvation, no one but God knows who is truly reprobate.59 As a result, it is always worth acting well. In his handling of these objections, Prideaux’s underlying pastoral motivations are clear. Prideaux was determined to show that the Reformed teaching on predestination did not turn God into a monster or undermine human freedom. He wanted to explain how a Reformed reading of predestination and reprobation was compatible with belief in the effectiveness of the Church’s ministry and the need for Christians to do good, whilst simultaneously closing the door to either despair or presumption in a believer’s

38  Grace and Conformity spiritual life. His treatment of these issues was necessarily brief, given the limits imposed by a lecture; but it is clear that Prideaux was not articulating his theology in abstraction from practical ministerial concerns, but rather was drawing from his theology the ammunition that would help the clergy address those concerns. Prideaux brought his lecture to a close by stating his conviction that everything he had said about the absolute decree of reprobation was no other than what the Scriptures, the Fathers, the sounder Scholastics, and the most famous orthodox theologians had proclaimed. Indeed, he remarked, some 260 years previously, a learned Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, had maintained ‘this cause of God against Pelagius’60 most copiously and most vigorously. For as Prideaux pointed out, revealing the theological principle that underlay his lecture series, ‘Those who ascribe even the least here to the choice of man, take away from God, to whom I fear (like Augustine) to commit the salvation of my soul only in part’.61 Prideaux was driven, not simply by hostility to Arminianism, though he certainly opposed it, but by his commitment to an Augustinian reading of Catholic orthodoxy on grace.

Middle Knowledge As we have seen, Prideaux argued that the divine decrees of predestination and reprobation were absolute. His opponents, by contrast, argued that they were conditional upon God’s foresight of a certain quality in those predestined or reprobated. Accordingly, having used his first lecture to defend the absolute nature of the decrees, Prideaux used his second to attack a key theological foundation of his opponents’ view, namely the doctrine of Middle Knowledge. Prideaux’s fellow Oxonian, the Puritan theologian, William Twisse, would discuss Middle Knowledge at length in A Discovery of Dr Jackson’s Vanity (1631) and De Scientia Media (1639), a discussion that has attracted some interest in the scholarship.62 Prideaux’s earlier treatment, in the Act lecture he delivered on 12 July 1617, has not, although it anticipated Twisse’s arguments in a number of ways. Prideaux acknowledged that the topic of middle knowledge might seem a purely academic matter, whose acceptance or rejection would not much prejudice the truth. Prideaux insisted, however, that middle knowledge was a very dangerous doctrine indeed, because it masked an assertion of the human will’s capacity for self-​determination after the Fall—​a capacity

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  39 by which human beings could aspire to supernatural acts, aided merely by moral suasion, rather than the powerful action of grace. It also masked an assertion of human merit, Prideaux thought, for it suggested that salvation is not an entirely free gift, but something that is at least partly owed to the human will.63 Prideaux began his discussion by setting down the basics of divine knowledge. The knowledge of God, Prideaux maintained, extends to everything that can be known, namely God and all things apart from God, whether existing or merely conceivable. God knows all these intelligible objects, Prideaux indicated, not successively, as human beings do, by comprehending one thing and then another or by reasoning from one thing to another; but rather in one undivided act of the divine essence, in which God comprehends both himself in himself, and all other things in their causes, of which God, of course, is the First.64 Traditionally, Prideaux indicated, the divine knowledge was considered to have two branches. First, there is the ‘knowledge of simple understanding,’ which has regard to God’s power and so extends to all things that are possible, whether they will actually exist or not. Second, there is the ‘knowledge of vision,’ which has regard to God’s will and which therefore extends to all things that actually will exist, as a result of the divine decree. The knowledge of simple understanding precedes the free act of God’s will, so it is often described as ‘natural’ knowledge; but the knowledge of vision follows God’s free act, so it is usually called ‘free’.65 As Prideaux underlined, the leading Dominican theologians of his day, such as Raphael Ripa, still adhered to this twofold classification of divine knowledge.66 However, a number of Jesuit and Arminian writers had recently argued for a third kind of divine knowledge, which they labelled ‘middle knowledge’. That was the knowledge of those things that depend, not on the divine decree, but on what rational beings freely choose to do. Prideaux consequently set himself the following question: ‘Whether, besides the knowledge of simple understanding, which extends to possible things; & the knowledge of vision which only has regard to future things; there is also in God a kind of third or middle knowledge of freely contingent futures, not absolute but conditional; by which God knows what men and angels, without any preceding decree, will freely do, if they are placed in this or that order of things, with these circumstances or those?’67 Prideaux set the stage for his discussion by setting down a number of points, on which both the supporters and the opponents of Middle Knowledge were

40  Grace and Conformity in agreement. Both sides agreed, he indicated, that God’s knowledge is not merely conjectural, but certain. Both sides agreed that God’s knowledge extends not merely to things in themselves, but also to their connections with other things, whether past, present, or future, and whether those connections are necessary or contingent. Prideaux underlined, in this connection, that both sides asserted that God knows conditional futures, even though the Jesuits misleadingly suggested that the Dominicans did not. Both sides agreed further that whatever God knows, God knows from eternity. And both sides intended that ‘such a foundation is to be assigned to this knowledge, as does not undermine the faculty of free will, nor exclude the grace of God, but sweetly reconciles the two with each other’.68 Both sides agreed, finally, that if the free acts of rational beings were indeed determined by a prior divine decree, as the Dominicans and the Reformed proposed, then there would be no need for Middle Knowledge, because it would have no object. So the question at issue was not whether God has certain and eternal knowledge of conditional futures, but how God has such knowledge. The Jesuits resorted to Middle Knowledge to explain it. Prideaux maintained, by contrast, that, ‘There is no such Middle Knowledge, but God infallibly foreknows the free determinations of the will, because he himself so disposes them to one side or the other from eternity by an immutable decree’.69 Prideaux’s principle here, that God’s foreknowledge of free human decisions is ultimately rooted in the divine decree, is precisely that which would later be endorsed by William Twisse, who insisted, against Thomas Jackson, ‘That God knows all future contingents by knowing his own will and purpose to produce them’.70 If there were such a thing as Middle Knowledge, Prideaux pointed out, then it would be possible to discern a reason for predestination beyond God’s will. However, Paul makes clear in Romans 9:11–​12 that such is not the case, so the concept of Middle Knowledge must be flawed. This argument is confirmed, Prideaux contended, by a consideration of the supposed object of Middle Knowledge, which is not actually something that can be known. For until the human will actually makes its decision, there is no determinate truth about any human choice. All that can be known before then is what the human will might choose; and such knowledge can only give rise to possible, not certain knowledge, as Diego Alvarez made clear.71 Twisse would later make exactly the same point.72 Prideaux’s next argument was drawn from the nature of causality. No effect can exist, he underlined, without dependence on a cause. However, those

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  41 who defend Middle Knowledge suggest that the object of such knowledge is the free determination of the human will, which is dependent upon no higher cause. But that, Prideaux argued, is effectively to posit an effect that exists without a cause, a creature, in other words, without a creator, which makes no sense at all.73 Furthermore, since the divine decree of predestination is supposed to follow from Middle Knowledge; his adversaries’ view actually reverses the proper order of causality, by suggesting that the First Cause acts after the Second Cause has acted, rather than vice versa.74 Such a scheme would make God not so much the author of human salvation as its bystander; because in it, ‘Grace is more fitly said to be the servant of human inclination, than the mistress; the attendant, rather than the cause’.75 The need to respect the proper order of primary and secondary causality would prove equally important in Twisse.76 The defenders of Middle Knowledge advanced several biblical passages in support of Middle Knowledge.77 Prideaux offered an alternative exegesis for all of them.78 He then turned to consider one of Grevinckhoven’s objections against William Ames. Grevinckhoven had argued that, if God foresees free future contingents in his will, then given that God foresees all things, he must also foresee sins in his will, and this would make God the author of sin. Prideaux thought this a trite objection and easily answered by distinguishing between an act and the malice that makes that act a sin. God wills the sinful act, but merely permits its malice. Returning to the distinction he had made in his first lecture between consequence and effect, Prideaux also underlined that ‘sin is a consequence of the decree, not an effect; for the permissive will is efficacious, not with regard to production, but with regard to illation. God did not decree that a certain person should sin, but decreed not to restrain, through grace, someone being ruined by their own malice: whence he certainly foresees that that person will be a sinner, since without God’s grace we are not able to will anything good’.79 Finally, Prideaux raised one of Arminius’s objections, namely that those things that have been decreed by God to be future are necessarily future with respect to that decree. As a result, the Reformed must be suggesting that nothing is truly contingent. Prideaux conceded that nothing can be both contingent and necessary in the same respect. He argued, however, that something could be both contingent and necessary in different respects; something could be contingent with regard to a secondary cause but necessary with regard to God. Such necessity with regard to God, since it is a necessity of consequence, which involved no coercion, was entirely compatible

42  Grace and Conformity with human freedom. That is why Christ was free in the work of redemption, even though his actions were determined by God. God is responsible, Prideaux underlined, not merely for the existence of whatever he has made, but also for the way it exists. God is therefore responsible for the fact that that necessary things exist necessarily, and the fact that contingent things exist contingently. As a result, far from God’s decree making all things necessary, God’s decree is actually the foundation of their contingency.80 Twisse would later make exactly the same point.81 Prideaux clearly wanted to alert his hearers to the conceptual difficulties that lay behind Middle Knowledge: the facts that it posited an unknowable object, that it reversed the proper order of causality, and that it made providence and redemption depend on human decision making. He also wished to show that the orthodox view did not undermine human freedom, as its opponents suggested, or make God the author of sin, two themes he carried forward from his first lecture. It is worth noting, as well, that just as in his lecture on Absolute Reprobation, Prideaux’s teaching here had an explicitly pastoral dimension. For, as he made clear, belief in Middle Knowledge suggested that a believer was known to God only in some hypothetical or ambiguous way—​a way perfectly compatible with that believer ultimately failing to attain salvation. The concept of Middle Knowledge could therefore undermine a believer’s confidence in their own salvation. As a result, only the orthodox approach to God’s knowledge, which rooted that knowledge in the divine decrees, could provide a believer with the assurance that their name was written in the Book of Life.82

The Extent of Grace Having discussed grace in relation to God, as its source, Prideaux turned to consider grace as it worked in relation to human beings. Three topics should command a theologian’s attention here: the extent of God’s grace, its efficacy, and its duration. He chose the first topic for his 1618 lecture, asking, ‘Whether grace sufficient for salvation is conceded to all people?’83 Prideaux began by defining his terms, beginning with ‘grace’. As he indicated, all God’s actions ad extra touching his creatures proceed either from providence or from predestination. Providence extends to all creatures and consists in their conservation and governance. This divine action is properly referred to as auxilium (assistance). Predestination, by contrast, is restricted

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  43 to rational creatures and involves the communication of saving grace to those who are called in Christ.84 The Jesuits, Prideaux claimed, wilfully confused the two, with the effect that grace meant no more than a general and indifferent influence, whose end was ultimately determined by the human will. Bellarmine even went so far as to abandon the term grace in favour of the term ‘motion,’ to make this point. For this reason, it was essential to maintain the distinction between divine assistance in general and grace. For although all grace is indeed a kind of assistance; not all assistance was sufficient grace. Prideaux outlined several different modes of grace, before making clear that he would be discussing only what he called ‘freely given grace’ (gratia gratis data), by which he meant the means which God provided to the elect in order to bring about their salvation. These means of salvation were either external, such as the grace of calling by the word, or internal, such as justifying faith. The internal means of grace could further be distinguished into ‘habitual’ and ‘moving’ grace. Habitual grace was an influence working within human beings: moving grace was an influence that came from outside them. Such moving grace was either prevenient, enabling the elect to will something spiritually good, or subsequent, which ensured that they attained the spiritual good they desired. Habitual grace could either be ordinary in nature, as in the spiritual gifts of faith, hope, and charity; or extraordinary, as in the gifts of ministry, which existed to edify the Church rather than save the one who received them.85 Prideaux indicated that he would take the term ‘sufficient,’ in his question, to mean sufficient for conversion, rather than merely sufficient for conviction. Such sufficiency, he remarked, could be considered either with respect to the means themselves, as indiscriminately propounded to both elect and reprobate; or it could be understood absolutely, when, through the internal operation of the Spirit, those means actually brought about salvation in the elect. He would be discussing the latter.86 At this point, Prideaux was ready to offer a refined statement of his question: ‘Whether the gratuitous divine favour regards every person so kindly, that, for its time and place, it is sufficient for the salvation of all people in their state after the Fall, whether Gentiles or Christians, infants or adults, reprobates or elect, either working through means or immediately, either ordinarily or extraordinarily?’87 Prideaux’s adversaries said it was: he claimed it was not.88 He drew his first argument directly from the text. The grace of God, Prideaux insisted, extends no further than the decree and God has not

44  Grace and Conformity decreed that all shall be saved. For as Romans 9:11–​13 makes clear, just as God loved Jacob, so he hated Esau, before either of them was born. God’s grace was consequently not equal in Esau and Jacob. It followed that God’s grace is not universally sufficient for salvation.89 The doctrine of absolute reprobation precludes the universality of saving grace. It was clear, Prideaux thought, that God supplies the means of grace unevenly. If grace sufficient for salvation were given to everyone, then everyone would be called externally, and everyone would receive equal assistance from the Holy Spirit to accept that call.90 Even among Christians, however, many people hear the same things as the elect, yet do not come to faith. Equally, many either cannot understand the word, such as infants and the insane, or they never get an opportunity to hear it, such as those living in pagan countries.91 Prideaux’s Jesuit and Lutheran adversaries responded with the suggestion that, contrary to appearances, sufficient grace for salvation was indeed offered to all ex parte Dei but was obstructed by the perversity of the human will. Prideaux refuted this by returning to his text. The fact that Jacob accepted grace and Esau did not must come either from something in them or something in God. It cannot be something in them, since both infants were fallen and so equally averse to grace. It must therefore come from God, who supplied grace more generously to Jacob than to Esau. Prideaux’s Remonstrant opponents focused on the atonement, arguing that redemption through the death of Christ was requested for all, but not applied by all. Prideaux once again disagreed. Requesting something implies a petition of some sort. As John 17:9 makes clear, however, Christ did not pray for all people, but only for those who had been given him by the Father.92 Nor was it of any consequence, Prideaux insisted, that the ransom of Christ was sufficient for the redemption of the world. Redemption and grace worked in different ways: the former is the material or meritorious cause of salvation, the latter is the efficient cause of salvation. In a similar way, he suggested, the sun is sufficient to illuminate the world, but the blind still cannot see unless their sight is restored.93 Prideaux noted that his opponents routinely resorted to I Timothy 2:4 and I Peter 3:994 to establish the universality of grace, arguing that if God wants all to be saved, as the texts suggest, then he will supply all with grace sufficient for that to happen. Prideaux responded, first, that the divine desire in these verses referred to that will in God which invited all who do not offer an impediment; not that will in God which actually effected salvation

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  45 by overcoming such impediments. Furthermore, ‘all people’ and ‘anyone’ in these verses meant all sorts of people, not absolutely everyone.95 Rightly understood, Prideaux suggested, these verses revealed that God wants all to people be saved by doing what he commands; they do not reveal that God wants to save everyone by ensuring that they will.96 In Prideaux’s mind, in other words, God’s wish to save human beings, on the condition of their obedience was, in a sense, universal, even if his will to confer the saving grace which would enable them to meet that condition was not. For Prideaux, saving grace—​ grace sufficient, in other words, for salvation—​is an internal and supernatural form of divine assistance, which is offered only to the elect and proceeds from the decree of predestination. The fact that so many people did not come to faith was an eloquent testimony to this truth. The death of Christ was itself of sufficient merit to ransom everyone. The fact that not all were saved by it was not the result of the reprobate stopping grace doing its work; it was the consequence of their not being elected to the means of salvation. And since they were not elected to the means of salvation, Christ’s prayer did not extend to them.97

The Efficacy of Grace: Conversion and Justification By the time Prideaux gave his next Act lecture, on 10 July 1619, the Synod of Dort had met and agreed a set of canons rejecting the Arminian understanding of grace. There was every sign that King James I welcomed that decision.98 So Prideaux spoke, that year, in an ecclesiastical environment where the hegemony of Reformed theology in England had been strongly reasserted. This may account for the somewhat more conciliatory tone he struck that year. Once again, Prideaux took his topic directly from the text. Romans 9:11–​ 12 presented two brothers in exactly the same condition, whom God had determined to treat very differently. So the counterfactual question naturally arose, he suggested, of ‘whether from two people equally established in grace, one might be converted and saved, the other might resist and perish?’99 Prideaux introduced the discussion, by observing that theologians had always struggled to reconcile providence with contingency, predestination with free choice.100 This was an important task, however, because, as Augustine had remarked, ‘If there is no grace of God, how does he save the world? If there is no free will, how does he judge the world?’101 Bernard of

46  Grace and Conformity Clairvaux had made the same point: ‘Take away free choice, and there would be nothing to be saved; take away grace, and there would be nothing whereby it might be saved’.102 One had to be very careful, Prideaux argued, ‘Lest whilst one flees from the Scylla of Pelagianism, one fall into the Charybdis of Manicheism and Enthusiasm’. Once again, in other words, he was keen to underline the difference between the orthodox reading of grace and a heretical fatalism. Augustine had shown the way forward, Prideaux thought, by demonstrating that grace did not destroy human choice but restore its liberty to choose the good.103 Augustine’s teaching was defended by Prosper, Fulgentius, and a number of Church Councils, but the balance they had struck was so delicate, and the discussion so complicated, that it failed to end the dispute. This was evident, Prideaux thought, in the ninth century controversy surrounding Gottschalk of Orbais, so recently related by Gerard Vossius, as well as in the writings of Bradwardine.104 The very same question continued to divide the Dominicans and the Jesuits within the Roman Catholic Church; it divided Aegidius Hunnius and Samuel Huber among the Lutherans; and it divided the Contra-​Remonstrants and the Remonstrants among the Reformed. Prideaux expressed his regret that the hostility between the Contra-​ Remonstrants and the Remonstrants had become unmeasured: ‘Do you act more studiously on behalf of grace? You will hear “Manichean, Predestinian, Borborita, Enthusiast, Florian, Puritan, Calvinist, Gomarist,” from the Papists, Lutherans, and Remonstrants. But if you leave even the smallest place for choice in first conversion, you will barely escape being smeared as a “Pelagian, or Semipelagian, Justitiary, Operist, Partitioner, Previsionist, Synergist, Arminian.” ’105 Indeed, such insults had even moved from the pen to the paintbrush, and a grotesque caricature of Arminianism as a five-​ headed monster had been printed within the last year.106 The whole controversy turned, Prideaux thought, on what accounts for the fact that grace has actual efficacy in one person, but not in another.107 A theologian’s aim here, he suggested, should be neither to belittle human nature, even in its fallen state, nor detract from God’s restorative grace. That balance, he suggested, had been correctly struck at Dort:108 ‘The wedge most fitted for this knot, will not only evaluate the crookedness of the will accurately, but also unfold the four remaining Articles now happily concluded by the Orthodox in the Synod of Dort against the Remonstrants (as is related), with the same care’.109 In Prideaux’s mind, in other words, the canons of Dort

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  47 represented the gold standard of orthodoxy on grace. This explains his outrage when he later saw their teaching spurned.110 His Act lecture exhibits his desire to draw Dort’s teaching into Oxford’s theological curriculum. Prideaux set out the common ground between the opposing parties in this debate. First, he noted, both sides were in agreement, against Pelagius himself, that grace must concur with conversion; not just externally, through the ministry of the word and the sacraments, but internally, by illuminating, influencing and renovating both intellect and will.111 Second, both sides agreed that human free choice does not receive grace as an inanimate creature, but rather as a subject capable of choice; for as Luther made clear the Fall had enslaved but not destroyed free choice.112 Third, the Remonstrants and the Jesuits both agreed with the orthodox that, in conversion, not only is the intellect illuminated by grace, but the affections are healed, and the will is stirred up and attracted. The Remonstrant writer Corvinus, Prideaux noted, was even prepared to admit that the affections were so irresistibly drawn by grace that, where grace leads, the affections infallibly followed; although Corvinus had still insisted that the will remained free to choose otherwise than inclined by those affections, thus ensuring that the effect of grace was ultimately resistible.113 So the disagreement here, Prideaux underlined, was ultimately a narrow one and hung on the following issue: whether, when the same operative grace is administered to two people, with the same subjective disposition, one person might be converted, while the other might render the same grace inefficacious by freely dissenting from it. Jesuit theologians said this is possible, though with varying degrees of qualification; as did the Remonstrants, the Pseudo-​Lutherans and the Socinians.114 They were opposed by Alvarez, Bañez, Cumel, Rispoli, and Diego Nugno. Prideaux stood with the latter party. Once again, his knowledge of, and sympathy with those Roman Catholic writers promoting an Augustinian reading of grace, is striking.115 Prideaux’s first argument was drawn from the Scriptures that ascribe whatever good that human beings do, not to the fallen will, but to the grace of God. He cited a number, culminating with I Corinthians 4:7: ‘For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?’116 Prideaux believed such passages ruled out the suggestion that human free choice might be considered a contributory cause of conversion. It followed that an equal measure of operating grace would invariably produce an equal outcome: ‘Nothing concurs on the part of the will to the conversion, of which we

48  Grace and Conformity speak, in the manner of a cause, but only in the manner of a subject; as a result, from people equally stirred up by grace, equal results, in terms of effects, will be obtained’.117 Jesuit theologians attempted to avoid this problem, by suggesting that the divine motion or grace could be equal in all yet still produce different results in different subjects because of the different situation and circumstances of each subject; just as a hungry person will not respond to alms in the same way as a full person.118 Prideaux answered that such divergent responses to grace must either be ascribed to the grace itself, in which case it was not equal; or they must be ascribed to the will of the recipients, which would clearly contradict I Corinthians 4:7, and is tantamount to Pelagianism. The Remonstrants, for their part, tried to get around I Corinthians 4:7 by suggesting that, in conversion, grace acts principally, and the human will acts only with and under it. As a result, the overall outcome could still be ascribed to grace rather than the will, just as Paul says it should. Prideaux disagreed. The cooperation of free choice was either coordinate with grace, or subordinate to grace. If his adversaries conceded that it was subordinate to grace, then Prideaux agreed with them and there was no need for further argument. But if they insisted, as they appeared to, that the cooperation of the human will was coordinate with grace, then the same problem arises; because grace could not produce the desired effect without the agreement of the human will. As a result, the human subject would have something to boast about that it had not received from God. So either Paul or the Remonstrants had to be wrong.119 Prideaux found another argument in the biblical passages that liken conversion to creation, such as Psalm 51:10, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ or John 3:3 ‘Unless one is born again on cannot see the kingdom of God’. These passages suggest, Prideaux thought, that just as one person does not contribute any more to their creation than another, so one person cannot contribute any more to their conversion than another either. But if no one contributes anything extra to their conversion that other people do not, then the same measure of grace will invariably produce the same outcome.120 The Remonstrants responded that, since human beings retain their innate power of free choice, even after the Fall, they may choose whether to respond to the first promptings of grace or not. As a result, the same measure of grace could indeed produce different results in different people. This, Prideaux indicated, was to misunderstand the consequences of the Fall. The Fall

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  49 corrupted the human will, not by preventing it making choices, but by restricting the kind of choices it could make. Fallen human beings retained the liberty to choose an earthly goal: but they were now incapable of choosing a spiritual or salvific one, and only grace could put that right. As Prideaux underlined, ‘The question is not, whether the will freely assents to the first impulse of grace; but where that free assent comes from, whether from the will, or from operating grace, which restored it to wholeness, so that it might assent to first grace; we do not therefore deny the assent, but we contend with Bernard that it is an effect of grace’. For Prideaux, in other words, human beings freely choose to be converted, but they only did so because of grace. Prideaux’s third argument was drawn ‘From that adamantine chain in Romans 8, between the immutable purpose of God, and its most unvariable effect’.121 If it were possible, he argued, that, of two people who received the same measure of grace, one might be converted and the other not, this chain would be broken and the foundation of predestination would be overturned. The Jesuits and the Remonstrants replied by suggesting that predestinating grace acted only by moral suasion, and so could be refused. Once again, Prideaux perceived an inadequate grasp of the effects of the Fall to lie behind their reply. Moral suasion, he underlined, assumed that the one being so persuaded has the power to accomplish what they are being persuaded to do. The Scriptures, however, described human beings as blind, deaf, even dead, with regards to their conversion and, consequently, powerless to do what is required.122 So whether one conceived operative grace, with the Dominicans, to be a physical action, or, with the Reformed and Augustine, to be a divine and supernatural action; it had to do more than persuade. If it did not, Prideaux remarked, God would be doing no more for a sinner’s conversion than the devil did for the sinner’s subversion. To these arguments, Prideaux added the judgement of Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine made it clear, he argued, that efficacious grace is not rejected even by hardened hearts, but only because it softens the heart.123 For Augustine, grace brings about not merely correct understanding but a good disposition of the will.124 Efficacious grace therefore makes the unwilling willing.125 As a result, the only thing that makes one person differ from another, is that God bestows efficacious grace on some and not others.126 Thomas Aquinas, Prideaux thought, had endorsed Augustine’s views on this point, as Cumel and Nugno had demonstrated.127 From the Dominican theologian, Raphael Riva, Prideaux drew an argument of a more philosophical nature. The First Cause, he indicated, must

50  Grace and Conformity be the ultimate source of all movement, within the universe. But this would not be true, if it was the human will that ultimately determined whether one person was converted and another not.128 Because there would then be two partial causes that were equally ‘first’, and that would vitiate the principle underlying Aristotle’s argument for the existence of the First Cause, namely that whatever is moved is moved by another.129 Prideaux also pointed out that the Jesuit and Arminian view of efficacious grace actually made it no easier to defend free will than its Reformed or Dominican alternative. For, since the Jesuits and the Remonstrants both conceded that God foresaw the conversion of Jacob and the pertinacity of Esau, those things became necessary, because divine foresight is infallible and cannot fail. Suggesting that Jacob’s will was only moved by moral suasion, not efficacious grace, would not extricate you from this problem.130 Prideaux turned finally to address the main arguments his adversaries deployed in favour of their position. The first of these was Matthew 11:21: ‘Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes’. Surely, Suarez argued, this suggests that the same grace can produce different effects in different people? Prideaux replied that lamenting in sackcloth and ashes may be evidence of sadness at sin, but it is not necessarily evidence of conversion and regeneration; the passage was consequently irrelevant to the question. Furthermore, Christ was clearly talking about external means of grace, namely his preaching and miracles, not the internal working of grace in conversion. The application of the same external means might well provoke quite different reactions amongst the reprobate; but the same was not true of efficacious grace.131 Prideaux’s opponents pointed to a passage in Augustine, indicating that God governs all things in such a manner as to allow them to exercise their own proper movements.132 Surely this implies that God must allow human free choice some role in its conversion? Prideaux replied that Augustine was indeed asserting, here, that God did not coerce the human will in conversion. However, this did not prevent God, as First Cause, determining the choice of the will, in such a way that no violence was done to it. ‘Nor indeed,’ Prideaux underlined, ‘do we deny all action of the will in first conversion (as Riva rightly concludes) but we say it works that act, such that it first receives from efficacious grace the wherewithal to act, with which, as liberated rather than free, it instantly cooperates’.133

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  51 The final argument advanced by Prideaux’s adversaries was that no opinion that assumes a fundamental opposition between grace and free choice should be entertained within the Church. Yet, they claimed, the Reformed position assumed exactly that, which is why the Reformed ascribed everything to grace. In reply, Prideaux suggested, with the Dominicans, that all created events happen necessarily, with respect to the First Cause. However, since God so orders Second Causes that some act contingently, and some necessarily; with respect to Second Causes, some events happen necessarily and some happen contingently and freely. The causal activity of the First Cause does not, therefore, undermine the nature of Second Causes. Prideaux applied this model of divine causality to conversion as follows: ‘The will of the one converted, necessarily produces saving effects, and for all that freely; grace liberating and moving it: albeit in the divided sense (that is considered apart from this leading of saving grace) it always retains the faculty to act otherwise than it does’.134 To put it another way, grace ensures that the human will chooses what God desires for it, but without eliminating its innate capacity to have made another choice, had grace been absent. Far from proposing a fundamental opposition between grace and free choice, Prideaux insisted, the orthodox sought a fitting harmony between grace and free will, in which the creature invariably followed the lead of the Creator, acting either freely or necessarily, as the Creator ordained. In reconciling divine predestination with human free choice, it was essential, Prideaux maintained, neither to detract from grace, nor to denigrate human nature, even in its fallen state. The Canons of Dort, he thought, set a compelling example in this regard. The Scriptures made clear that human beings could take no credit for the success of saving grace within them. It followed that even the will’s assent to grace must be ascribed to grace itself, not to an independent determination of the human will, as the Jesuits and Remonstrants both proposed. Yet, for all that, the human will did assent to grace, freely and without coercion. The efficacious grace that proceeded from the decree of predestination, Prideaux insisted, did not violate human nature, but rather freed it for salvation. God’s primary causality was not in competition with the secondary causality of his creatures: it was the foundation of that causality, ensuring that all second causes worked, either freely or necessarily, in accordance with their nature. Having discussed the efficacy of grace in conversion, Prideaux addressed another aspect of that efficacy in 1620, by discussing the grace of justification.

52  Grace and Conformity In this, he argued, he was simply following Paul’s logic in Romans 8: ‘there is no need of Ariadne’s thread, while the Apostle’s chain is in place; “those whom he predestinated, he also called; those whom he called, he also justified.” ’135 Justification was simply the next step in the process of salvation; the grace-​given corollary of true conversion. Prideaux underlined, at the outset, that justification was a key issue, as much for pastoral reasons as polemical; for ‘Faith is the hand, by which we apprehend that plank of salvation, by which we swim out of the quicksands of despair. Justification is the principle and hinge (as Bellarmine frankly acknowledges with Pighius) from which depend, or in which are situated, all the controversies between us and the Papists’.136 The orthodox position, Prideaux pointed out, was that ‘The just person both lives and is justified by faith alone’.137Prideaux began his defence of this thesis by defining its terms. ‘Faith’ here was taken, he underlined, not objectively, for what we believe, but subjectively, for that faculty whereby we believe. Faith was also understood, here, not as the act of believing, which might be interrupted, but as the underlying habit which gave rise to that act. The faith in question was also not a common or historical faith, which even a reprobate might have; but a proper, justifying faith, which belonged to the elect alone.138 Such saving faith consists in ‘the knowing of the intellect, the assent of the will, the trust of the heart; such that justifying faith is nothing other, than a trusting assent presupposing knowledge’.139 The assertion that justification was by faith alone, Prideaux made clear, implied that faith was alone with regard to the process of justification, not that it was alone because no other virtues were present alongside faith, in the person being justified. Furthermore, faith was conceived, here, as justifying, not formally, as though the act of believing itself justified the believer, by virtue of some quality inherent within it; but ‘relatively or instrumentally, insofar as faith, as a hand, apprehends the justice of Christ, and applies it to the believer in order that from thence he might be justified’.140 The justice of Christ which was applied to the believer in this way was not, of course, the innate and original justice of Christ, which was his alone; but what Prideaux called the actual justice of Christ: the perfect obedience which Christ offered to the Father by making satisfaction for sin and obeying the law. Prideaux also underlined that justification did not involve making someone just, but rather pronouncing someone just. The former required inherent justice in the one justified; for the latter, an evangelical and imputed justice was sufficient.141

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  53 In light of this discussion, Prideaux identified the central question as follows: whether faith (understood, not objectively as saving doctrine but subjectively, as that by which saving doctrine is assented to and by which the believer relies on Christ for salvation) alone (not with regard to its coexistence with hope and charity in the believer, but only with regard to its role in justification) justifies (relatively and in the manner of an instrument, whereby the believer apprehends and fiducially applies the satisfaction of Christ)? This, he asserted and the Papists, Socinians and Remonstrants denied.142 Prideaux focussed first on the way justification is described in Scripture. Paul repeatedly made clear, he argued, that justification was a free gift, and that no other virtues or works concurred with faith in the process.143 Bellarmine argued that the works Paul had in mind were only works performed without faith, and that the Apostle had not intended to rule out the possibility that the works of a believer might play some part in justification.144 The Cardinal’s suggestion could not stand, however, because the works which Paul discussed were clearly works undertaken by believers. Indeed, if any human work were required for justification, it would not be the free gift that Paul claimed it was. A believer is justified, Prideaux insisted, by that through which the actual justice of Christ, which both satisfies for sin and fulfils the law, is imputed to him. As Romans 3:22 makes clear, however, the justice of Christ is imputed to the believer only through faith.145 It is, therefore, faith alone which justifies. Faith apprehends and applies the merit of Christ to the individual believer. Hope and charity do not. Faith consequently justifies, not formally, because it is not the believer’s faith that actually justifies them, but relatively and instrumentally, by appropriating the righteousness of Christ. This reading of justification squared, Prideaux though, with the teaching of the Church Fathers.146 Prideaux then turned to address his opponents’ arguments. Roman Catholics generally referred to a number of passages which appeared to suggest that believers are justified by hope or by love.147 Prideaux pointed out, however, that those passages did not state that either hope or love was the cause of forgiveness; they suggested that hope and love coexisted with faith in the believer. That, he did not deny. Quite the contrary: faith, he insisted, is not simply the instrument which apprehends the justice of Christ; it is also the root of the other virtues. Faith is consequently the door to new obedience and to glory. It may be alone in the work of justification, but it is not alone

54  Grace and Conformity in the person being justified, ‘For the cause of justification is one thing, the quality of the justified another’.148 The Socinians, for their part, argued that, if the justification of a believer was gratuitous on God’s part, then it required no satisfaction at all, and consequently no imputation of Christ’s justice. Prideaux replied that, since God can only act justly, even God is not free to remit sins without satisfaction.149 The Remonstrants, by contrast, conceded that Christ had offered satisfaction for sins. However, Prideaux suggested, they perverted the purpose of that satisfaction, by claiming that, in justification, the believer’s own act of faith that was graciously accepted by God as righteousness, on account of Christ’s satisfaction. This, Prideaux thought, was a perverse and convoluted suggestion. The satisfaction of Christ, he insisted, was clearly directed towards the justice of God, not the human act of faith.150 The final argument Prideaux addressed was the suggestion that the orthodox teaching on justification effectively made the believer as righteous as Christ. Prideaux responded that one had to reckon not merely with the nature of the justice here, but also with its mode of possession. The believer was not just in the same way as Christ, because the justice involved was Christ’s own, and became the believer’s only by largesse. The justice was therefore Christ’s subjectively, and the believer’s only by imputation.151 In his discussion of conversion and justification, Prideaux was determined to establish that the efficacy of God’s grace was not dependent on human action. God’s will to convert did not require human consent, it effected it. God’s will to justify did not require human righteousness, it imputed the righteousness of Christ. Yet, in both cases, the recipient of grace was not inert but active in the process; active, however, with an action enabled by and subordinate to grace. Prideaux’s reading of conversion and justification therefore reflected a principle he drew from the Second Council of Orange, and which headed up his treatment of justification: ‘God loves us as we shall be by his gift, not as we are by our own merit’.152

The Duration of Grace: Perseverance and Assurance In 1621, Prideaux turned his attention from the efficacy to the duration of grace. The duration of grace, he indicated, could be considered both as to the truth itself, and as to the believer’s persuasion of that truth. The former was expressed in the doctrine of perseverance, the latter in the doctrine of

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  55 assurance. Prideaux decided to tackle perseverance first, and left assurance for the following year.153 The doctrine of perseverance was well-​trodden theological ground in Oxford. Both Prideaux’s predecessor in the Regius Chair, Robert Abbot, and his contemporary colleague in the Lady Margaret Chair, Sebastian Benefield, had lectured and published on the subject: Abbot with De Gratia et Perseverantia Sanctorum (1618) and Benefield with De Perseverantia Sanctorum (1618). The topic had recently been given a renewed relevance to the English theological scene by the publication of Richard Thomson’s Diatriba de amissione et intercisione gratiae, et justificationis. This work had been refused a licence in England during the 1590s, but its posthumous publication in Leiden, in 1616, had been overseen by no less a figure than John Overall, the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield.154 Abbot included a refutation of Thomson’s Diatriba as an appendix to De Gratia and Benefield specifically condemned it in De Perseverantia.155 In his lecture, Prideaux duly placed Thomson at the climax of his list of the opponents of orthodoxy.156 Prideaux underlined, at the outset, that he was defending only the perseverance of those who were truly regenerate and endowed with the gift of charity. Theirs was the firm faith mentioned by Paul in Colossians 2:5, the faith ‘by which whoever believes always believes’.157 Such faith involved not merely the illumination of the believer’s intellect, ‘but the renewal of his heart, by the implanted seed of grace, and the indwelling Spirit, by which they can do all things in him who strengthens, Philippians 4’.158 Considered in itself, Prideaux remarked, even such a rooted faith might be lost; for there was nothing in its nature which guaranteed its retention by the believer. However, considered with respect to God, it was impossible that anything which God wished to preserve would perish. This did not mean, Prideaux underlined, that the regenerate might not recede from God’s favour and saving influence. Article XVI of the Church of England’s Confession made clear that they could.159 However, it is one thing to fall into grave sin, and another to fall utterly. The act of charity might be interrupted, but the habit of charity always remained within the regenerate.160 Precisely stated, Prideaux thought, the question at issue was whether a believer (someone who is justified, regenerate, and endowed with a true, lively and rooted faith), is able (not as regards himself or his habit of faith itself: but as regards God and the event) not merely to recede from grace and sin gravely, but to fall away completely (whether totally, such that a new work of insertion into the body of Christ would be needed; or finally, such

56  Grace and Conformity that they perish and are deprived of God’s favour in the Son). Many Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Arminians affirmed that believers could fall away, but Prideaux disagreed.161 Prideaux based his position on the constancy of divine purpose mentioned in his text,162 as well as the indissoluble link asserted by Paul in Romans 8:30 between efficacious vocation, and irrevocable justification through faith, and the promised glorification.163 This argument was reinforced by II Timothy 2:19: ‘God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his.” ’164 The foundation of perseverance is firm, Prideaux argued, precisely because it depends not on human beings but on God, who knows his own not merely by observation, but by separating them from others.165 The Remonstrants replied to this, of course, by denying the absolute decree of election, but Prideaux felt he had already answered their arguments in his first lecture. The faithful, Prideaux contended, are frequently described in Scripture as having within them a life-​giving principle within them which cannot perish.166 The existence of such a permanent spiritual principle was incompatible with their finally falling from grace.167 Furthermore, he noted, Christ had prayed that those whom the Father had given him might be preserved.168 Since the Father hears the prayers of his Son, true disciples cannot ultimately fall from grace.169 Indeed, I John 2:19 made clear that those who did fall totally and finally had never possessed a true faith.170 Prideaux then laid out all the problems which would follow from the denial of perseverance. It would make God’s decrees depend on the uncertain outcome of human free choice. It would break the chain of means which God had made inviolable for the comfort of his people. It would snatch away the certainty of salvation from afflicted consciences. It would raise the horrifying prospect that, since all can ultimately fall, none might in fact be elect. For all these reasons, reasons which were pastoral as much as theological, Prideaux insisted that those who had truly been reborn could not fall totally or finally from grace and saving faith.171 Having dealt with the objective certainty of salvation in 1621, Prideaux turned, in 1622, to discuss its subjective certainty; i.e. the believer’s awareness of that certainty. This awareness was expressed by Paul in II Timothy 1:12: ‘I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me’. Prideaux referred approvingly to the interpretation of this verse given by the British delegation at Dort.172 ‘What does it reveal to us, other than that the act of trusting

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  57 assent is not only directed towards the thing promised, but also turned backwards towards the apprehension of the one believing’.173 To put it another way, believers do not simply claim, in hypothetic terms, that whoever believes and is baptised will be saved; they affirm that they, in particular, have received the Spirit of God.174 This sense of assurance is the anchor of the faithful in distress, Prideaux remarked, and he professed his agreement with Luther that, even if nothing else had been wrong with Roman Catholic theology, their teaching that one could not be certain of the remission of sins, grace and salvation would have been sufficient reason to separate from them.175 The orthodox position on assurance was particularly well expressed, Prideaux thought, in the British delegation at Dort’s response to the fifth Remonstrant article; part of the Suffragium collegiale theologorum Magnae Britanniae, which was published, as part of the Acta of the Synod, in 1620.176 Prideaux indicated that the question at issue, accurately stated, was as follows: whether a faithful adult Christian is able (not just with regards to his present state, but also his future state; not in terms of a continual act, but in terms of a foundation and habit never lost) and should (not on the basis of his proper dignity, but on the basis of the divine dignity and protection, which is known by deliberation) be certain (not by a certainty drawn from natural experience, understanding, or prudence; but by a certainty drawn from a lively and justifying faith, through examination of conscience and trust) of his salvation (both in this life and hereafter). He answered this question positively; his opponents, to varying degrees, answered it negatively. Prideaux’s first argument was drawn from the nature of faith as expressed in Hebrews 11:1: ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’. Faith, he indicated, makes present those things which are absent; it brings near those things that are far away. As a result, faith actually gives believers a foretaste of their future, which is why the Scriptures described assurance as a part of faith.177 For, wherever there is an open, evident, full and trusting persuasion of the remission of sins and the Father’s favour in the Son, such as there is in faith, there necessarily follows an assurance of salvation. Since every believer can and should acknowledge that his sins have been remitted and that the Father loves him in the Son; so every believer can and should be certain of his salvation. Prideaux’s second argument was drawn from the promises given in Scripture to those who have been sealed by the Holy Spirit. As he put it, ‘It behoves us to be thoroughly convinced of whatever the Spirit testifies that

58  Grace and Conformity we can and should believe’. Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 make clear that the Spirit bears witness to believers of their adoption as children of God. It follows that believers can and should believe in the certainty of their salvation.178 In reply, Bellarmine suggested that the Spirit’s internal testimony might well impart a sense of inward peace and delight, but it could not impart any certainty of salvation beyond a purely conjectural certainty, which might be mistaken. Prideaux felt that this merely indicated that Bellarmine had never felt the inward testimony of the Spirit. In any case, Prideaux pointed out, Bellarmine’s argument assumed that believers did receive inward testimony from the Spirit that they were indeed believers. If that testimony was reliable, then Prideaux’s point about assurance was established. If that testimony was not reliable, then Bellarmine would seem to be saying that the Holy Spirit’s testimony might deceive. Prideaux then drew an argument from Christ’s teaching on prayer. Mark 11:24 makes clear, he indicated, that those who pray should believe that they have received what they pray for;179 and, in the Lord’s Prayer, Christ commands believers to pray for the forgiveness of sins. It would seem to follow that those who pray the Lord’s Prayer should believe that they have been forgiven.180 To these arguments, Prideaux went on, ‘there accede the sacraments, as seals of this faith and certainty, of which baptism is an appeal to God of a good conscience, I Pet 3.21,’181 an appeal which enabled the believer to approach God with confidence, as urged in Hebrews 4:16.182 The Eucharist, meanwhile, ‘bears witness that our sins are expiated by the death and blood of Christ, whence we have all drunk of one Spirit, I Cor 12.13’. In Prideaux’s mind, in other words, the Church’s sacraments were not in any tension with the doctrine of grace; indeed, they actively contributed to the very sense of assurance that the orthodox doctrine of grace was intended to encourage. Prideaux conceded that Scripture does not promise forgiveness of sins to any given individual. Even so, it was surely legitimate, he felt, to reason from general promises of forgiveness, to the forgiveness of a particular person. Indeed, if such reasoning were not legitimate, in what sense would a believer know more of forgiveness than a demon? Prideaux admitted that the doctrine of assurance might be perverted, by some, as an excuse for carnal security or Pharisaical pride. He underlined, however, that ‘abuse by accident, does not prejudice something which is of itself salutary’.183 For Prideaux, in other words, the pastoral benefits of assurance, comfortably outweighed its potential for misuse.

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  59

Salvation and the Church The last two Act lectures in Prideaux’s series both explored the role of the Church in salvation. This is a powerful reminder that, for Prideaux and theologians like him, the theology of grace could not ultimately be divorced from the theology of the Church. As he remarked in 1623, when Romans 9:12 quoted the prophecy ‘The older will serve the younger,’ it pointed to the ‘prerogatives of the covenant & of the Church, outside which there is no salvation’.184 Prideaux therefore decided to explore these prerogatives using the question ‘Whether the peoples who were not waiting for the promised Messiah, or when he had been sent did not acknowledge him, were able to pursue salvation by the light of nature?’185 Prideaux underlined that this discussion concerned only those pagans to whom no knowledge of Christ had come.186 The discussion also concerned only those pagans who had the use of reason, not infants or the insane. After defining his terms, Prideaux offered a more precise statement of his question, as follows: whether gentiles (those destitute of explicit implicit knowledge of Christ) are able (by a circumspect will and reason, and constant attention, intention, and effort) to attain salvation (if they die without being further illuminated by faith in the Mediator)? Many theologians affirmed that they could. The Church of England, however, denied it in Article XVIII of her Confession, and that was the position which Prideaux set out to defend.187 After the Fall, Prideaux pointed out, human nature had become so corrupt that it was not only averse to all good but positively inclined towards evil.188 ‘Those who are in such a condition,’ he then argued, ‘that they no more perceive or think about those things that pertain to salvation, than a dead man can return to life; but, on the contrary, as slaves and captives, are carried off by their depraved will and affections, to their own destruction; such people are not able, by nature or by the leading of reason, to attain salvation’.189 Since pagans are in this condition, Prideaux contended, they cannot possibly achieve salvation through the use of their reason alone. The Remonstrants, he noted, who did not accept that original sin involved a fundamental corruption of human nature, argued that the human will retained sufficient integrity, even after the Fall, that it could rise to spiritual good by its own strength. To Prideaux, this idea smacked of Pelagianism.190 If true, it would suggest, contrary to Scripture, that the regeneration of a sinner was not a new creation.191 The Remonstrant position also seemed to

60  Grace and Conformity imply that conversion was as much a function of nature as of grace, when Paul ascribed it wholly to grace.192 Even the best works of the unregenerate, Prideaux insisted, were fundamentally unworthy.193 As a result, pagans could not hope for salvation on the basis of their moral works.194 Furthermore, Scripture taught clearly that faith was necessary for salvation.195 Some had suggested, Prideaux observed, that it was sufficient to believe that God exists and rewards those who obey him, without necessarily knowing about Christ. As he pointed out, however, such a Christ-​less conviction is not the saving faith described in John 17:3: ‘This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’. Scripture presents Christ as the only source of salvation, and since pagans had no knowledge of him, they could not hope for salvation either.196 Prideaux conceded the possibility that that one might be saved through Christ, but without conscious knowledge of him. He insisted, however, that the question at issue did not concern what God might conceivably do, but the good pleasure that God has revealed in Scripture.197 Prideaux underlined that the links which God had established between the means of salvation were indissoluble: Romans 8:30 made clear that God would only glorify, hereafter, those whom he had called and justified in time, and predestined before time. Romans 10:14 established that salvation is not possible for those who have never heard Christian preaching.198 Acts 11:18 taught that the gentiles had no hope of salvation, apart from the means offered within the Church.199 In Prideaux’s mind, in other words, soteriology and ecclesiology were inseparably connected. In fact, ecclesiology was merely the corporate dimension of soteriology. This idea provided Prideaux with the starting point for the final lecture in his series, which he delivered in 1624. ‘Outside the household,’ he began, ‘that is the enclosure of the Catholic Church, the Church cannot promise anything about anyone’s eternal salvation’.200 The consequence, he thought was clear: all those, whether Jews or Gentiles, who either do not enter, or who leave the flock of Christ, will be thrown from the slavery of sin, into the prison of eternal suffering; for, as John 3:18 makes clear, ‘Whoever does not believe is condemned already’. As the ancient writers of the Church had eloquently put it: no one has God for his Father, who does not acknowledge the Church as his Mother. In all likelihood, Prideaux’s decision to focus the 1624 lecture on ecclesiology, whilst an entirely fitting climax to the series on theological grounds, also reflected the recent resurgence of interest in this area of theological

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  61 debate.201 In 1622, the Countess of Buckingham, the mother of the King’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, had announced her conversion to Rome. Several members of her family also converted. In the face of growing Protestant protest against the proposed wedding of the Prince of Wales to the Spanish Infanta, this presented a major public relations problem for the King. He therefore arranged a series of debates, held before the Duke and Countess, between the Countess’s Roman Catholic confessor, John Percy (alias ‘Fisher the Jesuit’) and two Church of England divines: Francis White and William Laud. These debates were published by White as A Reply to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer to Certain Questions (1624).202 The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, also arranged a debate, a year later, between Fisher, White, and Daniel Featley in Sir Humphrey Linde’s London house, a debate that was attended by a large audience of the metropolitan élite, and whose explicit focus was the visibility of the Protestant Church before Luther. The discussion was immediately published by Featley as The Fisher Catched in His Own Net (1623). Percy replied, and Featley promptly issued a rather more substantial response, The Romish Fisher Caught and Held in His Own Net (1624).203 The topic was also taken up by Archbishop Abbot himself in A Treatise of the Perpetual Visibility and Succession of the True Church, which was published early in 1624.204 Prideaux’s Act Lecture gave him an opportunity to speak into this debate. Prideaux began his discussion by underlining that human beings cannot be liberated from slavery to sin by their own efforts, but only if they come to know Christ. And they can only come to know Christ through the doctrine handed on to the faithful by the Apostles.205 After the Apostolic era, however, the original purity of the Church’s teaching became corrupted by Popery. And although the wisest princes and people invariably resisted its spread, the whole world was eventually afflicted by this conspiracy of error. Luther and his fellow reformers pressed the Church to amend, but the Council of Trent merely entrenched superstition and scholastic speculation under threat of anathematization. The Church of Rome now arrogated to itself the title ‘Catholic,’ and claimed, as a consequence, that Protestants could not trace their Church any further back than Luther.206 So the following question arose: ‘Whether the Church of Protestants as distinct from the Papal was visible, before Luther’s Reformation, to any Christian generation in the world’.207 Prideaux began his discussion by underlining that those who are in communion through their external profession, those who are members of the visible Church, in other words, were not always united by an internal

62  Grace and Conformity and spiritual bond.208 ‘Sheep and goats are found in the same fold, vessels of honour and dishonour in the same house, the wheat is often hidden by a mass of tares’.209 Given the mixed nature of the Church, the Scriptures sometimes ascribed to the whole Church what was true of only a part of it. As Augustine pointed out,210 the Church is described, in Song of Solomon 1:5, as black, by reason of the sins of some, but also comely, by reason of the purity of the few. ‘It is said to be both (says Augustine) on account of the temporal unity in the one net of good fish and bad’.211 As a result, Prideaux remarked, when Scripture praised the Church, those words should be understood only of its glorious part. He also made the point, echoing Augustine, that the Church was often administered by citizens of the earthly city.212 As a result, the unity, sanctity, truth, and succession of the Church did not always shine out with full strength. Like the moon, the Church often contracted and suffered eclipse.213 So the Church was not always glorious, even though part of it was always visible.214 Prideaux pointed out that the term ‘Protestant’ had first been applied by his adversaries to those who had supported the Protestation at Speyer in 1529.215 The term was not new, however. The Vulgate translation of II Chronicles 24:19 referred to those prophets sent to reclaim the people of Israel from their idolatry as ‘protestantes’. Protestants were, in other words, the healthier members of the Church in every age who opposed its corruptions lest they leaven the whole mass.216 Such Protestants, Prideaux pointed out, did not invariably or immediately separate themselves from the Church, because ‘All those who abominated the Papal Curia, were nonetheless able to be in communion with the Roman Church’.217 Prideaux indicated that the term ‘visible’ properly applied to particular Churches, rather than to the Church as a whole, which could not be seen.218 A given Church might be visible by reason of the sensible communion of the members with each other. But it might also be visible by reason of the open profession of its scattered members, who agreed amongst themselves about the truth and who contended for it either by action or endurance, even though their adversaries prevented them from gathering for worship. A Church might equally be visible, when a congregation had removed itself from the Papal yoke, and continued the public preaching of that truth, under legitimate pastors, in settled and conspicuous assemblies, such as were enjoyed by the Protestants of Prideaux’s own day.219 After defining his terms, Prideaux was in a position to put his question more accurately, as follows: whether the Church (considered as the assembly

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  63 of all those who either professed Christ with the Romans, before Antichrist prevailed, or afterwards stood out for Christ) of those protesting (against corruptions, when they became intolerable), as distinct (not in terms of time, or place, or those articles which Rome had received from primitive antiquity; but in terms of protest and detestation of the superstition which Rome introduced afterwards, to the opprobrium of sincere religion) from the Papal (the Curia, faction, pestilence, and throne which assumed the mantle of the Church), was visible (whether in light, or under the cross, whether by acting, or by enduring) to the Christian world (to those who did not close their eyes, but rather enquired and observed) before Luther’s reformation (that is before Luther first began to oppose Papal indulgences) in any generation (going back to Christ)? Prideaux believed it was, and insisted that the Protestant Church of his own day could be traced back to the heroic times of Christ and the Apostles. His adversaries denied that continuity. Prideaux drew his first argument ‘from the nature of that Reformation, which did not construct a new Church, but correct the corrupt one’.220 Bellarmine admitted that the Church of Christ was not a new Church, with respect to the Jewish Church, but rather the same Church, but in a different state. Prideaux applied a similar argument to Protestantism: ‘The Church which was infected by popery, as distinct, however, from the infecting sickness, existed before Luther’s Reformation: but the Church of Protestants of today is the same, as to its essence [as that Church]; it follows that the Church of Protestants, as to its essence, predated Luther’.221 His adversaries replied that papal dominion, and the other accretions that Rome had added to the Catholic faith, were what constituted the Church, and that, without them, a congregation either ceased to be a Church, or it became heretical or schismatic. Prideaux disagreed: just as a human body could be distinguished from the leprosy infecting it, so the Church could be distinguished from Popery. Popery was an accident which, like sickness in a body, did not constitute the body, but impaired it. As a result, the removal of Popery did not bring about the end of the Church, but rather its recovery. Before the Reformation, Prideaux argued, the Church was ‘in popery;’ it was hidden beneath a deformed surface, and Popery was ‘in the Church’, as an aberrant accident adhering to it. However, the Church was not completely overwhelmed by papal squalor. So in those places where the Church had still flourished, its status changed, even though its location did not, once the yoke of Popery was lifted from it.

64  Grace and Conformity A congregation was not heretical, Prideaux underlined, if, having rejected any additions, it professed the entirety of the faith, as it was drawn from the Scriptures and comprehended in the Apostle’s Creed.222 Nor was a congregation schismatic, if it withdrew from Rome, or any other Church, on account of insupportable accretions, which were opposed to the communion and union of the Universal and Catholic Church, whether in terms of moral perversion, or doctrinal deviance.223 Prideaux drew his second argument from the fact that the many Christians before Luther had opposed papal corruption and looked for reformation.224 Since these people had harassed the Curia in both word and writing, they were undeniably visible; and to the extent that they opposed the Church’s corruptions, they were by definition Protestants.225 Prideaux perceived this desire for reformation in a large number of writers who never left the Roman Church; from William of Saint Amour, who had attacked friars in the fourteenth century, to Pope Adrian VI, who had attempted to reform the Church in the sixteenth. In fact, in the limited liturgical reforms undertaken after Trent, Prideaux found another argument in favour of Protestantism: for if the Mass could be changed in Rome, without scandal or the Church ceasing to exist; why could not such a purgation be allowed in any corrupt Church?226 Prideaux’s third argument was drawn from the visible and evidently Protestant congregations that had existed before Luther, such as the Hussites, the Lollards, and the Waldensians.227 He was aware of his adversaries’ rejoinder, that these dissenting groups believed some things that many Protestants did not. Prideaux responded that since superstition evolved over time, the Reformation needed was not always the same. It was sufficient, he thought, that they resisted papal inventions, some groups more, and some less. Furthermore, disagreements in the Church can arise concerning either discipline or doctrine; and doctrinal disagreements can arise concerning academic questions, ecclesiastical decisions, or articles of the faith. As Prideaux then underlined, ‘He does not, therefore, dissent so dangerously, who does not receive some ceremonies, & opinions of the School, as he who belittles the decrees of the Church in which he lives, or who errs in articles of faith’.228 If every disagreement were evidence of ecclesiastical division, Prideaux remarked, how is it that the Jesuits and the Dominicans were held to be members of the same Church? The history of the Church was littered with profound disagreements, but they did not all give rise to distinct Churches.

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  65 Prideaux’s fourth argument was taken ‘from the conformity of our Church, with the Primitive Church of Christ and the Apostles,’ which had, of course, existed before Luther.229 This conformity of the Protestant Churches with the Apostolic, he thought, could be demonstrated by comparing their teaching with the Scriptures. His adversaries responded that such doctrinal conformity did not demonstrate that any given Church was a true one, unless all who held that doctrine were united under one pastor. Prideaux replied that it might indeed be schismatic to leave the care of a pastor, if there was no just cause for separation. That said, the sheep were not required to submit to a pastor, who had become a wolf, or who had become an enemy to the salvation of the flock, as the Pope had.230 So if the members of a corrupt Church ‘by the mercy of God, were so united into some visible congregations, that they separated themselves, when they were able, from the filth of the papists, and, under the legitimate discipline of bishops and pastors, preserved the sincere doctrine of the gospel’ then it may be concluded that there was a Church of Protestants, distinct from the papal Church, even before Luther’s Reformation.231 The episcopalian note Prideaux struck here anticipated the similar note in the consecration sermon for Exeter College Chapel, which he preached a few months later. The Roman Catholics objected that, since there were no Protestant pastors before the Reformation, there could have been no Protestant Church either. Prideaux pointed to those moments in Israel’s history when it was without religious leaders but did not cease to be the Israel of God.232 He also pointed out that the Hussites, Lollards, and Waldensians had all had legitimate pastors. Furthermore, he indicated, some pastors may supply food for others, which they do not eat themselves, or they supply wheat that is mixed with straw. This is why Protestants are able to recognize even popish pastors, to the extent they have a legitimate vocation and preach Christ to some degree. Although, according to the measure of grace they have been given, the same Protestants may inwardly abstain from the corruptions which their popish pastors have added.233 Prideaux was ready to concede that, where a Church retained the fundamentals of the Catholic faith, it should not be deserted. The case was different, he thought, if the Church in question introduced such things as undermined the foundation of the faith or imposed unbearable injustices on its communicants. In any case, he underlined, Protestants had not actually left the Church of Rome until it became clear that it was not prepared to reform: ‘Having been warned both often and seriously, Babylon did not want

66  Grace and Conformity to be cured, what remained therefore but that we should depart?’234 For that reason, Prideaux felt that Protestants had not fled so much as been driven out. They had not so much seceded from the Rome that is, he argued, as returned to the Rome that was. ‘The sound things it retains even now, we embrace; what it adds, in its worship or its splendour, we reject: if it were to return, whence it fell, we accede, and will offer the right hand, not of servitude, but of friendship’.235

Conclusion The Act Lectures that Prideaux delivered in Oxford from 1616 to 1624 were conceived as a coherent series exploring the nature and consequences of grace. Delivered by the Regius Professor at the most high-​profile occasion on the university calendar, they represent something close to an official statement of the university’s orthodoxy on the disputed theological topics of the day. Prideaux’s stated aim in these lectures was to challenge any theology that exaggerated the role which human beings played in their salvation. As a result, it is an oversimplification to describe these lectures as a statement of the prevailing ‘Calvinist’ orthodoxy, or a ‘refutation of Arminianism’. Prideaux not only drew from a far wider range of sources than such descriptions suggest; he also had more theological opponents in mind than the Arminians. Prideaux was consciously working within an Augustinian theological tradition, whose roots lay in the Patristic era, which was exemplified by a number of medieval writers, not least Archbishop Bradwardine, and had recently been defended by many eminent Dominicans, as well as by the Reformed. Prideaux saw himself, in other words, as defending a Catholic, rather than a ‘Calvinist,’ orthodoxy on grace; a Catholic orthodoxy that he felt was also embraced by the other Reformed churches of Europe and had been deftly articulated in the Canons of Dort. The Act lectures demonstrate the remarkable breadth of the Reformed vision of grace, a breath of vision which has not always been reflected in the scholarship. For Prideaux, the theology of grace was not confined to questions of predestination, free choice, or assurance. It was also bound up with the divine knowledge, with the doctrine of justification, and with ecclesiology. Prideaux’s lectures sought to exhibit these links, illustrating how each

The Act Lectures of John Prideaux  67 area of doctrine was shaped by and shaped the others, as well as locating them within a coherent theological structure. The remarkable theological scope of these lectures was matched by the consistency of their pastoral concern. Far from elaborating an arid, predestinarian theology, divorced from the religious concerns of parish clergy and their flocks, Prideaux was constantly alert to the pastoral relevance of his teaching. He not only addressed common theoretical anxieties, such as whether the orthodox position on grace made God the cause of sin or imposed a fatalistic determinism on human existence. He also addressed practical matters such as how the orthodox teaching on grace squared with exhortation and moral effort and whether it might incline people to presumption or despair. He even dedicated an entire lecture to a defence of the Christian sense of assurance. Prideaux’s intent in these lectures was to present the Reformed teaching on grace as a source of comfort and certainty. Dixon has observed exactly the same motive among those he calls ‘practical predestinarians’. In other words, the parish and the academy may have employed different modes of theological teaching, but they did not present different theologies. Nor was the teaching of the academy uninterested in the spiritual needs of the average Christian. For Prideaux, ecclesiology was the corporate dimension of soteriology. The means of grace that God had eternally destined for the elect were to be looked for only within the visible Church. And since the members of the Church of England lived in a Church whose conformity with the Church of Christ and the Apostles could be demonstrated from the Scriptures, and which enjoyed the ministry of legitimate bishops and pastors, Papist carping was no cause for concern. The faithful could therefore be completely confident in the sacred institutions of the English Church.

2 John Davenant and the English Appropriation of the Synod of Dort The Synod of Dort and the Collegiate Suffrage ‘Grant, O God, that we may never deceive anyone through the Scriptures, nor be deceived in them, but that, seeking the truth in them, we may find it and, having found it, may defend it with steadfast faith’.1 So prayed Balthasar Lydius, the Pastor of Dordrecht, when he opened the National Synod of the Dutch Church, which had convened there on 13 November 1618. The Synod had been called to resolve the argument that had erupted, since the death of Jacob Arminius in 1609, between those who supported his teaching (called ‘Remonstrants’ after the ‘Remonstrance,’ the theological manifesto that they signed in 1610) and those who opposed it (known as ‘Contra-​ Remonstrants’).2 National Synods had been a recurrent feature of Dutch Protestantism; but the dispute over Arminius’s theology had become so toxic and so politically charged that the States General had taken the unprecedented step of inviting representatives from a number of other Reformed Churches to assist with the Synod’s work. King James I duly despatched four English theologians to the Synod, whom he assured the States General would pursue ‘the glory of God, and the rest of consciences, without any interest or partiality.’3 The four men he chose, however, were most unlikely to sympathize with the Remonstrants, since they were all distinguished exponents of Reformed Orthodoxy: George Carleton, then Bishop of Llandaff; Joseph Hall, then Dean of Worcester; John Davenant; then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and President of Queen’s College, Cambridge; and Samuel Ward, the Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.4 Before they left, the King instructed his delegates that, before expressing their views to the Synod, they were to agree a common position among themselves, ‘agreeable to Scripture and the doctrine of the Church of England’. The delegates were also told to advise the Dutch churches that ordinary Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0003

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  69 churchgoers should not be exposed to speculative theological opinions and that doctrinal innovations should be avoided. The King further commanded that, ‘if there be many oppositions between many who are overmuch addicted to their own opinions, your endeavour shall be that certain positions be moderately laid down, which may tend to the mitigation of heat on both sides’.5 James clearly expected his representatives to advance, not impede, the cause of international Protestant unity.6 Once the Synod had assembled, the delegates began questioning the Remonstrants representatives about their theology. The Remonstrants, however, rejected the authority of the Synod and refused to conform to its requirements about how they should present their opinions. Following a series of procedural arguments, the Remonstrants were therefore ejected from the Synod on 14 January 1619.7 At that point, the Synod undertook an analysis of Remonstrant opinions on the basis of their published works. All the delegations, whether from the Dutch provinces or abroad, were invited to draw up a formal expression of opinion (a ‘Suffrage’) on the questions at issue, with a view to drafting a set of canons.8 Early on in that process, the British delegation was able to fulfil their Sovereign’s irenic aspirations by smoothing over a sharp disagreement that emerged between a Dutch delegate, Francis Gomarus, and a Bremen delegate, Matthias Martinius, over what it meant to call Christ the foundation of election.9 It was not long, however, before the British delegates were struggling to maintain a united front among themselves. Martinius had raised the suggestion that the benefit of Christ’s sacrifice extended beyond the elect, and Bishop Carleton had attempted to change Martinius’s mind.10 It became clear, however, that Ward was sympathetic to Martinius’s view, and Ward apparently brought Davenant round to the same position.11 Goad and Balcanquhall, meanwhile, sided with Carleton. The British delegation was clearly divided. Ward, meanwhile, was busy undermining Carleton’s efforts to keep the division private, and irritating the Synod’s president, Johannes Bogerman, in the process.12 Martinius was not the only or most important influence on Ward and Davenant’s thinking on this issue. Davenant had in his possession, during the Synod, a manuscript of John Overall, Bishop of Norwich, which not only asserted that Christ had died for all people but also claimed that this was so clearly the confessional position of the Church of England that Overall was astonished any should question it.13 Furthermore, shortly before the Synod, Ward had received a letter from his patron, Arthur Lake, Bishop of Bath and

70  Grace and Conformity Wells, suggesting that under the Gospel Covenant the benefits of Christ’s mediation are made communicable to all.14 In other words, however eccentric their views appeared in Dort, Ward and Davenant knew that their position had influential support at home. The divided delegates turned to England for official backing: Carleton’s group to Archbishop Abbot,15 Ward and Davenant to the King.16 In the event, however, they were forced by the Synod’s timetable to state their common position before they received any input from England. So as Sir Dudley Carleton told the Archbishop, ‘our Divines, not to discover the difference among themselves, have expressed no more than wherein they all agree’.17 The way was therefore left open for Ward and Davenant’s views on the extent of grace. In a joint letter to Archbishop Abbot, the British delegates expressed the hope that he would approve of their ‘cautelous moderation . . . in withholding our hand from pressing in public any rigorous exclusive propositions in the doctrine of the extent of our Saviour Christ’s oblation’.18 The complete Suffragium Collegiale Theologorum Magnae Britanniae was published, along with the other delegations’ suffrages, with the Acta of the Synod in 1620. However, when the doctrine of the Synod of Dort came under attack there during the later 1620s, the Suffragium was republished in England several times: in the original Latin in 1626, 1627, and 1633; as well as in an English translation, the Collegiate Suffrage, in 1629.19 It effectively became the most authoritative statement of English Reformed Orthodoxy since the Lambeth Articles.20 The Suffrage addresses, in turn, each of the theological loci disputed with the Remonstrants: election and reprobation; the death of Christ; free will; conversion and perseverance. In other words, just as in Prideaux’s lectures, the orthodox Reformed teaching on grace was presented as a network of closely related and interdependent teachings, spanning a broad range of theological loci. Furthermore, although the specific heads of doctrine addressed in the Suffrage, since they reflected the topics raised by the Five Articles of Remonstrance of 1610, did not include the doctrine of justification or the doctrine of the Church as Prideaux’s lectures had, the British delegates nevertheless touched repeatedly on both of those areas of doctrine in the course of their analysis.21 In other words, the British delegates shared Prideaux’s view of the natural scope of the discussion. In their teaching on divine election, the British divines made their sublapsarian convictions clear: the object of predestination was man considered as fallen, not merely man considered as created and fallible: ‘The decree of

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  71 election, or predestination unto salvation is the effectual will of God, by which according to his good pleasure, for demonstration of his mercy, he purposed the salvation of man being fallen; and prepared for him such means, by which he would effectually and unfallibly bring the elect to the selfsame end’.22 Francis Gomarus, the one confessed supralapsarian at the Synod, used a selective quotation of Article XVII to question whether British Suffrage represented the official position of the Church of England.23 Carleton had Goad read the complete text of Article XVII in rebuttal. He then urged the Synod to follow the British lead by determining the question of election in an overtly sublapsarian manner. It was clearly unreasonable, Carleton suggested, ‘that for the particular opinion of one professor, who in this did disassent from the judgement of all the Reformed Churches, the Synod should abstain from the determination of the question’.24 The Suffrage underlined that the decree of election was an ‘effectual’ expression of the will of God; one which actually established the salvation of the elect, rather than merely enabling them to achieve salvation if they chose. It achieved this by ordaining not merely their final salvation but also ‘means agreeable to this foresaid intention; that is to say, those means, which God knew would without fail bring them to salvation’.25 The only cause of election, the Suffrage made clear, was ‘the mere good pleasure of God’.26 Given the British delegation’s role in calming the dispute between Gomarus and Martinius on the point, it is no surprise that the Suffrage offered a nuanced reading of the relationship between Christ and election. As noted above, Gomarus had taken exception to Martinius of Bremen’s teaching on this issue. John Hales set out the terms of that disagreement in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton: The doctrine generally received by the Contra-​Remonstrant in this point is, that God first of all resolved upon the salvation of some singular persons, and in the second place upon Christ as a mean to bring this decree to pass. So that with them God the Father alone is the author of our election, and Christ only the executioner. Others on the contrary teach, that Christ is so to be held Fundamentum Electionis [the Foundation of Election], as that he is not only the executioner of election, but the author and the procurer of it. . . . D. Gomarus stands for the former sentence, and in defence of it had said many things on Friday. This night Martinius of Bremen being required to speak his mind, signified to the Synod, that he made some scruple concerning the doctrine passant about the manner of Christ being

72  Grace and Conformity Fundamentum Electionis, and that he thought Christ not only the effector of our election, but also the author and procurer thereof. 27

In the Suffrage, the British delegates adopted a mediating position, emphasizing that the election of Christ was integral to the decree of election and not merely a means to effect the Father’s will; although they fell short of suggesting that Christ was the author of the decree. As the Suffrage put it: ‘Christ is the head and foundation of the elect [caput et fundamentum electorum]: so that all saving graces [omnia beneficia salutifera] prepared in the decree of election are bestowed upon the elect only for Christ, through Christ, and in Christ’.28 It then went on to expand this position as follows: God, in the eternal election of particular men, by one and the selfsame act, both doth assign Christ their head, and also doth appoint them according to his good pleasure the members of Christ: out of which purpose even before their vocation (which is afterward performed in time) God doth behold them as given unto Christ, and chosen in him, and accepted of himself. . . . Whatsoever is intended to the elect from all eternity, is (as we may so say) shut up in the will of God, neither is it immediately imparted unto us, but for Christ, in Christ, and by Christ. . . . Lastly, he is the fountain, from which all the streams of saving grace do flow to us.29

The British delegates were clear, in other words, that the election of Christ was intrinsic to the election of other human beings; and that every grace bestowed upon the elect was bestowed only for the sake of Christ, only because they were united to Christ, and only because Christ himself bestowed it upon them.30 The Suffrage underlined that ‘faith, perseverance, and all gifts of grace leading home unto salvation, are the fruits and effects of election’ not preconditions for election.31 And, although emphasizing that supernatural gifts were not given only to the elect, the delegates underlined that ‘those gifts, which have an infallible connexion with glory, and do work effectually for the obtaining thereof: (as justifying faith and persevering) are the very effects of eternal election’.32 They also underlined that ‘In predestination the means to salvation are no less absolutely decreed, than salvation itself. For howsoever salvation, in the execution thereof, dependeth upon the conditional use of the means, yet the will of God electing unto salvation is not conditional, incomplete, or mutable: because he hath absolutely purposed to give unto the

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  73 elect both power and will to perform those very conditions, namely, repentance, faith, obedience, and perseverance’.33 The Suffrage makes clear that election was not a purely theoretical matter: rather, it was a spiritual reality experienced by every true believer. They rejected the idea ‘That in this life no man can receive any fruit or perceive any sense of his own election, otherwise then conditional,’ insisting instead that ‘filial adoption is the proper, natural, and inseparable fruit of election, and is to be perceived by the elect in this life, the spirit of adoption revealing it to their hearts’.34 This sense of adoption, they underlined, was ‘the earnest of our inheritance, which is an infallible sign that we shall never be disinherited, but shall at length obtain our inheritance. . . . Neither is there any falsehood in this solid peace of conscience, in the glorying of the godly, or in this infused hope, because these gifts are both sent by God to the elect; and to this end are they fastened in their minds, that they may be certain arguments of their unchangeable election’.35 This practical knowledge of election was not drawn a priori from a grasp of the decree but a posteriori from the perception of its effects in the life of a believer. Like Prideaux, however, the British delegates were sensitive to the varying spiritual circumstances of each believer, noting that ‘the assurance of election in the children of God themselves, is not always so constant and continual, but that oftentimes it is shaken with temptations, and for a time suppressed, so that not only the degree of assurance is lessened, but even election itself, in respect of the sense and apprehension of the elect, seems uncertain, and ready to vanish’.36 The Suffrage then turned to consider the question of reprobation. ‘Reprobation properly called, or not-​electing,’ they asserted, ‘is the eternal decree of God, by which out of his most free will he hath decreed, not so far to take pity of some persons fallen in Adam, as to rescue them effectually, through Christ, out of the state of misery, and without fail to bring them to bliss’. The proper act of reprobation was therefore ‘the denying of the same glory, and the same grace, which are prepared for the sons of God by election’.37 Reprobation, the British delegates maintained, was grounded, just like election, on the ‘most free will of God [in liberrima Dei voluntate]’38 It was not a function of ‘any quality or other condition, than that which is in the elect, and which is common to the whole corrupted heap’.39 As a result, both the decree of reprobation and the decree of election proceed simply from God’s free pleasure [ex liberrimo suo beneplacito] and ‘he does not fetch the reason out of any disparity among them’.40

74  Grace and Conformity The British delegates anticipated the objection that an absolute decree of reprobation was unjust and they were careful to provide an answer. ‘The glory of Heaven is due to none, but is the “free gift of God,” Romans 6.23. Therefore God according to his most free will, can choose whom he will to glory, and overpass whom he will, and that without any aspersion of injustice or hard dealing: since that in the bestowing of free gifts there is no place left for injustice. Neither is it any inclemency or cruelty, to deny that to any man, which is no way due unto him’.41 Furthermore, they underlined, even the reprobate receive many gifts of grace: though ultimately, of course, ‘by God’s permission, [they] fall into those sins, in which being forsaken and so remaining till death, they make themselves liable to just damnation’.42 This last remark anticipated the final thesis that the British divines laid down about reprobation, namely that ‘God damns none, or destinates to damnation, except in consideration of sin’.43 The reason this must be so, the Suffrage underlined, was that ‘damnation is an act of vindicative justice, and therefore it must necessarily presuppose a precedent fault’.44 In other words, though not using Prideaux’s terminology, the British delegation was effectively making the same distinction between the negative act of reprobation, or preterition, and the positive act of reprobation, or predamnation. And, like Prideaux, they considered that whereas preterition was based on no specific quality in its object, predamnation necessarily was.45 As noted previously, the British delegates had disagreed sharply about whether Christ’s death was intended for anyone other than the elect, and the Suffrage was written so as not to exclude the position of Davenant and Ward. Nevertheless, it opened with a clear statement that the primary intended beneficiaries of the death of Christ were the elect. ‘Christ died for the elect,’ the Suffrage asserted, ‘that he might effectually obtain for them, and infallibly bestow on them both remission of sin, and salvation’.46 What is more, it added, ‘Out of the selfsame love by and for the merit and intercession of Christ, faith, and perseverance, are given to the same elect, yea and all other things, by which the condition of the covenant is fulfilled, and the promised benefit, namely, eternal life is obtained’.47 In terms of presentation, in other words, the Suffrage foregrounded the assertion that Christ’s death was intended for the elect. That, of course, reflected the majority view among the delegates, and the view of its chair, Carleton. The Suffrage then acknowledged, however, that the death of Christ had been offered as ‘a ransom for the sins of the whole world’..48 It followed that ‘there is no mortal man, who cannot truly and seriously be called by the

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  75 ministers of the Gospel to the participation of remission of sins, and eternal life by this death of Christ’. As a result, ‘There is nothing false, nothing colourably feigned in the Gospel, but whatsoever is offered or promised in it by the ministers of the Word, is after the same manner offered & promised unto them by the Author of the Gospel’.49 That said, the Suffrage underlined, this possibility of redemption, which is universal, becomes actual only as God determines it should: ‘Touching the benefit by the death of Christ, in which is contained an infinite treasure of merits, and spiritual blessings, the actual fruit doth redound to men after that manner, and that measure, and by the same means, as seems good to God himself. Now it pleaseth God even after the acceptation of this sacrifice, no otherwise to bestow actually upon any man remission of sins and eternal life, then by faith in the same Redeemer’.50 This principle enabled the British delegates to reconcile the universal saving orientation of Christ’s death, with God’s particular predestination of the elect: And here that same eternal and secret decree of election shows itself, in as much as that price was paid for all, and will certainly promote all believers unto eternal life, yet is not beneficial unto all; because all have not the gift of fulfilling this condition of the gracious covenant. Christ therefore so died for all, that all and every one by the means of faith might obtain remission of sins, and eternal life by virtue of that ransom paid once for all mankind. But Christ so died for the elect, that by the merit of his death in special manner destinated unto them according to the eternal good pleasure of God, they might infallibly obtain both faith and eternal life.51

The Gospel promise of salvation for those who believe could therefore be proclaimed to everyone, without deception.52 Furthermore, within the Christian Church, ‘wherein according to the promise of the Gospel salvation is offered to all, there is such an administration of grace, as is sufficient to convince all impenitents and unbelievers, that by their own voluntary default, either through neglect or contempt of the Gospel, they perish, and come short of the benefit offered unto them;’ for ‘Christ by his death not only established the evangelical covenant, but moreover obtained of his Father, that wheresoever this covenant should be published, there also, together with it, ordinarily such a measure of supernatural grace should be dispensed, as may suffice to convince all impenitents and unbelievers of contempt, or at least of neglect, in that the condition was

76  Grace and Conformity not fulfilled by them’.53 Nevertheless, the Suffrage underlined, ‘God is not tied by any covenant or promise to afford the Gospel, or saving grace, to all and every one. But the reason why he affords it to some, and passeth by others, is his own mercy and absolute freedom’.54 The British delegates later drew up an explanation of their position on the death of Christ, which was probably intended either for Archbishop Abbot, or for King James.55 They indicated there that they had insisted on the universal orientation of Christ’s death, out of deference both to Christian Antiquity and to the various statements made to that effect in the Thirty-​ nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer.56 To put it another way, the Suffrage was intended to be both a Catholic and a Conformist statement on grace. The delegates had derived their assertion of the universality of the Gospel promises from Article XVII, ‘where our church doth signify that the promises of God in the Gospel do appertain to all generally to whom they are published’.57 The reason why the Gospel promises are not effectual in all they suggested, was not the result of any deficiency in Christ’s death, or because the Gospel promises do not actually pertain to all; but rather ‘the defect is inherent in man, who will not receive that grace, that is truly and seriously offered on God’s part’. If that were not the case, they pointed out, ‘we cannot see what ground God’s ministers have seriously to exhort and invite all to repentance, and belief in Christ’.58 There was, in other words, an overtly pastoral motivation behind the position they had adopted. The delegates underlined that no Reformed Church explicitly restrained the benefit of Christ’s death to the elect, and that even the Contra-​ Remonstrants accepted, when pressed, that if an infidel actually came to faith, they would be saved.59 They pointed out that ‘sundry of the most learned bishops, and others in England do hold the same’.60 Taking too restrictive a position on the death of Christ would offend the Lutherans, who might be more easily brought round ‘to hold the doctrine of predestination according to the opinion of St. Augustine and the Church of England’.61 It also ran counter to a host of eminent Reformed authorities.62 Clearly, the delegates felt that their inclusive approach on this point needed some explanation for the home audience.63 In relation to free will and conversion, the British delegates adopted a predictably sombre reading of the spiritual capacity of fallen humanity. ‘The will of man being fallen,’ the delegates observed, ‘is deprived of the supernatural and saving graces with which it was endowed in the state of innocency, and therefore to the performing of any spiritual actions it is able to do nothing

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  77 without the assistance of grace’.64 In the fallen will, there is not merely the possibility of sinning, there is a headlong inclination to sin, a ‘greedy thirst and desire’ for it.65 That said, there were certain external works (such as churchgoing, and listening to sermons) which are ordinarily required before conversion and which are still within the free will even of fallen human beings.66 Furthermore, there were certain spiritual effects which might be stirred up by such activities even before conversion: a ‘knowledge of God’s will, a sense of sin, a fear of punishment, a bethinking of freedom, and some hope of pardon’.67 For, as the Suffrage underlined, ‘The grace of God is not wont to bring men to the state of justification (in which we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ) by a sudden enthusiasm, or rapture, but by divers degrees of foregoing actions taming and preparing them through the ministry of the Word’.68 For the British delegation, in other words, the institutional Church was the ordinary workshop of predestinating grace. The British delegates underlined that ‘Those whom God hath thus disposed, he doth not forsake, nor cease to further them in the true way to conversion, before he be forsaken of them by a voluntary neglect or repulse of this initial or entering grace’.69 For this initial grace can be stifled by the rebellious will of fallen human beings, such that ‘some, in whose hearts by the virtue of the word and the Spirit, some knowledge of divine truth, some sorrow for sin, some desire and care of deliverance have been imprinted, are changed quite contrary, reject and hate the truth, deliver themselves up to their lusts, are hardened in their sins, and, without all desire or care of freedom from them, rot and putrify in them’.70 Before their conversion, the British delegates insisted, even the elect behave in such a way that they deserve to be forsaken; yet ‘such is the special mercy of God towards them, that, though they do for a while repel and choke the grace of God, exciting or enlightening them, yet God doth urge them again and again, nor doth he cease to stir them forward, till he have thoroughly subdued them to his grace, and set them in the state of regenerate sons’.71 Turning to the work of conversion, the British delegates underlined that ‘God doth regenerate, by a certain inward and wonderful operation, the souls of the elect, being stirred up and prepared by the aforesaid acts of his grace; and doth, as it were, create them anew, by infusing his quickening spirit, and seasoning all the faculties of the soul with new qualities’.72 God accomplishes this work through the instrument of the Word, and in the process, ‘man is merely passive, neither is it in the power of man’s will to hinder God

78  Grace and Conformity regenerating thus immediately’.73 Once a human being has been regenerated, however, there follows ‘our actual conversion, wherein out of our reformed will, God himself draweth forth the very act of our believing, and converting: and this our will being first moved by God, doth itself also work by turning unto God, and believing, that is, by executing withal its own proper lively act’.74 In order of time, these two events cannot be distinguished, but in order of causality, God’s act of regeneration comes before the human act of conversion.75 The Suffrage flatly rejected the Arminian suggestion that converting grace is only ‘a gentle and moral suasion or inducement’.76 Moral suasion alone, it argued, was quite incapable of moving a fallen will; rather ‘the will must be overcome and changed by a powerful operation . . . that so it may effectually embrace the good represented unto it’.77 The Suffrage consequently rejected the suggestion that ‘presupposing all the operations of grace, which God useth for the effecting of this conversion, yet the will of man is still left in an equal balance, either to believe, or not to believe, to convert, or not to convert itself to God’.78 If that were the case, then conversion would ultimately be ascribed to the free will of human beings rather than the grace of God. It would also follow ‘that God affordeth no more grace to the elect, then to those, who are not elected, and that those owe no more thanks to God, then the other: inasmuch as the hand of God hath wrought in both nothing else, but an even stand of the will’.79 Nonetheless, the British delegates insisted that ‘This action of God doth not hinder the freedom of the will, but strengthen it, neither doth it root out the vicious power we have to resist, but it doth effectually and sweetly bestow on a man a resolute will to obey’.80 ‘For God doth so work in nature, even when he raiseth and advanceth it above its proper sphere,’ the Suffrage made clear ‘that he doth not destroy the particular nature and being of anything, but leaves to everything its own way and motion to perform the action’.81 When God works by his Spirit on the souls of human beings, they therefore work more freely, not less so. Even so, the delegates pointed out, ‘God doth not always so move a converted and faithful man to godly ensuing actions, that he takes from him the very will of resisting, but sometimes he suffers him, through his own weakness, to stray from the direction of grace, and in many particular actions to follow his own concupiscence’.82 It was their conviction that effectual grace did not compromise human free will that led the British delegation to condemn Johannes Piscator’s opinion that human beings can do no more good than they do, nor indeed less evil. The reprobate,

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  79 the Suffrage insisted, though unable to throw off the dominion of sin in general, remained free to avoid specific sins: the elect, though free from sin’s dominion, might still stray from the path of righteousness.83 In their discussion of perseverance, 84 the British divines began by underlining that the question of perseverance pertained only to those who had been justified by a lively faith, not to infants for whom such a faith was impossible.85 This, of course, neatly defused the argument against perseverance which was drawn from the apostasy of many who had been baptized as children.86 The Suffrage then opened its discussion by examining the case of those who were not elect. Once again, the British delegates exhibited the conviction that certain manifestations of grace were experienced even by the reprobate. ‘There is a certain supernatural enlightening granted to some of them, who are not elect,’ the delegates argued, ‘by the power whereof they understand those things to be true, which are revealed in the Word of God, and yield an unfeigned assent unto them’.87 In such people, there may arise out of this enlightening a degree of knowledge and faith, a change in the affections, and even amendment of life.88 ‘In these,’ the Suffrage went on, ‘as the enlightening and assent, yielded to the truth revealed from above, was not feigned, but true in its own kind and degree; so likewise was the change of their affections and manners: namely these beginnings or entrances were not feigned or colourable, but proceeded out of the power of those dispositions unto grace, and from the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, which they felt in themselves for a time’.89 The grace given to the non-​elect was, in other words, real grace and its spiritual effects were authentic.90 Upon such beginnings, the Suffrage went on, such people are charitably esteemed to be justified believers.91 However, ‘they, who are not elect (although they thus far proceed) yet they never attain unto the state of adoption and justification: and therefore by the Apostasy of these men, the Apostasy of the Saints is very erroneously concluded’.92 That is because Although they, who are not elect, being brought up & cherished in the Church’s bosom, are in their minds, will, and affections disposed by the aforesaid preparatives tending in some sort to justification, yet are they not thereupon placed in the state of justification or adoption. For they still retain thoroughly settled in their hearts the strings and roots of their lewd desires, to which they give themselves over, still they remain wedded to the love of earthly things, and the hardness lurking in the secret corners of their hearts is not taken away: so that either persecution or temptation arising,

80  Grace and Conformity they retire from grace, whence it is manifest that they never really and truly attain that change and renovation of the mind and affections, which accompanieth justification, nay nor that which doth immediately prepare and dispose unto justification.93

In the British delegates’ mind, the chain of graces described by St Paul in Romans 8:30 was sufficient to demonstrate that only the elect were ever truly justified. It followed that ‘Apostasy is only of those, who never reached home to true justification, and to the state of adoption. But as for those, who are the chosen sons of God, and endued with true sanctity, their perseverance is certain and undoubted’.94 For ‘Besides that dogmatical faith and some kind of amendment in affections and manners, there is in due time given to the elect justifying faith, regenerating grace, and all other gifts, by which they are translated from the state of wrath unto the state of adoption and salvation’.95 As Jay Collier has underlined, by deploying the distinction between merely preparatory or enlightening grace and regeneration proper, the British delegates were able to maintain the reality of grace in the lives of those who were not elect, whilst denying the apostasy of any who had been truly justified.96 The Suffrage went on to explain that the elect constantly retained the state of adoption and salvation, despite the fact that they daily fell into sin.97 That said, when the elect commit very grave sin, ‘they do incur the fatherly anger of God, they draw upon themselves a damnable guiltiness, and lose their present fitness to the kingdom of heaven’.98 Furthermore, ‘The unalterable ordinance of God doth require, that the faithful so straying out of the right way, must first return again into the way by a renewed performance of faith and repentance, before he can be brought to the end of the way, that is, to the Kingdom of Heaven’.99 For the elect should not wallow in their sins, placing their hope in the bare decree of election to save them: because the decree of election prescribes not merely the salvation of the elect, but also the means to that end.100 In other words, ‘the salvation of the elect is sure indeed, God so decreeing: but withal (by the decree of the same our God) not otherwise sure, then through the way of faith, repentance, and holiness. “Without holiness no man shall see God,” Hebrews 12.14’.101 Through God’s providence and mercy the elect never die in a state of unfitness for the Kingdom.102 Nevertheless, ‘between the guilt of a grievous sin, and the renewed act of faith and repentance, such an offender stands by his own desert to be condemned; by Christ’s merit and God’s decree to be acquitted; but actually absolved he is not, until he hath obtained pardon by renewed faith & repentance’.103 Damnation will never result from such a

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  81 sin in the elect, because the remedy of Christ’s blood stands as a remedy to be applied by their renewed faith.104 Furthermore, ‘In the foresaid space the right to the Kingdom of God is not taken away, universal justification is not defeated, the state of adoption remaineth undissolved, and by the custody of the Holy Spirit, the seed of regeneration, with all those fundamental graces, without which the state of a regenerate man cannot stand, is preserved whole and sound’.105That said, the Suffrage underlined that the fact ‘That the regenerate do not altogether fall from faith, holiness, and adoption, proceeds not from themselves, nor from their own will, but from God’s special love, divine operation, and from Christ’s intercession and custody’.106 The Suffrage assumed that the doctrine of perseverance, just like the doctrine of election, should be a spiritual reality in the life of a believer. ‘Every faithful man,’ it underlined, ‘may be certainly persuaded, that, through the mercy of God his Father, he shall be kept, and be brought unto eternal life’.107 The delegates underlined, however, that this sense of assurance was not necessarily constant in the life of a believer, and could be suppressed.108 The delegates underlined that assurance did not become actual in the life of a believer without a commitment to holiness of life and the proper use of the means of grace. As they put it, ‘The firm persuasion of God’s bestowing the gift of perseverance, and of our attaining of life everlasting, we attribute to the mercy of God alone; and the intercession of Christ, as to the original cause: but so, as we withal refer it to sanctification, as an unseparable companion, and a most sure sign’.109 Assurance was not invariably so strong that it shut out all fear of damnation, particularly in the face of severe temptations.110 Nevertheless, the Suffrage underlined, ‘When a faithful man, after much struggling, hath got the upper hand of these temptations, that act, by which he doth apprehend the fatherly mercy of God toward him, and eternal life to be conferred without fail upon him, is not an act of floating opinion, or of conjectural hope, such as may be built on a false ground, but it is an act of a true and lively faith, stirred up, and sealed in his heart by the spirit of adoption’.111 The British delegates explicitly rejected the suggestion that the Reformed teaching on perseverance was conducive to impiety.112 Asserting the certainty of the end did not undermine but rather establish the means to that end; for ‘the same holy men, who upon sure grounds promise unto themselves both constancy in the way of this pilgrimage, and fruition of God in their everlasting home, know also that these are not obtained without performance of the duties of holiness, and the avoidance of contrary vices’.113 Furthermore, although any doctrine could be perverted to an evil use, the

82  Grace and Conformity British delegates denied that the doctrine of perseverance had led to wantonness of life in any of the Reformed Churches that embraced it.114 In their closing remarks, the British divines acknowledged that there were many theological disagreements which might safely be left undecided: ‘But as for those which are of that nature, that, unless they be maintained, the free grace of God, in the provision for man’s salvation, is infirmed, and the free will of man set up in God’s throne, for those you ought constantly to stand, as for the free-​hold of religion’.115 Reprobation, they underlined, was a topic that needed to be handled with particular care, so as to avoid exposing the Reformed churches to scandal by ‘fearful opinions, and such as have no ground in the Scriptures . . . which tend rather unto desperation, then edification’.116 ‘Lastly,’ they concluded, ‘we are so to determine of the precious merit of Christ’s death, that we neither sleight the judgement of the Primitive Church, nor yet the Confessions of the Reformed Churches, nor (which is the most principal point of all the rest) weaken the promises of the Gospel, which are to be propounded universally in the Church’.117 So even their parting shot contained another nod to Article XVII. The British divines’ Suffrage has been discussed in detail, because it enjoyed a significant afterlife in the English church. It was not, however, the final effort of the British delegation at the Synod. Carleton was a member of the committee that drew up the final canons at Dort and, as Collier has shown, the British delegation, although asserting both the total and final perseverance of the elect in the Suffrage, nevertheless attempted, unsuccessfully, to prevent the Canons condemning the belief that some of those truly justified might ultimately fall from faith.118 Collier argues persuasively that this final effort was motivated by the delegates’ awareness that certain prominent English clergy, Overall included, held that this was a legitimate reading of Augustine.119 The British delegation also sought to have some of the harsher expressions of Contra-​Remonstrant opinion explicitly condemned, again without success.120 Nevertheless, the British delegates all assented to the final set of Canons, and the published Acta of the Synod were received by King James, the Prince of Wales, and Archbishop Abbot with every sign of approbation.121

Davenant’s Lectures: Prolegomena and Polemic Upon returning from Dort to Cambridge, Davenant resumed his duties as Lady Margaret Professor and promptly delivered a series of lectures on

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  83 predestination and another on the death of Christ. They were published posthumously as the Dissertationes Duae (1650).122 In a letter to Ward, Davenant referred to these lectures as his ‘readings . . . upon the first two articles’.123 The articles in question were the first two of the Five Articles of Remonstrance (1610) that had been confuted at the Synod of Dort. In these two lecture series, Davenant repeatedly echoed the positions that he and his fellow delegates had maintained in the Collegiate Suffrage. 124 His lectures were, in other words, an attempt to inculcate the distinctive understanding of Reformed orthodoxy which he and his fellow delegates had hammered out at the Synod. In Davenant’s lectures, Dort was certainly speaking, but with a distinctively English accent. In the preface to his lectures on predestination, Davenant echoed Prideaux’s commitment to explore the mysteries of the divine decrees no further than the light of Scripture penetrated.125 At the same time, he underlined that the doctrine of predestination should not be the preserve of the learned alone and insisted that the doctrine of gracious election should not be silenced or distorted.126 As Davenant put it, ‘We should conduct ourselves shamefully to be mute in the Cause of God, when the enemies of truth molest us on every side with their writings and cries’.127 Davenant use of Bradwardine’s phrase ‘the Cause of God’ to describe his task echoed Prideaux’s.128 Furthermore, Davenant believed, just as Prideaux did, that promoting God’s cause required quite as much engagement with Roman Catholic theology as it did with the Arminian theology. As a result, although his lectures were organized around the Remonstrant Articles, as Prideaux’s were not; they cannot be straightforwardly described as ‘anti-​Arminian,’ any more than Prideaux’s can. Davenant, like Prideaux, had a broader theological agenda than that. Davenant’s discussion of predestination opened with some prolegomena, in which he attempted to short-​circuit one or two unhelpful disputes. ‘If we consider the nature and perfection of God in se;’ Davenant began, ‘he does not see first one thing, then another; nor decree or will this first, then that; but by a unique and most simple act he sees all things from eternity at the same time, and decrees all things at the same time within himself ’.129 Like Prideaux, in other words, Davenant did not want his hearers to be distracted from the fundamental truths of predestination by the competing causal schemes being advanced amongst the Reformed. Davenant defined election as ‘the singular action of the Divine will, setting apart from eternity some for the end of glory or eternal life, [whilst] passing

84  Grace and Conformity others by’.130 Election, he argued, which concerns a person’s ultimate end, should be distinguished from predestination, which concerns the means to that end. Although some theologians confused the two, Davenant chose to use the terms strictly, taking predestination, therefore, to mean the special providence of God, whereby he resolves, from eternity, to procure efficacious means of salvation for those whom he elects in Christ; and in conformity with that resolution, brings about their salvation in time, both efficaciously and infallibly.131 All theologians agreed, Davenant underlined, that rationality is required in the subject of predestination. This is because predestination concerned a supernatural, namely eternal happiness, of which brute beasts are not capable. However, there was disagreement among the Reformed about whether sin was also required in the object of the decrees, with the some suggesting that it was not.132 Davenant underlined that the position that the decree of predestination itself was logically prior to any consideration of sin in the object of the decree was not a new opinion. He noted that the Jesuit writer Francisco Suarez had actually thought it the more common opinion among Roman Catholic theologians; so supralapsarianism was clearly not invented by Calvin and Beza, Davenant remarked, whatever its opponents may have suggested.133 Like Prideaux, Davenant deployed the distinction between the first and second acts of the decrees to explain this issue. If by predestination there is meant only a designation of the subject to the end of glory, he indicated, and by reprobation is meant only the negation of that act (i.e., preterition or non-​ election), then it is not necessary to suppose sin to have been foreseen in the subject so predestined or reprobated.134 This could be shown, he thought, by reference to the angels.135 The predestined angels, of course, never actually sinned; so the decree to elect them, and consequently pass by the others, cannot have required sin in the subject of the decree that concerned them. Since this is the case, the idea that the divine decrees of election or reprobation did not regard their subjects as fallen is not as unacceptable an idea as its opponents often alleged.136 Davenant, like Prideaux, was apparently keen to assuage this intra-​Reformed dispute. His respectful treatment of the supralapsarian position may also have been influenced by the abiding reputation in Cambridge of William Whitaker and William Perkins. Davenant nevertheless went on to observe that both Scripture and Augustine generally took predestination and reprobation to involve more than the designation to a particular end. They joined with that designation,

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  85 in the case of predestination, the decree to prepare and give certain infallible means to that end; and, in the case of reprobation, the decree to condemn the one who falls away. Consequently, Davenant judged it more fitting, indeed, more true, to say that sin was presupposed as a condition in the subjects of the decrees of both predestination and reprobation.137 As he underlined, the decree of predestination included the gift of Christ to the one predestined, as the physician and vivifier of the soul; but that, of course, assumed corruption and death in the one predestined.138 The decree of predestination also included the means whereby the one predestined would be saved, such as repentance and justifying faith; but only a sinner needed repentance or justification.139 As for the decree of reprobation, Davenant argued, since it was intended to illustrate God’s glory, it could not do so, if it destined for punishment anyone who was not worthy of punishment. For, as Davenant underlined, ‘although God is able, according to his absolute liberty, to decree within himself that to a creature, no matter how innocent, this or that good should not be communicated, which he will communicate to others; yet he is not able to decree the infliction of punishment on an innocent creature, if his justice is to stand’.140 As a result, wherever the decree of reprobation is taken to include the decision to inflict punishment, as it usually is in the Bible, it must presuppose sin in the subject of the decree.141 Davenant may have been ready to defend supralapsarianism from the calumnies of its harshest opponents; but he commended the sublapsarian position, endorsed in the Collegiate Suffrage and in the Canons of Dort, as most consonant with the truth. Davenant distinguished between ‘common conditions’ of predestination, conditions such as rationality and sin which were required in every subject of the decrees; and what he called ‘distinguishing conditions,’ conditions whose foresight led to a distinction being made between those subjects, such as the good or bad use of the will or the presence or absence of faith. Orthodox theologians accepted that there were conditions common to all the subjects of predestination and reprobation; but they denied that there were any distinguishing conditions in those subjects which might explain why one person is predestined and another reprobated.142 Davenant therefore contended that the primary question at issue between the orthodox and their adversaries was this: ‘Whether, in those who are elected and predestined to glory there is any act or quality foreseen and fore-​considered by God, or anything else, that might be the merit, cause, reason, condition, or antecedent, howsoever proposed, to the decree of election, such that upon the presence of such a

86  Grace and Conformity precedent in the Divine prevision, election is put in place, from its absence [election is] denied’.143 Numerous writers, both past and present, had claimed that there were such distinguishing conditions in the subjects of the decrees. Davenant put this down to pride, ignorance of the extent of human corruption, and a desire, born of sinful human curiosity, to explain away the inscrutability of the decrees.144 Among those misguided theologians, Davenant turned first to consider the Spanish Jesuit Gabriel Vasquez; remarking that, for all his faults, Vasquez thought more correctly about predestination than most Arminians.145 He drew Vasquez’s position principally from his Commentaria ac Disputationes in Primam Partem Sancti Thomae (1598–​1615). Vasquez had pointed to the numerous biblical passages in which predestination is associated with good works. Davenant conceded that predestination and good works were indeed associated in Scripture, but argued that Vasquez had got it the wrong way round: ‘The foresight of future holiness was not the cause of predestination, but predestination the cause of the foreseen sanctity’.146 Ephesians 2:10 states that ‘We are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them’. To put it another way, God foresees no goodness in human beings but that which he prepared for them in predestination.147 Vasquez then pointed to I Timothy 2:4, which states that God ‘desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’. How could this be true if God’s decree of reprobation was absolute? Davenant responded that God’s will to save all, in this passage, should be understood in exactly the same way as God’s will that all should come to the knowledge of the truth. But it was clear that God did not wish absolutely everyone to know the truth, since Jesus had directed the disciples not to preach the Gospel in certain areas, and God had evidently allowed many in the New World to live without it.148 Davenant therefore proposed that God may be said ‘to will’ something in two ways: by a merely approbative will or by an efficacious will. God wills something with a merely approbative will, insofar as it is something good and worthy of love. For the approbative will is nothing other than a simple complaisance of the divine will toward something suited to the divine nature. By contrast, God wills something with an efficacious will, when he decrees to bring that good thing about in a specific subject, for the purpose of his glory.149

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  87 Davenant rejected Vasquez’s suggestion that, since God was good, he would surely predestine everyone to salvation. As Davenant put it, ‘From the fact that God is good by nature, it is rightly inferred that he wills good to all his creatures; but not rightly that he wants any good whatever for any given creature, or equal and identical goods for equal creatures’.150 God does not, of course, have to give the same degree of strength or intelligence to all his creatures; and the same is true of grace. Furthermore, after the Fall, God is not obliged to desire the same degree of good for everyone. God may still show mercy to all, to some degree, without conferring on everyone the special mercy of predestination.151 To counter Vasquez’s suggestion, that the doctrine of absolute predestination implied that good works ultimately contributed nothing to salvation, Davenant referred to his earlier point that the decree of predestination included the means, as well as the end of the decree. Just because the decree to give glory was prior to the decree to give grace or good works, he argued, did not mean that grace and good works played no part at all in the attainment of salvation: ‘because when we posit an absolute and efficacious decree of God about some future event, we understand God, at the same time, in order to fulfil this intention, to will to supply and apply those means by which such an effect is produced. In the antecedent decree of giving glory, therefore, the consequent decree of giving good works is virtually included, and the other means which are the way to the kingdom of glory’.152 Good works certainly promoted the salvation of the elect, even though they were not the cause of election. Like Prideaux, Davenant rejected the suggestion that absolute predestination undermined human free choice. He echoed Prideaux’s response to this objection, underlining that the efficacious will of God not only brings about what God chooses, but brings it about in the way that God chooses. God is not limited to such means as to coerce or impose necessity upon the human will: God is able to use means which move the human will efficaciously, infallibly, yet freely. Far from eliminating human free will, Davenant pointed out, God actually strengthens it, so that it is able to choose those things that will lead to eternal life, when before it was not, as both Augustine and Domingo Banez had pointed out.153 For, as Davenant underlined, ‘to be able not to persevere in faith, to be able to fall from holiness, in a word, to be able to sin and perish, is not freedom, or a part of freedom, but a malady and weakness of the free will’.154 Predestination was, in other words, the foundation of genuine freedom.

88  Grace and Conformity Having dealt with the Jesuit view, Davenant turned to consider the arguments of the Arminians, drawing them principally from Peter Bertius’s Scripta Adversaria Collationis Hagiensis (1615). In order to make their position easier to defend against the charge of Pelagianism, the Arminians made predestination conditional upon foreseen faith rather than foreseen good works. They also claimed that this foreseen faith was not actually the cause of predestination, but merely a precondition or antecedent to predestination. Davenant was unimpressed. If God predestines someone because of foreseen faith, he argued, and passes by another because of foreseen unbelief; then faith, or unbelief, was effectively the cause of election, whatever the Arminians claimed.155 Central to the Arminian position on predestination, Davenant suggested, was the distinction between the divine decree to offer eternal life to those who persevere in faith; and the divine decree to bestow eternal life on all those whom God foresaw would actually persevere.156 Arminius and his followers identified the first of these decrees as the primary decree of predestination.157 But this, Davenant argued, radically departed from the way predestination was understood by the writers of Scripture and the sounder theologians, all of whom took predestination to mean the practical decree of God, whereby he wills to give efficacious grace and eternal life infallibly to certain individuals. The decree of predestination, Davenant insisted, had never been understood as a universal law showing everyone how salvation might be attained.158 Arminius and his followers cited Ephesians 1:4, ‘even as he chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world’. Since only believers can be said to be ‘in Christ,’ they suggested, faith must have been foreseen in all those who are elected. Davenant did not disagree that only those whom God foresaw would be believers were actually elected. However, he argued, just as he had done in relation to good works, that such people were believers because they were elected, not vice versa. Davenant pointed to John 6:37, ‘All that the Father gives me will come to me’. This verse showed, he thought, that the decree of the Father was the cause of faith: to be chosen ‘in Christ’ consequently meant to be chosen with respect to Christ, as mediator and head of the Church, to be joined with Christ by grace, and to be destined for glorification as one of Christ’s members.159 For Davenant, the source of the Arminian error about predestination was to make faith, which is properly part of the execution of predestination, an antecedent motive for the decree. As Davenant colourfully put it, if a king

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  89 decided to crown a beggar as his heir, and then decreed that the beggar should wear royal robes for that coronation; it would not follow that the king’s foresight that the beggar would wear those robes, was the cause of the beggar’s coronation. As he underlined: ‘Election before earthly time is as it were the measure of all the spiritual blessings (namely of faith, sanctity, perseverance) that are given in time; and not, vice versa, (as the Remonstrants desire) foreseen faith and perseverance the measure of election’.160 God loves those who are not yet believers, by preparing for them the gift of faith through which they will become believers and therefore inherit eternal life.161 So no adult is ever predestined to be saved without coming to faith.162 Just like Prideaux, in other words, Davenant was clear that the decree of predestination was not so absolute, that nothing was required in those who were to be saved.

Davenant’s Lectures: the correct understanding of predestination and reprobation Having answered his adversaries’ arguments, Davenant felt free to set out the orthodox position. ‘The predestination of every person to life,’ he asserted, ‘arises from the mere good pleasure of God, and not from any foreseen operations of the human will: moreover, the grace of election is the cause and fountain of all the good operations that lead to eternal life, not the reward or recompense that follows after’.163 This statement was consonant, Davenant suggested with Augustine’s definition of predestination as: ‘The prescience and preparation of the favours of God, by which all those who are freed are most certainly freed’.164 For God undoubtedly foresaw, in the elect, the gifts of grace which he had prepared for them when he elected them in Christ.165 Faith was one of these gifts, but it was not an antecedent condition or cause of election.166 Davenant then cited Aquinas’s definition that ‘Predestination is a kind of ordering, existing in the divine mind, of some persons towards eternal salvation;’ and that ‘the execution, however, of this order is [accomplished] passively in the predestined, but actively in God’.167 If predestination ordered human beings towards eternal life, Davenant argued, it made no sense to consider them as already ordered towards eternal life by their perseverance in faith, prior to that decree. Grace did not find, but kindle faith in the heart of the elect. The eternal decree, which was the cause of that grace, depended on no preceding act of the human will, but only on God’s good pleasure, as

90  Grace and Conformity Scripture frequently indicated.168 The decree of predestination therefore involved faith; but as a quality which it generated in the elect and the means whereby they came to eternal life, not as the precondition of their election.169 Given an Arminian reading of the decrees, Davenant pointed out, the divine act of election ultimately depended on human acts of faith and perseverance. As a result, the number of the elect was uncertain, until it emerged from the contingent acts of the human will: for those human acts were foreseen, rather than fore-​ordained by God.170 But if the distinction between the elect and the non-​elect flowed from the human will, rather than the operation of grace, then Peter was no more ordered towards eternal life than Judas Iscariot. The only difference between them lay in the fact that Peter, by believing and persevering, fulfilled the universal decree of God, whereas Judas did not.171 Davenant observed that the election of Christ, which was the archetype of all human election, was not the result of foreseen merits or faith. As Augustine had pointed out, the human nature of Christ was not assumed because it was a particularly excellent human nature; the incarnation of the Son in that particular human nature was rather a work of sheer grace.172 Davenant also observed, following Prosper, that the election of those who died in infancy cannot have depended on their foreseen good works or faith either; because believing and doing good works both require the use of reason, which those who died in infancy never acquired.173 Since neither Christ himself, nor the Christian children, were predestined on the basis of foreseen merit or faith, Davenant contended, the same must be true of all Christians, because election should work in the same way for everyone.174 For Davenant, only an orthodox understanding of the decrees could safeguard the inscrutability of election.175 Like Prideaux, he felt that the Jesuits and Arminians undermined this mystery, by making the rationale for God’s decrees perfectly comprehensible. In Davenant’s opinion, any theological position that made predestination easy to understand was to be rejected.176 He also believed that his opponents’ position deprived the decree of predestination of any practical power to promote salvation in the elect. Because, if the decree arose from God’s foresight of perseverance in the elect, then all the spiritual difficulties that might impede perseverance must already have been overcome before the decree was made. As a result, the decree itself did nothing to support Christians in their faith and holiness. This argument alone, Davenant thought, was sufficient to

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  91 discredit the opposing position; because it effectively turned predestination into post-​destination.177 Davenant’s concluding argument underlined his commitment to the gratuity of grace: ‘We must not introduce a kind of election that overturns the pure grace of God, and reduces the distinction of those elected and those rejected to the good use of free will: but election from foreseen faith, and non-​election from foreseen unbelief does this’.178 As Augustine had showed, Davenant insisted, ‘such a gratuitous grace cannot be established, unless this absolute predestination is established at the same time’.179 Having dealt with predestination, Davenant next tackled ‘the preterition, non-​election, or reprobation of those persons whom God did not deem worthy of that choice and special mercy which leads infallibly to life’.180 Two theological pitfalls were to be avoided here, he indicated: the first offends against the divine goodness; the second against the divine will. It was an offence against the divine goodness, Davenant argued, to teach that God, by his absolute will and independently of any consideration of sin, created certain people in order that they might perish. The cause of birth, Davenant insisted, and the cause of perishing, are quite different: that human beings are born is the gift of God; that they perish is the consequence of sin. It was true that certain people were created whom God foresaw would not partake of eternal life; whose free will God decreed not to support by special grace; and whom God further decreed justly to condemn on account of their sins. However the damnation of such people was not the goal of their creation, it was the result of their own wickedness.181 As Hosea 13:9 made clear ‘Your perdition is from yourself ’.182 It was also an offence against the divine goodness, Davenant thought, to suggest that God does nothing for the non-​elect that does not proceed from the decree of non-​election. Quite the contrary: God confers many benefits, both temporal and spiritual, on the non-​elect while they live; including some things that, in their own nature, tend to salvation.183 God does some of these things from his common love of humanity, and some on the basis of the covenant through which supernatural benefits are conferred on all members of the Church.184 In the event, of course, God’s gifts are rendered noxious by the reprobate themselves; but God did not design those gifts for abuse, nor did he supply the reprobate with any evil intent in order that he might subsequently punish them. Davenant was echoing, here, the approach that he had adopted with the other British delegates at Dort, by attempting to show that

92  Grace and Conformity the decree of reprobation was not an expression of unmitigated malevolence toward the reprobate.185 It was an offence against the divine will, Davenant suggested, to defend God’s goodness in the decree of reprobation, by compromising the absolute decree of election. This mistake was committed by all those who sought to justify the decree of reprobation by making election depend on God’s foresight of faith or obedience, thereby making reprobation depend on God’s foresight of a lack of such faith or obedience.186 According to Davenant, this turns Romans 9:18 ‘he has mercy on whomever he wills,’ into ‘he has mercy on those he sees will be just, or faithful, or obedient;’ it therefore makes the distinction between the elect and the reprobate dependent on human freedom.187 ‘We however,’ Davenant underlined, ‘just as we have taught the benefit of election to depend upon the free good pleasure of God, and not upon any prior good action of man, so we have derived the negation of that same benefit, which we are accustomed to call non-​election, preterition or negative reprobation, from the same most free will of God, doing as he pleases with what is his own’.188 He took the opportunity to underline, just as Prideaux had done, that the will to punish was different from the will not to confer a benefit. ‘That former will to punish in God,’ he insisted ‘neither could nor should be considered, unless it be with an antecedent respect to the sin of the person to be punished, as a demeritorious cause; whereas the will to pass by, the not-​willing to predestinate, that I might speak in this way, can be considered without an antecedent respect to the sin of the non-​elect’.189 The reason for this is that punishment is an act of vindictive justice, which presupposes a fault deserving of such punishment.190 Non-​election, by contrast, is not the imposition of a punishment, but the negation of an undeserved benefit, one that God is not bound to confer on anyone; and the denial of that undeserved benefit does not require an antecedent fault.191 Davenant summarised his own position on reprobation as follows: The prescience of demerits is not the cause of preterition, non-​election or reprobation taken strictly and properly; but, just as it depends on the mere good pleasure of God, that some certain persons are infallibly ordained to grace and glory, through the special providence of God which we call predestination; so, it depends on the mere freedom of God, that some other persons are not so ordained, but left alone by this efficacious grace, and permitted to fall away from glory.192

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  93 As a result, if anyone asks why God softened Paul’s heart but not that of Judas Iscariot, Davenant would not refer them to the foreseen faithlessness or demerit of Judas, but would simply say, with Paul, that God ‘has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills’. Davenant then turned to address the arguments adduced by those opposed to his position, again engaging with Jesuit as well as Arminian sources.193 He began with those scriptural passages which seemed to suggest that God does not want anyone to perish.194 Davenant explained these were expressions of God’s simple complaisance at the prospect of all people coming to belief and being saved, not expressions of God’s efficacious will to save all. As a result, they were perfectly compatible with God’s decree to permit some to persist in their infidelity and fall away from salvation.195 Since the negative act of reprobation denied to nobody a benefit which was owed them, Davenant pointed out, there could be no suggestion that it was unjust.196 As for the positive act of reprobation, he again underlined, ‘no one is damned because a reprobate, but because guilty’. 197 Davenant also underlined that the rebellion, obduration and ultimate perdition of a sinner, were not caused by the decree, they were merely its consequences. Their cause was actually the corrupted nature and sin of the reprobate. As he made clear, the means and causes of damnation are not connected in the same way with the decree of reprobation, as the means and causes of salvation are connected with the decree of predestination. And the reason for this distinction briefly is: that the means and causes of salvation are certain spiritual goods; the good falls under the providence of God, as intended, caused and ordained by him; but the means and causes that lead to damnation are spiritual evils: evil however falls under divine providence in this way, not as intended and caused, but as foreseen, permitted and regulated.198

Davenant insisted that Christ’s command to preach the Gospel to all people was not inconsistent with absolute reprobation. It could not be inferred from this command, he thought, that God would give special grace to all who heard the Gospel; for there is no valid conclusion from the will of command to the will of election. Nor did this make God’s offer of grace in the Gospel dishonest; for God may offer, truly and without any dissimulation, salvation to the reprobate, on the condition of repentance and faith, even though he has not decreed to ensure that they will actually repent and believe. As Davenant put it: ‘In this therefore that hidden decree of election and

94  Grace and Conformity reprobation manifests itself, that the death of Christ, which by the ordination of God would have availed any man, if he believed, for reconciliation and the obtaining of life, nonetheless does not profit any but the elect, to whom only is given, out of special mercy, that grace by which efficaciously they are able to, and want to, and actually fulfil the stated conditions’.199 Davenant’s defence of the veracity of the Gospel call, here, anticipated the position he would adopt in his lectures on the death of Christ.200 In answer to the suggestion that the absolute decree of reprobation turned the Gospel into a ministry of condemnation, by making it a means to the reprobate’s damnation; Davenant reiterated his earlier point that it is a mistake to assume that everything that happens to the non-​elect flows from the decree of reprobation. He conceded that God knew the preaching of the Gospel would ultimately be harmful to the reprobate, since God had not decreed to give them the special grace which would have enabled them to receive it with profit. However, Davenant categorically denied that the preaching of the Gospel, or any other instance of common grace, proceeded from a primary intention to condemn or that it should be considered a means subordinate to damnation. God’s intention, Davenant argued, should always be understood from the nature of the means themselves, not from an evil outcome which God foresaw but did not prevent.201 The preaching of the Gospel is, by nature, ordered towards human salvation and God administers it to no one with the primary intention of condemning them. However, when human contempt intervenes, the Gospel gives rise to the condemnation of the contemptuous person, an outcome which God foresaw and chose not to impede. God has no need to provide the reprobate with means by which they will be led to eternal death, since they produce such means in abundance by themselves whenever God does not oppose his special grace. The means of salvation offered to the reprobate therefore flow from God’s love of humanity (φιλα νθρωπια), and from his general providence, which so disposes of means to an end, that it can permit a second cause to fall away from that end through their own fault. Davenant also insisted that absolute reprobation did not prevent Christians from praying for all people, as scripture commands.202 The one praying does not need to be certain that their prayer will result in the salvation of those for whom they pray. It should be sufficient for a Christian that God commands them to pray in this way, that such prayers are pleasing to God, and that they are conducive to God’s glory. The outcome of those prayers can safely be left

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  95 to God. Indeed, since it cannot be known who is reprobate and who is not, it is the duty of a Christian not to hold any person a reprobate.203 Nor, Davenant insisted, was the decree of absolute reprobation an excuse for Christian ministers to be slack. For, although God’s decree of predestination cannot be altered or frustrated by human action, Christian ministers can and should promote the effects of predestination and the benefits prepared for human beings within that decree. The decree of predestination is absolute of causes, but not of means; so the constancy of divine election does not make all human offices unnecessary, either with respect to themselves, or with respect to others.204 Once again, Davenant’s pastoral concerns were not far from the surface here. Having answered his adversaries’ arguments against absolute reprobation, Davenant turned to set out the orthodox view. Following Bradwardine, Davenant defined reprobation, when understood negatively as preterition or non-​election, as an eternal unwillingness of God to confer special grace on a certain person. 205 Romans 9,206 he contended, made clear that such non-​election does not proceed from foreseen infidelity, but from the mere will of God.207 Ephesians 1:11 further established that God ‘works all things according to the counsel of his will,’ including reprobation. The Scriptures also indicate that some people belong to Christ, whereas others do not;208 and that only those who belong to Christ can believe.209 In other words, the giving of certain persons to Christ, and the not giving of others, must precede their faith, not follow it.210 The truth of his position, Davenant urged, is also clear from another point Bradwardine had made, that God is as sovereign over the things that do not exist, as over the things that do. 211 So the fact that, in a given person, penitence and perseverance do not exist cannot be ascribed to anything other than the will of God.212 If such things were left to the will of human beings, Davenant argued, then it would be possible to frustrate the purpose of Christ’s passion; because, since the human will is contingent, everyone could reject the grace of God. However, it is alien to sound theology and contrary to the Scriptures, Davenant urged, to turn the death of Christ into a potentially unsuccessful gamble.213 As the Scriptures made clear, God has infinite ways of moving human hearts towards repentance, belief and perseverance. That saying of Proverbs 21:1, ‘The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will,’ was as true of common hearts as royal ones.214 So, if some people never came to faith and perseverance, it could only be concluded

96  Grace and Conformity that it was not God’s will that they should. If God had wanted to give faith to both Peter and Judas Iscariot, they would both have believed; because, if God wishes to instil a good quality into a human will, they will not resist, since God would produce in that person they will not to resist.215 Davenant insisted that the doctrine of absolute reprobation was not simply the opinion of Augustine and his disciples. It was also the doctrine received by those famous church councils that opposed the Pelagians and Semi-​pelagians. It was important to make this point, Davenant believed, because Arminius, Corvinus and others, had claimed that the doctrine of absolute reprobation was never confirmed by any council. Davenant disagreed, and although he admitted that the Early Church Councils may not have discussed the doctrine in precisely the same terms as his contemporaries, he insisted that they decreed many things that cannot stand without accepting the absolute decree of reprobation.216 For Davenant, as for Prideaux, in other words, absolute reprobation was a Catholic truth.

Davenant’s lectures: predestination in pulpit and pew Having completed his exposition of predestination and reprobation, Davenant felt that the last thing he needed to do was reprove the abuse of the doctrine and explain how it could be fruitfully used by both ministers and their audiences. His Epilogue had, in other words, an overtly pastoral focus. In that, it went significantly beyond what had been offered within the Collegiate Suffrage, despite the British delegates’ evident concern for the pastoral application of their doctrine. In the first place, Davenant argued, the doctrine of absolute predestination was being mishandled, if it was communicated out of its due place. The people should first be summoned to faith and repentance, before being introduced to the mysteries of election. John 3:16 was, he thought, the model of where to begin: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’.217 Another pastoral error, Davenant argued, was wandering into questions to subtle for ordinary capacities, questions more fit for the university than the pulpit. Some questions, he thought, were probably too subtle even for the schools, and were only to be undertaken there if the assaults of theological adversaries and the need to maintain the orthodox cause made it absolutely necessary.218 Davenant was critical of foolish young preachers who used the

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  97 pulpit to inform people about the latest theological controversies. His advice was therefore to preach only what was essential, although his view of what was essential was reasonably comprehensive: The Ministers of the word therefore, as oft as occasion is offered of treating of Predestination before the people, must be content to contain themselves within those bounds which the holy Scripture hath clearly chalked out unto us. Let them teach, how God elected his own unto life eternal before the foundations of the world were laid. Let them teach, how this election flowed not from the foresight of man’s merits, but from the free will and gracious pleasure of God electing. Let them teach, that whatsoever saving good is found in us, is the effect of this free and gracious mercy. Let them teach, that the assurance of our Election is not to be sought in God’s secret decrees or our own idle imaginations, but in the effects and operations of the faithful and sanctified soul. These and other such doctrines which are clear, sound and profitable, may and ought be preached unto Christians.219

It was a grave mistake, Davenant suggested, to preach the infallible salvation of the elect, without articulating the means whereby the elect are brought to that salvation. As he underlined, Romans 8 makes clear there is no election without vocation, justification and sanctification. Ephesians 1 also makes clear that there is no election without holiness and the manifestation of spiritual gifts.220 So, a wise minister, Davenant insisted, would never teach his people that certain people are absolutely predestined to eternal life, without also teaching them that the elect are none other than those who walk by faith and holiness in the way that leads to eternal life. Likewise, a prudent minister would never teach that certain people are passed-​by, without also teaching them that those passed by are none other than those who bring destruction upon themselves, by their own voluntary impenitence, infidelity and impiety.221 In his advice to the laity, Davenant remarked that the two spiritual dangers that arose from a misunderstanding of this doctrine were presumption and despair. To counter the first of those risks, Davenant underlined that ‘the decree of predestination as it concerns others is altogether by us unsearchable .... As it concerns ourselves, it is unsearchable also à priori, in its causes, and is to be perceived only by its effects after our conversion and sanctification’.222 He clearly had an eye here not only to those who misused their assumed election to excuse bad behaviour, but also to those who misapplied the doctrine

98  Grace and Conformity of predestination to divide the Christian community into the godly and the rest. Davenant was clearly doing his best to ensure that his students did not fall into the noxious opinions often ascribed to the Reformed by their theological opponents.223 It is a certain token of wickedness, Davenant underlined, to turn a doctrine that should encourage holiness into an excuse for sin. No one could conclude that they would be saved regardless of how they live, because predestination carried no one to heaven without a due use of the means of salvation. For the decree as to the end of a human life, includes within it the ordinary means whereby a human life tends to that end.224 Prideaux, of course, had made exactly the same point. The doctrine of the absolute decrees was also, Davenant believed, no cause for despair. Scripture makes clear that some people are elected and some are reprobated, but it does not identify who those people are. As a result, no one can rationally conclude from this doctrine that they are among the reprobate, least of all a member of the Church. Through the preaching of the Gospel, Davenant underlined, a Christian receives God’s call and the Son of God is offered to him, together with the remission of sins and eternal life. A Christian also has the Spirit of God standing and knocking at the door of his heart and enjoys many other privileges which, although they are not sufficient of themselves to demonstrate that such a Christian is one of the elect, they sufficiently demonstrate that he neither can nor should have any preconception that he is reprobate. Presumption that one is reprobate is as foolish as presumption that one is elect. 225 Davenant insisted that the potential abuse of this doctrine by the profane was no reason to bury it in silence. Election, he insisted, is a singular benefit of God, and the foundation of all the other gifts that lead to salvation. It is the highest ingratitude to neglect it.226 The doctrine is also abundantly useful for a Christian to know. It illustrates divine attributes such as infallible prescience, absolute dominion, sovereignty and immutability. Above all, it illustrates God’s graciousness. For, as Davenant urged, ‘We ought to acknowledge and admire in God a free and gracious mercy altogether undeserved on the creatures’ part: and this attribute also doth shine so clear in the doctrine of Predestination, that those who go-​about to deny or obscure it must withal be guilty of denying or obscuring this mere and free mercy of God showed in the salvation of man’.227 Rightly understood, Davenant argued, the doctrine of predestination stirs up a Christian’s love for God. It encourages godliness in those who have a lively

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  99 sense of their election. It is also a powerful means for beating down human pride and instilling humility.228 Turning one of his adversaries’ arguments on its head, Davenant even suggested that, rightly understood, the doctrine of predestination was actually a sovereign remedy for despair. For, as he underlined, ‘whatsoever hope the proud Pelagian can build upon the power of his own free-​will, which is none at all, that and more can the righteous build upon the alone mercy of God, which is infinite’.229 Predestination helped sustain Christians in adversity, because it gave them the confidence that, whatever afflictions they might be undergoing in this life, the joys of heaven awaited them. Rightly understood, it also prepared them for those afflictions, because ‘whosoever understandeth this doctrine aright, understandeth withal that he was elected not straight to be carried into heaven on a bed of down, but to become conformable unto the Head of the Elect Christ Jesus as well in the cross as in the crown, and first in the cross, after in the crown’.230

The Death of Christ Jonathan Moore has suggested that Davenant’s lecture series on the death of Christ was an example of what he calls ‘English Hypothetical Universalism’.231 This might have surprised Davenant. He would probably have denied that there was anything specifically ‘English’ about them, beyond their consonance with the Thirty-​nine Articles. In fact, his lecture series opened with a historical introduction in which he made clear that the position he intended to advance was neither idiosyncratic nor national but both Catholic and Reformed.232 Before Augustine, he pointed out, the Church had been of one mind: the death of Christ was endured for the whole human race, even though it was actually beneficial only for those who believed.233 So clear was this consensus that some Semi-​Pelagians had tried to undermine Augustine’s teaching on grace, by suggesting that it restricted the benefit of the death of Christ to the elect, a charge which had been refuted by Prosper.234 There had been further discussion of the question in the early Middle Ages, Davenant noted, but most schoolmen had believed it sufficient ‘to teach that Christ died for all sufficiently, but for the elect effectually;’ a statement, Davenant thought, with which no one could reasonably disagree.235 For Davenant, his approach to the atonement was simply what the Church had always taught. Nor did he feel that it represented a novelty

100  Grace and Conformity amongst Protestants. The chief doctors of the Reformed Church, Davenant argued, had ‘taught that [the death of Christ] was proposed and offered to all, but apprehended and applied to the obtaining of eternal life only by those who believe’.236 He found evidence for this position in the writings of Melanchthon, Calvin, Bullinger, Aretius, Musculus, and Zanchi.237 Admittedly, some Protestant divines had recently stepped beyond this well-​ established orthodoxy, either by teaching that Christ had died for the elect alone, or by teaching that Christ had died to redeem all individuals equally; so Davenant proposed to establish Catholic truth on this matter through a series of theses.238 His first thesis was that ‘The death of Christ is represented in holy Scripture as a universal remedy [which is] applicable for salvation, by the ordinance of God and the nature of the thing itself, to all and every human being’.239 ‘The death of Christ,’ here, Davenant underlined, was a synechdoche, standing for ‘that infinite treasure of merits, which the Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ, by doing or suffering, prepared and accumulated for our benefit’.240 Although the death of Christ, so understood, was offered as a remedy applicable to every human being, it would not actually profit anyone without specific application.241 The death of Christ was universally applicable, in other words, but it was not universally applied, ‘For God has ordained that it should be applicable to every individual through faith, but he has not determined to give that faith to every individual, by which it may be infallibly applied’.242 The fact that the means of applying this universal remedy were given to some human beings and not others was a mystery, which Davenant referred to the hidden will of God. 243 Davenant set out the scriptural foundations for this thesis.244 He underlined, as he did so, that those theologians who so emphasised the doctrine of predestination that they ended up undermining the belief that Christ had died for the world, ‘overturn also the substance of our preaching of the Gospel, which is found chiefly in this, that we assure every man, that God is so reconciled to him by the death of Christ, that if he believes in Christ, he will not impute his trespasses to him, but will award him with eternal life’.245 Once again, pastoral concerns underlay Davenant’s academic teaching.246 He believed that limiting the effect of Christ’s death to the elect made it impossible to promise the unconverted that, if they came to faith, they would certainly be saved. As Davenant underlined, ‘a real call to believe presupposes an object in which to believe’; yet ‘If he should be called to faith in Christ, to whom Christ was not applicable from the ordination of God, faith would be

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  101 required in a false object’.247 A sinner can only be invited to put his trust in Christ, if he can be assured that Christ died for him. Davenant insisted that the view he was advancing was the confessional position of the Church of England. ‘Thus speaks our English Church, Article XXXI’ he noted, ‘ “The offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual: and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone.” ’248 The consonance of his teaching with the Thirty-​nine Articles was a point he repeatedly underlined, referring elsewhere to Article II, which describes the death of Christ as a ‘sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men’249; and to Article XV, which refers to Christ as ‘the Lamb without spot, who by sacrifice of himself once made, should take away the sins of the world’. 250 The second thesis Davenant asserted was that the death of Christ was sufficient for the salvation of every human being, not by reason of mere sufficiency or intrinsic value, according to which the death of God is a price more than sufficient for redeeming a thousand worlds; but by reason of the Gospel covenant confirmed with the whole human race through the merit of his death, and of the divine ordination depending upon it, according to which, under the possible condition of faith, the remission of sins and eternal life is decreed to be tendered to every human being who will believe, on account of the merits of Christ.251

As Moore has pointed out, Davenant was distinguishing, here, between ‘mere sufficiency’ and ‘ordained sufficiency’. Davenant explained this distinction with an analogy. If a prince has enough money in his treasury to ransom some captive subjects, then he has a ‘mere sufficiency’ to do so, even though he has no intention of using his money for that purpose: but the same money may be said to have an ‘ordained sufficiency’ to ransom them, once the prince has earmarked it for that purpose.252 The intention gives the money in question a specific orientation. Applying this distinction to Christ’s death, Davenant contended that its ‘mere sufficiency’ for redemption was simply of a factor of its inherent value, abstracted from any actual redemptive purpose; whereas the ‘ordained sufficiency’ of Christ’s death for salvation, was its value, considered as intended and offered for the purpose of human redemption.253 The death of Christ had, in other words, both an inherent sufficiency to redeem the world, and

102  Grace and Conformity also ‘a certain ordination, according to which the aforesaid sacrifice was offered and accepted for the redemption of all humankind’.254 Furthermore, Davenant argued, an ‘ordained sufficiency’ might be ordered towards its end in either an ‘absolute’ or a ‘conditional’ manner. Extending his analogy, he indicated that the money destined to ransom the prince’s captive subjects would have an ‘absolute ordained sufficiency’ if the prince intended simply to disburse the money and deliver the captives; but it would have a ‘conditional ordained sufficiency’ if the prince expected the captives to do something before he would make the money available for their release. Davenant then made clear that the death of Christ had a conditional, rather than an absolute ordination to the redemption of humanity. God expected human beings to do something, in order that the merit of Christ be applied to them; God expected them to put their faith in Christ. The death of Christ was therefore the basis of the Gospel covenant in which salvation is promised to anyone who believes.255 Davenant underlined, however, that alongside the open, conditional ordination of the death of Christ towards the redemption of the entire human race, expressed in the Gospel covenant, there was also a secret and absolute ordination of that death towards the redemption of certain specific persons.256 This was the ‘new’ covenant, referred to in Hebrews 8:10,257 which ensured that the elect fulfilled the terms of the Gospel covenant by giving them a persevering faith.258 Only Christ knows who is included within this secret and absolute orientation of his death; but without it, human depravity is such that the Gospel covenant would be in vain, because fallen human beings would never believe in Christ, unless efficacious grace ensured they did.259 Davenant insisted that ascribing to the death of Christ a ‘mere sufficiency’ for the redemption of humanity, without any ‘ordained sufficiency’ of the sort he described, would undermine the Scholastic axiom that Christ died for all men ‘sufficiently’. He criticized those among the Contra-​Remonstrants who had suggested that it did, taking particular aim at the delegates from Nassau, who had maintained such views at Dort.260 Davenant’s strong objection to such views raises a question mark over Moore’s designation of his position as ‘English Hypothetical Universalism;’ because Davenant distanced himself from those who, in his words, ‘admit only such an oblation and sufficiency in the death of Christ as is merely hypothetical, if it be referred to all’.261 For Davenant, the universal orientation of the death of Christ was not hypothetical but actual, albeit conditional.262

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  103 Davenant had no truck either with the suggestion that Christ’s death was a sufficient ransom for all, but had not actually been offered for all. As he put it, ‘truly common sense refuses that it should be granted that he died sufficiently for all, who is denied to have died or to have been offered up for some’.263 Davenant did not merely take issue with foreign Contra-​Remonstrants, he also turned his fire on an English theologian who had denied that Christ died for all men, the separatist exile William Ames. Ames had granted, Davenant indicated, that the sufficiency of Christ’s death was not directed in the same way towards devils as it was towards human beings. But how would that be, if Christ’s death was not directed towards humanity in some way? For if Christ’s death is considered in terms of its ‘mere sufficiency,’ apart from any salvific orientation; then it has no more bearing on human beings than on devils.264 Davenant’s choice of Ames as his English opponent had, of course, the polemical advantage of linking the position that he was opposing with separatist Puritanism: an engagement with the widely revered Perkins on the topic might have been more problematic.265 Davenant’s third thesis asserted that although the death of Christ had a universal reach, ‘yet the aforesaid death of Christ does not place anyone, at least of adults, in a state of grace, or actual reconciliation, or of salvation, before he believes’.266 This thesis was directed against those who drew, from the fact that Christ had died for all people, the erroneous conclusion that all human beings were now reconciled to God. Davenant perceived this error in some Remonstrants, as well as in Francis Puccius and Samuel Huber, two writers whom Prideaux had also condemned on this point.267 To avoid this error, Davenant’s thesis established two distinct steps in the process of human redemption: the first, whereby, through the death of Christ, the divine will is so inclined toward humanity as to make salvation possible for every human being on the condition of faith; the second, whereby, upon believing, every elect person is received into the Father’s favour, justified and given the right to eternal life. Davenant made clear, as he had done in his lectures on predestination, that faith, although it was a human act, was nonetheless a gift of God. As he put it, ‘He who promulgated this universal decree of the Gospel, “he who believes shall be saved,” nevertheless has reserved to himself the special privilege of giving faith to some, of his special mercy, and of his not-​granting of it to others, of his non-​pleasure, and on account of their manifest unworthiness’.268 The death of Christ bound God to be reconciled with every human being who believes; but it did not bind God to bestow efficacious grace on every human being, by which they might believe.269 In this way, his teaching

104  Grace and Conformity on the universal applicability of the death of Christ could be squared with his teaching on predestination and reprobation. This third thesis was also effective, as Davenant pointed out, against any who claimed that, by virtue of the death of Christ, all the elect were justified, even before they believed. Davenant could not think of any Protestant writers who taught this, but he noted Richard Thomson’s claim that some did.270 Thomson’s claim has been endorsed in the recent scholarship.271 Needless to say, Davenant had no time for such views. Remission of sins did not flow immediately from the death of Christ, he insisted; it required repentance and faith. For, although Christ’s death was sufficient to expiate every sin, it would not make any human being righteous, unless they were united with him; and faith was the proper instrument of union with Christ.272 So the fact that God had eternally decreed that a given person would be saved did not mean that they were actually justified before they came to faith. God’s eternal decrees were distinct from their saving effects in time.273 The last thesis that Davenant proposed was directed against those who argued that since Christ’s death was universal in extent, it was now incumbent upon God, as a matter of justice, to supply sufficient means of salvation to everyone. Against that suggestion, Davenant insisted that even given the universal orientation of Christ’s death, ‘it is consistent with the goodness and justice of God to supply or to deny, either to nations or to individuals, the means of application, and that according to the pleasure of his will, not according to the disparity of human wills’.274 Davenant specifically denied, as Prideaux had, that God was under any obligation to supply grace to those who rightly used the gifts of nature, as some Arminians had suggested. He quoted the Dominican theologian, Diego Alvarez, and Robert Abbot, Prideaux’s predecessor as Regius Professor at Oxford and one of Davenant’s own predecessors as Bishop of Salisbury, in support of his view.275 ‘God is bound to no man,’ he insisted, ‘and owes no man anything, except of his own gracious and voluntary promise’.276 Although Davenant accepted that some sparks of natural light remained within fallen humanity, along with an imperfect desire for moral good; he denied, again quoting Abbot, that such corrupt ruins should produce anything but corruption.277 Quite the contrary: ‘We say . . . that all men, from their bad use of nature, render themselves unworthy of the Gospel’.278 Furthermore, he insisted, God does no injustice in not granting the means of application of Christ’s death to everyone, for ‘it is just and right that the free application of his own benefit should be in the power of the benefactor’.279

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  105 Davenant underlined that his position on this question had the advantage of illustrating not only ‘the absolute liberty of God in the first conferring of grace’280 but also ‘the gratuitous and special mercy of God in giving to some men both the light of the Gospel and saving grace’.281 It also ensured that ‘All occasion of glorying is taken away from men, and the glory of human salvation is wholly attributed to God’.282 Davenant’s teaching was once again pastorally inspired and designed to inculcate spiritual humility. Davenant brought his lectures to a close with a rather briefer discussion of how the death of Christ related to the predestinated alone. As he underlined, We ought not . . . to oppose to each other and, as it were, clash together these divine decrees, “I will that my Son should offer himself on the cross for the sins of the human race, that all men individually may be saved by believing in him”; “I will so dispense my efficacious grace that not all, but the elect only, may receive this saving grace whereby they may be saved”. If these two decrees seem to any to oppose each other, he ought rather to acknowledge the weakness of his own understanding, than to darken any of those things which are so plainly contained in the Holy Scriptures.283

In particular, Davenant insisted, against Arminian writers such as Grevinckhoven: Christ did not die in order to give human beings the mere possibility of salvation, a possibility which they might ultimately reject; for ‘we by no means think that the death of Christ was like a throw of dice, but that it was decreed from eternity by God the Father and Christ, through the merit of his death, infallibly to save certain persons’.284 Davenant found ample warrant for this belief in the Scriptures and the Church Fathers. ‘Christ died for the sheep,’ he underlined, ‘for the children of God, for the Church, for the members destined for him from eternity according to the purpose of election, namely, that by the merit of the death of Christ, this predestination of God might be accomplished in them’.285 Christ died for everyone; but he so loved his elect, that he determined, by his death, to ensure they would come to faith and eternal life.286 Davenant thought it frankly incredible to suggest, as Grevinckhoven did, that the precious blood of Christ might have been shed for the sake of an outcome that ultimately depended on uncertain determinations of the human will.287 Some might object, Davenant suggested, that there was an incongruity between the universal scope of the death of Christ and the divine decree to give faith only to some. He disagreed. The special intention of God to give grace

106  Grace and Conformity and salvation to the elect, on account of the merits of Christ, did not conflict with the conditional promise that all who believe shall be saved, ‘but is rather a special design subordinate to the infallible fulfilment of the universal compact’.288 In any case, since the death of Christ was a free gift of God to the human race, the distribution of the benefits arising from that gift is undoubtedly, and rightly, God’s prerogative. Like Prideaux, Davenant found warrant for his belief that God restricted the saving application of Christ’s death to the elect in Christ’s prayer in John 17.289 It was important, Davenant argued, to retain the proper proportion between Christ’s offering of himself for humanity and his intercession for them. It was by virtue of Christ’s particular intercession, that the elect were given faith, perseverance, and salvation. This was the reason that Davenant felt able to agree with Suarez that ‘ “As Christ prayed for men in a different way, so he merited in a different way, on which account, although he is the universal redeemer of all men, and a sufficient cause of salvation, yet in a special way he is the effectual cause of salvation to those whom he makes obedient to himself.” ’290 Like Prideaux, Davenant believed that redemption and grace worked in different ways. The Canons of Dort had not actually determined the extent of the atonement; simply stating that ‘The death of the Son of God is the only and most perfect sacrifice, and satisfaction for sins, of infinite price and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world’.291 Davenant’s lectures on the death of Christ therefore went significantly beyond the teaching of the Synod. They reflected rather the teaching on the death of Christ which had been advanced by the British delegation in their Collegiate Suffrage. That said, Davenant’s lectures significantly altered the emphasis and presentation of the Suffrage. For whereas the Suffrage foregrounded the particular orientation of Christ’s death towards the elect, whilst conceding that Christ had nevertheless died for all people, Davenant’s lectures foregrounded the universal orientation of Christ’s death to all human beings, whilst admitting that it also had a particular orientation towards the elect. To that extent, his lectures anticipated the reordering of the British delegates’ theses on this point in the 1633 edition of the Suffrage. By then, Bishop Carleton had died, thus leaving Davenant as the senior surviving author.292

Conclusions The Collegiate Suffrage of the British delegation at Dort was the most authoritative statement of English Reformed orthodoxy on the Arminian dispute

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  107 and it was repeatedly republished as that teaching came under attack in the reign of Charles I. Mindful of the King’s instruction that their position should be agreeable to the doctrine of the Church of England, the British delegates made a clear effort to ensure that their teaching reflected the confessional position of the English Church, as expressed in the Thirty-​nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. To that extent, the Suffrage was a self-​consciously Conformist document. Echoing Article XVII, the Suffrage advanced an explicitly sublapsarian reading of predestination and reprobation. Following disagreements among the British delegates, the Suffrage emphasized the particular orientation of the death of Christ toward the salvation of the elect, but acknowledged that it was nevertheless a ransom for the whole world, such that all who believed might be saved. The Suffrage insisted that the will of fallen human beings was incapable of any spiritual actions without the assistance of grace, whilst underlining that this assistance generally came gradually and was mediated through the institutions of the visible Church. It also underlined that this assistance, though so effectual as invariably to achieve its aim, did not compromise but strengthened the natural freedom given to human nature. The Suffrage balanced its confidence in the perseverance of saints and the corresponding possibility of a reliable sense of Christian assurance, with an assertion of the authenticity of the grace experienced by the non-​elect and the reality of alienation from God experienced by the elect after grave sin. When Davenant returned from Dort to Cambridge, he was soon offering a lecture series on predestination and another on the death of Christ, his ‘readings upon the first two articles,’ as he would later call them. In these lectures, Davenant was not simply delivering the doctrine of Dort as it had been stated in the Synod’s Canons; rather, he was taking his inspiration from the Collegiate Suffrage. The theology of grace inculcated in his lectures was, in other words, a theology of grace that reflected the Church of England’s breadth of theological opinion and was consciously shaped by her confessional and liturgical norms. The lectures were, a consciously Conformist undertaking. Davenant’s lectures cannot be described, any more than Prideaux’s, as straightforwardly anti-​Arminian. Davenant shared Prideaux’s wider theological vision, and spent as much time engaging with Roman Catholic theology as he did engaging with Arminian theology. Like Prideaux, he believed that he was defending a Catholic doctrine of grace, in continuity with the

108  Grace and Conformity wider Protestant tradition, and in opposition to any theological tendencies that risked making salvation dependent on human beings. The evident pastoral concern shown by Prideaux in his lectures was even more pronounced in Davenant. Taken together, therefore, these two professors reinforce the message that academic theology was never isolated from ministerial concerns. In fact, it was, to a great extent, shaped by them. Like Prideaux, Davenant was keen to clear up any misunderstandings of the orthodox teaching on grace that might obscure the goodness and justice of God. Davenant explained that the creation of the reprobate was an instance of divine beneficence, not divine malice. He demonstrated that God was not the efficient cause of the reprobate’s sinful slide into perdition. He underlined that God gave the reprobate many good and even potentially saving gifts in this life. He also insisted that absolutely no one was condemned to Hell but for his own sin. Davenant’s pastoral motivations were especially clear in the Epilogue to his lectures on predestination. There, he offered practical advice to both preachers and their flocks about how to teach and receive the doctrine. He explained that it was not a cause for either presumption or despair, but rather a compelling illustration of the divine perfections as well as an incentive to humility. No matter how difficult the doctrine of absolute predestination and reprobation might appear, they could not be neglected, he believed, because God’s grace could not be adequately represented without them. Pastoral instincts again underlay Davenant’s lectures on the death of Christ. Davenant was determined to expound the atonement in such a way that salvation could be offered with integrity to all. In his mind, there was nothing hypothetical about the universal orientation of Christ’s death. Christ had truly died in order that everyone might be saveable: and they would indeed be saved, if they put their faith in that death. Even so, Christ had not died in order that everyone would come to faith. So God’s saving purpose was truly universal in scope; even if it was only the elect who would ultimately come to salvation. Davenant’s treatment of the death of Christ was consonant with the teaching of the Suffrage but he significantly altered its emphasis. Rather than foregrounding the particular orientation of the death of Christ to toward the salvation of the elect, as the Suffrage had done, Davenant’s lectures emphasized instead the universal orientation of that death and the fact that it rendered possible the salvation of all who believed. This emphasis reflected Davenant’s own reading of the Articles and Prayer Book, a reading informed

John Davenant and the English Appropriation  109 by Overall. His lectures therefore expressed a subtly different flavour of Reformed Conformity from those of his Oxford contemporary, Prideaux. They arguably reflect his own and Ward’s position at Dort more closely than the delicate balance struck by the delegation as a whole in the Collegiate Suffrage.

3 Responses to Montagu From the Publication of the Gag to the York House Conference Prideaux and Davenant had both delivered their lectures on the doctrine of grace, confident that the Reformed theology which they were defending was the official orthodoxy of the English Church. Dissenting voices had certainly been heard from time to time, and both men were aware that there were English theologians, some highly placed, who took a different line. Even so, those dissenting voices probably seemed marginal in a Church that had recently taken a full part in the Synod of Dort and had responded to the Synod’s decisions with every sign of approval. But the theological landscape of the English Church was about to change dramatically, and the confidence of Reformed Conformists such as Prideaux and Davenant would soon look increasingly precarious. The catalyst for this transformation was a Royal Chaplain and Canon of Windsor, Richard Montagu, a man whose historical scholarship Prideaux had commended as late as his Act Lecture of 8 July 1623.1 Within a few months, however, the Regius had cause to take a dimmer view of Montagu’s work. On 12 December 1623, Montagu wrote a letter to his friend John Cosin, at Durham House.2 It was unguarded, as his letters usually were, and openly hostile to the theology he associated with Geneva. Referring to one pseudonymous author, whom Cosin had recently unmasked, Montagu wrote this: ‘Had he his due, his books should fire him at a stake. Before God, it will never be well till we have our Inquisition . . . . Bene sit to my Lord of Durham and you for disveiling this Andabatarian Puritan, but O si you could persuade his Majesty to take strict order that these Allobrogical dormice should not so much as peep out in corners or by owl-​light’. During the next few years, however, it was Montagu himself who would experience something close to an inquisition, an inquisition dominated by the forces of Reformed Conformity. The spark for those flames was the manuscript he sent to Cosin with this letter. Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0004

Responses to Montagu  111 Several months earlier, Montagu explained, Papist proselytizers had begun interfering with a woman living in his Essex parish. Montagu had managed to talk the woman out of converting, and had asked to meet with those who had troubled her faith. They refused; so he had sent them, via the woman, a set of theological propositions, with the suggestion that he would himself be prepared to convert if the Roman agents could answer what he had written. A long delay had ensued. Then, on 5 October 1623, the woman was passed the name of a Papist contact in London, who was prepared to meet with Montagu. She also handed to Montagu ‘a little whip-​jack in a blue jacket’ entitled A Gag for the New Gospel.3 Montagu was challenged either to rebut this pamphlet or convert to Rome. Montagu was unimpressed with this tract but felt that he could not let this challenge pass: ‘I have seen many foolish things in that kind, but never saw more, therefore answer it I must, unless I would γέλωτά ὀφλισκάνειν [become liable to laughter], and answer it I have . . . bitterly and tartly, I confess, because the ass deserved to be rub’d. This I send to you’. Montagu invited Cosin to read over his response to the pamphlet, sharing it with no one apart from their mutual friend Augustine Lindsell; and then to get it licensed, ‘but of no Puritan’.4 Cosin quickly acted on Montagu’s suggestion. Montagu composed the prefatory letter for the publication on 28 December 1623,5 and by 11 January 1624 , he was already discussing the book’s frontispiece and complaining about an error made by the printer.6 The error was never rectified but this was soon the least of Montagu’s problems. Early in 1624, what would turn out to be King James I’s last Parliament gathered in Westminster. On 13 May, John Pym reported to the Commons that a petition had been brought into a Committee charged with investigating some lurid allegations about Thomas Anyan, the President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The petitioners evidently felt that this was the appropriate forum for dealing with any scandalous cleric, because their petition did not actually relate to Anyan; it was a complaint about Montagu’s recently published book, A Gag for the New Gospel? No: a New Gag for an Old Goose. A copy of this petition was published some years later by one of its original signatories, John Yates.7 It noted that ‘the erroneous and dangerous opinions of Arminius and his sectaries’ had disturbed the Netherlands. It then warned that ‘this dangerous doctrine and other erroneous opinions, hath of late been hatched, and now begins to be more boldly maintained by some divines of this our kingdom; especially by Mr Richard Montagu, who hath published a book, with show of license, by authority, full fraught with these opinions’. The

112  Grace and Conformity petitioners asked Parliament to ensure that ‘these sparkles of erroneous doctrine may timely be put out, and such order be taken with the authors, that their infectious and corrupt doctrine may spread no further’. Pym reported to the Commons that Montagu’s Gag was indeed ‘full fraught with dangerous opinions of Arminius, quite contrary to the Articles established’. The petition against it was then read to the whole House, which resolved to refer the matter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot.8 Shortly thereafter, however, Parliament was adjourned, and it was not until 1625 that the Committee was able to report on the action Abbot had then taken.9 Apparently, Abbot had confirmed that the Commons had acted correctly in submitting Montagu’s book for his examination; and he had then given Montagu a ‘grave and fatherly’ admonition to revise the Gag. Montagu, however, recalled his conversation with the Archbishop rather differently. He later averred to Bishop Neile that Abbot had merely advised him, but not commanded him, that if he were to produce a second edition of the Gag, he should explain those passages that had caused offence.10 Montagu appears, in fact, to have started work on a revised edition of the Gag, as he refers to that project a number of times in his letters.11 He also appears to have composed some kind of reply to the petition, and sent it to the Lord Keeper, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln. In his letters to Cosin, he asked for Bishop Neile’s help in getting it back from Williams, so that he could use it in connection with his subsequent defence.12 The King, meanwhile, was working at cross purposes with his Parliament. James was furious with the petitioners, rather than with Montagu, and gave them a severe dressing down.13 He had also spoken to Montagu himself. Apparently, the King expressed his support for Montagu, remarking that ‘If thou be a Papist, I am a Papist’. He also gave him permission to publish something in his own defence, and had rather undermined the Archbishop’s intervention by telling Montagu that he need not revise the Gag, unless he wished to do so, and that he was certainly under no obligation to show it to Abbot if he did.14 Meanwhile, powerful figures were lining up against Montagu elsewhere. Montagu heard rumours that a group in Oxford, led by Prideaux, was drawing up a theological charge sheet against him. Soon enough, a threatening document came into his hands. On 14 October, Montagu wrote to Cosin: ‘It is not long since I was with you, yet since that time there came into my hands this enclosed, a collection of doctrines out of my book, opposed, as you see, by the Articles and Homilies. As they came, per omnia I transcribed them, and

Responses to Montagu  113 send them to you. You see how I have stirred these hornets . . . yet again they will to Parliament with this Information better thewed than the former. For there we were to take the gentleman’s words for Popery and Arminianism. Here it is τί πρός [with references]’.15 The document was anonymous, but Montagu was pretty sure who lay behind it. ‘You will desire to know where or whence I had them. I cannot tell the authors. I suppose it is the Oxford draft by Dr Prideaux etc, whereof I heard long since. This I can tell you. Dr Featley can resolve you, both unde, quomodo, qualia and ad quid [from what place, in what manner, of what sort, to what end]; and peradventure Dr Goad. You have all I know. A secret friend procured them for me’. It appears to have been this document that prompted Montagu to act on the King’s suggestion, and compose a work in his defence. As he said to Cosin, ‘Against the Parliament I do purpose to have my answer ready to these, if, as it is threatened, they exhibit this against me’.16 He also asked Cosin to help him gather some supportive statements from the kind of theologians whom his enemies respected: ‘At your leisure help me with some quotations out of B[ishop] Morton’s work, Dr Hall’s Clerum, which I have not read, Dr Ussher’s, or such men as are feasible with them, and yet join in those things which I affirm’.17 On 4 November, Montagu informed Cosin that Williams had finally returned his original response to the Commons petition, and that this would form the basis of his defence, as further informed by the charge sheet which he had recently received: ‘I have my answer with me, and am disposing of it by adding what hath come to my hands since, changing, & c. So soon as I have done, and I will make all possible haste, I will send it to you’. Montagu was as good as his word and, on 22 November, he sent the result of his labour to Cosin, to be forwarded, if possible, to King James: ‘Now to my Informers. I have sent you what I thought fit to answer. The particulars you shall find in reading. I desire the King may see it, and be acquainted with the general at least’.18 This document was the draft of what would soon be published as Appello Caesarem.19 At this stage the Appello was still in manuscript form, and there was only one copy.20 But Montagu already had an eye on publication, and was concerned, lest the caustic remarks that he made in it about his adversaries be made public too. ‘There are certain personal touches sometime,’ he wrote. ‘If they may be printed sine [without] them, I shall be contented; for my only end and scope in them was but to have the King take notice, not regarding the publication of those particulars, if the answer may be printed’.21 Montagu

114  Grace and Conformity evidently wanted to undermine his enemies privately, not challenge them in public. The ultimate decision about whether to publish his work, Montagu referred to Bishop Neile. Cosin responded enthusiastically, but this only increased Montagu’s alarm about the derogatory remarks he had made, and his next letter reveals who the targets of those potentially embarrassing jibes had been: ‘I could wish it might be printed with all my heart, but the particular passages of the professor at Oxford, Dr Featley, etc, I desire only the King may take notice of them, and then incumbant in spongiam [may they lie in moss, i.e. be laid aside]. So if you inform my Lord [Bishop Neile] it will do well’.22 Neile clearly did show Montagu’s Appello to King James, who decided it should be published, but only after it had been reviewed by Francis White, the Dean of Carlisle,23 who, as a client of Neile’s, was unlikely to be hostile.24 Unfortunately, White turned out to be less than discreet, and he showed Montagu’s draft to someone dangerously close to Montagu’s opponents. Montagu complained about this to Cosin on 10 January 1625: ‘It was ill done of the Dean to communicate the papers, especially to one of the faction, as that Dr. is. By that means, the brethren will have intelligence’.25 A few weeks later, Montagu related to Cosin how frenzied his enemies had now become: ‘What ado is here with Dr Featley and his comrades!’26 Montagu had been warned that a new set of objections against his work was being drawn up; and he ascribed this unwelcome initiative to Archbishop Abbot’s chaplains, Featley and Goad; who, Montagu remarked, ‘are both apt enough to do it of themselves, as apt as with Dr Hall, of W[orcester], and Dr Prideaux, at first to inform or attend Informations against me at Parliament, whereto they would have drawn in Dr. White, who quashed this business’.27 The most outspoken of Montagu’s opponents was the notoriously irascible Prideaux, who was clearly outraged by what Montagu had written. Montagu was unfazed: ‘You told them right for Oxford,’ he wrote to Cosin on 31 January 1625 ‘For Dr Prideaux his thrasonisms and threats as honest men as himself will justify it’. Indeed, Montagu seemed relieved that his fundamental theological disagreement with men like Prideaux was now out in the open: ‘But it is well things are as they are. For my part, alea jacta est, let them inform till their hearts and heads ache. I am a professed enemy of that Allobrigical city of God and holy cause’.28 Even Montagu knew, it would seem, that his opponents identified their theological agenda as the Cause of God.

Responses to Montagu  115 Nicholas Tyacke offers a lively account of the response to Montagu in Anti-​ Calvinists;29 and he points to the numerous publications directed against his Appello Caesarem in the course of the 1626 Parliament. However, Tyacke does not mention, in this connection, the publication of Prideaux’s first nine Act Lectures, early in 1625. That the Lectiones Novem may be considered the opening salvo in the literary campaign against Montagu is made clear in Montagu’s own correspondence; for that was precisely how Montagu interpreted them. In fact, since the Lectiones actually made it to press before the Appello, but after one of Prideaux’s allies had been shown Montagu’s draft of the Appello, they may even have been intended as a pre-​emptive strike.30 Montagu was tipped off about the plan to publish the Lectiones Novem early on. In a letter of 7 February 1625, he wrote, over-​optimistically as it turned out, ‘I hear say Dr Prideaux’s nine eggs are rotten, that is, called in’.31 A week later, he had evidently been disabused of this hope, and was beginning to wonder just how personal Prideaux’s onslaught might be: ‘Your eggs man, if they prove not addle, the blessing you bestowed upon them be with them: but if he touch me I may happily lash him in English. When I see it I shall know more of him . . . doth he name me?’ Then, in a letter of 21 February, Montagu expressed the fear that, once his own book had been published, he might be unfairly painted as the troublemaker: ‘For as for that fear of arising a schism, it cannot light upon me, the Lectures being post nati [born later] to my Gag’.32 Montagu need not have worried. Prideaux’s only reference to him, in the Lectiones Novem, was the positive one he had made at the 1623 Act.33 Perhaps, at this stage, even Prideaux was prepared to pour a little oil on troubled waters. That said, it would not have taken a very subtle reader to conclude that Montagu was the target in Prideaux’s preliminary warnings about the incendiary effect of Arminius’s teaching in the Netherlands, and its ultimate tendency toward Socinianism34; or in his complaint to the Prince of Wales about those who were forsaking the unshakable truths of predestination, efficacious grace, and justification by faith alone.35 The powerful statement of Reformed Orthodoxy that is found in Prideaux’s lectures certainly made it an effective and, coming as it did from the King’s Professor in Oxford, authoritative rejoinder to the theology of grace that Montagu promoted in the Appello. The publication of the Lectiones Novem was not Prideaux’s only engagement with Montagu during the course of 1625. An anonymous troublemaker told Prideaux that the original draft of the Appello had contained insulting remarks about him, which White had removed.36 Prideaux was clearly livid: ‘At

116  Grace and Conformity Oxford they were all on fire’. Montagu wrote, on 23 May 1625: ‘Here were last week at Eton some of the tribe with Mr Hales, and no talk but disclaiming against Mr Montagu. Dr Prideaux, if he had him there, would teach him better divinity. In Bocardo, you must imagine’.37 Around the same time, Prideaux denounced Montagu publicly, in the Oxford Divinity School, saying that he was ‘Merus Grammaticus [a mere philologist]; a fellow that studies phrases, more than matter: that he understands neither the Articles nor Homilies; or, at least, perverts both’.38 Prideaux also threatened, apparently, that the public burning of Montagu’s latest book would be the first thing on the agenda of the new Parliament.39 The Regius Professor’s limited oil stock had clearly run dry; and from Montagu’s perspective, it was the man he referred to as ‘the Bedlam of Ex[eter]’40 who was now leading the charge against him. Prideaux’s threat about Parliament proved well-​founded. On 6 July 1625, Montagu was summoned before the House of Commons and questioned about his book. In the course of that examination, he revealed that the late King had encouraged him to publish the Appello.41 On 7 July, the Commons appointed a subcommittee to examine Montagu’s writings and prepare a formal complaint for the House of Lords. Montagu was himself committed to the custody of the serjeant-​at-​arms and only allowed to return home to Windsor on giving a bond of £2000 to return to Parliament when summoned. On 8 July, a delegation from both Houses waited on King Charles I at Hampton Court to complain about Montagu, but the King effectively warned them off. Montagu was too ill to attend the brief August session, after which Parliament was dissolved.42 Montagu’s allies moved to protect him. On 2 August 1625, Bishops John Howson of Oxford, John Buckeridge of Rochester, and William Laud of St Davids wrote to the Duke of Buckingham on Montagu’s behalf. They advised him that Montagu was being attacked for maintaining what was actually the authorized doctrine of the Church. If the hostility was allowed to continue, they warned, other loyal and like-​minded churchmen would become discouraged.43 The bishops already had some reason for believing that Buckingham would be sympathetic, despite his ongoing patronage of the prominent Reformed theologian and moderate Puritan, John Preston.44 In a letter to Cosin of 24 October 1624, Montagu indicated that he meant to tell Bishop Laud ‘how graciously the Duke [of Buckingham] used me at Windsor last St George’s Day [April 23 1624], and that motu proprio. He bad me rely upon him, and none but him, and let me know what preferment I desired,

Responses to Montagu  117 and I should have it. And that he spake not as a courtier, but my real, true and constant friend’.45 A few months after receiving the three bishops’ letter, Buckingham wrote to Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, asking him, on behalf of the King, to assemble a panel of fellow bishops both to examine Montagu’s books and deliver an opinion both upon them and to consider how best to keep Montagu safe from his critics. The Duke suggested the names of some bishops who might be invited. He included the three bishops who had just written to him on Montagu’s behalf, as well as Bishops George Montaigne of London and Richard Neile of Durham, neither of whom were great friends of the Reformed cause.46 It was clear where the Duke’s loyalties lay. Andrewes duly conferred with Montaigne, Neile, Buckeridge and Laud, and they predictably concluded, as they indicated to Buckingham in a letter of 16 January 1626, that Montagu ‘hath not affirmed anything to be the doctrine of the Church of England, but that which in our opinions is the doctrine of the Church of England, or agreeable thereunto’.47 Buckingham was therefore forearmed when, early in 1626, Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, bent his ear bent about the ‘erroneous and dangerous’ contents of Montagu’s two books.48 At Warwick’s request, the Duke agreed to convene a theological conference at which Montagu’s published opinions could be discussed.49 This took place at his London residence, York House, on 11 and 17 February 1626. Thomas Morton, then Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and John Preston were invited to make the case against Montagu’s writings. John Buckeridge, Francis White, John Cosin, and Montagu himself were invited to defend them.50 The Duke also assembled an audience of influential laymen, predominantly of Reformed sympathies, who took an active part in the debate.51 From the outset, the Duke made clear his support for Montagu. Before the discussion even began, he underlined that he had already referred Montagu’s opinions ‘to the grave and judicious judgment of the most eminent and learned prelates of the land, who have assured me that Mr Montagu hath delivered nothing but the true, orthodox, and established doctrine of the Church of England or what is agreeable thereto’. He also expressed the hope that the peers assembled would ‘upon this private conference receive such satisfaction therein that you shall likewise be of the same opinion’.52 From Buckingham’s point of view, in other words, the Conference was intended to exonerate Montagu.

118  Grace and Conformity Preston arrived late on the first day, so it was Morton who led the opening session. He attempted to show that both Montagu’s teaching on the Church and his teaching on justification contradicted the Thirty-​nine Articles. Montagu’s books asserted, Morton claimed, that, under certain circumstance, General Councils could not err, contrary to Article XXI; that justification included good works, contrary to Article XI; that the blessed got to heaven by their own merit, again contrary to Article XI; and that the Church of Rome had not erred in matters of faith, contrary to Article XIX.53 Morton did not actually address Montagu’s views on predestination until Viscount Saye and Sele insisted that it was ‘the chiefest matter’ of the Conference.54 Morton then disputed Montagu’s claim that the truly justified could fall from grace.55 Preston intervened during this exchange, and then appears to have taken the lead from Morton during the second session, when the discussion focussed on absolute election, on the authority of the Synod of Dort, and on the extent of the atonement.56 Since the Conference was private, no official record was made of the discussions and such evidence as survives is both incomplete and partisan. The accounts associated with Cosin and White suggest that Morton and Preston made little headway. The accounts associated with Preston suggest that he, at least, had his opponents on the run. Either way, the Conference did not achieve Buckingham’s goal for it; indeed, as Fuller records, ‘William Earl of Pembroke was heard to say that none returned Arminians thence, save those who repaired thither with the same opinion’.57 The York House Conference therefore did nothing to dampen the controversy over Montagu’s works, but it did make clear to the Reformed that a rival vision of the English Church was beginning to acquire powerful support and that it was not going to be easily silenced. The need to articulate the Reformed Conformist platform had therefore become more acute.

Daniel Featley: The Parallels (1626) Although Montagu believed that it was Prideaux who called the shots against him, he was clear that the Regius was working hand in glove with ‘that urchin,’ Daniel Featley, whose patron Montagu thought Prideaux was.58 In 1626, Featley published, anonymously, the Parallelismus nov-​antiqui erroris Pelagiarminiani. This pamphlet purported to have been drawn up by two unnamed English divines, in order to settle the faith of a foreign visitor, who

Responses to Montagu  119 had been troubled by an Arminian apologist called Roerghest, who was described, in the Latin version of the pamphlet, as a philologist. This was the same label, that Prideaux had attached to Montagu in the Oxford Schools the year before.59 The pamphlet set out to demonstrate, by lining up the relevant quotations side by side, that the Arminian writers of the Netherlands had effectively taught the same doctrine as the Pelagian and Semi-​Pelagian heretics of the fourth and fifth centuries.60 The Parallelismus was therefore illustrating a point that had been made by Prideaux in his lecture on Absolute Reprobation: ‘If one reads the letters of Prosper and Hilary of Arles, that are found in the works of Augustine . . . one might conclude them to write as much about the Arminians, as about the Pelagians, so precisely do they align’.61 Featley published an anonymous translation of his pamphlet twice that year, first under the title A Parallel of New-​Old Pelagiarminian Error and then under the title Pelagius Redivivus.62 In the translated edition, he made clear that he had the highest warrant for the kind of argument he was making. In what purported to be the translator’s letter to the reader, he referred to a conversation that the late King James had had with two clergymen shortly before his death. ‘His Majesty having occasion to touch upon the treatises of St. Augustine, that are extant in the seventh tome, (which he might seem prophetically to recommend as a sovereign antidote against an evil up-​ creeping since his death) he styled them “St. Austin’s Polemical tracts against the heretics that agree with our Arminians:” and presently calling to mind their proper name, termed those heretics (from the author of that sect) “the Pelagians” ’.63 This acute royal observation, Featley suggested, reinforced and was reinforced by his own Parallel. Once again, there was no direct mention of Montagu. There was, however, a thinly veiled reference to him and to his collaborator, John Cosin, in the translator’s letter. Clearly, Cosin’s close collaboration with Montagu was a matter of public record. ‘If any,’ Featley wrote, ‘after he hath viewed this table, cast a scorn upon it, as composed by some gloating Puritan, and condemn criminis inauditi of a new found crime, namely of doctrinal Puritanism all those that give any credit to such Parallels, or differ from him in those points .... Either he knoweth not the parties whose tenets are here set one by the other, or he wants judgement to compare, & for defect thereof, cozens himself with mountebank wares’.64 Montagu had been openly identified as ‘Mountebank’ in a near contemporary pamphlet of unknown origin that now exists only in fragmentary form.65 And, a couple of years later, the same play

120  Grace and Conformity on Cosin’s name was used to good effect by William Prynne, in A brief survey and censure of Mr Cozens his cozening devotions (1628). Featley was therefore employing a recognized code. Featley defined his polemical purpose in the Pelagius Redivivus in terms that have been observed in both Prideaux and Davenant. He had published the work, he claimed, ‘to express to thee my desire to serve as a voluntary (as did that excellently learned and zealous Archbishop Bradwardine) in causa Dei contra Pelagianos, in God’s cause and quarrel against the Pelagians’. Featley, like Prideaux and Davenant, saw himself as an Anti-​Pelagian, before he saw himself as an Anti-​Arminian. He was defending Reformed doctrine because he believed that it was Catholic doctrine. And he identified that task as the Cause of God. Featley soon produced an English sequel to the Parallelismus, entitled A Second Parallel together with a writ of error sued against the appealer. This used the same format as the Parallelismus in order to demonstrate that Montagu, now identified unambiguously, was effectively teaching the same doctrine as the Dutch Arminians—​however much he may have protested that he had read not a word of Arminius. In the ‘Epistle to the Catholic Christian Reader,’ with which Featley prefaced this work, he made clear the combined prosecutorial weight of his two publications: If it be confessed, that Arminius his pedigree is lineally to be derived from Pelagius, and that Pelagius is the great Apenninus, from which the divided streams of corrupt doctrine flow; then undoubtedly the assertions of Arminius were priùs damnatae, quàm natae were condemned by the Catholic Christian Church, before they were brought forth by Arminius. . . . I have therefore thought it worth the pains, to take the line of Pelagius which is already brought down to Arminius, and from Arminius to draw it out even to the Appealer, to the end, all, that are not forestalled with prejudice, may see, that both the Appealer, and Arminius hold their errors in capite from Pelagius; And that at the first the Netherlands, and other parts received the infection of pestilent doctrine from Britain by Pelagius; and now at last, that Britain hath received it from the Netherlands by Arminius.66

Leif Dixon has recently taken a rather dim view of Featley’s intervention in the Montagu affair. He writes this: ‘Daniel Featley—​one of the fiercest polemicists around—​seemed to suffer a failure of nerve, and worried out loud in his Pelagius Redivivus that men would read his work and think it ‘composed

Responses to Montagu  121 by some gloating Puritan’, and find him guilty of ‘a new found crime, namely of doctrinal Puritanism’. Dixon then goes on to argue that Featley ‘went on to pretend, for want of a better idea, that Montagu was a crypto-​Catholic, a continental Arminian, or both’. As a result, ‘Featley’s Pelagius Redivivus roused the old ghosts, but failed to understand the new realities’.67 Dixon’s remarks here hardly do justice to Featley’s contribution to the discussion. Featley’s accusation that Montagu was effectively an Arminian was not the result of a failure of nerve, nor was it a brickbat he threw, for want of anything better to say: it was the result of textually based theological taxonomy. It was rooted in a comparative reading of Montagu alongside the Dutch Arminians, and of the Dutch Arminians alongside the Pelagian and Semi-​Pelagian authors of the fourth and fifth centuries—​a comparative reading that revealed a close correlation between the thought of these disparate authors. Prideaux had repeatedly pointed out this correlation in his Act Lectures. Featley’s approach was not simply an unimaginative attempt to blacken his opponent: it was a theological analysis rooted in the teaching of the academy. Featley was aware that Montagu claimed not to be a disciple of Arminius: ‘Verily, the Appealer disclaims all kindred or affinity with Arminius; nay he protesteth, he knoweth not the man’. Featley’s purpose in A Second Parallel was not, therefore, to argue that he was: it was rather to exhibit the intellectual kinship of their theology. As Featley put it, ‘Admit he never read, or heard of Arminius, this will be no good plea, if his doctrine be the doctrine of Arminius. For mine own part I will not undertake to prove that the Appealer was ever an apprentice to James Harmin; but by setting up both of their looms, I will make it appear that they are both ὁμότεχνον, of the same trade or craft’.68 To that extent, it is possible to accept Jay Collier’s recent argument that Montagu was not, strictly speaking, an Arminian.69 It was not Featley’s intention to demonstrate that he was. That said, the theological affinities which Featley observed between Montagu and the Arminians would certainly explain Montagu’s effusive reaction when Cosin eventually sent him a copy of Arminius’s works. ‘I thank you for your Arminius,’ he wrote, on 19 May 1626, ‘I never saw him before. The man had more in him than all the Netherlands’. If Montagu was not, strictly speaking, an Arminian, he was undoubtedly a theological fellow-​traveller; and that was quite sufficient for Featley’s purposes. The accusations of Arminianism and Semi-​Pelagianism, which Featley and many others directed at Montagu and those who thought like him,

122  Grace and Conformity should not, therefore, be reduced to polemical mud-​slinging. Such accusations were undoubtedly made with a polemical purpose and had a polemical effect, but they were also the result of serious theological scholarship. Featley anticipated that accusations of Puritanism might be hurled at his pamphlet. This did little to daunt him, however, because he was convinced that only the ignorant, or the misguided, could fail to conclude from the detailed evidence that he was advancing that Montagu was promoting theological positions that had already been advanced by the Arminians, and that they, in turn, were endorsing theological positions that had been advanced by the Pelagian and Semi-​Pelagian writers of the Early Christian centuries. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, with regard to Roman Catholicism. Featley was certainly not attempting to prove that Montagu was a crypto-​ Catholic. Indeed, he flagged up a number of areas where Montagu’s position diverged from that of Rome.70 Rather, Featley was setting down the similarities between Montagu’s theological positions and those advanced by various Roman Catholic authorities, as well as the corresponding points of disagreement between Montagu and various English Protestant authorities. Featley did not conceal the fact that Montagu was not, at least straightforwardly, a crypto-​Catholic. His intention was, rather, to show that Montagu was undermining central Protestant convictions, and he was attacking those within the Church who most zealously defended those convictions. As he wrote, in the pamphlet’s peroration, ‘Let moderate men, and no frantic Puritans judge, whether the Appealer . . . pretending an answer to a gagger of the Protestants, he intend and endeavour not to gag the most learned and zealous Protestants; and drawing out his style more poignant then a stiletto, in colour and show against the Romish enemy, he cunningly give not therewith a secret wound to his own Mother the Church of England, and the true professors of the Gospel therein’. To put it another way, Featley was not accusing Montagu of being a closet Catholic: he was accusing him of being a disloyal son of the Church of England, who was abandoning her established doctrines and attempting to discredit her most eminent divines; and that was a more persuasive and, consequently, more effective charge. The Second Parallel did not confine itself to tabulating comparative quotations. Featley also used the footnotes to these quotations to advance summary arguments in defence of his own position. In relation to Absolute Predestination, for example, Featley used one footnote to answer the argument that the orthodox teaching made God the author of sin. Not so, he wrote, ‘God decreed the permission and disposing of sin, which he fore-​saw

Responses to Montagu  123 upon his permission would be, he did not decree the effecting, or existence of it, that it should be. Saint Augustine fully answereth these and the like arguments in his book de Corrept. & Grat. cap. 10’.71 Featley used another footnote to show that the doctrine did not encourage sin: ‘For the doctrine itself of Predestination, it openeth no gate to a dissolute life, but shutteth and barreth all such unlawful posterns; “Shall we continue in sin because grace aboundeth? God forbid,” Rom. 6. 1. On the contrary, it openeth a fair gate, and directeth a certain ready way to holiness of life; for “God hath predestinated us, that we might be conformable to the Image of his Son,” Rom 8. 29. And God “hath chosen us before the foundation of the world, that we might be holy and blameless before him in love,” Ephes. 1. 4’.72 And he used a third footnote in this chapter to explain that it was not the Reformed view, but Montagu’s view, that was more likely to lead to religious despair. The orthodox believer, he underlined, ‘is taught to repose his hope and confidence not in himself, but in God; whereas the Prophet crieth out, “Cursed is he that putteth his trust in man.” ’ By contrast, ‘the doctrine of the Arminians and the Appealer, which maketh God’s Election to depend upon the will of man, which, as they say, may totally and finally fall away from grace, is in truth a most desperate doctrine, taking away all solid and firm ground of comfort both in life and death’.73 Featley’s pastorally minded arguments here echoed those deployed by Prideaux and Davenant in their academic lectures. These footnotes enabled Featley to offer a handy list of theological authorities that were opposed to Montagu’s approach. One footnote on Absolute Predestination, for example, read: ‘See Calvin’s Preface of his book of Divine Predestin. and first book of Institut. 17. Chap. Beza against Castellio Peter Martyr in his Comment. on the 1. Chap. of the Epistle to the Romans. Zwinglius in his Sermon of Providence. Abbot Prelect. of the Author of sinne. Paraeus Answer to Bellarmine’s second book of the state of sin, and loss of grace, chap. 4. and divers others’.74 Needless to say, it was Augustine’s voice that was most frequently referenced at the bottom of the page; for, as Featley wrote, ‘we desire to hear none rather than Saint Augustine speak in this Cause: never had the Church of God since the Apostle Saint Paul, a more valiant and resolute Champion of Grace, than Saint Augustine’.75 The footnotes equally gave Featley an opportunity to challenge Montagu’s reading of Church History. Responding to Montagu’s claim that the idea that justified believers might fall finally from faith had been defended by Bishop Overall during the Hampton Court Conference,76 Featley wrote this: ‘Doctor Overall, after he had affirmed, “That a justified man committing any

124  Grace and Conformity grievous sin (as adultery, murder, or treason) became, ipso facto, subject to God’s wrath, and was in the state of damnation (quoad praesentem statum)” addeth, “yet those that are called, and justified according to the purpose of God’s election did never fall, either totally from all the graces of God, to be utterly destitute of all the parts, and seeds thereof, or finally, from justification; but were in time renewed by God’s Spirit unto a lively faith, and repentance, and so justified from those sins, and the wrath, curse, and guilt annexed thereunto, whereinto they were fallen, and wherein they lay so long, as they were without true repentance for the same.” ’77 Featley was anxious to show, in other words, that Montagu’s opinions found no precedent in the respected Bishop Overall. In the concluding section of the Second Parallel, ‘A writ of error sued against the Appealer,’ Featley expressed his dismay that the Appello had made it to the press at all when other more edifying works had not. He speculated about the dark motives that might explain this: ‘whether is it, because that some are more solicitous of the temporal estate of the Church, impeached by Puritanism, then of the spiritual, in danger of being utterly overthrown by Popery? Or (because they would have Popery and Puritanism more even balanced, then they are) that their access to either might be of more moment? or is it, because (as the Appealer hath taught us) that there are certain in this Kingdom tantum non in Episcopatu Puritani [Puritans even though in the Episcopate], there are also some of the clergy, that are tantum non in uxoratu Papistae [Papists even though they are married]: or . . . the opposition to Puritanism is all the Religion they seem to profess?’. Featley was aware, in other words, that Montagu was not alone. The Cause of God was under threat from other clergy as well; and Featley suspected that some of those who menaced it were indeed closet Papists.

Daniel Featley: The Ancilla Pietatis (1626) Featley’s two Parallels have been widely acknowledged in the historiography of the Montagu affair.78 Featley’s celebrated devotional, Ancilla Pietatis, has not. Like the two Parallels, the Ancilla was published in 1626, though it was entered in the Stationers’ Register the year before, on 8 November 1625, and in some editions the second part bears a 1625 publication date.79 Since the Parallelismus was not entered until 19 January 1626, the Ancilla, if it is understood as a contribution to the Montagu debate, would represent Featley’s first

Responses to Montagu  125 published intervention in this dispute. And, given that the Ancilla, unlike the Parallels, was republished four times before the Civil War, it would also count as his most effective and enduring intervention. Taken at face value, Featley’s preface to the Ancilla might seem to preclude it from being taken as a polemical piece. Featley told his reader that, during the ‘late dreadful visitation’ (the Plague, which hit London in 1625), he had observed the desolation of England’s religious assemblies, and perceived the vital importance of private devotion. He consequently gave up the work of theological controversy and focussed instead on a work that might encourage devotion. The Ancilla was the result. Whatever he may have claimed, however, Featley clearly still had an eye on theological controversy. In the very preface in which he renounced polemic he also underlined his ongoing commitment to that task: ‘Not that I altered my judgement touching the study of controversies, which (without all controversy) is not only most needful, but delightful also to them that are therein exercised’.80 He also made the point that spiritual writing required far less expertise than theological controversy: ‘it is not for every hand to meddle with those thorny difficulties, which yet must be carefully handled by them who will make a strong hedge or sure fence for the Lord’s Vineyard’. Anyone who had caught wind of Prideaux’s public dismissal of Montagu as a mere philologist would have been able to put two and two together. This suggestion that the Ancilla was not quite as innocent of polemical intent as its preface pretended is reinforced by Featley’s commendation of reading controversial theology on one’s death bed. He wrote this: ‘I might instance likewise in Doctor Whitaker’s Cygnea Cantio, his swanlike song before his death, wherein he warbleth sweetly upon those at this day most vexed questions of universal grace and freewill. And his contemporary, the eye of the other University, Doctor Rainolds, when he lay on his death bed, called for Doctor Abbot’s (after the Lord Bishop of Salisbury) Reply to W. Bishop, then newly come forth, and heard much of it read unto him with great contentment’. Since both William Whitaker’s Cygnea Cantio, and the second part of Robert Abbot’s defence of William Perkins (which was indeed published in 1607, the year of Rainolds’ death) contained powerful assertions of a Reformed understanding of grace, against Peter Baro and William Bishop respectively; it is hard not to see Featley’s preface to the Ancilla as an instance of rhetorical apophasis. This interpretation is further strengthened by the second part of the Ancilla, which includes a simple catechism, the Sum of Saving Knowledge.

126  Grace and Conformity This catechism appears only to have been included in the 1626 editions of the Ancilla, and its relevance to the Montagu debate was very clear. For, as Suellen Tower has pointed out, Featley’s Sum was the only catechism entered in the Stationers Company Register during the reign of Charles I that maintained the doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation.81 In the letter to the reader, which prefaces one impression of the Sum, Featley deftly excused the inclusion of a catechism in a manual of devotion, on the basis that all expressions of family piety properly fell under the rubric of private devotion, including the catechesis of children. He had, therefore, ‘endeavoured to reduce into a short total sum, all necessary points of faith, and special duties of holy obedience required of every man, in what place, state, condition or calling so ever he be’.82 Featley also prefaced his catechism with a summary table of the method of this work which, he thought, ‘may serve for a model of all practical theology or divinity. For as Cusanus said that the world was Deus explicatus, God unfolded . . . so it is most true that true divinity is but Catechismus explicatus, Catechism at large’.83 Featley clearly viewed the Sum as something more significant than a Christian primer for children. The divine decrees loomed large in Featley’s presentation of basic Christian belief.84 Asking what the Scriptures teach concerning the works of God, Featley wrote this: ‘That he decreeth and executeth all things for his glory, according to the counsel of his own will; powerfully working all the good of nature, and grace in all things, and wisely disposing of all evil, both of sin and punishment’.85 The particular decree that bears upon the eternal state of rational beings, Featley made clear, is the decree of predestination. This is twofold, consisting in election on the one hand, and reprobation or rejection on the other. Featley explained election as ‘God’s eternal counsel and purpose of choosing certain angels and men, and bringing them to everlasting happiness, for the declaration of his mercy’.86 Reprobation, he described as ‘God’s eternal counsel, and purpose of leaving others in their sins, and the misery he foresaw they would bring upon themselves, and further reserving them to everlasting torments for the manifestation of his justice’.87 Focussing more specifically on the predestination and reprobation of human beings, as opposed to angels, Featley underlined that human beings, by the abuse of their free will, have brought a curse upon themselves and their posterity. His catechesis was, in other words, emphatically sublapsarian. Featley then went on to explain that

Responses to Montagu  127 of his mercy and grace, he chose and chooseth some out of the estate of misery, and corruption; maketh them his sons by adoption, calleth them to the knowledge of the truth, regenerateth them by his Spirit, justifieth them by faith, and in the end crowneth them with everlasting glory. Others he left, and leaveth in the state of misery & corruption, offereth them some outward means, and sometimes inward also, so far as maketh them unexcusable, and for their refusal, or abuse of them, casting them into a reprobate sense; and in the end after many judgements, and plagues in this life, condemneth them to everlasting torments in hell.88

Featley was as clear, therefore, as Prideaux and Davenant had been, that predestination to glory could not be divorced from all the means of election and grace, and that reprobation did not entirely exclude temporary manifestations of inward grace.89 The elect recognize themselves as such, Featley suggested, first and foremost ‘by the testimony of the Spirit, which witnesseth to our hearts that we are the sons of God’. But election can also be discerned by the conformity of their belief with the Scriptures, in all points necessary to salvation; as well as ‘by a lively hope and particular affiance in Christ, and his merits, for our salvation, grounded on the promises of the gospel, applied to us by a special faith’.90 Assurance and orthodoxy were inseparably intertwined in Featley’s presentation of the Christian faith. Featley’s Sum was a concise statement of exactly the theology of grace that Montagu had rejected in the Gag and the Appello. And, as its introduction made clear, it numbered the Reformed understanding of grace as among the ‘necessary points of faith . . . required of every man’.91 Given the admission, in the Preface to the Ancilla as a whole, that the questions of grace and free will were the vexed theological issues of the day, the inclusion of the Sum makes it difficult to see the Ancilla as anything other than a conscious intervention in the Montagu affair. As has been observed, the Sum did not survive into the later editions of the Ancilla; but the Ancilla itself was indelibly marked by the kind of theology the Sum expressed. After an extended section on preparation for prayer, Featley offered an explanatory table summarizing the form and matter of prayer. Prayer, he said, was tripartite, consisting in confession, invocation, and thanksgiving. ‘In the third,’ he underlined, the Christian should ‘recount God his benefits’. Of these, the Christian should begin with the spiritual benefits, which are ‘1. Election. 2. Creation. 3. Redemption. 4. Vocation.

128  Grace and Conformity 5. Justification. 6. Sanctification. 7. Hope of Glorification’.92 The Ancilla was suggesting, in other words, that the golden chain of predestination should inform every Christian’s prayer life. Featley then set down a series of biblical passages, which he thought might inspire appropriate meditations on these manifold spiritual benefits. These texts also served, of course, as a handy list of scriptural authorities for the doctrines in question.93 What Featley considered the orthodox teaching on grace naturally informed the prayers that he had composed for the book as well. The preparatory prayer for ‘all the conditions requisite in prayer’ was a standing rebuke to any Arminian leanings lurking in its reader’s breast. It began: ‘Heavenly Father, whose gift it is that I can ask any good gift at thy hands, without whose grace I cannot desire thy healthful and saving grace’.94 The prayer after Communion involved a confident statement of justification by faith and Christian assurance: ‘I know that I shall live eternally and blessedly, because by thy faith working in and through this sacrament, I receive the seed of immortality’. This confidence in election marks the prayers that Featley proposed for a Christian’s Sunday morning devotions, even as he neatly skewered any unhealthily sacrificial readings of the sacrament by deploying the language of the Prayer Book Communion service in a private and non-​ Eucharistic devotion. ‘Accept I beseech thee this my morning sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, which with a willing heart and devout affection I offer unto thee, in confidence of thy Son’s infinite merits, and acknowledgement of thine everlasting love, and those inestimable benefits which by him, and for him, and with him thou conferredst upon me, and all thine elect in him’.95 Featley then developed this into a rapturous meditation on Christian assurance: ‘Who can raise his thoughts, and desires to the high price of our calling, and incorruptible crown of glory laid up for us in heaven? . . . Enlarge my heart with thy love, that I may in some sort comprehend . . . the measure of thine infinite love manifested to me in the faith of Jesus Christ, and abundantly testified by writing my name in the book of life before I was . . . .’96 The prayer for Monday morning enlarged on the total incapacity of a fallen human being to choose any spiritual good, thus ruling out the Arminian conception of the efficacy of grace. The Christian is encouraged to acknowledge that ‘I cannot desire to think, nor have will to desire, nor grace to will any good;’ and then to pray for God’s help: ‘infuse into my heart the Spirit of grace, without which spiritually I cannot breath in my prayers, nor sigh, not so much as move any faculty or part of soul or body unto thee’.97 The same theme of the spiritual incapacity of fallen humanity returned on Tuesday

Responses to Montagu  129 evening: ‘I can render thee nothing but that which thou puttest in my heart to render it to thee’.98 Featley’s sentiments here accord with Ryrie’s observation about Protestant piety that ‘True prayer, it was generally acknowledged, was neither a human “work” nor a human response to God’s work. Rather it was itself God’s work, drawing devotees into intimacy with himself ’.99 The Reformed piety that breathes through the Ancilla could be found in any number of contemporary devotional manuals, most of which emerged from within the Puritan community. Featley was clearly aware of his competition, and commended his predecessors for their work.100 Indeed, he explicitly placed the Ancilla within that tradition by referencing the floral imagery adopted by the famous and frequently reprinted devotional, A Garden of Spiritual Flowers (1609): ‘To sum up all in a word, I have brought thee into the Spouse garden of flowers and spices; I have gathered some out (almost) of every bed, and laid by them a thread in the analysis or method, to bind them up together. Make thou thy posy as thou likest best; and breathe out with me that sweet prayer of the Spouse, cut in one of her knots’.101 Featley claimed, however, that his forerunners in devotional writing had omitted a number of important things. ‘I have much marvelled’ he wrote, ‘what the reason might be that they undertaking to fit prayers and devotions to several seasons, and special occasions, baulked the Christian fasts and feasts’.102 Featley put this down to a misguided scruple about the observation of Saints’ days;103 but even this scruple, he thought, could not explain the neglect of the great Christian festivals. As he underlined, ‘But admit there might be a legal caveat put in against the Saints’ plea, what have the feasts of our Lord and Saviour deserved, that they should be struck out of their Calendar, or slightly passed without the honour of a meditation, hymns, or prayer on them? They cannot plead want of precedent, authority, or direction: for they have copies fair written in golden characters by Chrysostom in his Homilies, Chrysologus, Leo, Augustine, Bernard, & other devout Fathers in their sermons upon these days. If they saw not them, why did they not follow the excellent pattern in the Book of Common Prayer? Which laying before me, I have drawn forms of exhortations, hymns, and prayers, carrying throughout a manifest impression of the feast to which they are dedicated’.104 The English Prayer Book was, in other words, the avowed inspiration for the Ancilla. Featley further burnished his Conformist credentials by adding a defence of Christian feasts to the relevant section of the Ancilla. This essay began with a lengthy quotation, from Richard Hooker, in defence of the Church’s

130  Grace and Conformity festivals. Featley then continued: ‘Thus the renowned author of Ecclesiastical Polity gilds over all the rubrics of our Church calendar. And it seems strange to me that any religiously devoted persons should go about to deface, much more utterly expunge them out of all books of common prayer and public devotion’.105 Featley was evidently anchoring his Reformed piety firmly within the established polity of the Church. He was attempting to demonstrate, in other words, that the doctrine of grace which he was defending was by no means inimical to the distinctive structures and liturgy of the English Church, whatever Montagu may have claimed.106 Perhaps it was his display of mildly anti-​Puritan conformity that enabled the Ancilla itself to be multiply republished during the reign of Charles I, when the accompanying Sum was not.107 As a result, the Ancilla continued to perform its carefully packaged polemical purpose long after Featley’s other interventions in the Montagu affair had become a thing of the past.108

Samuel Ward: A Joint Attestation and Gratia Discriminans Montagu was alarmed about the opposition he faced from Featley and from Prideaux, but they were not the only well-​connected clergy who took umbrage at what he had written. At a couple of points in the Appello, Montagu unwisely insinuated that the divines representing the British Churches at Dort had subscribed to a synodical statement condemning episcopacy, thus raising question over their loyalty to the Church of England.109 ‘What ends men had in that Synod,’ he wrote ‘I know not, nor am curious to enquire: how things were carried, I as little understand or care. Whether any or all subscribed absolutely or with protestation, I cannot tell. Let them look unto it, and answer for it, whom it doth concern’.110 Needless to say, such remarks were not well received by the former delegates. The gathering storm-​clouds are observable in letters between two of them, John Davenant, by now Bishop of Salisbury, and Samuel Ward, Davenant’s successor as Lady Margaret Professor in Cambridge. On 10 October 1625, Davenant wrote to congratulate Ward on his proposed vindication of the British delegation from Montagu’s attacks. He also made clear his low regard for Montagu as a theologian, and echoed Featley’s suggestion that Montagu had misrepresented Overall, whose manuscript opinion, of course, he had used at Dort. Montagu, Davenant wrote, ‘mightily deceives

Responses to Montagu  131 himself in taking it for granted that Dr Overall, Bucer, or Luther were ever of his mind in the point of predestination or falling from grace. The truth is that he never understood what they meant’.111 A couple of months later, in a letter of 8 December 1625, Davenant reiterated his opinion that the Appello was a book whose teaching was quite contrary to the common tenets of the Church of England on exactly those doctrinal points.112 Ward’s vindication of the British delegates was ready for the press and entered on the Stationers’ Company register in 18 April 1626. A Joint Attestation, Avowing that the Discipline of the Church of England Was Not Impeached by the Synod of Dort was published shortly thereafter, bearing the names of all five British delegates at Dort: George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester; John Davenant; Walter Balcanquhall, Dean of Rochester; Samuel Ward; and Thomas Goad, who at this point was still one of Archbishop Abbot’s chaplains, having long served in that capacity alongside Featley. The Attestation accused Montagu of discourtesy in publicly questioning the conduct of men he knew without speaking to them first.113 It made the point that the Arminians at Dort had been quite as zealous for ministerial parity as their opponents, and that there was, consequently, no ‘natural consanguinity’ between the doctrine maintained at Dort and Presbyterian discipline, whatever Montagu might claim.114 The pamphlet then underlined that the British delegation had explicitly subscribed only to the doctrinal conclusions of the Synod, not to its decrees on Church order.115 Furthermore, the senior member of the British delegation, George Carleton, had recorded a formal Protestation at the Synod, to the effect that that Episcopal government had dominical sanction and reflected the practice of the Apostles.116 The Attestation therefore challenged Montagu to make reparation to those he had publicly slandered and withdraw what he had written to their prejudice.117 Between his 1625 exchange of letters with Davenant, and the publication of the Attestation, Ward had himself attacked Montagu’s teaching on grace from the pulpit of Cambridge’s University Church. On 12 January 1626, he preached a Latin sermon to the clergy on Philippians 2:12–​13: ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure’. Ward did not name Montagu in this sermon, but it contained an explicit attack on the Dutch Remonstrants. Montagu, of course, claimed not to have read Arminius. However, he raised the possibility in the Appello that Remonstrant teaching might be perfectly compatible with Christian orthodoxy. As he put it, ‘If Arminius in tenets agreeth unto Scripture plain and express: if he hath agreeing unto his

132  Grace and Conformity opinions the practice, tradition, and consent of the ancient Church, I embrace his opinions; let his person or private ends, if he had any, alone: I nor have nor will have confarreation therewith’.118 Montagu also suggested that Arminius and his followers had been attacked for maintaining a perfectly legitimate doctrinal alternative. ‘I excuse not Arminius,’ he wrote, ‘or Arminians in any misdemeanour. Only let not innocency in different opinions, be calumniously traduced without cause’.119 In his Latin sermon, Ward undertook to demonstrate that Arminian or Remonstrant theology was quite as noxious as its opponents had claimed and clearly incompatible with Catholic teaching on grace. As he indicated in a letter to his friend James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, which he wrote some weeks after he had delivered this sermon, Ward believed that the root of Arminian error was a mistake about free will.120 It is therefore no surprise that he spent much of his Concio discussing that very question. His aim was to show how a theologian committed to an orthodox, Augustinian conception of grace could nonetheless speak meaningfully about human freedom. Ward insisted that a regenerate person under the guidance of God’s grace remains genuinely free to do good works, and acts in them without either natural necessity or external compulsion.121 To speak meaningfully about human choice, Ward argued, there must be a rational judgement between two alternatives; and this requires that the human will possess the capacity not to choose what it in fact chooses. Ward called this capacity ‘resistibility’ (resistibilitas),122 and he insisted that it is a natural ingredient in all properly human actions.123 God’s gift of grace to the regenerate, he argued, did not remove this capacity, nor did it impose any natural necessity upon their actions, even though the habit of sanctifying grace made them more inclined to good works. It is important to underline this, Ward pointed out, in order to rescue the orthodox conception of grace from an accusation which is unfairly directed at it by its opponents; namely, that it removes the capacity to resist or disagree with God’s will. This was, of course, precisely the accusation which Montagu had made. Concerning the fate of the reprobate, Montagu wrote this: ‘Your teachers declare expressly, it was God’s positive, peremptory, prime, irresistable Act: they were cast into it by God irrespectively, because he would do it: they were thereunto appointed by himself, for himself, and his own pleasure; and being so appointed by his will, were absolutely necessitated thereunto, that they could not possibly resist his will, alter his purpose, prevent his decree, nor avoid the effects of his pleasure’.

Responses to Montagu  133 Ward insisted, on the contrary, that the capacity of the will to resist the divine decree was intrinsic to human nature. ‘This resistibility is connatural and inborn,’ he said, ‘and comes from the will as a natural power and inseparable and proper passion, which flows from the will, insofar as it is a free power. Whensoever, therefore, it wills and consents, it wills and consents resistibly, that is to say, that it so offers its consent that, if it did not wish to, it would not give its consent’.124 Ward insisted, citing Augustine and Fulgentius, that this characteristic of the human will was not removed by grace, and that human beings consequently remained meaningfully free. This was precisely the reason, Ward argued, why the Apostle told his readers to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. The two great dangers in a Christian’s progress towards salvation, he indicated, are carnal security, which makes believers negligent in good works, and spiritual pride, which makes believers ascribe to themselves, what should be ascribed instead to God’s grace. A holy fear is the proper antidote to both these dangers. And Christians have good cause to be constantly fearful, because of the ‘helplessness of our nature, [our] ignorance of what should be done, the difficulty of [doing] good, [our] propensity to evil, the enticements of the flesh’.125 Roman Catholics and Remonstrants alike wrongly concluded and feared because of this, and similar scriptural injunctions, that no one could be sure of salvation. Ward disagreed: for him, Christian assurance did not preclude this holy fear and solicitude in well doing: it merely precluded ‘doubt about God’s benevolence towards us, and a hanging uncertainty’.126 Indeed, he noted, Bernard of Clairvaux had suggested that, since fear is a spiritual gift, when a believer perceives himself to be fearful, the believer knows that his hope is secure. Rightly understood, in other words, godly fear is a source of assurance, not a reason to doubt. Ward next addressed the question of why Paul commanded believers to work, whilst simultaneously claiming that it was God who was at work within them. This, Ward remarked, is a question that had vexed the Church since the time of Pelagius, and had recently arisen in the Low Countries between the Remonstrants and the Contra-​Remonstrants.127 Like Prideaux, Davenant, and Featley, in other words, Ward identified the fundamental theological vice in Remonstrant thought as Pelagianism. The Remonstrants, Ward remarked, did indeed concede that the Holy Spirit infuses by habitual grace both the potential to choose the good, and the inclination to do so. However, they insisted that the will remained free to

134  Grace and Conformity reject the prompting of the actual grace that leads to good works, and that this degree of resistibility must be present in all pious actions. The consequence of their position was that ‘the will is still left in equilibrium;’128 as a result, the believer’s conversion, sanctification, and perseverance all remain uncertain. Ward argued that the debate between the Orthodox and the Remonstrants was not about whether the will has the capacity to resist grace—​resistibilitas. Both parties conceded that it does. The issue was rather about the mode of this capacity. The Synod of Dort did not exclude what he calls the will’s ‘connate’ capacity to resist grace, whereby it could resist if it chooses to do so. Nor did the Synod exclude what he calls its ‘adnate’ capacity to resist, whereby the will, as fallen, desires and has the capacity to resist God’s grace. What the orthodox claim is rather that ‘when God works upon the will with efficacious grace “to will,” this grace efficaciously establishes a non-​resistance in the will, and thus eliminates actual resistance at that time’.129 In the working of grace, neither the connate nor adnate capacity to resist is removed; it is simply that the presence of efficacious grace is incompatible with actual and ultimate resistance to God’s will.130 Efficacious grace ‘always elicits consent and acceptance: and from that moment therefore, it is impossible that the will should not approve, or should in fact resist’.131 And since it is the human will that consents, Ward contended, the human will remains indisputably the formal cause of all virtuous actions. It is the believer who wills and does, in other words, not God: although it is undoubtedly God who works that willing and doing within them.132 The Remonstrants, Ward underlined, had suggested that God only brings about the bare possibility of willing or doing good. This opinion, he thought, was nothing less than Pelagianism, and quite contrary to the mind of the Apostle, as well as to the opinions of Augustine and the decrees of the Second Council of Orange (529).133 If God only works the possibility but not the actuality of conversion, good works, and perseverance, then human choice plays a greater role in those acts than grace. For, as the English medieval theologian Bradwardine made clear, an act is both prior to, and more perfect than, the bare potential to act.134 Furthermore, Ward suggested, the Remonstrant position entailed that the human will is the principal cause of Christian belief and conversion. Grace concurred with the will, in their view, but only concomitantly and contingently; as a result, faith and conversion depended ultimately upon the human will.135 This, Ward thought, subverted both the gratuity and the mystery of divine election: its gratuity, because the outcome of the decree depends on

Responses to Montagu  135 the human will, and its mystery, because the motive for the divine call is, under these circumstances, perfectly transparent.136 Prideaux and Davenant had said the same. For all these reasons, Ward advised his audience to steer clear of Remonstrant theology and, by implication, Montagu’s theology as well. Their arguments echoed those of the Pelagians and Semi-​Pelagians, and had been comprehensively refuted by Augustine. Since that time, Ward contended, Augustine’s teaching on grace had been adhered to by the whole Church. It had also been endorsed by the Church of England ever since the Reformation and taught by all the professors of Divinity in Cambridge, with the unhappy exception of Peter Baro, whom Archbishop Whitgift rightly forced to resign for his error.137 Ward’s unstated suggestion here was that a similarly condign sanction should be imposed upon Montagu. Ward’s sermon was published in London a few months after its delivery, under the title Gratia Discriminans. It was entered in the Stationers’ Company register on 12 June 1626, having been licensed for the press by Thomas Goad, who also composed a Latin poem to preface the work. In that poem, Bradwardine’s emblematic phrase appears once again. ‘Advance! Hasten, mighty defender of the Cause of God! Hasten to contradict this railing pride, which arrogates to the will, what is from above!’138 In this, he was simply picking up on Ward’s own use of the phrase, when he apologized to his audience for the exceptional length of his sermon. ‘I am aware . . . I have too much abused your patience; but the Cause of God needed to be fought for against those troublesome not defenders, but deceivers, but inflaters, but destroyers of free will’.139

George Carleton: An Examination Ward and Goad were not the only former delegates at Dort who reacted to the Appello. Carleton, the leader of the British delegation, did so as well, publishing a substantial rejoinder to it that year: An Examination of Those Things wherein the Author of the Late Appeal Holdeth the Doctrines of the Pelagians and Arminians, to Be the Doctrines of the Church of England. The Bishop of Chichester was clear where Montagu’s error lay. The Author of the Appeal hath troubled the Church of England with strange doctrines in two things especially: First, in the doctrine of predestination

136  Grace and Conformity he attempteth to bring in a decree respective, which he taketh for granted to be the doctrine of our Church: But this will never be granted by us, nor proved by him. Secondly, he taketh it likewise for granted, that the doctrine of our Church is, that a man may fall away from grace totally and finally: If his meaning be that such as are called and justified according to God’s purpose may so fall away, this was never a doctrine of the Church of England. If his meaning be that others may fall away, which are not called and justified according to God’s purpose, then hath he troubled the Church with an idle discourse to no purpose: for in this he hath no adversary.140

Carleton indicated that he had always been loath to discuss the deep mysteries of predestination; but the irreverent handling to which these mysteries had recently been subject, of which Montagu’s Appello was the latest and worst example, had finally driven him to action. Even so, Carleton had not found it easy to take this step, since Montagu was not merely a fellow minister of the Church of England but also a long-​standing personal acquaintance. ‘But in God’s Cause,’ Carleton underlined, ‘all respects of friendship and acquaintance, yea if it were of blood and kindred, must give place to the truth’.141 Carleton defined his allegiance in the same terms as Ward, Goad, Featley, Prideaux, and Davenant. In a letter to Cosin, which he wrote during the summer of 1626, Montagu claimed that Prideaux had licensed Carleton’s attack on him for the press.142 The Stationers’ Company register does not record the publication of Carleton’s book, but it does indicate that Prideaux had presented Alexander Huish’s Lectures upon the Lord’s Prayer for printing on 2 May 1626, so the Regius was certainly involved in licensing books at that time. One of Carleton’s printers, Michael Sparkes, later deposed before Parliament that ‘Bishop Carleton sent for him, sitting the Parliament, and desired him to print his book against Montagu, and to encourage him the more granted him a protection under his own hand, whereupon he printed it: after which Doctor Goad, Archbishop Abbot’s Chaplain, Doctor Ward and Doctor Balcanqual licensed it for the press, with a special recommendation, whereupon he reprinted it: yet notwithstanding, immediately after the Parliament ended, by Bishop Laud’s means, this licensed book was called in’.143 The extant 1626 editions of Carleton’s Examination bear out Montagu’s, and Sparkes’s claims about the book’s publishing history. There is one edition of the Examination on its own, the impression of which is described as ‘London, printed for William Turner. 1626’.144 William Turner was actually an Oxford

Responses to Montagu  137 printer,145 who had been used by Prideaux for his Lectiones Novem. Huish’s lectures, which Prideaux certainly had licensed that year, were described as ‘Imprinted at London, and are to be sold by William Turner in Oxford. 1626’. The presence of Turner’s name therefore makes plausible an Oxford connection for this edition. There is another 1626 edition of the Examination, which describes itself as ‘The second edition, revised and enlarged by the author. Whereunto also there is annexed a joint attestation, avowing that the discipline of the Church of England was not impeached by the Synod of Dort, London: Printed for William Turner, MDCXXVI [1626]’.146 A variant of this edition is described as ‘Printed for Michael Sparkes’.147 It therefore seems likely that this edition was the one that Sparkes described as having been licensed by Goad, Ward, and Balcanquhall—​all of whom, of course, had subscribed to the Attestation. It would appear, in other words, that the publication of Carleton’s Examination involved the cooperation of a number of Montagu’s opponents across Cambridge, Oxford, and Lambeth. Carleton opened the Examination with a rejection of Montagu’s claim that orthodox Reformed theology was tantamount to Puritanism. Those who shaped England’s reformation, Carleton insisted, had held the same doctrine as Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer,148 so it was wrong of Montagu to describe orthodox Reformed teaching as ‘Puritan’. As he put it, ‘albeit the Puritans disquieted our Church about their conceived Discipline, yet they never moved any quarrel against the doctrine of our Church. . . . But it was then the open confession both of the Bishops and of the Puritans, that both parts embraced a mutual consent in doctrine, only the difference was in matter of inconformity’. The conclusion to be drawn from this was clear, whatever Montagu might claim: ‘hitherto there was no Puritan doctrine known’.149 The first to disturb this doctrinal consensus, Carleton indicated, had been Barrett, Baro, and Thomson; whose views had been emphatically rejected by the Bishops of that day, including Archbishops John Whitgift of Canterbury and Matthew Hutton of York. Montagu’s suggestion that such men were to be counted Puritans for supporting the doctrine of the Lambeth Articles was patently absurd.150 The orthodox Reformed position on grace had, in other words, an impeccable Conformist pedigree. Carleton accused Montagu of effectively importing Pelagianism into the English Church, and he defined that noxious doctrinal tendency just as Prideaux had done. ‘The sum is to pull down the power of God, and to set up the power of man. This they attempted to do by defacing the grace of God.

138  Grace and Conformity And because that could not be done, without controlling the doctrine of predestination, this they have likewise attempted. Predestination is fashioned into a new mould by these men, who have made it not to depend upon God, but upon man’.151 Like Prideaux and Davenant, Carleton saw Pelagianism behind any soteriology that risked exalting the human will over God’s grace.152 In Carleton’s view, Montagu had wilfully misrepresented the orthodox doctrine of predestination, in order to discredit it. As he put it, ‘The author of the Appeal doth often charge some men with a doctrine, which no man did ever maintain. For I say, he is not able to prove, that any have maintained the doctrine of predestination, in those terms which he proposeth’.153 In particular, Carleton underlined, no orthodox writer, not even Calvin, asserted that anyone would be condemned to hell, without regard to their sins.154 The doctrine of predestination, Carleton insisted, was rooted in Scripture. It was also explicitly taught by the Thirty-​nine Articles, whatever Montagu might think. Article XVII made very clear that calling followed from predestination, not vice versa, which overthrew any suggestion that the decree of predestination might be conditional upon foreseen faith. Article XVII also made clear that a Christian is justified ‘freely’. If freely, Carleton insisted, then without consideration of foreseen faith.155 Far from being a mark of doctrinal Puritanism, the orthodox Reformed theology of grace lay at the heart of doctrinal Conformity. Montagu was quite wrong, Carleton suggested, to describe predestination in terms other than his opponents had used, calling it ‘absolute,’ ‘necessary,’ ‘irrespective,’ ‘irresistible,’ ‘determined’.156 Carleton indicated that he personally disliked those terms, for ‘Scripture provides us with words sufficient: will of God, and πρόθεσις purpose of God, and εὐδοκία the good pleasure of God. These words suffice to sober minds to express this doctrine’.157 That said, Carleton was prepared to accept, and defend those terms, when they were properly explained. ‘He chargeth us to teach that this decree is absolute . . . If this be the meaning of the word, that God’s purpose of predestination dependeth upon the only will of God, and not upon anything foreseen in men predestinated, which God respected in predestinating: then I affirm that this is the ancient and Catholic doctrine of the Church, and the contrary is the doctrine of the Pelagians’.158 Nor did Carleton balk at the word ‘necessary’. Can any man give us a reason, why the purpose of God should not be necessary? . . . There must be some cause of the necessity of those things that are

Responses to Montagu  139 necessary: What cause can this be? It must either be the will of God, or some other thing. The ancient writers of the Church make it the will of God. If you can find any other cause, you must declare it. The will of God may truly be said to be the necessity of things, because it is the prime, high and necessary cause of things. If you grant not this, then you must point out unto us some superior cause: which because you cannot do, you must be contented with us to confess, that the will of God is not only necessary, but the necessity of things. 159

Indeed, Carleton thought it little short of blasphemy to suggest that God’s decrees were merely contingent.160 Carleton also accepted that predestination could be described as ‘irrespective,’ i.e. without respect to any quality in those predestinated. Augustine had often maintained this; and if Montagu disputed the idea, he needed to show what quality it is in those predestined that the decree of God respects.161 Montagu seemed to Carleton to be suggesting that the grace of God was given in respect of human merit, although he described that merit in terms of faith, obedience and repentance. Suggesting that grace was given in respect of human merit was precisely what Pelagius had taught.162 That said, Carleton accepted that human beings were not ultimately saved without any respect to their faith and obedience. ‘The reason is,’ he made clear, ‘because salvation and glorification are in the nature of a reward . . . and salvation and glory may be said to respect the works that went before’.163 It was simply that God’s decree to predestine anyone to salvation, and the efficacious calling that followed from such predestination, was without prior respect to their faith and obedience.164 With regards to the decree of reprobation, however, Carleton suggested, the situation was different. For, although there cannot be a concurrent cause of salvation, besides God’s will; there certainly was a concurrent cause of condemnation, namely human sin.165 Like Prideaux and Davenant, Carleton distinguished between the decree of preterition, which he called ‘dereliction,’ and the decree of reprobation, which he considered as an ordination to condemnation. The former was absolute; the latter was not. As a result, the decrees of predestination and reprobation did not mirror each other precisely. Carleton explained this disparity, in connection with the decree of reprobation: If we understand an absolute decree to be such as dependeth upon the only will of God, without respect to any other thing; then I confess I cannot understand any such absolute decree in this: For those things are here

140  Grace and Conformity understood absolute, which depend upon no other cause, but only the will of God. Now here besides the will of God, we find sin to be a just cause to condemn, and to reprobate. For this ground we take with Saint Augustine that predestination and reprobation do respect sin. And if besides the will of God, sin also be a just cause of condemnation, then, I understand not how any decree herein can be absolute. But if it should be further questioned whether dereliction of some in their sin be absolute? so far as my knowledge reacheth, I must yield that this may be called absolute; because in this there is no other cause but only the will of God: For seeing that all men are once found sinners, there may be a cause given why all men may justly deserve condemnation: the cause is apparent, that is, sin; but why any man should be saved no cause appeareth, but only the will of God, and his mercy to them whom he is well pleased to deliver from sin.166

In this, of course, Carleton was adopting the same position as Prideaux and Davenant, and for the same reason; namely to demonstrate that the decree of reprobation was not unjust. Carleton had reservations about the suggestion that grace was ‘irresistible,’ since it was clear that grace was daily resisted, even by the regenerate. It was rather that God’s will ultimately overcame that resistance in the elect: ‘this power of God doth so order the will of man, that the will of man cannot but be willing to receive this grace, when it is thus ordered, framed and wrought upon; for the power of working is in grace: grace worketh, converteth nature and healeth it: nature is wrought upon, converted, and healed’.167 When it came to the term ‘determined,’ Carleton entirely failed to see Montagu’s problem. ‘This was never doubted,’ he wrote, ‘no not amongst the Pelagians, that the counsel and purpose of God is determined. Only the question is what doth determine God’s purpose? whether his own will or man’s freewill? If this man’s purpose be to give this to man’s free will, then he cometh home to the Pelagians. If he confess this determinating power to be in God’s will; then to what end doth he object this, as a thing absurd, that the decree is determined?’ As Prideaux and Davenant had, in relation to Jesuit and Arminian theology, Carleton accused Montagu of theological absurdity, for reversing the proper order of causation: ‘For that I call nonsense, that is against divinity, philosophy and common reason, as this is, which maketh a subsequent grace to be the cause of a precedent grace; to set the effect before the cause’.168 Faith and obedience were the God-​given fruit of predestination, so they could not

Responses to Montagu  141 possibly be its cause: ‘For albeit men according to God’s purpose are called, do believe, are justified, walk in obedience & repentance, and other good works, yet it is God that worketh that which he predestinateth, and worketh according to his own exceeding great power faith in men, charity, and hope, and maketh them walk in obedience’.169 As Carleton underlined, there is a God-​given order in the chain of grace within the predestined, and theologians must respect it, or they will unravel God’s redemptive plan: ‘The graces of God are ordered, and they that would disorder them, trouble the whole frame of our salvation. For God hath set the order: from God’s purpose proceedeth predestination, from predestination calling, from calling faith and justification, from justification obedience and all fruitful works’.170 This order is set out clearly by Paul in Romans 8:29–​30; and this passage ‘doth prove that a precedent grace may be some cause to draw after it a subsequent grace; but for a subsequent grace to be any manner of cause to draw a precedent, this is impossible’.171 The same order was established by Article XVII, which Montagu was consequently contradicting with his idea of a respective decree. Turning to address the question of perseverance, Carleton underlined that God is the source of many different graces. Some of these may be refused or lost.172 However, the graces which flow from predestination, namely the grace of calling and justification may not: ‘This grace is primary, constant and unchangeable: This is a free gift proceeding from the purpose of God, and is wrought in us by God’s calling. Of this the Apostle speaketh. “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” ’173 Perseverance is thus a grace which is given to all true believers; and though they may fall into sins of infirmity, they will never fall back under the dominion of sin, for God’s imperishable seed abides within them.174 ‘I say further,’ Carleton added, ‘that sin is so far from cutting off faith totally in the regenerate, that it is rather ordained, by the infinite mercy of God, (which is rather to be adored, and wondered at, then disputed) it is, I say, ordained for the better exercise of faith and repentance’.175 The gift of charity may wax and wane, but God’s purpose of salvation in those predestined cannot fail.176 This doctrine, Carleton indicated, had not been challenged before Augustine’s time, so the Church Fathers who had written before him had spoken more loosely on this question than Augustine did, as Augustine himself admitted.177 But Augustine’s commitment to the perseverance of the saints was abundantly clear, and Carleton dedicated an entire chapter setting down Augustine’s opinions on the subject.178 Carleton insisted, however,

142  Grace and Conformity that, pace Montagu, Augustine was not an exceptional voice in this area. He found support for the orthodox teaching on perseverance in Ambrose, Prosper, Gregory the Great, Bede, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Alonso Tostado (Abulensis).179 This was Catholic truth, in other words, not merely Augustinian truth. Furthermore, despite Montagu’s claims to the contrary, Carleton insisted, Overall explicitly denied that those truly justified could ever fall from grace either totally or finally.180 In other words, ‘This doctrine of total and final falling away, which he pretendeth to be the doctrine of our Church, was a doctrine refuted at Hampton Court, by D. Overall, and before that time was never received here: For D. Overall would never have refuted a doctrine received in this Church. Then let him seek out when his doctrines began to be the doctrines of our Church’.181 A key error that explains the Arminians’ and Montagu’s rejection of this doctrine, was their inadequate conception of grace. ‘We must observe,’ he wrote, ‘that one especial ground of their error is in this, that they conceive and understand amiss of grace. They take it for another thing then the Scriptures have declared, and the Church of God from the Scriptures have taken it to be. And therefore when they define grace, they say it is a moral persuasion. Arminius himself saith, it is lenis suasio’; and, as a result, ‘they admit no power of God here’.182 But human conversion, Carleton insisted, requires far more than persuasion; for persuasion reaches no further than human wisdom, and it requires far more than that to liberate humanity them from the dominion of darkness and Satan: it requires the transformative power of God.183 As he put it, ‘if we be drawn to believe by the exceeding greatness of God’s power, by the mighty working of his power; then it followeth, that the grace whereby we are called, whereby we believe, and repent, and are justified, and in the end saved, is the power of God. It was his good will and purpose to predestinate us, but it is his power to execute that good purpose, to draw sinful men out of the power of darkness, into the kingdom of light, to work in our hearts a love of obedience by his holy Spirit. To work this, far surpassed the power of creatures, and therefore it is done by the power of God’.184 Carleton brought his work to a close by challenging Montagu’s suggestion that the orthodox doctrine of predestination was a scholastic speculation that should not be imposed on the Church. ‘Why any doctrine contained in the holy Scripture’, Carleton exclaimed, ‘should be called a mere scholastical speculation, is a thing I conceive not. He must give a reason that calleth it so. Mere scholastical speculations may well enough be spared without any loss or hindrance to our salvation: But will he say that these doctrines of Scripture

Responses to Montagu  143 may so well be spared without any loss or hindrance to our salvation? It would be an hard task for Pelagius himself to prove that’.185 For Carleton, as for Featley, the orthodox doctrine of grace was a necessary point of faith.

Joseph Hall’s Via Media Overall enjoyed a walk-​on part in both Featley’s Second Parallel and Carleton’s Examination, but he became a central figure in Joseph Hall’s abortive contribution to the Montagu affair. As indicated above, Montagu was aware that the Dean of Worcester liked his opinions no more than Prideaux.186 What he may not have known is that Hall actually produced a response to his writings, the Via Media, which came close enough to publication for it to be licensed and entered on the Stationers’ Company Register on 13 August 1626, before Hall withdrew it from the press.187 Given that it was not ultimately published until 1660, the significance of Hall’s tract lies not in the impact which it had on the controversy, but in the further illustration which it provides of the diversity of the Reformed Conformist response to Montagu’s works. From the outset, Hall struck a self-​consciously irenic, rather than a confrontational tone.188 In his dedicatory letter to the King, Hall warned that there was ‘a storm coming towards our Church, such a one, as shall not only drench our plumes, but shake our peace’.189 He urged the King to curb the disputatious tendencies of both parties; asking permission, in the meantime, to contribute to the restoration of tranquillity within the Church, by ‘showing how unjustly we are divided, and by what means we may be made, and kept entire’.190 Hall approached his task by setting down a series of theses on the five areas of doctrine disputed between the Reformed and the Remonstrants. He then backed these theses up with references to the Thirty-​ nine Articles, as well as ample quotations from both the Collegiate Suffrage and Overall’s manuscript opinion on the five Remonstrant Articles, the very opinion which Davenant had used at Dort. This approach enabled Hall to suggest, without ever naming his opponent, that, notwithstanding Montagu’s claims to the contrary, the line taken by the British divines at Dort was both consonant with the Thirty-​nine Articles, and not in fundamental disagreement with the opinions of Bishop Overall, whose name by the 1620s, as Milton has argued, ‘was synonymous with moderation and authority’.191 As Lake observes, this enabled Hall to argue that the ‘fairly uncompromising restatement’ of Reformed orthodoxy encapsulated in his theses ‘did indeed

144  Grace and Conformity represent the middle ground upon which all sound, moderate and reasonable divines could meet’.192 Echoing the concerns of the British delegates at Dort, which in turn reflected their reading of Article XVII, Hall forcefully emphasized the universality and reliability of the Gospel call. ‘There is no Son of Adam,’ he asserted, ‘to whom God hath not promised, that, if he shall believe in Christ, repent, and persevere, he shall be saved . . . This general, and undoubted will of God, must be equally proclaimed to all men through the world without exception, and ought to be so received, and believed, as it is by him published, and revealed’.193 Hall also underlined, as the Suffrage had done, that God’s grace extended beyond the elect: ‘All men (within the pale of the Church especially) have from the mercy of God such common helps towards this belief, and salvation, as that the neglect thereof makes any of them justly guilty of their own condemnation’.194 Hall insisted, nevertheless, that God had ‘decreed to give a special, and effectual grace to those, that are predestinate according to the good pleasure of his will, whereby they do actually believe, obey, and persevere, that they may be saved’. With regards to the reprobate, he argued that ‘God doth not either actually damn or appoint any soul to damnation without the consideration and respect of sin’.195 Hall’s use of the phrase ‘actually damn’ makes clear that he had in mind what Prideaux called the positive decree of reprobation ‘predamnation,’ rather than the negative decree of reprobation, ‘preterition’. Hall argued, as the Suffrage had done, that the death of Christ enabled all people to be saved, if they came to faith: ‘God pitying the woeful condition of man fallen by his free will into sin, and perdition, sent his own Son, that he should give him himself as a ransom for the sins of the whole world, so as there is no living soul, that may not be truly, and seriously invited by his faith to take hold of the forgiveness of his sins, and everlasting life by the virtue of this death of Christ with certain assurance of obtaining both’.196 Those who did not benefit from this universal offer of salvation had only themselves to blame, Hall suggested, because ‘God hath ordained, that wheresoever the gracious promise of the Gospel shall be preached, there shall be, and is withal ordinarily so much supernatural grace offered together with the outward means, as may justly convince the impenitent, and unbelieving of a wilful neglect, if not a contemptuous rejection’.197 That said, alongside this general supply of grace, ‘God hath decreed to give a special, more abundant, and effectual grace unto his elect, whereby they may be enabled certainly, and

Responses to Montagu  145 infallibly to apply unto themselves the benefit of Christ’s death, and do accordingly believe, and persevere, and attain salvation’.198 Hall insisted on the spiritual incapacity of human beings, and on their inability to achieve conversion or regeneration without God’s grace.199 He conceded, however, that there were some outward acts prerequisite to conversion which those not yet regenerate were able to perform. He also conceded that certain internal prerequisites to salvation were provoked by the Spirit in the hearts of those not yet regenerate; ‘for the grace of God doth not use to work upon a man immediately by sudden raptures, but by meet preparations, informing the judgment of his danger, wounding the conscience by the terrors of the law, suppling it by the promises of the Gospel’.200 These internal effects of grace were invariably choked by sin, even in the elect. However, in the elect, God ‘notwithstanding follows them effectually with powerful helps till he have wrought out his good work in them’.201 In the process of human conversion, Hall underlined, God first infuses his Spirit and grace into the human heart, and then elicits from it the acts of belief and repentance: ‘He gives that power, which the will exercises: so as it is at once both ours, and God’s; ours in that we do work; God’s, in that he works it in us’.202 As a result, Hall insisted, echoing Ward’s emphasis in Gratia Discriminans, ‘God doth not overthrow the nature of the will, but causeth it to work after its own native manner, freely, and willingly, neither doth he pull up by the roots that sinful possibility, which is in our nature to resist good motions, but doth sweetly, and effectually work in man a firm and ready will to obey him’.203 In his treatment of perseverance, Hall again echoed the Suffrage by conceding that the reprobate did experience some authentic spiritual impulses, even if they never took permanent root.204 He also conceded, as the British delegates had, that the elect might commit grievous sin and so fall under the displeasure of God, ‘so as he neither can, nor ought to persuade himself other, then that abiding in this State impenitent, he is obnoxious to eternal death’.205 Hall insisted nevertheless that ‘Howsoever such a one stands by his own desert in the state of damnation, yet those who are soundly rooted in a true, and lively faith, lose not all their right to the inheritance of Heaven, neither can either totally, or finally fall from grace, and perish everlastingly: But by the special, and effectual favour, and inoperation of God are kept up, and enabled to persevere in a true, and lively faith, so as that at last they are brought to eternal life’.206

146  Grace and Conformity Hall suggested that these brief theses contained all that needed to be known on these topics.207 He then undertook an extended analysis of the differences between the Dutch Remonstrants and their opponents on the question of predestination, which sought to show that the disagreements were actually insignificant, if one took seriously the more qualified and defensive expositions of the Remonstrant position.208 In particular, he suggested, if one accepted at face value the concession made by some Remonstrant authors, that faith was ultimately the gift of God, then the idea of predestination upon the foresight of faith ceased to be problematic.209 For only the suggestion that faith was given only to those who freely disposed themselves to receive it could turn this position into Pelagianism.210 As Lake underlines, by defining Pelagianism in this way, Hall was effectively anathematizing ‘any genuinely Arminian version of the doctrine of election from foreseen faith’.211 Hall suggested, however, that the disagreements between the Remonstrants and their opponents over predestination were ultimately irrelevant in the English context, because ‘The Church of England according to the explication of R. B. Overall goes a mid-​way betwixt both’.212 Hall then offered a judiciously rearranged excerpt from Overall’s discussion of predestination, which deftly highlighted the Reformed elements within it: Our Church (saith he) with St. Austin maintaineth an absolute and particular decree of God to save those, whom he hath chosen in Christ, not out of the prescience of our faith, and will, but out of the mere purpose of his own will, and grace, and that thereupon God hath decreed to give, to whom he pleaseth a more effectual, and abundant grace, by which they only not may believe and obey, if they will, but whereby they do actually will, believe, obey, and persevere without prejudice to the rest, to whom he hath also given gracious offers, and helps to the same purpose, though by their just fault neglected. What can the Synod of Dort in this case wish to be said more?213

Hall then went on to explain Overall’s perhaps more problematic remarks about God’s conditional will, and the general evangelical promise to save all who believe, remarks which Hall had carefully excised from the passage which he quoted. ‘The sound of a general and conditionate will, perhaps, seems harsh to some ears,’ he argued, but ‘it is the approved distinction of worthy, orthodox, and unquestionable divines’.214 Hall illustrated this point

Responses to Montagu  147 from the writings of the indisputably Reformed Girolamo Zanchi.215 In Hall’s careful hands, Overall was thus revealed as a pillar of Reformed orthodoxy. Hall deployed Overall’s opinion to similar effect in his less extensive discussions on the death of Christ,216 free will and conversion,217 and perseverance.218 In each case, Overall was presented as the safe and English middle way between two foreign extremes. As Lake has observed, Hall effectively transformed Overall ‘from a party to the dispute into one of its arbitrators’.219 In so doing, Hall was depriving Montagu of a key precedent for the legitimacy of his opinions. This approach made polemical sense, as Milton has underlined, both because Overall was an authority whom Montagu recognized, and because he maintained a rather more nuanced position on the Arminian points than Montagu.220 Hall was effectively recruiting Overall into the ranks of Reformed Conformity.

Conclusions In the Gag and the Appello, Montagu had thrown down the gauntlet on the theology of grace. The York House Conference underlined that he enjoyed powerful support. England’s Reformed Conformists were not slow to respond to the challenge Montagu represented. In Montagu’s own mind, Prideaux and Featley were his chief adversaries, both behind the scenes and in print; but Ward and Carleton were quite as zealous. By publishing his Act Lectures, Prideaux offered a timely and authoritative restatement of Reformed orthodoxy on grace. He also drew up a theological charge-​sheet against Montagu and denounced him in the Schools. Montagu saw Featley as Prideaux’s closest collaborator in this effort. Far from being simple instances of theological mud-​slinging, Featley’s Parallels reflected the teaching of the theological academy, at least as exhibited by Prideaux. Conscious that Montagu had denied being an Arminian, Featley did not claim that he was. He sought rather to illustrate the theological kinship between Featley and the Arminians, and the Arminians and the Pelagians and Semipelagians. In the same way, he did not claim that Montagu was a crypto-​Catholic, he simply pointed to the theological parallels that existed between Montagu and Roman Catholic theology. Featley’s Parallels were perhaps more effective than some scholars have conceded. It was, however, Featley’s Ancilla that represented his most enduring contribution to the debate. This frequently republished devotional work deftly

148  Grace and Conformity anchored an orthodox reading of grace within the Church of England’s liturgical year. It consequently offered a powerful rejoinder to Montagu’s claim that Reformed orthodoxy was tantamount to Puritanism. In the Ancilla, such orthodoxy took an unmistakably Conformist form. The same point underlay Ward’s coordination of the Joint Attestation in which the British delegates at Dort vindicated their loyalty to English Church polity. Ward also preached and then published the Gratia Discriminans against Montagu, which demonstrated, against Montagu’s claims to the contrary, that the Reformed teaching on grace had indeed been Augustine’s, and that such teaching did not compromise human freedom. As Bishop of Chichester, Carleton was the most senior figure to answer Montagu, and his Examination seems to have involved a degree of Reformed Conformist collaboration. Like Featley and Ward, he denied that Reformed orthodoxy was a mark of Puritanism. He illustrated instead its compatibility with the Articles and its impeccable Conformist credentials. Reformed orthodoxy on grace was, in Carleton’s mind, as in Ward’s and Featley’s, the doctrinal dimension of Conformity. Hall’s ultimately unpublished Via Media adopted a rather different polemical tack, summoning Montagu back to what Hall presented as the moderate middle way of the English Church. It was, however, a middle way defined by the Collegiate Suffrage and a purposively Reformed reading of Overall and one which had no room for Arminianism.221 The Reformed Conformists were undoubtedly in the vanguard of the response to Montagu’s controversial opinions. Using a range of polemical strategies, they set out to defend the Reformed understanding of grace as the accepted orthodoxy of the Church of England. They exhibited both its compatibility with the Thirty-​nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer and its roots within the Catholic tradition.222 In their minds, doctrinal Conformity implied an orthodox Reformed understanding of grace; so that understanding could never threaten the polity of the English Church.

4 The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation The Royal Proclamation Publishing rejoinders to Richard Montagu was not the exclusive preserve of prominent Reformed Conformists. Over the course of 1626, Anthony Wotton, Lecturer at All Hallows, Barking, published A dangerous plot discovered; John Yates, Rector of Stiffkey in Norfolk, published Ibis ad Caesarem; Henry Burton, Rector of St Matthew, Friday Street in London, published A plea to an appeal; and Francis Rous, a lay politician with theological interests, published Testis Veritatis. These writers have usually been identified as Puritans; certainly their relationship with ecclesiastical authority was occasionally less comfortable than that enjoyed by their Conformist fellow-​controversialists.1 The flood of theological polemic from such a wide range of sources clearly alarmed the authorities, who attempted to constrain theological discussion by royal fiat. However, as this chapter will show, the government attempt to silence the discussion of grace and predestination was less successful than has often been assumed. On 14 June 1626, a day before the dissolution of Parliament, Charles I issued a proclamation designed to quench the Montagu affair. ‘Of late,’ the King observed, ‘some questions and opinions seem to have been broached or raised in matters of doctrine, and the tenets of our religion, which at first only being meant against the Papists, but afterwards by the sharp and indiscrete handling and maintaining of some of either parts, have given much offence to the sober and well grounded readers’. Charles consequently admonished his clergy to ‘carry themselves so wisely, warily, and conscionably, that neither by writing, preaching, printing, conferences, or otherwise, they raise any doubts, or publish, or maintain any new inventions, or opinions concerning religion, then such as are clearly grounded, and warranted by the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England’.2

Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0005

150  Grace and Conformity The original draft of this proclamation had identified Montagu as one of the theological troublemakers it had in mind and had lamented the danger that people might be drawn into Arminianism and then plain Popery through his writings.3 The King had then intervened to ensure that the published version mentioned neither Montagu nor the threat of Arminianism.4 Even so, Montagu was fearful that his supporters at Court had thrown him to the lions, as he told Cosin, in a letter of 28 June: ‘For the alteration you speak of, mirror, stupeo, et pertimeo [I marvel, I am aghast, and I am greatly afraid], least I be not only not preferred . . . but be abandoned. For else, why was the Proclamation so carried? Why are not the opponent writers questioned? Why write they still, as I hear, even since the Proclamation, impune’. 5 Montagu was somewhat encouraged, however, by a conversation he had with the Duke of Buckingham a few weeks later, in which the Duke apparently pledged his own and the King’s support.6 Furthermore, the Proclamation was soon re-​deployed against Montagu’s opponents, by those more sympathetic to his opinions. Bishop Neile used it, two days after it had been issued, to quash a thesis defending absolute predestination at the Cambridge Commencement.7 News of this reached Davenant shortly before he had left London for Salisbury, as appears from a letter he wrote to Ward, on 22 June 1626: ‘There is a proclamation lately come out which inhibits broaching of new opinions & multiplying of entangled questions. How far those of Durham House will stretch the meaning thereof I know not. I hear tell that whereas a question was propounded by the answerer concerning absolute election, you have since been commanded to recall it and take another instead thereof ’.8 Ussher shared Davenant’s concerns about how the Proclamation might be used by those hostile to Reformed theology. Preaching before the King at Greenwich, on Sunday 25 June, he confronted the issue directly. The proponents of an Arminian reading of grace, he argued, since they were a minority among the clergy, were bound in conscience to refrain from expressing their novel theological views, however right they believed themselves to be.9 Those who had urged the King to issue a Proclamation silencing both sides in the debate had therefore given him bad advice. For, as Ussher argued, ‘it is not an easy matter to silence a multitude in that they have been born, bred and taught in, so as to keep order in a few’. By contrast, ‘Those few that move opinions may be easily made to keep their limits and not to disturb the peace of the Church, but to keep their opinions to themselves’.10 Ussher was clear, in other words: it was Montagu who needed muzzling, not his opponents, and

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  151 Ussher was prepared to preach that unwelcome message to the King and his household, even if it meant that he might not be invited back.11 Ussher’s advice went unheeded. On 29 June, the Court of High Commission summoned all the stationers who had printed the tracts against Montagu that year, and ordered them to cease printing or selling them. Since the Court that sat was composed of Archbishop Abbot, Walter Balcanquhall, Thomas Goad, and the Dean of the Arches, Sir Henry Martin, ‘all of them of a contrary opinion to Montagu,’ and two of whom had been involved in the very publications they were calling in, this decision was almost certainly the result of political pressure. It certainly caused surprise.12 Nicholas Tyacke has suggested that ‘Calvinism’ was effectively muzzled within Cambridge after Neile’s suppression of the thesis on absolute election.13 He associates this ‘anti-​Calvinist’ takeover with the election of the Duke of Buckingham as University Chancellor in 1626. This marked, Tyacke suggests, the assertion of more direct royal control than at any time since the accession of Elizabeth. However, when Buckingham was assassinated, in 1628, he was replaced by Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, whose religious sympathies were widely thought to lie, not so much with the Anti-​Calvinists, as with the Puritans.14 Furthermore, attention to the activities of Ward after 1626 demonstrates that the suggestion that ‘Calvinism’ was effectively silenced in Cambridge during this period is wide of the mark.15 A significant number of Ward’s Commencement Determinations were published posthumously, as part of his Opera Nonnulla in 1658. The Determinations are not dated, but the theses that they discussed can be compared with a manuscript list of Cambridge Commencement theses in the British Library.16 The manuscript itself gives cross-​references to Ward’s published Determinations.17 Furthermore, Ward’s posthumous editor, Seth Ward, made clear that the Determinations which he included in the Opera had been intended for Commencement, and were therefore ‘beautifully and accurately written, and in no need of revision’.18 There is little doubt, in other words, that the Determinations in Ward’s Opera represent his teaching during Commencement, Cambridge’s equivalent of the Oxford Act. Commencement theses for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, which were those the Lady Margaret Professor usually had to determine, were proposed by the aspiring graduands and agreed by the University authorities. Some of the theses proposed after 1626 were intended to be hostile to the Reformed teaching on grace,19 but others clearly were not. Ward’s position as Professor,

152  Grace and Conformity which involved regulating and concluding the discussion, meant that, whatever the intention of the respondent, Ward was in a strategic position to ensure that Reformed orthodoxy prevailed. He duly made the most of it.

Ward’s Determination on the Concurrence of God (1627) A year after Neile’s intervention, and still under Buckingham’s Chancellorship, Ward had a golden opportunity to reassert the Reformed teaching on grace. At the 1627 Commencement, Matthew Miller, of Clare College, was the chosen respondent. Clare was then under the leadership of the Thomas Paske, a man sympathetic to Reformed divinity, and Miller had been a Fellow under him.20 Miller’s thesis was: ‘The concurrence of God does not take away from things their proper mode of operation’.21 As has already been noted, Ward believed that mistaken thinking about the relationship between efficacious grace and human free choice lay at the heart of Remonstrant error. So Miller’s thesis gave him the perfect excuse to reprise the theme that had dominated his Gratia Discriminans the year before. As was customary, Ward began by defining his terms. ‘Things’ in this thesis, he indicated, meant all secondary causes. Regarding the ‘mode of operation’ of a secondary cause, Ward underlined that there were three possibilities. A secondary cause might act necessarily (when it can only act in one way—​the sun necessarily shines), contingently (when it might have acted another way—​the crops might not have grown, though not as a result of any conscious choice), or freely (Paul consciously chooses to preach the Gospel). As Ward underlined, God not only gives all things their nature and powers; God also ensures that they retain them.22 In order that creatures may act, God concurs immediately with secondary causes in all of their operations, both as to their concrete individual existence (suppositum) and as to their powers. For example, God concurs immediately with a bonfire, both in terms of its existence as a specific bonfire, and in terms of its production of heat and light.23 Nevertheless, all secondary causes have their proper operations: God does not produce their effects directly; he produces them through the action of the secondary cause. Ward was not, in other words, an occasionalist. Since all secondary agents have their proper mode of operation, they bring about their effects either necessarily, contingently, or freely, in accordance with that mode.

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  153 Ward underlined that the divine concurrence is invariably proportionate to the form by which the secondary cause is operating; such that if the secondary cause is acting from a supernatural principle (e.g. in an action arising from habitual grace), the divine concurrence will be supernatural in nature and thus of a more elevated sort than it is with operations that are merely natural. So the divine concurrence in a believer’s act of charity is of a more elevated sort than the divine concurrence in their digestion. In this determination, Ward indicated, he was discussing only God’s concurrence in ordinary actions, whether natural or supernatural, not God’s concurrence in extraordinary actions, such as miracles.24 Ward noted that the thesis raised the question of whether the divine concurrence with the operation of secondary causes either detracted from or impeded their proper mode of operation. To put it another way, did the divine concurrence stop the action of a secondary agent being contingent, or free? All agreed, Ward thought, that the divine concurrence, when it was considered simply as an influx of divine power, simultaneous and concomitant with the action of the creature, did not detract from the creature’s proper mode of operation. Contemporary divine cooperation and concomitance clearly did not stop the sun from shining necessarily, crops from growing contingently,; or Paul from preaching freely. That said, the nature of this cooperation and concomitance needed further exploration. For, granted that God and the creature were operating simultaneously, it might be asked how they were operating simultaneously. Jesuit theologians argued, Ward remarked, that God concurs and cooperates because the creature concurs and cooperates, not vice versa. From this, they inferred that the operation of the human will is logically prior to the divine concurrence, even though it is not previous to it in time. Bellarmine even argued, Ward pointed out, that, except when acting extraordinarily, God invariably chooses to act when the human will concurs and had indeed obliged himself to do so, when he created free will.25 A number of other writers had adopted this view, Ward pointed out, including the Remonstrants, who ‘acknowledge no other concurrence of God with secondary causes in their operations, than an immediate simultaneous influx with the secondary cause in its action and effect, of such a sort, however, that all the modification and determination of the act is from the secondary cause, especially in free actions’.26 The Remonstrants further claimed, Ward noted, that unless this is the case, the free acts of humans and angels are subject to a fatal necessity and God is therefore a tyrant. As a result, Ward

154  Grace and Conformity suggested, the Remonstrants were undermining efficacious grace and divine predestination so as to defend human liberty.27 If Neile thought he had closed down such discussions in Cambridge, he was wrong. At this point, Ward stated his own position. We, by contrast, in conformity with the Scriptures and the Fathers, above all those who lived after the rise of the Pelagian heresy, and especially Augustine, boldly assert these three things: I The concurrence of God with secondary causes, even free ones, is an antecedent influx in those secondary causes, not only a simultaneous influx, much less a subsequent [influx] in their actions and effects. II We say that this antecedent concurrence of God, the First Cause, modifies and determines in its way, the actions of all secondary causes. III We say that this prior concurrence of God in secondary causes, modifying their actions, does not remove from any of them their proper mode of operation, [it does] not [remove] from causes acting necessarily, contingently, freely, the mode of acting necessarily, contingently, freely.28

The rest of the Determination was dedicated to demonstrating the truth of these claims. That the divine concurrence must be an antecedent influx in the operations of secondary causes is clear from Scripture, Ward believed. He cited a number of biblical verses, 29 arguing that they showed how the same effect, produced both by God and a secondary cause, is produced simultaneously by the operation of both; yet, in terms of logical order, it is produced first by the divine operation. God is the First Cause, independent of all others, so God does not merely conserve the operating power of the secondary cause but moves it and applies it to its operation, without doing any damage to the condition or mode of that cause.30 Ward argued that, if God’s causal action is not logically prior to that of the secondary cause, then God cannot be properly called the First Cause or the First Mover, in respect of that operation.31 God is not called the First Cause or the First Mover merely in himself, and according to his own essence: God is called the First Cause and the First Mover because in all causation and movement, or which comes to the same, in the order of all causers and movers,

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  155 God’s action is absolutely prior. Furthermore, Ward underlined, everything created comes from God as its cause. The fact that a secondary cause produces its effect is clearly something created, and must therefore come from God. In terms of logical order, God must therefore direct the creature to its operation, before the creature itself operates. In terms of logical order, all effects must proceed from the First Cause, before they proceed from their secondary cause.32 Furthermore, God is the First Agent, who uses secondary causes as his instruments, in order to produce an effect. But no instrument is able to move, unless it is moved by its principal. So secondary causes, which are God’s instruments in the production of created effects cannot move unless they are first moved by God.33 Indeed, if a free secondary cause were not subject, in its operation, to the prior action of God, then the creature’s own will would be the first and original cause and principle of its operation, moving itself simply and freely into volition and action. But that would imply that there were more than one first principle in the Universe, which, Ward suggested, is effectively Manichaeism. Indeed, this view has even less to commend it than Manichaeism, since it would entail that there are as many first principles as there are human beings and angels. Ward then proceeded to demonstrate his second claim; namely that it is this prior divine concurrence which modifies and directs the actions of all secondary causes. All causes that are directed by another, Ward argued, do not themselves determine any of their effects. But the divine will directs itself to the production of its effects. So it must be the divine concurrence that directs the actions of secondary causes, not vice versa. Indeed, he pointed out, it would argue a great imperfection in God, if the divine concurrence were merely an indifferent influx, whose operation was ultimately determined by an inferior cause.34 The sun is a finite and created cause and its causal action is therefore endowed with potentiality. The sun’s action is consequently modified by the inferior causes on which it operates (e.g. the sun will make wax soft and mud hard). By contrast, God is the ‘infinitely perfect and most universal Cause, Pure Act free from all potentiality; as a result of which, his will or concurrence, in which there is the application of the divine will and power, cannot be determined to operation by the concurrence of the human will, or any other secondary cause’.35 Just as the human will determines and modifies the means which are subject to it, so the divine will determines and modifies the means which are subject to it, namely all secondary causes. When an artist wishes to produce

156  Grace and Conformity a painting, Ward observed, it is the artist who whittles the pencil, mixes the colours, moves his hand, imagines the design, and draws the lines. The instruments that the artist employs do not influence or determine his will to paint; rather the artist’s will directs them towards his intended goal. In the same way, in divine concurrence, it is God who determines and shapes the actions of his creatures, not vice versa.36 The same truth arises, Ward suggested, from the perfection of divine providence. The divine providence directs every single thing that exists or happens in time towards God’s chosen end. However, this providence will not be perfect, if the divine concurrence were indifferently disposed towards a number of different effects, and was only determined to a specific effect by the secondary cause. For it pertains to the perfection of divine providence, Ward argued, not only to ordain the means to its end, but also to ensure that this end infallibly follows from those means. If the divine concurrence were indifferent to a range of possible outcomes—​if it did not apply all secondary causes to the particular effect intended by God—​then the direction provided by divine providence would not necessarily be followed by the end which God intended.37 In fact, Ward suggested, if the actions of free secondary causes were not determined and modified by the divine concurrence, they would be removed from the scope of God’s providence. And this would reduce the ambit of divine providence from the governance of all things, to a looser kind of general oversight. However, as Aquinas underlined, the divine providence extends to all things to which divine causality extends;38 and if God could not ensure the concurrence of human free choices, only the divine prescience, not the divine providence, would extend to them.39 Ward turned then to establish his third assertion, namely that divine concurrence does not undermine a creature’s proper mode of operation. Ward noted first that, since God endowed all creatures not only with their being, but also with their proper powers and modes of operation, it pertains to the fitness of divine providence that the divine concurrence should enable creatures to act in the way God created them to act. Furthermore, since God’s will is efficacious, everything that exists does so in the way that God intends. But God wills that some things exist necessarily, some contingently, and some freely, so that that there is an order in creation that is conducive to the completeness and perfection of the Universe.40 In other words, contrary to the suggestion of Molina, ‘the necessity and contingency of things, that God wills outside himself, do not simply depend on the necessity or contingency of the

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  157 secondary causes, but much more from the ordination and efficacy of the divine will, insofar as for those things which he wills to exist outside himself whether necessarily, contingently or freely, he ordains causes that are either necessary, or contingent, or indeed free’.41 Of course, the Jesuits and the Remonstrants claimed that the antecedent influx of the divine concurrence was ultimately incompatible with free action, particularly in free actions of a supernatural order. Ward therefore set out to demonstrate, as he had in his Gratia Discriminans the year before, that ‘this antecedent influx in the will, does not remove from the created will its liberty, or rather its proper mode of acting freely’.42 In the first place, he argued, it is impossible for God to make a creature that does not depend on him, both as to its being and as to its operation. For just as in the created order, created wisdom and created justice are enjoyed by participation in the divine wisdom and the divine justice; such that God, who is uncreated Wisdom and Justice, is the first proper cause of all created wisdom and justice, and of all created actions that are truly wise and just; ‘so all created freedom of will comes from nowhere else, but a participation of the highest and uncreated liberty, which is in the divine will: such indeed that this uncreated liberty of the divine will is the first, proper, and inmost cause of all created liberty and of all the free actions of creatures’.43 In other words, far from the efficacious and sovereign action of the divine will destroying the freedom of action of a created will, the latter cannot exist without the former, but necessarily depends on it, as all participated good depends on the essentially good.44 If it were the case, Ward argued, that for an act of a human agent to be free, it had to be predefined by that agent alone, and could not have been predefined by God: then God could not actually decree anything involving the wills of angels or human beings. And that would compromise the reach of divine providence. Indeed, if God’s providence extended no further than the provision of human faculties, and of sufficient aid for humans to use those faculties as they chose; then it would be a kind providence far less perfect than its human equivalent, which clearly does extend to individual human actions. For a human master will provide for his supper, by instructing his cook to prepare it. It follows that ‘it should not be doubted but that the divine providence reaches powerfully from end to end [of creation], and deploys all good things without any exception forcefully and sweetly, forcefully indeed on his side, but sweetly on my side, as Bernard stated’.45 The free choice of God instils liberty into human beings, not merely be conferring upon them a

158  Grace and Conformity free faculty; but, which Ward suggested was far better, by conferring on them the perfection of that faculty, namely the good will itself, the choice, agreement and consent of the will.46 In the process of conversion, Ward argued, it is clear that the human will acts freely, yet it is also clear that there is a divine influx that is antecedent to the human decision and that accounts for it. This influx worked, Ward thought, ‘not only by physically raising the will in order that it can elicit a supernatural act; nor merely morally, by inviting, persuading, and attracting; but, by the forceful transmission of power, kindling, and moving, and efficaciously applying it to the work of conversion, while nonetheless preserving for it, its natural mode of acting, viz. by the mode of free election and cooperation’.47 For Ward, the best illustration of divine concurrence at work with the human will was Christ himself. In Christ’s free acts, such as his accepting death for the life of the world, the choice and consent of the human will was produced by his divinity. But God did not merely give to Christ’s humanity the possibility of acting in this way, nor did God merely persuade and draw Christ to do this; but ‘in the mode of a physical cause, by pre-​moving the created will, and determining its act, as Christ himself confesses, John 5 “I can do nothing on my own” & ch 8 “I do nothing from myself ” & ch 14 “the Father who dwells in me does his works.” ’48 Indeed, Ward suggested, it would risk Nestorianism to claim that the human will operated independently of the divine will; since it is certain that, in the hypostatic union of the two natures in the one person of the God-​man, the divine will invariably precedes the human will, and the human will invariably confirms it. In the act of death, the divine will in Christ impelled the whole human suppositum, and moved even the human will, not by persuasion only, but efficaciously and physically, and yet this act was nonetheless free, and consequently of all the acts of the created will the most maximally meritorious.49 But if the free actions of Christ, Ward went on, were willed and chosen beforehand by God, without prejudice to Christ’s liberty, then the same may be true of us. By claiming that an antecedent determination of the divine will would compromise human liberty, Ward remarked, the Jesuits and the Remonstrants were undermining both the perfection of God’s wisdom and providence, and the freedom and efficaciousness of the divine will: and that, he argued, subverting a language beloved of the avant-​garde Conformists, was a form of sacrilege. The opinion of Augustine was therefore to be preferred here,

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  159 when he spoke of ‘that God whom no man’s will resists, when he wills to give salvation’.50

Ward’s Determination on the Justification of Baptized Infants (1629) Not all the opportunities which Ward was given to maintain the Reformed teaching on grace were quite as welcome as that afforded by Matthew Miller. At the 1629 Commencement, Edward Quarles, a fellow of Pembroke College, proposed the thesis that ‘All baptized infants are undoubtedly justified’.51 In a letter to Ussher, which he wrote a year later, Ward said that he had been ‘very loath that the question should be brought upon the Commencement stage’. He objected to Quarles’s thesis, because he saw it as an attack by those in Cambridge who were ill-​disposed to Reformed orthodoxy. As he told Ussher, ‘the question was given with a purpose to impugn the doctrine of perseverance, as they conceived, by an undeniable argument’.52 Ward attempted to persuade the Vice-​Chancellor for that year, Matthew Wren, Master of Peterhouse, that admitting Quarles’s thesis would infringe the King’s 1626 proclamation. Wren, however, no friend to Reformed theology, was having none of it. He ruled Quarles’s thesis acceptable, since ‘the affirmative part of the question was the authorized doctrine of our Church, as appeared in the rubric, of deferring confirmation’.53 The suggestion that all baptized infants were justified threatened Reformed teaching on perseverance, and hence the Reformed view of grace, because it was obvious that not everyone who had been baptized died a faithful Christian. So if all baptized infants were justified, it would seem to follow that some of the justified did finally fall from faith, contrary to the teaching of Dort.54 Montagu had used exactly this argument in the Appello Caesarem, referring to the very rubric that Wren used to legitimate Quarles’s thesis, and suggesting it demonstrated that the Reformed understanding of perseverance was incompatible with the Prayer Book.55 In his Determination, Ward set out to prove the contrary. Ward observed that some theologians avoided this problem by restricting the spiritual benefit of baptism to the elect only. This effectively defused the tension between what the Prayer Book claimed about baptism, and the Reformed teaching on perseverance; because, if it is only the elect who are justified at baptism, then no one who has been justified finally falls from

160  Grace and Conformity grace, regardless of how many of the baptized abandon their faith. The Oxford theologian, Cornelius Burges, advanced this argument in a book which he published in the same year that Ward had to determine Quarles’s thesis.56 Prideaux, Featley, and Downame appear to have embraced this position too.57 Ward chose not to follow this line of thought. Instead, he took what was an unusual step for a Reformed theologian, by arguing that baptism had been ordained as a remedy for original sin and that it was effectual for this purpose, even among those who were not elect.58 He pointed out that this had been the position of Augustine, and that it had been subsequently endorsed by a number of Early Church Councils.59 It was also the position of Prosper, who stated the matter, Ward thought, with perfect clarity: ‘ “Whoever says that from those who are not predestined to life, original sin is not taken away by the grace received at baptism, is not a Catholic.” ’60 Davenant had actually anticipated Ward’s argument on this point, in his lectures on the Death of Christ. He had also cited the same sentence from Prosper to endorse his position. He argued there that ‘Augustine did not teach that Christ died for the predestined alone, because Prosper from his opinion extends the peculiar benefit of his passion, namely the remission of original sin, to infants even not predestinated. (Resp. Ad obj 2 Gall. & Sentent. 2) “He who says that from those who are not predestined to life, original sin is not taken away by the grace received at baptism, is not a Catholic.” Which opinion was embraced at the Synod of Valence even some ages after Augustine’.61 Davenant was also in correspondence with Ward on this very point in the months before the Quarles disputation.62 It might be objected, Ward remarked, that such teaching conflicts with the doctrine of perseverance; which, as Ward pointedly reminded his audience, was assumed by Article XVII. Ward had an answer for this. Those who have been baptized but are not elect, he suggested, are indeed freed from the guilt of original sin and cannot fall back into it. However, they are condemned for all the actual sins, which they commit after baptism. Although the remission of original sin is sufficient to place an infant in the state of salvation, as the Prayer Book rightly indicates, it is not sufficient for an adult, because adults commit actual sins, and actual sins can only be discharged by faith and repentance.63 In any case, Ward observed, the situation of infants really had no bearing on the doctrine of perseverance at all.64 Perseverance meant perseverance in

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  161 voluntary acts of faith and repentance. Since infants lack the use of reason, they are incapable of such voluntary acts. As a result, while infants may remain in a state of grace, they do so because God physically conserves them in it. They are not properly said to persevere in that state, because they do not freely cooperate with God’s grace, but are merely the passive objects of it.65 Featley and Prideaux had taken the same line. 66 By explicitly excluding the case of infants from the question of perseverance, Ward was following the line taken in the Collegiate Suffrage, an English translation of which was published in same year as the Quarles Determination.67 A letter, which Davenant wrote to Ward on 4 November 1628, reveals that Ward had been closely involved in that publication. ‘For the reprinting of the Suffrage,’ Davenant wrote, ‘I think it not amiss: that so notice may be yet more generally taken, that we favour not those absurd opinions, which some falsely conceive to have been allowed in the Synod of Dort: though we oppose those new-​fangled opinions which some would father upon our Church’. It is therefore no surprise that Ward echoed the position taken by the Suffrage at Commencement that year. In his Determination of a hostile thesis on infant baptism, Ward had shown that, whatever the likes of Wren or Montagu might believe, the Prayer Book was perfectly compatible with a Reformed view of perseverance. Despite Neile’s 1626 intervention and the ongoing machinations of his Cambridge allies, Ward was still able to contradict one of Montagu’s claims on the most high profile day of the university calendar.

Ward’s Determination on the Punishment of the Reprobate (1633) Ward was afforded another useful opportunity to defend Reformed teaching on grace in 1633. On this occasion, the thesis emerged from a more sympathetic source. The respondent, Ezekiel Wright, was a Fellow of that famous Reformed seminary, Emmanuel College. Emmanuel was then under the Mastership of William Sandcroft, who had defended for his DD, in 1629, the impeccably Reformed thesis that ‘The faithful man can be certain, by faith, of God’s grace towards him’.68 Sandcroft must surely have approved of Wright’s 1633 thesis: ‘Every reprobate perishes for his own engrafted wickedness alone’.69 This thesis opened the door for Ward to vindicate the Reformed understanding of reprobation.

162  Grace and Conformity A ‘reprobate,’ Ward explained, was anyone who had not been elected to eternal life, ‘since we state that reprobation properly so called, from which is denominated whoever is reprobate, is nothing other than the denial of the preparation of that special mercy and efficacious grace, which certainly and infallibly conveys and leads to eternal life’.70 Every reprobate, Ward underlined, whether infant or adult, will ultimately perish eternally, condemned to both exclusion from the Kingdom of Heaven (poena damni) and the endless suffering (poena sensus) which the damned suffer in Hell. By ‘wickedness,’ in this thesis, was meant the depravity, iniquity, lawlessness (αταξια) and viciousness which rendered a sinner obnoxious to God. The thesis was so worded, Ward indicated, as to comprehend not merely the wicked actions of the reprobate but also the wickedness imputed to the reprobate, on account of Adam’s sin, as well as the inborn corruption of the reprobate’s fallen nature, which is the result of that sin.71 By maintaining that the reprobate only perishes on account of his own wickedness, the thesis was not excluding the possibility that God might sometimes impute the guilt of another person to the reprobate; as God does, for example, when he holds a person guilty for the sin of their ancestors. However, the thesis was deliberately excluding this as the primary cause of the reprobate’s ultimate perdition. Ward divided the reprobate into three kinds of people. He began by discussing adult reprobates living within the Church. It is very clear, he argued, that such people die because of their own engrafted sin, because they sin not only against the light of nature and the moral law but also against the light of grace, which is offered to them in the Gospel and which invites them to repentance and faith. For, as Ward underlined, within the pale of the Church, salvation is offered, according to God’s promises, to all who repent and believe, and this is sufficient to render inexcusable the impenitent and unbelieving. This was clear in Scripture72 and Ward encouraged those who heard him not to neglect, spurn, or treat with contempt, the Gospel message.73 Even in a Commencement determination, the boundaries between academic and pastoral discourse were not entirely clear cut. Turning to adult reprobates outside the Church, Ward argued that these, too, perished through their own wickedness, because they all sinned against the law of nature that is written in human hearts.74 Furthermore, such people have all sinned by their unbelief: for John 3:36 makes clear that ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him’. Nor could such persons plead as an excuse the eternal ‘non-​election,’ by which God had decreed, prior to any

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  163 foreseen perseverance in wickedness on their part, to deny them the efficacious grace that would certainly have led to their salvation. In the first place, this decree of non-​election—​the decree to deny the reprobate efficacious grace, although antecedent to their wickedness—​did not cause that wickedness.75 For, as Ward pointed out, not all antecedents cause their consequents. If the sun were a voluntary agent, and chose not to emit his rays some part of the world; it would not follow that the sun caused the darkness there, or that the darkness was a proper effect of the sun.76 In the second place, Ward pointed out, the decree of non-​election necessitates nobody to commit the sins for which they are ultimately condemned. This is most obvious in the case of reprobate infants, who are condemned only for partaking in original sin. That sin is not the result of the decree of non-​election; rather, the decree of non-​election finds them already fallen into original sin, for which they will ultimately be condemned.77 With regard to adult reprobates, Ward maintained, the inward deliberation that they used in sinning; their disordered desire and delight in sinning; and the inner light and divine motion by which God restrains them, even amidst their sins, demonstrated beyond doubt that the denial of efficacious grace did not compel them to sin. Turning finally to infant reprobates, Ward conceded that there was disagreement here. The Pelagians, in Augustine’s day, and the Anabaptists of Ward’s day, denied that human beings are born guilty of Adam’s sin, and therefore denied that they were in a damnable state. The Remonstrants, for their part, denied that God so imputes the sin of Adam to his descendants, that they are all connected with the guilt of Adam’s sin; they also deny that there is, in any of Adam’s descendants, anything that is truly sinful, before they act themselves.78 Against such heterodox opinions, Ward deployed a Conformist combination of Article IX,79 the Prayer Book service of Baptism and a number of the Homilies. Scripture made clear, he thought, that human beings are by nature children of wrath, and that they are conceived in iniquity from a defiled seed.80 This corruption manifested itself in habitual concupiscence, whereby all human beings were inclined to resist the law of God.81 This innate vitiosity of nature existed in children as well as in adults, and it produced actual sin in them, as soon as age permitted.82 How could it be maintained, Ward asked, that such a habitual aversion to goodness was not hateful to God? For it was this habitual inclination to evil which lay at the root of all sinful acts.83 Furthermore, Ward argued, since the Scriptures make clear, both that Christ died for all and also that Christ died only for sinners, infants must be

164  Grace and Conformity amongst the sinners for whom Christ died.84 Why, otherwise, would circumcision have been given as the seal of forgiveness under the Old Covenant? And why would baptism, the seal of forgiveness under the New, have been administered to infants since the time of the Apostles?85 It is clear, therefore, that infants are guilty of sin. There is, even in them, an engrafted wickedness sufficient to make them worthy of eternal perdition. This engrafted wickedness cannot be taken away, except through the application of the merits and death of Christ. The only ordinary means instituted by God to apply the merits and death of Christ to an infant was the sacrament of baptism.86 Since some infants died un-​baptized, it followed that they died without having had their wickedness expiated through the merits and death of Christ. It was therefore necessary that there had been issued a decree of non-​election, or negative reprobation regarding them, since it is certain that they were not elect. The decree of positive reprobation regarding them was then issued as a result of the foresight of their perseverance in their own engrafted wickedness, a wickedness that had never been expiated. The determination of this thesis again provided Ward with a platform to clarify and defend the orthodox doctrine of reprobation. Breaking down the reprobate into different categories, Ward explained how, in each case, the reprobate were condemned only for their own sin. God’s justice in reprobation was consequently unimpeachable, even in the hard cases of those infants whose life led ultimately to perdition.

Davenant’s Defence of Grace in the Expositio (1627) Ward’s predecessor as Lady Margaret Professor was consecrated as Bishop of Salisbury on 18 November 1621. It was not long before Davenant began wondering how he might put the academic work he had undertaken in Cambridge to good use. In a letter dated 20 February 1623, he told Ward that an initial re-​reading of his lectures had been somewhat discouraging: ‘But it may be,’ he went on, ‘that in time I shall polish that which is rough, & cut away that which is superfluous: and then dispose of it, as by my friends (and yourself especially), I shall be advised’.87 Even when his publishing programme was still an aspiration, Davenant clearly thought of Ward as his primary theological and editorial consultant. Davenant’s plan to publish his professorial lectures began to acquire substance about the time that Montagu’s writings were causing controversy. In a

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  165 letter dated 10 October 1625, Davenant told Ward that ‘I have appointed my chaplain to run over my readings, and to take notice as he goes of such faults as the transcriber has committed, that so there may be the less trouble when they come to you. I will have those other readings of mine upon the two first articles [of the Synod of Dort] transcribed with as much speed as Vincent can despatch them’.88 On 8 December, Davenant reported that, following a visit of the Cambridge printer Leonard Green to Salisbury, his lectures on Colossians were ready to be sent to Ward, with a view to their publication; preferably, he indicated, in folio. He gave Ward full editorial authority over this enterprise: ‘If in perusing it, you find anything defective or erroneous, spare not to send me your free censure, which I shall take kindly, and readily reform what is faulty, or subscribe to your reformation’.89 Unfortunately, the manuscript of the Colossians lectures was riddled with errors. So in a letter of 13 February 1626, Davenant suggested that Ward send it back to him for correction. Shortly after this, Ward recruited a ‘Mr Love’ to help with the editorial work involved. Davenant asked for thanks to be passed on to Love for his work, in a letter 6 March 1626.90 This was surely Richard Love, who took his DD in 1631, became Master of Corpus Christi in 1632, and was a regular ally of Ward on the Cambridge Consistory.91 Ward kept up the pressure on Davenant, despite these editorial difficulties, and his efforts bore fruit. In a letter to Ward dated 26 September 1626, Davenant wrote: I confess I have always been, and am very backward to put anything of mine in print; because in all kinds there are extant score of writers, who have bestowed better pains than I could do, and upon whom the readers’ pains may better be bestowed. And besides, I cannot revise them as were fit; mine eyes not serving me to read mine own hand. Yet that you may see how easy I am to yield unto the persuasions of my friends, though contrary to mine own mind; I have caused my scholar Vincent to transcribe those readings upon the Epistle to the Colossians, which he has now finished.

Davenant again invested Ward with full editorial control over the final product: ‘If you shall judge them fit for the press, I will commit them to your disposition’.92 Ward clearly did, and Davenant’s Expositio epistolae D. Pauli ad Colossenses was duly printed in Cambridge in 1627. The King visited Cambridge shortly after the Expositio appeared, and Ward had evidently planned to present Davenant’s work to him. His plan

166  Grace and Conformity was foiled, however, by Richard Neile, the recently appointed bishop of Winchester—​the very man, of course, who had quashed the thesis on absolute predestination a couple of years before. Ward complained about this partisan intervention in a letter to Ussher, dated 16 May 1628.93 However, Neile’s hostility did not prevent a second edition of the Expositio coming out in 1630, nor a third in 1639. This last edition bore the imprimatur of the then Vice-​Chancellor Ralph Brownrigg, Master of St Catherine’s College; as well as of Samuel Ward; Thomas Bainbrigg, Master of Christ’s College; and Richard Love—​four ringleaders of the Cambridge opposition to avant-​garde Conformity during the 1630s.94 The Expositio was, of course, a biblical commentary rather than an exercise in controversial divinity, but Davenant took every opportunity that it offered to expound the orthodox view of grace. He made his agenda clear in the preface, setting the scene in First Century Colosse in such a way that the parallels with the English Church of his own day could not be missed. By the good offices of Epaphras and other faithful ministers of the Word, Davenant noted, the Church of Colosse had been ‘excellently founded, and rightly instructed in the mystery of the Gospel’.95 Some ministers of Satan had subsequently arisen, however, who were determined to obscure the Gospel and disturb the Church. In 1627, it would not have taken much imagination to discern the parallel between these Colossian agitators and Montagu. Davenant then noted that Epaphras went to Rome and reported the situation to Paul, who wrote the Epistle to resolve the problem; so as Davenant made clear, ‘The scope of the whole Epistle is this, that all hope of human salvation should be placed in Christ alone’.96 Davenant repeatedly discussed the nature and efficacy of grace as he worked his way through the letter. He underlined, early on, that ‘God cannot fail to be efficacious, when those means of men’s salvation are exhibited, which he himself ordained to that end’.97 That is why the preaching of the Gospel by weak and sinful human beings, although it may seem an ineffective way to procure human salvation, is nonetheless powerful when God so ordains.98 Paul’s initial greeting in the letter, (Colossians 1:2) ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father,’ prompted an extended discussion of the different meanings of the word ‘grace’. Grace meant, first, ‘The gratuitous act of the divine will, accepting a man in Christ, and mercifully condoning sins . . . This gratuitous love of God is the first gift, in which all other gifts are given’.99 Grace meant, second, ‘All habitual gifts which God pours out to sanctify the soul. In

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  167 this way faith, charity, and all saving virtues and gifts are called graces’.100 Grace meant, third, ‘The actual assistance of God, by which the regenerate, after habitual grace has been accepted, are strengthened for the performance of good works, and for perseverance in faith and piety. For, even to men renewed and sanctified by grace, the daily assistance of God is still necessary for every single virtuous action’.101 Davenant then underlined that there was a necessary connection between these three expressions of grace: inherent grace is not given, unless it is preceded by the grace of acceptance; nor, when it is given, will it produce any fruit without the help of God in every good act. Davenant underlined that the grace of acceptance flows ‘immediately from the divine will, and is not elicited by a human good . . . The love of God does not find a worthy person, but makes a worthy person by love’.102 Habitual grace, too, flowed from God alone, for ‘Certainly nothing can be the operating physical cause in the production of grace, apart from God alone. For the infusion or production of grace is like creation, insofar as it does not have any cause in the subject, nor material from which power can be drawn by natural motion; it therefore belongs to God alone, who made all things from nothing, to impart and imprint grace’.103 From this Apostolic greeting, Davenant pointed out, there arises a controversy with the Papists as to whether a faithful person can be sure that they are in God’s grace and have had their sins remitted in Christ. ‘Our opinion,’ he made clear, ‘is that every faithful and truly justified man, can and should infallibly believe, that his own sins have been remitted, and that God has been reconciled to him, that is to say, that he has this grace and peace which the Apostle wished for the Colossians’.104 He then set out his arguments for that position at some length.105 Davenant returned to this question of assurance, when discussing Paul’s reference to (Colossians 1:5) ‘the hope laid up for you in heaven’. Davenant underlined that this hope was certain, and would not be given or denied on the basis of human merit.106 As a result, ‘pious men should be certain of the attainment of eternal life’.107 For Davenant, the process of human salvation was God’s work from beginning to end. God predestined the elect to life out of the mere good pleasure of his will. God then drew them to himself by efficacious vocation in time, when they would never have embraced salvation, if left to their own resources. This drawing was accomplished by efficacious grace, which is communicated to the elect alone and denied to others. The primary cause of human salvation was, therefore, the mercy of God, predestining and efficaciously calling his elect.108 It is therefore necessary to speak of both an

168  Grace and Conformity eternal election, and a temporal election ‘by which Christians are selected from the dregs of the world to the service of God by the precept of the Gospel’.109 Temporal election is only effective, however, because of eternal election. Davenant then underlined, however, that ‘the consideration of our gratuitous election before the foundations of the world were laid, should not dispose us to idleness, but rouse us up to a perpetual holiness of life, because God has elected us to that end’.110 He then cited Ephesians 1:4 to that effect: ‘He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him’. Davenant’s pastoral motive is clear here: the orthodox teaching on grace should not be so interpreted as to undermine holiness of life. With the publication of his lectures on Colossians out of the way, Davenant began to prepare his other lectures for possible publication. Writing to Ward on 4 November 1628, Davenant reported that ‘My readings De Morte Christi [concerning the death of Christ] are ready for the press; but those others concerning predestination are not. We will advise hereafter concerning the publishing of them’.111 The drafting process had clearly proceeded far enough for Davenant to have sent Ward a revised copy of the lectures on predestination by February 1630. At this point, however, Davenant hit the brakes. In a letter to Ward dated 23 February 1629 [1630], Davenant referred to his ‘Treatise of Predestination, which is now in your custody,’ but also made clear that he did not want this document to go any further. I pray keep it private to yourself. For by exceptions which now [sic] taken against my sermon lately preached at the Court, I understand that, howsoever the doctrine of our Church is not disclaimed in the point of predestination, nor the doctrine of the Arminians allowed, yet for peace sake his Majesty’s resolution is, this high point should neither by preaching nor writing be debated one way or other.112

Davenant was referring, here, to an embarrassing incident that had taken place a few days previously. He had been called before the Privy Council, after preaching a sermon at Court that touched on predestination. This had angered the King, who felt the sermon had infringed a Royal Declaration of 1628 reinforcing the 1626 prohibition on the promotion of any doctrine that went beyond the authorized teaching of the Church. When Davenant appeared at the Council Table, Samuel Harsnett, the Archbishop of York, had ‘made a speech of well nigh an half an hour long, aggravating the boldness of

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  169 mine offence, and showing many inconveniences it was likely to draw after it’.113 Davenant was then given an opportunity to reply, and it soon became clear that Harsnett had not persuaded his fellow Privy Councillors, who let Davenant go without censure. By the good offices of Prideaux’s patron, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, Davenant was subsequently granted an interview with the King before he left Court. In that private audience, Charles made clear that he did not want the doctrine of predestination discussed in public at all, because it was too complicated for ordinary people to understand and it was more useful for them to hear about reformation of life. Davenant had promised his obedience.114 The abortion of his publishing project was therefore an early expression of his obedience. As we have seen, Davenant’s lectures on predestination and the death of Christ were only published in 1650, a decade after his death.115 Davenant turned his attention instead to a somewhat safer area of theology, preparing for publication instead the lectures that he had delivered on theological authority, and on habitual and actual righteousness (i.e. justification). These were printed in Cambridge, so presumably also with Ward’s editorial assistance. The Praelectiones de Duobus in Theologia Controversis Capitibus came out in 1631, with a dedication to the King. That Ward and Davenant intended this work to be read as part of a wider defence of the Reformed theology of grace is clear from Davenant’s preface to the lectures on righteousness, where a familiar phrase recurs. When reflecting upon the several topics which are controverted between us and the Papists, I find that there is scarcely one in which our opponents do not maintain that side which immoderately exalts men, and everything of human attainment; while leaving it to us to maintain the Cause of God in opposition to the pride of man.116

This, he thought, accounted for the Roman Catholic rejection of the orthodox doctrine of justification, in favour of an account of justification that relied instead on their own virtues and inherent qualities. But, as Davenant pointed out, ‘whilst they are elevating and extolling dust and ashes, they can never look to receive divine help’.117 A correct understanding of grace was, in other words, a necessary precondition for the receipt of grace. No wonder Davenant persisted with promoting it. We shall return to Davenant’s Praelectiones in the next chapter.

170  Grace and Conformity

Davenant’s Defence of Grace in the Determinationes (1634) The Praelectiones did not exhaust Davenant’s newfound enthusiasm for the press. In 1634, he published his Determinationes quaestionum quarundam theologicarum. These were issued not only by themselves, but also as part of the second edition of his Praelectiones. Ward again played a key role in this publication. Davenant evidently sent the initial manuscript to Ward, but Ward advised him to replace one of the Determinations it contained. That was his Determination of the thesis ‘Justifying grace is not lost’ [Gratia justificans non ammittitur].118 Ward had presumably been anxious about its inclusion, because broaching such a topic might be thought to infringe the 1628 Declaration. Davenant duly sent Ward a replacement Determination on 8 December 1634, once again encouraging Ward to exercise full editorial discretion. ‘I am afraid I have extended the determination unto a greater length than is fitting; if you think fit, I give you full power to prune away what is superfluous’.119 Davenant also encouraged Ward to check his references, since he had prepared the Determination too quickly to source the quotations properly, and had had to rely on his notes. If he found anything amiss, Davenant asked him to send the query to him, before letting it go to the press.120 That was not quite the end of the story, however; because Davenant then discovered, to his consternation, that a quotation of Alexander of Hales, the authenticity of which he had questioned in the Determination, could indeed be found in a very early edition. Naturally enough, he did not want the Determination printed with this mistake. He sent his instruction to Ward about how to deal with this problem in a letter dated 27 January 1634 [1635]. ‘If therefore, you shall reserve that Determination for another impression, I would have those few lines wherein my conjecture is expressed dashed out; unless you can in the mean time learn that in some more ancient written copy there is no such miracle mentioned’.121 The offending Determination, on ‘The Roman Church has unjustly taken the chalice from the lay-​people’ [Ecclesia Romana injuste calicem laicis ademit], was missing in the 1634 edition of the Determinationes, but restored for the 1639 edition, without any reference to the disputed miracle. Ward’s editorial involvement clearly extended to subsequent editions of Davenant’s books as well. Although Davenant had removed one risky Determination, in light of the 1628 Declaration, he had kept several more. In particular, he kept the

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  171 Determinations of the theses: ‘True believers are able to be certain about their salvation’122; ‘Free will is not granted to the unregenerate for their spiritual good’123; ‘The decree does not take away freedom’124; ‘The divine prescience was not the cause of the fall of man’125; ‘The subject of divine predestination is fallen man’126; and ‘Sufficient assistance for salvation is not given to all people’.127So Davenant still managed to cover most of the disputed questions in the theology of grace. And that is not surprising since, as he indicated in the Preface that he added to the second edition of the Determinationes, he intended his work to lay the foundations of good academic judgement among students of theology. The Determinationes was, in other words, a theology textbook. Although Davenant had removed the Determination that explicitly discussed the perseverance of the saints, this did not prevent the doctrine of assurance making an appearance. The papists object to assurance, Davenant noted, because they argue that no one can be certain that they will persevere. But this argument does not avail to undermine the certainty of salvation, ‘because the same God, who has inspired faith in the hearts of his children, will preserve it, lest it be utterly extinguished’.128 Furthermore, as Hebrews 6:18 makes clear, the Christian hope is meant to be a source of strong encouragement; and how could it be that, if the hope of eternal life were uncertain? Those who oppose the certainty of salvation, Davenant indicated, often suggest that such assurance makes human beings overly secure in their spiritual status, and so encourages spiritual presumption. But, as Davenant underlined, ‘We do not, in fact, concede to the regenerate such a faith in the remission of sin and one’s own justification, that perpetually excludes all fearfulness of the contrary, but which in all battles and temptation conquers at the last’.129 It is certainly possible to have a sure, but doubting faith, as demonstrated by the father’s exclamation in Mark 9:24: “I believe; help my unbelief!” Furthermore, those who defend the certainty of faith do not affirm that the sense of assurance is constant, but rather that it exerts itself whenever a Christian engages in acts of penitence and piety, and withdraws like the sun behind a cloud, whenever a Christian sins. So, rather than making a Christian overly secure, assurance perceptibly wanes whenever a Christian wallows in cupidity.130 Once again, pastoral considerations were clearly shaping Davenant’s discussion. Davenant’s treatment of the relationship between the divine decree and human freedom, in his Determination on that subject, echoes Ward’s teaching on the same issue. Davenant, however, was particularly preoccupied

172  Grace and Conformity with explaining how God’s involvement in evil actions did not mean that he was the cause of sin.131 Davenant underlined, at the outset, that the divine will related differently to good and to evil human actions. In relation to good actions, ‘God does not merely decree that they shall exist, but decrees at the same time to approve them, and to cooperate in order that they may exist’.132 In evil actions, however, God ‘decreed to permit the event, he decreed to concur with the agent as the universal mover, lastly, he decreed to ordain that event: but he did not decree to approve the evil action when it exists, much less to impart any wickedness into the agent, so that it might exist’.133 Like Ward, Davenant explained the compatibility of the divine decree and human freedom by underlining that God decrees not merely that something should be, but the way in which it should be. ‘For God has not only decreed, or foreseen those actions and events, but the mode of the actions and the events: some he decreed to take place naturally, some necessarily, some freely and contingently’.134 Consequently, the divine decree does not take away human liberty. Quite the contrary: God’s decree makes human liberty the more secure, ‘because he, whose decree is not broken, has decreed that liberty shall be present to me in that action’.135 For, although the divine decree excludes a contrary act or event, it can consist with the potential and freedom towards such a contrary event.136 This is so, Davenant argued, even though the divine decree is not merely a bare prescience, but an efficacious concurrence in good actions, that impels the wills of believers to will and do those things that God has decreed. ‘We confess’ Davenant wrote, ‘that this capacity to choose or refuse is not so fixed in our freedom, that God is not able to direct the inclination of the will wherever shall seem good to him: but he always does this in the regenerate, not by coercing the will, but by persuading and gently bending it’.137 A question remained, however, about the evil actions of the wicked. Since they have within them a principle impelling them to evil, namely original sin, but, as a result of the divine decree, do not have the contrary principle that would impel them to the good, namely divine grace, is it not the case that they sin necessarily? Davenant accepted that the fallen will cannot, by its own powers, shake off its own corruption; but this did not mean, he argued, that the unregenerate were not free in their sinning. For, although original sin inclined the unregenerate to evil, it did not limit or compel them to any particular sin, at any given time. This is evident, he argued, because even wicked men choose when to commit their sins, and can avoid occasions when doing so would be dangerous.138 As Davenant underlined, the capacity to choose

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  173 freely is essential to human beings. So although in good actions, the human will may have its principle of origin elsewhere, namely in God’s grace, it must have its principle of action within itself. It follows that every inclination, that is elicited from the human will, is inevitably free and voluntary. To assert the contrary would involve a contradiction in terms.139 Davenant’s concern to show that the position that he maintained did not make God the cause of sin came to the fore again in his Determination on the relationship between divine prescience and the Fall. Foreknowledge could not have been the cause of Adam’s sin, Davenant insisted, because foreknowledge pertains to the intellect, not to the will; and the intellect has no power of producing effects in anything but itself.140 If it did, of course, then all events would necessarily have existed from eternity, as they were foreknown, which is clearly not the case. ‘Effects never proceed,’ Davenant insisted, ‘from knowledge alone, without the intervention of the will, by way of inducing, and of power, and by way of execution’.141 So the fact that God had foreknowledge of the Fall does not mean that he caused it. Scripture makes quite clear that God did not collude with the Fall: for God warned Adam of the danger in advance, and supported him with sufficient grace to avoid it. The Fall was rather the result of Adam’s misuse of his innate freedom, at the instigation of the Devil.142 If that had not been the case, God’s sentence against Adam and Eve, and the punishment inflicted on them, would have been incompatible with justice.143 Davenant’s opponents raised the objection that, since what God has foreseen will inevitably come to pass, Adam’s sin was necessary, and consequently excusable. Once again, Davenant referred to the various ways in which things may exist: ‘He foresees all things equally: but among these, he sees some things that will happen necessarily, some freely and some contingently. He saw that Adam would sin, but freely; he did not sin necessarily, by virtue of the foreknowledge’.144 It is quite true, Davenant conceded, that the divine foreknowledge cannot be deceived; but this infallibility proceeds from the mode of the divine knowledge, not from the condition of the things known. For, unlike human beings, God’s knowledge is not derived from the condition of the things he knows, but from himself, as their eternal and immutable cause. That is why God has necessary and certain knowledge about things that, in themselves, are fleeting and uncertain. Davenant’s opponents also raised the objection that God did not merely foresee the Fall, but decreed from eternity to permit it. Yet, they contended, no permissive decree can be issued, to which an efficacious decree is not

174  Grace and Conformity attached. So God turned out to be the cause of the Fall, after all. Davenant replied that, although he conceded that a permissive decree preceded the Fall, he maintained that Adam’s Fall came about according to that decree, but not on account of that decree. As he underlined, ‘Permission alone is never the cause of the thing permitted, for the will of the person permitting only establishes and effects this within himself, that he would not impede the action of the other, not that he would promote it by working or effecting it’.145 And, although it is true that an efficacious decree is always added to a permissive one, that efficacious decree did not impel Adam into sin. For, he argued, ‘the permissive decree sets down that the creature will fall, through its own voluntary defection, into the evil foreseen by God; but the efficacious decree determines, not to effect that evil, but to elicit good out of that evil, by ordaining and directing it’.146 In his Determination on the object of predestination, Davenant made it very clear that the decree of God extended to the reprobate as well as to the elect. ‘There is an eternal decree of God,’ he asserted, ‘which gratuitously elects some for the end of eternal beatitude, and leads them by infallible means toward the same: but, on the other hand, freely passes others by, and justly destines them for eternal punishment’.147 He found authority for this in the decrees of the Council of Valence, and noted that Augustine, Fulgentius, and Prosper did use the word ‘predestination’ with this broader significance.148 He then argued that the subject of this decree of predestination, whether in those accepted, or those rejected, was man considered as fallen, such that corruption is a foreseen precondition of this decree. He underlined, as Prideaux had done, that ‘We do not assert there to be, in the divine intellect or will, a real priority or succession in those things that are seen and decreed; in God all things are seen at once and decreed from eternity: but, according to our way of understanding, we are accustomed to apply the terms former and latter to the divine intellections and decrees, accordingly as things of themselves depend on each other in a certain order’.149 Thus, with regard to God, the permission of the Fall is neither before nor after the decree of predestination, for both of them are from eternity. However, according to the human mode of understanding, predestination and the Fall are so connected, Davenant contends, that no one can be understood as predestined, unless they are supposed as fallen. This can be shown, he argued, by reference to Christ himself. Christ is the head of the elect; he is the bond of union between God, electing, and man,

The Defence of Grace after the 1626 Proclamation  175 as elect. But Christ was destined to become incarnate as a Redeemer and a Mediator; and that, of course, assumes that human beings are in need of both redemption and mediation; it therefore presumes that they are fallen. To put it another way, human beings are not predestined in the Incarnate Redeemer, unless they need redemption.150 Davenant added that the means of grace to which the elect are destined in their predestination to glory, all assume that their recipients are fallen, corrupt, and dead in their sins. For effectual calling, justification, and regeneration are gifts that only make sense for a sinner. Christ came to call the righteous, not sinners; Christ justifies the ungodly, not the upright; the Spirit gives life to the dead, not to those who are already alive.151 Furthermore, Davenant suggested, the end of the decree of predestination is to glorify God’s mercy in the elect, and his justice in the reprobate. But there would be no need for mercy, if the elect were not sinners; and there would be no call for punitive justice, if the reprobate had not sinned.152 Davenant admitted, as he had in his lectures on the subject, that there were differences of opinion among Protestants on this question. He underlined, once again, that the supralapsarian position endorsed by Calvin, and for which he had been criticized by the Jesuits, could find precedent in Scotus, as well as in contemporary Roman Catholic theologians such as Naclantus, Pighius, Catharinus, Galatinus, and Albert Mendoza. Davenant then argued, as he had before, that although the Fall did not cause the decree; God did consider sin as an annexed condition, inherent in all the objects of the decree, whether they were elect or reprobate. ‘Others of our divines very clearly think the same,’ Davenant remarked, ‘though they sometimes speak obscurely of the matter; for whoever will read their writings with an attentive and unprejudiced mind, will soon observe that they, in their discussions, do not remove the foreseen Fall of men from God predestinating; but they rather urge, that the cause of reprobation is not to be found in the consideration of the Fall’153; a marginal note here also referred the reader to William Whitaker’s famous last sermon.154 Maintaining a common Reformed front was clearly still a priority in the 1630s.

Conclusion The Royal Proclamation of 1626 was meant to silence the controversy that had been sparked by Montagu, and it was soon wielded against the proponents

176  Grace and Conformity of a Reformed theology of grace. Its effectiveness in silencing the voice of Reformed Conformity, however, should not be overstated. In Cambridge, Ward’s duty to determine Bachelor of Divinity theses ensured that an orthodox theology of grace was articulated and defended at Commencement into the 1630s. Even Edward Quarles’s hostile 1629 thesis on the justification of baptized infants offered Ward an opportunity to show how his teaching on grace was entirely consistent with the Prayer Book’s claims about baptism; to demonstrate, in other words, that orthodoxy on grace and Conformity in polity were compatible. Ward reinforced his public teaching through a close editorial collaboration with his predecessor, as Lady Margaret Professor, John Davenant. Although an uncomfortable experience of preaching at Court made Davenant reluctant to publish his lectures on predestination and the death of Christ; with Ward’s assistance, he was able to promote an orthodox Reformed view of grace in his Colossians commentary, his lectures on habitual and actual righteousness, and his Determinationes. These books were all printed in Cambridge more than once during the reign of Charles I. Ward and Davenant therefore ensured that Cambridge’s University press remained a vehicle for Reformed orthodoxy throughout the Personal Rule. As a result, Reformed Conformity remained a live theological option within the Church of England. In their teaching and publishing during the late 1620s and the 1630s, Ward and Davenant reprised many of the themes and arguments observed in earlier Reformed Conformist writings. As Ward’s determination on baptism demonstrates, however, the Reformed Conformist tradition remained fertile theological ground, capable of generating new variants of Reformed divinity. Ward resolved the apparent tension between the orthodox Reformed teaching on grace and the Book of Common Prayer through a distinctive and creative appropriation of Patristic thought. The fact that other Reformed Conformists took a very different line merely exhibits the ongoing intellectual liveliness of the tradition. A commitment to Conformity did not stifle, but stimulate the diversity and inventiveness of Reformed theology.

5 The Articulation of Justification by Faith ‘The Main betwixt Them and Us’ In the theological conflicts of the 1620s and 1630s, the doctrine of justification loomed every bit as large as the doctrine of predestination. Montagu believed, in fact, that it lay at the heart of the controversy between the Durham House clergy and their opponents. As he said to Cosin, ‘In that of justification cum appendiciis [with appendices], is the main betwixt them and us’.1 That is why, when denounced by his informants for defending the Council of Trent’s teaching on justification in the Gag, he refused to backtrack in the Appello, lest he surrender his cause. 2 The innovative character of Montagu’s teaching on justification became clear early in his discussion. To justify is a word of Christian learning only: yet taken and derived from external Courts, and judiciary proceedings in cases of accusation and defence. In which regard it hath a three-​fold extent, upon a three-​fold several act: First to make just and righteous. Secondly, to make more just and righteous. Thirdly, to declare and pronounce just and righteous.3

With this opening definition, Montagu had effectively turned upside down the approach to justification that had prevailed in the Protestant world since Martin Luther. He had demoted the forensic, or declarative aspect of justification, the keystone of Protestant belief and piety, to a lowly third place. Instead, he made the acquisition of inherent righteousness, which orthodox Protestants normally described as sanctification, the primary definition of justification. ‘Justification properly,’ he wrote, ‘is in the first acceptance. A sinner is then justified when he is made just: that is, translated from state of nature, to state of grace’.4 This transformation, Montagu indicated, consisted in both the forgiveness of sins and the infusion of grace. Both of these are acts of God’s Spirit within a human being, and both are obtained through faith.5 Faith, he wrote, Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0006

178  Grace and Conformity embraces God. God then responds to that embrace by forgiving the believer’s sins, and accepting the believer as God’s child in Christ;6 ‘so that properly to speak, God only justifieth, who alone imputeth not, but pardoneth sin: who only can and doth translate us from death unto life, reneweth a right spirit: and createth a new heart within us. Causally, and actively God doth it. But because God was drawn thereto by our faith, which laying hands upon his mercy, in Christ, obtaineth this freedom, and newness, and renewing from him, faith is said to justify instrumentally’.7 Montagu was careful to underline that it was faith alone that played this instrumental role, ‘without copartners in the act’.8 As a result, he was able to say that justification was indeed by faith alone; but not for the reason most orthodox Protestants would have given. For, in Montagu, the act of faith was not, primarily, the act that apprehended and appropriated the alien righteousness of Christ; it was, primarily, the act that opened the way to divine forgiveness and the infusion of inherent righteousness. Montagu did not, of course, deny that the believer apprehended Christ by faith; he simply shifted the theological spotlight away from it, and towards the spiritual transformation of the believer, making that the heart of justification instead. As he put it, ‘Justification, in the act thereof, is only the work of God, for Christ’s sake: whose death and Passion apprehended by faith, which is the sole peculiar work of faith to do, as it hath made an atonement betwixt God and us, so hath it procured remission of our sins at his hands, and thereupon a new state of grace’.9 In this divinely-​accomplished transformation, there was no question of human merit, Montagu insisted, for no human being could deserve such a boon; as even, he pointed out, the Council of Trent had accepted.10 The Information against the Gag, which Montagu of course ascribed to Prideaux, homed in on Montagu’s teaching on justification as incriminating evidence of his proximity to Popery. As recorded in the Appello, the Information took exception to his teaching that a sinner is justified when made just, to his teaching that justification consists in both the forgiveness of sins and the infusion of grace, and to his teaching that justification involved a fundamental change of condition into a state of renewal, regeneration and justice. As the Informer put it, ‘In this main point he accordeth fully with the Council of Trent . . . & contradicteth the doctrine of the Church of England in the book of Homilies, serm. of salvation, and all other Reformed Churches’.11 It was the chapter VII of the Council of Trent’s Sixth Session that set out what was involved in justification, decreeing that

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  179 ‘Justification itself . . . is not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, through the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts, whereby man of unjust becomes just, and of an enemy a friend, that so he may be an heir according to hope of life everlasting’. The similarity between Trent’s insistence that justification consists in both remission of sins and inner renewal, and Montagu’s teaching on that point is striking. In his Appello, Montagu duly responded to the accusation that his teaching on justification concurred with Trent. He did not back away from his tripartite definition of justification,12 pointing out that impeccably Reformed divines such as Perkins and Whitaker had all insisted that newness of life must always be conjoined with justification.13 ‘Now, if a man at all times, when he is truly justified, be also sanctified,’ he then protested, ‘what offence can there be, to allow one common word to contain and express both these parts?’14 Here, Montagu was papering over a vital distinction that underlay Reformed teaching on this point; for although no Reformed theologian would have disagreed that all those who are justified are also being sanctified: all Reformed theologians would have drawn a clear distinction between what was involved in justification and what was involved in sanctification. Coincidence in the same subject, in other words, did not entail identity of action. Montagu endeavoured to justify his argument by suggesting that Scripture spoke of justification both ‘precisely, for remission of sins, by the only merits and satisfaction of Christ, accepted for us, and imputed to us; and enlargedly, for that act of God, and the necessary and immediate concomitants unto, and consequents upon that . . . by which a sinner guilty of death, is acquitted, cleansed, made just in himself, reconciled unto God, appointed to walk, and beginning to walk in holiness and in newness of life’.15 Montagu evidently suspected, however, that his argument would not convince; and he complained, perhaps a little feebly, that it was unfair of fellow Protestants to attack him on the minutiae of justification, when his argument had been intended for Roman Catholics. ‘Have I unto you seemed to confound justification with sanctification, if yet you know the difference between them? or have I ascribed, in your seeming, any act of sanctification unto justification? You may be pleased to remember, that I went not most punctually to work, but è re natâ [as the occasion demanded], to confute the Gagger, described justification at large: never suspecting, that any professed enemies of Popery, as you would seem to be, would so captiously have perverted my true sense and meaning’.16

180  Grace and Conformity Since his informers were being so uncharitable, Montagu undertook to speak with greater precision in the Appello. ‘Be it known unto your Masterships,’ he wrote, ‘that I believe, justification in strictness of terms is neither regeneration, nor renovation, nor sanctification; but a certain action in God, applied unto us, or a certain respect or relation whereby we are pardoned and acquitted of our sins, esteemed righteous before God, and accepted by him in Christ unto life everlasting’.17 Here he appears to be backing away from the identification of sanctification with justification that he had previously implied.18 He then asked, however, ‘Can this be conceived without a change? God pardoneth sin in man, for the death and passion of Christ his Son; in that very act and instant imputing unto him the righteousness of Christ, that all-​sufficient and well-​pleasing sacrifice, for his justification. and doth he leave him there? his sins belike remaining still in being, as they were?’19 Clearly not; but since forgiveness of sins and acceptance to eternal life are inconceivable without a corresponding change of heart, the doctrinaire insistence that the divine act of justification be sharply distinguished from the divine act of sanctification was ultimately incoherent: ‘I know well enough, what you are afraid of, what you would say, because you neither understand yourselves, nor me, that do not make this change the same with justification in the act; but an incident, instant, necessary consequent thereupon’.20 Montagu was arguing, in other words, that a theological distinction that had been of primary importance to Protestant orthodoxy since the early days of the Reformation, although technically correct, was neither clear, nor particularly helpful. During the York House Conference, Morton raised Montagu’s teaching on justification as a particular cause for concern. Article XI made clear that justification was by faith alone, Morton argued, but Montagu had suggested that a range of other graces were involved.21 Montagu had qualified his views quite carefully, however, particularly in the Appello; and when Francis White took up cudgels in his defence, Morton struggled to convince the assembled dignitaries of Montagu’s heterodoxy on this point.22 But the general thrust of Morton’s objection was clear: ‘all Mr Montagu’s discourse about justification was for the justifying of popish doctrine, and for bringing in good works to be a part of justification’.23 In his Second Parallel, Featley also homed in on what Montagu had written about justification. He set down a number of quotations on justification taken from the decrees of the Council of Trent, and from Montagu, side by side. Three of the remarks made by Montagu, to which Featley took

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  181 exception, had also been used in the Information; which is hardly surprising, if Featley was working as closely with Prideaux as Montagu believed.24 Both Featley and the Information homed in on Montagu’s assertions that ‘A sinner is then justified, when he is made just, that is, translated from state of nature to state of grace’; that justification ‘consisteth in forgiveness of sins primarily, and grace infused secondarily’; and that justification resulted in the sinner being ‘transformed in mind, renewed in soul, regenerate by grace’.25 It should perhaps be noted that Featley drew his evidence about Montagu’s unsound teaching on justification, as opposed to other areas of doctrine, exclusively from the loosely worded Gag, rather than from the more defensively written Appello.26 Featley contrasted Montagu’s teaching on this point with that of the Articles and Homilies. From Article XI, Featley quoted the phrase, ‘We are accounted righteous before God, only by the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith, and not our own works’. From the first and second parts of the Homily of Salvation, Featley then concatenated the following passage: Because all men be sinners, and breakers of God’s law, therefore can no man by his own acts, words, and deeds, seem they never so good, be justified. But of necessity every man is constrained to seek for another righteousness, or justification to be received at God’s own hands: that is to say, forgiveness of sins: And this justification, or righteousness, which we so receive of God’s mercy, and Christ’s merits, is accepted and allowed of God for our full and perfect justification. The faith in Christ, which is within us, doth not justify us; for that were to account ourselves to be justified by some act or virtue, which is within ourselves.

Featley’s parallel on justification was also accompanied by a long discursive footnote. Featley used it to draw his reader’s attention to three points on which Montagu disagreed with the established doctrine of the Church of England, and agreed instead with Rome. In the first place, Featley indicated, Montagu took the primary signification of the phrase ‘to justify’ to be ‘to make a man righteous’. By contrast, Featley remarked, ‘the Church of England and the Protestants generally’ take it to mean ‘accounting, declaring, or pronouncing a man righteous’. In the second place, Montagu took justification to consist in both the forgiveness of sins, and the infusion of sanctifying graces; whereas the Church of England taught that

182  Grace and Conformity justification consisted only in the forgiveness of sins. In the third place, the Church of England taught ‘That we are not justified by inherent righteousness, or, by any virtue within us’. Both Montagu and the Church of Rome, by contrast, claimed ‘That we are justified by sanctifying and regenerating graces within us, whereby we are transformed in mind, and renewed in soul’. But as Featley pointed out, it is sanctification that happens by renewing grace inherent in the believer, not justification; and ‘the confounding of sanctification with justification (as the Appealer and Papists do) is an error of dangerous consequence, as the learned well know’.27 Although Featley did not quote the Appello directly, on this point; he was undoubtedly engaging with the thrust of its argument.

Ward’s Commencement Determinations The centrality of justification to the theological debates of the 1620s and 1630s, is underlined by the frequency with which the doctrine was debated at the Cambridge Commencement. Questions on justification were handled there in 1626, 1628, 1632, 1633, 1634, 1635, 1637, 1639, and 1640.28 The doctrine was clearly a major front in the ongoing conflict between the Reformed and their opponents; and it became increasingly clear that opinions more alarming than Montagu’s were gaining currency. One of Richard Neile’s chaplains, Eleazar Duncon, provoked anger during the 1633 Commencement, by defending, for his Doctorate of Divinity, the thesis that ‘Good works are efficaciously necessary to salvation’.29 Judging by the poem that later celebrated Duncon’s performance, his argument was daring indeed. The poem remarked of faith that ‘unless it is a formed faith, it is wholly dead, and instead of faith, you have a sad corpse of faith’.30 The contention that only a ‘formed faith’ could justify was altogether too reminiscent of Bellarmine’s teaching on the same subject. 31 Duncon also appears to have suggested that faith could not save anyone without love and hope. As the poem put it, ‘Faith is vain, where faith is alone: let true love, lively hope be added; otherwise there is no salvation . . . The holy and beautiful band of virtues will give salvation, which, by the divine covenant, they merit’.32 Both the suggestion that faith alone did not bring salvation, but rather a combination of faith, hope, and love, and the suggestion that, under the New Covenant, this combination of virtues actually merited the salvation that they brought, were inimical to orthodox Reformed theologians.

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  183 Duncon was not the only young divine prepared to test the boundaries of orthodoxy. In 1634, John Tourney’s handling of justification in two successive sermons, one of them the Latin sermon required for his Bachelor of Divinity, saw him hauled before Convocation and denied his degree.33 Tourney had previously been under consideration as the Commencement respondent. Following his Latin sermon, however, as Ward reported to Ussher, ‘he was stayed by the major part of the suffrages of the doctors of the faculty. And though sundry doctors did favour him . . . yet he is put by, and one Mr Flathers of our college chosen to answer’.34 William Flathers duly proposed the unimpeachable thesis that ‘Faith alone justifies,’ and Ward used the determination to articulate the orthodox position on justification.35 Ward underlined his Conformist credentials, at the outset, with a quotation from Article XI: ‘We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings; wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification’; and Ward repeatedly referred to the Book of Homilies thereafter.36 He was keen, in other words, to emphasize that his teaching represented the confessional position of the English Church. Ward pointed out that the word ‘justify,’ in this thesis, had a forensic sense, as it invariably did in Scripture, ‘such that to justify is the same thing as to absolve in a trial, or to liberate from a sentence of condemnation’.37 Ward was clearly leaving no opening for opinions like Montagu’s. Ward also underlined that the ‘faith’ mentioned in the thesis was not a merely Catholic or dogmatic faith, which simply accepted the truth of what had been revealed.38 Nor was it what he called a special faith, which specifically applied the promises of the Gospel to the believer. Faith was rather ‘trust relying on Christ the Mediator for remission of sins, not so much including as supposing a firm and undoubted assent to the conditional promises of the Gospel’.39 Such trust was the proper means of applying the death and satisfaction of Christ to the penitent sinner. It consequently justified, not on its own account, but instrumentally; by applying, to the sinner, the righteousness and satisfaction of Christ, which was the material cause of a believer’s righteousness.40 By asserting that faith justified ‘alone,’ Ward underlined, the thesis was not denying the presence of preparatory works or dispositions in a justified person, but rather their cooperation in the process of justification.41 For, as he made clear, it was not just any sinner, regardless of their condition, who could be a fit subject for justification; but only ‘a sinner believing by a Catholic faith, fearing

184  Grace and Conformity punishment, hoping for kindness, desiring reconciliation, truly lamenting his sins, wearied by his former life, striving for a new one, conscious of his innate depravity, renouncing his own justice and merit’.42 Unless a sinner was so disposed, in fact, he could not rely on Christ, for he would not wish to do so.43 That said, none of these preparatory acts actually brought about his justification. The only way that justification happened was ‘through the natural faculty and act alone, elevated and moved by grace, by which [the sinner] relies on, finds rest on, leans on, puts his trust in, cleaves to the mercy of God’s promise and the ransom and satisfaction of Christ for the reconciliation and the remission of the sinner’44; and the only faculty and act that did that was faith.45 The thesis that faith alone justified could be proven, Ward suggested, by those passages of Scripture that taught that justification was not the consequence of any human work. First on his list was Galatians 2:16: ‘we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ . . . because by works of the law no one will be justified’.46 The thesis could also be proven, he thought, by those passages that made clear that human beings are justified by grace.47 For, as Ward pointed out, Paul repeatedly made clear that being justified by grace and being justified by faith were effectively one and the same.48 The same point was established, Ward argued, by the scriptural insistence that human beings are not justified by their own righteousness, but by God’s. For the only instrument by which a sinner could appropriate Christ’s obedience, blood, and death, and the satisfaction and ransom that Christ had offered, is faith; as Paul made clear in Romans 3:25.49 Furthermore, Ward underlined, citing Proverbs 20:9, human beings could never be justified by their own works, since their own works are invariably imperfect and can never meet the standard of God’s perfect justice.50 Ward also pointed out that it is not just the sinner’s initial justification that comes by faith; for as Paul made clear in Romans 1:27, the just ‘shall live by faith’. All the sins that a believer commits after initial justification are, therefore, remitted on the same basis. Faith was, Ward underlined, the only condition mentioned in Scripture, for the application of Christ’s merit and death under the Covenant of Grace.51 Ward found another supporting argument in God’s jealousy for his own honour. That aspect of the divine character was disclosed by Isaiah 42:8: ‘My glory will I not give to another’. Ward underlined that Among all the affections of the spirit, however, there is none by which we more clearly testify that we entirely and completely ascribe the whole glory

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  185 of our justification to God and his Christ, than by renouncing our own righteousness and totally confiding and relying on the mercy of God, and the death and merits of Christ the Redeemer, in the business of justification before God.52

For this reason, God had wisely established that justification would be by faith alone, because it precluded all human boasting and ensured that the glory of human justification was preserved for God and Christ.53 As Paul eloquently put it, in Romans 3:27: ‘Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith’.54 Ward concluded his determination with a ringing endorsement of Flathers’s efforts. 55 A year later, however, Ward was confronted with a considerably less congenial reading of justification. For the 1635 Commencement, John Novell of Pembroke College proposed the thesis that ‘The faith which alone justifies is not without faith and love’.56 There was nothing inherently wrong with this assertion. As indicated earlier, Ward was happy to concede that other virtues might coexist with faith in the justified person. That was clearly not what Novell had in mind, however; and, at one point, Ward became sufficiently irritated by Novell’s argument to interrupt him with an uncharacteristic pun: ‘ “Descendas com novella tua theologia,” dixit Dr Ward moderator’ [“Get down with your novel theology,” said Dr. Ward the moderator’].57 The closing remarks of Ward’s determination that year make clear what Novell’s error had been: ‘Whether to be justified by faith alone, excluding hope and love as concauses in the business of justification, as it is expressed in the Homily to which Article XI refers; is formed faith, which includes hope and charity in its very definition, I leave to be judged by all those endowed with a sound mind’.58 Ward’s remarks here suggest that Novell’s argument had echoed that offered by Duncon in 1633. By the time of the 1635 Commencement, Duncon’s approach to justification had recently been given a new lease of life by the publication of Robert Shelford’s Five Pious and Learned Discourses (1635), which incorporated the poem celebrating Duncon’s Doctor of Divinity disputation. As Henry Burton was quick to complain, ‘this book was licensed by the Vice-​ Chancellor of Cambridge that then was, Dr. Beale, and published at the very Commencement . . . that so it might poison all England’.59 Shelford’s Five Discourses promoted an understanding of justification every bit as alarming as Duncon’s. ‘Without charity,’ Shelford wrote, ‘works

186  Grace and Conformity are dead, as well as faith, and knowledge, and other graces. And where there is charity, that is to say, a divine love to God and all goodness, there all things are alive, and every grace working to salvation. Faith believeth to salvation, hope hopeth to salvation, knowledge knoweth to salvation; all work by charities spirit. Hence the School calleth charity the form of virtues’.60 Like Duncon, in other words, Shelford was effectively endorsing the phraseology of Bellarmine. Shelford also drew the same conclusion as Duncon and Bellarmine about the relative significance of faith and love in justification. We see salvation by faith: but we never obtain it, until we desire and seek it by charity’s desire. Wherefore I conclude, that, for so much as charity is the nearest and immediate cause of our conversion, of our seeking and finding God, therefore this is the most precious grace of God for our good, and is the greatest mean and instrument of our justification; because justification and conversion to God is all one: for God is our righteousness: but the greatest mean of our apprehending of him is by charity, which lays hold of him in the will and reasonable affection: therefore this must be the greatest mean of our justification.61

Novell’s argument during the 1635 Commencement seems not to have echoed Shelford’s particular emphasis on charity. Nevertheless, Novell shared with Shelford, as with Duncon, the desire to give virtues other than faith a causal role in justification, a theological move that no Reformed theologian could accept. Ward opened his Determination by offering a reading of the thesis rather different from Novell’s. ‘This question is deservedly established against those who do not allow preparatory works which dispose toward the justification of sinners’.62 Ward then offered a quick summary of the points he had made the year before, which Novell had clearly forgotten. Justification was to be understood in a forensic sense; and justifying faith was to be understood as an act of trust, by which the sinner takes refuge in Christ the Mediator for forgiveness and salvation.63 ‘Furthermore,’ Ward underlined, once again emphasizing the authoritative character of his teaching, ‘our confession states that this justifying faith justifies alone’. ‘It adds this exclusive particle,’ he pointed out, ‘not in order to exclude, either in the act of justification, or in the person to be justified, the coexistence or concomitance of preparatory works and previous dispositions, but a cooperation and justifying power in the process of justification’.64 It is important to insist on this, Ward pointed

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  187 out, ‘in order that we can dispel the false accusation of Solifidians most unjustly thrown at us by the Romans’.65 As Ward almost certainly knew, however, it was not just Roman Catholics who made this accusation, Shelford had done so as well: ‘Faith only justifieth, saith the vulgar preacher. Then, saith the Solifidian and loose liver, what need I care how I live? No sin can hurt me so long as I believe. Thy preacher and thou are both in an error; because God’s word no where teacheth this, but the contrary’.66 Ward underlined the need for the sinner to be duly prepared for justification, in terms identical to those he had used a year earlier.67 He also reiterated his insistence that these preparatory works, although necessary preconditions to justification, played no role in justification itself. Only a lively faith, or trust (fiducia), did that. And even that was not because such faith had any inherent moral power or virtue, but rather because it relied entirely on God’s promises of mercy, and Christ’s ransom and sacrifice. A lively faith, or trust, was the only means that the Holy Spirit used to apply the merit of Christ to a repentant sinner, and thereby to justify.68 Ward once again found ecclesiastical authority for this teaching in a number of the Homilies.69 Although faith is, in other words, the only immediate instrument of justification, it was not conceived by the Church of England to be without hope and love. This is clear, Ward suggested, from the first part of the Homily of Salvation, which states that ‘faith doth not shut out repentance, hope, love, dread, & the fear of God, to be joined with faith in every man that is justified, but it shuts them out from the office of justifying’.70 The same point is made in the second part of that Homily, which, having demonstrated that the doctrine of justification by faith was taught by the Church Fathers, then adds: ‘Nevertheless, this sentence, that we be justified by faith only, is not so meant of them, that the said justifying faith is alone in man, without true repentance, hope, charity, dread, and the fear of God, at any time and season’. Such virtues, Ward insisted, although they coexist with faith in the justified person, play no role in justification. For, as he put it, ‘they are weak and imperfect, nor are they able to merit remission of sins and justification’.71 That is why all of a sinner’s trust must be placed in the mercy of God and the sacrifice of Christ. ‘I have reviewed these points in more detail,’ Ward indicated, ‘in order that it might appear to all that, in our explanation, we step in the footprints left by Mother Church, and have not deviated from them by so much as a nail’s breadth’.72 Shelford had denied that

188  Grace and Conformity the assertion that a sinner is justified by faith alone was the authoritative teaching of the English Church.73 Novell appears to have done so as well. So it is no surprise that Ward felt the need to reassert the confessional orthodoxy of his own position. Ward turned then to consider the nature of the hope and love that coexist with justifying faith. In particular, he drew a distinction between the hope and love that prepare a sinner for justification, and the hope and love that exist in a justified believer. Before justification, the object of hope is merely God’s mercy: but after justification, it is eternal life and glory. This hope of glory is, Ward argues, proper only to the justified, and is a certain testimony of God’s love, imparted by the Holy Spirit to the conscience of a justified believer.74 In the same way, before justification, the love of God that a sinner evinces is merely a love of God as the author of justice and the one inviting the sinner to reconciliation. But this is only an inchoate form of love, which needs to be perfected after justification. For, as John 14:23 makes clear,75 the love of God that exists within a justified sinner is nothing less than ‘the abiding or indwelling of the Trinity in a man. And God is believed to come and dwell within us when He is made propitious by the remission of sins’.76 The supernatural love, or charity, that is imparted by the indwelling Trinity, orders all the other infused virtues towards their proper end, which is eternal felicity. Charity consequently loves God, not merely as the author of nature, but as the author of all spiritual blessings. It therefore follows from justification and the remission of sins, and so also justifying faith, as Paul made clear.77 It is also, as John underlined, a privilege given only to the children of God.78 Ward made clear that the sinner was justified by faith prior to the infusion of charity, and prior, too, to faith working by charity, whatever Shelford may have claimed. This was, however, a priority of logical order (natura), not a priority of time. For there was no moment in time when the sins of the justified have been remitted, but charity has not yet been infused. To the remission of sins, there followed the gift of the Spirit and the concomitant infusion of spiritual gifts, of which charity is the greatest.79 Nonetheless, Ward underlined, ‘it cannot be said that the faith which alone justifies, includes hope and charity in its formal definition, since then our Church could not truly say that faith alone justifies’.80 Justifying faith takes none of its efficacy in justification from the other virtues. Indeed, as Luther said, ‘Faith justifies before and without charity’.81 There were a number of reasons, Ward suggested, why ‘this justification [i.e. the notion of justification advanced by Duncon and Novell] by the uniting of the three theological virtues (faith, hope and charity)’ cannot have entered the

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  189 minds of those who composed the Articles and Homilies.82 In the Homily to which Article XI itself refers, faith is clearly distinguished from hope and love, just as it is distinguished from the other virtues. Furthermore, the proper object of faith is not that of hope or love. The object of justifying faith is Christ and his sacrifice; but the object of hope is the promised inheritance, and the object of charity is God as Father, and consequently as reconciled already to the sinner.83 As Lancelot Andrewes had underlined, Ward pointed out, cheekily deploying the Gamaliel of the avant-​garde Conformists against them, the faith that justifies according to Article XI justifies in a forensic sense.84 But if it is the three theological virtues that justify as virtues, Ward contends, they would justify by making the sinner just physically, and by infusing inherent justice; and that is not how the Scriptures describe justification.85 Indeed, if justification came from the three theological virtues, it would represent not the free remission of sins, so much as the physical expulsion of them from the sinner. However, as the Scriptures make clear, the expulsion of sin from the sinner, i.e. the process of sanctification, is gradual, not instant; imperfect, not perfect. In particular, carnal concupiscence invariably remains even in the regenerate, and prevents them from relying on their own righteousness at the divine tribunal. The Christian’s only hope was therefore to decline the forum of justice, and to take refuge, instead, in the forum of mercy. ‘Therefore,’ Ward asserted, against Duncon and Novell, ‘this novel justification by that uniting of the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity is asserted contrary to the received doctrine of our Church’.86 The orthodox teaching on justification, Ward pointed out, had been defended in writing by the Bishops of Salisbury (John Davenant, John Jewel and Robert Abbot), Winchester (Lancelot Andrewes), Durham (Thomas Morton), Ely (Francis White), Bath and Wells (Arthur Lake) and Norwich (John Overall); not to mention a host of other celebrated theologians.87 What is more, Ward remarked, the King had recently forbidden anyone from teaching doctrine contrary to the articles, or imposing a new sense upon what had been publicly established.88 Ward then let his audience draw their own conclusions about Novell’s claims.

Davenant’s Praelectiones: the basis of justification Determining academic disputations was not, of course, the only form of theological teaching that Ward offered within the University. He was also

190  Grace and Conformity expected to offer regular lectures, and these lectures permitted a more expansive discussion of the doctrinal questions than the necessarily concise format of a Determination. In Ward’s posthumously published Opera, there is a section entitled ‘A Treatise of Justifying and Special Faith and of the Certainty of Grace’ (Tractatus de Fide Justificante et Speciali item de Certitudine Gratiae). This evidently began as a series of lectures, since Ward repeatedly implies that his audience are fellow members of Cambridge University. He refers, for example, to George Downame and John Davenant as ‘most reverend bishops sent from this our University’.89 He also describes John Redman, who had served as Lady Margaret Professor at various times under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, as ‘our predecessor and the first head of the College with us that rejoices in the title of the Holy and Undivided Trinity’.90 Ward would appear to have delivered these lectures at some point after 1636, since he referred to Downame’s A Treatise of Justification, as having been printed in London three or four years earlier; it was first printed in 1633.91 So it is plausible to suggest that Ward’s lectures on justification were envisaged as a response to the unsound teaching on justification that had been given voice in Cambridge by the likes of Duncon and Tourney, Shelford and Novell. Ward also envisaged his lectures on justification as a complement to, and completion of, Davenant’s Praelectiones on habitual and actual justice, whose publication, of course, Ward had overseen in 1631. To cover the same topics that Davenant had discussed, Ward remarked, would be like rewriting the Iliad after Homer. So he would confine himself to answering those parts of Bellarmine’s discussion of justification that Davenant had not addressed. Ward admitted that Downame’s Treatise had actually covered some of this ground already, but felt that it had perhaps not done so in sufficient detail.92 Taken together, in other words, Davenant’s Praelectiones and Ward’s Tractatus were conceived by Ward as a comprehensive rebuttal of the treatment of justification that had been offered in the third volume of Bellarmine’s Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei.93 Once again, it is clear that the target here should not be defined exclusively by reference to English anti-​Calvinism. Davenant and Ward were primarily engaging with a Roman Catholic exposition of justification, which they believed was inimical to grace. That said, the emergence in England, both during and after the Montagu affair, of opinions about justification that to some extent echoed those found in Bellarmine, lent the rebuttal of the Cardinal’s work a renewed relevance. It also had the advantage of exhibiting the parallels between

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  191 English anti-​Calvinism and Roman Catholicism, without directly attacking any conforming clergy.94 Davenant’s Praelectiones went well beyond a discussion of justification. Their overall aim had been to refute Bellarmine’s charge that Protestants did not believe that any inherent righteousness is infused into the justified and to explain the sort of value that Protestants placed on good works. As a result, Davenent touched upon justification only negatively, while seeking to demonstrate that Christians are not actually justified by the infusion of inherent righteousness that he was defending. That said, the ambitious scale of the Praelectiones meant that this was an extensive and detailed discussion. The question at issue between Bellarmine and his Protestant opponents, Davenant made clear, was ‘what, and of what kind that righteousness is, which justifies man before God, and in view of which, God himself pronounces man to be free from sin, and the penalty of sin, and accounts him worthy of his favour and eternal life’.95 Justification must be understood, he argued, from those passages in Scripture where the topic is professedly treated, and especially from Paul’s Epistles. ‘With him then,’ Davenant underlined, just as Ward had, ‘it always bears a forensic signification in this controversy, and denotes and act of God, absolving, like a judge, an accused person, pronouncing him just, and accepting him to the reward of righteousness, that is life eternal’.96 In other words, to justify someone does not mean to make a person just, by infusing a moral quality into them: it means to issue a sentence, pronouncing that person just.97 Davenant insisted that ‘we openly affirm that the righteous God justifies no one . . . unless by the intervention of a true and perfect righteousness, which also becomes truly the righteousness of the justified person himself ’.98 The Roman Catholic calumny that Protestant teaching makes justification a mere legal fiction is therefore without foundation.99 On the contrary, God bestows upon the justified person, a righteousness so perfect that He cannot but regard the justified as righteous.100 For, as Davenant put is, ‘the perfect obedience of Christ the Mediator, who dwells in us, and by his Spirit unites us to himself, is the formal cause of our justification; since it is made ours by the gift of God, and applied by faith’.101 Ward, of course, thought the same. As a result, Davenant underlined, ‘We do not mean that the act of justifying, on the part of God, is nothing else than a bare forensic declaration resting on no foundation; for it contains, in the first place, a valid gift of true and perfect righteousness, on which is founded the sentence and declaration of being just’.102 To put it another way, every justified person is not merely

192  Grace and Conformity pronounced just, but truly made just. However, they are not made just by the inherent righteousness that is infused into them; they are made just by acquiring the righteousness that was performed by Christ, which is communicated and imputed to believers by divine appointment.103 The reason that believers could not be made just by infused righteousness is that, in this life, such infused righteousness is invariably an inchoate and imperfect kind of righteousness.104 As a result, it cannot be a cause of justification, but only an appendage of justification.105 Davenant discussed at length the various biblical authorities which Bellarmine had advanced to support the view that justification was a function of inherent righteousness. Unsurprisingly, he argued that they had all been either misunderstood or misapplied. Davenant then focussed on the arguments Bellarmine had advanced to undermine the concept of imputed righteousness; a concept, that lay at the heart of the Protestant understanding of justification. Once again, Davenant insisted, Bellarmine’s suggestion that the idea of imputed righteousness involved a dubious legal fiction was quite mistaken. He asserts that we make justification to consist in the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, because Christ covers us with his righteousness, and God, beholding us thus covered, declares that he regards us as righteous. We, on the contrary, hold that justification consists in this imputation, not only because Christ covers us with his righteousness; but much more because he bestows his righteousness upon us. Nor do we say, that God regards us as righteous, merely because he looks upon us covered with the righteousness of our Redeemer; but because, according to his own appointment, he regards all who believe as both united into one person in Christ, and as made true partakers of his righteousness and obedience.106

Bellarmine had claimed that the idea of imputation was not actually found in the Scriptures. Davenant disagreed.107 Bellarmine had also claimed that such an imputation was not necessary. Davenant, by contrast, insisted that it was, not merely because the remission of sins depended upon it, but also because human righteousness, even after the forgiveness of sins, was not sufficient to obtain eternal life.108 When Bellarmine suggested that sin was imparted to Adam’s descendants, rather than imputed, Davenant flatly contradicted him: ‘The proposition that the disobedience of Adam does not become ours imputatively, or does not render us unrighteous by imputation is manifestly false’.109 Bellarmine had then contended that, if the imputation

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  193 of Christ’s righteousness were true, Christians would then be as righteous as Christ. But as Davenant underlined in reply, ‘we are not deemed righteous, because this righteousness is inherent in us, but because we inhere in him, who has this righteousness: and so it becomes ours by the law of faith through the benefit of communication, not by means of inhesion’.110 Prideaux had said much the same.111 Having answered the various criticisms that Bellarmine had levelled at Protestant teaching, Davenant then turned to consider the specific question of the formal cause of justification. ‘By the formal cause of justification, we understand nothing else than that by which we stand, in the sight of God, freed from condemnation, innocent, favoured, and accepted to life eternal’.112 The formal cause of justification could not be a Christian’s actual righteousness, Davenant indicated, because that consisted in merely transient acts; nor, Davenant insisted, could it be a Christian’s inherent righteousness. Once again, he pointed to the defects that exist in every Christian’s inherent righteousness. ‘Inherent righteousness in itself considered,’ he wrote, ‘such as it is found in the militant state is imperfect, and wants those degrees of perfection that are necessarily required for formal justification. For, to be justified formally by righteousness is nothing less than to be equal to the divine will, considered as the supreme rule’.113 Every aspect of inherent righteousness, whether faith, hope or love, is profoundly defective; yet only such a righteousness as is perfect according to the most exact rule of the law can justify a person before God.114 Even the inherent righteousness that is infused into a Christian, Davenant underlined, inevitably coexists with sin, and so it cannot provide the formal basis for justification.115 The infusion of inherent righteousness, Davenant contended, was both distinct from, and posterior to justification. ‘Sanctification by inherent righteousness,’ he wrote, ‘is, in order of causality, posterior to justification; nay, they are two acts, although concomitant in time, yet distinct in themselves and in their nature’.116 Davenant also argued that both the distinctness of justification from sanctification and its logical priority to sanctification were ideas rooted in Scripture.117 Davenant was, in other words, asserting precisely the distinction that Montagu had been doing his best to fudge. Davenant insisted that both justification and sanctification were necessary for salvation. Sin gives rise not only to a liability to punishment but also to an internal taint. Justification deals with the former, sanctification the latter. The remission of sins, through justification, is invariably accompanied by the

194  Grace and Conformity infusion of grace and righteousness; but the two processes work in very different ways. Remission of sins is an individual act and effected in a moment; but the infusion of grace, or sanctification, is a continual act, and effected successively and by degrees. Remission of sins delivers from guilt and the punishment of sins; but the infusion of grace purges from the defilement of sin. We obtain the remission of sins proximately from God, by the righteousness of Christ imputed to us; but the infusion of righteousness making it their own, by the operation of the Holy Spirit.118

Ward must have been delighted by Davenant’s next remark, apposite as it was to his ongoing engagement with the English anti-​Calvinists: ‘The Jesuits are therefore quite mistaken in laying it down, that forgiveness of sins is not at all distinct from the infusion of inherent righteousness, and in contending on that ground that inherent righteousness is the form of our justification’.119 If a Christian’s justification were indeed on the basis of inherent righteousness, Davenant argued, it would follow that Christ’s merit was applied to believers only in order that they might obtain that inherent righteousness. Having obtained it, however, their need for Christ’s merit would cease. And that would make Christ not so much the Christian’s present redeemer and reconciler, but merely the one who obtained, in the past, the grace that transforms us in the present. Davenant insisted, on the contrary, that the merit of Christ constantly avails to render the justified Christian pleasing and acceptable to God.120 Davenant made clear that a pastoral imperative lay behind his understanding of justification. As ever, his academic theology was not divorced from the preoccupations of practical ministry. ‘The formal cause of justification,’ he wrote, ‘ought to be of such a kind, that a Christian may safely and boldly confide in it under struggles of conscience and the agony of death’.121 But no Papist, Davenant argued, has ever dared to rely on their own righteousness in that way. Davenant saw Anselm’s Admonitio Morienti as a venerable example of the orthodox view of justification in action, bringing comfort to a dying sinner.122 Christians have to rely on Christ’s righteousness rather than their own, he underlined, continuing in a pastoral vein, because we pray for divine forgiveness on a daily basis. As he put it,

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  195 We all sin every day, every day we seek remission, and in the moment of death do so most vehemently and humbly. We acknowledge, therefore, that we do not stand justified or worthy of heaven, by a quality of righteousness permanently adhering to us, but that through the remission of sins and divine grace, eternal life is bestowed upon us for Christ’s sake, most unworthy [as we are].123

Having addressed Bellarmine’s arguments against the Protestant view of justification, Davenant then began to lay the foundations of his own position, explaining with greater precision what he understood by the terms ‘imputation’ and ‘formal cause’. ‘To impute, therefore, something to someone,’ he indicated, ‘is the same thing in this question, as to reckon and number it with those things which are his own and pertain to him’.124 All sorts of things may be reckoned as ours in this way; but they are only said to be ‘imputed’ to us, when they avail to us for some specific effect, as much as if they proceeded from us, or had their location in us. Thus an unworthy son may be accepted into royal favour on account of the virtues and loyal service of his father being ‘imputed’ to him.125 The ‘form’ of justification, Davenant indicted, was that by which a Christian was not merely accounted and pronounced justified before God, but actually made or constituted so. Since the Christian is the passive term in justification, it is not necessary that his justification be derived from anything inherent in him. Just as a person may be said to be loved, without any inhering quality in them, which provides the foundation of that statement; so a person is said to be justified, without there being any inhering quality, which provides the foundation for their justification.126 Davenant then bombarded his reader with a series of arguments designed to demonstrate, positively, that the formal cause of justification was indeed the imputation of Christ’s obedience. If, as Scripture suggests, he argued, the benefit of justification lies in the fact that, having apprehended Christ by faith, the Christian is absolved from sin and accepted for eternal life, in consideration of Christ’s merits; then believers are justified by the imputed righteousness of Christ, not by their own inherent righteousness.127 Furthermore, as Paul makes clear, the disobedience of Adam is imputed to our condemnation, and the righteousness of Christ is imputed for our justification.128 Scripture tells us, he indicated, that God delivers transgressors from punishment out of regard for the suffering and death of Christ on the cross.129 ‘If the righteousness of Christ making satisfaction,’ Davenant then

196  Grace and Conformity argued, ‘be ours by imputation, why not also the righteousness of Christ fulfilling the law?’130 He was not suggesting, he underlined, that Christ’s personal righteousness inhered in a justified Christian, but rather that ‘in regard of the fulfilment of the law for us by Christ, [God] accepts us to life and the reward of glory, as if we had fulfilled the law by our own personal righteousness’.131 For God, by his decree, has transferred the duty of fulfilling the law from human beings made weak by sin, to Christ the God-​Man; and God wills that the obedience and righteousness that Christ performed in our flesh, should become ours by imputation.132 Scripture also tells us, Davenant pointed out, that Christ has actually become our righteousness, but this cannot happen other than by imputation.133 It is also the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, Davenant argued, that lies behind Paul’s suggestion that believers have ‘put on’ Christ,134 and the suggestion that Christ has been made the ‘surety’ for Christians.135 Davenant brought his argument to a close with a brief recapitulation of his position. Justification of life therefore does not pour over us from any quality inhering in ourselves, but from the complete righteousness of the Mediator, given and imputed to us. Our inherent righteousness does not have in itself rectitude, that is, complete and absolute perfection of righteousness; it therefore cannot produce in us justification of life, which is the most perfect effect of a most perfect cause. Hence, the righteousness of Christ takes for us the place of a formal cause, in order to constitute the ground of this justification.136

He then set out a large number of theological authorities supporting his position on justification, running from the earliest Church Fathers, to contemporary Roman Catholic writers, including Bellarmine himself!137

Ward’s Tractatus: Justifying Faith and the Certainty of Grace Since Davenant had handled the controversy about the formal cause of justification so expertly, Ward indicated early on in his lectures (all of which he reorganized for the Tractatus into chapters),138 that he would confine his own treatment to the controversy ‘concerning faith & especially concerning justifying faith’.139

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  197 Ward underlined, as he had in his Determination, that Article XI was the authoritative statement on justification within the English Church. Five conclusions could be drawn from it, which provided the parameters of orthodox reflection on this subject: 1. We are reckoned just before God, on account of the merit of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ. 2. Only on account of the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, are we reckoned just before God. 3. Only on account of the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, are we reckoned, through faith, just before God. 4. We are not reckoned just before God, on account of our works and merits. 5. That we are justified by faith alone is a most wholesome doctrine and very full of comfort.140 Ward underlined, as he had in his Determinations, that Scripture takes justification in a forensic sense, opposing the act of justification to the act of condemnation.141 ‘That [faith] is therefore called justifying faith, by which the sinner repenting, believing in Christ and his satisfaction, is absolved from the guilt of sins before the tribunal of God, and pronounced just’.142 Bellarmine claimed that Protestants restricted the object of this justifying faith to the promise of personal forgiveness. Not so, insisted Ward, ‘We say that the object of justifying faith is Christ, Christ the Mediator, Christ the Redeemer, the death, passion, satisfaction and merit of Christ, according to that of the Apostle Rom 3:25 “Whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” ’143 But from the fact that a Christian believes in Christ in this way, he can apply to himself all the benefits of Christ, including his promise of personal forgiveness. These are properly speaking, therefore, the objects of what Ward refers to as special, rather than justifying faith.144 Bellarmine had also claimed that Protestants, by identifying faith as trust (fiducia), were effectively confusing it with hope. Ward agreed that Protestants defined justifying faith as trust; but he denied that this meant they confused it with hope, ‘since,’ he insisted, ‘the affections are truly and really distinct’. This brought Ward to the heart of the controversy. ‘It is questioned, between Protestants and Romans,’ he indicated, ‘whether justifying faith is the bare, firm and certain assent to all those things which God puts forward to

198  Grace and Conformity be believed, or, which comes to the same, [whether it] is a firm assent to all things that have been divinely revealed’.145 The Roman Catholics claimed that it was; and, although Ward did not mention it, they were not alone. In 1624, Francis White, who had, reviewed Montagu’s Appello prior to its publication, had published A reply to Jesuit Fisher’s answer. This work had an appendix, entitled A brief relation, which described a conference between Fisher and the then Bishop of St Davids, William Laud. In 1624, this account was presented as the work of Laud’s chaplain, but it was republished in 1639 under Laud’s own name.146 In A brief relation, salvation was ascribed to a faith that sounded suspiciously like what Ward identified as a merely Catholic faith. Laud’s ‘chaplain,’ for example, defended his master’s loyalty to the English Church in the following words: ‘to believe the Scripture, and the creeds; to believe these in the sense of the ancient Primitive Church; to receive the four great General Councils, so much magnified by Antiquity; to believe all points of doctrine, generally received as fundamental, in the Church of Christ; is a faith, in which to live and die, cannot but give salvation. And therefore the B[ishop] went upon a sure ground, in the adventure of his soul upon that faith’.147 The faith described here is clearly a matter of assent to revealed truths, not a matter of personal reliance on Christ; so Laud was effectively embracing a Roman Catholic understanding of faith, as Henry Burton later pointed out.148 Shelford appears to have taken a similar view, writing at one point that ‘Whatsoever is necessary to salvation, is contained in these four points; in true faith, in good life, in prayer, and grace. True faith is contained in the three Creeds, of the Apostles, of Nice, and of Athanasius; the two latter being the exposition of the former’.149 So Shelford, too, was suggesting that faith was a matter of assenting to the articles of belief. Ward, by contrast, underlined that The Orthodox Church of Protestants affirms that this Catholic faith, by which we assent to all things divinely revealed in the holy Scriptures, is required and necessarily presupposed for the justification of a sinner: she even adds that it is the basis and foundation of that faith by which we are justified, insofar as it assents to the promises of the Gospel or covenant of grace; but she teaches further that the faith by which we are justified is far different from the former, inasmuch as it does not mean a bare general assent to those things which God has revealed in his word; but means over and above that trust in Christ the Mediator and Redeemer for the remission of sins.150

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  199 Ward pointed out that a merely Catholic faith could be found in many who did not have eternal life; whereas the New Testament’s elogies of justifying faith make clear that it is found only in those who do.151 He also contended, as he had in his Determinations, that justifying faith was revealed as the condition of the covenant of grace, whereas bare assent to revealed truth was not.152 Catholic faith, Ward indicated, was seated in the intellect, and its act was an intellectual act of assent. Justifying faith, by contrast, was seated in the will, and its act was a disposition or affection of the will, by which one relied on an effective means for a desired end.153 The Scriptures, Ward contended, consistently identified ‘believing in’ someone, with putting one’s trust in them.154 The New Testament had even developed a Greek neologism (εις τον Χριστον πιστευειν) to make the point that believing in Christ was not the same thing as believing whatever Christ had said or done. As Ward underlined, ‘To believe in Christ crucified is not barely to assent that Christ is crucified; for even the demons believe that’.155 For, as Augustine had made clear, ‘He in fact believes in Christ who hopes in Christ and loves Christ’. 156 But hoping in Christ, Ward underlined, means putting one’s trust in Christ. Ward once again found warrant for this position in Anselm and Fisher, as well as in the Homilies, but he also added a number of more recent Roman Catholic authorities who concurred with his judgement, culminating with Cornelius Jansen.157 Ward then turned to address the objections that Bellarmine had raised against the Protestant conception of justifying faith. He insisted that identifying justifying faith with trust did not involve confusing it with hope; and he set out the differences between them.158 He conceded, however, that trust was used in a number of different ways in Scripture. It could denote, he thought, ‘1. The disposition of trust, properly so called [i.e. the trust which was identified with justifying faith], distinct from hope. 2. A degree of hope, properly so called, in which sense it is called strengthened hope. 3. An act of the intellect, a full persuasion and thus it is opposed to doubt’.159 That observation enabled him to deal with problematic Biblical loci that appeared to distinguish trust from faith.160 Ward also underlined, against Bellarmine, that there were many more places in Scripture, where faith could not possibly denote an assent to revealed truth, as the Roman Catholics suggested it did.161 Ward was equally dismissive of Bellarmine’s argument that the Apostles’ Creed supported the idea that faith was a matter of assenting to revealed propositions. Quite the contrary, Ward insisted, ‘To believe in the Son of

200  Grace and Conformity God . . . is to put one’s trust in the Son of God; and to believe in the Son of God [who] suffered, was crucified, and died, for the expiation of our sins, is to put one’s trust in the Son of God, [who] suffered, was crucified and died, for the remission of sins: which act is the proper act of justifying faith, and is the same thing as to believe in Christ as Saviour and Redeemer’.162 In the same way, to believe in God the Father, means to put one’s trust in God as Father; and no one can do that, without first putting their trust in the ransom offered by the Son to satisfy God’s vindictive justice.163 So there was nothing in the Creed, Ward insisted, that warranted the Roman Catholic identification of justifying faith with a bare assent to revealed truth. Ward amassed abundant Patristic testimony for drawing a clear distinction between Catholic faith and justifying faith. ‘The act of faith with the Fathers’ he insisted, ‘is the same thing as to place all hope and trust in God’. 164 The same distinction could be seen, he thought, in many near-​contemporary Roman authorities as well.165 Needless to say, he paid particular attention to what Augustine had to say on this point, dedicating an entire chapter to him. ‘Certainly,’ Ward remarked, ‘if under the name and notion of the act of believing in Christ, Augustine includes the act of going to Christ, of cleaving to Christ, of hoping in Christ, then he is including whatever we require under the name of trust’.166 Ward underlined, as he had in his Determinations, that the Protestant understanding of justifying faith did not exclude the need for preparatory works that disposed a sinner towards justification.167 Exhibiting, once again, the pastoral and, indeed, devotional concerns that underlay his academic theology, Ward tried to explain how these preparatory works cohered in the believer’s experience of justification. The love of God, he suggested, produced in the heart of a sinner a serious contrition and sadness at the offense done to God, along with a detestation of all sin, and an absolute resolution to sin no further. This contrition of the heart impelled the sinner to take refuge in the sacred anchor of divine mercy, namely the passion and satisfaction of Christ the Redeemer, and to confide in this alone, placing all trust in it for the absolution of every charge, and the remission of every sin, before the tribunal of God.168 The Holy Spirit, Ward suggested, led the sinner through an ordered series of preparatory states. These moved from a merely Catholic faith, through a fear of judgement, the hope of mercy, a love of God inviting sinners to be reconciled, a love of Christ as Redeemer and Saviour, a desire arising from the awareness of redemption and salvation to please and obey God, and the

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  201 consequent resolution to live in a new way. At last, the duly prepared sinner took refuge in God’s mercy, and Christ’s redemption and merit for the remission of sins, confiding firmly in him, and putting trust in him for forgiveness and reconciliation with God.169 Having set out his understanding of justifying faith, Ward then turned his attention to special faith. Before embarking on the discussion proper, Ward underlined that ‘the theologians of our confession . . . rightly affirm that believers are able truly to apply to themselves, in particular, the general propositions of the Gospel, and are able certainly to believe and to trust that their sins in particular have been remitted to them’.170 This special faith, Ward insisted, is not the same thing as justifying faith.171 He reiterated the distinction that he had drawn earlier, between that trust by which the will relied on Christ the Mediator, which Ward, of course, identified with justifying faith; and that trust which consisted in ‘a strengthened hope, or rather,’ he made clear, ‘a firm assent or persuasion concerning the remission of sins, in which this kind of hope is founded’.172 Ward would be discussing the latter. Ward returned to the syllogism that he had used in his 1626 Determination on this topic: ‘Whoever believes in Christ, to him his sins are remitted. I believe in Christ. Therefore my sins are remitted’.173 Ward then went on, ‘Because I am certain that I fulfil the condition, by believing in Christ the Redeemer, I am therefore certain that my sins have been remitted to me by a special faith applying to me the thing promised in the covenant’.174 Such special faith, he pointed out, could not possibly be justifying faith (whatever Lutherans like Chemnitz believed)175 because it assumed that justification has already happened, whereas justifying faith is logically prior to justification itself.176 The two were also distinct, he underlined, again reflecting his pastoral concerns, because justifying faith could exist without a personal confidence in the remission of sins, as it often did in those who were undergoing grave temptation.177 Special faith and justifying faith were also distinct in terms of their objects, he argued. The object of justifying faith was Christ himself, and his satisfaction; whereas the objects of special faith ‘are the things promised in the new covenant, or the benefits of the covenant, such as justification, the remission of sins, union with Christ’.178 Since the remission of sins was actually an object of special faith, this was a further reason why it should not be identified with justifying faith; for special faith must presuppose the remission of sins. Furthermore, special faith was not the faith that fulfilled the covenant, so it could not be the kind of faith that

202  Grace and Conformity justified. For Scripture does not say that sins are remitted to those who believe their sins are remitted, but rather that sins are remitted to whoever believes in Christ.179 Ward next set out to establish that special faith was properly a sure faith. As he put it, He who truly believes in Christ the Redeemer for the remission of sins, and, by experimental knowledge, certainly knows himself to believe in Christ and to place his trust in His satisfaction and merits for the remission of sins, from hence, by virtue of the divine promise that sins are remitted this way to a sinner, both certainly and truly knows, or at least can and should know, that his sins have been remitted to him.180

Ward distinguished between three different kinds of certainty of faith. There was a certainty of divine faith that was immediate and that relied directly on divine revelation. There was a certainty of divine faith that was mediate and that relied on one principle that was certain by immediate divine faith, and another that was evident either by the light of nature or by experience. Finally, there was a certainty of human faith that relied on a reliable but human authority. Special faith, Ward explained, was an instance of mediate divine faith, since its major proposition, ‘Whoever believes in Christ, to him his sins are remitted,’ was drawn directly from divine revelation; and its minor proposition, ‘I believe in Christ,’ is known by experience. As a result, its conclusion, ‘Therefore my sins are remitted,’ had what Suarez called ‘theological certainty’181 In the controversy over special faith, Ward underlined, the whole dispute turned on the epistemic status of the minor proposition; whether, in other words, a believer could be certain that he was a true believer. The Reformed believed that a believer could hold this belief truly and with certainty, even if doubts might occur during the first stages of the believer’s conversion and whenever the believer was undergoing grave temptation.182 This is because the human conscience ordinarily provided a certain witness to all the acts that fell under human knowledge, whether internal or external. And since a person’s conscience is able to perceive and consider his thoughts, intentions, resolutions, actions and undertakings, no other kind of testimony is as convincing to him.183 It follows, Ward argued, that the faithful can indeed have certainty about their own acts of faith, charity, hope, patience, etc.184 This can be seen very

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  203 clearly in the Psalms, when David repeatedly claims he knew his own faith.185 David both exercised the acts of hoping, confiding, loving, believing, and knew himself to be exercising them, without any fearfulness that he was not doing so.186 Indeed, ‘From this experimental knowledge he pronounces and infers categorically, that God viewed him with favour, would hear his prayers, and would not let him be confounded’.187 David’s faith certainty was not, Ward insisted, a matter of special revelation, as the Jesuits were wont to claim. Rather, it came ‘from the common and ordinary experience and sense of the faithful, who are unhesitatingly certain that they exercise these kinds of acts, and are not mistaken in this their assertion or asseveration’.188 And since the faithful can be certain whether they are fulfilling the condition of the covenant of grace, Ward contended, they can be certain that their own sins have been remitted.189 In the Gospels, Ward observed, people are periodically asked whether they believe in Christ. But this question would be pointless if they could never be certain that they did.190 The same is true of the biblical injunctions to believe in Christ, and of the biblical promises to those who do: they would be pointless if their recipients could not know whether they believed. Again, the faithful are periodically encouraged in the Bible to give thanks for God’s forgiveness,191 which they could not do unless they were certain of that forgiveness.192 Ward then quoted Richard Field, to the effect that, if the Roman doctrine on this point were true, no one would be able to give thanks for the greatest spiritual benefit of all, namely their justification.193 Ward indicated that this certainty about grace and forgiveness could also be drawn from the conscience. The conscience, he said, bears witness to all human acts, internal and external. And the certitude derived from it excludes all fearfulness that we may have done the opposite.194 Paul clearly trusted his own conscience with regard to his conduct in Corinth, as is made clear in II Corinthians 1:12.195 And Augustine, citing that very verse, in his commentary on Psalm 149, ‘supposes all devout people to be able to know of faith, the sincerity, of hope, the certainty, and charity to be without dissimulation; and also without any fear of the contrary’.196 So if the conscience of a believer indicates that he places his trust in Christ the Redeemer, and his satisfaction, for the remission of sins; then he may undoubtedly infer, without fear of the contrary, that his sins have been remitted, on account of the Gospel promise.197 To the testimony of the conscience, Ward added the testimony of the Holy Spirit, who bore witness that the faithful had been adopted as the

204  Grace and Conformity children of God. The reliability of this testimony can be deduced from Romans 8:15–​16, where Paul writes, ‘you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’. Since the Spirit bears witness that the believer is a child of God, he may conclude that his sins have been remitted; for it would be absurd to suggest that the Holy Spirit’s witness was untrustworthy.198 Ward underlined that the witness of the Spirit came not through a miraculous revelation, but ‘through the ordinary inspiration of the Holy Spirit, by the means of the Word, and the sacraments, and the exercises of faith and penitence, in which are the prayers of the faithful’; to these he added ‘the absolution, besides, of the priest coming to the aid of a doubtful conscience, and that kind of means’.199By such means as these, Ward argued, the Holy Spirit is wont to inspire, by the help of grace, holy acts, motions, and operations in the intellect, will, and affections, which the believer experimentally senses and discerns, thus providing a certain testimony of his adoption and sonship.200 Bellarmine was quite wrong, Ward thought, to suggest that this was merely a conjectural kind of certainty.201 The nature and efficacy of the sacraments, Ward argued, provided further support for the certainty of grace. For God not only promises his grace in the Word; but adds the visible signs of the sacraments, as seals of that promised grace, and means and instruments of sustaining and confirming faith; by which a believer could know with certainty, that the benefits of Christ, the remission of sins, the renovation of our nature, and the grace of adoption pertain individually to him.202 And if that is the case, then special faith, by which a believer applies to himself, as an individual, the benefits won by the death of Christ, is a legitimate consequence of participation in the sacraments.203 For as Ward underlined, ‘All the sacraments, that have been instituted, in order that they might be signs of the covenant, are also equally instituted, that they might be seals of the justice of faith; that they might seal to the truly faithful, that they are just by faith in Christ’.204 The sacraments of the Old Testament, Ward indicated, were signs of grace to come, the sacraments of the New Testament are signs of the grace now exhibited by Christ to the world. Baptism succeeds Circumcision, and is no less a sign of justice than Circumcision once was. The Eucharist succeeds the Paschal Lamb, and is an exhibitory and obsignatory sign of Christ crucified;

The Articulation of Justification by Faith  205 ‘By a worthy reception of these sacred mysteries we are made partakers of the death of Christ, and of all the benefits which he merited for us by blood; the same benefits are sealed to us, and we are made certain of their collection, as by a seal or pledge’.205 The Eucharist, seals to the faithful the certain promise of the remission of sins through the death of Christ: it is therefore a powerful instrument of Christian assurance.

Conclusions In his Act lectures, Prideaux made clear that the doctrine of justification by faith alone was integral to the Reformed vision of grace. Montagu, too, understood that it lay at the heart of the controversy between the avant-​garde Conformists and their Reformed opponents. It is therefore unsurprising that it became a focus of theological controversy during the 1620s and 1630s. It was a key front in the ongoing debate between the supporters and the opponents of Reformed theology within England, and Reformed Conformists such as Morton, Featley, Downame, Ward, and Davenant were all active on this theological territory. It was, however, hostility to Rome rather than hostility towards Arminianism which galvanized the Reformed in this area of doctrine. Morton and Featley took issue with Montagu himself, arguing that his approach to justification smacked of Popery; particularly in his wilful confusion of justification and sanctification, two saving divine actions that Protestants had distinguished since the time of Luther. However, Montagu was not alone in stretching the boundaries of English orthodoxy. The Cambridge Commencement saw repeated attempts to promote a view of justification which included hope and love as concauses of justification with faith, rather than concomitants. Ward repeatedly rebuffed these attempts, and was in a position to ensure that the orthodox Reformed understanding of justification was maintained in Cambridge until the Long Parliament was called. Furthermore, Ward not only collaborated in the publication of a major work of Davenant’s which discussed justification in considerable detail; he also completed that work with his own unpublished Tractatus, which he had originally delivered as lectures at some point after 1636. Once again, both

206  Grace and Conformity works demonstrate that their authors had a constant eye to the pastoral relevance of their theology. Ward’s Tractatus, in particular, involved an extended discussion and defence of Christian assurance, one which gave a particular prominence to the role of the sacraments. Once again, the Reformed Conformists saw the institutions of the Christian Church as the instruments of, not alternatives to, the efficacious working of God’s grace.

6 The Lord’s Supper The Promotion of Altars and John Williams’s Grantham Judgement As we have seen, Montagu’s opponents took exception to both his teaching on grace and his teaching on justification. They also took exception to his teaching on the Eucharist. In their commanding study of Early Modern English religious worship, Altars Restored, Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke chart the debates elicited by the rise of such avant-​garde Conformist attitudes to the Eucharist and the liturgical changes associated with such attitudes. The Reformed Conformists played a major part in those debates. It therefore makes sense to preface the discussion of the Reformed Conformist attitudes to the Lord’s Supper with an analysis of Montagu and his allies’ writing on the subject.1 One of the many complaints that the Informant levelled at Montagu’s Gag, in 1624, was that ‘Of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, he writeth very Popishly’. This charge was imprecise, but Montagu suspected that it had to do with the kind of language he had used in his discussion of the Eucharist. So that was the subject he addressed in his Appello.2 In the Gag, Montagu had referred to ‘the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar’.3 This was a phrase calculated to antagonize Reformed readers, since Roman Catholic writers habitually referred to the Eucharist in this way, and it implied that the communion table was a sacrificial altar and the Eucharist consequently a sacrifice.4 Despite his critics’ objections, Montagu refused to back away from such language in his Appello. ‘Why then is it such Popery to name the Lord’s Supper, the Sacrament of the Altar?’ he demanded, ‘Walk at random and atravers in your by-​paths, if you please. I have used the phrase of Altar for the Communion-​table, according to the manner of Antiquity, and am like enough sometimes to use it still’.5 For Montagu, in other words, the use of sacrificial terminology in relation to the Eucharist was not merely unproblematic; it was hallowed by Christian antiquity.

Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0007

208  Grace and Conformity In fact, Montagu claimed he had scriptural warrant for this terminology, using the very passage that Protestants used to defend their insistence on the word ‘table’.6 ‘St Paul,’ he wrote, ‘calleth the pagan altars (which were indeed and truly altars) tables: and why may not we name the Lord’s Table an altar, by the same warrant? You cannot communicate, he saith, of the table of the Lord, and the table of devils’. Montagu then applied Paul’s flexible usage to a couple of other controversial terms as well, deftly taking the opportunity to level his usual counter-​charge at his critics. ‘Nor will I abstain,’ he wrote, ‘notwithstanding your ogganition, to follow the steps and practice of Antiquity, in using the words sacrifice and priesthood also, and yet be farther from Popery in that practice, than you from Puritanism’.7 In the Gag, Montagu openly referred to the Eucharist as a sacrifice and did so without significant qualification. In the midst of an attack on the Roman denial of the cup to the laity, he had deployed a quotation from Cyprian that could not fail to raise Protestant hackles. Speaking of the celebrant during the Eucharist, Montagu noted, Cyprian had written that ‘he then offers a true and full sacrifice in the Church to God the Father, when he proceeds to offer it according to what he sees Christ Himself to have offered’.8 Montagu had then used Cyprian’s words to explain why contemporary Roman practice was misconceived, but not in the kind of language that Protestants would usually deploy. Why must the chalice be given to the laity, contrary to the usual Roman practice? he asked, ‘because otherwise we offer not the sacrifice as we should. “Nor is the Lord’s sacrifice celebrated with a legitimate consecration unless our oblation and sacrifice respond to His passion:” and that cannot be without pouring out of wine, that representeth the shedding of his blood. But your Church hath altered it; presumptuously done. Who gave your Church such authority?’9 As a result, Montagu contended, ‘your sacrifice is neither full nor true,’10 unlike, his implication being, the sacrifice that was offered within the Church of England. Under the guise of an attack on Rome, Montagu was thus promoting nothing less than a revolution in the Church of England’s Eucharistic theology. For unlike Rome, Montagu implied, the Church of England offered in the Eucharist a sacrifice that was both full and true. Admittedly, in the Appello, Montagu subsequently applied the kind of qualification that had been conspicuously absent from his earlier work, just as he had in relation to justification. ‘It may be,’ he wrote, ‘I have taken licence in use of terms; but no error in doctrine can you find: for, to put off your imputation from farther fastening, I believe no such sacrifice of the altar as the

The Lord’s Supper  209 Church of Rome doth. I fancy no such altars as they employ, though I profess a sacrifice and an altar’.11 Montagu then quoted from one of those writers he deemed ‘feasible’ with his opponents, whose works he had asked Cosin to ransack for useful quotations; namely, Thomas Morton.12 ‘In the . . . reverend Bishop’s words: “the Lord’s Table, being called improperly an Altar, can no more conclude a sacrifice understood properly, than when as S. Paul calling Titus his son according to the faith, which is improperly, a man may contend, S. Paul was his natural father according to the flesh.” ’13 But whereas Morton was using the impropriety of such language to show that the Eucharist should not be called a proper sacrifice: Montagu was using it to defend an alternative, non-​Roman Catholic, use of sacrificial language. This is why, Montagu argued, ‘The Lord’s Table hath been called θυσιαστήριον [an altar] from the beginning; not, as some falsely teach, by succeeding [i.e. later] Fathers. S. Paul himself may seem to have given authority and warrant to the phrase, Heb. 13.10’. Hebrews 13:10 reads ‘We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat’. Most Protestants understood ‘altar,’ in this verse, to refer to Christ,14 but many Roman Catholics understood it to refer to the altar of the Mass.15 Evidently, so did Montagu. He then quoted a number of Early Church Fathers, who had all described the Lord’s Table as an ‘altar,’ even though, he pointed out, the altars of the Early Church had been made of wood, rather than stone.16 Whatever his adversaries said of the word ‘altar,’ in relation to the Eucharist, Montagu contended, they could not entirely reject the word ‘sacrifice’. With a degree of condescension calculated to infuriate an Oxford Professor, Montagu wrote: ‘Now though you may stumble and break your shins at the altar, yet I hope you will not overthrow the sacrifice. I have so good opinion of your understanding, though weak, that you will confess the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, or Communion-​table, whether you please, to be a sacrifice’. Montagu made clear, however, that the kind of sacrifice that he had in mind was ‘not propitiatory, as they call it (I will use this word, “call it,” lest you challenge me upon Popery for using propitiatory) for the living and dead; not an external, visible, true, and proper sacrifice, but only representative, rememorative, and spiritual sacrifice’.17 That said, if his opponents were prepared to admit such a representative, commemorative and spiritual sacrifice, he wondered, how could they deny an altar. For, as he underlined, ‘D. Reynolds and B. Morton have granted, that though we have no proper altar, yet altar and sacrifice have a mutual relation and dependence one upon the other’.18 Indeed, Montagu suggested that

210  Grace and Conformity Rainolds had been prepared to accept that not only all believers in general, but Christian ministers in particular, might be called ‘priests,’ on account of the spiritual sacrifices they offered. 19 Once again, however, whereas Rainolds had used this argument to restrain the use of sacrificial language in relation to the Eucharist, Montagu was using it to promote it.20 The Informers’ hostility to what Montagu had written about the Eucharist did not prevent further attempts by his circle to test the boundaries of sacrificial discourse. In 1629, William Laud and John Buckeridge opened their publication of the works of Lancelot Andrewes with a volume of Opuscula Quaedam Posthuma.21 That volume included Andrewes’ Two Answers to Cardinal Perron, in which Andrewes had made comments about the Eucharist quite as unguarded as those Montagu had made in the Gag.22 Furthermore, since Andrewes was widely respected and his editors claimed the support of the King, his comments were shielded from immediate criticism. ‘The Eucharist,’ Andrewes wrote, ‘ever was, and by us is considered, both as a sacrament, and as a sacrifice’. He went on, ‘The sacrifice of Christ’s death is available for present, absent, living, dead, (yea, for those that are yet unborn),’ and, ‘when we say the dead’ he explained, ‘we mean it is available for the Apostles, Martyrs, and Confessors and all (because we are all the members of one body) these no man will deny’.23 Andrewes then indicated that the Church of England agreed with Augustine’s statement that ‘Before the coming of Christ, the flesh and blood of this sacrifice were foreshadowed in the animals slain; in the passion of Christ the types were fulfilled by the true sacrifice; after the ascension of Christ, this sacrifice is commemorated in the sacrament’.24 Applying this reading of the Eucharist to the controversy between the English and Roman Churches about the altar, Andrewes suggested that ‘If we agree about the matter of sacrifice, there will be no difference about the altar. The holy Eucharist being considered as a sacrifice (in the representation of the breaking the bread, and pouring forth the cup) the same is fitly called an altar: which again is as fitly called a table, the Eucharist being considered as a sacrament, which is nothing else but a distribution and an application of the sacrifice to the several receivers’.25 Such flexibility of language reflected the scriptural use, Andrewes thought: ‘For the altar, in the Old Testament, is by Malachy called mensa Domini [the table of the Lord]. And of the table in the New Testament, by the Apostle it is said, habemus altare [we have an altar]. Which, of what matter it be, whether of stone, as Nyssen; or of wood, as Optatus, it skills not. So that the matter of altars makes no difference in

The Lord’s Supper  211 the face of our church’.26 Andrewes then concluded the Two Answers with a handy summary of the points on which he believed there was actually no disagreement between the English and Roman Churches at all. This included ‘5. We grant the Eucharist a sacrifice’; and ‘6. We are not against altars, we have them’.27 Unlike Montagu, Andrewes had no opportunity to hedge his remarks in the Two Answers with subsequent qualification. Qualification was provided instead by John Buckeridge, whose funeral sermon for Andrewes opened with a prolonged discussion of the relationship between the Eucharist and sacrifice. This sermon had first been preached on 11 November 1626; so, some time before the publication of the Two Answers. Peter McCullough has suggested that it may originally have been intended as a response to Reformed anxieties about Montagu’s theology.28 And it could be seen to serve a very similar purpose, in the context of Buckeridge and Laud’s inclusion of Two Answers, among Andrewes’s published works. Although Buckeridge was more nuanced in his use of sacrificial language than Andrewes had been in the Two Answers, he did not row back from Andrewes’s and Montagu’s central exegetical claim; namely that Hebrews 13:10 sanctioned altars in Christian churches. Quite the contrary: he positively celebrated it, deploying it, dramatically, as the opening flourish of his sermon. ‘In the tenth Verse,’ he began, ‘the Apostle saith, we have an altar, of which they have no right to eat, that serve the tabernacle’. He then went on. Habemus Altare, We have, that is, Christians: so it is proprium Christianorum, proper to Christians: not common to the Jews together with Christians; they have no right to communicate, and eat there, that serve the Tabernacle. And yet it is commune Altare, a common Altar to all Christians, they have all right to eat there. And so it is externum Altare, not only a spiritual Altar in the heart of every Christian; then Saint Paul should have said habeo, or habet unusquis{que} I have, and every Christian hath in private to himself: but we have an altar, that is, all Christians have; and it must be external, else all Christians cannot have it.29 The defence of altars was, in other words, at the top of Buckeridge’s agenda. Buckeridge saw no reason for any Protestant embarrassment about sacrificial language in relation to Christian worship. ‘Christians then have an offering,’ he insisted, ‘and let us offer up to God continually; this is the ground of the daily sacrifice of Christians, that answereth to the daily sacrifice of the Jews. And this sacrifice of praise and thanks may well be understood the [sic] Eucharist, in which we chiefly praise and thank God for this his chief

212  Grace and Conformity and great blessing of our Redemption. And this and all other sacrifices of the Church external or spiritual must be offered up and accepted per Ipsum, in, by, and through Christ’. Taking inspiration from Romans 12:1 and I Peter 2:5,30 as read by Augustine,31 Buckeridge argued that the spiritual sacrifice that the Church offers to God, is not the natural body of Christ, which is Christ’s alone, but rather Christ’s mystical body, namely the Church itself.32 In this ecclesial and mystical sacrifice, it is the members of Christ who constitute the sacrifice, not Christ, who is their head. So, although the Church had no power to sacrifice the natural body of Christ, as Rome seemed to believe; the Church nonetheless made a daily sacrifice, offering itself up daily to God, in anticipation of the perfect surrender of the Last Day.33 As Buckeridge put it, ‘That which went before in the Head, Christ, on the cross, is daily performed in the members, in the Church. Christ there offered himself once for us; we daily offer our selves by Christ, that so the whole mystical body of Christ in due time may be offered to God’.34 This ecclesial and liturgical sacrifice had been obscured by the Roman dogma of the sacrifice of the Mass; but it was, Buckeridge argued, precisely what Luke was alluding to, when he mentioned the sacrifice of the liturgy in Acts 13:2. Acts 13:2 begins ‘While they were worshiping (Λειτουργούντων) . . . ’ but the Authorized Version rendered this phrase ‘As they ministered to the Lord’. Erasmus, by contrast, had translated the phrase as ‘sacrificantibus illis’ [while they were sacrificing], a reading which Buckeridge preferred. 35 At the same time as the likes of Montagu, Andrewes and Buckeridge were becoming more confident in the use of sacrificial vocabulary in relation to the Eucharist; their theology was being given physical expression by the erection or restoration of altars in church buildings. This physical transformation of the experience of worship in English churches has been ably charted by Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, so there is no need to offer more than a brief summary of their findings here. The move towards altars began to be seen in those cathedrals, where the communion table was still placed in the middle of the Choir, with the long side running east-​west (‘table-​wise’). In January 1617, William Laud, the recently appointed Dean of Gloucester, ordered the cathedral’s communion-​table positioned instead at the east wall, with the long side running north-​south (‘altar-​wise’).36 The same transformation took place a few months later in Durham Cathedral, during the vacancy between Bishops William James and Richard Neile.37 In 1619, Bishop Samuel Harsnett of

The Lord’s Supper  213 Norwich instructed a number of his parishes to place their tables altar-​wise at the east end. Meanwhile, in London, Lancelot Andrewes was able to showcase a particularly elaborate altar-​wise arrangement in his Episcopal chapel at Winchester House in Southwark. In 1620, the wooden communion table at Durham Cathedral, now placed altar-​wise, was replaced with a stone altar by the new Dean, Richard Hunt.38 This tendency took a little longer to affect the life of England’s parishes. In June or July 1627, the Vicar of south Grantham, Peter Titley, took it upon himself to move the communion table to the east end of the church and place it altar-​wise, citing the prevailing practice in the Chapel Royal and cathedral churches as precedent for doing so. Titley’s parishioners objected, claiming that they could no longer hear divine service, and appealed to their diocesan, John Williams, the Bishop of Lincoln. When both a party of the aggrieved parishioners, and an angry Vicar, presented themselves at his palace in Buckden, Williams spent a night composing an official response. He decreed that the table should remain where it had stood in the past, and he set out his reasons for rejecting the incumbent’s wish to place the table altar-​wise in a letter that was soon being widely circulated.39 Although conceding its significance in the debates of the period, Fincham and Tyacke do not offer an exposition of Williams’s arguments in the Grantham Judgement. They will therefore be set out in detail here, as an example of the Reformed Conformist response to Laudian innovation. Williams began by underlining that the placing of the Lord’s Table within a church building was an indifferent matter, unless it became a cause of scandal or contention.40 He commended the Vicar both for pursuing ‘decency and comeliness, in the officiating of God’s Divine Service,’ and for his awareness of the prevailing practice in royal chapels and cathedral churches. He made it clear, however, that the erection of an altar in his church was unacceptable. Indeed, Williams suggested, with his characteristic delight in a witty turn of phrase, ‘if you should erect any such altar, which (I know you will not) your discretion will prove the only holocaust to be sacrificed thereon’.41 Williams based his opposition to altars on the Church’s confessional documents and canons. He was clear, in other words, that the nature and location of Eucharistic furniture was a matter of Conformity, and that Titley’s attempt to erect an altar, as opposed to a table, represented a departure from, not an expression of Conformity. ‘You have subscribed when you came to your place,’ Williams underlined, ‘that “That other oblation which the Papists were wont to offer upon their altars, is a blasphemous figment, and

214  Grace and Conformity pernicious imposture” . .. and also, that we in the Church of England ought to take heed, lest our communion of a memory, be made a sacrifice: in the first Homily of the Sacrament’.42 Williams was quoting here from the Thirty-​nine Articles, Article XXXI, which read ‘Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits’; and also from the ‘Homily on the Worthy Receiving of the Sacrament,’ which warned of the Lord’s Supper that ‘We must then take heed, lest of the memory, it be made a sacrifice’. These confessional statements, Williams conceived, made clear that altars should not be erected in English churches. They were also reinforced by canon, notably the canons of Convocation of 1571, which insisted that the Churchwardens provide a ‘fair joined table’ for Communion,43 the Queen’s Injunctions of 1559, and the Canons of 1604.44 Having established that altars were prohibited within the English Church, Williams then contended that placing the table altar-​wise against the east wall could not be justified either. He observed that it had never been the usual practice in country churches; pointing out, flippantly, that if they had been, ‘the country-​people would suppose them dressers, rather than tables’.45 Williams argued that the Prayer Book rubric, which instructed the celebrant to stand at the ‘north side’ of the table for communion, clearly implied that the table should stand with its long side running east-​west, not north-​south. He then underlined that ‘What you saw in chapels, or cathedral churches is not the point in question, but how the tables are appointed to be placed in parish churches’.46 So although he commended Titley for his knowledge of the prevailing practice in such places, he did not approve of its application within his parish.47 Williams conceded that medieval stone altars had been retained in some German churches, and he was open to the possibility that they might have survived in some English religious buildings as well.48 But where they had, he insisted, they were not altars properly so called; and that for the compelling theological reason that ‘the sacrifice of the altar abolished, these (call them what you will) are no more altars, but tables of stone or timber’.49 Like Andrewes, Williams pointed to Malachi 1:7 to establish that ‘in the Old Testament, one and the same thing is termed an altar and a table. An altar, in respect of what is there offered unto God, and a table in respect of what is there participated by men, as for example, by the Priests’.50 Unlike Andrewes, however, Williams deployed this verse to undermine Hebrews 13:10 as an

The Lord’s Supper  215 authority for Christian altars. ‘The place is worth the marking,’ he wrote, ‘For it answers that very objection out of Heb. 13. 10 which you made to some of your fellow ministers; and one Master Morgan before you to Peter Martyr, in a disputation at Oxford’.51 Williams then went on to offer his own interpretation of the locus. ‘We have no altar in regard of an oblation,’ he argued, ‘but we have an altar in regard of participation, and communion granted unto us. The use of an altar is to sacrifice upon, and the use of a table is to eat upon; and because communion is an action most proper for a table, as an oblation is for an altar, therefore the Church in her liturgy, and canons, calling the same a table only, do not you call it an altar? [sic]’52 Williams then pointed to evidence that the Early Church had generally positioned the communion table in the middle of the church-​building, rather than at the east end. ‘If you desire to know out of Eusebius, St. Augustine, Durandus, and the fifth Council of Constantinople, how long communion tables have stood in the midst of churches, read a book which you are bound to read, and you shall be satisfied, Jewel against Harding: Of private Mass, Artic. 3. pag. 195’.53 Williams summed up his decision in three principles: 1. You may not erect an altar, where the canons only admit a communion table. 2. This table must not stand altar-​wise, and you at the north end thereof, but table-​wise, as you must officiate at the north side of the same. 3. This table ought to be laid up (decently covered) in the chancel only, as I suppose, but ought not to be officiated upon. . . but in that place of the church or chancel, where you may be seen and heard of all; though peradventure you be with him in Tacitus, master of your own, yet are you not of other men’s ears; and therefore your parishioners must be judges of your audibleness in this case. Williams then reiterated his conviction that the placing of the communion table was, fundamentally, an indifferent matter: ‘Whether side soever (you or your parish) shall yield to the other, in this needless controversy, shall remain, in my poor judgement, the more discreet, grave, and learned of the two’.54 Williams’s Grantham letter may have been an occasional and pastoral composition; but multiple copies were made of it and some even sold. John Hacket claimed that Prideaux had referred to it approvingly in his lectures

216  Grace and Conformity at Oxford, and that it had been cited in Parliament, with the dominical commendation ‘Well done good and faithful servant’.55 It is particularly significant as an expression of Reformed Conformity because it represented an explicit attempt to define Conformity, in conscious opposition to the theological language and liturgical practice promoted by many Laudians. In the Grantham Letter, Williams was effectively offering a rival to the Laudian vision of Conformity; one decisively shaped by the Reformed conviction that the Eucharist should not be understood as a sacrifice, properly so-​called. The Letter also made the case that this Reformed reading of what it meant to conform was firmly rooted in the Church of England’s confessional documents and enjoined by her canons. As Hacket pointed out, ‘the Metropolitan intending one common decency in all churches of his province, about the table of Christ’s Holy Supper, this paper (six years older than his translation to the See of Canterbury) where it was spread, made it difficult to be obey’d’.56

The Background to the Oxford Troubles and Thomas Morton’s Institution (1631) The circulation of Williams’s Grantham judgement did not prevent the spread of altars. Fincham and Tyacke have shown that new altars were erected in Abingdon, near Oxford, and Bishop Wearmouth, near Durham, in 1628, as well as Ashwell, in Hertfordshire, in 1629.57 This tendency gradually began to penetrate the Universities as well. The communion table was moved from the middle of the chancel to the east end in All Souls College, Oxford, in 1629. Early in 1631, the ongoing restoration of the Chapel at Magdalen College, Oxford, that had begun soon after Accepted Frewen became President in 1626, finally reached the east end and an altar was duly installed. Oxford was already in a state of political ferment, following the contested election of William Laud as Chancellor in 1630. The previous Chancellor, Prideaux’s great patron, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, had died on Saturday 10 April 1630. News reached Oxford overnight. Frewen, who was then serving as Vice-​Chancellor, caught wind of Pembroke’s death while on a College progress. He galloped back to Oxford and made it to Magdalen before the end of Evening Prayer on Sunday 11 April. He immediately made contact with his allies among the Heads of House. They agreed that Laud was their man, and made arrangements to summon Convocation the very next day, in an effort to prevent other candidates emerging.

The Lord’s Supper  217 Laud’s opponents were equally quick off the mark. The agents of Pembroke’s brother and heir, Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery and now also of Pembroke, arrived in Oxford that night. They managed to garner support from Oxford’s contingent of Welshmen; from Prideaux, from some other Heads of House of the ‘Calvinian party,’ and from the four Colleges whose Visitor was the author of the Grantham Letter. However, the attempt to prevent Laud’s election failed, and he won by nine votes.58 This was not the end of the matter, however. An appeal from five members of the University, William Price, William Kerry, Alexander Hyde, Francis Hyde and Giles Thorne, was drafted on 23 April and sent to the King. Price was already a Bachelor of Divinity, and had served as White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy since 1621. Francis Hyde had served as University Proctor in 1627, and he and Alexander were both sons of Sir Laurence Hyde II, who kept a house in Salisbury Cathedral Close near that of Bishop Davenant. Sir Laurence had been an eminent parliamentarian and had served as attorney-​ general to James I’s consort, Anne of Denmark. Francis would soon be serving as secretary to the Earl of Denbigh; while Alexander would benefit, in due course, from the ecclesiastical patronage of both Philip Herbert and John Davenant, whose niece he later married. So these scholars were suspiciously well connected. Their appeal, however, was unsuccessful, and Laud was duly invested with the Chancellorship of Oxford on 28 April. The political antagonism in Oxford was aggravated a couple of months later by Peter Heylyn. On 11 July 1630, he used the Act Sunday Sermon to denounce the Feoffees for Impropriations; a trust that supported Puritan Lecturers across the country. Heylyn also took the opportunity to condemn those conforming clergy who turned a blind eye to Puritanism, so as not to offend the people. In Heylyn’s words, ‘possibly there cannot be a greater mischief in the Church of God than a popular prelate’.59 Following the Grantham judgement, in which he had taken the side of the lay-​people against their Vicar, and his support of the Petition of Right in the 1628 Parliament, it would not have taken great imagination to identify Williams as one of the popular prelates whom Heylyn had in mind. Heylyn made exactly that charge against the Grantham judgement a few years later, in A coal from the Altar (1636).60 Heylyn’s sermon was effectively a shot across the bows of the Reformed Establishment, and their episcopal supporters. The following year, one of the most widely respected Reformed theologians in the country, Thomas Morton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, published a scathing attack on Roman Catholic sacramental teaching, in which an

218  Grace and Conformity entire book was dedicated to the denial that the Eucharist was a propitiatory sacrifice. Of the Institution of the Sacrament of the Blessed Body and Blood of Christ was entered on the Stationers’ Company registers on 10 February 1631, and it was already sufficiently well known in Oxford for it to be cited by Prideaux in his Act Lecture that year.61 It would soon become a standard work of reference for those opposed to the avant-​garde Conformists’ attitude to the Eucharist. Although conceived as a response to the Roman Catholic polemicists Richard Brereley and Robert Parsons, Morton invested it with a particular relevance to the Oxford situation, by addressing his dedicatory letter to the ‘brightest lights and ornaments of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities’.62 ‘The Christian Commonwealth,’ Morton wrote, ‘has nothing more sublime, nothing more holy and revered, than the sacrament of the Eucharist, by which we Christians are, in a certain manner, transformed into Christ himself ’.63 The Papists, however, had debased this holy institution, by turning it into theatrical spectacle, by claiming it was a sacrifice, and by encouraging the idolatrous adoration of the consecrated elements. What is more, they had maintained that such objectionable teaching and practice actually reflected the practice of Christian antiquity. Morton set out to prove them wrong and to establish that the ‘Romish Mass is a very mass, or rather a gulf of many superstitions, sacrilegious and idolatrous positions and practices’.64 Morton indicated that he had impelled to this task by many things, but not least ‘lest anyone (which execrable omen, may God strike down!) slide into Roman bread-​worship’.65 That threat, of course, had an alarming relevance, in a university where a controversial new altar was being erected, within months of the contested election of a Chancellor known to favour them. Morton’s Institution was intended to engage across the whole front of Roman Catholic Eucharistic theology. So his discussion of sacrifice only came after five books attacking the Roman conception of Eucharistic presence. Morton began with a quotation from the Tridentine Canons on the Eucharist: ‘Whosoever shall deny . . . it to be a true and proper sacrifice: or that it is propitiatory, let him be anathema’.66 Morton first examined the Roman claim in the light of Scripture, more particularly the Biblical accounts of the Last Supper. ‘There is not one word,’ he concluded, ‘in Christ his first institution, which can probably infer a proper sacrifice’.67 Furthermore, not one of Christ’s actions on the Last Supper was sacrificial in nature.68 No texts of the New Testament made for a sacrifice either, even one quoted twice by Buckeridge. In Acts 13:2, Morton argued, the Greek word Λειτουργούντων

The Lord’s Supper  219 connoted only ministry in general; so ‘why sacrificing, say we, and not some other ministerial function, as preaching, or administering the sacraments, seeing the words may bear it?’ He deftly countered Erasmus’s scholarship, which Buckeridge favoured, with Isaac Casaubon’s, ‘who for Greek-​learning hath scarce had his equal in this our age’. 69 In specific relation to Hebrews 13:10, Morton noted that ‘This some of you greedily catch at, for proof of a proper sacrifice in the Mass, and are presently repelled by your Aquinas, expounding the place to signify, either his altar upon the cross, or else his body, on his altar in heaven’.70 Distracting the faithful from the eternal offering made by the ascended Christ in heaven, and directing their minds instead to the inconstant sacrifices of fallible earthly priests was, Morton suggested, the height of sacrilege.71 Having examined the Scriptural authorities alleged for the idea that the Eucharist was a proper sacrifice, Morton turned to examine the writings of the Church Fathers. He concluded that, although they had certainly described the Eucharist as a sacrifice, they had not meant, by that, a proper or propitiatory sacrifice.72 They had meant instead that the Eucharist was the representation of a sacrifice, and they had described baptism as a sacrifice in exactly the same way.73 Since they understood the Eucharist as a sacrifice only in this representative and improper sense; one should conclude that they used the terms related to sacrifice, such as ‘priest’ and ‘altar,’ in an improper sense as well. Morton then took the opportunity to point out that ‘The word altar, applied to the table of the Lord (which anciently stood in the midst of the church, so that they might compass it around) was far more rarely called θυσιαστήριον of the Greeks, or altare of the Latins, than τράπεζα, and mensa, that is, table: which they would not have done, if the altar had carried in it the true and absolute property of an altar’.74 Such words were not calculated to make the Magdalen College altar any more palatable. Although Morton denied that the Eucharist was a sacrifice in the proper sense; he nonetheless insisted that it was indeed a sacrifice in a figurative sense, and that such figurative and spiritual sacrifices were, according to Scripture, far more excellent than their proper and corporal alternatives.75 Morton cited the Prayer Book communion service as evidence that good Protestants perceived many excellent sacrifices within the Eucharist: First, the sacrifice of mortification in act, and of martyrdom in vow, saying “We offer unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a holy, lively and reasonable sacrifice unto thee. Next a sacrifice eucharistical,

220  Grace and Conformity saying “We desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept of our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.”. . . Thirdly, a sacrifice latreutical, that is of divine worship, saying “And although we be unworthy to offer up any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept of our bounden duty and service & c.”76

Morton then insisted that ‘Protestants in their commemoration offer up the same body and blood of Christ, which was sacrificed on the cross, as the object of remembrance, and most absolute sacrifice of our redemption’. So, when Roman Catholics claim that they offer up exactly the same body and blood as were Christ’s upon the cross, We, as instantly, and more truly, proclaim that we offer (commemoratively) the same, undoubtedly the very same body and blood of Christ his all-​ sufficient sacrifice on the cross, although not the subject of his proper sacrifice, but yet as the only adequate object of our commemoration . . . Whereby it will be easy for us to discern the subject sacrifice of Christ from ours, his being the real sacrifice, ours only the sacramental representation.77

Having established that the Eucharist was a figurative rather than a proper sacrifice; Morton turned to consider whether it could be considered propitiatory, in the proper sense. This idea, he indicated, ‘Protestants abhor and impugn as a doctrine most sacrilegious; and only grant the celebration to be propitiatory (improperly) by God’s complacency and favourable acceptance, wherewith he vouchsafeth to admit of the holy actions and affections of his faithful’.78 Once again, Morton found support for the idea that the Eucharist could be considered properly propitiatory neither in Christ’s words at the Last Supper, nor in the writings of the Church Fathers. Morton had no problem, however, with the idea that the Eucharist might be considered propitiatory in an improper or figurative sense. Nevertheless, he underlined that Propitiatory in God’s merciful acceptance we defend, but not in equivalency of valour and virtue in itself. First, as it is an Act commanded by Christ . . . Secondly, as it is a godly Act, whereby we doe affiance our soul to God . . . Thirdly, as it is an Act serving peculiarly to God’s worship, for religiousness is that (said Chrysostom) wherewith God testifieth himself to be well pleased. Fourthly, as it is an act of commemoration and representation of that only properly propitiatory sacrifice of Christ upon the cross . . . that

The Lord’s Supper  221 commemoration alone hath not any propitious efficacy in itself: But yet by the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ, resembled thereby, God vouchsafeth to be propitious unto us.79

It is only through the uniquely propitiatory virtue of Christ’s sacrifice, Morton indicated, that any Christian prayers for the remission of sins, or any other blessings from God, are heard.80 The Eucharist applies this propitiatory virtue to the faithful, but so does baptism.81 The Eucharist is not properly propitiatory, Morton argued, because it is an offering made by an imperfect human priest, and consequently lacks the perfection needed to propitiate God for sin. The Eucharist also lacks the element of destruction that is essential to a sacrifice, properly so called; in particular, it involves no shedding of blood, whereas Hebrews 9:22 makes clear that ‘without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins’.82 Above all, as even Roman Catholic writers admit, the Eucharist, as such, is only ever of finite value; whereas only the infinite merit of Christ can satisfy the infinite and divine Majesty.83 Morton brought his discussion to a close with a brief summary of his view. ‘That the Eucharist was ordained of Christ, for the application of remission of sins sacramentally to all communicants, is the profession of all Protestants. That the sacrifice of Christ’s cross is therein offered up objectively, by commemoration and supplication, for all conditions of men, hath an universal consent among them, without exception’.84 Nevertheless, Morton rejected the idea that the Eucharist might be considered a proper, propitiatory sacrifice for sin. Such teaching, he argued, actually commits sacrilege ‘by professing another properly satisfactory and propitiatory sacrifice, for remission of sins, besides that which Christ offered upon the cross’.85 For, as he put it, ‘Christ having once for all satisfied the justice of God, by the price of his blood, in the behalf of all penitent sinners, who in contrition of heart and a living faith apprehend the truth of that his redemption; it cannot but be both injurious to the justice of God, and to the merit of Christ, that the same satisfactory sacrifice, as it were a new payment, ought again, by way of Satisfaction, be personally performed and tendered unto God’.86 What is more, he underlined, the claim that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice did spiritual damage to communicants, By detracting from the absolute function of Christ his priesthood now eminent, and permanent before God in Heaven; and thereupon stupifying

222  Grace and Conformity the minds of communicants, and (as it were) pinioning their thoughts, by teaching them so to gaze, and meditate on the matter in the hands of the priest, that they cannot (as becometh spiritual eagles) soar aloft, and contemplate upon the body of Christ, where it’s infallible residence is, in that his heavenly Kingdom.87

In Morton, once again, pastoral concern was driving theology.

The Oxford Troubles and Prideaux’s Act Lecture (1631) The Nonconformist Minister, John Quick, summed up the mood of Oxford University, during the early months of 1631, in a manuscript biography of one of those most closely involved. For Dr Frewen, President of Magdalen College, having converted the communion table of his Chapel into an altar (the first altar that was erected since the Reformation in our University); this strange innovation together with the spreading of Arminianism, & the rigorous pressing of conformity unto ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies . . . awakened and alarmed those who feared God in city, country and University, lest that Popery should return again by these its harbingers and van-​couriers. Hence some learned & godly divines in Oxford threw out sharp invectives against them from the pulpit of St Mary’s.88

The divines who took part in this campaign were Thomas Ford, a respected Tutor at Magdalen Hall; William Hodges, a Fellow of Exeter College and also Prideaux’s future son-​in-​law;89 and Giles Thorne, one of the signatories to the appeal against Laud’s election as Chancellor. A complete manuscript survives of the sermon that Ford preached on 12 June 1631. He denounced the ornate apparatus of worship relished by Rome; and, by easy implication, that being foisted on the University by the President of Magdalen. The truth of the Gospel methinks is most amiable in simplicity. It is the bankrupted beauty of that strumpet of Rome that a long time hath needed the vizard of a false dress. Let it ever be the glory of our virgin mother . . . her attire needeth not to be over much or garish. What a pity it is such a

The Lord’s Supper  223 beauty as thine should be dishonoured with the unnecessary adorning of overmuch putting on. 90

Ford was equally forthright about the doctrine that lay behind such unbecoming elaboration. Thy doctrine is that the sacrament of our communion is an Eucharist, & that we have no sacrifice to offer besides the calves of our lips, our hearty prayers and thanksgivings. Where then have some of thy sons been a struggling to learn the uncouth language of a strange land. Thy constitutions and canons command a decent communion table in every church, which whether it stand in the body of the church or the chancel, thou never taughtest us to make any scruple of conscience about it.91

With these words, of course, Ford was effectively endorsing the position of Williams’s Grantham Judgment of four years before. Ford then exhorted his congregation ‘to contend earnestly for the faith which was once delivered to our fathers’.92 His sermon was a call to man the Reformed barricades. The Vice-​Chancellor, William Smith, immediately demanded a copy of the sermon. Ford demurred. Smith wrote to Laud, who instructed him to discipline this troublesome preacher. A summons was duly fastened to the doors of St Mary’s Church on 2 July.93 On 6 July Ford went to hand over his sermon. Smith promptly charged him with contumacy and breach of the peace, and sent him to the university gaol. Ford appealed. His appeal was accepted by the Proctors on 8 July, and sent to Congregation on the 9 July. Congregation remitted it to a committee, which decided, by a significant majority, that Ford was not guilty.94 Prideaux was a member of the committee, as was John Wilkinson, Ford’s own head of house.95 Smith was furious and made his own appeal to Convocation. A committee was appointed, but they failed to conclude the matter before the statutory time limit, so Smith’s appeal lapsed.96 By this time, Oxford was filling up with former students and guests for the annual Act, which probably did little to relieve the tension. But neither did the Regius Professor; because on 12 July, Prideaux chose to give his annual Act Lecture ‘on the Sacrifice of the Mass’.97 Although Fincham and Tyacke do not refer to it, there can be little doubt that Prideaux’s Act lecture was targeted at the altar controversy, particularly given that he took as his text Hebrews 13:10; the very passage whose exegesis divided the Laudians and the Reformed. Prideaux went straight to the

224  Grace and Conformity point: ‘An altar, indeed, in the proper sense, connotes a sacrifice, and requires a priest to offer that [sacrifice] upon it, in the requisite way’.98 So, if Christians have altars, they must also have priests and sacrifices; Prideaux set out to explore exactly what kind of priests and sacrifices Paul (whom he took to be the author of Hebrews) had in mind. Prideaux began with the context of the epistle. Jewish converts to Christianity, he suggested, had been attacked by non-​converts, who claimed that they had apostasized from God’s law, rejected the priesthood of Aaron, and committed sacrilege against the sacred institutions and sacrifices.99 The Apostle had intervened to prevent these neophytes from being drawn away from the faith; an example, Prideaux underlined, ‘to be scrupulously followed by all godly pastors (above all when the flock was in jeopardy)’.100 Hebrews made clear that Christ’s sacrifice had replaced its types in the Mosaic Law. In the Old Testament sacrifices, Christ had merely been promised, but on the altar of the cross, Christ had come. The temporary priesthood of Aaron had consequently been replaced by the eternal priesthood of Christ, a priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. As a result, the ceremonies of the Old Law were now useless: ‘For it is not with foods, or ceremonies, but by grace, that the heart is established’.101 For Prideaux, in other words, the suggestion that Christians had any proper altar or sacrifice, other than Christ’s cross, impeached the grace of God. Whereas Roman Catholics claimed that Hebrews 13:10 refers to the altar of the Mass, Prideaux explained, Protestants insist that the only Christian altars are ‘the altar of Christ, namely his cross, upon which he offered himself to the Father once and sufficiently for our sins: and the Altar Christ, who is held our altar, by reason of protection, expiation, satisfaction and sanctification’.102 As a result, ‘to squeeze out of this [text], and obtrude, a stone altar, or the sacrifice of the Mass, not merely perverts the intention of the Apostle, but turns the sacrament of the supper upside down, and overthrows the unique expiatory sacrifice of the Saviour’.103 Prideaux’s uncompromising words were a clear rejoinder to the kind of exegesis offered by Buckeridge in Andrewes’s funeral sermon two years before. And Prideaux made clear that he was not only addressing Roman Catholics. He was also mindful, he said, of those reckless individuals who were questioning whether the Reformers’ rejection of altars and sacrifices had been prudent.104 That, indeed, was why he raised the question, couched in the language of Article XXXI, of ‘Whether the Papist sacrifice of the mass, be a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit’.105

The Lord’s Supper  225 In the time of the Apostles, Prideaux observed, echoing Ford’s sentiments the month before, the Eucharist had been observed with a simplicity that was far removed from the theatrical pomp of Rome. Prideaux also echoed Morton’s claim that there was no suggestion in the New Testament that the Eucharist was any kind of propitiatory sacrifice. Until the papacy of Gregory I, Prideaux suggested, nothing vain or onerous had been introduced into the Eucharistic rite, and he referred approvingly to the ancient use of the Sursum Corda.106 And although unnecessary ceremonies were then added, true teaching on the Eucharist had still prevailed, Prideaux thought, until the reign of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.107 At this point, Prideaux turned to the definition of his terms. A sacrifice, he pointed out, could be either Eucharistic or propitiatory (hilasticum) in nature. Eucharistic sacrifices could be found in both Testaments; the Old Testament, referred to the sacrifices of a contrite heart (Psalm 51:17), of praise, and of a right conversation (Psalm 50:23); the New Testament referred to the sacrifices of love, of martyrdom, of intercession, of thanksgiving, of justice of alms, and many others.108 A propitiatory sacrifice, he argued, could be either typical, namely those foreshadowing Christ, or real. But the only real propitiatory sacrifice, he insisted, was the unique offering of Christ on the altar of the cross, a sacrifice made once for the sins the world, ‘in which the priest himself presented his own self as a sacrifice of infinite value, to be perpetually called to mind by Christians, but not repeated’.109 The New Testament, Prideaux insisted, recognized no other propitiatory sacrifice but this. In the controversy about altars and sacrifices, Prideaux pointed out, all agree that the idea of sacrifice is intrinsic to the worship of God, such that wherever worship is offered, some kind of sacrifice is offered. All agree, too, that under the Old Covenant, there were both internal and external sacrifices, i.e. sacrifices commonly so called, and sacrifices properly so called; and that whereas the external and properly so called sacrifices of the Jews have vanished, the internal and commonly so called sacrifices remain. All agree, furthermore, he thought, that Christ offered himself once upon the cross, as the plenary expiation for our sins, and the propitiation of the Father.110 Prideaux did not think that there was any real dispute about the word ‘Mass,’ so long as it was understood to refer to the liturgical dismissal that was customary in religious assemblies. Nor did he think that Protestants rejected the idea that the Eucharist might be called a sacrifice in a symbolic sense; namely by reason of its commemoration, representation and application of, and thanksgiving for,

226  Grace and Conformity the perfect sacrifice of Christ. Indeed, he pointed, like Morton, to the Book of Common Prayer as compelling evidence to the contrary.111 So the controversy was not, Prideaux insisted, about whether the Eucharistic rite taken as a whole was a sacrifice; or, indeed, about whether in the Lord’s Supper, if it is rightly celebrated, a Eucharist is offered to God. No Protestant would deny such things. The controversy was rather about whether the external, propitiatory and corporal sacrifice of the Mass, consisting not in the various blessings, prayers or consecrations of the liturgy, but in the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and their offering up for the living and the dead, was a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit. This Protestants affirm, and Papists strenuously deny.112 As was customary, Prideaux interrupted his lecture with a solemn blessing. He used the opportunity to note that not everything contained in Roman Eucharistic liturgy was misconceived. Many godly sentiments were expressed in the Roman Missal and Gradual, and the Reformers had incorporated whatever was valuable into the Prayer Book.113 That said, since the Missal now thrust in a sacrifice instead of the sacrament, and the obscene theatre of the Antichrist instead of the simple supper of the Lord, ‘we should have nothing to do with such traffic; but should escape from these Babylonian ruins’.114 ‘Let there not be found in your thuribles,’ Prideaux urged his audience, ‘any alien fire of schism (which the Lord did not prescribe) that might kindle an exotic fire in the doctrine or discipline of Mother Church’.115 Returning to his lecture, Prideaux drew his first argument against the altars and sacrifices of the Roman Mass from the text itself. In Hebrews 13:10, he insisted, the altar did not denote anything made of stone, or indeed any other material; it referred to Christ, through whom Christians constantly offer the sacrifice of praise, that is to say, as Hebrews puts it a couple of verses later, ‘the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name’. To substitute a mechanical altar for Christ, and thence to derive a priesthood and a sacrifice, was indeed, Prideaux insisted, a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit. The sacrifice of the Mass, Prideaux suggested, subverted the institution of Christ and the practice of the Apostles, and transformed it into an idol. At the Last Supper, Christ did not stand at an altar, but recline at a table. He did not sacrifice himself, but consecrated bread and wine; and he did so, not that they might be offered to the Father, let alone that they should be adored or carried about, but so that his disciples might eat and drink them.116 ‘Nor did he then institute a propitiatory, satisfactory, meritorious or impetratory

The Lord’s Supper  227 sacrifice for the living and the dead; but a commemorative, representative, applicative and obsignatory sacrament, of that most consummate sacrifice to be enacted the next day’.117 The Apostles, in turn, added nothing to the Lord’s Supper that they had not received from the Lord. Paul, in particular, made clear in I Corinthians 11:25–​26 that the Eucharist was not a sacrifice, but a commemoration and proclamation of the Lord’s death until he comes.118 The Scriptures, Prideaux insisted, nowhere gave support, whether expressly or by necessary conclusion, to the idea that the Eucharist was a sacrifice. The sacrifice of the Mass was also contradicted, Prideaux argued, by the unique priesthood of Christ. For if Christ is ‘a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek,’ as Hebrews 7:17 asserts, then he has neither successors nor deputies in this priesthood, and it is blasphemous to claim that he does.119 If you try to avoid this problem, as the Jesuits do, by suggesting that the sacrifice of the cross and the mass are really one and the same sacrifice, then you are effectively confusing the past, the present and the future, which is absurd. You are also depriving the Eucharist of its commemorative and representative function; for, the Eucharist cannot simultaneously be the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and the representation or commemoration of that sacrifice.120 Nor could the Eucharist be said to apply Christ’s sacrifice to the believer, if it were a sacrifice, because such application assumes that the sacrifice has already been offered.121 The very nature of a sacrament also ruled out the idea that the Eucharist is a sacrifice. ‘For a sacrament is given by God, and accepted by us. A sacrifice, however, is accepted by God, and given by us’.122 To put it another way, the sacrifice of the Mass reversed the flow of sacramental efficacy. For, as Prideaux underlined, in a sacrifice, the terminus a quo is man and the terminus ad quem is God: but in a sacrament, the terminus a quo is God, but the terminus ad quem is man. In any case, Prideaux indicated, echoing Morton’s argument to the same effect, Hebrews 9:22 makes clear that expiatory sacrifices require the shedding of blood, which is absent from the Eucharist. So the Roman suggestion that the Mass is an unbloody sacrifice is actually a contradiction in terms. An unbloody sacrifice is a sacrifice that is not a sacrifice.123 When the Church Fathers referred to the Eucharist as a sacrifice, Prideaux pointed out, or used the language of priesthood and altars; they did not mean that the Eucharist was a sacrifice properly so called; they meant either that it was a symbolic sacrifice, by reason of its commemoration, representation and application of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross; or they meant that it was a Eucharistic sacrifice of thanksgiving for that immeasurable benefit.124 In

228  Grace and Conformity fact, he remarked, even Aquinas had argued that the Eucharist was a sacrifice because it represented the true sacrifice of Christ on the cross.125 Prideaux accordingly concluded that ‘Therefore if we do have some altar, under the Gospel, it is not properly, but metaphorically so called’.126 He also indicated, in relation to the many Patristic quotations that Bellarmine and others piled up in favour of the sacrifice of the Mass, that the Fathers had also called the waters of baptism a sacrifice, as, he pointed out, the Bishop of Lichfield had acutely demonstrated. The marginal reference at this point was to Morton’s Institution.127 Prideaux brought his Lecture to a close with a pointed address to God: ‘Convert (we pray) or confound the seducers, and open the eyes of the seduced, that they might see through your Son, how they are misrepresenting and trafficking with the intention of your Son, by horrible blasphemies’.128 Accepted Frewen must have shifted awkwardly in his seat. The Regius Professor’s decision to attack the sacrifice of the Mass on the most high profile occasion of the University Calendar, just a few days after sitting on a committee that had overturned the Vice-​Chancellor’s decision to discipline a member of the University for preaching along similar lines, was an undeniably partisan move. The Dean of Christ Church, Brian Duppa, was outraged. He wrote to Laud, on 1 August, complaining that ‘these late stirs are not of an ordinary nature; but strike at the very root of government, which now lies bleeding. The Vice-​Chancellor’s power is questioned: the Proctors that should assist him, receive the appeals of delinquents from him: the delegates, such as are rather parties than judges’.129 On 8 August, the Vice-​Chancellor duly appealed to Charles I, asking the King to intervene, and restore his authority over the University.130 Prideaux topped the list of those delegates whom Smith accused of perverting the cause of justice.131 The King investigated the matter in person, at Woodstock, on 23 August 1631. According to the account Quick later received, the King particularly pressed Ford over whether it had been Prideaux who had initially dissuaded him from handing over his sermon to the Vice-​Chancellor. In the event, Ford, Thorne and Hodges were all banished from the University (though Thorne and Hodges were later allowed to return); the Proctors were sacked; while Prideaux and Wilkinson were both given a formal reprimand ‘for their misgovernment and countenancing the factious parties’. As Prideaux received his reprimand, however, the King indicated that it was he who had deserved to lose his place more than any of the rest, and that he had only been spared, on account of his long service and Laud’s intercession on his behalf.132 This

The Lord’s Supper  229 debacle left Reformed divinity in a rather weaker state in Oxford than it was in Cambridge. Although the King’s wrath fell on Prideaux, Laud believed that the Regius had merely been a cat’s paw in this affair. In the history of his Chancellorship at Oxford, Laud indicated that ‘the head of all these tumultuous stirs was by violent presumptions conceived to be one whom it least became for his coat’s sake: and I shall spare his name, rather for his coat than himself ’. Fincham and Tyacke have raised the persuasive suggestion that Laud was here pointing the finger at Williams rather than at Prideaux, as has usually been assumed.133 This intriguing thesis perhaps receives support from a remark made by Richard Corbett, Bishop of Oxford, when he deputized for Williams on 15 September 1631, at the consecration of the elaborate new chapel in Lincoln College, which Williams had just paid for. As Fincham and Tyacke have pointed out, it is surprising that Williams was not present at this event; less so, if he had supported a preaching campaign that had recently angered the King. During the consecration ceremony, Corbett may even have been pointing a finger at Williams. For, as he blessed the pulpit, Corbett criticized the way pulpits had recently been used in Oxford, lamenting that ‘the right spirit comes not up, or very seldom here of late’. One of the hallmarks of unsanctified preaching, which he specifically mentioned, was that ‘The altar shall be no more called an altar, but a dresser’.134 The dismissive reference to altars as dressers had been given recent currency by William Prynne, in a pamphlet attacking Giles Widdows, the avant-​garde Conformist Rector of St Martin’s, Carfax, in Oxford.135 But anyone familiar with Williams’s Grantham Letter would have recognized the phrase from there. Heylyn, for one, traced Prynne’s use straight back to Williams.136

John Williams’s The Holy Table, Name and Thing (1637) The Oxford altar dispute did nothing to impede their spread across the country. Indeed, in 1633, the King appeared to give his public support to the altar-​wise position of the communion table, in the case of the London parish of St Gregory by Paul’s; a ruling that, as Fincham and Tyacke have pointed out,137 ‘contradicted, without fully repudiating, Williams’s Grantham judgment’. The case could certainly be called upon to justify the innovation.138 In 1635, Thomas Morton produced a revised edition of his Institution, in which he appeared to accept this trend. Although he retained his insistence

230  Grace and Conformity that the table had anciently stood in the middle of the church; he added, ‘All this notwithstanding, you are not to think that we do hereby oppugn the appellation of priest and altar, or yet the new situation thereof in our church, for use as convenient, and for order more decent’. Prynne thought that Morton’s text must have been tampered with before publication. He claimed that Morton had told his friend Featley, shortly before the publication of the new edition, that he disliked calling communion tables altars, or placing them altarwise.139 Elsewhere in the book, Morton certainly reinforced his opposition to the idea that the Eucharist was a sacrifice, or the communion table an altar. He underlined, for example, that he certainly was oppugning ‘the Romish opinion and doctrine’ about the words priest and altar, whereby you do hold them, in the very propriety of words, and not as the Fathers did, only by way of allusion. For your better apprehension of this truth, if you will be pleased to observe that Christ, in the time of the first institution and celebration of the sacrament, propounded it in the place where he, with his disciples, gave it unto them to be eaten and drunken; then tell us where was it ever known, that any altar was ordained for eating and drinking?140

Morton also added the comment that calling the place where the sacrament was celebrated a table, rather than an altar, was no derogation from its dignity, since Paul had used the same term. Morton also sharpened the tone of his attack on the Roman Catholic exegesis of Hebrews 13:10; adding a pointed rhetorical question: ‘Who is of so shallow a brain, as not to discern the unconscionableness of your disputers; who confessing that the Apostles, in their times, did abstain from the words sacrifice, priest, and altar, do notwithstanding allege the word altar, in the text to the Hebrews, for proof of a proper altar of the Mass’.141 So, if Morton’s text was massaged, whether by himself or another, to take account of the prevailing liturgical wind; his opposition to the theology that inspired such developments was actually amplified, not subdued.142 Given the centrality of Hebrews 13:10 to the debate, it is unsurprising that, when Heylyn published his repudiation of Williams’s Grantham Judgment, A Coal from the Altar (1636), he brandished that very text on the frontispiece.143 Heylyn also used the verse, within the pamphlet, to establish the legitimate and ancient use of the word altar within the Christian Church. ‘And

The Lord’s Supper  231 above all indeed,’ he wrote, ‘St. Paul in his Habemus altare, Hebrews 13. 10. In which place, whether he mean the Lord’s Table, or the Lord’s Supper, or rather the sacrifice itself, which the Lord once offered; certain it is that he conceived the name of altar, neither to be impertinent, nor improper in the Christian Church’.144 Heylyn rejected Williams’s claim that Article XXXI precluded the idea that the Eucharist was a sacrifice, or the communion table an altar. ‘The Article hath nothing in it,’ Heylyn insisted, ‘either of Papists, altars, or that other oblation: which is here thrust into the text, only to make poor men believe, that by the doctrine of the Church in her public Articles, altars and Papists are mere relatives; that so whoever talks of altars, or placing of the table altar-​wise, may be suspected presently to be a Papist’.145 On the contrary, the Church accepted a number of ways in which the Eucharist might be thought of as a sacrifice; and there was no reason to assume, as Williams had, that the Vicar of Grantham intended any sacrifice other than those which the Church allowed.146 Even Williams, Heylyn noted, accepted that the Church had an altar, in terms of participation and communion, though not in terms of oblation. This, he thought, was ‘enough to justify both the situation of the table altarwise, and the name of altar, and that too in the very instant of receiving the communion’.147 That said, Heylyn disputed Williams’s claim that the Church recognized no altar in terms of oblation. As he put it, ‘the communion table, was called an altar, both in regard of the oblations there made to God, for the use of his priests, and of his poor; as also, of the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, which was there offered to him by the congregation. And therefore, as before we found an altar, in regard of participation, and communion; so here we have an altar in respect of oblation also’.148 Needless to say, Heylyn questioned Williams’s reading of the Church’s canons and injunctions.149 He took his stand on the very precedents that Williams had rejected as irrelevant to the situation in parish churches, on the basis that they were the places where the law was most punctiliously observed. ‘If we look into the former practise, either of the chapels of the King, the best interpreter of the law, which himself enacted, wherein the communion table hath so stood as now it doth, since the beginning of Queen Elizabeth, what time that rubric in the Common Prayer book was confirmed, and ratified: or of collegiate and cathedral churches, the best observers of the form and order of God’s public Service; the Vicar had good warrant for what he did’.150 For Heylyn, in other words, true Conformity actually required

232  Grace and Conformity altars; because, like Titley, he believed that Conformity should be defined by reference to the exemplary usage maintained in certain major churches, and above all in the Chapel Royal, rather than to the customary usage of the parishes. With a Star Chamber case hanging over him, it might have been politic for Williams not to respond to such provocation. But, as even his sympathetic biographer later observed, Williams ‘was obnoxious to . . . ἀκροχολία, a sudden eruption of choler sometimes upon a little stirring’.151 In 1637, he duly published a furious reply to Heylyn, under his own licence: The Holy Table, Name and Thing.152 Williams immediately dismissed Heylyn’s reference to practice in the Chapel Royal, and referred him to canon law instead. Once again, the nature of true Conformity was the primary issue here. How the King shall adorn and set out his Chapel Royal, is a matter imminent and left to his own princely wisdom and understanding. It is a sin against many precepts to whisper or doubt, but that he doth it wisely and religiously . . . It is not therefore his Majesty’s Chapel, but his laws, rubrics, canons and proclamations, that we are to follow in these outward ceremonies.153

In any case, Williams remarked, who ever heard of a chapel providing the standard for a whole province? What would be the point of Bishops, Convocations or Parliaments, if that were so? For Williams, in other words, the idea that certain places of worship might be considered exemplary undermined the legitimate structures of ecclesiastical authority.154 Williams rejected Heylyn’s central argument that the spiritual sacrifices, which the Church of England accepted, were of themselves sufficient warrant for referring to the communion table as an altar. For, as he underlined, such spiritual sacrifices were connected with many other places in the Church. ‘I appeal to all indifferent men,’ he wrote, ‘that pretend to any knowledge in divinity; if the reading-​pew, the pulpit, and any other place in the Church, be not as properly an altar for prayer, praise, thanksgiving, memory of the Passion, dedicating of ourselves to God’s very service, and the church’s box or basin, for that oblation for the poor which was used in the primitive times, as is our holy table howsoever situated or disposed’.155 If such spiritual actions were sufficient to make an altar, Williams remarked, then a church building would have multiple altars; ‘whereas no place in all the church doth offer unto us

The Lord’s Supper  233 the body and blood of Christ, in the outward forms of bread and wine, beside the holy table only’.156 For, as he put it, ‘Insomuch as the distribution of the Lord’s Supper in both kinds, is a real and sensible action, it is a real and sensible table: but because the lauds and thanksgivings are by all divines acknowledged to be a metaphorical and improper sacrifice, it is but a metaphorical and improper altar. And to call it an altar in that sense, you know the Letter doth everywhere allow’.157 Williams was happy to concede that ‘all these spiritual odours, improperly called sacrifices, are not only stirred up and made more fragrant with the meditation, but many times sown of seeds, and engendered at first by the secret operation of this Blessed Sacrament’.158 He was also prepared to grant that the place where the sacrament was celebrated was worthy of particular care and adornment, in light of the spiritual benefits that the sacrament conveyed: ‘In contemplation of all these rare and special graces of the Spirit, wrought in our souls by means of the Eucharist, you shall not reasonably expect any outward expression of reverence and submission to the founder of the feast, any trimming and adorning of the room and utensils prepared for this great solemnity, which I will not approve of ’.159 Williams had certainly observed this principle in his palace chapel at Buckden and in his construction of Lincoln College Chapel.160 ‘But this I can by no means approve,’ he underlined, ‘which Protestants and Papists do jointly deny, that ever material altar was erected in the Church for the use of spiritual and improper sacrifices’.161 He then quoted Thomas Cranmer, John Hooper and Thomas Morton’s Institution to that effect.162 Unsurprisingly, Williams rejected Heylyn’s suggestion that Article XXXI was not opposed to altars in churches. As he underlined, the Articles and Homilies make perfectly clear that ‘There was indeed in the sacrament a memory of a sacrifice, but sacrifice there was none’. He then drew from the Homilies a practical and pastoral conclusion: ‘We must take heed of quillets and distinctions, that may bring us back again to the old error reformed in the Church’.163 Since one of the chief bulwarks of the Romish error was the insistence that the Eucharist be celebrated, not on profane tables, but on sacrificial altars, any move in that direction was incompatible with the Homilies’ pastoral concerns.164 The Church, Williams noted, never actually referred, in her authoritative formularies, to a commemorative sacrifice, but only to the remembrance of a sacrifice; ‘that is (as she clearly interprets herself in the page before) of the memory of Christ’s death, which she there affirms to be sufficiently celebrated

234  Grace and Conformity upon a table’.165 Although he was aware of orthodox divines who used the phrase, he insisted that it was ‘not with an intent to disturb the doctrine of God’s Church,’166 for they simultaneously insisted that a commemorative sacrifice was not a true sacrifice, but merely ‘a memory and representation of a true sacrifice’.167 Furthermore, Williams contended, ‘there is no one word in Christ’s institution that can probably infer a proper sacrifice: as our reverend bishop proves at large’. The reverend bishop he cited at this point was Morton, in his Institution.168 Williams poured scorn on Heylyn’s use of Hebrews 13:10. ‘This one place of the Epistle to the Hebrews, is the Helena of all this sort of people. This they hug and clip and kiss: “And above all indeed, St. Paul in his Habemus altare.” Lord, how the man melts upon it!’169 Protestant divines had repeatedly demonstrated that it was a grotesque abuse of Scripture to apply the text to a material altar, he insisted; and among a number of authorities for this point, he cited the dismissive words added to the 1635 edition of Morton’s Institution.170 In fact, Williams went on, ‘this is the first son of the reformed Church of England, that hath presum’d openly to expound this place, of a material altar’.171 In order to make that claim stick, he offered a charitable gloss on Andrewes’s Two Answers: ‘And so a great scholar indeed of this Church hath expounded it. “For the altar in the Old Testament is by Malachy called Mensa Domini. And of the table in the New Testament, by the Apostle it is said, Habemus altare.” The altar in the Old, the table in the New Testament (if we will speak with that great personage, properly and theologically)’. With this caveat, Williams had deftly aligned Lancelot Andrewes with Peter Martyr.172 Williams’s own understanding of the disputed locus was that ‘the cross of Christ is more appositely aim’d at in that text, then the holy table’.173 He freely accepted that Hebrews 13:10 provided Apostolic precedent for using the word altar in a Christian context; but he then underlined that ‘there is no man ever made doubt thereof; so as it be taken, as St. Paul takes it, metaphorically, and by way of allusion, but not materially, for this church-​utensil; which is the thing that lies before us upon the carpet at this time’.174 Williams also observed that ‘no writer before the beginning of the Reformation, did literally, and in the first place, but allegorically only, and in the second place of their exposition, by way of use (as it were) and accommodation, bend this text to the material altar’.175 He pointed out that even the most learned Roman Catholic writers generally preferred another interpretation.

The Lord’s Supper  235 Turning, finally, to the question of the appropriate location of the communion table, Williams reiterated his conviction that ‘Communion-​tables have heretofore stood in the midst of chancels and churches,’ and that this followed the practice of the Early Church.176 For, as he put it, ‘There is nothing more clear in Antiquity, then, that not only this altar in Constantinople, but all the altars and communion-​tables in all the Eastern Churches were so situated and disposed, as they might be compassed round about by the priests and deacons’.177 In other words, fixing the table against the East end was not merely a breach of English custom and canon, it represented a departure from the hallowed practice of Christian Antiquity. Williams contested Heylyn’s reading of the St Gregory case; insisting that it left the decision about where the table was most fitly and conveniently located to the Ordinary, just as the Grantham Letter had done. As Williams underlined, the power of the Ordinary over ecclesiastical affairs was second only to that of the King. As a result, If he command according to the laws and canons confirmed, (for otherwise he is in his eccentrics, and moves not as he should do) why then, in such a case as we had even now, that is, a case of diversity, doubt and ambiguity, he is punctually to be obeyed by those of his jurisdiction, be they of the clergy, or of the laity . . . The exceptions from this rule are very few; in cases only, when the command of the Ordinary doth expressly oppose an article of belief, one of the Ten Commandments, or the general state and subsistence of God’s Catholic Church. In all other cases whatsoever that are dubious, the inferior is bound to believe his superior, saith the most wise and learned of all the Jesuits.178

For Williams, in other words, a properly defined canonical obedience was key to resolving the arguments that certain Laudian innovators had provoked. His Puritan contemporaries were not so sure.179

Conclusions The reign of Charles I saw a concerted effort by Anti-​Calvinist theologians to rehabilitate the terms ‘sacrifice’ and ‘altar’ in relation to the Eucharist. This theological revision was given material expression by the installation of altars. This took place in a number of England’s cathedrals, initially, but it was

236  Grace and Conformity not long before it spread to parish churches as well. Reformed Conformists reacted sharply to this innovation, condemning both the theology and the church furniture involved.180 Williams’s widely circulated Grantham Letter summarized the Reformed Conformist platform. The Articles and the Homilies condemned the idea that the Eucharist was a proper sacrifice. As a result, and as the Church of England’s canons had repeatedly made clear, altars had no place in English churches. The claim that their installation was an expression of Conformity was consequently bogus. The theological case against conceiving the Eucharist as a proper sacrifice, or the holy table a proper altar, was set out at length by Thomas Morton. His Institution of 1631 rejected the argument that there was any Scriptural of Patristic support for such ideas. It also made clear that Reformed orthodoxy had plenty of room for sacrificial language, so long as that sacrifice was understood in a representative and commemorative sense. The only true Christian sacrifice was, Morton insisted, the sacrifice of Christ and the only proper altar was the cross. To say anything else was to derogate from God’s work of redemption. Morton’s Institution was immediately deployed by Prideaux, when a controversy about altars exploded within Oxford. Charles I’s personal intervention ensured that this controversy ended badly for the Reformed. Williams may have been behind this dispute, but it was Prideaux who bore the brunt of royal displeasure and, thereafter, Oxford’s Reformed community was rather less voluble than its equivalent in Cambridge. Williams was not to be silenced, however. When his Grantham Letter was attacked by Heylyn, Williams immediately published The Holy Table, Name and Thing. Drawing repeatedly on Morton’s work, he once again insisted that true Conformity involved a rejection of material altars and the Eucharistic theology that they represented. This did not preclude sacrificial language, so long as it was understood symbolically, nor did it preclude the embellishment of liturgical space and furniture. Williams was effectively promoting, here, a vision of Conformity to rival that offered by the Laudians; a vision of Conformity rooted in Reformed Eucharistic theology, and whose reading of the Church’s confessional documents, liturgy and canons was decisively shaped by the rejection of any proper sacrifice or altar but Christ. Williams’s vision of Conformity also lent significant weight to the legitimate power of the Ordinary. Hierarchical oversight –​ἐπισκοπή –​was, in other words, built into his system.181

7 Episcopacy Carleton’s Consensus The Belgic Confession was read to the delegates attending the Synod of Dort on 29 April 1619.1 It included several statements about church order that were inimical to the constitution of the English Church. Article 30 gave lay elders a place in the government of the Church: the Church of England had no such officers. Article 31 asserted that all ordained ministers ‘have the same power and authority’: the Church of England gave exclusive authority over ordination and church discipline to her bishops. Article 32 rejected ‘all human innovations and all laws imposed on us, in our worship of God, which bind and force our consciences in any way’: the Church of England insisted on a number of liturgical ceremonies that many godly Protestants found objectionable and had deprived ministers who would not use them. Alert to these sensitivities, the President of the Synod, Johann Bogerman, when he asked the national delegations to deliver their judgements on the Confession the following day, specifically excepted from that verdict the problematic articles on Church order.2 When the British delegates returned to their lodgings and studied the Confession in more detail, they drew the conclusion that, although they were not actually being asked for their opinion on the disputed articles, ‘yet it was convenient for us (who were assured in our consciences that their presbyteral parity and laical presbytery was repugnant to the discipline established by the Apostles, and retained in our church) to declare in a temperate manner our judgements as well concerning that matter’.3 Accordingly, at the start of the next day’s session, the leader of the British delegation, George Carleton, made clear his delegation’s objections to the Belgic Confession. As the British delegates later recalled, in the Joint Attestation, Carleton declared our utter dissent in that point: and further showed that by our Saviour a parity of ministers was never instituted, that Christ ordained twelve apostles and seventy disciples; that the authority of the twelve was Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0008

238  Grace and Conformity above the other; that the Church preserved this order left by our Saviour. And therefore when the extraordinary authority of the Apostles ceased; yet their ordinary authority continued in the bishops, who were by the apostles left in the government of the Church to ordain ministers, and to see that they who were so ordained, should preach no other doctrine: that, in an inferior degree, the ministers that were governed by bishops, succeeded the 70 disciples: that this order hath been maintained in the Church from the time of the Apostles. And herein he appealed to the judgement of any learned man now living, if any could speak to the contrary.4

After Carleton had finished, ‘a similar exception was likewise added by the other Britons to the exception concerning discipline, if anything be generally determined in the same place, against legitimate external ceremonies’.5 As Anthony Milton has underlined, the presence of the British delegates at Dort, and their subscription to the Synod’s Canons, are ‘a potent . . . memorial to a moment in the history of the Church of England when its ties with the Reformed churches of the continent were given formal and tangible recognition’.6 It can be argued, however, and with equal validity, that the British delegates’ pointed rejection of the Belgic Confession’s statements on Church order also represented a self-​conscious assertion of the distinct identity of the British Churches within the Reformed family. For, notwithstanding their avowal of a theology of grace which they shared with the other Reformed churches of Europe, the British Churches took the opportunity of this international synod to insist publicly, indeed somewhat obstreperously, on the validity and, in certain respects, superiority of their own patterns of church polity. George Carleton’s personal commitment to episcopacy has been widely acknowledged.7 However, the work in which he offered perhaps his most detailed discussion of the subject, the Consensus Ecclesiae Catholicae contra Tridentinos, has not been the focus of significant study. Yet it was the Consensus that elicited a letter of caution from Carleton’s cousin, Sir Dudley Carleton, then serving as James I’s Ambassador in Venice, which indicated that a number of his diplomatic colleagues there were concerned lest the book’s uncompromising defence of episcopal prerogatives undermine the common Protestant front against Rome. As Ambassador Carleton wrote, ‘You conclude peremptorily an Ecclesiae Antiquae Catholicae Consensus [consensus of the ancient Catholic Church] for ordination by bishops only, which is held by these a matter rather of convenience than necessity, & to be

Episcopacy  239 used or not used according to the condition of the place where our religion is professed’.8 The Consensus undoubtedly made some powerful claims for episcopacy; claims quite as exalted as those which Milton has observed among the more advanced Laudians.9 In Milton’s words, ‘Laudian writers derived from Cyprian an aristocratic vision of the universal church as ‘this one and undivided Bishopric’—​an association of independent and equal iure divino bishops, with episcopal government both forming a unity within the Church, and also providing the basis of the unity of the church as a whole’. The Reformed Conformist Carleton would appear to have anticipated this development. As Carleton put it, in the Consensus, Individual bishops hold their portion within the Catholic [Church], nor should anyone exceed their proper measure. In this way, although these all work within their own part, yet, because the parts cohere among themselves through the bond of peace and unity, as parts of one body, whatever they do in their own part . . . they are understood to do not merely for themselves, but also for the whole Church. In this manner, many bishops constitute one episcopate. As Cyprian beautifully [remarked] “Let no one deceive the brotherhood by lying; let no one corrupt the faith by a perfidious prevarication of the truth. The episcopate is one, the parts of which are held together by the individual bishops” ’.10

For Carleton, in other words, the episcopate was an instrument of ecclesial union, binding the different parts of the Catholic Church together through the peaceful cooperation of individual bishops. Carleton’s exalted view of the episcopal office did not prevent him from insisting that the Apostolic succession, celebrated by the Church Fathers, was defined more by doctrinal continuity, than by a merely local succession. ‘The ancients wished to be understood, by “succession” and “teaching seat,” ’ Carlton underlined, ‘not the privilege of a certain place, but the integrity of Apostolic teaching, handed on in the Church, [and] preserved by the bishops’.11 As a result, bishops who stood within a local line of succession, but did not stand within the doctrinal line of succession, were untrustworthy teachers, regardless of the position they occupied.12 A church is only shown to be Apostolic ‘from the consanguinity of doctrine with the Apostolic

240  Grace and Conformity [Church]’.13 Doctrinal consonance with the Apostles, not personal succession, is therefore ‘the unique testimony of truth’.14 Bellarmine had famously argued that the Church could not exist without bishops and that since, among Protestants, there was no episcopal succession; there were no bishops and, consequently, no Church. Carleton rejected his argument out of hand: ‘There is in our churches consanguinity of doctrine and harmony with Apostolic doctrine, this is sufficient for the proof of a true church’.15 Carleton’s insistence on the priority of doctrinal over local succession set him apart from the view of episcopacy that was increasingly advanced among the Laudians, and opened the way for him to acknowledge the apostolicity of those Reformed churches that were not led by bishops.16 His vision of the episcopate may have been Cyprianic, but his view of apostolicity ensured that his ecclesiology had room for the other Protestant churches. Nevertheless, Carleton made the point that Bellarmine’s argument did not actually apply to the British churches, in any case, nor to ‘our bishops, who are canonically ordained. Indeed, to speak a little of the succession of our bishops; we will easily prove, that our bishops were established far more regularly than the Romans’.17 Carleton traced the succession of the English bishops of his own day back to Augustine of Canterbury, underlining that, according to Bede, Augustine of Canterbury had been ordained a bishop not by Pope Gregory, but by Virgilius, Archbishop of Arles. Canterbury’s Apostolic succession was therefore not from Rome, but from the mother church of Gaul, where Paul’s companion Trophimus had supposedly preached.18 Furthermore, Carleton remarked, in that whole line of succession from his contemporary, George Abbot, all the way back to Trophimus, or whichever Apostolic figure had established the Church in Arles, there were no irregularities such as the female Pope John VIII (the legendary Pope Joan), or the child pope, Benedict IX. The Roman emphasis on episcopal succession was therefore a weapon that turned back in their hands.19 So Carleton may have believed that doctrinal succession was paramount, but he also celebrated the unimpaired local succession enjoyed by the Church of England, and found it a handy polemical resource against Rome. If Roman apologists turned their attack on those Protestant churches which, unlike the British, did not have bishops, Carleton referred them to several of their own authors, who maintained that bishops and priests were fundamentally members of the same order. John Capreolus (c. 1380–​1444), for example, had maintained this, and concluded from it that every priest was potentially able to confer orders. In Capreolus’s view, consecration as a

Episcopacy  241 bishop did not add any new power to the priest; it merely removed an impediment to the use of his existing power.20 In other words, Carleton pointed out, there was warrant within the Catholic tradition for the idea that nothing inherent in their order prevented priests from ordaining; they simply needed a suitable opportunity to do so. So although Carleton insisted that ‘the Church is not, nor ever was, without bishops,’ he also added a significant caveat: ‘or those who supply the place of bishops’.21 The fact that a bishop was not ordained strictly according to canon did not mean that the Church would perish.22 In fact, in cases of necessity, even presbyters might ordain: ‘for it is better to ordain without bishops, than that the Church be wholly destitute of presbyters’.23 This exception applied, he indicated, to the Reformed churches that currently lacked bishops. Those churches had been obliged to withdraw from the Antichrist, in order to retain their communion with the Catholic Church. As a result, the Papist bishops who had overseen them did not wish to ordain their ministers.24 So ‘because, in some places, it could not otherwise be done, their presbyters were constrained. For it seemed less bad, not to have bishops, than [not to have] the truth, and to lose the communion of the Catholic Church’.25 In other words, just as the presence of bishops was not a guarantee of Catholicism, so the absence of bishops was not an insuperable impediment to it. Carleton’s insistence that non-​episcopal ordinations, although irregular, were nonetheless effective, squared, he suggested, with the Early Church’s attitude to the Donatists. For although Donatist ministers, since they were in schism, could not legitimately baptize, Augustine had insisted that their baptisms were nonetheless effective, and should not be repeated.26 Gregory the Great had later adopted a similar attitude towards schismatic ordinations.27 Carleton’s contention that presbyteral and, consequently, irregular ordinations were nonetheless effective, reflected the commitment to the gratuity and sovereignty of God’s grace that he later expressed in his Examination. For Carleton, God’s saving purpose did not depend on human choices, so it could hardly be impeded by canonical irregularity. Not that Carleton had any doubts that ordination was an immutable prerogative of the episcopal office. As he underlined, ‘after the authority of the sacred Scriptures, the consensus of the Catholic Church always so prevails with me, that whatsoever things I see confirmed by that consensus, seem to me sacrosanct and immutable’.28 And the consensus of the Catholic Church was clear: bishops ordain and presbyters receive their ordination from bishops. The Apostles commissioned bishops in the Church and established them as

242  Grace and Conformity their successors in such a way that, although the extraordinary Apostolic authority ended with them, the ordinary Apostolic authority did not, but was instead handed on to the bishops and remains with them. It is on this basis that bishops have always conducted ordinations. This was the point he made at Dort. As a result, although, in terms of preaching and the administration of the sacraments, presbyters can do whatever bishops can do; they may not ordinarily ordain.29 As Carleton put it, ‘If we review all the ages of the Church from Apostolic times, until the memory of our fathers, no other method of ordaining will be found, except by bishops. Which sacred ceremony, therefore, the Church received from the Apostles, and constantly preserved for so many centuries: who can reject, who does not reject the authority of the Catholic Church?’30 Carleton hoped that his remarks in this regard would not be received as an insult by other churches but rather as a friendly admonition, ‘for what becomes the churches of Christ more,’ he asked, ‘than charity and unity? Since the church is one, we must all strive zealously for unity, and charity is the bond of unity’.31 Carleton found ample warrant for episcopacy within Scripture. The first function of a bishop was to ordain. That could be seen, he suggested, in Titus 1:5, where Paul wrote to (Bishop) Titus, ‘This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you’. The second function of a bishop is to root out heresy. That could be seen in I Timothy 1:3, where Paul wrote to (Bishop) Timothy, ‘remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine’32 For Carleton, the conclusion was clear: Since therefore from the sacred scriptures, and the consensus of the Church, the office of bishops be proven, all reformed churches ought to accede to this unity of the Church, and there is hope that all will accede, when the zeal for contention is laid aside, and obstinate stubbornness; and truth and the unity of the Church is sought. There is hope, I say, that what was established out of necessity for the time, by mature counsel and deliberation, and out of charity, will be brought back to the pristine practice of the Catholic Church.33

In other words, whilst non-​episcopal polities could be tolerated on a temporary basis, Carleton believed that Christian unity ultimately required the restoration of episcopacy across the Reformed world. His Consensus

Episcopacy  243 consequently offered a challenge to the Reformed churches of Europe to emulate their British sisters and return to the practice of Catholic antiquity. Little wonder that it caused such a stir within the diplomatic community of Venice.

Ward and Episcopacy: The Commencement Determination of 1625 When Richard Montagu questioned the behaviour of the British delegates at Dort, they vindicated their loyalty to the polity of the English Church in the Joint Attestation of 1626. Ward did not even wait that long. At the 1625 Cambridge Commencement, Stephen Hall of Jesus College proposed the thesis that ‘The reformed churches do not disagree about the fundamentals of the faith’.34 Ward deftly used his determination of this topic to defend his own and the British delegation’s commitment to the episcopal structure of the English Church. As Ward made clear, early on, ‘we are not saying that the reformed churches do not disagree over the external method of ecclesiastical polity or the administration of discipline’.35 After all, he pointed out, no one could overlook the fact that the British and Irish churches disagreed significantly with the German and French churches over the way matters of external polity should be arranged. That said, Ward insisted, this discrepancy did not bear upon the fundamentals of the faith; ‘indeed diversity of this kind can and should be tolerated in external polity, without injury to fraternal unity, or division, particularly since all the reformed churches retain those things that are absolutely necessary, that is to say, the pure preaching of the word of God, the due administration of the sacraments, the ordination of pastors by public authority, and, lastly, the censure of morals’.36 As Ward underlined, a disagreement over external polity, where there was consensus about the fundamentals of the faith, is not a sufficient reason for the Reformed churches to contend with each other, or shun external union.37 Ward immediately underlined, however, just as Carleton had, that it would be preferable for the Reformed churches of mainland Europe to adopt episcopacy, in order that their agreement in faith might be reflected by their agreement in polity. As he put it, I solemnly profess, that it would be best-​advised . . . if, just as the other reformed churches are united with our Church, by the unity of one and

244  Grace and Conformity the same faith, so they may also choose to be united [with us] in the assertion of the preeminent and original power of bishops over presbyters, and that, accordingly, their ordinations can be more certainly derived from the Apostles themselves, and they may duly conform themselves to the well-​ attested praxis of the universal Church from apostolic times.38

Like Carleton, Ward believed that the polity of the British churches more closely reflected the practice of the Apostolic Church, than the kinds of church polity adopted in many parts of the Reformed world. He also believed that the episcopal succession which the British churches enjoyed offered a greater assurance of the legitimacy of those churches’ ministry, since it ensured that every minister could demonstrate that his ministerial vocation had ultimately been derived from the Apostles. In a Determination that was not specifically focussed on the question of ministry, Ward did not have time to explain how he reconciled his commitment to episcopacy with his acceptance of the validity of ordination in the transmarine churches. He shone a little more light on that in a letter which he intended for William Bedell, and wrote in 1641, the draft of which can be found among his papers in Sidney Sussex Library.39 Ward wrote there that ‘Touching the transmarine churches reformed, I doubt not but you have truly defended in your defence against Mr Wadsworth that they want no bishops’. The ‘defence against Mr Wadsworth’ which Ward mentioned here was Bedell’s contribution to The Copies of Certain Letters which Have Passed . . . between Mr James Wadsworth . . . and W. Bedell (1624). There, Bedell had argued that the Reformed churches of mainland Europe were not actually without bishops at all, and that for two reasons. In the first place, ‘because a bishop and a presbyter are all one, as Saint Jerome maintains, and proves out of Holy Scripture, and the use of Antiquity’.40 And in the second place, ‘Those Churches in Germany have those whom they call Superintendents and general Superintendents . . . Yea, and where these are not, as in Geneva; and the French Churches, yet there are, saith Zanchius, usually certain chief men that do in a manner bear all the sway, as if order itself and necessity led them to this course. And what are these but bishops indeed, unless we shall wrangle about names, which for reason of State those churches were to abstain from’.41 Ward was evidently convinced by this argument, remarking to Bedell that it had since been given further support by Andrewes in his Responsiones to three letters from Peter du Moulin, that were published

Episcopacy  245 in Andrewes’s Opuscula (1629).42 ‘Though to what purpose is it to abolish the name,’ Andrewes had written, ‘and to retain the thing? For even you retain the thing, without the title; and they two, whom you named [i.e. Calvin and Beza], while they lived, what were they, but bishops in deed, though not in name’.43 It would appear, in other words, that Ward was in agreement with Carleton that bishops and presbyters were members of the same ecclesiastical order, and that those who had assumed episcopal office in an uncanonical way were nonetheless capable of exercising episcopal functions. Although Ward was clearly prepared to accept that some Reformed churches preserved a version of episcopacy in their presidents and moderators; he nonetheless questioned the propriety of making such offices temporary. ‘I nothing doubt,’ he wrote, ‘but that the presidents of presbyteries in the assurgent church were always fixed and perpetual ever since the Apostles’ times, both in the grievous persecutions and also in the flourishing time of the Church in the time of the first general councils, which whether it be justly and wisely changed I much doubt’.44 In other words, like Carleton, Ward seems to have thought that episcopacy was a pattern of Church order that should not be changed. So whilst he accepted the validity of transmarine reformed orders, he did not think they were as demonstrably legitimate as those of the British churches and he doubted the propriety of their innovations in church government. Toward the end of his 1625 Determination, Ward turned his focus directly to Montagu, and the criticisms he had made of the British delegates at Dort.45 ‘Not so long ago,’ Ward remarked, ‘a certain learned man wrote that this Synod also condemns the discipline of the Church of England; and says elsewhere that the discipline of the English Church is held to be unlawful in that and other Dutch Synods’.46 Ward insisted that this was not the case: ‘While the foreign theologians were present, neither directly, nor indirectly, nor by consequence, was the discipline of the Church of England anywhere condemned, or held to be unlawful, or injured by anybody in any way, even in the slightest degree’.47 Ward assumed that Montagu had based his accusation on the fact that the Belgic Confession was published among the Acta of the Synod, and that, since it included articles hostile to English Church polity, they must have been approved by the Synod as well. Montagu was mistaken about this, however, and could easily have been disabused of his error, if he had actually consulted the Acta in detail, or spoken to his diocesan bishop, Carleton,48 or indeed any other of the surviving delegates.49 Ward’s 1625

246  Grace and Conformity Determination was, in other words, virtually a trailer for the line the British delegation would shortly take in the Joint Attestation.50

Davenant and Episcopacy: The Expositio and the Determinationes In both the Expositio (1627) and the Determinationes (1634), Davenant discussed questions of Church order. Paul’s opening salutation at Colossians 1:1, ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother’ prompted Davenant to underline, against Roman Catholic claims to the contrary, that ‘we deny that there are successors in this apostolic authority, whether to Peter, or the other Apostles. To the Apostles there succeeded not new Apostles, but bishops’.51 Davenant was evidently keen to flag up his episcopalian convictions from the outset. He undertook a more detailed treatment of Church order when expounding Colossians 1:25: ‘whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God’. Davenant pointed out that the word ‘dispensation’ here—​in Greek οἰκονομίαν—​meant the dispensation or management of a family household. If the Church was God’s family household, he then underlined, it should be administered in line with God’s instructions. God was the head of the household, and its Apostles, bishops, presbyters and deacons were all God’s servants, in the administration of that household. From this, Davenant drew a number of conclusions about ecclesiastical polity. ‘Since the Church is God’s family,’ he pointed out, ‘no one should exercise any function within it, except one who has been legitimately called by God himself ’.52 Such a calling to ecclesiastical ministry might be extraordinary, as it was in the case of the Apostles and prophets; or it might be ordinary, such as it was in the case of bishops and ministers. An ordinary calling should be issued by those who hold ecclesiastical jurisdiction, using some visible sign, so that it may be known to the Church who is a minister. As Davenant underlined, ‘Those who are ordained in this manner are able rightly to affirm that they are made ministers according to the dispensation of God. They who lack this ordination are usurping the administration of another man’s family, without either the appointment or the approbation of the Lord’.53 Public ordination by duly constituted ecclesiastical authority is the necessary hallmark of legitimate ministry, because it shows the members

Episcopacy  247 of the church that the one ordained is not an imposter, but has been called to his ministry by God. Davenant then set out the case for a hierarchical model of church government, and the consequent irregularity of its egalitarian rivals. ‘Since in every dispensation and the management of any family, it is requisite that there should be order, not only with respect to the dispensation itself, but also with respect to the dispensers themselves, if they are numerous; it is evident that they disturb the Church of God, and subvert this dispensation, who endeavour to introduce a parity of ministers into the Church’.54 As the Schoolmen had made clear, Davenant remarked, order is a matter of assigning things to their proper places; and wherever there is plurality without order, confusion will inevitably arise. Reason itself indicated the need for a hierarchy within the Church. ‘According to this dispensation and arrangement of God,’ Davenant observed, ‘one person is made bishop, others are ordained presbyters, others deacons; nor ought those who are placed in inferior situations assume those functions which belong to their superiors. For the Lord himself of the household “gave some, Apostles; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;” and in place of these, he desired that ministers, distinct in their orders, should be substituted in perpetuity’.55 The strength of Davenant’s remarks here should not be overlooked. He was asserting that episcopacy was an aspect of God’s dispensation of his household, the Church; it was, in other words, iure divino. He was also asserting that God intended episcopacy to continue in perpetuity; it was immutable. Episcopacy was again Davenant’s focus in his Determinationes, when he resolved the thesis that ‘The diversity of degrees among evangelical ministers is not repugnant to the word of God’.56 As he made clear, the diversity in mind here was specifically that which distinguished the episcopate from the presbyterate. Determining this thesis did not require him, he thought, ‘to inquire subtly whether the episcopate be a distinct order from the presbyterate, or just another and higher degree in the same order’.57 That said, he promptly quoted a number of a medieval authors,58 before remarking, ‘Hither tends the argument of the schoolmen, that the episcopate, as distinguished from the simple priesthood, is not another order, but a more eminent power and dignity of certain persons who are in the same sacerdotal order’.59 So although he did not think the question an important one; he was clear that the weight of medieval academic opinion supported the view that presbyters and bishops differed only in degree.

248  Grace and Conformity In order to resolve this thesis, Davenant wrote, it would be sufficient to show that ‘those to whom it is proper to be called bishops have a higher power, greater dignity, and more eminent offices annexed to them than other presbyters have, and that this is not repugnant to the word of God’.60 It would be a trivial task, he remarked, to show that this distinction was merely ‘not repugnant’ to the Word of God; ‘for it is easy to demonstrate that, in the divine word, this superiority of bishops above presbyters was foreshadowed, traced in outline, and firmly established by the Apostles themselves’.61 Far from being repugnant to the Word of God, episcopacy was actually the form of church government sanctioned by the Word of God. To make this case, Davenant pointed, first, to the tripartite hierarchical establishment of the Jewish Church, in which the High Priest presided over the other priest and the Levites. This had provided the precedent for the Christian Church to establish a similar order, as Davenant illustrated with a quote from Jerome: ‘In order that we may know that Apostolic traditions were taken from the Old Testament; what Aaron, his sons, and the Levites were in the temple, bishops, presbyters, and deacons claim for themselves in the Church’.62 It is worth noting, in this context, that Davenant evidently felt that there was no conflict between the claim he had made, in the Expositio, that episcopacy was God’s dispensation for the Church, and his acceptance, in the Determinationes, that it was an Apostolic tradition and a constitution of the primitive Church. Joseph Hall would later make the same equation.63 In the second place, Davenant observed, ‘it is manifest that Christ himself constituted ministers for the edification of the Church, not endued with equal authority, but distinct in degree of dignity and power’.64 Like Carleton, Davenant saw this dominical commitment to hierarchy in the distinction Christ had made between the Twelve and the Seventy; and he insisted that the Twelve stood above the others, not merely in terms of their spiritual gifts, but also in the extent of their authority and power.65 Furthermore, and again with Carleton, Davenant indicated that all the Church Fathers were in agreement that bishops had succeeded the Apostles in the ordinary government of the Church, and that the presbyters had succeeded the seventy other disciples, quoting Augustine to this effect.66 ‘So they who want evangelical ministers to be of equal power,’ he remarked, ‘are seen either not to know the action of Christ, or to judge that it is not worth imitating by the Church’.67 In the third place, Davenant argued, the Apostles themselves, before they died, appointed, in the great cities, a bishop to be the chief pastor, who was superior in authority and greater in power than the other presbyters of that

Episcopacy  249 city.68 Thus, Titus became bishop of Crete, Timothy of Ephesus, James of Jerusalem etc. These bishops’ successors always enjoyed a superior authority over inferior ministers; which is why, Davenant claimed, Church Fathers such as Hilary and Gregory Nazianzen referred to them as prelates, heads of their churches, princes of the Church. Indeed, Christ himself acknowledged the pre-​eminence of these chief pastors, or bishops, when he referred to them as angels, in the book of Revelation.69 Even Beza, Davenant noted, conceded that the angels in Revelation must be the presidents of those churches; and Davenant had no problem with using this term for a bishop. That said, ‘what he adds about the office of this president not being perpetual, is so clearly refuted by Church history, that it is surprising to see it asserted by a learned man not unversed in Antiquity’.70 Davenant clearly had the same reservations as Ward about the temporary forms of oversight adopted in some reformed churches. Having established the superior dignity and power of bishops through biblical typology, the example of Christ and the practice of the Apostolic Church; Davenant then undertook to explain what this superior dignity and power entailed. He underlined that bishops enjoyed many privileges that were not actually derived from the first institutions of their office by the Apostles, but were prerogatives granted to them by Christian princes, or by the Councils of the Church. Such privileges, he insisted, were an honour done to bishops, they were not essential to their function. There were, however, three peculiar marks of episcopal office, by which bishops were distinguished from and acknowledged to be superior to presbyters.71 The first is that the Apostles only ever appointed one bishop in a city, no matter how populous it was, and no matter how many presbyters were there; and when that first bishop died, he was succeeded by one man, and not more. That is why the Council of Nicaea’s eighth canon established that there may not be two bishops in the same city. If the Apostles had intended to establish a parity of ministers, Davenant asked, why had they established a singular personal succession of this kind? Even Jerome, he suggested, though no great supporter of episcopal dignity, had conceded that with this singular succession, went a singular dignity and pre-​eminence. Church Fathers such as Cyprian clearly believed that the peace and unity of the Church depended upon the special authority of the bishop over his diocese, and even Jerome seems to have thought the same. 72 ‘This very singleness of episcopal succession,’ Davenant argued, ‘always joined with a certain breadth of authority, is sufficient of itself to crush the newfangled error of the parity of all ministers’.73

250  Grace and Conformity The second ancient mark of episcopal pre-​eminence, Davenant contended, was ‘the right and power of ordination, which as transmitted by the Apostles themselves to bishops, but denied to the inferior presbyters’.74 Like Carleton, he saw this in Paul’s instructions to Titus, at Titus 1:5, that he should ordain presbyters in Crete. Why could the ministers in Crete not ordain presbyters before Titus arrived, Davenant asked, unless the power of ordination was reserved for bishops?75 Even Jerome had been clear that the one thing that bishops did, which presbyters could not do, was ordain. ‘In this Apostolic institution,’ Davenant insisted, ‘the Catholic Church has always acquiesced, and has not acknowledged any other ordination lawful, than that which was celebrated by a lawful bishop’.76 Quite the contrary: there was Patristic precedent for rescinding the orders of those who had only been presbyterally ordained. At this point, Davenant engaged in a significant digression from his argument. It is often asked, he pointed out, whether, in cases of necessity, anyone apart from a bishop can validly confer orders. ‘To this we reply,’ he wrote, Since to confer holy orders is by apostolic institution an act of the episcopal office, if presbyters, in a well established church do that, their act is not only unlawful, but is null and void . . . But in a disturbed church, where all the bishops have fallen into heresy or idolatry, where they have refused to ordain orthodox ministers, where they have accounted those alone to be worthy of holy orders who participate in their error and faction, if orthodox presbyters (lest the church perish) be compelled to ordain other presbyters, I could not venture to pronounce ordinations of this kind vain and invalid.77

If the ministerial prerogative of baptizing may be exercised by a lay-​person, where there is a risk that a single infant might otherwise not be baptized; why should not the episcopal prerogative of ordaining be exercised by presbyters, when danger threatens a whole church?78 Necessity, Davenant suggested, was, as it were, a temporary law, which excused that which it compelled; and the Church, just like any secular commonwealth, was entitled to take extraordinary steps in order to preserve its existence.79 Davenant then applied this principle to the transmarine reformed churches. If then, certain Protestant churches, which could not look for ordination under popish bishops, have, constrained by this necessity, ordained

Episcopacy  251 presbyters, by the unanimous agreement of their own presbyters, they are not to be considered as having prejudiced the episcopal dignity, but as having yielded to the necessity of the Church.80

Like Carleton, Davenant saw the non-​episcopal polities adopted by certain Reformed churches as a tolerable response to exceptional circumstances, not a legitimate alternative to episcopacy. The third mark of episcopal superiority, Davenant suggested, was the bishop’s power of jurisdiction over both laity and clergy. This jurisdiction was not a regal or lordly jurisdiction; but it was such a pastoral and paternal jurisdiction as was inconsistent with equality of authority.81 As Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus, as well as the book of Revelation show, bishops have power to deprive and excommunicate their clergy for teaching unsound doctrine.82 Not that Davenant felt that this should be done without the counsel of the other presbyters; indeed Cyprian’s commitment to do nothing without the advice of his clergy was probably echoed, he thought, in the practice of other primitive bishops.83 Even so, he argued, the judicial sentence invariably proceeded from the authority of the bishop alone, and the only appeal against that sentence was to a church synod.84 Davenant then turned to address some of the arguments put forward by those opposed to this episcopal dignity. Chief among them were the remarks Jesus makes in Matthew 20:25–​26, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you’. These words, Davenant argued, echoing Carleton’s aristocratic vision of the episcopate, undoubtedly implied a parity of authority between the Apostles, but they did not impose a parity of authority among all ministers. If they had, Jesus would not have made a distinction between the Twelve and the Seventy, nor would Paul have given Timothy and Titus authority over the other pastors within their dioceses. Jesus’s words here were rather intended to make clear that a bishop’s authority was pastoral and paternal, not regal or lordly in nature.85 In response to the argument that the terms ‘bishop’ and ‘presbyter’ are used promiscuously within the New Testament and that this indicates that the two offices were not only equal, but in fact the same; Davenant suggested that, while the Apostles lived, they had not appointed bishops in the cities near where they resided but had instead committed the churches in those places to the joint care of their presbyters. Since, therefore, those presbyters were effectively exercising pastoral oversight over such churches, they were

252  Grace and Conformity sometimes referred to as bishops. Furthermore, in terms of preaching and the administration of the sacraments, the two activities which bore most directly on the salvation of human souls, bishops, and presbyters are indeed equal; presbyters may therefore be called bishops—​overseers—​insofar as they oversee the salvation of others. It is also possible, Davenant suggested, that such language was an encouragement to Christian humility; rather as the Apostles occasionally referred to themselves as presbyters, without thereby diminishing their own Apostolic authority. 86 Finally, in response to the argument that the pre-​eminence which Apostles held over other ministers of the Gospel was extraordinary in nature and could not, therefore, be passed down to any successors, Davenant conceded that some Apostolic prerogatives were indeed extraordinary, and confined to the original Apostles. Among these he counted direct vocation by Christ himself, mission to all the nations, infallibility of teaching, and the gift of tongues and miracles—​all of which were necessary for the first foundation of the Church. However, the Apostles also exercised other prerogatives, such as ordination, and the direction of the Church, which continued to be necessary long after the foundation of the Church. ‘These offices,’ Davenant insisted, ‘and others such as these, without which an established church cannot stand firm or be rightly governed, have been transmitted to bishops, and establish them as higher in degree and greater in power, than other presbyters’.87 Davenant’s point, here, was precisely that which Carleton had made to the gathered delegates at Dort.

Hall’s Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted When Ward offered his thoughts on episcopacy at Commencement and Davenant published his opinions in print, the institution of episcopacy was firmly entrenched in all three of Charles I’s Kingdoms. A very different situation faced Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, when he published on the same topic. On 8 December 1638, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland voted to abolish episcopacy from the Kirk, and declared it unlawful. On 13 December, it deposed the Scottish bishops, threatening them with excommunication if they refused to accept the Assembly’s decision. These actions were then ratified, when the General Assembly met in Edinburgh the following year. On 11 February 1640, George Graham, Bishop of Orkney, wrote to the General Assembly, renouncing his title and abjuring the institution

Episcopacy  253 of episcopacy.88 In response to these alarming developments north of the border, William Laud prevailed upon Hall to undertake a defence of episcopacy, with the proviso that Laud should approve the text prior to its publication. The Archbishop then kept in close touch with Hall as he conceived and drafted the book. Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted (1640) was consequently a book whose final form reflected a certain amount of Laudian tinkering.89 Hall certainly offered a far more strident assertion of episcopal government than Carleton, Ward, or Davenant had done. The divine origin of episcopacy, which Davenant had mentioned in passing in the Expositio, Hall now made the primary focus of his argument, as his book’s title made clear. This assertiveness was partly a factor of his polemical situation. Episcopacy was now under direct attack within the British Isles, and a British bishop had recently renounced not only his own orders but episcopacy itself. Hall’s outrage was clear from his opening line: ‘Good God! what is this, that I have lived to hear? That a Bishop in a Christian Assembly should renounce his episcopal function, and cry mercy for his now-​abandoned calling?’90 The book’s tone may also have something to do with Laud’s involvement in the project. Laud repeatedly asked Hall to reduce the leeway he had given to non-​episcopal views of church government. Even so, in almost all respects, Hall’s Episcopacy followed the lines of argument that Carleton, Ward and Davenant had already set out. Hall’s central contention against the behaviour of the Kirk was that ‘Episcopacy, such as you have renounced, even that which implies a fixed superiority over the rest of the clergy, and jurisdiction; is not only an holy, and lawful, but a divine institution; and therefore cannot be abdicated, without a manifest violation of God’s ordinance’.91 Hall’s case for the divine institution of the episcopate consolidated both dominical and Apostolic precedents, just as Carleton’s and Davenant’s had done. ‘That government,’ he wrote, ‘whose ground being laid by our Saviour himself, was afterwards raised by the hands of his Apostles cannot be denied to be of divine institution’.92 Hall pointed to the same evidence of dominical intent as Carleton had at Dort, and Davenant had in his Determinationes: ‘Who sees not then a manifest imparity in our Saviour’s own choice, in the first gathering of his Church; wherein his Apostles were above his other Disciples; the twelve above the 70’.93 This original pre-​eminence was then reflected, Hall contended, in the jurisdiction which the Apostles exercised over the Primitive Church after the Ascension of Christ.94

254  Grace and Conformity As Hall underlined, ‘not only the government, which was directly commanded, and enacted; but that which was practised and recommended by the Apostles to the Church, is justly to be held for an Apostolical institution’.95 Like Carleton and Davenant, Hall saw undeniable evidence of that practice in the Pastoral Epistles,96 writing, ‘It is no other than our present episcopal power, that by the blessed Apostle, is committed to Timothy and Titus; and that with so clear evidence, that for my part, I do not more fully believe there were such men, than they had such power, and these warrants to execute it’.97 Like Davenant, he saw further evidence for episcopacy in the Spirit’s words to the angels in Revelation.98 He also echoed Davenant’s swipe at Beza’s suggestion that the angels might have enjoyed a merely temporary prelacy. ‘Blessed God! Where was this monster of opinion formed? Who ever read or heard of such a course of administration, from the beginning of God’s Church upon earth, until this present age?’99 Hall laid a particular emphasis upon the immutability of episcopal government. This was, in part, because he was seeking to confute those ‘not disallowing episcopacy in itself, but holding it to be lawful, useful, ancient; yet such as was by mere humane device, upon wise and politic considerations, brought into the Church, and so continued, and therefore upon the like grounds alterable’.100 That, of course, had been the position of the Protestant diplomats in Venice who had objected to Carleton’s Examination. Hall had no more truck with such views than Carleton had done. ‘The form which the Apostles set and ordained for the governing of the Church,’ he insisted, ‘was not intended by them for that present time, or place only; but for continuance, and succession forever. For no man, I suppose, can be so weak, as to think that the rules of the Apostles were personal, local, temporary; as some dials, or almanacs, that are made for some special meridians: but as their office and charge, so their rules were universal to the whole world; as far, and as long as the world lasteth’.101 For, as he asked, ‘if our blessed Saviour thought it fit to found his Church in an evident imparity, what reason should we have to imagine he did not intend so to continue it?’102 Davenant, of course, had felt much the same. Like Carleton and Davenant before him, Hall contended that the Apostles enjoyed both an extraordinary ministry, which they did not hand on to any successors, and an ordinary ministry which they did. As he put it, ‘they were Apostles immediately called, miraculously gifted; infallibly guided, universally charged. Thus, they had not, they could not have, any successors; they were (withal) church governors appointed by Christ to order and settle the

Episcopacy  255 affairs of his spiritual kingdom; and therein (besides the preaching of the Gospel, and baptizing, common to them, with other ministers) to ordain a succession of the meet administrators of his Church’.103 Hall also conceded, as Carleton and Davenant had done, that the titles of bishop and presbyter were promiscuously used in the Apostolic Church; suggesting, like Davenant, that this was an index of their Christian humility, not a sign that they disregarded the prerogatives of their office.104 Again, like Carleton and Davenant, Hall saw the episcopate as a guarantor of Church unity. ‘The Apostles,’ he wrote, ‘by the direction of the Spirit of God, found it requisite and necessary for the avoiding of schism and disorder that some eminent persons should everywhere be lifted up above the rest, and ordained to succeed them in the overseeing and ordering both the Church and their many presbyters under them, who by an eminence, were called their bishops’.105 Behind this instinct that episcopacy was an instrument of ecclesial unity was an assumption which Hall again shared with Carleton, Ward, and Davenant; namely, ‘That order cannot be kept, where there is an absolute equality of all persons convened’.106 Hall was also clear, as Carleton and Davenant had been, that the essence of the episcopal office had little to do with the many privileges and prerogatives that had accrued to bishops over the course of history. As he put it, ‘the accession of honourable titles, or (not incompatible) privileges, makes no difference in the substance of a lawful and holy calling: These things, being merely external, and adventitious, can no more alter the nature of the calling, than change of suits, the body’.107 Furthermore, he, like they, insisted that the essence of the episcopal office lay in the twin powers of ordination and jurisdiction: ‘Episcopacy is an eminent order of sacred function, appointed by the Holy Ghost, in the Evangelical Church, for the governing and overseeing thereof; and for that purpose, besides the administration of the word and sacraments, endued with power of imposition of hands, and perpetuity of jurisdiction’.108 That this model of church government had been continuously accepted by the Catholic Church, ever since the time of Christ was not, for Hall, a matter for serious debate. ‘Turn over all histories,’ he wrote, ‘search the records of all times and places, if ever it can be shown that any orthodox church in the whole Christian world, since the times of Christ and his Apostles, was governed otherwise than by a bishop, superior to his clergy (unless perhaps during the time of some persecution, or short inter-​regnum) let me forfeit my part of the cause’.109

256  Grace and Conformity Hall’s concession that episcopal government might have been suspended under extraordinary circumstances, such as in times of persecution, or in the absence of episcopal oversight, is nonetheless a significant one. Laud had been concerned about the favourable attitude to the transmarine reformed churches that Hall seemed to be adopting, in the early stages of this project. In a letter dated 11 November 1639, Laud wrote ‘you say in your first point, that where episcopacy hath obtained, it cannot be abdicated without violation of God’s ordinance . . . [But] never was there any church yet where it hath not obtained . . . and wheresoever now episcopacy is not suffered to be, it is by such an abdication, for certainly there is was a principio [from the beginning]’.110 Laud then went on: ‘in your second head, you grant that the presbyterian government may be of use where episcopacy may not be had. First, I pray you, consider whether this concession be not needless here, and in itself of a dangerous consequence. Next, I conceive there is no place where episcopacy may not be had, if there be a church more than in title only’.111 It appears that Hall accepted Laud’s criticism: the published version of his book does not contain any overt concessions to non-​episcopal forms of church government. That said, Hall implicitly endorsed the argument that both Carleton and Davenant had made, that the Reformed churches of the European mainland could be forgiven for abandoning episcopacy, because they had no other choice. Near the beginning of the work, he warned his Scottish interlocutors ‘not to deceive your selves vainly with the hope of hiding your heads, under the skirt of the authority of those divines and churches abroad, which retain that form of government whereto you have submitted: for know, their case and yours, is far enough different. They plead to be by a kind of necessity cast upon that condition, which you have willingly chosen: they were not, they could not be, what you were, and might still have been’.112 By drawing such a sharp distinction between the Church of Scotland’s renunciation of episcopacy, and the different history of the Reformed churches of mainland Europe, Hall was able to preserve, by implication, the argument to which Laud had objected; for, unlike his Archbishop, he clearly did believe that there were places where episcopacy might not be had. That said, Hall’s reading of Christian antiquity had not revealed to him any convincing precedent for non-​episcopal ordinations, even in extremis.113 Carleton, of course, had thought the same.114 Laud’s anxieties were not entirely settled by Hall’s revised draft. In a letter of 14 January 1640, Laud suggested that Hall put a greater emphasis on an issue ‘which you seem to pass by, as not much material to the question;’ but

Episcopacy  257 which ‘is, in our judgement here, the very main of the cause; and it is whether episcopacy be an order or degree’.115 Hall answered Laud on 18 January 1640. ‘For that point of the degree or order of episcopacy, though I well knew the weight of it, yet I did purposely intend to wave it here, because it fetcheth a great and learned part of the school upon us, and because I found it to be out of the way . . . but our tenet is doubtless most defensible: and I have accordingly stated it in this review’.116 Like Carleton and Davenant, Hall was aware there was a powerful current of scholastic opinion running against the idea that the episcopate and the presbyterate were distinct orders. Unlike Davenant, however, he seems to have thought that it was a significant question. Furthermore, given Hall’s comfortable reference to ‘our tenet,’ he seems to have adopted the position that episcopacy was a distinct order before Laud had lent on him. It was not simply a response to the looming threat of Scottish Presbyterianism, nor to an overbearing Archbishop. That said, Hall’s revised discussion of the issue did not evince great conviction that it was absolutely crucial or that there was only one legitimate opinion on the matter. ‘As for the further subdivision of this quarrel,’ he wrote, ‘whether episcopacy must be accounted a distinct order, or but a several degree in the same order, there is here no need for the present, to enter into the discussion of it . . . ’.117 He expressed surprise, however, at the rigidity of those who ‘stand so highly upon this difference, to have it merely but a degree;’ a surprise that might also, of course, have extended to those who contended too fiercely for the opposite opinion. Hall then pointed out that it was actually the Papists that were the greatest supporters of the idea that the difference between a priest and a bishop was merely one of degree, since they related all ministerial power to the Eucharist: ‘So then these doughty champions among us, do indeed, but plead for Baal, whiles they would be taken for the only pullers of him down’.118 Carleton, of course, had not been at all embarrassed to call upon these authors, if it enabled him to defend the transmarine Reformed against their Roman adversaries. ‘But for ourselves,’ Hall went on, ‘taking order in that sense, in which our oracle of learning, Bishop Andrewes, cites it out of the school, qua potestas est ad actum specialem [by which a power is towards its particular act]; there can be no reason to deny episcopacy to be a distinct order’.119 Hall was referring, here, to a discussion in Andrewes’s Responsiones to Du Moulin, in which Andrewes had argued that a difference of degree indicated the kind of superiority that did not entail any specific extra power, whereas a difference of order indicated the kind of superiority that did.120 Since bishops were

258  Grace and Conformity invested with both the power to confer orders, and the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and since a difference in power implied a difference of order; Hall saw no reason why bishops should not be considered a distinct order. ‘Moreover,’ he added, ‘in the Church of England, every bishop receives a new ordination (by way of eminence, commonly called his consecration) which cannot be a void act, I trow, and must needs give more than a degree’.121 This argument, too, had been used by Andrewes, in his discussion with Du Moulin.122 So it seems that it may have been Andrewes’s influence that had persuaded Hall that bishops and presbyters belonged to different orders. Hall brought this digression to a close, however, by underlining that the concession that bishops were a distinct order was far from essential to his case. ‘Howsoever this be,’ he wrote, ‘yet if it shall appear that there was by Apostolical ordination, such a fixed imparity, and constant jurisdiction amongst those, who were entrusted with the teaching and governing God’s people, that is, of bishops above the other clergy, as I have spoken, we have what we contend for’.123 He may have taken a different view of orders from Ward and Davenant; but for Hall, unlike Laud, the ‘very main of the cause’ was not a matter of order, but a matter of superior authority. In that, of course, he was in agreement with his Reformed Conformist comrades.

Episcopacy and Grace Carleton, Ward, Davenant, and Hall’s reflections on episcopacy all took their place within the Church of England’s unfolding conversation about its ecclesial identity. The fact that this conversation included a number of such churchmen, who were both hostile to Arminian soteriology and also committed to an episcopal Church order, has been widely recognized. However, the relationship between these two aspects of their thinking has not been greatly explored. Yet without a grasp of how these theologians understood that relationship, the coexistence of a Reformed theology of grace with an episcopalian ecclesiology, risks appearing, at least in theological terms, to be little more than a politically driven eccentricity. However, as Prideaux’s Act Lectures demonstrate, to the Early Modern theological mind, soteriology and ecclesiology were not independent spheres of thought. Quite the contrary: the theology of grace was the foundation on which the theology of the church was built. As a result, questions of grace and questions of church polity were related.

Episcopacy  259 This has usually been acknowledged in the case of both Laudians and Puritans, whose divergent attitudes to Church order have generally been seen in the scholarship as intimately bound up with their divergent soteriologies. The Laudian focus on the sacraments and ceremonial conformity has been taken as the natural corollary of an Arminian reading of grace. The Puritan focus on the Word preached and on a Christian’s freedom from human ceremonies has been taken as the natural corollary of a Reformed soteriology. The same connection between attitudes to polity, and attitudes to soteriology, has rarely been suggested in the case of the Reformed Conformists. As a result, they are left teetering awkwardly between two stools: Conformist Episcopalians, who refused to follow the logic of their ecclesiology towards an anti-​Calvinist soteriology; or Reformed divines, who refused to follow the logic of their soteriology into Puritanism.124 This may reflect the lingering influence of Max Weber’s claim that, ‘every consistent doctrine of predestined grace inevitably implied a radical and ultimate devaluation of all magical, sacramental and institutional distributions of grace, in view of God’s sovereign will’.125 Nicholas Tyacke certainly cites Weber with approval early on in his Anti-​Calvinists, and goes on to remark that ‘the grace of predestination and the grace of the sacraments were to become rivals for the religious allegiance of English men and women during the early seventeenth century’.126 However, the idea that institutional channels of grace in the Church and the sacraments existed in a state of theological rivalry with the doctrine of predestination would have astonished the Reformed theologians of the seventeenth century. For them, the two were held inextricably together through the concept of the means of grace. God accomplished the decree of predestination, not by putting Christians straight into heaven, but by providing them with the institutional means whereby, under the powerful influence of efficacious grace, they would inevitably get there. The first of those institutional means, the means that initiated the Christian’s self-​conscious journey towards heaven, was the preaching of the Gospel by a legitimately ordained minister. The link between the working of grace and the ordained ministry can be seen in two sermons published by George Downame in 1608.127 These sermons later became a focus of political tension between the Church of England and the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, on the eve of the Synod of Dort, when they were attacked by the Dutch theologian, Gerson Bucerus (c. 1565–​1631).128

260  Grace and Conformity Downame’s commitment to episcopacy was obvious from the opening lines of the first sermon: ‘The blessed Apostle S. Paul, having left Timothy as his substitute at Ephesus, and invested him with episcopal authority, (that is to say, with so much of the Apostolical power as was necessarily to continue in the Church, which besides the ministry of the word and sacraments, common to all ministers, consisteth specially in the power of ordination, & ecclesiastical jurisdiction:) he addresseth this and the other Epistle unto him, thereby informing him, and in him all bishops, how to behave himself in the house of God, which is his Church’.129 Downame used his sermon to explore not only the nature of Christian ministry, but also its place within the economy of salvation. ‘Ministers were ordained,’ he wrote, ‘to supply the office, and sustain the person of the Son of God, who is the Word and Wisdom of his Father. The ministers therefore were ordained to supply the room of Christ. Which the Lord did, not that he would have the ministry of the word less esteemed, then if he should speak from heaven himself; but that he might by this means teach us after a more familiar manner, and might make the better trial of our obedience’.130 This ministry was necessary to salvation, Downame contended, under all ordinary circumstances. ‘For although Christ hath performed so much as is sufficient, for the salvation of all,’ he argued, yet none are actually saved, but they only, to whom the benefit of the Messiah is communicated. Now the merits of Christ are applied ordinarily by the ministry of the word and sacraments: unto which, for that cause, the power of salvation is ascribed. They therefore who enjoy the ministry of the word and sacraments, let them acknowledge themselves infinitely bound unto the Lord; who hath visited them with the favour of his people, and vouchsafed unto them the peculiar privilege of his visible Church; in that he hath not only sent his Son to redeem them, but also given them those means, whereby the benefit of Redemption may be applied unto them.131

Christian ministry was, in other words, the ordinary means of redemption, the channel through which the benefits won by Christ were normally applied to his people. Downame underlined the relevance of the ordained ministry to every stage in the out-​working of God’s decree of predestination in the life of each Christian. ‘Whereas there are three degrees of salvation in this life,’ he wrote,

Episcopacy  261 our vocation, our justification, our sanctification: what one of these is not effected by the ministry of the word, and what one of them is effected ordinarily without it? For whom God hath elected, them doth he call; neither shall any be saved (I speak of such as come to years of discretion,) but such as are, or shall be called . . . Now men are called by the ministry of the Gospel, seconded and made powerful by the Spirit of God. Neither is there any means in the world, so effectual to work the conversion of a sinner, or to bring him unto faith in Christ, as the ministry of the word.132

For Downame, the consequence of all this was very clear: ‘If therefore our vocation, justification and sanctification, which are all the degrees of salvation going between election and glorification, be all of them wrought by the ministry of the word: we must acknowledge it, worthily to be called the power of God to our salvation, and not without good cause the power of saving men’s souls to be ascribed unto it, and to the preachers of it, as to the means and instruments under God’.133 It was this conception of ordained ministers as ordinary means of salvation that held the doctrine of predestination and the doctrine of the Church together. Ordinarily speaking, God brought about his eternal decree in the life of each believer only through the ordained ministry. As a result, the question of who was and was not legitimately ordained was of vital significance. Theologians such as Downame were quite convinced that the only mode of ordination which evidently bore the seal of Apostolic authority was episcopal. As he put it, anticipating the opinions of Carleton, Ward, Davenant and Hall, ‘it hath been the received opinion in the Church of God, even from the Apostles’ time until our age, that the right of ordination of presbyters, is such a peculiar prerogative of bishops, as that ordinarily, and regularly, there could be no lawful ordination, but by a bishop’.134 Downame further pointed out that the ancient Church had repeatedly ruled that non-​episcopal ordinations were null and void.135 Admittedly, Downame offered the same concession to the Reformed churches of mainland Europe as his Reformed Conformist colleagues. He did not so appropriate the right of ordination to bishops, he underlined, ‘as that extraordinarily, and in case of necessity, it might not be lawful for presbyters to ordain’.136 ‘For suppose a church either altogether destitute of a bishop,’ he argued, ‘or pestered with such as the popish prelates are, heretical & idolatrous, by whom no orthodoxal ministers might hope to be ordained; we need not doubt, but that the ancient Fathers would, in such a case

262  Grace and Conformity of necessity, have allowed ordination without a bishop, though not as regular, according to the rules of ordinary church government; yet, as effectual, & as justifiable, in the want of a bishop’.137 Like Davenant, Downame drew an analogy between extraordinary ordinations by presbyters, where no bishop could be found, and extraordinary baptisms by lay-​people, where no minister could be found. Both of these, he thought, were irregular; yet justifiable under the circumstances and to be held as effective.138 That said, Downame’s concession did not imply any watering-​down of his commitment to episcopacy. After reviewing both Biblical and Patristic data, Downame’s conclusion was very clear: ‘For whereas it hath been proved, that the government of the churches by bishops, is an Apostolical and divine ordinance: may not we also infer, that all churches are so necessarily and perpetually tied unto it, as that no other form of government is warrantable in the Church of God? and that not only this government is lawful, but that it only is lawful?’139 God works out his eternal decree of salvation in human lives through the ministry of legitimately ordained ministers. The only legitimate and divinely sanctioned means of ordination (under ordinary circumstances) is episcopal ordination. Membership of an episcopally ordered church is thus the surest way to salvation. Polity and predestination consequently went hand in hand. The same link between grace and episcopacy can be observed in an address which John Prideaux gave to celebrate the graduation of eleven doctors of divinity, during the Oxford Act of 1624; an address which was published, two years later, as part of the Orationes Novem. Prideaux chose as his text, Hebrews 5:4: ‘And no one takes this honour for himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was’. This text makes clear, he suggested, that no one should rashly assume the sacred ministry without a clear vocation from God. To do so was to commit the kind of sacrilege which had brought God’s deadly wrath down upon the presumptuous Uzzah, in II Samuel 6.140 ‘An ordinary vocation,’ Prideaux insisted, ‘is therefore required as a matter of necessity’.141 For, just as no one can become a knight or a baron without advancement by the sovereign power; so no one can assume the duties of Christian ministry without a call from God.142 Those who do not have such a vocation are to be reckoned as heretics and fanatics: for they enter God’s house by a window, like burglars; not through the door, as the householder does.143 Davenant had made the same point. Prideaux underlined that ‘the necessity of a specific vocation arises not merely by reason of order and seemliness, but [by reason] of precept and of

Episcopacy  263 divine command’.144 In the Old Testament, he pointed out, no one assumed the duties of a priest, or of a prophet, whose legitimate vocation to that office was not manifest; and usurpers were duly punished if they did. In the New Testament, the need for a ministerial vocation was equally clear. In Mark 1:34, for example, Jesus forbad the demons to proclaim the truth about who he was; thus making the point, Prideaux suggested, that ‘without a vocation . . . it is rash to preach even the truest of things’.145 Prideaux quoted Romans 10:15: ‘How are they to preach unless they are sent?’ He concluded from Paul’s remark that no one is able to preach the Gospel effectively, unless it is clear to those who hear that the preacher has authority to proclaim the message; ‘for if a legitimate vocation is not apparent, with what faith will the pastor instruct the flock, or the sheep receive the food’.146 Since receiving the Gospel with faith was ordinarily necessary for salvation, Prideaux was effectively echoing Downame in giving the visible legitimacy of a minister’s orders a key role in human redemption. Given this need to exhibit a valid ministerial calling, Prideaux believed that the Church of England was wise to retain, and solemnly perform, the ceremony of the laying on of hands according to the pattern set by the Apostles. Bishops, he noted, were ordained in England by two or three other bishops, just as the Apostolic Canons required147; while presbyters and deacons were ordained by the bishop ‘not furtively, or perfunctorily, but with requisite ceremonies and prayers, in the open theatre of the Church, that the people might know, that it attends to legitimate pastors, and that the pastors might faithfully apply themselves to that task, which they know has been conferred upon them by legitimate authority’.148 The Roman adversary, Prideaux pointed out, had repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of English episcopal orders, in an attempt to render the Church of England and her ministry suspect.149 But what, Prideaux wondered, could they possibly say against them? Were not the Church’s bishops ‘consecrated by legitimate bishops and with due solemnity?’150 Prideaux indicated, at this point, that ‘I act in this cause on behalf of the English Church only; the transmarine churches are not without their patrons, by whom the adversaries shall see at another time what they may reply’.151 He was not concerned, in other words, to justify the ministry of foreign churches that lacked episcopacy; he was concerned only to establish the legitimacy of the Church of England’s episcopal hierarchy.152 Roman apologists, he noted, claim that English bishops are defective in two respects: they lack the uninterrupted succession from prior bishops and they have not undergone the

264  Grace and Conformity rites essential for episcopal consecration.153 Prideaux flatly denied both these claims, citing the authority of Francis Mason’s exhaustive treatment of the subject, Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1625).154 Prideaux acknowledged that some Protestants might be alarmed that the legitimacy of English ministerial orders might be demonstrated by reference to a line of succession running back through the Roman hierarchy: ‘are the grapes of reformed religion to be gathered from papist spines, are the bishops of Christ to be fetched from Antichrist?’155 As he underlined, however, the more judicious would recognize that ‘in matters of this kind, the salvific effect depends not on the sincerity of those ministering, but on the authority of those instituting. Since indeed the power to teach is one thing, the purity of doctrine another. Nor is he who has fallen away from the purity of doctrine, through superstition or heresy, immediately deprived of the ability to ordain’.156 Prideaux’s words here are significant. He was arguing that the ‘salvific effect’ of Christian ministry was dependent on the legitimacy of a minister’s orders, and he was establishing the legitimacy of English church orders, using the line of episcopal succession that ran back through the medieval hierarchy of the Church of Rome. Episcopacy thus had a direct bearing on the work of grace in Prideaux’s mind, as it had in Downame’s. Just like Downame, Prideaux insisted on the need for a legitimately ordained Christian ministry. He also underlined, like Downame, that the saving work of that ministry, its potential to act as a channel for God’s grace and an instrument of predestination, depended on the validity of its orders, a validity that was clearly exhibited within the episcopal structure of the English Church. So, for Prideaux, as for Downame, grace and polity went hand in hand. To these two voices, that of Featley should be added. In 1636, Featley published a significant collection of sermons that he had delivered over the course of his career, the Clavis Mystica. Featley set out his rationale for this volume in the dedicatory letter to Charles I. He placed it squarely in the context of the ongoing threat to orthodox belief and religious unity. ‘Experience teacheth,’ Featley wrote, ‘that the presentest remedies against those venomous serpents, which infest the Church of Christ, whether heretics or schismatics, are the pens of orthodox writers’. Furthermore, whereas ‘that which is spoken cometh but to a few which are within hearing, and stayeth not by them . . . that which is written, and much more that which is printed, presenteth itself to the view of all, and is always ready at hand: and

Episcopacy  265 as it receiveth, so it maketh impression’.157 It was this consideration, he indicated, that had driven him to gather his sermons together, ‘especially because therein the proper heresies of these times are encountered, and the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England maintained by the oracles of God and the joint testimony of prime antiquity’. Featley ended his letter by wishing the King ‘assurance of eternal happiness’; a somewhat cheeky aspiration, perhaps, given the King’s stated disrelish for predestinarian discussion. The Clavis Mystica contained two sermons that Featley had preached at episcopal consecrations. Clearly, Featley believed that episcopacy was a fit subject for repeated meditation. In the sermon he had preached at the consecration of Robert Wright, Bishop of Bristol, he spoke in terms reminiscent of both Downame and Prideaux. ‘As the Spouse of Christ, which is his mystical body,’ he wrote, is infinitely indebted to her head for this gift of the Spirit, whereby holy congregations are furnished with pastors, and they with gifts, and the ministry of the Gospel continually propagated; so we above all nations in the world at this day are most bound to extol and magnify his goodness towards us herein: among whom in a manner alone, this holy seed of the Church remaineth unmixed and uncorrupt; not only as propagated but propagating also, not children only but fathers. Apostolical doctrine other reformed Churches maintain; but do they retain also Apostolical discipline? Laying of hands they have on ministers and pastors, but consecration of Archbishops and Bishops they have not. And because they want consecrated Bishops to ordain Pastors, their very ordination is not according to ancient order. Because they want spiritual fathers in Christ to beget children in their ministry, their ministers by the adversary are accounted no better than filii populi [sons of the people]; whereas will they nil they, even in regard of our hierarchy, the most frontless Papists must confess the children begot by our reverend fathers in the ministry of the Gospel, to be as legitimate as their own.158

Featley, like Downame and Prideaux, believed that episcopal ordination guaranteed the legitimacy of Christian ministry in a way that other modes of ordination could not. In his view, episcopacy ensured that the Church of England retained the fullness of Christ’s gift to his Church, a gift which was the means of propagating the Gospel.

266  Grace and Conformity

Conclusion The Synod of Dort offers an eloquent testimony to the Church of England’s membership of the Reformed theological community; but it was also a moment when the English Church asserted its distinctiveness from, and superiority to, the other European Reformed churches, in virtue of its episcopal structure. The British delegation acted as it did because, for a number of the most prominent Reformed churchmen of Early Stuart England, episcopacy had become a non-​negotiable element within their theological vision. Foreshadowed in the temple hierarchy of the Old Testament; reflecting a ministerial imparity instituted by Christ himself; firmly established by the Apostles and exhibited in their inspired writings; episcopacy was, in the eyes of these Reformed theologians, the perpetual and divinely sanctioned form of church polity, and only the implacable demand of necessity could warrant any departure from this Apostolic pattern. For Reformed Conformists, the church’s legitimately consecrated bishops derived their prerogatives in ordination and ecclesiastical jurisdiction through a personal, local succession that could be traced back to the Apostles. Episcopal ordination consequently assured the believers of their minister’s God-​given authority to teach; though it was the consonance of their minister’s doctrine with that of the Apostles that gave substance to that succession, and ultimately guaranteed the truth of his message. Since there had been no way for some Reformed churches to preserve both the purity of Catholic doctrine and the Apostolic form of church government; the non-​ episcopal polities which they had adopted were tolerable for the time being. However, the cause of Christian unity ultimately summoned those churches to return to the primitive and more scriptural practice maintained within the British churches. Reformed Conformists did not, of course, agree on every aspect of this vision. So whereas Carleton, Ward, and Davenant inclined to the view that bishops and presbyters were fundamentally part of the same order; Hall, perhaps under the influence of Lancelot Andrewes, had concluded that the presbyterate and the episcopate should be considered distinct orders, by virtue of their distinct ordinations and powers.159 That said, all the Reformed Conformists agreed, against Laud, that this question was not the heart of the issue. Furthermore, whereas Downame, Carleton, and Ward were clearly open to the possibility that the episcopate might exist in fact, though not in name, in other Protestant churches, Davenant and Hall did not make a

Episcopacy  267 similar suggestion. There were also different nuances in the Reformed Conformist case on episcopacy.160 Carleton was unusual in making so much of Cyprian’s vision of a unitary episcopate, an emphasis that made sense in a polemical work against Rome. Davenant was distinctive in his exploration of the Church as God’s household, an idea which he had drawn from the text of Colossians. And whereas Davenant, writing at a time when episcopacy was not under particular threat, mentioned its divine institution in passing; Hall, who was confronting the abolition of episcopacy in Scotland, made it the primary focus of his argument. Nonetheless, these Reformed Conformists shared a profound theological commitment to episcopacy, a commitment which set them apart from many contemporary Reformed theologians. This commitment engaged directly with their commitment to a Reformed reading of grace in their conception of Christian ministry as a means of grace. As Downame and Prideaux made clear, no one could profitably receive the ministry of the Church –​receive it with faith, in other words—​unless convinced that the minister acted and spoke with God’s authority. Episcopacy provided a clearer demonstration of a minister’s legitimacy than its rivals, because it exhibited the derivation of the minister’s orders from the Apostles themselves. For Featley, England’s retention of an episcopal hierarchy was a mark of particular divine favour, and was consequently a cause for national thanksgiving.

8 Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year Thomas Morton: A Defence of the Innocency of the Three Ceremonies (1618) When the British delegates at Dort extended their objection to the Belgic Confession so as to include anything in it that might be taken to impugn ‘legitimate external ceremonies;’ they did so at a time when the controversy over the Church of England’s liturgical arrangements was being energetically stoked, from both sides of the North Sea. In 1616, Thomas Morton was appointed Bishop of Chester, and it was not long before he was proceeding against a number of the diocese’s recalcitrant Nonconformists, in the Court of High Commission. Morton encouraged the ministers concerned to set out their objections to the Prayer Book in writing, and he then began composing a book intended to answer their objections.1 A few months later, in 1617, King James I used a visit to Scotland to showcase the English liturgy and to put pressure on the Kirk to bring its liturgical practice into closer alignment with that of the Church of England. In the same year, a prominent English separatist, William Brewster, who had fled to Holland in order to escape ongoing persecution for Nonconformity, republished, through his private press in Leiden, An abridgement of that book which the ministers of Lincoln diocese delivered to his Majesty. This pamphlet had first been printed at a secret English press in 1605, and it set out the principal puritan objections to the Book of Common Prayer. The stage was therefore set for a renewed conflict between Puritans and Conformists over the legitimacy and value of the liturgical provisions that set the Church of England apart from her Reformed sister-​churches in mainland Europe. In August 1618, in the Scottish city of Perth, a tightly controlled meeting of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved a set of Articles that enjoined kneeling at communion, confirmation by bishops, and the observation of certain holy days; all English ceremonies that were obnoxious Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0009

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  269 to many members of the Kirk.2 Shortly thereafter, Morton’s answer to the complaints about the Prayer Book made by the Chester Nonconformists and in the Abridgment, was published as A defence of the innocency of the three ceremonies of the Church of England (1618).3 In 1619, a hostile account of the Perth Assembly, written by the Scottish separatist David Calderwood, was published through Brewster’s Leiden press. In September 1619, following an investigation by Sir Dudley Carleton, who was by then the British Ambassador to the Netherlands, Brewster’s press was forcibly closed down, his stock impounded, and his primary collaborator arrested.4 Brewster was not, however, the only Nonconformist exile in the Netherlands who came under pressure from the English government at this time. William Ames had left England for the Netherlands in 1610, where he became chaplain to Sir Horace Vere, the commander of the English forces there, whilst also overseeing the English Congregation meeting in the Hague. Ames had immediately made his ecclesiastical loyalties clear, by publishing a Latin translation of William Bradshaw’s defence of Nonconformity, English Puritanism (1605), along with a letter, under his own name, attacking the Church of England’s canons and hierarchy.5 Ames had then distinguished himself with a number of anti-​Arminian polemical works in the run-​up to the Synod of Dort, as a result of which he was invited to serve as a theological adviser to the Synod’s President, Bogermann. James I forced Vere to suspend Ames as his chaplain early in 1619, and blocked his prospective appointment as professor of theology in Leiden.6 Ames eventually found security in 1622, with an appointment at Franeker University, and he promptly embarked on a long-​running campaign against Morton’s Defence. In 1622, he published A Reply to Dr Morton’s General Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies. He followed this up, in 1623, with a second volume, A Reply to Dr Morton’s Particular Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies, which focussed specifically on the surplice, the sign of the cross in baptism, and the requirement to kneel when receiving communion. Ames was again busy with this controversy shortly before his death.7 Ames’s sustained hostility to Morton’s Defence raises a question over Ryrie’s claim that ‘when we look at the lived experience of religion in this period, the supposed distinction between puritan and conformist dissolves into a blurred spectrum in which the extremes do not differ too starkly from one another.’8 After all, the three ceremonies that Morton set out to defend undoubtedly shaped ‘the lived experience of religion’ in most English parishes. The minister was expected to wear the surplice during every service; the sign

270  Grace and Conformity of the cross was a compulsory part of the baptismal rite; communicants were expected to receive the elements on their knees. One of the arguments that Ames advanced against the disputed ceremonies, in fact, was that they had so informed the religious experience of many churchgoers that they ‘do attribute as much holiness to some of these ceremonies, as they do to some holy ordinances of God.’9 Ames confessed and lamented ‘the opinion which many people in all parts of the land have concerning our ceremonies, viz. that the sacraments are not rightly & sufficiently administered without them.’10 This was not, in other words, an abstract polemical controversy divorced from religious experience. Morton’s Defence bore directly on the ‘lived experience of religion’: and Morton was attempting to vindicate the Conformist pattern of that lived experience against its detractors. As he made clear, in his prefatory letter to George Villiers, then Marquis of Buckingham, the target in his Defence was the ‘the Non-​conformist. He, although he doth owe his spiritual birth unto the Church, as well as his natural unto his parents; yet nevertheless doth he defame his Mother’s religious worship; infringe her wholesome liberty; and contemn her just authority: thereby occasioning that horrid schism, which is made by separatists, the dissected sects, and very Acephalists of this present age.’11 And although Morton himself preferred the term ‘Non-​conformist;’ he was clear that he was addressing those who also attracted the label ‘Puritan.’12 Brian Quintrell has suggested that Morton’s Defence justified the controverted ceremonies of the Prayer Book primarily by reference to a subject’s duty of obedience to the monarch. As Quintrell expresses it, Morton’s overarching argument was that it was not sufficient to refuse to conform to any of the adiaphora purely for reasons of conscience, as each of the king’s subjects also owed obedience to him as supreme governor of the church. That obligation should be recognized by observing the rituals of the Church of England in the practice of divine worship. To do so acknowledged the royal supremacy, spared the scrupulous worshipper’s conscience, and contributed to an orderliness in church services by collective participation.13

Quintrell contrasts Morton’s position on the ceremonies in the Defence, with two contemporary sermons by Andrewes and Buckeridge, both of which sought, by contrast, to defend the Prayer Book ceremonies as ‘essentially religious duties.’14

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  271 It is certainly true that Buckeridge saw the act of kneeling at communion as an intrinsic, and even, under ordinary circumstances, a necessary element of worship. As he put it, in the sermon Quintrell cites, ‘it is an act latriae exhibentis, of divine and religious worship, that is exhibited in recognition of supreme dominion unto God; and so, as in man the heart is first framed, and then the outward parts; so grace first offereth the heart and soul in devotion to God, and then tendereth the body in bowing and kneeling in his service.’ It followed, Buckeridge argued, that ‘This prostration and kneeling is not so much a ceremony, as a part or duty in divine worship, not to be omitted but in case of necessity.’15 Morton, by contrast, was perfectly happy to refer to the controverted ceremonies as ceremonies, as the title of his book makes clear. Morton also insisted, in relation to the disputed aspects of worship he discussed, that ‘in these our three, none of us did ever place any essential worship of God; or power of justification; or religious piety and sanctification; or do, in our estimation, prefer them before; yea, or do so much as equal them with any ordinance of God.’16 The Church of England did not command the observance of these ceremonies, in other words, because it thought that they made believers holy, or because it thought they were absolutely necessary.17 However, it would be reductionist to suggest, as Quintrell does, that Morton conceived the observance of the Church of England’s ceremonies to be merely a matter of civil obedience to the magistrate and not a religious act as well. He did indeed think them a matter of civil obedience, and argued that they bound human consciences as such.18 However, he also described the ceremonies as a matter of ‘religious decorum, and godly signification.’19 The ceremonies were of spiritual benefit to the worshipper, in a manner that went beyond the fulfilment of the Christian duty of civil obedience.20 God’s demand for decorum in Christian worship, Morton underlined, was made abundantly clear in the Scriptures: ‘Saint Paul, 1. Cor. 14. “Let all things be done decently, and in order.” And again; “Let all things be done unto edifying.” 21 ‘By virtue of which permission,’ Morton argued, ‘the Apostle doth grant a general licence and authority to all churches, to ordain any ceremonies that may be fit for the better serving of God.’22 Given these biblical injunctions, human decisions about the proper conduct of worship actually took on a divine character. Obedience to them consequently became an expression of religious obedience to God, and not simply civil obedience to the authorities that God had established.

272  Grace and Conformity Morton underlined that Calvin had made exactly the same point in relation to the church’s liturgical institutions; specifically, ‘kneeling in solemn prayer, which (saith he [Calvin]) is so human, that it is also divine. It is divine; but why? Even because it is a part of that decency, the care and observation whereof is commended unto us, by the Apostle . . . but human, so far as they are appropriated by men to some circumstance of person, time or place; and so it is in this Scripture rather intimated than expressed.’23 Morton then applied this principle to the controverted ceremonies of the Church of England. ‘By which rule,’ he argued, ‘we are likewise authorized to call some ceremonies of our Church, in a kind of generality, divine, so far as they have any dependence upon that general direction of Scripture, which commandeth that things be done in order, decency, & to edification: but human, in respect of the application of such rules, according to the discretion of the Church.’24 This was why the ceremonies that the Church of England imposed could indeed be counted as part of God’s worship, despite puritan objections to the contrary. As Morton indicated, The true understanding of the two acceptations of this phrase “parts of God’s worship” might easily have rectified your judgements; for it is sometimes taken in authors more strictly and properly for that essential form and manner of worship wherein there is placed an opinion of justice, sanctity, efficacy, or divine necessity: and so we hold it sacrilegious for any church to impose, or to admit of any such ceremony proceeding from human institution. Sometimes again the same phrase is taken more largely, for every circumstantial rite, which serveth for the more consonant and convenient discharge of that essential worship of God: and thus we hold it a piece of Christian liberty, belonging to the Church, to ordain ceremonies, which may tend to decency, order, and edification, as hath been already shown, and acknowledged.25

Morton was clear that the ceremonies imposed by the Church of England, although not absolutely essential to Christian worship, were nonetheless expressions of that worship, not merely opportunities for obedience to the magistrate. Morton also insisted that the Church of England’s ceremonies were beneficial to the worshipper as ‘moral signs . . . signifying unto us moral duties; to wit, the surplice to betoken sanctity of life; the signing the forehead with the

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  273 cross, constancy in the faith of Christ; and kneeling at the Communion, our humility in receiving such pledges of our redemption by Christ Jesus.’26 He cited the works of Calvin, Rainolds, Chemnitz, Jewel and Zanchi to establish both the legitimacy and benefit of such ‘significant’ ceremonies.27 Morton’s contention was, in other words, that the distinctive liturgical arrangements of the Church of England were not merely an aspect of religious worship, they were also conducive to the edification of the faithful, by wordlessly reminding them of their moral duties.28 Morton explained that a distinction should be made between two different kinds of significant ceremonies, ‘the one sacramental, by signification of grace conferred by God: the other is only moral, by signification of man’s spiritual duty and obedience towards God.’29 Among the spiritual or mystical signs used within the Church, some were merely significant, in that they resembled spiritual things; but others were not merely significant, but also ‘obsignant’, because they sealed and exhibited the truth of God’s promise.30 Sacraments were ‘obsignant’ ceremonies, because they ratified the Covenant of Grace and applied its benefits to the believer. The sprinkling of water in baptism, for example, ‘is a sign of remission of sin conferred upon the person baptized; and therefore is it proper to God, who only giveth the thing, to ordain such a sign.’31 A moral sign, by contrast, ‘doth not represent any collation of grace given by God unto man, but only notifieth a duty of man in some moral virtue which he oweth unto God.’32 For that reason, significant ceremonies that are merely moral in nature, unlike sacraments, can indeed be established by human authority, without the need for an explicit divine command. Contrary to puritan suggestions, Morton argued, this freedom to institute new ceremonies did not leave the door open for the introduction of corrupt Popish customs. For, as he put it, The word Popish is here taken of you in the strictest sense, not simply for the ceremonies themselves, but for the mixture of abuses that are in them, by the superstition of that Church. And therefore to conclude from the lawful use of ceremonies in our Church, to an appropriation of the Romish abuse of them, gave me just cause to call your consequence unconscionable; for as much as your own hearts can tell you, that our Church is not so earnest to entertain the use of any one ceremony, formerly observed in the Church of Rome, as it is zealous to abhor her superstition in all her abuses: some of them being brutish and senseless, some childish and ridiculous, some

274  Grace and Conformity heathenish and idolatrous; whereby such their ceremonies respectively are become to be most properly Popish.33

Since the Church of England had clearly distanced herself from any Roman Catholic superstitions about the ceremonies that she retained, there was no risk at all of Popery coming in by that route. Morton invoked Peter Martyr in support of his position.34 Morton then offered a number of biblical precedents for the establishment of morally significant ceremonies upon human authority, without a specific divine command. The first was the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple, a ceremony that was established without specific divine instruction, under Judas Maccabeus, and in which Jesus himself took part.35 This ceremony was, Morton pointed out ‘1. A ceremony of human invention, by Judas Maccabaeus. 2. Appropriated unto God’s service, in a solemn feast. 3. Ordained to teach a spiritual duty of thankfulness. 4. Significant, for benefits or blessings received [i.e. the resumption of Jewish worship in the Temple in 164BC, during the Maccabean revolt].’36 The same points could be made, Morton indicated, about the altar of witness constructed by the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh, which is described in Joshua 22, or about Solomon’s consecration of the courtyard of the Temple for sacrifices, in I Kings 8:64. Neither of these were the result of any divine command, and yet they are nowhere condemned.37 Morton saw something similar in the love feasts mentioned at Jude 12, in the observance of worshippers keeping their heads covered or uncovered, described in I Corinthians 11:2–​16, and in the kiss of peace mentioned at Romans 16:16.38 As he argued, in relation to the latter, ‘Is there now any point, in your general proposition, which is not particularized in this holy kiss? First, the institution (so far as it was not commanded by Christ) was human: secondly, the property of it, significant: thirdly, the use was in Sacris, to wit, in the time of holy and public worship: fourthly, the end was signification of Christian love.’39 Under the Apostles, in other words, the Church had evidently exercised the power to institute mutable ceremonies of religious significance, without a specific divine instruction to do so; and the Church, Morton argued, was still entitled to do so. The fact that such significant ceremonies may, in the past, have been abused was not, Morton insisted, a sufficient reason for abolishing them today. As he put it, ‘There was never almost any truth so divine, or ceremony so sacred, which the filthy mouths, and sordid fingers of some heretics, have

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  275 not wickedly polluted.’40 And ‘seeing the best things, and of most holy use have been subject unto heretical abuses of godless men; it will be almost impossible for us to find any ceremony which shall be altogether without exception; and to be forbidden to use any ceremony, would bring no small prejudice to our Christian liberty.’41 Morton insisted that Christian liberty was infringed quite as much by the superstition opinion that certain things were not permissible, as by the superstition opinion that they were necessary. As he put it, Christian liberty . . . is properly impeached by a doctrinal necessity; namely, by teaching men to believe something to be necessary in itself, which Christ by the power of his New Testament hath left to his Church, as free and indifferent. Which kind of doctrine our Church condemneth, as false and superstitious. And this superstition is twofold; the one is affirmative, the other negative. Affirmative superstition is to affirm the use of anything, that is indifferent, to be of absolute necessity; as without which the faith of Christianity, or the true worship of God, cannot possibly consist. Of which kind we have had many examples in Popery. The negative superstition is to deny the lawful use of anything, which Christ hath left free: with which kind of superstition, not only Papists, but also many ancient heretics have been dangerously infected. 42

For Morton, the natural corollary of Christian liberty was not freedom from any significant ceremonies at all; it was the freedom of the Church to impose or alter significant ceremonies, as best suited the divinely mandated goals of decency and order.43 In Morton’s mind, therefore, Reformed theological principles, rightly understood, were not in tension with Prayer Book ceremonies; they undergirded them.

Featley’s Ancilla and the Church of England’s Liturgical Year Morton’s Defence focussed on just three of the many Prayer Book ceremonies that Puritans found objectionable, namely the cross in baptism, the surplice, and kneeling during communion. Ames was unimpressed with such lack of breadth. ‘I would fain understand the reason,’ he wrote, ‘why three ceremonies are only defended, seeing there be many threes of those things which

276  Grace and Conformity stay many godly men from subscription and conformity, as is to be seen even in that abridgement which this defender doth chiefly oppose?’44 Prominent amongst the other complaints made by the Abridgement was the Prayer Book’s imposition of set feasts and fasting days: ‘It commandeth the observation of many holy-​days, and requireth the minister to bid them . . . It appointeth saint’s evens to be kept as fasting days . . . It appointeth the time of Lent to be kept as a religious fast, and perverteth both the example of Christ’s fast, & sundry other places of Scripture to the justifying thereof . . . ’45 The defence of the liturgical year was therefore a priority for those who sought to vindicate the Church of England’s polity from puritan attack. Joseph Hall briefly rose to that challenge in his Common Apology against the Brownists of 1610. This work was conceived as a response to a pamphlet by John Robinson, in whose separatist congregation in Leiden Brewster served as an Elder. Among Robinson’s many complaints against the English Church was this: ‘Though you have lost the shrines of saints, you retain their days, and these holy as the Lord’s day.’46 Hall’s response was robust: ‘We have not lost, but cast away the idolatrous shrines of saints: their days we retain; theirs, not for worship of them, which our Church condemneth, but partly for commemoration of their high deserts, and excellent examples: partly for distinction: indeed therefore God’s days, not theirs: their praises redound to him.’47 The primary aim of such days was divine service, with some time also for recreation. Hall found Biblical warrant for the Church to establish festival days in the feast of Purim recorded in Esther 9:17, the dedication of the walls of Jerusalem, recorded in Nehemiah 12:27, and the feast of the dedication of the Temple, mentioned in John 10:23. ‘If such days may be appointed by the Church,’ he wondered, ‘whose names should they rather bear (though but for mere distinction) then the blessed Apostles of Christ?’48 In any case, Hall suggested, Robinson’s focus on saints’ days was misleading, ‘for you equally condemn those days of Christ’s birth, Ascension, Circumcision, Resurrection, Annunciation, which the Church hath beyond all memory celebrated.’49 These days were observed in the English Church in the same way that the Sabbath was observed, though not in the same degree. For, in the case of such holy days, that observance was made ‘not in conscience of the day, but in obedience to the Church.’ Robinson and his associates, Hall argued, were happy to observe fasting days: ‘Why shall that be lawful in a case of dejection,’ Hall asked, ‘which may not in praise and exultation?’50 Such

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  277 festival days, Hall pointed out, were certainly permitted in the Reformed Churches of Holland and France.51 Featley undertook a more prolonged defence in his spiritual manual, Ancilla Pietatis. As indicated earlier, the Ancilla should be read in the context of the Montagu affair: Featley was using it, in part, to exhibit the compatibility of an orthodox Reformed reading of grace with the Prayer Book calendar. Such a polemical approach was, however, quite capable of addressing two different opponents at once. On the one hand, it addressed those, like Montagu, who had suggested that Reformed orthodoxy was incompatible with the Prayer Book, and ultimately entailed a fundamental disloyalty to the Church of England. On the other hand, it addressed those, like the promoters of the Abridgement, whose commitment to Reformed orthodoxy had drawn them into Nonconformity. Featley’s defence of the Church of England’s festivals has already been outlined. He was equally enthusiastic about the Church’s fasting days. In fact, Featley’s sustained interest in and defence of the Fast Days of the liturgical year raises a significant question mark over Webster’s suggestion that fasting ‘was, at most, a marginal concern’ for conformist writers.52 Featley criticized those who happily observed extraordinary fasts, in times of grave national peril, but neglected the ordinary fasts enjoined by the liturgical calendar. ‘Yet certainly,’ he remarked, ‘the devout soul out of a sympathy with her Saviour cannot but weep with him, as well as rejoice with him, in some measure. Fast with him on Good Friday, as well as feast with him, and for him, on Easter Day.’ For, as he put it. ‘If any tears of a sinner are the wine of angels, I am persuaded they are those tears of devotion, which after much fasting, and prayer, and meditation, spring out of the serious apprehension of Christ’s infinite love testified to mankind by his fasting, watching, praying, weeping, bleeding, and dying for us on the Cross.’53 It might be objected, Featley thought, that meditating on the Passion should be the focus of every day’s devotion, so particular commemorations were actually unnecessary. As he underlined, however, ‘it is more proper to remember the work of the day, in the day wherein it was wrought. And albeit the Jews were bound always to remember God’s wonderful deliverances; yet more strictly were they bound on the very day for that end appointed to be kept solemn.’54 It did not matter that there was no specific scriptural warrant for these days, Featley thought, because ‘the practise of the ancient Church, and the religious constitutions of the present, ratified by supreme authority, should sway in a matter of this nature.’55 Featley’s words are telling here. The

278  Grace and Conformity Church’s fasting days are an ancient and religious institution, not merely a civil one, even though they were also ratified by the King. Featley admitted that it was not a grievous religious error to use a prayer unrelated to the proper liturgical focus of the day; ‘yet it is,’ he suggested ‘an indecorum and blur in art. It is all one as if they should set a mark before them, and shoot no more towards it then any other white.’56 It was, therefore, a fitting Christian aspiration ‘to avoid this impropriety, if not incongruity.’57 Featley had consequently undertaken to ensure that all the private devotions proposed in the Ancilla were attuned to the day for which they were intended. His devotions were, in other words, a way of rooting the Church’s festival or fast days in the private prayer life of the believer. In doing so, Featley indicated, he had deliberately emphasized the importance of the Christian Sabbath. One of the complaints made about the Prayer Book in the Abridgement about feast days had been that ‘it preferreth them (in some sort) before the Lord’s Day. For the ordinary lessons appointed in the calendar for the Lord’s Day must give place to the proper lessons of that holy day that falls on the Lord’s Day.’ Featley made clear, however, that a proper regard for the Church’s feast days did not entail any belittling of the Sabbath. Quite the contrary, in fact; for, as he underlined, the Sabbath ‘is the chief and sovereign day, and the Queen of all days, and may rightly challenge the precedency of all festivals, both in regard of God’s strict command for the religious observing it, and for that it is the sampler of them, they being cut as it were out of the days of the week, otherwise days of labour, according to the pattern of the Sabbaths rest.’ The Church’s festivals, were echoes of the Sabbath, not competitors. Featley was very clear, however, that the Church’s festivals were not to be slighted, especially the dominical ones. As he underlined, The feasts peculiarly dedicated to our Saviour and the Holy Ghost succeed the Sabbath. . . For whatsoever scruple hath been made of saints’ days, the whole world as far as it is, or ever was Christian, hath observed religiously these feasts as monuments and a kind of sacraments to refresh the memory of the chief works of our Lord, and mysteries of our faith, to check and control whose universal and uniform practice, especially in a matter of this nature is most insolent madness.58

Once again, Featley was insisting that the due observation of feast days was, and always had been, a religious, not merely civil observance. They served to

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  279 remind the Christian of Christ’s saving works, and might even be described as a kind of sacrament intended for that purpose. Featley even recruited Calvin to his cause: ‘Is not Christ “the rose of Sharon” ’ Featley exclaimed, ‘and “the bright morning Star”? Doubtless then the festivals in special consecrated to him, ought to be as the fairest flowers in the round garland of the year, and brightest stars in the Church-​firmament. We never read of any (saith Calvin) that were blamed for drawing too much water out of the well of life: neither can we possibly give too much honour to the King of Glory.’59 Featley did not actually make provision in the Ancilla for saints’ days and their eves. He underlined that this did not reflect any qualms about such feasts. ‘The saints’, martyrs’, and arch-​angels’ days I have purposely omitted:’ he wrote, ‘not that I dislike the keeping of them; for I have ever, and will justify, and maintain the observation of them, according to that godly institution, and practice of our Church. But I desired to keep my book within the compass of the title, which is a Manual. And albeit we honour saints, and martyrs, yet religious devotion which is my theme is restrained to God by holy David.’60 The proper observation of saints’ days was, in other words, both justifiable and orthodox; it was simply that they were not Featley’s priority in the Ancilla. Featley enlarged upon the spiritual benefits of observing the liturgical year in the second part of the Ancilla; insisting, once again, that the Church’s feast and fasting days were a religious institution, and conducive, with the help of the Spirit, to a believer’s edification, because they brought to mind God’s merciful work in redemption. As he put it, in the dedication to the Countess of Denbigh, ‘the feasts representing to your religious thoughts what Christ hath done for you, will (through the blasts of God’s Spirit) inflame the heat of heavenly love in you: and the fasts admonishing you what Christ hath suffered for you, must needs yield abundant matter to supply the springs of godly sorrow.’61 The rhythm of the liturgical year, Featley suggested, alternating between feasts and fasts, actually reflected the natural constitution of humanity. As he put it, The heart of a man is in continual motion; it always either dilateth itself, or contracteth: and the hidden man of the heart in like manner hath his systole and diastole, (as the anatomists speak): his heart continually either enlargeth itself by joy, or contracteth itself by sorrow. And no doubt, when God bespeaks our hearts for himself, he especially expects and respects

280  Grace and Conformity these motions thereof and affections producing them. He will have us joy in him, and sorrow and long after him. Joy in his favour, and sorrow in his displeasure. Joy in his promise, and sorrow at his threats. Joy in the Holy Ghost, and sorrow in our own spirits. Feast to him in a thankful profession of his gracious goodness, and fast to him in an humble confession of sinful wickedness. If our feasts be feasts of devotion, and our fasts be fasts of contrition, our gracious Redeemer will vouchsafe to be present at both: he will feast and fast with us. At our fasts he will weep for our spiritual, as he did for Lazarus his corporal death. At our feasts he will turn our water into wine, and ravish our souls with heavenly melody.62

For Featley, in other words, the liturgical year was a godly institution, whose aim was to stir up devotion at some points and arouse contrition at others, in a manner perfectly fitting the spiritual constitution of humanity. The passages of scripture, the theological analyses, and the prayers which he allotted for every festival and fast were all designed to complement this religious end, and to do so in a way which both expressed orthodox Reformed belief and encouraged Christian assurance. Featley’s treatment of Christmas Day is a good example of this. The purpose of the feast was, he wrote, to celebrate ‘the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ As he did in relation to all the Christian festivals, Featley began by setting down the biblical grounds for this festival; establishing the correspondence between the Old Testament prophecies that pointed forwards to Christ’s birth and the New Testament passages that recorded it. To the Protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15, ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel;’ Featley linked Hebrews 2:16 ‘he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham,’ and Galatians 4:4 ‘when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman.’63 In relation to Genesis 49:10 ‘The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come;’ Featley explained that ‘Christ is called Shiloh from an Hebrew word signifying to send, or to save, or . . . to intimate Christ’s virgin birth.’64 Featley saw this fulfilled in Matthew 2.1 ‘when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king;’ since, as he explained, Herod ‘who reigned when Christ was born, was a stranger and so the sceptre was then departed from Judah.’65To the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 ‘The Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a Virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel,’

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  281 Featley related Matthew 1:24–​25 ‘Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name Jesus.’ To Isaiah 9:6 ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given;’ he related Luke 2:11 ‘For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.’ And to Micah 5:2 ‘But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting;’ he paralleled the accounts of Christ’s birth in Matthew 2 and Luke 2.66 Featley then set out the religious benefits which he encouraged his reader to draw from the festival. ‘For thine instruction,’ he wrote, ‘meditate on Christ’s birth. For thy comfort apply the benefits to thyself. For thy correction examine thy new birth and life, and quicken thine obedience by the exhortation. Thy thankfulness by the hymn. Thy zeal and devotion by the prayer.’67 Featley’s opening exhortation was ‘To strive and pray for the state of grace and regeneration.’68 This religious purpose was drawn directly from the Christmas Day collect in the Prayer Book, which reads ‘Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-​begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin: Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit.’ Featley then explained how this should be undertaken, in a way that clearly displayed the Reformed theology of grace that lay behind his devotional scheme. On this day, he wrote, ‘We must desire and pray that we may be regenerated, and born anew, because by it we obtain. 1. Entrance into the Kingdom of Grace; [and] Glory. 2. Knowledge. 3. Liberty from corruption; [and] reigning sin. 4. Adoption, and the title of the Sons of God. 5. The pre-​ eminency of the firstborn. 6. The spirit of supplication, and access to God with confidence. 7. The guidance of the Spirit. 8. An incorruptible inheritance.’69 Featley’s intended course of meditation on Christmas Day was designed to lead his reader steadily towards a sense of Christian assurance. He then set out a series of biblical texts that would do just that.70 Like the Easter Anthems, in the Prayer Book, Featley’s Christmas Day hymn was a collection of biblical verses that were widely taken as referring to the birth of Christ, beginning with the angelic song overheard by the shepherds, in Luke 2:14, ‘Glory be to God on High, in earth peace, good will to men,’ and ending with a verse from the Prayer Book canticle for Morning Prayer, the Benedictus ‘To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the

282  Grace and Conformity shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.’71 Featley then brought his Christmas devotions to a close with a substantial prayer rhapsodizing on the wonder and hope arising from the birth of Christ. ‘Thou which madest all days,’ he wrote, ‘wert this day made of a woman, and made under the Law. From all eternity it was never heard, that eternity entered into the calendar of time, supreme Majesty descended into the womb; immensity was comprehended; infinity bounded; ubiquity enclosed, and the Deity incarnated: Yet this day it was seen; for this day the Word became flesh; God became man, and to effect this wonderful mystery, a Virgin became a Mother.’72 Once again, Featley was quite explicit about the relationship between this festival, and a proper sense of Christian assurance: ‘Lord who this day camest down to me, draw me up to thee, and give me access with more confidence and boldness; for now thou art become my brother and ally by blood.’ 73 He then brought his Christmas prayer to a close with a confident petition for perseverance: ‘Let my faith conceive thee, my profession bring thee forth, my love embrace thee, and devotion entertain and continually keep thee with me till thy second coming. So come unto me Lord Jesus, come quickly.’74 In his discussion of the Church’s fasting days, Featley expanded on what he meant by calling the observation of the liturgical year a religious act. A work may be called ‘religious’ in a broad sense, simply because it is commanded by the Christian faith. But a work may also be called ‘religious’ in a narrower sense, because it is a work or act ‘in which religion properly taken for the worship of God consists.’75 These, in turn, are of two sorts: ‘1. Principal, as believing in God, praying & the like. 2. Accessory, serving as helps or preparations to the principal, as, watching, fasting and the like.’76 It followed that fasting was ‘not to be esteemed such an act of religion, as wherein principally and immediately we worship God; for the Kingdom of God (as the Apostle teacheth) “consisteth not in meats and drinks”, neither in feasting or fasting: . . . yet it may be truly called not only a good work, but also a religious, i.e. a work commanded by religion, and tending to religion, as a preparation and help thereunto.’77 When Featley referred to the observation of the liturgical year, whether through the observation of the Christian festivals, or through the observation of the Church’s fasting days, as a ‘religious’ action, he meant that it was a work commanded by the Church, and that it promoted a religious end by serving as a preparation or help towards that end. The explicitly religious goal of these acts was what distinguished them from other acts of civil obedience.

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  283 Featley then applied this analysis more specifically to Lent. ‘The Lent Fast,’ he wrote, ‘is a mixed constitution; partly civil, appointed by the King or State, to preserve young cattle, spend fish, and encourage fishermen: partly ecclesiastical ordered by the Church for religious ends.’78 The religious ends that the Church intended to promote through the Lent Fast were: 1. To beat down the flesh at that season when (by reason of the heat of the blood) it usually waxeth most wanton . . . 2. To conform the members to the Head. In this season of the year our Lord’s Agony and bitter Passion were endured, and are remembered: and therefore most fit it is that by fasting, watching, and tears, we express true remorse and sorrow for those our sins which were the causes of those his sufferings. 3. To prepare us to the celebration of the Feast of Easter, and the participation of the Blessed Sacrament . . . 4. To celebrate, and (as far as we are able) to imitate our Lord’s fast of forty days, at least by some kind of abstinence during that whole time to imprint that miraculous fast of our Saviour for us deeper in our memories.79

These religious aims were the reason why Featley was able to explain the Lent fast, through a brief catechism, that appeared in one of the 1626 editions of the Ancilla: Q. Doth the Church of England keep the Lent fast as religious, or a mere civil constitution? A. Not as a mere civil, but also a religious sanction: for (as it appeareth in the Book of Common Prayer) special collects, Epistles, and Gospels, with a Commination are appointed for divers days in Lent. Q. Is it not Popery to keep strictly the Lent Fast as a religious institution? A. It is not: for first, the religious observation of Lent is far more ancient then Popery. There are such evident prints and footsteps of it in the authentical records of the primitive Church, that he is altogether ignorant in the writings of the Fathers, or blind that seeth them not. Secondly, we keep not Lent as the Papists do, but as the ancient Christians did before Popery was hatched. As in other things: so in this we purge away the dross; we retain the gold; wee remove the abuse; wee preserve the use. 1. We place

284  Grace and Conformity not Religion, or the substance of God’s worship in abstaining from any kind of meat. 2. We renounce all merit by fasting. 3. We abstain not from flesh as being any way conceived by us to be more unholy then fish. 4. We do not equalize human constitutions Ecclesiastical or Civil to Divine Laws. The one we teach directly and immediately to bind the conscience, the other but indirectly & mediately. 5. We keep it not by virtue of any papal constitution, but in conformity to the ancient Church, and obedience to His Majesty’s ecclesiastical laws.80

Featley’s earliest discussion of Lent was significantly expanded before the year was out. A long essay in defence of the Lent Fast was added, which was intended to settle any consciences that had been troubled by ‘some great masters in Israel.’81 Christian liberty, he insisted, was quite as compatible with set and regular fasting days, as it was with the extraordinary and occasional ones which most puritans were quite happy to observe.82 Indeed, Featley thought, regular fasts might actually be more pleasing to God. ‘Doubtless,’ he wrote, ‘as that myrrh is more precious which drops from the tree of its own accord, than that which runneth after pricking or incision: so those devotions are more kind and pleasing to God, which love and a desire of growing in spiritual grace move us to: than such as present necessity, and horror of imminent judgments extort from us.’83 He then quoted a lengthy passage of Hooker that made the same point.84 Furthermore, he argued, if it was legitimate for Church governors to establish a new fasting day, why was it not legitimate for them to observe ancient fasting days such as Lent, which were brought in, Featley suggested, either by the Apostles or by their immediate successors, as the mention of Lent in Ignatius’s letter to the Philippians would seem to suggest.85 Augustine had observed, Featley pointed out, that the season of Lent was not observed in the same way across the Christian world. He consequently marvelled that ‘Cardinal Bellarmine and other Romanists versed in antiquity, can reconcile their judgments with their learning: who make the Lent Fast as it is this day observed in the Roman Church, a divine sanction and an Apostolic tradition, binding all churches to the like observation. Were it so, there could not have been that variety in the keeping Lent Fast in the primitive Church, whereof Irenaeus, Socrates, and other ancient writers beyond exception give us notice.’86 He then proceeded to set down a number of early church authorities on the matter,87 concluding from them that ‘as the errors of the Papists is discovered, who enforce their Lent as an Apostolic tradition,

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  285 to be kept under pain of damnation; so also their ignorance is descried, who misconceive our Lent to be a mere Romish device, or Popish tradition.’88 Addressing his argument specifically to the latter group, Featley underlined how weak an argument theirs would be, even if it were true. He did so on grounds similar to those that Morton had used to defend the Prayer Book ceremonies. ‘For if it were granted,’ he wrote, ‘that in later ages we in the Western Church had received from Rome the Lent Fast, together with the Scriptures, Sacraments and holy orders: must we therefore cast all these away, because we received them from so bad a hand?’89 The Church of Rome may have been a schismatical, or heretical church, or indeed the Whore of Babylon, ‘yet I know of no law of God or man forbidding us to accept even from her a sacred jewel. If she have slurred, defiled or defaced it; we may, nay we ought to wash, rub, brighten and refine it.’90 For, as Featley underlined, ‘albeit the Church of Rome be very foul . . . yet not all evil is within her, neither is all that is in her evil. And if she have any good in this kind, they have better right to it who are better, and will use it well, than she who abuseth it.’91 Featley then observed, however, that such an argument was not actually necessary in the case of Lent, ‘For it is most evident that the dedication of a fast before Easter, called Quadragesima, or Lent, is by many hundreth [sic] of years more ancient than any Romish or Popish tradition properly so called.’92 The ancient Christian churches may not all have observed Lent in exactly the same way; but the evidence showed that they had all kept a fast before Easter.93 Only the heretic Aerius, the same heretic who also opposed episcopacy, of course, had refused to do so.94 ‘Now I leave it to the discreet Christian,’ Featley went on, ‘to judge whether it be safer and of better report to go in this cross way of heteroclite heretics, or tread in the path of the ancient doctors of the Church: wherein we may trace the footsteps of a Lent Fast even from the footsteps of Christ and his apostles.’95 Featley then set down a long catalogue of Patristic support for the Lent fast, before asking ‘If we may fetch the Lent Fast from an higher and clearer source than the puddle of Roman tradition, what objection of any moment can be made against our Lent devotions?’96 For, as he underlined, ‘The abstinence from daintier meats and drinks, and often forbearing our daily repast, is but to master our flesh, or but to punish it for former riot, and to afflict our soul for our sins, and to fit both body and soul to religious duties then more frequently to be performed. And if this be superstition, what is religion?’97 Once again, Featley would not let his reader get away from the fact that he was promoting the Lent Fast as a specifically religious observance.

286  Grace and Conformity Featley made the point that ‘The reformed churches beyond the sea, who hate the very garment spotted by the Whore of Babylon, yet both avow the antiquity, and allow the piety of our Lent Fast, being purged from Popish errors concerning it, and superstitions in it.’98 He was the able to cite both the Second Helvetic Confession, ­chapter 24, and the Second Bohemian Confession, c­hapter 15. Featley then concluded his discussion with a powerful exhortation to devout Lenten observance: Let us who breathe in the purest air of all the reformed churches, and are freest from fogs of Roman superstition, retain our Lent and observe it according to the holy injunctions of our Church, and account is as it is termed in our language, a sacred loan, or a special time lent to us by God, to call ourselves to account for misspending the rest of the year, to bewail our sins in sackcloth and ashes, to bring down our proud flesh and subdue it to the Spirit, to improve our talent of grace by frequency of religious exercises, and to prepare ourselves for the most public, sacred and solemn participation of the body and blood of our Redeemer at Easter.99

This introductory essay was followed by a significantly expanded series of questions and answers on the Lent Fast. These made clear that religious fasts were indeed a divine ordinance, but that the prescription of the specific time and manner of fasting was an ecclesiastical and human constitution, entirely consonant with the Word of God. ‘To fast religiously at some time, is God’s command,’ Featley wrote, ‘at this time, to wit, in Lent, is the Church’s precept.’100 Featley made clear that the avoidance of certain sorts of meat during Lent was actually a matter of civil obedience (since it was enjoined by the King to support the fishing industry)101; but ‘our forbearing all dainty, costly and more pleasing meats, and drinks, as Daniel did, as also our more sparingly feeding at our meals, and oftentimes missing them is religious, or upon religious and spiritual considerations.’102 Lenten observance was therefore both a civil and a religious matter, he urged; and he reiterated the reasons he had given in the earlier catechism for the church to prescribe this ‘physic of fasting for the soul,’103 including the idea that it was a celebration of Christ’s own forty day fast. Featley significantly expanded his discussion of the last point, noting that many Reformed doctors denied that Christ’s own fast could be imitated in any way, since it was miraculous in nature. Featley found their reasons unconvincing. Christ’s fast could be taken as a miraculous demonstration of his

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  287 divinity, in which case it could not be imitated; but it could also be taken ‘as a moral remedy against temptation, or rather a spiritual armour which Christ took upon himself when he was to buckle with the Devil; and thus we may, and ought to imitate Christ’s fast in the kind, though not in the degree . . . ’104 After all, Christians cannot pray with the same intensity as Christ; but no one would conclude from this that they should not pray.105 When Featly turned to the devotional exercise for Ash Wednesday, he followed the same pattern as he had for Christmas Day. He first established the scriptural foundations of the day, pointing to the Old Testament types of Christ’s fast, in those of Moses (Exodus 34:28) and Elijah (I Kings 19:8), and the New Testament accounts of it in Matthew and Luke. He then set out his spiritual exhortations for Ash Wednesday, which were ‘For thine instruction meditate on Christ’s Fast. For thy comfort apply the benefit of it to thy soul. For thy correction condemn thy luxury, and consider what great cause thou hast to humble thy soul with fasting. Quicken thy repentance by the Psalm. Thy fasting by the exhortation. Thy devotion by the prayer ensuing.’106 Featley’s Psalm was a suitable concatenation of penitential verses. His exhortation then set out nine reasons why a good Christian ought to fast: ‘1. God commandeth it. 2. Christ commendeth it . . . 3. The Saints practised it . . . 4. It expelleth the Devil. 5. It quickens Prayer. 6. It humbleth the Spirit. 7. It tameth the flesh. 8. It averteth God’s Judgements. 9. It obtaineth blessings. Temporal. Spiritual.’107 This was followed by a long sequence of texts which illustrated Featley’s contention that religious fasting had been practiced by godly men and women under both Testaments. Featley then rounded off the devotion with a penitential prayer. ‘My sins cry for vengeance,’ he wrote, ‘and shall I be silent for pardon? Gracious God either silence them, or hear me. If thou wilt not hear the voice of my words, hear the voice of my tears: if thou wilt not hear them, hear the voice of thy Son’s blood which speaketh better things then the blood of Abel.’108 Even in the midst of such seasonal penitence, however, there was a strong statement of a Christian assurance, rooted in a Reformed conception of grace. The prayer made clear, for example, that, despite the believer’s many sins, the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence testified to their salvation: ‘I have grieved thy spirit, but it grieveth me that I should been so graceless as to grieve that Spirit of grace, which sealeth thy chosen to salvation.’109 The prayer also made clear that the blood of Christ was of sufficient value to outweigh any sin: ‘The guilt of my sin is great, but the price of thy blood is greater. I have offended an infinite Majesty, but satisfaction hath been made by an infinite Majesty. My

288  Grace and Conformity wickedness cannot exceed thy goodness: for my power of sinning is finite, but thy faculty of pardoning is infinite.’110 And it came to a fitting climax with a confident vision of ultimate pardon and restoration: ‘Let no sight delight me, till I see my sins removed like a mist and thy countenance shine upon me. Let no sound or voice delight me, till I hear thee by thy Spirit to speak peace to my conscience, and say to my soul, I am thy salvation.’111

Richard Holdsworth’s Defence of the Lent Fast Just a year after the publication of Featley’s Ancilla, and possibly as a riposte to it, John Cosin published A collection of private devotions (1627), in which he offered rather more elevated reasons for the observance of Easter Day and Lent than Featley had done, whilst making no concessions at all to puritan qualms about the Sabbath.112 Of Easter Day, Cosin wrote, ‘this sacred festival was instituted by the divine authority of God and of Christ himself. In regard whereof, it ought to be no less to us, than it was of old to the Christians all the world over, even the feast of all feasts, and the solemnity of all solemnities, the highest and the greatest that we have.’113 Cosin’s claims for the Lent Fast were not quite so exalted, but he insisted, nonetheless, that the season had been religiously observed ‘throughout all ages, both in the Greek and in the Latin Church.’114 He cited a number of Patristic references earlier than Augustine, which suggested that Lent was an observance that actually dated back to the time of the Apostles. He then remarked that the same point had been made ‘after them by a whole cloud of witnesses, even to our own times: all of which being put together will prove abundantly that the Lent which we now keep, is, and ever hath been, an Apostolical constitution.’115 Cosin’s claim that the feasts and fasts of the Church’s year were based on such exalted authority was immediately denounced by William Prynne. In A brief survey and censure of Mr Cosin his cozening devotions (1628), Prynne set out Cosin’s discussion of Lent, and concluded that ‘from the words and scope of all which passages, the author doth palpably teach: that the Lent fast is an apostolical constitution, coming from divine authority, which binds us accordingly to observe it.’116 Cosin was suggesting, Prynne argued, that the fasting days of the liturgical year were observed in England, ‘not in any political respect, as prescribed and enjoined by the state for public ends . . . but as apostolical precepts and constitutions, prescribed and enjoined by the Church’s bare authority.’117 But this, Prynne argued, was not the way in which

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  289 the Church of England understood them. As he put it: ‘our Church doth principally observe these days: not as fasting days or days of devotion to be spent in prayer and fasting, but rather, yea chiefly, as fish days, for the advancing of fishing, and sparing of young cattle, not as days enjoined by the Church’s but designed by the state’s authority.’118 Then, with puritan hackles already raised, Charles I issued an edict on 24 June 1632, announcing a crackdown on those who did not observe the dietary rules of the Church’s fasting days. These unsettling developments made the reiteration of the conformist case for the religious, as opposed to a merely civil observance of Lent, highly desirable. Richard Holdsworth, the Professor of Divinity at Gresham College in London, quickly rose to the challenge. His lectures on the subject were posthumously published as part of the Praelectiones Theologicae (1661), but they were probably delivered in late 1632 or early 1633.119 In them, Holdsworth argued, just as Featley had done, that the Lent Fast was primarily a religious, rather than a civil institution. His expansive and detailed defence of Lent illustrates, once again, that fasting was not of marginal concern to the conformist mind. Holdsworth referred to Lent as the ‘anniversary’ of the fast which Christ underwent after his baptism.120 He noted, however, that there was considerable disagreement among theologians about the nature of this season;121 and he proposed to chart a via media between the dissenting parties. As he put it, ‘some truly are disposed to the extremes, and that both to the right and to the left. To the right, [are] those who make the institution originally divine; to the left, those who [make it] a merely human constitution. And between these two are others interposed who follow the middle way.’122 In other words, Holdsworth was deliberately positioning the Reformed Conformist understanding of Lent which he was articulating, as the virtuous via media between excesses reminiscent of Prynne’s Puritanism, on the one hand, and excesses reminiscent of Cosin’s Laudianism, on the other. Those who claimed that Lent was a merely human institution either dismissed it as superstitious, or accepted it, but on the mistaken grounds that it was a civil institution without any sacred dimension.123 Although Holdsworth admitted that Lent had been gravely corrupted by the Roman Catholic Church; he rejected the idea that a solemn annual fast, when it is piously observed, could be dismissed as superstitious.124 Furthermore, he argued, whilst the laws of the realm certainly did impose dietary regulation, during Lent, for political purposes; the institution itself was much older than those laws.125 ‘The sum of this matter is,’ he suggests, ‘that the Lent fast took

290  Grace and Conformity its origin from the Church, but received vigour and authority from the laws of princes.’126 In other words, the Lent fast, as it was observed by the Church of England, was not merely a secular institution; rather, it had both an ancient and spiritual aim as well as a more recently acquired political one. In that, Holdsworth was at one with Featley. Turning to the opposite extreme, Holdsworth observed that Bellarmine, and a number of other Roman Catholic authors,127 claimed that fasting in Lent was an Apostolic institution, and they deployed numerous Patristic authorities to establish their case. Holdsworth pointed out, however, that the Church Fathers who explicitly stated that Lent was an apostolic tradition were both few in number and relatively late. Furthermore they were all writers who habitually used the word ‘Apostolic’ to describe Church customs which were ancient, but whose origin was not actually known, so their testimony is unreliable.128 There are, Holdsworth admitted, very many Church Fathers who mention the observance of Lent. In fact, he remarked, there is hardly a writer from the fourth to the sixth century who does not.129 Even so, that is merely circumstantial evidence; and although it makes the Apostolic origin of Lent a possibility,130 there are other reasons for thinking it unlikely. The first is that there is no mention of Lent in the writings of the New Testament, and ‘what is not evangelical, excites mistrust that it is not apostolic.’131 Furthermore, since the scriptures are God-​breathed, they would not omit a genuinely Apostolic tradition, which was binding on the faithful. The second is that Lent was diversely observed within the early Church, and ‘what is not uniform and identical, it is probable that it is not an apostolic tradition. For what the Apostles instituted, since they were taught by the same Spirit, they instituted in the same way everywhere, in order that it might be kept uniformly by all.’132 Holdsworth pointed to the histories of Eusebius, Socrates and Sozomen133 and Letter 36 of Augustine134 as evidence of this diversity. He concluded that, since the observance of the Lent fast is evidently not an Apostolic tradition, it must be an ecclesiastical institution instead.135 Holdsworth then turned from the origin, to the purpose of Lent. He argued that fasting, in itself, was an indifferent, rather than a virtuous act. ‘Fasting . . . ,’ he wrote, ‘is not numbered among those things which are good of themselves, and to be sought for their own sake, but among those things which are related to something else, and are therefore good and laudable only to the extent that they are ordered to something better than themselves, and to a good end.’136 The ends of fasting in general, Holdsworth suggests, are well

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  291 known: the mortification and subjection of the flesh; the preparation of the spirit for sacred meditations; and the expression of our humiliation before God as we confess our sins.137 However, Holdsworth thought it worthwhile to explore the rationale for the Lent Fast in particular, given that the Roman Catholics had advanced a number of altogether specious reasons for it.138 He noted, in passing, that Protestant writers had not generally explored this question, since Lent was either condemned, or simply not observed, in most Protestant Churches.139 His only recourse was, therefore, to wade through the various reasons that had been advanced by the Roman Catholics, in the hope of finding something convincing. Holdsworth immediately dismissed all arguments for Lent based on various mathematical calculations, such as the suggestion of some Church Fathers that Lent is meant as a kind of temporal tithe. As he pointed out: the mathematics does not work and, even if it did, God is entitled to the whole year, not just a tenth of it.140 Holdsworth also dismissed all arguments for the Lent fast which suggested, as Bellarmine had, that it was intended either as a source of merit, or as a means of satisfying for sins. This was wrong, Holdsworth insisted, since no morally good human work could ever be meritorious. This was the case, a fortiori, with fasting, since it is not even a morally good work at all, unless it was simultaneously accompanied by prayer and repentance.141 Holdsworth’s Reformed theology of grace therefore bore directly on his attitude to the liturgical year. Having dismissed these unsatisfactory explanations for the Lent fast; Holdsworth set out some principles which might shed light on the subject. First, he noted: if there are good reasons for a religious practice in general, then those reasons also apply to a particular instance of that practice. As a result, all the reasons advanced for fasting in general applied equally to the Lent fast.142 Secondly, he noted: ‘in offices of piety, it is sufficient to establish a legitimate institution, if those offices, which are prescribed in the divine scriptures generally and under an indefinite time, are reduced to a certain and definite time by human authority.’143 For, Holdsworth suggested, the Church must have the authority to make laws about matters adiaphora, and to determine, with prudence, when those actions, whose timing is not specified in the scriptures, should be performed. Otherwise, he noted, there would be confusion, and the worship of God would languish.144 His argument here chimed precisely with Featley’s. Thirdly, Holdsworth argued, just as the rationale for fasting in general lay in it its relation to other virtuous acts, like prayer and repentance, so the rationale for the Lent fast lay in its relation to

292  Grace and Conformity other things as well. More specifically, the Lent fast was a means of preparing to receive the sacrament at Easter;145 it was a means of exercising ecclesiastical discipline by requiring the faithful to perform public penance for their sins;146 and it was a means of imitating the moral example set by Christ during his miraculous fast, though it is not, of course, an attempt to recreate the miracle.147 Holdsworth turned, finally, to consider the various ways in which the Lent fast had been corrupted by the Roman Catholics. The first and gravest abuse, he suggested, lay in the wicked teaching of Bellarmine and others, that the choice of foods enjoined by Rome is a holy act of worship which could satisfy for sin and merit salvation.148 Such teaching was the consequence of sinful pride, and it must be rejected out of hand, ‘because it is a contradiction of the divine letters and word, opposed to the kindness of divine grace, insulting to the divine merits of Christ, and indeed repugnant to right reason.’149 Once again, Reformed theological instincts was decisively shaping Holdsworth’s reading of Lent. Fasting cannot be counted an essential act of worship, Holdsworth insisted, because scripture teaches that there is no sanctity or justice to be found in corruptible and earthly things. Whatever virtue there is in a fast comes not from the act itself, but from the attitude of the soul undertaking it, and the ends to which it is directed.150 Just like Featley, he saw the Lent fast as an accessory, rather than a primary act of religious devotion. The second major Roman abuse of Lent, Holdsworth suggested, was the damage the Roman Church did to Christian consciences by claiming that breaking its dietary rules was a mortal sin. This teaching, he says, was not merely wrong, it was hypocritical, especially given the many dispensations from these rules, which the Roman Church itself allowed. Holdsworth did not deny that the Church, just like the Christian magistrate, is entitled to impose dietary regulations for some legitimate cause or common utility. But if anyone broke such rules through inadvertence, and without intending any contempt or causing any scandal, then they had committed no sin, since these regulations were not a matter of divine law.151 The third Roman abuse of Lent, Holdsworth argued, was the damage which has been done to the Lent Fast itself. A fast, Holdsworth insisted, involved abstinence from all food and drink until the evening: that is the Biblical pattern laid down in Jonah 3. But the Roman Catholics have undermined Lenten abstinence in a number of ways: they allow the fast to end as early as midday; they permit a number of collations during the period of the fast; they permit luxurious meals at the end of the day, so long as the dietary

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  293 rules are respected; and they prohibit the eating of meat, while permitting the consumption of wine and all manner of other delicacies. ‘In so many ways,’ he contended, ‘they sin against all the laws of a fast, and against that which is the chief of all, the definition itself.’152 For Holdsworth, in other words, the Roman Catholic Lent was no fast at all. As a result, it was the Lent Fast as observed by the Church of England that most closely reflected the godly practice of the primitive Church, and the scriptural attitude to fasting. The Lent Fast, at least as it was observed by Reformed Conformists within the English Church, was therefore an expression of, not a challenge to, a Reformed approach to Christian devotion.

Preaching the Liturgical Year: Featley’s Clavis Mystica (1636) and Prideaux’s Certain Sermons (1637) The confidence in the religious value of the liturgical year that has been observed in Featley’s Ancilla and in Holdworth’s Pralectiones, can also be seen in Featley’s and Prideaux’s major sermon collections. Featley’s 1626 volume, Clavis Mystica has already been referred to: Prideaux issued a somewhat smaller collection, Certain Sermons, a year later. Unlike Featley, Prideaux did not set out the purpose of his publication in the dedicatory letter; but it would not be too far-​fetched to suggest that it was, like Featley’s, intended to articulate the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, as he understood it; to showcase, in other words, the preaching of an authentically Reformed style of Conformity. In this context, it is significant that both Featley and Prideaux chose to include in their collections a number of sermons that were associated with the festivals and fasts to which Puritans often objected. As a result, their sermon collections were another means of demonstrating that a Reformed theology of grace was perfectly compatible with the religious observance of the Church’s festivals and fasts. Featley included a sermon preached on the First Sunday in Lent, in which he argued that the religious observance of Lent was an ancient and laudable custom, and reiterated many of the points he had made in the Ancilla. ‘Now albeit private repentance hath no day set, nor time prefixed to it, but is always in season:’ he wrote, yet now is the peculiar season of public, when the practice of the primitive, and the sanction of the present Church calls us to watching and fasting, to

294  Grace and Conformity weeping and mourning, to sackcloth and ashes, to humiliation and contrition; when in a manner the whole Christian world (I except only some few heteroclites) accordeth with us in our groans, and consorteth with our sighs, and keepeth stroke with us in the beating our breasts, and setteth open the sluices to make a flood of tears, and carry away the filth of the whole year past.153

Once again, Featley was underlining that the observance of Lent was a religious matter, enjoined by the Church for spiritual ends. Featley suggested, in fact, that Lent, and the other set fasts of the Church’s year, were actually a necessary bulwark against the rising tide of human wickedness. ‘Verily such is the overflowing of iniquity, and inundation of impurity in this last and worst age of the world,’ he wrote, ‘that the most righteous among us can hardly keep up their head, and hold out their hands above water, to call to God for mercy for themselves & others: hath not then the Church of God great reason to oppose the Eves, Embers, & Lent fasts, as so many flood-​gates, if not quite to stay, yet somewhat to stop the current of sin?’154 Featley spoke in stark terms of the sin that infected the noblest works of human beings: ‘even when we pray against sin, we sin in praying: when we have made holy vows against sin, our vows by the breach of them turn into sin: after we have repented of our sins, we repent of our repentance, and thereby increase our sin.’155 A proper grasp of human depravity should, he thought, spur every Christian to penitence at all times, and the most devout observance of the fasting days prescribed by the Church. ‘In which consideration,’ he wrote, ‘if all the time that is given us should be a Lent of discipline, if all weeks Embers, if all days of the week Ash Wednesdays, how much more ought we to keep Lent in Lent now, at least continually to call upon the name of God for our continual blaspheming it?’156 Lent was the proper time, he urged, ‘to fast for our sins in feasting, now to weep and mourn for our sins in laughing, sporting, and rioting in sinful pleasures.’157 This was the reason, Featley argued, that the Church imposed dietary discipline during Lent. As he put it, ‘to this end our tender mother the Spouse of Christ debarreth us of all other delights, that we should make God’s statutes our delights: for this cause she subtracteth our bodily refection, that we may feast our souls: therefore she taketh away or diminisheth our portion in the comforts of this life, that with holy David we should take God for our portion.’158 The religious exercises of watching, fasting, mourning and prayer, which were proper to the season, were, he argued, ‘not only kind

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  295 fruits of your devotion, special exercises of your mortification, necessary parts of contrition, but also testimonies of obedience to the Law, and duties of conformity to Christ’s sufferings, and of preparation to our most public and solemn Communions at Easter.’159 Featley ended his by suggesting that the mourning and penitence that he had enjoined during the Lenten season, would ultimately bring comfort, when it was combined with a proper sense of Christian assurance. ‘Thus I have pricked you out (to use the phrase of the musicians),’ he remarked, ‘a lesson of compunction; which though it be a sad pavane to the outward man, yet it is a merry galliard to the inward. The physic which kindly worketh, and maketh the patient heart-​sick for the present, yet much comforteth him out of assured hope, that the present pain will bring future ease & help.’160 Once again, Featley’s point here was that the observance of Lent, was not merely compatible with Reformed spirituality, it was of positive benefit to it. The enthusiasm for the liturgical year which Featley exhibited in the Clavis Mystica was perhaps predictable, given his remarks on the subject in the Ancilla. But it is possible to find the same commitment in Prideaux’s published sermons as well. He included two sermons in his collection that related to the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter; both of which had already been published among his Eight Sermons (1621). Then, they had perhaps been intended as a gesture of support for King James’s religious policy in Scotland which, as indicated earlier, included the requirement of the Five Articles of Perth (1618) that the Kirk observe some of the Christian festivals, among them Christmas and Easter. These sermons played rather differently, however, in the religious environment of the late 1630s, when Cosin’s controversial Private Devotions had associated the strict observance of the liturgical year with a particular theological agenda. By republishing such sermons, Prideaux, like Featley, was demonstrating that the Christian festivals were an orthodox expression of Reformed Conformity. For Christmas Day, Prideaux had taken as his text Psalm 110:3 ‘In the day of thy power shall the people offer thee free-​will offerings with an holy worship; the dew of thy birth is of the womb of the morning.’ This Psalm, he argued, was a clear prophecy of Christ’s first coming. In the verse he had chosen, one could observe, first, ‘the solemnity of this time,’ namely the Incarnation of Christ; second ‘our duties in celebrating this time’s solemnity;’ and third ‘a comfort to the afflicted Church,’ in the promise of a hidden but fruitful propagation of the gospel, despite the opposition which the Church might face.161 With this reference to the relative invisibility of the Church,

296  Grace and Conformity Prideaux was, of course, underscoring his Reformed theological convictions. Again, such remarks played rather differently at a time when some Laudians were downplaying the theological significance of the invisible Church. Divines often observed, Prideaux pointed out, four distinct ‘comings’ of Christ: his coming in the flesh in the Incarnation; his coming into the hearts of the faithful by grace; his coming at the hour of every human being’s death; and, finally, his coming at the day of judgment. ‘In reference to these four comings of Christ;’ Prideaux pointed out, ‘the Church by a laudable custom, hath anciently celebrated the four Sundays, immediately going before the feast of the Nativity, by the name of Advent Sundays, that prepared before-​ hand, with the due meditation of so inestimable a benefit, we might solemnize the Nativity, with the greater triumph.’162 So Prideaux was not merely celebrating the Christmas festival, he was also commending the structure of the liturgical year in which that festival was embedded. Prideaux then proceeded to set out an orthodox Chalcedonian interpretation of the Incarnation, but he could not resist the opportunity to take a swipe at the Lutherans as he did. Speaking of the Early Church Fathers, he wrote that ‘They constantly maintained the distinction and integrity of both natures against Eutyches’ confusion; united notwithstanding in one and the same person, against Nestorius distraction . . . Wherein our Lutherans are farthest out, by grounding the hypostatical union on the transfusion of the proprieties from one nature into another, and not (as they ought to do) on the communication of the subsistence from the Deity to the Manhood.’163 So Prideaux was wearing his Reformed theological commitments very much on his sleeve, even as he celebrated one of the religious festivals that many puritans found objectionable. When Prideaux turned to address the duties to be expected of Christians during this festival, he underlined that solemn, orderly and indeed beautiful public worship were central to their task. His heavy implication was that the comely liturgical provisions of the English Church were precisely the kind of thing that the Psalmist had had in mind. As he put it, Two things may be hence gathered, as the graces and lustre of all Christian worship; cheerfulness in the undertaking, & sincerity in the performance. Both which, as they concern a settled Church or congregation, must be set forth unto the world in regard of the place, the temple appointed for that purpose, for the more solemnity. In respect of the administration, in vestures or gestures, or some mark of difference, which shall be thought

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  297 fittest, for decency & edification, between the priest and people. There may be a holiness without external beauty; and there is external pomp enough, not grounded upon inward holiness. But such unlawful divorces should not dismay us; from a ready, and voluntary striving, for regaining, and maintaining, this blessed match of beauty and holiness.164

Such decency, he insisted, had obtained in the Primitive Church, until theatrical borrowings had corrupted it. In such ceremonial observance of the day, Prideaux thought, the correct internal disposition of the worshipper was of vital importance, if such service was to please God. As he underlined, ‘Surely, dullness, or murmuring, or coldness, or external formalities aiming rather to please the world, or stop men’s censurings, than proceeding of inward willingness; is so far from acceptation at the hands of God, that he pronounceth it worthy of all reproach and punishment.’165 To Prideaux’s mind, in other words, puritans who were reluctantly prepared to use the Church’s ceremonies purely for the sake of avoiding censure, rather than out of any internal devotion, were actually no different from the mere formalists they so often criticized.166 This anti-​puritan theme intensified, as he turned his fire on those who criticized Church festivals, whilst simultaneously enjoining an unduly rigorous observance of the Sabbath. ‘The more too blame,’ he wrote, ‘are those humorous schismatics, that snarl at this, and the like festivals, and are come now at length to that Jewish niceness, as to deny the dressing of meat upon the Sabbath day; I say no more, from such the poor may expect poor Christmasses.’167 That said, Prideaux had little more time for those who ‘take up all such times with gourmandizing, and gambols, instead of these free-​will offerings in the beauty of holiness.’168 The devout Christian should tread the mean between these two extremes, he urged, according to Nehemiah’s direction, Chap. 8. verse 10. Who when the people that returned from the captivity, wept at the reading of the Law which they had so carelessly transgressed: “Go your way (saith he) eat of the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared.” And his reason is remarkable: “For this day is holy unto our Lord, neither be ye sorry, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” This course if we took, on such, and the like holy days, the fruit would appear at length, in the secret increase of the faithful.169

298  Grace and Conformity Prideaux was clear, in other words: the Church’s festivals were indeed to be counted as days which were holy to God.170 They were consequently days which should be marked by a proper spirit of festivity and hospitality; and that, if they were, they would bear fruit the increase of the faithful. For Prideaux, the Church of England’s festivals could actually be a means of God’s efficacious and converting grace. Once again, grace and polity went hand in hand.

Conclusions The British delegation at Dort had not merely defended the episcopal structure of the Church of England, they had also defended the Church’s right to impose the legitimate external ceremonies enjoined by the Prayer Book. Their stance reflected the Reformed Conformist conviction that the liturgical order of the English Church, eccentric as it may have seemed within the wider Reformed world, was of positive spiritual benefit to the faithful and was not merely compatible with, but conducive to an orthodox Reformed piety. Morton set out the case for this in his Defence of the innocency of the three ceremonies (1618). He made clear that observance of the Church’s ceremonies was not a necessary part of Christian worship, but nor was it simply a matter of civil obedience. Decorum was a divinely mandated purpose in liturgy; so when the Church made provisions to accomplish that purpose, they took on a divine character, and became parts of God’s worship. Furthermore, the Prayer Book ceremonies were not simply conducive to decency and order, they also edified, by signifying moral duties to the worshippers. The Church’s right to impose such significant ceremonies was warranted by Scripture, and did not infringe Christian liberty. Christian liberty was threatened rather by those who claimed that such ceremonies were forbidden. Featley’s defence of the Church of England’s liturgical year similarly insisted that its observance was a religious act, not merely a matter of civil obedience. The Ancilla set out to show how the proper use of the liturgical year could stir up devotion and encourage a sense of Christian assurance. The Christian festivals were not rivals to the Christian Sabbath, but echoes of it. The Christian fasts were godly accessories and preparatives to worship, not meritorious works. The Ancilla’s defence of Lent, in particular, was later echoed by Holdsworth. Holdsworth resisted the suggestion that the Lent Fast was an Apostolic institution, but he was equally clear that that it was not

Disputed Ceremonies and the Liturgical Year  299 merely a matter of civil obedience. Instead that it was an ancient Ecclesiastical precept with a clear religious purpose that had been obscured by Rome, but restored by the Church of England. This positive estimate of the liturgical year was reflected in the sermon collections of Featley and Prideaux. Their preaching illustrated how the rhythm of Christian festivals and fasts could stir up penitence and lead to a greater sense of assurance. Prideaux, in particular, made clear his contempt for puritan objections to the liturgical calendar, and underlined, instead, that a godly and comely celebration of a Christian festival might even be an instrument of God’s efficacious grace. For these writers, and indeed for their puritan opponents, Conformity was not merely an abstract polemical position; it decisively shaped the ‘lived experience of religion.’ In their apologetics, devotional literature, and preaching they sought to promote a style of piety that was at once authentically Reformed and observant of the Church of England’s distinctive liturgical culture. More than that, they sought to explain both how Reformed theological commitment led naturally to Conformist liturgical observance, and how Conformist liturgical observance was, in turn, conducive to the cultivation of a Reformed devotional life. And they framed that argument in conscious opposition to puritan nonconformity. Far from dissolving, ‘the supposed distinction between puritan and conformist’ was intrinsic to their devotional vision.171

Conclusion Summary of Findings In the historiography of the Early Stuart English Church, Reformed Conformity has rarely received the attention that it deserves. Scholars have undoubtedly acknowledged the presence of many Conformist clergy who embraced a Reformed theology of grace, but the bulk of their attention has usually been given to Puritan or Laudian voices instead. Reformed Conformity has consequently been reduced to a foil for other traditions, rather than being considered as a theological platform, style of piety, or religious identity in its own right. As a result, the picture of the Early Stuart Church that many historians have drawn does not reflect the full range of its theological and devotional diversity. This study has begun the process of correcting that imbalance in the scholarship, by focusing on ten of the most prominent Reformed Conformist theologians working during the reigns of James I and Charles I. The study opened with an analysis of Prideaux’s lectures at the annual Oxford Act. Contrary to the widespread assumption in the scholarship, Prideaux was not solely preoccupied with opposing Arminianism. Rather, he understood himself to be defending the ancient and Catholic conviction, famously articulated by Augustine of Hippo, that salvation was God’s free gift to his elect, against an equally ancient but heterodox tendency to make human salvation ultimately dependent on the human will. As a result, Prideaux spent as much time engaging critically with Pelagian, Semi-​ Pelagian, and Jesuit theology as he did with Arminianism. Prideaux was clearly conscious that he was engaged in an international theological conflict that both antedated and transcended the divide between Protestants and Roman Catholics. He drew abundantly from the writings of those theologians who had already distinguished themselves in what he referred to as ‘the Cause of God’. Augustine naturally topped that list, closely followed by Prosper of Aquitaine and those Early Church Councils which had endorsed Augustine’s views on grace. Amongst the medieval exponents of Grace and Conformity. Stephen Hampton, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190084332.003.0010

Conclusion  301 orthodoxy, Prideaux took particular inspiration from Thomas Bradwardine, the anti-​Pelagian Archbishop of Canterbury, whose De Causa Dei was published, at the behest of George Abbot, in 1618. But Prideaux was also prepared to acknowledge the orthodox instincts of many near-​contemporary Romans Catholic theologians, particularly among the Dominicans, and he repeatedly quoted the likes of Raphael Ripa and Diego Alvarez with approval. Prideaux’s defence and exposition of orthodox soteriology also involved a far broader range of theological topics than has generally been recognized. In Prideaux’s mind, the Catholic teaching on grace consisted in a web of interconnected and interdependent truths that extended from God’s will and knowledge, to the extent and efficacy of grace, the nature of justification, perseverance, assurance, and ecclesiology. For a Reformed Conformist such as Prideaux, in other words, the defence of absolute predestination was simply one front in a much broader theological campaign. The Synod of Dort met while Prideaux’s lecture series was already under way. Prideaux referred approvingly, not only to the Canons that the Synod propounded but also to the Collegiate Suffrage, which had been drawn up for the Synod by the British Delegation. The Suffrage was not only published immediately after the Synod, it was also republished and translated for the English market a number of times in the 1620s and 1630s. It arguably became the most influential statement of Reformed orthodoxy on grace in England, second perhaps to the 1595 Lambeth Articles. Although consonant with the Canons of Dort, the Suffrage nevertheless exhibited a distinctive approach to the death of Christ. This approach emerged from internal disagreements among the British delegates, in which the nature of Conformity to the confessional position of the Church of England had been a key point of contention. In an effort to contain these disagreements, the Suffrage foregrounded the assertion that Christ’s death was intended for the salvation of the elect, whilst also conceding that it had a sufficient orientation towards the salvation of the human race that anyone could truthfully be told that Christ had died for them. When Davenant returned from the Synod and resumed his teaching duties in Cambridge, he delivered a series of lectures on predestination and another on the death of Christ. These were the first two theological loci addressed in the Five Articles of Remonstrance of 1610 and subsequently were debated at Dort. Although Davenant’s lectures were therefore explicitly framed by the Arminian controversy, as Prideaux’s were not, many of the observations already made about Prideaux’s lectures also applied to Davenant’s.

302  Grace and Conformity Like Prideaux, Davenant recognized that the theological questions at issue both antedated the Arminian controversy and transcended the divide between Protestant and Catholic. Like Prideaux, Davenant spent as much time addressing Jesuit theology as he did answering the Remonstrants. Like Prideaux, he referred approvingly to medieval theologians such as Aquinas and Bradwardine, as well as contemporary Roman Catholics, in support of his own position. Like Prideaux, he understood his endeavour to be promoting ‘the Cause of God’. Given that Davenant had been one of its authors, it is not surprising that the teaching of the Suffrage finds constant echoes in his lectures. That said, he subtly altered the balance struck by the Suffrage in his treatment of the death of Christ. Rather than emphasizing that Christ’s death had been intended for the salvation of the elect, Davenant foregrounded instead the universal saving purpose of Christ’s death, leaving its orientation towards the elect almost as an afterthought. Davenant’s lectures were consequently a better representation of his own and Ward’s thinking at Dort than they were of the Suffrage itself, and they illustrate the diversity that existed within Reformed Conformity. Both Prideaux’s and Davenant’s lectures exhibited a clear concern for the pastoral application of the doctrine that they delivered. Prideaux devoted an entire lecture to the validity of Christian assurance, while Davenant concluded his lectures with a discussion of how the orthodox teaching on predestination and reprobation should be both preached and received; and their pastoral concerns were frequently evident elsewhere as well. Considered together, Prideaux’s and Davenant’s lectures underline that the academic discussion of Reformed soteriology was never divorced from its practical application to the hearts and minds of the faithful. For Prideaux and Davenant, there was no such thing as purely academic theology. The division between practical or devotional theology and academic or polemical theology, a division which has often influenced contemporary scholarship, finds no support in either of these theologians. Prideaux and Davenant both took it for granted that the Reformed and Catholic understanding of grace that they were expounding was the acknowledged position of the Church of England. When Montagu published A New Gag for an Old Goose, however, he offered a rival vision of the English Church; one in which Reformed orthodoxy had been reduced to a marginal opinion. When the Gag came under attack in Parliament, James I gave Montagu permission to reply. In close collaboration with Cosin, Montagu

Conclusion  303 then produced his Appello Caesarem, in which he claimed that the Reformed teaching on grace was actually a puritan dogma rather than the teaching of the English Church. Montagu even went so far as to question the Conformist commitment of the British delegates at Dort. At the York House Conference, it became clear that Montagu’s views enjoyed powerful support and were not going to be easily stifled. Reformed Conformists offered a swift and coordinated response to Montagu’s attack. Prideaux drew up a theological charge sheet against Montagu’s Gag, and swiftly brought his Act Lectures to publication, deliberately presenting them as an official expression of English orthodoxy. Featley used a series of pamphlets to highlight the similarities between Montagu’s opinions and views held by the opponents of orthodoxy, the Pelagians, Semi-​ Pelagians, Arminians, and Roman Catholics. The British delegates at Dort vindicated the loyalty they had shown to the polity of the English Church. Ward and Carleton directly addressed Montagu’s theological criticisms of Reformed orthodoxy, with Carleton taking particular exception to the idea that the Reformed teaching on grace could be called ‘puritan’. Hall struck a more irenic tone, but nevertheless made clear that any theology which placed salvation in human hands stepped beyond the range of views acceptable within the Church of England. Reformed Conformists were therefore in the vanguard of the Reformed response to Montagu. They sought to establish not merely the coherence of a Reformed understanding of grace, but also its status as the established orthodoxy of the English Church. Their intention was, in other words, to show that Conformity necessarily involved a doctrinal commitment to Reformed soteriology. The 1626 Royal Proclamation ‘for the establishing of the peace and quiet of the Church’ was meant to restrict the public airing of the theological issues which had divided Montagu and his opponents. Working closely with Davenant, however, Ward was able to ensure that, in Cambridge at least, it did not have this effect. Their combined efforts meant that orthodox Reformed positions on grace were being propounded at Commencement, and published through the University Press, throughout the 1630s. As a result the public voice of Reformed Conformity was never effectively muzzled. This observation is only reinforced when the analysis is widened, as both Prideaux’s lectures and Montagu’s remarks on the subject suggest it should be, to include the Reformed teaching on justification. That, too, continued to be regularly defended at Commencement, in lectures, and in print throughout the Personal Rule. Davenant and Ward saw to it, in other words,

304  Grace and Conformity that the anti-​Calvinist reading of grace never evaded public challenge within the Academy and that Reformed Conformity remained a live religious option right up to the Civil War. From the perspective of Reformed Conformity, the articulation of soteriology was not the only aspect of Church life in which Laudian innovation threatened the Church of England’s established orthodoxy. During the reign of Charles I, a number of anti-​Calvinist theologians became increasingly happy to describe the Eucharist in sacrificial terms. This theological development took tangible form in the erection of altars, first in the Cathedrals and then in the Parish Churches of England. Once again, Reformed Conformists were at the forefront of the resistance to this trend. Williams’s widely circulated Grantham Judgement offered a reading of the Eucharist, and of liturgical Conformity, that was decisively shaped by Reformed objections to the sacrifice of the Mass and consequently rejected the Laudian move towards altars. Morton provided additional theological ammunition for the Reformed Conformist case in his Institution. When a group of Oxford clergy, possibly encouraged by Williams, denounced the Laudian altar policy from the pulpit, Prideaux not only protected them from university discipline but echoed their concerns at the 1631 Act. Prideaux’s actions earned him a public rebuke from the King. When the Laudian polemicist, Peter Heylyn, attacked the Grantham Judgement, a few years later, Williams responded aggressively with The Holy Table, Name and Thing, in which he advanced a Reformed reading of liturgical Conformity that emphatically rejected its Laudian alternative. Once again, Reformed Conformity proved to be a resilient tradition. The Reformed Conformists’ acceptance of Dort’s teaching on of grace did not mean that their sympathy with the other Reformed churches of mainland Europe extended to questions of Church polity. At the Synod itself, Carleton had underlined the British delegates’ conviction that episcopacy reflected the intention of Christ and the practice of the Apostles, and had been maintained in the Catholic Church ever since. It was consequently a divinely sanctioned and inalterable form of Church government. Those churches which had abandoned it, which included all the non-​British churches represented at the Synod, were called to resume it in the name of Christian unity. Carleton’s view on the matter was echoed by his fellow delegates in subsequent years: by Ward at the Cambridge Commencement, by Davenant in his Determinations, and by Hall in his Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted. For these Reformed Conformists, episcopacy was vital to the good order of the Church, even if it set the British churches apart from their European sisters.

Conclusion  305 Furthermore, Reformed Conformists such as Prideaux, Downame, and Featley drew an explicit connection between episcopacy and the working of grace. In their mind, episcopal ordination, by virtue of its evident derivation from the Apostles, offered the faithful greater certainty about the legitimacy of their clergy’s orders than was possible under other forms of Church government. Confidence in a preacher’s legitimacy was, however, key to the fruitful hearing of God’s Word. For Reformed Conformists, grace and polity went hand in hand. The British delegates at Dort had not merely insisted on the divine origin of episcopal government; they had also insisted on each Church’s inalienable right to impose liturgical ceremonies. This reflected the Reformed Conformist conviction, articulated by Morton in the year the Synod met, that Church ceremonies were not simply a matter of obedience to the government but rather parts of God’s worship and capable of edifying those who used them. This conviction was echoed in Featley’s Ancilla Pietatis, in which he illustrated how the devout observance of the Church of England’s set feasts and fasts could become a support for orthodox Reformed piety, and a means of cultivating a proper sense of Christian assurance. Holdsworth echoed Featley’s views, when he defended the Lent Fast as a religious institution, on orthodox Reformed grounds, in conscious opposition to Laudian and Roman Catholic understandings of the observance, on the one hand, and the Puritan tendency to dismiss the season as a merely civil institution, on the other. A similar confidence in the edifying potential of the Church of England’s liturgical year was expressed in the sermon collections published by Featley and Prideaux in the late 1620s. For Reformed Conformists, in other words, the liturgical order of the English Church was of positive religious value and, when devoutly used, it could be an instrument of God’s predestinating grace.

The Significance of English Reformed Conformity The acknowledgement of Reformed Conformity as a distinctive religious tradition within English Protestantism has direct bearing on our understanding of both the Early Stuart Church and the Reformed world as a whole. In terms of the Early Stuart Church, it reshapes our conception of the ecclesiastical landscape so that it better reflects not only the true diversity of English religious identities, but also the relative importance of these identities. There

306  Grace and Conformity is no denying that Puritanism and Laudianism were distinct and significant intellectual forces within early seventeenth-​century England. They were not, however, the only such forces. Throughout the reigns of James I and Charles I, Reformed Conformity was a compelling, coherent, and influential alternative. The roll-​call of the clergy who have been the subjects of this study is, by itself, sufficient to illustrate the point. Prideaux, Featley, Davenant, Ward, Carleton, Williams, Morton, Hall, Downame, and Holdsworth were theologians without whose work it is not possible to give any useful account of the religious debates that took place during the Early Stuart period. Whether by virtue of their academic teaching, their polemical writing, their works of devotion, their published sermons, or their ecclesiastical position, they were all figures of recognized distinction and influence within the English Church. Yet none of them can be accurately characterized as a Puritan or as a Laudian. They were something other—​something that can be identified as Reformed Conformist. Furthermore, the ten clergy who have been the focus of this study were merely the tip of an iceberg. In the spring of 1641, for example, the House of Lords established a theological subcommittee to advise them on the shape of a post-​Laudian religious settlement, a subcommittee chaired by Bishop Williams. Among the Reformed Conformists who attended that Committee, were no fewer than seven of the ten theologians who have been the focus of this study.1 Nevertheless, the Lords did not struggle to nominate other theologians of a similar stamp and a similar eminence to join them. James Ussher, Ralph Brownrigg, John Hacket, Robert Sanderson, and Thomas Westfield were also invited to attend. Publicly recognizable Reformed Conformists were therefore not hard to find, even after a decade and a half of Laudian predominance within the Church. If the clock is turned a little further back, the strength of Reformed Conformity is even more evident. Most scholars concede that they had dominated the ecclesiastical hierarchy under James I.2 During the reign of Charles I, Reformed Conformity was arguably the Church of England’s reversionary interest.3 The Reformed Conformists who sat on the 1641 subcommittee continued to exhibit a dual commitment to Reformed soteriology and the established order of the English Church. In the account of the subcommittee’s meetings, which was later published under the joint names of Ussher, Williams, Prideaux, Ward, Brownrigg, Featley, and Hacket, a number of ‘Innovations

Conclusion  307 in Doctrine’ were condemned. These included the complaint ‘that some do teach and preach, that good works are concauses with faith in the act of justification’; that ‘some have published, that there is a proper sacrifice in the Lord’s Supper . . . and therefore that we have a true altar, and therefore not only metaphorically so called . . .’; that ‘divers have oppugned certitude of salvation’; that ‘some have defended the whole gross substance of Arminianism’; that electio est ex fide praevisa [election is from foreseen faith]; that the act of conversion depends upon the concurrence of mans’ free will; ‘that the justified man may fall finally and totally from grace’; that ‘Some have defended universal grace as imparted as much to reprobates as to the elect and have proceeded usque ad salutem ethnicorum [even to the salvation of pagans], which the Church of England hath anathamatized’.4 All of these were theological positions that had previously been condemned either in the lecture halls of Oxford and Cambridge or in print by several of the Reformed Conformists sitting on the subcommittee. This vigorous assertion of Reformed orthodoxy was matched by a robust defence of the established order of the Church. A few concessions were indeed offered to puritan sensibilities. In terms of the Book of Common Prayer, the Reformed Conformists on the subcommittee had clearly been prepared to discuss, for example, ‘whether the names of some departed Saints and others should not be quite expunged the Calendar’; ‘whether lessons of canonical Scripture should be put into the Calendar instead of Apocrypha’; ‘whether Gloria Patri should be repeated at the end of every Psalm’; ‘whether the hymns, Benedicite omnia opera, & c. may not be left out’; and ‘whether it be not fit to have some discreet rubric made to take away all scandal from signifying the sign of the cross upon the infants after baptism, or if it shall seem more expedient, to be quite disused’.5 They were also prepared to tighten up the Church of England’s Eucharistic discipline and alter various phrases in the Prayer Book that were capable of a heterodox reading. At the same time, however, the subcommittee was not prepared to consider abolishing choral music in English cathedrals, the surplice, kneeling at communion, the wedding ring, the structure of the liturgical year, or the special service for the beginning of Lent.6 So as far as the Reformed Conformists were concerned, many of the distinctive ceremonies of the English church to which Puritans had so frequently objected were not even up for discussion.7 In terms of episcopacy, the subcommittee specifically gave Williams the task of drafting their suggestions.8 He had not finished it by the time the subcommittee ceased to meet, but he was in a position to present it in the form

308  Grace and Conformity of a parliamentary bill in early July 1641, and it was read twice in the House of Lords. Once again, only limited concessions to a more collegial model of Church government were on offer, as is clear when Williams’s bill is compared with its alternatives.9 The discussions of 1641 are significant, because they indicate how far the Reformed Conformists were prepared to move in response to puritan criticisms of English Church polity, when they were under significant political pressure to hammer out a mutually agreeable Church settlement. The evidence suggests that they were not prepared to move very far at all. There is little suggestion here to warrant contemporary Laudian fears ‘that doctrinal Calvinism being once settled, more alterations would be made in the public liturgy . . . till it was brought more near the form of Gallic churches, after the platform of Geneva’.10 Even if the subcommittee’s liturgical proposals and Williams’s scheme of Church government had been fully implemented, the Church of England would not have looked very much like the Reformed Churches of France or Switzerland. The instincts of some on the subcommittee were rather more Conformist than the Laudians feared. The resilience of Reformed Conformity within the Early Stuart Church of England once again demonstrates the breadth and adaptability of the wider Reformed tradition. English Reformed Conformists sat on the Synod that defined Reformed orthodoxy against Arminianism. At the same time, these theologians took the opportunity of that Synod to assert the superiority of episcopal government and to vindicate the freedom of every Reformed Church to decide exactly what ceremonies were appropriate for its public worship, even if other Reformed theologians did not like them. English Reformed Conformity shows that an accurate grasp of the Reformed tradition cannot fail to make room for episcopacy, for choral music, for ancient liturgical forms, indeed for all aspects of the eccentric polity that shaped the Early Stuart English Church. As a result, proper attention to English Reformed Conformity further undermines an overly narrow conception of the Reformed tradition as a whole. The phenomenon of English Reformed Conformity also exhibits, of course, the inventiveness and flexibility of Reformed theology. Davenant’s approach to the death of Christ and Ward’s teaching on baptism both arose, at least in part, from the creative interaction of Reformed theology with the distinctive liturgical and confessional structures of the English Church. Featley was clearly elaborating a distinctively Conformist expression of Reformed

Conclusion  309 piety. Conformity was, in other words, a stimulus, not an impediment, to the ongoing evolution of the Reformed tradition. The theological principle that ensures that the Reformed approach to grace does not inevitably undermine the role of the Church and the sacraments, as Weber once suggested it should, is the insistence that God’s predestination of the elect to salvation includes the provision of such means as will carry them to that end. This was a principle that the Reformed Conformists repeatedly articulated in their defence of Reformed orthodoxy, and they recognized the distinctive institutions of the English Church as among those means. Within this distinctive theological tradition, style of piety and religious identity, faithful Conformity was not a rival but an instrument of God’s electing grace.

Notes Introduction 1. Trinity College, Dublin, MS 533/​3, f 58 v. ‘Habitu Coccineo Indutis’. The description of the ceremony is taken from this manuscript. 2. John Prideaux, A Sermon Preached on the Fifth of October 1624: at the Consecration of St. James’s Chapel in Exeter College (Oxford, 1636), Dedicatory Letter. I have referred to the later edition since it is paginated. 3. It has been suggested that this double-​aisled model in church buildings reflected a conscious refocusing of ecclesiastical architecture away from the communion table and towards the congregational experience of the word: Maurice Howard, The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven & London, 2007b), 61–​71. 4. Geoffrey Tyack, ‘Gilbert Scott and the Chapel of Exeter College, Oxford,’ Architectural History, 50 (2007): 125–​148, 125–​126; Anne-​Françoise Morel, Glorious Temples of Babylonic Whores: the Culture of Church Building in England through the Lens of Consecration Sermons (Leiden, 2019), 287–​288. 5. Anthony à Wood, The History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford: Now First Published in English, from the Original Manuscsipt [sic] in the Bodleian Library; with a Continuation to the Present Time, ed. John Gutch (Oxford, 1786), 117. Alex Chalmers, A History of the Colleges, Halls and Public Buildings attached to the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1810), 72. 6. For an image of the Chapel interior showing these columns, see Tyack, ‘Chapel of Exeter College,’ 128. Cf Nicholas Tyacke, The History of the University of Oxford IV: the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1997), 160–​161. 7. Nicholas Tyacke, The History of the University of Oxford IV: the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1997), 160–​161. 8. Bernini used Solominic columns to make the same point in relation to the altar, in the baldaquin which he completed for St Peter’s in Rome in 1633. For the significance of Solomonic columns, see Richard Durman, ‘Spiral Columns in Salisbury Cathedral,’ Ecclesiology Today, Journal of the Ecclesiological Society, 29 (2002): 26–​35, 29. 9. Exeter College, Oxford, MS C.II.4 f 45 records that the College Chapel had a carpet and cushion for the communion table, as well as linen table cloths. 10. Trinity College, Dublin, MS 533/​3, f 59 r. 11. Trinity College, Dublin, MS 533/​3, f 62 r & 58v. Prideaux was a lifelong supporter of instrumental and choral music in worship: John Prideaux, Fasciculus Controversiarum Theologicarum (Oxford, 1649), 244. Peter McCullough has remarked on the ‘window of opportunity seized by some in the reign of James, to effect a rapprochement between pulpit and choir—​two parts of worship that had been pitted against each other

312 Notes first by the early Elizabethan reformers, and were to be so again by the Laudians in the 1630s’. Peter McCullough, ‘Music Reconciled to Preaching: a Jacobean Moment?’ in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2013), 109–​130, 112. John Prideaux was clearly one of those who seized this opportunity with enthusiasm. 12. Prideaux, Consecration, 2. 13. Ibid., 4. 14. John Howson, A Second Sermon Preached at Paul’s Cross (London, 1598), 49. Howson was here quoting John Chrysostom’s Homilies on I Corinthians, 36.8. Admittedly, Howson then pursued this remark of Chrysostom’s a little further, including the Greek Father’s reference to church buildings as ‘locus angelorum, locus archangelorum, regia Dei, coelum ipsum the place of angels, yea of archangels, the very palace of God, and heaven itself ’. Prideaux’s description—​‘a sacred congregation-​house’—​was distinctly more reserved. 15. For the emergence of a Protestant sense of sacred space that was combined with hostility towards Roman Catholicism, see Andrew Spicer, ‘Holiness and The Temple: Thomas Adams and the Definition of Sacred Space in Jacobean England,’ The Seventeenth Century, 27, no.1 (2012): 1–​24, esp. 3. Thomas Adams shared a patron with John Prideaux in the Third Earl of Pembroke. Adams’s Paul’s Cross sermon, on which Spicer focussed this article, was preached just a couple of months before Prideaux’s Consecration sermon. 16. Prideaux, Consecration, 6. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Howson, A Second Sermon, 30. 19. Prideaux, Consecration, 8 20. Ibid., 9. The unworthy opponents Prideaux had in mind here were almost certainly the Brownists, who contended that churches that had previously been used for Roman Catholic worship should be destroyed. For the Separatists case for the destruction of church buildings, see Keith L. Sprunger, ‘Puritan Church Architecture and Worship in a Dutch Context,’ Church History, 66 no.1 (1997): 36–​53, 39–​41, & 46. Thomas Adams also targeted the Brownists in his Paul’s Cross sermon: Spicer, ‘Holiness and The Temple,’ 10–​11. 21. Prideaux, Consecration, 12–​ 13. Prideaux’s positive estimation of the appropriately costly adornment of church buildings strikes a slightly different tone from his Reformed conformist contemporaries Thomas Adams and Joseph Hall. Cf Spicer, ‘Holiness and The Temple,’ 7; Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: the Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–​c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), 124. 22. Howson, A Second Sermon, 26–​29. 23. Prideaux refers to Roberto Bellarmino, Disputationes . . . de Controversiis Christianae Fidei (Ingolstadt, 1590–​1593), 1:2109–​2110. 24. Prideaux, Consecration, 10. Hakewill’s Chapel pointed east. 25. Prideaux’s insistence on the importance of consecration reflects a growing concern to distinguish places of worship from the secular realm which, as Andrew Spicer

Notes  313 has underlined, was a concern that extended beyond those associated with the religious policies of William Laud. Andrew Spicer, ‘ “God Will Have a House”: Defining Sacred Space and Rites of Consecration in Early Seventeenth Century England,’ in Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton, eds., Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2005), 207–​230, 208. Spicer, ‘ “God Will Have a House,” ’ 216. 26. Prideaux, Consecration, 14. 27. Ibid., 15–​16. Walter Balcanquhall, one of the British delegates at Dort, also emphasized the episcopal prerogative in the consecration of churches. Walter Balcanquhall, The Honour of Christian Churches and the Necessity of Frequenting of Divine Service and Public Prayers in Them (London, 1633), 19. 28. Arthur Cochrane, ed., Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (Louisville, 2003), 289. 29. Prideaux, Consecration, 22. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 23. 32. Ibid., 23–​24. 33. Andrew Spicer has characterized the beliefs of divines such as Adams and Prideaux as ‘a stance that viewed churches from a practical and utilitarian perspective’, and which ‘emphasized the need for an appropriate setting for worship while rejecting ostentatious display and adopting an anti-​Catholic stance’. Spicer, ‘Holiness and The Temple,’ 8 & 17. Spicer’s description does not quite do justice to Prideaux’s remarks here, which suggest that, by virtue of their association with, and use for, intrinsically holy actions and institutions, an extrinsic and derivative holiness actually adheres to church buildings, which Christians should respect. 34. Prideaux, Consecration, 26. Hakewill’s Chapel at Exeter College was dedicated to St James, a conscious homage to the King. John Prideaux, Alloquium serenissimo Regi Jacobo (Oxford, 1624), sig, A2v. I am grateful to John Maddicott for this reference. 35. The reference was to Hooker, Laws, V. xii, xiii, & xvi. 36. Prideaux, Consecration, 27–​28. His last remark may be a reference to the inscription on the windows. 37. Second Helvetic Confession, chapter XXIII. 38. Howson, A Second Sermon, 40–​41. 39. Ibid., 43–​44. 40. Anon., An Abridgment of that Book which the Ministers of Lincoln Diocese Delivered to His Majesty upon the First of December Last (English secret press, 1605), 70. 41. McCullough, ‘Music Reconciled to Preaching,’ 129. 42. Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: a Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy. Studies in Modern British Religious History vol 32.(Boydell, Woodbridge, 2015) , 10. 43. Ibid., 159–​167 & 348–​346. 44. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-​revolution,’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (London, 1973), 119–​143, 129.

314 Notes 45. Kenneth Fincham, ‘Introduction,’ in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–​1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke, 1993), 9. 46. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–​1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 539. 47. Daniel W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud (Cranbury, NJ and London, 1997), 14. He reiterated this case in Daniel Doerksen, ‘Polemist or Pastor?: Donne and Moderate Calvinist Conformity,’ in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit, 2003), 12. 48. Maltby was keen to underline that the pro-​Prayer Book petitions she discussed generally avoided addressing soteriogical questions. Nevertheless, one of her key players, Sir Thomas Aston, was openly anti-​Arminian, and the Petitions themselves underlined the Prayer Book’s compatibility with continental Reformed theology. So this ‘Prayer Book Protestantism’ had a distinctly Reformed tinge. Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 105–​106 & 131, on Aston, 163–​164, on foreign Reformed divines, 117, 169–​170. 49. E.g. Richard McCabe, Joseph Hall: a Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford, 1982); Peter Lake, ‘Serving God and the Times: the Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson,’ Journal of British Studies, 27, no. 2 (Apr., 1988): 81–​116; Kenneth Fincham, ‘Popularity, Prelacy, and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself,’ The English Historical Review, 111, no. 443 (Sept. 1996): 856–​881; Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007); Richard Snoddy, The Soteriology of James Ussher: the Act and Object of Saving Faith (Oxford, 2014). 50. E.g. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–​1640 (Oxford, 1987); Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992); Peter McCullough, ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes,’ The Historical Journal, 41, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), 401–​424; Anthony Milton, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: a New Approach,’ in Politics, Religion, and Popularity: Early Stuart essays in honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge, 2001); Graham Parry, Glory, Laud, and Honour: the Arts of the Anglican Counter-​Reformation (Woodbridge, 2006); Calvin Lane, The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church (Abingdon 2013). 51. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word, 25. 52. Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 250–​276. 53. Debora Shuger ‘Introduction,’ in Religion in Early Stuart England, 1603–​1638: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Debora Shuger (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2012), xvi. 54. Stephen Hampton, Anti-​Arminians: the Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008). 55. , Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 65. 56. Ibid., 46.

Notes  315 57. Ibid., 65. 58. Ibid., 66. 59. Ibid., 165. 60. Ibid., 169. 61. Ibid., 174. 62. Ibid., 176. 63. Cf Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation (Cambridge, 2011), 111–​148. 64. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: the Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–​c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), 122–​125. 65. Michael Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: an Examination of Responses, 1600–​1714 (Oxford, 2006) , 24–​25. 66. Ibid., 36–​38. 67. Ibid., 38–​39. 68. Lake hinted at this development with a reference to James Ussher’s treatment of the Eucharist. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 176. Cf Bryan Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines: Sacramental Theology and Liturgy in England and Scotland, 1603–​1662 (Aldershot, 2002), 70–​71 & 74–​77. 69. Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013) , 6. 70. Ibid., 1. 71. Ibid., 6. 72. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: a Social History of Calvinism (Yale, 2002), xxiii. 73. Richard Muller ‘Directions in the Study of Early Modern Reformed Thought,’ Perichoresis 14, no. 3(2016) : 3. 74. Ibid., 4. 75. Ibid., 8. 76. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–​1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), xx. 77. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 457. 78. Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (Woodbridge, 2015) , 361. 79. Ibid., 358. 80. Ibid., 70–​77. 81. Julia Merritt, ‘The Pastoral Tightrope: a Puritan Pedagogue in Jacobean London,’ in Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (Cambridge, 2002), 143–​ 161, 143–​144. 82. J. Martin Bac, Perfect Will Theology: Divine Agency in Reformed Scholasticism as against Suarez, Episcopius, Descartes, and Spinoza (Leiden, 2010), 99 n. 83. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers, and Their Audiences, 1590–​1640 (Cambridge, 2010) , 343–​344. 84. Ibid., 345. 85. Ibid., 361. 86. Ibid., 370.

316 Notes 87. Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–​1640 (Farnham, 2014), 302, 352–​355. 88. Anthony Milton (ed.), The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–​1619), Church of England Record Society 13 (Woodbridge, 2005), 157–​158. 89. Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2 vols (London, 1691–​1692), 2:68. 90. Joseph Hall, The Reconciler (London, 1629), 86. 91. Nicholas Cranfield, ‘Chaplains in Ordinary at the Early Stuart Court,’ in Patronage and recruitment in the Tudor and Early Stuart Church, Borthwick Studies in History 2, ed. Claire Cross (York, 1996), 120–​147, 142. I am grateful to Dr John Maddicott for this reference. 92. Joseph Hall, The Best Bargain (London, 1623), Dedicatory Letter. 93. Hall, The Reconciler, 94. 94. Robert Hall matriculated there, in 1628, Samuel and George in 1631, John and Edward in 1635. 95. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:37. 96. Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson. D 47, fo. 16r. 97. Ibid. 98. John Barwick, Hieronikes (London, 1660), 72. 99. Bodleian., MS Rawlinson D 47, I f. 209. Fincham considers the Elizabethan bishop John Jewel to have been the model bishop amongst the Jacobean Reformed Conformists. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 275–​276. 100. Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 47, II passim. ODNB s.v. ‘Thomas Morton.’ 101. Hall, The Reconciler, 61–​62. 102. Ibid., 66–​68. 103. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 73, f 483. 104. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 70, f.105. 105. ODNB s.v. ‘Samuel Ward’ 106. Samuel Ward, Opera Nonnulla (London, 1658), 148. 107. Milton, British Delegation, 105. 108. Ibid., 102. 109. Hall, The Reconciler, 75. 110. Ibid., 77. 111. John Dury, ed., De Pacis Ecclesiasticae Rationibus (s.t., 1635). 112. Milton, British Delegation, 194. 113. Ibid., 381. 114. Ibid., 383. 115. John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (London, 1693) , 1:24–​25. 116. Ibid., 1:27. 117. Ibid., 1:63. 118. Morris Fuller, The Life, Letters, [and] Writings of John Davenant (London, 1897), 163. 119. Hacket, Scrinia, 2:45. Fuller, Davenant, 515. 120. Hacket, Scrinia, 2:32. Ralph Brownrigg, who became Master of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in 1635, was one of Ward’s closest allies in the University, and another Reformed Conformist.

Notes  317 121. Hacket, Scrinia, 1:60. 122. Hacket, Scrinia, 2:36. 123. Public Record Office, E331 Lincoln/​8 (Returns to First Fruits Office). CCEd Record ID: 189111. 124. Lincolnshire Archive, Additional Register 3 (Episcopal Register). CCEd Record ID: 59278. 125. David Hoyle, Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590–​ 1644 (Woodbridge, 2007) , 187. 126. Ibid., 173. 127. Ibid., 205. 128. Richard Dey, Two Looks over Lincoln (London, 1641), 5. 129. George Hakewill is mentioned earlier, as are Ralph Brownrigg; James Montagu, Bishop of Winchester; and James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh—​all of whom enjoyed close links with some of the ten clergy mentioned,; although one should be mindful of Alan Ford’s warning against ‘the tendency to impose upon him [Ussher], and the early seventeenth century Church of Ireland, primarily anglocentric dichotomies between puritan and conformist’: Ford, James Ussher, 280. Fincham’s study of the Jacobean episcopate suggests that the list might be expanded to include Archbishops George Abbot of Canterbury and Tobie Matthew of York, as well as Bishops Robert Bennett of Hereford, John King of London, Arthur Lake of Bath and Wells, Henry Robinson of Carlisle, Nicholas Felton of Ely, Robert Abbot of Salisbury, John Jegon of Norwich, Miles Smith of Gloucester, and Lewis Bayly of Bangor: Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 250–​274. Lake makes the case for Robert Sanderson: Lake, ‘Serving God and the Times’; Doerksen for John Donne and George Herbert: Doerksen, Conforming to the Word; and Spicer for Thomas Adams: Spicer, ‘Holiness and The Temple,’ 2. 130. Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge 1982), 261; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement (Cambridge, 1997), 167–​168. 131. This definition broadly concurs with Lake’s rather more sour account of Conformity: ‘The term ‘conformist’ is used to refer not to all those who can in some sense be said to have conformed to the rites and ceremonies of the English church, but only to those men who sought to make a polemical fuss about the issues of church government and polemical conformity and who sought to stigmatize as puritans, those less enthusiastic about such issues than themselves’. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 7. 132. Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘Heterodoxy,’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001), 16–​40 & 53–​74. 133. Peter Lake, ‘Defining Puritanism—​Again?’ in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth Century Anglo–​American Faith ed. Francis Bremer (Boston, 1993), 3–​29, 6. 134. Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity, and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,’ in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–​1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke, 1993), 161–​185.

318 Notes 135. Ibid., 163. 136. As Fincham’s remarked about the variation in pastoral practice among the Jacobean evangelicals: ‘To acknowledge these differences is not to undermine the notion of a common churchmanship: rather, it is to admit the width of English Calvinism and the impact of personality on episcopal government’. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 270. 137. Featley, Clavis Mystica, 125. Featley’s insistence that he was no kind of Puritan stands in contrast to Ryrie’s uncertainty on the subject. Cf Ryrie, Being Protestant, 7. 138. Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), 124.

Chapter 1 1. Romans 9:10–​11: ‘And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—​in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—​she was told, “The older will serve the younger” ’. 2. Prideaux’s immediate predecessor as Regius Professor, Robert Abbot, had focussed a series of addresses between 1613 and 1615 on the theology of grace as well. Robert Abbot, De Gratia, et Perseverantia Sanctorum Exercitationes (London, 1618). 3. Anthony Milton makes extensive use of Prideaux’s lectures in his discussion of Early Stuart Ecclesiology. 4. Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–​1640 (Oxford, 1990), 74. 5. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy,’ in The History of the University of Oxford volume IV: Seventeenth Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 587. 6. E.g. John Prideaux, Viginti-​duae Lectiones de Totidem Religionis Capitibus (Oxford, 1648), 115. 7. The 1625 lecture, by contrast, took as its text Matthew 5:37. 8. Prideaux underlined, however, that several wiser and more moderate Jesuits avoided this mistake; notably, Alfonso Salmeron, Francisco de Toledo, Benedict Pereira, and Robert Bellarmine. 9. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 4. 10. Richard Snoddy, The Soteriology of James Ussher: the Act and Object of Saving Faith (Oxford, 2014), 25. 11. Eef Dekker, ‘Was Arminius a Molinist?’ The Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, no. 2 (Summer, 1996): 337–​352; J. Martin Bac, Perfect Will Theology: Divine Agency in Reformed Scholasticism as against Suarez, Episcopius, Descartes and Spinoza (Leiden, 2010), 171–​173. 12. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 17–​19. 13. Ibid., 25, 26, 28, 29, & 30 where Prideaux castigates both the Jesuits in general, and the individual theologians Becanus, Molina, Vasquez, Lessius, and Suarez. 14. Ibid., 17–​18.

Notes  319 15. Ibid., 25–​27. 16. This is not to deny, of course, that Prideaux was indeed concerned with Arminianism. He caused a series of specifically Arminian questions to be debated in Exeter College in 1617, a copy of which apparently fell into Laud’s hands. William Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom (London, 1646), 155–​156. I am grateful to John Maddicott for reminding me of this reference. 17. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 2. 18. Ibid., 2. 19. Ibid., 3,4,8, & 11. 20. Ibid., 11. ‘Non igitur Calvinus solus contra Pighium, aut Beza contra Castelionem, aut Perkinsius & eorum symmistae, thesin nostrum sustinenti; sed omnes fere (quod sciam) perspicaciores, & textus tenaciores theologi’. 21. Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003), 100–​102. 22. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 443. 23. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 12. ‘Quos Omnes si non vere, at saltem fere, in hac causa Calvinistas Diceres’. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Richard Muller has written so many books on this subject, that it would be unhelpful to list them all. The most relevant to this discussion are Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC, 1986); Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca.1520 to ca. 1725, 4 volumes (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003). 26. Sean F. Hughes, ‘The Problem of “Calvinism”: English Theologies of Predestination c.1580–​1630,’ in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students, ed. Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot, 1998), 229–​250, 229. 27. Hughes, ‘ “Calvinism,” ’ 232 & 233. 28. David Como, ‘Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth Century England,’ in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–​1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, 2000), 64–​87, 66. 29. Ibid., 66. 30. Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007). 31. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 2. 32. Ibid., 4. ‘Utrum Detur Absolutum Reprobationis Decretum’? 33. Ibid. Prideaux’s Divinity Faculty colleague at Oxford, the Lady Margaret Professor, Sebastian Benefield, was similarly committed to the interdependence of the decrees of predestination and reprobation. Cf Sebastian Benefield, The Sin against the Holy Ghost Discovered (Oxford, 1615), 158: ‘A people may be, or not be God’s people in respect of God’s predestination, that his immutable decree concerning the salvation of some, and the damnation of the rest, set down by himself from all eternity. In which sense there is among both the Israelites and Gentiles, Ammi, the Lord’s people, and there is also among them Lo-​ammi, a people not the Lord’s. As many of them, as

320 Notes God foreknew (praescientiâ approbationis [by the prescience of approbation], as the Schoolmen call it,) specially, as to love and like them, them hath he predestinated and chosen to be his people: the rest whom so he foreknew not (for otherwise to his absolute prescience all things are naked) the rest, I say, whom specially he foreknew not, them hath he ordained of old to be no people of his’. 34. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 7. Prideaux underlined that there was no disagreement about the final cause of the decrees; namely the manifestation of God’s omnipotence, mercy, justice, and glory. 35. Ibid., 8. Cf Henk van den Belt (ed.), trans. Riemer A. Faber, Synopsis Purioris Theologiae: Latin Text and English Translation, Vol. 2 (Leiden, 2016), 52–​55. 36. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 10. 37. Robert Abbot, The Third Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholike (London, 1609), 54–​55: ‘Here M. Bishop going about to discover impiety in us, bewrayeth exceeding great ignorance in himself, not having yet learned to put a difference betwixt reprobation & damnation. We say and we therein say the truth, that there is no cause of damnation but only sin, and yet we say as truly, that there is no cause of reprobation, but only the will and pleasure of Almighty God. Damnation is Gods sentence of judgement whereby he assigneth the reprobate to eternal punishment for sin. Reprobation is the counsel and decree of God whereby he leaveth men in the state of sin wherein he found them that they may justly be condemned’. Anthony Milton (ed.), The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–​1619) (Woodbridge, 2005), 241. George Hakewill also used this distinction to defend absolute reprobation: An Answer to a Treatise Written by Dr. Carier (London, 1616), 287. Andrew Willet became less sure of it. Andrew Willet, Hexapla, that Is, a Six-​fold Commentary upon the Most Divine Epistle of the Holy Apostle S. Paul to the Romans (Cambridge, 1611), 440–​441. For Willet see Darren M. Pollock, Early Stuart Polemical Hemeneutics: Andrew Willet’s 1611 Hexapla on Romans (Gőttingen, 2017), 224–​229. 38. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 10. 39. Ibid., 7. 40. The Anti-​Calvinist writer Peter Baro had recently played up these disagreements to polemical advantage. Peter Baro, Summa Trium de Praedestinatione (Harderwijk, 1613), 4–​5 & 10. 41. Richard Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI, 2012), 131. 42. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 10. 43. Ibid. ‘Quicunque autem fidelis, inquit Augustinus, vult praedestinationem bene intellegere, attendat ipsum caput, et in illo inveniat et se ipsum’. He is quoting Augustine, De Dono Perseverantiae, ch. 24. 44. Ibid. 45. Prideaux later expressed explicitly sublapsarian convictions in print, defining the Church as ‘certus electorum numerus ex massa peccata pro mero Dei beneplacito’ [the fixed number of those elected out of the mass of sin by the mere goodwill of God]: John Prideaux, Fasciculus Controversiarum (Oxford, 1649), 135.

Notes  321 46. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 9. ‘Tanquam necessarium (ut loquuntur) in objecto requisitum . . . ne iustitia divina in absolute reprobationis decreto, nimis rigida videretur’. 47. Ibid. ‘Non ut causam efficientem sed deficientem, non qua removetur quod adest, sed non admovetur quod sustentaret’. 48. Prideaux’s argument here was not unprecedented. Elnathan Parr, A Plain Exposition upon the Whole 8. 9. 10. 11. Chapters of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (London, 1618), ii, 35: ‘Reprobation is not the cause of damnation, as election is of salvation: nor a cause at all, unless you say a deficient cause, as the sun is the cause of night. Damnation follows reprobation, but the cause of it is sin not God’s decree’. 49. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 11. ‘Decretum dei aeternum . . . est absolutum, non a mediis, non a causa finali, sed a motiva vel causa sive conditione externa impulsive in objecto: idque quoad praeteritionem, sive actum negativum, licet hominum ista discretio postea actu fiat in massa peccata, & quoad actum affirmativum, sive praedamnationem, semper praesupponat peccatum’. 50. Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–​1640 (Farnham, 2014), 2. 51. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 2. 52. Ibid., 12. 53. Ibid. 54. Benefield had recently drawn a similar consequence from this verse: Sebastian Benefield, Eight Sermons Publicly Preached in the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1614), 7–​8. 55. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 12. 56. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 13. 57. Ibid., 13. ‘Sic ut necessaria a causis necessariis, contingentia a contingentibus producerentur’. 58. Ibid., 14 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. ‘Hanc Dei causam contra Pelagium’. Thomas Bradwardine’s defence of Augustinian theology, the De Causa Dei contra Pelagium, would be published by Sir Henry Savile, with the assistance of William Twisse, at the instigation of George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1618. 61. Ibid. ‘Qui vel minimum hic deferunt hominis arbitrio, Deo detrahunt, cui timeo ego (cum Augustino) animae meae salutem ex parte tantum committere . . . . ’ 62. Sarah Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978): 635–​652; Bac, Perfect Will Theology, 99–​ 156; Richard A. Muller, Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought (Grand Rapids, 2017), 225–​235. 63. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 20. 64. Ibid., 23. 65. Ibid., 24. 66. Ibid. He refers here to Raphael Ripa, Ad S. Thomae Aquinatis totam Primam partem Notationes et Dubitationes Scholasticae (Venice, 1609).

322 Notes 67. Ibid. ‘An praetor scientiam simplicis intelligentiae, quae tantum est de possibilibus: & scientiam visionis quae sollummodo respicit future; detur etiam in Deo scientia quaedam tertia seu media, de futuris libere contingentibus, non absolute, sed ex conditione; quae cognoscit Deus quid hominess et angeli, absque aliquot praecedente decreto, libere essent facturi, si cum his vel illis cicumstantiis, in tali vel tali rerum ordine collocentur’. 68. Ibid. ‘Tale fundamentum esse assignandum huius scientiae, quod nec liberi arbitrii facultatem prorsus tollat, nec gratiam Dei excludat, sed utrumque inter se suaviter conciliet’. 69. Ibid., 25. ‘Non datur talis scientia media, sed Deus infallibiliter praescit liberas voluntatis determinations, quia ipse ad hanc vel illam partem ab aeterno per decretum immutabile illas sic disposuit’. 70. Muller, Divine Will, 231. Cf Bac, Perfect Will Theology, 106. 71. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 26. He refers here to Diego Alvarez, De Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae at Humani Arbitrii (Rome, 1610). 72. Muller, Divine Will, 226. 73. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 26. 74. Ibid., 27. 75. Ibid. ‘Gratia aptius diceretur pedissequa humanae inclinationis, quam domina; comes, quam causa’. 76. Muller, Divine Will, 229; Bac, Perfect Will, 130. 77. E.g. I Samuel 23:11–​12 and Matthew 11:21 78. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 29. 79. Ibid., 30. ‘Peccatum est decreti consequens, non effectus; voluntas enim permissive efficax est, not quoad productionem, sed quoad illationem. Non autem decrevit Deus ut quis peccaret, sed decrevit aliquem propria militia ruentem, non per gratiam retrahere ne pecceret: unde certo praesciat illum peccaturum, cumabsque gratia ipsius ne bene quidem velle posimus’. 80. Ibid., 30–​31. 81. Muller, Divine Will, 230. 82. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 21. 83. Ibid., 32. ‘An gratia suffiens ad salutem concedatur omnibus?’ 84. Ibid., 38–​39. 85. Ibid., 39. He has in mind the gifts listed in Romans 12 and I Corinthians 12. 86. Ibid., 40. 87. Ibid., 40. ‘An gratuitus Dei favour tam benign singulos respiciat, ut omnibus, sive Ethnicis, sive Christianis, infantis, aut adultis, reprobis aut electos, in statu eorum post lapsum, pro loco aut tempore, mediate, aut immediate, ordinario, vel extraordinario modo, ad salute sit sufficiens?’ 88. Prideaux’s colleague, Sebastian Benefield clearly agreed with him. Benefield, Eight Sermons, 4. ‘All indeed shall be saved, if by all, we understand the elect and chosen of God. But if under all we comprehend the reprobate, all shall not be saved. Say all the elect, not one of them shall perish; all shall repent; for God will have mercy on all. Say

Notes  323 all the reprobate; all shall perish, and none shall repent, for mercy shall be showed to none’. Prideaux was also following the line taken by his predecessor: Abbot, De Gratia, 23–​24, 29. 89. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 40. 90. Cf Abbot, De Gratia, 28. 91. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 41. 92. John 17:9, ‘I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me’. 93. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 41. 94. I Tim 2:4: ‘Who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’; I Peter 3:9: ‘He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance’. 95. Cf Abbot, De Gratia, 37–​38. 96. Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 43. 97. Cf Abbot, De Gratia, 36: ‘Certe aliud est simpliciter se dedisse, quod per dignitatem hostiae fecit, quod commune omnium, aliud est ex dilectione se dedisse . . . quod proprium esse voluit electorum’. [Certainly, it is one thing to have given himself simply, that is a function of the worth of the sacrifice, which is common to all, and it is another thing to have given himself out of love . . . which he willed to be proper to the elect.] 98. Milton, British Delegation, 351. 99. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 45. ‘An ex duobus in aequali gratia constitutis, alter convertatur & salvetur, alter resistat & pereat?’ 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. , 46. Augustine, Epistola, 214. ‘Si non est Dei gratia, quomodo salvat mundum? Si non est liberum arbitrium, quomodo judicat mundum?’ 102. Ibid. Bernard of Clairvaux, De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, ch 1. ‘Tolle liberum arbitrium, non erit quod salvetur; tolle gratiam, non erit unde salvetur’. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 47. ‘Gratiae studiosius partes agis? Manichaeus, Praedestianus, Borborita, Enthysiasta, Florianus, Puritanus, Calvinista, Gomarista, a Pontificiis, Lutheranis, & Remonstrantibus audies. Sin arbitrio relinquas vel minimas in prima conversion partes; vix Pelagiani, aut Semipelagiani, Iustitiarii, Operistae, Particularii, Praevisiarii, Synergistae, Arminiani, lituram effigies’. Borborita (Boggy) was Hugo Grotius’s unflattering nickname for the Reformed theologian Samuel Maresius (whose French surname, Desmarets, is a homonym of ‘des marais’, meaning ‘of the marshes’), Cf James Nicholas, Calvinism and Arminianism Compared (London, 1824), i, 270. ‘Florianus’ is presumably a reference to Florus of Lyon, who defended Gottschalk in the eighth century. The Particularius was a monastic officer whose task was to divide up the food. 106. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 47. The 1618 caricature is reproduced in Carlos N. M. Eire, Reformations: the Early Modern World 1450–​1650 (New Haven, 2016), 572. 107. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 48. Cf Francisco Suarez, Omnia Opera, 26 vols (Paris, 1856–​ 1866), xi, 376.

324 Notes 108. The Canons of Dort were first published in England shortly after Prideaux had given this lecture; the license was issued on 21 July 1619. Milton, British Delegation, 297 n. For the text of the Canons, see Milton, British Delegation, 297–​321. 109. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 48. ‘Cuneus enim idoneus huic nodo adaptatus, non tantum liberi arbitrii curvitatem, ad amussim exiget: sed & reliquos quatuor Articulos in Synodo Dordracensi contra Remonstrantes (ut fertur) iam foeliciter ab Orthodoxis conclusos, eadem opera expediet’. 110. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 78. 111. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 52. 112. Prideaux referred approvingly here to Martin Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio. 113. Johannes Corvinus, Reponsionis ad Ioannis Bogermanni . . . annotations (Leiden, 1616), 258 & 262. 114. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 52. 115. Ibid. 116. Prideaux also quoted Genesis 6:5; I Corinthians 2:14; II Corinthians 3:5; John 15:16; Philippians 2:13. 117. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 53. ‘Nil concurrit ad conversionem, de qua loquimur, ex parte voluntatis causative, sed tantum subjective, unde aequali gratia excitati, aequales ex parte effectus sortiuntur. 118. Prideaux noted the different ways in which Bellarmine, Fonseca, and Suarez had described this. 119. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 53. 120. Ibid., 53–​54. 121. Ibid., 53. ‘Ex adamantina ista catena ad Rom. 8 inter immutabile Dei propositum, & effectum ipsius constantissimum’. 122. Ibid., 55. 123. Augustine, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, ch 8. 124. Augustine, De gratia Christi et de Peccato Originale, ch 24. 125. Augustine, Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum, I, ch 19. 126. Augustine, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, ch 5. 127. Prideaux refers in the margin to Aquinas, S.Th, IaIIae q 99 art 2 & q 112 art 3. 128. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 56. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 57. 132. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk 7, ch 30. 133. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 58. ‘Necque enim omnem, in conversione prima, voluntati negamus actionem (ut recte concludit Ripa) sed dicimus eam actam agere, sicut primo habeat a gratia efficaci unde agat, cum qua ut liberata potius quam libera, statim coagit’. 134. Ibid., 59. ‘Voluntas igitur conversi, salutares effectus necessario producit, & tamen libere, gratia ipsam liberante & agente: licet in sensu diviso (hoc est seposito hoc salutaris gratiae ductu) retineat simper facultatem ut alio se divortat’.

Notes  325 135. Ibid., 61. ‘Non opus est Ariadnes filo, dum Apostoli adsit catena; “Quos praedestinavit, eos vocavit; quos vocavit, eos etiam justificavit.” ’ 136. Ibid., 65–​66. ‘Fides manus est, qua apprehendimus illam salutis tabulam, per quam e syrtibus desperationis enatamus. Justification principium & cardo est (ut ingenue cum Pighius agnoscit Bellarminus) a quo pendent, vel in quo versantur, omnes inter nos & Pontificios controversiae’. 137. Ibid., 68. ‘Ex sola fide justum vivere & iustificari’. 138. Ibid., 68. He cited Titus 1:1: ‘the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth’. 139. Ibid., 69. ‘intellectus notitiam, voluntatis assensum, cordis fiduciam; adeo ut nil aliud sit fides justificans, quam assensus fiducialis praesupponens notitiam’. This tripartite distinction within faith was a Reformed commonplace: Muller, Dictionary, s.v. ‘fides’. 140. Ibid. ‘Relative sive instrumentaliter, quatenus fides ut manus apprehendit Christi iustitiam, & fideli applicat ut inde iustificetur’. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid., 70. He cited Romans 3:28, ‘For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law’; Titus 3:5, ‘he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy’; Galatians 2:16, ‘a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified’; Romans 3:24, ‘justified by his grace as a gift’; Romans 4:14, ‘For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void’. Many of the biblical references is the 1648 edition of the lecture are incorrect, but the text enables their identification. 144. Prideaux refers particularly to the discussion of justification in Bellarmino, Disputationes, 3:1002–​1008. 145. Romans 3:22 refers to ‘the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe’. 146. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 72. 147. E.g. Romans 8:24 and Luke 7:47. 148. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 74. ‘Nam aliud est causa justificationis, alius qualitas justificati’. 149. Ibid., 75. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid., 75. 152. Ibid., 60. Canon 12 ‘Tales nos amat Deus, quales future sumus ipsius dono, non quales sumus nostro merito’. 153. Ibid., 77. 154. ODNB s.v. ‘Richard Thomson’ 155. Robert Abbot, De Gratia et Perseverantia Sanctorum (London, 1618), 83–​end; Sebastian Benefield, De Perseverantia Sanctorum (Frankfurt, 1618), 243.

326 Notes 156. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 80. There is no reference to Thomson, Abbot, Benefield or Prideaux in Jay Collier’s Debating Perseverance: the Augustinian Heritage in Post-​ Reformation England (Oxford, 2018). 157. Ibid., 79. ‘Qua qui credit semper credit’. 158. Ibid. ‘Sed ipsius cordis innovationem, per gratiae injectum semen, et spiritus incubatum, quo omnia possunt in eo qui corroborat, Philippians 4’. The reference is to Philippians 4:13: ‘I can do all things through him who strengthens me’. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid., 80. 161. Ibid. 162. Romans 9:11: ‘That God’s purpose of election might continue’. 163. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 83. Romans 8:30: ‘And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified’. Abbot gave similar weight to this text: Abbot, De Gratia, 4. 164. Benefield also made use of this verse. Benefield, De Perseverantia, 140. 165. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 84. 166. Ibid., 86. Prideaux mentions Matthew 13:23, ‘As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it’; I Peter 1:23, ‘you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God’; John 4:14, ‘The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’; and I John 3:9, ‘No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him’; and uses other phrases that suggest I John 2:27; Colossians 3:16; I Corinthians 6:19; but appear not to be correctly referenced. 167. Abbot had also emphasized the indwelling of the Spirit as guarantor of perseverance. Abbot, De Gratia, 7–​8. 168. John 17:11: ‘Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one’. 169. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 87. 170. I John 2:19: ‘They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us’. 171. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 89. 172. Ibid., 92. Milton, British Delegation, 281–​282. 173. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 92. ‘Quid aliud nobis indicat, quam assensus fiducialis actum, non directum tantum esse in rem promissam, sed reflexum, etiam in credentis apprehensionem’. 174. I Corinthians 2:12: ‘We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God’. 175. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 93. 176. Ibid., 95. 177. Prideaux refers to a large number of passages, including Ephesians 3:12; II Corinthians 3:12; I Timothy 3:13; Hebrews 3:6; Hebrews 4:16. 178. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 102.

Notes  327 179. Mark 11:24: ‘Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours’. 180. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 104. 181. Ibid. ‘Accedant sacramenta, ut huius fidei & certitudinis sigilla, e quibus baptismus est stipulatio bonae conscientiae erga Deum, I Peter 3.21’. 182. Hebrews 4:16: ‘Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need’. 183. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 110. ‘Abusus per accidens, rei non praejudicat per se salutari’. 184. Ibid., 111. ‘Praerogativae foederis & Ecclesiae, extra quam nulla est salus’. 185. Ibid., 112. ‘Utrum gentes quae nec Messiam promissum expectarunt, nec missum agnoverunt,ex naturae lumine salute potuissent consequi’. 186. Ibid., 119. 187. Abbot had maintained the same. Abbot, De Gratia, 29. ‘Gratia non est universalis. Quibus Christum non revelat Deus, iis gratiam ad salutem non facit’. [Grace is not universal. To those to whom God does not reveal Christ, he does not give saving grace.] 188. E.g. I Corinthians 2:14, ‘The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned’; Romans 7:14 which describes human beings as ‘sold under sin’; II Timothy 2:26 which speaks of ‘being captured by [Satan] to do his will’; Genesis 6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually’; Romans 7:23 ‘but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members’. 189. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 120. ‘Qui tali sunt conditione, ut non magis percipant vel cogitant ea quae spectant ad salute, quam mortuus se resuscitet ad vitam, sed e contra ut servi & captive, a depravata voluntate & affectibus, in propriam rapiuntur interitum; isti non possunt ex naturae, aut rationis ductu, salutem consequi’. 190. Ibid. 191. He quoted Psalm 51:10: ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God’. 192. Philippians 3:13: ‘for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure’. 193. He quoted Isaiah 64:6: ‘All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment’. 194. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 120. 195. E.g. Hebrews 11:6: ‘Without faith it is impossible to please God’; Mark 6:16 ‘Whoever does not believe will be condemned’; John 3:18: ‘Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God’; Galatians 5:6: ‘in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love’. 196. E.g. Acts 4:12: ‘And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’; I Corinthians 3:11: ‘For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ’; John 14:6: ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’.

328 Notes 197. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 122. 198. Ibid. Romans 10:13-​1: ‘For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?’ 199. Ibid. Acts 11:18: ‘When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, “Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life.” ’ 200. Ibid., 127. ‘Neque extra domum, hoc est Ecclesiae Catholicae septa, de salute cuispiam aeterna, polliceri potest aliquid Ecclesia’. 201. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 301–​305. 202. White’s epistle to the reader was dated 10 April 1624: Francis White, A Reply to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer to Certain Questions (London, 1624), ‘To the Reader’. 203. ODNB s.v. ‘John Percy [alias Fisher]’ 204. Abbot’s treatise was actually entered on the Stationers’ Company Register on 17 December 1623. 205. Prideaux is referring here to Romans 6:17: ‘But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed’. 206. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 128. 207. Ibid., 129. ‘An Ecclesia Protestantium a Papali distincta, ante Lutheri reformationem quovis seculo orbi Christiano fuerit conspicuo’. 208. Featley made the same point. Daniel Featley, The Romish Fisher Caught and Held in His Own Net (London, 1624), L1*v–​L2*r. 209. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 129. ‘Oves et haedi inveniuntur in eadem caula, in eadem domo vasa honoris et contumeliae, & obruitur aliquoties triticum, zizaniorum cumulo’. 210. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, bk 3, ch 33. 211. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 129. ‘Utrumque dicitur (inquit Augustin.) propter temporalem unitatem intra una retia piscium bonorum et malorum’. 212. Ibid. He cited Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, Psalm 61. 213. Ibid. 214. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, L2*r: ‘In this question, we undertake not to prove a Protestant Church visible in all Ages, in the first acceptation, but in the later only, we maintain visible; but not a conspicuous, eminent, and glorious face of a Church in all Ages, consisting of an apparent hierarchy’. 215. Featley also accepted that the name ‘Protestant’ was new. Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, L2*v–​L3*r. 216. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 130. Featley also defined Protestants by ‘their faith and doctrine, positively comprised in, & confined to scripture; and oppositely, as it is repugnant to all errors in faith, and manners, against the holy Scriptures, especially against the present errors of the Church of Rome’. Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, L2*v. See also George Abbot, A Treatise of the Perpetual Visibility and Succession of the True Church Is All Ages (London, 1624), 94.

Notes  329 217. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 130. ‘Quique detestabantur Papalem Curiam, communicare nihilominus potuerant cum Romana Ecclesia’. 218. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, M*r: ‘The Church in this acceptation, as it consisteth of the elect only, is known to God only, and consequently is invisible’. 219. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 130. 220. Ibid., 136. ‘Ab ipsa Reformationis natura, quae non novum erigit Ecclesiam, sed corruptam corrigit’. 221. Ibid. ‘Ecclesia papismo infecta, distincta tamen a morbo inficiente, erat ante Lutheri Reformationem: sed eadem est hodie quoad essentiam Ecclesia Protestantium: ergo Ecclesia Protestantium quoad essentia praecessit Lutherum’. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, 170–​171: ‘Luther formed no new Church, but reformed the Church he found; and therefore cannot be termed, the first Apostle of Protestant doctrine; although, in a tolerable sense, he may be styled, the first Apostle of the happy Reformation in our days. Luther burnished and refined the gold of the sanctuary, obscured with rust: he made not new gold’. 222. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 136. 223. Ibid., 137. 224. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, Q1*v: ‘Such were those, who though they remained most of them in the outward communion with the Church of Rome, yet groaned under that Babylonish yoke, and in heart abhorred the idolatry and superstition reigning in that Church; and they desired, with sighs and tears, a reformation before Luther’. See also Abbot, Treatise, 94–​95: ‘Our settled and resolved judgement is, that when it is asked, Where our Church in former Ages was; we may, besides that which we have formerly answered, truly say, that it was in England, in France, in Spain, in Italy, yea, in Rome itself: Spiritus ubi vult spirat, the Holy Ghost breatheth where it pleaseth: for who cannot conceive by the writings of many in former Ages, or by such touches as others do give concerning them, that divers, who lived nearest the Whore of Babylon, did most detest her abomination; and, finding that the weakness and impurity of her doctrine could not truly satisfy the hungry and thirsty soul, did, according to that knowledge which Christ out of his Word revealed unto them, seek some means which was not ordinarily professed in that time?’ 225. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, L3*r–​L3*v: ‘Protestants in faith and doctrine are of two sorts; either implicitly, and virtually: and such are all those, who holding the Scripture for the sole and entire rule of faith, condemn consequently all doctrines of faith, against or besides the holy Scriptures, especially if they deliver such positions and doctrines, from whence by necessary and infallible consequence, some particular error or other of the Romish Church (although not perhaps sprung up in their time) may be repelled. Or explicitly, and actually: and such are they, who directly & professedly opposed Romish errors as they crept in, or not long after; especially those who opposed the whole masse of Popish errors and superstitions, after they grew to a ripe sore, fit to be lanced, about the time of Luther’. 226. Ibid. 227. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 138. Prideaux’s ascribed less significance to these groups than other contemporary polemicists. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, L3*: ‘As

330 Notes the same piece of gold successively passeth through divers stamps and inscriptions: so the self-​same faith of Protestants, in substance, hath passed though all Ages, yet with divers names; as of Becherits, Berengarians, Petrobrusians, Henricians, Albingenses, Waldenses, Dulcinists, Lollards, Luiddamites, Wickleuists, Hussites, Thaborits, Lutherans, Hugonots, Gospellers, and Reformers’. Featley was also keen to defend these medieval separatist communities against the accusations made by Roman Catholic polemicists: Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, P3*r–​Q1*. Abbot made such groups the primary (though not sole) focus of his pamphlet: Abbot, Treatise, 30–​94. 228. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 138. ‘Non autem tam periculose dissentit is, qui caeremonias nonnullas, & Scholae opiniones non recipit, quam alter, qui Ecclesiae, in qua vivit, decreta minus facit, aut in fidei articulis hallucinatur’. Cf Featley, Fisher Caught and Held, O4*v: ‘Among the professors of the truth, there may be differences of judgement; not only touching rites, and ceremonies, and matters of discipline, but also touching points of doctrine, so the points be not main and fundamental, or such as are clearly and expressely defined by the Church out of manifest texts of Scripture’. Cf Abbot, Treatise, 111. 229. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 138. ‘A conformitate nostrae ecclesiae, cum primitiva Ecclesia Christi & Apostolorum’. 230. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 139. 231. Ibid., 140. ‘Ita Dei misericordia coaluerunt in coetus aliquos visibiles, ut segregarunt seipsos quantum potuerunt a paplibus iniquitamentis, & sub legitima Episcoporum & pastorum disciplina, doctrinam Evangelii synceriorem retinuere’. 232. Prideaux referred to Hosea 3:4. ‘For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods,’ and Psalm 74:9. ‘We do not see our signs; there is no longer any prophet’. 233. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 142. 234. Ibid., 143. ‘Admonita tam saepe, tam seio, sanari noluit Babylon, quid restat igitur nisi ut exiremus’. 235. Ibid. ‘Quod retinet adhuc sani, amplectimur, quod adjecit, in rem suam, aut pompam, rejicimus: redeat, unde cecidit accedimus, & dextras non servitutis, sed societatis dabimus’.

Chapter 2 1. Donald Sinnema, Christian Moser, & Herman J. Selderhuis, Acta et Documenta Synodi Nationalis Dordrechtanae, 1618–​1619 (Göttingen and Bristol, CT, 2018), II:2, 7. ‘Effice, O Deus, ne quenquam fallamus per scripturas, nec fallamur in illis, sed ut veritatem in illis quaerentes eam inveniamus, inventam constanti fide propugnemus’. 2. Milton, British Delegation, 7. 3. Ibid., 43. ‘La gloire de Dieu et le repos des consciences sans aulcun interest ou partialité.’

Notes  331 4. After the Synod had begun, the King sent another delegate, Walter Balcanquhall, to represent the Church of Scotland. Milton, British Delegation, 148. When Joseph Hall fell ill during the Synod, he was replaced by Thomas Goad, one of Archbishop Abbot’s chaplains, although Abbot would perhaps have preferred to replace him with Prideaux, as Sir Dudley Carleton had suggested: Milton, British Delegation, 158. Abbot would certainly have preferred that George Hakewill had been sent to Dort, rather than Samuel Ward. Milton, British Delegation, 371. 5. Milton, British Delegation, 93–​94. 6. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 61–​63. 7. Milton, British Delegation, 147–​148. 8. Ibid., 223. 9. John Hales, Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable Mr John Hales (London, 1673), 2:86–​88. Milton, British Delegation, 198–​199. This was not the last time the British were called upon to resolve disputes between the Dutch and the Bremen delegation. Hales, Golden Remains, 2:114. 10. Hales, Golden Remains, 2:92. Hales had informed Sir Dudley Carleton that ‘My Lord Bishop of late hath taken some pains with Martinius of Bremen, to bring him from his opinion of universal grace’. 11. Ibid., 2:101. Milton, British Delegation, 199–​200. 12. Milton, British Delegation, 202. 13. For Overall’s opinions and reputation, see Anthony Milton, ‘ “Anglicanism” by Stealth: the Career and Influence of John Overall’, in Kenneth Fincham & Peter Lake, Religious Politics in Post-​Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 159–​176. See also Collier, Debating Perseverance, 50–​53. 14. Milton, British Delegation, 77 & 100. 15. In his request that Sir Dudley Carleton involve the Archbishop, Balcanquhall underlined that the opinion that he, Goad, and Carleton were defending had been ‘confirmed much by my late L[ord] of Salisbury [Robert Abbot], his G[race’s] brother, who was thought to understand the meaning of our confession as well as any man’. Hales, Golden Remains, 2: 103. Cf Abbot, De Gratia, 35. 16. Milton, British Delegation, 210. 17. Ibid., 215. 18. Ibid., 216. 19. Ibid., 225. 20. Prideaux, of course, had already used it as an authority in his 1622 Act Lecture. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 95. 21. George Carleton, John Davenant, Samuel Ward, Thomas Goad, &Walter Balcanquall, The Collegiate Suffrage of the Divines of Great Britain (London, 1629) , 61–​62 & 112–​ 113 (on justification); 11–​12, 49, & 58 (on ecclesiology). This English edition will usually be quoted here, with references to the Latin text where necessary to clarify technical terminology. 22. Ibid., 1–​2. 23. Gomarus misquoted the Thirty-​nine Articles in an attempt to suggest that the Church of England had not determined the matter as clearly as the British Suffrage and, when

332 Notes corrected, pointed to William Whitaker and William Perkins as respectable English exponents of his own supralapsarian position. Milton, British Delegation, 224–​225. 24. Hales, Golden Remains, 2:130. The Canons of Dort did eventually embrace a sublapsarian position. Milton, British Delegation, 299. 25. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 4. 26. Ibid., 3. 27. Hales, Golden Remains, 2:86–​87. See also Snoddy, Soteriology of James Ussher, 40–​41. 28. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 5. 29. Ibid., 6. 30. Muller observed a similar approach in Amandus Polanus: Muller, Christ and the Decree, 155–​156. Oliver Crisp suggests that the Reformed theologians of Saumur approached the election of Christ in a similar way, and that this position was compatible with the Second Helvetic Confession (1566): Oliver Crisp, God Incarnate: Explorations in Christology (London & New York, NY, 2009), 37–​38. 31. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 7. 32. Ibid., 7. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 69. 33. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 9. 34. Ibid., 22. 35. Ibid., 23. 36. Ibid., 23. 37. Ibid., 30. 38. Ibid., 31. The British delegates, like Prideaux, referred to Romans 9:11 as authority for this. 39. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 33. 40. Ibid., 33. 41. Ibid., 31. 42. Ibid., 36. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 69. 43. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 38. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Cf Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 10. 46. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 43–​44. 47. Ibid., 45. 48. Ibid., 46. 49. Ibid., 46–​47. 50. Ibid., 47. 51. Ibid., 47–​48. 52. Ibid., 48. 53. Ibid., 49–​50 54. Ibid., 53. 55. Milton, British Delegation, 218, n.110. 56. Ibid., 218–​219. They cited Articles II, VII, XV, & XXXI, as well as the ‘Consecratory Prayer’. Collier has underlined the British Delegates’ commitment to Christian Antiquity as demonstrating the Catholicity of their views on perseverance. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 91.

Notes  333 57. Milton, British Delegation, 220. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 221. 61. In his late-​arriving guidance on this issue, James had expressed the wish that his delegates avoid offending the Lutherans if possible. Milton, British Delegation, 212. 62. Milton, British Delegation, 221. 63. Abbot had urged them to take a different line on this issue. Milton, British Delegation, 194. 64. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 64–​65. 65. Ibid., 67. 66. Ibid., 68. 67. Ibid., 69. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 73. 70. Ibid., 74–​75. 71. Ibid., 76. 72. Ibid., 79–​80. 73. Ibid., 81–​82. 74. Ibid., 83. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 94. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 96. 79. Ibid., 97. 80. Ibid., 87. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., , 89–​90. 83. Ibid., 97. 84. As Collier notes, the British delegates gave more space to the doctrine of perseverance than to any other. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 64. 85. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 102. 86. Ibid., 103–​104. The British delegates expressed outrage that the Arminians deployed this argument, when they evidently rejected the idea that baptism involved any imparting of grace. 87. Ibid., 104–​105. 88. Ibid., 108. 89. Ibid., 110. 90. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 65. 91. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 111. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 66. 92. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 112. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 66. 93. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 112–​113. 94. Ibid., 117. 95. Ibid., 117–​118.

334 Notes 96. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 70. 97. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 119. 98. Ibid., 121. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 73. 99. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 123. 100. Ibid., 124. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 75–​76. 101. Ibid., 124–​125. 102. Ibid., 126. 103. Ibid., 126–​127. 104. Ibid., 127. 105. Ibid., 129. 106. Ibid., 133. 107. Ibid., 140. 108. Ibid., 141, 109. Ibid., 145. 110. Ibid., 151. 111. Ibid., 153. 112. Ibid., 168. 113. Ibid., 168–​169. 114. Ibid., 169. 115. Ibid., 174–​175. 116. Ibid., 176. 117. Ibid., 177. 118. Ibid., 83–​90. 119. Ibid., 91–​92. For Overall’s view on this point, see Milton, British Delegation, 70. The British delegates had better luck altering the wording of the Canons on the death of Christ, and on ensuring that the Canons of Dort made room for Davenant and Ward’s conviction that baptism cleansed even the reprobate from original sin. Hales, Golden Remains, ii, 143. 120. Milton, British Delegation, 324–​326. 121. Ibid., 378–​380. 122. The Dissertationes Duae merely indicate that Davenant’s lectures had been given ‘some years previously’. John Davenant, Dissertationes Duae (Cambridge, 1650), ‘Dissertatio de Praedestinatione et Reprobatione,’ title page. However, the lectures on predestination refer to Gerard Vossius’s history of the Pelagian controversies and quote directly from Robert Abbot’s De Gratia et Perseverantia Sanctorum, both of which were only published in 1618. Davenant, Dissertationes, 224 & 226. The quotation on page 226, beginning ‘Haec illa est vera gratia quam Christiana fides profitetur . . .’ comes from Abbot, De gratia, et perseverantia sanctorum, 60. The lectures on the death of Christ, meanwhile, refer to the Acta of the Synod, which were only published in 1620. Davenant, Dissertationes, 17, 18, 20. It is possible that Davenant introduced these references during the editing process, which he mentioned to Ward in a letter of 20 February 1622: Fuller, Life, Letters, & Writings, 144. However, Davenant’s own description of that process does not suggest that he was planning to introduce any new material, but rather ‘polish that

Notes  335 which is rough, & cut away that which is superfluous’. It therefore seems likely that these lectures were delivered at some point between the British delegation’s return from the Netherlands in May 1619 and Davenant’s election as Bishop of Salisbury in June 1621. 123. Fuller, Life, Letters, and Writings, 163. 124. These echoes will be outlined in the footnotes rather than the main text of this chapter. 125. Davenant, Dissertationes, 105. 126. Ibid., 105–​106. 127. Ibid., 106. ‘Nos etiam turpe ducamus in causa Dei obmutescere, cum hostes veritatis scriptis et clamoribus suis undique nobis obstrepunt’. Cf Carleton et al. Collegiate Suffrage, 174–​175. 128. Cf Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 14. 129. Davenant, Dissertationes, 107. ‘Si Dei naturam et perfectionem in se consideremus, illum nun primum unum videre, dein aliud; necque prius hoc decernere aut velle, deinde illud; sed unico & simlicissimo actu ab aeterno omnia simul vidisse, omnis simul in se decrevisse’. Cf Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 10; Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 1–​2 & 30. 130. Davenant, Dissertationes, 112. ‘Singularem actionem voluntatis Divinae, ab aeterno separantis quosdam ad finem gloriae seu vitae aeternae, aliis praeteritis’. Cf Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 10, 131. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 1–​2. 132. Davenant is here talking about the first act of reprobation, not the second. 133. Davenant, Dissertationes, 115–​116. 134. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 33. 135. Davenant, Dissertationes, 116. Prideaux made the same point. Prideaux, Viginti-​ duae, 10. 136. Davenant, Dissertationes, 116. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid., 117. 139. Ibid., 118. 140. Ibid., 118. ‘Nam utcunque Deus, pro absoluta sua libertate, potest apud se decernere, quod creaturae quantumvis innocenti, hoc aut illud bonum not sit communicaturus quod aliis communicabit, tamen non potest decernere, stante sua justitia, creaturae innocent poenam infligendam’. 141. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 38–​39. 142. Davenant, Dissertationes, 119. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 3, 13, 31, & 33. 143. Davenant, Dissertationes, 120. ‘Utrum in illis qui eliguntur & praedestinuntur ad gloriam detur aliquis actus aut qualitas a Deo praevisa & praeconsiderata, aut aliud quodcunque, quod sit meritum, causa, ratio, conditio, aut antecedens quolibet modo ita propositum decreto electionis, ut ex positione talis praecedanei in praevisione Divinae ponatur electio, ex negatio negatur’. 144. Ibid., 121. 145. Ibid., 122.

336 Notes 146. Ibid., 123. ‘Praescientia igitur futurae sanctitatis non fuit causa praedestinationis, sed praedestinatio causa praevisae sanctitatis’. 147. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 13–​15. 148. Davenant, Dissertationes, 125. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 35. 149. Davenant, Dissertationes, 126. 150. Ibid., 135. ‘Ex eo quod Deus sit natura bonus, recte infertur, illum velle bonum omni suae creaturae; sed non recte, illum velle quodvis bonum cuivis creaturae, aut aequalia & eadem bona aequalibus creaturis’. 151. Ibid. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 31–​32. 152. Davenant, Dissertationes, 136. ‘Quia quando ponimus absolutum & efficax Dei decretum de quocunque eventum futuro, intelligimus simul Deum, propter hanc intentionem adimplendum, velle adhibere & applicare illa media, quibus tale effectum producatur. In antecedente ergo decreto dandi gloriam, virtualiter includitur consequens decretum dandi bona opera, caeteraque media quae via sunt ad regnum gloriae’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 168–​169. 153. Davenant, Dissertationes, 138. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 87. 154. Davenant, Dissertationes, 139. ‘Imo posse non perseverare in fide, posse deficere a sanctitate, uno verbo, posse peccare & perire, non est libertas, aut pars libertatis, sed liberi arbitrii morbus vel imbecillitas’. 155. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 13–​15. 156. Arminius actually proposes a quadripartite, rather than a bipartite structure to the decrees. Davenant has homed in on what Arminius would have counted as the second and fourth decrees in predestination. Keith Stanglin & Thomas McCall, Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (Oxford, 2012), 134–​140. 157. Davenant, Dissertationes, 142. Milton, British Delegation, 179. 158. Davenant, Dissertationes, 143. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 10–​13. 159. Davenant, Dissertationes, 147. He was drawing here on the mediating position adopted by the British delegates concerning Christ’s role in election. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 5–​7. 160. Davenant, Dissertationes, 152. ‘Electio ante tempora secularia est quasi mensura omnium spiritualium benedictionum (puta fidei, sanctitatis, perseverantiae) quae dantur in tempore; non vice versa (ut volunt Remonstrantes) praevisa fides & perseverantia mensura electionis’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 7. 161. Davenant, Dissertationes, 155. 162. Ibid., 158. 163. Ibid., 159. ‘Praedestinationem singulorum personarum ad vitam ex mero Dei beneplacito oriri, & non ex praevisis ullis humanae voluntatis operationibus: quinetiam omnium bonorum operationum quae ad vitam aeternam ducunt, gratiam electionis causam ac fontem esse, non praemium aut mercedem sequentem’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 1–​3. 164. Davenant, Dissertationes, 159–​160. ‘Praedestinatio est praescientia & praeparatio beneficiorum Dei, quibus certissime liberantur quicunque liberantur’. The quotation is from Augustine, De Dono Perseverantiae, ch 14. 165. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 5–​6.

Notes  337 166. Ibid., 13. 167. Davenant, Dissertationes, 160. ‘Praedestinatio est quaedam rato ordinis aliquorum in salutem aeternam, in mente divino existens . . . Exsecutionem huius ordinis esse passive in praedestinatis, active autem in Deo’. Davenant is quoting Thomas Aquinas, S.Th, Ia q 23 art.2. 168. E.g. Ephesians 1:11: ‘In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will’. 169. Davenant, Dissertationes, 161. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 7–​8. 170. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 11–​12. 171. Davenant, Dissertationes, 165. 172. Davenant cites Augustine, De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, ch 15. 173. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 25–​27. 174. Davenant, Dissertationes, 168. 175. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 12. 176. Davenant, Dissertationes, 168. 177. Ibid., 169. 178. Ibid., 170. ‘Non debemus introducere talem electionem, quae puram Dei gratiam evertit, & discrimen electorum & rejectorum ad bonum usum liberi arbitrii reducit: sed electio ex fide praevisa & non electio ex infidelitate praevisa hoc faciat’. 179. Ibid., 170. ‘Non posse talem gratuitam gratiam stabiliri, nisi stabiliatur simul absoluta haec praedestinatio’. 180. Ibid., 171. ‘Praeteritione, non-​electione, sive reprobatione illarum personarum quas Deus eximia illa & speciali misericordia, quae ad vitam infallibiliter perducit non est dignatus’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 30. 181. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 38. 182. Davenant, Dissertationes, 171. ‘Perditio tua ex te’. Modern translators have generally rendered this verse differently. In the Authorized Version it reads ‘O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself ’. 183. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 104–​111. 184. Ibid., 49–​53. 185. Ibid., 36–​38. 186. Ibid., 41–​43. 187. Davenant, Dissertationes, 173 188. Ibid., 173. ‘Nos autem, sicuti ipsum electionis beneficium ex gratuito Dei beneplacito, non ex praeeunte aliquo hominis bono actu pendere docuimus, ita negationem eiusdem beneficii, quam non-​ electionem, praeteritionem, sive reprobationem negativam appellare solemus, ex eadem liberrima Dei voluntate arcessimus, facientis de suo quod vult’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 30–​32. 189. Davenant, Dissertationes, 173. ‘Prior illa voluntas puniendi in Deo considerari non potest aut debet, nisi cum respectu antecedaneo ad peccatum personae puniendae, tanquam causam demeritoriam; sed haec voluntas praetereundi, vel noluntas, ut ita loquar, praedestinandi, considerari potest absque respectu antecedaneo ad peccatum non-​electae’.

338 Notes 190. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 38. 191. Cf Ibid., 31–​32. 192. Davenant, Dissertationes, 174. ‘Praescientiam demeritorum non esse causam praeteritionis, non-​electionis sive reprobationis stricte & proprie sumptae; sed sicuti ex mero Dei beneplacito dependet, quod certae quaedam personae per specialem providentiam, quam praedestinationem appellamus, infallibiliter ordinentur ad gratiam & gloriam, ita ex mera Dei libertate dependet, quod aliae quaedam personae non ita ordinentur, sed a gratia hac efficacy destituantur, & a Gloria deficere permittantur’. 193. In this section, he focussed on a work by the Arminian theologian Johannes Corvinus, Defensio Sententiae D Jacobi Arminii (Leiden, 1613). 194. E.g. Ezekiel 18:23: ‘Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?’ He also mentions Hosea 13:9, I Timothy 2:4, and Matthew 11:28. 195. Davenant, Dissertationes, 175. 196. Ibid., 180. 197. Ibid. ‘Nemo enim damnatur quia reprobatus, sed quia reus’. 198. Ibid., 182. ‘Non enim . . . media & causae damnationis ita connexae sunt cum decreto reprobationis, sicuti mediae & causae salutis connectuntur cum decreto praedestinationis. Atque ratio discriminis in promtu est: nam media & causae salutis sunt bona quaedam spiritualia; bonum autem subjacet providentia Dei, ut intentum, causatum, & ordinatum ab ea; sed media & causae quae ducunt ad damnationem sunt mala spiritualia: malum autem huiusmodi subjacent Divinae providentiae, non ut intentum & causatum, sed ut praevisum, permissum, ordinatum’. 199. Ibid., 195. ‘In hoc igitur se exserit arcanum illud electionis & reprobationis decretum, quod mors Christi, quae ex ordinatione Dei cuivis homini, si crederent, ad rconciliationem & vitam obtinedam valeret, non proficit tamen nisi electis, quibus solis ex speciali misericordia datur illa gratia, qua efficaciter possint & velint & reapse adimpleant dictam conditionem’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 46–​48. 200. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 198–​200. 201. Davenant, Dissertationes, 202. 202. I Timothy 2:1: ‘I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people’. 203. Davenant, Dissertationes, 205. 204. Ibid., 207. 205. Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei, contra Pelagium (London, 1618), 426. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 30–​32. 206. He cited specifically Romans 9:16 ‘So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy,’ and Romans 9:18 ‘So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills’. 207. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 31 & 41–​42. 208. John 17:9 ‘I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours’. 209. John 10:26 ‘But you do not believe because you are not among my sheep’.

Notes  339 210. Davenant, Dissertationes, 216. 211. Bradwardine, De causa Dei, 625. 212. Davenant, Dissertationes, 216. 213. Ibid,, 218. 214. Proverbs 21:1. 215. Davenant, Dissertationes, 221. 216. Ibid., 222. Davenant refers to the councils of Diospolis (415), Milevis (402), Carthage (418), Orange II (529). 217. Ibid., 234. 218. Ibid. 219. Ibid. ‘Sufficiat ergo verbi ministris, quoties haec praedestinationes materia coram populo tractando occurrit, intra illos limites se continere, quos sacra scriptura nobis aperte delineavit. Doceant, ante jacta mundi fundamenta Deum elegise suos ad vitam aeternam. Doceant hanc electionem non ex praevisis hominum meritis, sed ex gratuito beneplacito elegentis processisse. Doceant quicquid in nobis boni salutiferi reperitur id huius gratuitae misericordiae effectum esse. Doceant huius electionis nostrae certitudinem non quaerendum esse in arcanis Dei decretis, aut otiose speculationibus, sed in animi fidelis & sanctificati effectis & operationibus. Haec aliaque consimilia, quae clara, firma, fructuosa sunt, possunt & debent populo Christiano predicari’. N.B. The translation given here, and in subsequent quotations from this section of the lectures on predestination, is Davenant’s own, as set out in Animadversions (1641). 220. Ibid., 235. 221. Ibid. 222. Ibid., 236. ‘Praedestinationis decretum impenetrabile nobis est omnino quoad alios .... Est etiam quoad nosmetipsos a prioi impenetrabile, & ex effectis post conversionem & sanctificationem sollummodo perceptibile’. 223. Lake and Stephen, Scandal and Religious Identity, 39. 224. Davenant, Dissertationes, 238. 225. Ibid., 239. 226. Ibid., 240–​241. 227. Ibid., 241. ‘Postremo, pura, & omnimodo impromerita ex creaturae parte misericordia est vel maxime in Deo agnoscanda & celebranda. Haec autem proprietas ita relucet in praedestinationis doctrina, ut qui eam negatum aut obscuratum eunt, eadem opera puram hanc, & gratuitam Dei in hominibus salvandis misericordiam, negare aut obscurare convincantur’. 228. Ibid., 242. 229. Ibid., 243. ‘At quantum tumidi Pelagiani de virtute liberi sui arbitrii, quae nulla est, tantum sancti sancti de sola misericordia Dei, quae magna est, jure optimo possunt sibi polliceri’. 230. Ibid., 242. ‘Quia quisquis eam doctrinam recte intellexit, intelligit simul se praedestinatum, non ut sine sanguine aut sudore in coelum protinus subveheretur, sed ut praedestinatorum capiti Christo Jesu tam in cruce, quam in Gloria, & prious in cruce quam in Gloria, conformis rederetur’.

340 Notes 231. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 187–​208. 232. The British delegates had explained their position on the death of Christ in the same way. Milton, British Delegation, 219–​221. 233. Davenant, Dissertationes, 2. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 221: ‘We make no doubt but this doctrine of the extent of Christ’s redemption is the undoubted doctrine of the holy Scriptures, and most consonant to Antiquity, Fathers and Councils’. 234. Davenant, Dissertationes, 2. 235. Ibid., 8. ‘Docere Christum pro omnibus mortuum sufficienter, pro praedestinatis efficaciter’. 236. Ibid., 9. ‘Omnibus enim propositum & oblatum, a solis credentibus apprehensum & ad fructum aeternae salutis applicatum docuerunt’. 237. Ibid., 9. He quoted from Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes Theologici (Leipzig, 1546), 200; John Calvin, In epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Strasburg ,1540), 146 and In Evangelium secundum Iohanem (Geneva, 1555), 35; Heinrich Bullinger, In Apocalypsim (Zurich, 1535), sermon xxviii, 77–​78; Benedict Aretius, In epistolas Pauli ad Timothy, ad Titum at ad Philemonem (Morges, 1580), 50–​51; Wolfgang Musculus, Loci Communes (Basel, 1560), 191 and Girolamo Zanchi, Miscellaneorum Libri Tres (Neustadt, 1592), 3:13–​14. These theologians had all appeared in the explanation of the British delegation, alongside a number of others: Milton, British Delegation, 221. 238. Davenant, Dissertationes, 10 239. Ibid., 10. ‘Mors Christi in sacra scriptura proponitur ut universale remedium omnibus & singulis hominibus ex ordinatione Dei & natura rei ad salutem applicabile’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 46. 240. Davenant, Dissertationes, 10. ‘Infinitum thesaurum meritorum . . . quem Mediator Dei & hominum, homo Jesus Christus, sive agendo sive patiendo, in nostrum usum comparavit & congessit’. 241. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 46. 242. Davenant, Dissertationes, 11. ‘Ordinavit enim Deus ut omnibus & singulis esset applicabilis per fidem, sed non decrevit omnibus & singulis eam fidem donare per quam infallibile applicaretur’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 48. 243. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 53. 244. He pointed to John 3:16; John 3:17–​18; John 12:47–​48; II Corinthians 5:19–​20; Hebrews 4:1–​2; II Corinthians 5:14; I Timothy 2:6; Hebrews 2:9; I John 2:2. 245. Davenant, Dissertationes, 14. ‘Evertunt simul evangelicae nostrae praedicationis materiam, quae in hoc potissimum sita est, quod quemvis hominem certiorem facimus, Deum esse illi per mortem Christi sic reconciliatum, ut si in Christum credat, non sit illi imputaturus peccata, sed vitam aeternam adjudicaturus’. 246. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 177. 247. Davenant, Dissertationes, 17. ‘Vocatio seria ad credendum preasupponit objectum paratum in quod credatur . . . . Si enim ille vocaretur ad fidem in Christum cui Christus non esset ex ordinatione Dei applicabilis, fides in falsum objectum . . . postularetur’. 248. Ibid., 14. ‘Sic loquitur Ecclesia nostra Anglicana, Art. 31 “Oblatio Christi semel facta perfecta est redemtio, propitiatio & satisfaction pro omnibus peccatis totius mundi

Notes  341 tam originalibus quam actualibus; neque est alia satisfaction praeter illam”.’ This Article had been used by the British delegates to justify their Suffrage, and, as Milton points out, it had previously been used by Overall to support his interpretation of the Church of England’s teaching on this point. Milton, British Delegation, 218. 249. Ibid., 17. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 219. 250. Davenant, Dissertationes, 35. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 219. 251. Davenant, Dissertationes, 37. ‘Non ratione nudae sufficientiae sive intrinseci valoris, iuxta quam mors Dei est praetium mille mundis redimendis plusquam sufficiens, sed ratione foederis Evangelici merito mortis huius cum toto humani generi stabiliti, & ordinationis Divinae inde dependentis, juxta quam, sub possibili fidei conditione, remissio peccatorum & vita aeterna propter merita Christi mortui cuivis homini credituro exhibenda decernitur’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 48. This order again anticipates the 1633 edition of the Suffrage. 252. Davenant, Dissertationes, 38. 253. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 190. 254. Davenant, Dissertationes, 38. ‘Ordinationem quondam, juxta quam praedicta hostia ad redemtionem omnium hominum fuit oblata & acceptata’. 255. Ibid., 38–​39. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 47–​48. 256. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 43. 257. Hebrews 8:10: ‘For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’. 258. Davenant, Dissertationes, 39. 259. Ibid. 260. Ibid., Dissertationes, 40. Cf Acta Synodi Nationalis, ii: 99. 261. Davenant, Dissertationes, 27. ‘Qui talem sollummodo hypotheticam oblationem & sufficientiam admittunt in morte Christi, si ad omnes referatur’. 262. Ibid., 27. 263. Ibid., 40. ‘Sensus etenim communis respuit, ut pro omnibus sufficientur mortuus concedatur, qui pro aliquibus mortuus sive oblates negatur’. 264. Ibid., 42. 265. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 38–​42. 266. Davenant, Dissertationes, 55. ‘Neminem tamen, saltem ex adultis, praedicta Christi mors reponit in statum gratiae, actualis reconciliationis, sive salutis, antequam credat’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 61–​62. 267. Davenant, Dissertationes, 58. Cf Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 34–​35. 268. Davenant, Dissertationes, 57. ‘Qui enim promulgavit hoc universale decretum Evangelicum, “Quisquis crediderit salvus erit,” reservavit nihilominus sibi speciale privilegium donandi fidem aliquibus pro singulari sua misericordia, non donandi aliis pro liberrima & iustissima sua voluntate, atque ipsorum manifesta indignitate’. 269. Ibid., 57. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 53. 270. Davenant, Dissertationes, 58. 271. Robert J. McKelvey, ‘ “That Error and Pillar of Antinomianism”: Eternal Justification’, in Michael A.G. Haykin & Mark Jones, Drawn into Controversie: Reformed

342 Notes Theological Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth-​Century British Puritanism (Gottingen, 2011), 223–​262, 232. 272. Davenant, Dissertationes, 60. 273. Ibid., 66. 274. Ibid., 70. ‘Stat cum bonitate & iustitia divina suppeditare vel negare, sive nationibus, sive singularibus hominibus, media applicationis, idque pro beneplacito voluntatis sua, non pro disparitate voluntatum humanarum’. Cf Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 47 & 53. 275. Ibid. The British delegates had also referred to Abbot in their Suffrage, though not on this point. Carleton et al., Collegiate Suffrage, 89. 276. Davenant, Dissertationes, 71. ‘Deus nemini tenetur, nemini quicquam debet, nisi ex promissione gratuita & voluntaria’. 277. Ibid., 70. 278. Ibid., 72. ‘Dicimus itaque omnes mortales ex malo usu naturae sese indignos reddere evangelio’. 279. Ibid. ‘At aequum & congruum est, ut penes benefactorem sit libera sui beneficii applicatio’. 280. Ibid., 76. ‘Absoluta libertas Dei in prima collatione gratiae’. 281. Ibid. ‘Gratuita & specialis Dei misericordia in quibusdam hominibus donandis tam luce evangelica quam gratia salutifera’ 282. Ibid. ‘Omnem gloriandi ansam praereptam esse hominibus, & gloriam salutis humanae Deo . . . esse totaliter tribuendam’. 283. Ibid., 87. ‘Non debemus itaque inter se comittere & quasi collidere haec decreta Divina, “Volo Filium meum ita semetipsum in cruce offerre pro peccatis humani generis, ut omnes & singuli in eum credentes possint servari”; “Volo gratiam meam efficacem ita dispensare, ut non omnes, sed electi solummodo, accipiant hanc fidem salutiferam qua serventur”. Si cuiquam haec duo decreta pugnare videantur, debet ille intellectus sui infirmitatem potius agnoscere, quam quicquam eorum, quae in sacris Scripturis tam diserte habentur, inficias ire’. 284. Ibid. ‘Nos autem minime arbitramur Christi mortem fuisse tanquam aleam jactam; sed Deo Patri Christoque fuisse ab aeterno decretum, merito huius mortis certas quasdam personas ... infallibiliter servare’. 285. Ibid., 90. ‘Christus igitur mortuus est pro ovibus, pro filiis Dei, pro Ecclesia, pro membris sibi secundum electionis propositum ab aeterno destinatis, scilicet ut merito mortis Christi haec praedestinatio Dei impleretur in iisdem’. 286. Ibid., 90. 287. Ibid., 92–​93. 288. Ibid., 105. ‘Sed potius esse speciale quoddam consilium, ad universalis huius pacti infallibilem impletionem subordinatum’. 289. Ibid., 94–​95. Cf Prideaux, Viginiti-​duae, 41. 290. Davenant, Dissertationes, 95. ‘Sicut Christus diversimode pro hominibus oravit, ita diversimode meruit: propter quod, licet omnium sit universalis Redemtor, & sufficiens causa salutis, speciali tamen modo est causa efficax salutis, eorum quos sibi facit obedientes’. Cf Francisco Suarez, Opera Omnia, 26 vols (Paris, 1866), 18: 359.

Notes  343 291. Milton, British Delegation, 305. 292. Ibid., 243 n.26.

Chapter 3 1. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 123. He referred to Montagu’s Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum (1622). 2. George Ormsby ed., The Correspondence of John Cosin, Part I, Surtees Society, vol 52 (Durham, 1869), 32–​33. The letter is wrongly dated as 12 December 1624. This must be incorrect, because Richard Montagu’s A Gag for the New Gospel was published before 13 May 1624, since a petition against it was discussed in the House of Commons; and this letter was evidently written before its publication. 3. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 33. The book in question was John Heigham, The Gag of the New Gospel (London, 1623). 4. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 33. 5. Richard Montagu, A Gag for the New Gospel? No: a New Gag for an Old Goose (London, 1624), ‘To the reader’. 6. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 45–​46. This letter is wrongly dated as 11 January 1624–​ 25. This must be incorrect for the same reasons as the letter of 12 December. 7. John Yates, Ibis ad Caesarem (London, 1626), ‘Popery in gross,’ 46. 8. Commons Journal, 13 May 1624. 9. S. R. Gardiner ed., Debates in the House of Commons in 1625 (Camden Soc, NS 6, 1873), 47. 10. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 78. 11. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 28, 37, 57, 59. Cf also Gardiner, Debates, 46. 12. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 23–​24. 13. ODNB, s.v. ‘John Yates’. 14. Gardiner, Debates, 46. 15. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 79. This letter is also wrongly dated. Montagu refers to it, and the charge sheet it enclosed, in a letter dated 24 October 1624. Cf Ibid., 22. 16. Ibid., 80. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 25. 19. This identification is made clear in the following letter, where Montagu refers to the document as ‘the Appeal’. Ibid., 29. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 27–​28 22. Ibid., 29. 23. Ibid., 34–​35. 24. ODNB s.v. ‘Francis White’. 25. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 42. Ormsby suggests that the Doctor in question was probably Daniel Featley.

344 Notes 26. 27. 28. 29.

Ibid., 50. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Nicholas Tacke, Anti-​Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–​1640 (Oxford 1991), 125–​163. 30. The dedicatory epistle to the Lectiones Novem is dedicated to Charles as Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall, which, of course, he ceased to be on 27 March 1625. The dedicatory epistle of the Appello, by contrast, refers to ‘my late most sacred Lord and Master’. Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem (London, 1625), Epistle Dedicatory. 31. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 53. I am grateful to Prof. Anthony Milton for this reference. 32. Ibid., 56. 33. Prideaux, Viginti, 123. ‘Epiphanium recte liberat noster Montacutius a clarissimi Casauboni censura’. The marginal note refers to Montagu’s Analecta Ecclesiasticarum Exercitationum (London, 1622). 34. Prideaux, Lectiones Novem (Oxford, 1625) , Ad lectorem. 35. Ibid., Dedicatory Epistle. 36. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 69. 37. Ibid., 69–​70. Bocardo was the name of Oxford’s prison. 38. William Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom (London, 1646), 57. This is recorded in a letter sent by Thomas Turner to William Laud, also dated 23 May 1625. 39. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 71. 40. Ibid., 77. 41. Gardiner, Debates, 46. James I had died on 27 March 1625. 42. ODNB,s.v. Richard Montagu 43. Laud, Works, 6:244–​245. 44. Moore’s analysis of Preston’s religious position concludes that he is best identified as a ‘moderate’ or ‘fully conforming’ Puritan. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 23. 45. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 22. 46. Laud, Works, 6:249. 47. Ibid. 48. One of Cosin’s accounts suggests that the conference of anti-​Calvinist divines had been held before Warwick raised the matter with Buckingham but another suggests that the meeting was held subsequently. Cf Cosin, Works, 2:22 & 68. Note also Cosin, Works, 2:22 n. 49. Tyacke suggests that Buckingham may have hoped to defuse the religious concerns raised by his political enemies. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 166. 50. A delay to the beginning of the Conference meant that Montagu was only able to make the second of the two sessions. Cosin, Works, 2:2. 51. The laymen present at the initial meeting were Robert Rich; William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (Prideaux’s patron); James Hay, Earl of Carlisle (a patron of Joseph Hall); William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele; and a Secretary of State, Sir John Coke. All these men were sympathetic to Reformed theology. Lay attendance was reinforced,

Notes  345 at the second session of the conference on 17 February, by the Earls of Manchester, Bridgewater, Dorset, and Mulgrave. Barbara Donagan suggests that this only brought ‘a reinforcement of the conference’s old-​line English Calvinist component’. Barbara Donagan, ‘The York House Conference Revisited: Laymen, Calvinism and Arminianism,’ Bulletin of Historical Research 64/​155 (1991): 312–​331, 315. 52. Cosin, Works, 2:68. 53. Ibid., 2:23, 28, 30, 33. 54. Ibid., 2:35. 55. Ibid. 56. Moore, English Hypthetical Universalism, 154–​165. Moore argues that Preston’s views on the death of Christ were very similar to those maintained by Ward and Davenant. 57. Fuller, Church History, 3:345. 58. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 69. 59. Daniel Featley, Parallelismus nov-​antiqui erroris Pelagiarminiani (London, 1626), Prefatory letter. 60. The Stationers’ Company Register entry for 19 January 1626 records Featley’s publication of ‘Antisemipelagianismus’. Since no work of that title is elsewhere recorded, this is presumably the Latin edition of the Parallelismus. 61. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 13–​14. ‘Si legeret quispiam epistolas Prosperi & Hilarii Arelatensis, quae extant apud Augustinum . . . exestimaret eos de Arminianis aeque scribere ac de Pelagianis; ita quadrant fingula’. 62. The Stationers’ Company Register entry for 19 January 1626 also records Featley’s publication of the English translation of the Parallelismus, under its title Pelagius Redivivus. 63. Daniel Featley, Pelagius Redivivus, Translator’s Letter. 64. Ibid. 65. Anon. A Brief Censure upon an Appeal to Cæsar (The STC suggests: Oxford, 1625), 18 and passim. 66. Daniel Featley, A Second Parallel together with a Writ of Error Sued against the Appealer (London, 1626), Epistle. 67. Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, 230–​231. 68. Featley, Second Parallel, Epistle. 69. Collier, Debating Perseverance, 121. 70. Featley, Second Parallel, 2:8 (General Councils), 2:30 (Invocation of Saints), 2:32 (Extreme Unction), & 2:36 (Papal Primacy). 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 1:7n. 73. Ibid., 1:8n 74. Ibid., 1:3n. 75. Ibid,, 1:76n. 76. Ibid., 1:22. 77. Ibid., 1:24n. Featley was quoting Overall’s remarks as recorded by William Barlow: William Barlow, The Sum and Substance of the Conference (London, 1604), 41–​42.

346 Notes 78. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 156; White, Predestination, Policy, and Polemic, 231–​232; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 116; Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, 230–​231. 79. This edition is STC 10725. 80. Daniel Featley, Ancilla Pietatis (London, 1626), Preface to the Christian Reader. This and (unless otherwise stated) all further references to the Ancilla are taken from STC 10726. 81. Suellen Mutchow Towers, Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2003), 280. 82. Daniel Featley, The Sum of Saving Knowledge (London, 1626), To the Christian Reader. 83. Ibid. 84. Green seems to have overlooked Featley’s Sum in his discussion of those catechisms that contained explicit questions on double predestination. Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–​1740 (Oxford, 1996), 359–​367. 85. Featley, Sum, 7. 86. Ibid., 8. 87. Ibid., 9. Featley’s discussion of predestination in the context of the divine nature is thus a counter-​example to Green’s observation that ‘the point at which the elect or election were first mentioned was often not at the start, during a discussion of God’s nature or power or decree’. Green, Christian’s ABC, 365. 88. Featley, Sum, 11–​12. 89. Green has suggested that ‘the authors of the great majority of works inside our sample seem to have drawn a discreet veil over the deeper questions relating to the nature and causes of the decree and its position in the divine plan’. Green, Christian’s ABC, 367. Featley’s Sum would seem to be an exception. Green does not refer to it in his discussion. 90. Featley, Sum, 20. 91. Ibid. 92. Featley, Ancilla, 28. 93. E.g. Ibid., 48–​49 which lists, in relation to election, I Peter 2:9; Revelation 17:14; John 15:16; Romans 8:33; Ephesians 1:4; 2 Thessalonians 2:13. 94. Ibid., 60. Ryrie has rightly underlined the importance and prevalence of the experience of assurance within English Protestant devotional life. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 44–​46. Featley’s Ancilla exhibits how that worked within an explicitly Conformist spiritual framework. 95. Featley, Ancilla, 122. 96. Ibid., 123. 97. Ibid., 184. 98. Ibid., 226. 99. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 101. 100. Featley, Ancilla, Preface. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid.

Notes  347 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 399. Featley’s quotation reflects Brydon’s remark about the Jacobean reception of Hooker: ‘With Hooker having been apparently reclaimed by the conformist Calvinist mainstream of the Jacobean Church he could safely be quoted in defence of their beliefs concerning Church discipline and belief ’. Brydon, Evolving Reputation, 38. 106. E.g. Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem, 30, where he suggests that the doctrine he was promoting had been attacked ‘by those that were petitioners against the doctrine and discipline established in the Church of England’. 107. Before the Civil War, the Ancilla was republished in 1628, 1630, 1633, and 1639. 108. Lake’s observation that Featley engaged with Montagu by direct assault rather than by stealth overlooks what Featley was attempting to achieve with the Ancilla. Peter Lake, ‘The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War: Joseph Hall’s Via Media in Context,’ in Susan D. Amussen & Mark A. Kishlansky, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester, 1995), 55–​85, 77. 109. Montagu, Appello, 70 & 108. 110. Ibid,, 70–​71. 111. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 72, fol. 55. 112. Ibid., fol. 61. 113. George Carleton, John Davenant, Samuel Ward, Thomas Goad, & Walter Balcanquall, A Joint Attestation, Avowing that the Discipline of the Church of England Was Not Impeached by the Synod of Dort (London, 1626) , 3. 114. Ibid., 4. 115. Ibid., 7. 116. Ibid., 10–​11. 117. Ibid., 24. 118. Montagu, Appello, 12. 119. Ibid., 43. 120. James Ussher, ed. C.R. Elrington, The Whole Works, 17 vols (Dublin, 1847–​1864), 15:370. 121. Samuel Ward, Gratia Disciminans (London, 1626), 7. Ward’s fondness for adding the suffix -​bilitas to denote real but not necessarily fulfilled potential was complained about by George Carleton during the Synod of Dort. Milton, British Delegation, 201–​202. 122. Ward, Gratia Disciminans , 8. 123. Ibid., 9. 124. Ibid., 9–​10. ‘Est enim haec resistibilitas connata & nativa, ab ipsa voluntate qua potentia naturalis, inseparabilis, & propria passio, quae fluit a voluntate, qua potential libera. Quandocunque enim vult & consentit, vult & consentit resistibiliter, id est, ita suum praebet consensum, ut si ipsa nollet, talem consensum non eliceret’. Cf Richard Muller, Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought (Grand Rapids, 2017), 308–​309.

348 Notes 125. Ibid., 15. ‘Naturae nostrae imbecillitas, ignorantia agendorum, difficultas ad bonum, propensitas ad malum, illecebrae carnis’. On the wider pastoral concerns underlying Ward’s theology in this sermon, see Margo Todd, ‘Justifying God: the Calvinisms of the British Delegation to the Synod of Dort,’ Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 96 (2005): 280, 286–​287. 126. Ward, Gratia Disciminans , 16. ‘Dubitationem de divina erga nos bnevolentia & pendulum incertitudinem’. 127. Ibid. 22–​23. 128. Ibid., 25. ‘Voluntas adhuc in aequilibrio reliquatur’. 129. Ibid., 28. ‘Cum Deus efficaci gratia operatur in voluntate ipsum velle, hanc gratiam efficaciter ponere in voluntate non resistentiam, atque ita tollere, eo tempore, actualem resistantiam’. 130. Ibid., 29. 131. Ibid. 32. ‘Gratia simper elicit consensum & acceptationem: ac proinde eo momento impossibile sit quod voluntas non annuat aut de facto resistat’. 132. That the human will remained meaningfully free despite the irresistibility of grace was the common stated position of the British delegates at Dort. Milton, British Delegation, 259–​260. For further discussion of Ward’s own approach to efficacious grace see: Todd, ‘Justifying God,’ 280–​282. 133. Ward, Gratia Disciminans , 36. 134. Ibid., 37. 135. Ibid., 39. 136. Ibid., 49. 137. Todd, ‘Justifying God,’ 288. 138. Thomas Goad, ‘Age, perge,’ in Ward, Gratia Discriminans. ‘Age, perge, Causae fortis adsertor Dei, perge obloquenti huic obloqui superbiae, quae, quod superne sit, voluntati arrogat’. 139. Ward, Gratia Discriminans, 53. ‘Sentio me . . . nimium abusum patientia vestra; sed causa Dei propugnanda erat contra istos importunos non defensores, sed deceptores, sed inflatores, sed praecipitatores liberi arbitrii’. 140. George Carleton, An Examination of Those Things wherein the Author of the Late Appeal Holdeth the Doctrines of the Pelagians and Arminians, to Be the Doctrines of the Church of England (London, 1626) , 1. 141. Ibid., 3. 142. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 99–​100. The letter is undated, but it implies that the See of Exeter was vacant, which it became with the death of Valentine Carey on 10 June 1626. It also expresses Montagu’s fears about the possible recall of Parliament, which would place it after the dissolution of Charles’s Second Parliament on 15 June. The letter speaks of August as being in the future and refers to an imminent journey north by Cosin. Cosin attended a Durham Chapter meeting on 9 August. All this suggests the letter was written at some point between 15 June and 1 August 1626. 143. Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom, 159. 144. STC 4633. 145. Tyacke, Seventeenth Century Oxford, 679–​680.

Notes  349 146. STC 4634. 147. STC 4635. 148. Carleton, Examination, 4–​5. 149. Ibid., 5. 150. Ibid., 7. 151. Ibid., 8. 152. Cf Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 14; Davenant, Dissertationes, 243. 153. Carleton, Examination, 9. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid., 12. 156. Ibid., 15. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 16. 160. Ibid.,, 17. 161. Ibid., 18. 162. Ibid., 28. 163. Ibid., 27. 164. Ibid., 27. 165. Ibid., 26. 166. Ibid., 24–​25. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid., 34. 169. Ibid., 30–​31. 170. Ibid., 35. 171. Ibid., 36. 172. Ibid., 42. 173. Ibid., 41. He cites Romans 11:29. 174. Ibid., 43. He cites I John 3:9 and I Peter 1:23. 175. Ibid., 77. 176. Ibid., 49. 177. Ibid., 49 178. Carleton, Examination, 50–​58. 179. Ibid., 59–​60. 180. Ibid., 95. 181. Ibid., 96. Milton, ‘ “Anglicanism” by Stealth,’ 174. 182. Carleton, Examination, 65. 183. Ibid., 66. 184. Ibid,, 69. 185. Ibid., 109. 186. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 50. 187. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic Case,’ 82 n 42. The tract was posthumously published as part of Joseph Hall’s remains, whose anonymous editor suggests that Hall halted the publication lest it be thought to infringe the Royal Proclamation against religious

350 Notes controversy issued on 14 June 1626. Joseph Hall, The Shaking of the Olive Tree (London 1660), ‘Christian Reader’. 188. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic Case,’ 70–​71. Lake argues that Hall’s use of moderate and irenic tropes in the Via Media echoes his use of them in several near-​contemporary sermons and reflects his support for a political agenda that minimized intra-​ Reformed theological divisions in order to build consensus for war with Spain. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic Case,’ 78. 189. Hall, Olive Tree, Dedicatory Letter. 190. Ibid. 191. Milton, ‘ “Anglicanism” by Stealth,’ 175. 192. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic Case,’ 73. 193. Hall, Olive Tree, 355. His choice to headline the universality of the divine promise echoes Davenant’s approach in his lectures and anticipates the later re-​ordering of the Collegiate Suffrage. 194. Ibid., 356. 195. Ibid., 357. 196. Ibid., 357–​358. 197. Ibid., 358–​359. 198. Ibid., 359. 199. Ibid,, 359. 200. Ibid., 360. 201. Ibid., 361. 202. Ibid., 362. 203. Ibid. 204. Ibid., 363–​364. 205. Ibid., 364. 206. Ibid., 364–​365. 207. Ibid., 365. 208. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic,’ 75. 209. Hall, Olive Tree, 367. 210. Ibid., 370. 211. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic,’ 74. 212. Hall, Olive Tree, 374. 213. Ibid., 375. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 67–​68. 214. Ibid., 375. 215. Ibid., 375–​378. 216. Ibid., 379–​380. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 69. 217. Ibid., 383–​384. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 70. 218. Ibid., 385–​386. Cf Milton, British Delegation, 70. 219. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic,’ 71. 220. Milton, ‘ “Anglicanism” by Stealth,’ 175. 221. Lake, ‘Moderate and Irenic,’ 77. 222. As Polly Ha has shown, a Puritan writer such as Walter Travers was also prepared to use arguments drawn from the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-​n ine

Notes  351 Articles in order to attack Montagu’s teaching on saintly intercession as fundamentally alien to the English Church: Polly Ha, ‘Spiritual Treason and the Politics of Intercession: Presbyterians, Laudians, and the Church of England,’ in Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-​Atlantic World 1600–​1800, ed. Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock (Basingstoke, 2015), 66–​88. However, in his engagement with Montagu, Travers was not prepared to defend Episcopacy, celebrate the liturgical year, or explain why Reformed theology should not be equated with Puritanism, as Ward (and the other British delegates), Featley, and Carleton were.

Chapter 4 1. For the identification of Yates, Burton, and Rous as Puritans, see ODNB, svv ‘John Yates,’ ‘Henry Burton,’ and ‘Francis Rous’. For Wotton, see John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in 17th Century England (Woodbridge, 2006), 55. Yates had found his preaching restricted by Bishop Samuel Harsnett during the 1620s. Burton was dismissed from court after the death of King James I after accusing Bishops Richard Neile and William Laud of being ‘popishly affected’. Wotton had been suspended by Bishop Richard Bancroft in 1604. Rous had publicly criticized the worldliness of the higher clergy in a pamphlet of 1622. 2. Charles I, A Proclamation for the Establishing of the Peace and Quiet of the Church of England (London, 1626). 3. Public Record Office, SP 16/​29/​78–​79. 4. Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992), 111–​112; Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 91. 5. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 95. 6. Ibid., 101 7. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 48. The thesis was, ‘No one disputes, save in error, against absolute predestination’. 8. Morris Fuller, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Davenant (Methuen & Co, London, 1897), 167. 9. Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern England and Ireland (Oxford, 2007), 142. 10. Northamptonshire County Record Office, Finch Hatton MS 247, 196–​197, cited in Ford, James Ussher, 143. 11. Ford, James Ussher, 143. 12. Thomas Birch ed., The Court and Times of Charles I, 2 vols (London, 1848), 1:116. 13. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 49. 14. ODNB, s.v. ‘Henry Rich’. 15. Cf. Peter White: Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), 305–​307. 16. British Library, Harley MS 7038.

352 Notes 17. E.g. BL Harley MS 7038, ff. 94, 96, 99, 100. 18. Ward, Opera, Preface. ‘Pulchre atque accurate scriptae, descriptione nova non inidgebant’. 19. Hoyle, Religious Identity, 154–​155 & 171. 20. Ibid., 152. 21. BL Harley MS 7038, f 96. ‘Concursus Dei non adimit rebus suum operandi modum’. The divine concurrence with human action was a regular point of contention between the Reformed and their Jesuit and Remonstrant opponents. Cf George Abbot, The Reasons which Doctor Hill Hath Brought for the Upholding of Papistry (Oxford, 1604), 345 & 352; Thomas Morton, A Catholic Appeal for Protestants (London, 1609), 206, 210, & 213; William Ames, Rescriptio Scholastic & Brevis as Nic. Grevinchovii Responsum (Amsterdam, 1615), 141; and William Twisse, Dissertatio de Scientia Media (Arnhem, 1639), 353–​358. Few English authors addressed the question as directly and systematically as Ward. 22. Ward, Opera, 115. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 115–​116. 25. Ibid., 116. He is quoting Bellarmino, Disputationes, 3:742. 26. Ibid., 116. ‘Concursum Dei cum causis secundis in suis operationibus non alium agnoscant quam influxum immediatum simultaneum cum causa secunda in eius actionem & effectum, ita tame nut omnis modification & determination actus sit ex causa secunda, praesertim in actionibus liberis’. 27. Ibid., 216. Cf Ames, Rescriptio, 151–​161. 28. Ibid., 216. ‘Nos contra conformiter Scripturis & Patribus, imprimis iis qui vixerunt post exortum haeresin Pelagianum, praesertin Augustino, fidenter haec tria asserimus:

I. Dei concursum cum causis secundis etiam liberis esse antecedaneum influxum in ipsas causas secundas, non autem solum influxum simultaneum, multo minus succedaneum in illorum actiones et effectus. II. Dicimus hunc concursum antecedaneum Dei, primae causae, modificare & determinare suo modo, actiones omnes secundarum causarum. III. Dicimus hunc concursum Dei praevium in causas secundas eorum actiones modificantem non adimere ipsis suum cuiusque proprium operandi modum, non causis agentibus necssario, contingenter, libere, modum agendi necessario, contingenter, libere’.

29. He cites Isaiah 26:12 ‘You have indeed done for us all our works’. I Corinthians 12:6 ‘There are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone’. Ephesians 1:11 ‘Him who works all things according to the counsel of his will’. Romans 11:36 (wrongly cited as Romans 9) ‘ For from him and through him and to him are all things’. Wisdom 11:120 (wrongly cited as Wisdom 8) ‘But you have arranged all things by measure and number and weight’. 30. Ward, Opera, 117. Cf Morton, Catholic Appeal, 210 & 214. 31. Cf Ames, Rescriptio, 161–​162. 32. Ibid.

Notes  353 33. Ibid. 34. Cf Twisse, Dissertatio, 357–​358. 35. Ward, Opera, 117. ‘Deus autem est causa universalissima infinite perfecta, & purus actus omni potentialitate vacuus; unde eius voluntas vel concursus in quo est intentio voluntatis & virtutis divinae, determinari non potest ad operandum ex concurs liberi arbitrii vel cuiuscunque alterius causae secundae’. 36. Cf Ames, Rescriptio, 165. 37. Ward, Opera, 118. 38. Ibid. Ward quotes S.Th Ia q 22 art 2. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 119. 41. Ibid. ‘Contra quam habet Molina, necessitate & contingentiam rerum, quas Deus extra se vult, non tantum pendere a causarum secundarum necessite & contingentia, sed potissimum ab ordinatione & efficacia divinae voluntatis, quatenus iis quae extra se vult vel necessario, vel contingenter, vel libere fieri, destinavit causas vel necessarias, vel contingents, vel etiam liberas’. 42. Ibid. ‘Hunc antecedaneum influxum in ipsum voluntatem, non adimere voluntati creatae suam libertatem seu proprium libere agendi modum’. 43. Ibid. ‘Sic omnis create libertas voluntatis non aliunde habetur quam ex participation summae & increatae libertatis, quae est in voluntate divina: ita scilicet ut illa libertas increate divinae voluntatis sit causa prima propria atque intima omnis creatae libertatis omniumque liberarum actionum creaturam’. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. ‘Nullatenus ergo dubitandum quin divina providential attingat a fine usque ad finem fortiter, & disponat omnia bona absque ulla exceptione fortiter & suaviter, fortiter quidem pro se, suaviter autem pro me, ut scite Bernardus’. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 120. ‘Non tantum physice elevando voluntatem ut posit actum supernaturalem elicere; nec moraliter solum invitando, suadendo & alliciendo; sed eam imressa virtute transeunte succendendo & movendo & efficaciter ad opus conversionis applicando, servato tamen ei sui naturali agenda modo, viz. per modum liberae electionis & cooperationis’. 48. Ibid. ‘Per modum physicae causae, praemovendo voluntatem creatam, & eius actus determinando. Sic enim Christus ipse fatetur Joan. 5 Non possum ego ex meipso facere quisquam & cap. 8 A meipso facio nihil & cap. 14 Pater in me manens, ipse facit opera’. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. ‘Volenti Deum salvum facere nullum hominis resistit arbitrium’. The phrase comes from Augustine, De Gratia et Correptione, ch 14. 51. BL Harley MS 7038, f 97. ‘Omnes infantes baptizati sine dubio iustificantur’. 52. Ussher, Works, 15:504. 53. Ward, Opera, 50. 54. Canons of Dordt, fifth main point of doctrine, article 3. 55. Montagu, Appello, 35–​36.

354 Notes 56. Cornelius Burges, Baptismal Regeneration of Elect Infants (Oxford, 1629), 3. 57. George Downame, The Covenant of Grace (Dublin, 1631), 393 & 399; Daniel Featley, Katabaptistai kataptüstoi The dippers dipped (London, 1645), 61; John Prideaux, Fasciculus Controversiarum (Oxford 1649), 291, where he apparently accepts the argument that baptism produces no fruit in the reprobate. 58. Ward, Opera, 50 & 52. It was generally accepted among the Reformed Conformists that baptism was ordained as a remedy for original sin: Featley, Katabaptistai, 20–​ 21 & 43; Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 340 and Fasciculus, 287; Joseph Hall, Contemplations, the Fifth Volume (London, 1620), 368; John Williams, Three Small and Plain Treatises (London, 1620), 44. That said, there were differences amongst the Reformed Conformists, as amongst the wider Reformed, over the whether the rite of baptism should be conceived as an instrument that conveyed forgiveness, or a sign and seal of a pre-​existing forgiveness: Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines, 74–​77 & 171. As Spinks shows, Ward clearly interpreted the sacraments as instruments of grace. Prideaux clearly did not: Prideaux, Fasciculus, 275: ‘Signa & sigilla nil in se continent, vel conferunt, sed gratiam iam forte allatam, vel etiam postea conferendum tantum significant & obsignant’ (The signs and seals contain or convey nothing in themselves, but rather signify and seal grace already perhaps conveyed, or afterwards to be conferred). 59. Ward, Opera, 53 60. Ibid., 53. ‘Qui dicit, quod ab his qui non sunt praedestinati ad vitam, non auferat percepta baptismi gratia originale peccatum, non est Catholicus’. Cf Prosper, Opera (Cologne, 1609), 329. 61. Davenant, Dissertationes, 2. ‘Augustinum non docuisse Christum pro solis praedestinatis mortuum, quod Propter ex eius sententia proprissimum passionis fructum: nimirum remissionem peccati originalis, ad infants etiam non praedestinatos extendit, Respons. ad obj. 2 Gall. & Sentent. 2. “Qui dicit quod ab his qui non sunt praedestinati ad vitam, non auferat percepta baptismi gratia originale peccatum, none est Catholicus.” Quam sententiam nonnullis post Augustinum seculis etiam Synodus Valentina amplexata est’. 62. Fuller, Life & Letters, 264 & 267. George Downame took a different line from Davenant and Ward on this point in his suppressed work, The Covenant of Grace, 393: ‘Not all that are baptized are truly justified. for as Augustine saith; sacraments in the elect do truly work that which is figured by them, but all they that are baptized, are not elect. Again, whom God truly justifieth, their sins he doth remit, but saith Augustine, God doth not forgive the sins of all, but of them only whom he hath foreknown & predestinated: and indeed it is absurd to imagine, that grace is otherwise given, then according to the eternal purpose of grace’. Ussher alerted Ward to his disagreement with Downame in a letter of 15 March 1630, referring to this very passage and its references to Augustine. Ussher, Works, 15:482. 63. Ward, Opera, 54. 64. Davenant was inclined to agree with him, as he made clear in a letter of 4 November 1628. Fuller, Life & Letters, 267. 65. Ward, Opera, 54.

Notes  355 66. Featley, Parallel, 86–​87; Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 80. 67. Anthony Milton ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–​1619), Church of England Record Society 13 (Woodbridge, 2005), 265. 68. BL Harley MS 7038, f 97. ‘Fidelis de gratia Dei erga se ex fide certus esse posit’. On William Sancroft, see Patrick Collinson, From Cranmer to Sancroft (London, 2006), 174–​175. 69. BL Harley MS 7038, f 98. The manuscript renders the thesis ‘Reprobus quisque, sua sola perit militia,’ but in Ward’s Opera, it is recorded as ‘Reprobus quisque, sua sola insita militia perit’. 70. Ward, Opera, 131. ‘Siquidem reprobationem proprii nominis a qua denominator quis reprobus, non alius esse statuimus, quam negationem praparationis illis specialis misericordiae & efficacies gratiae quae certo & ifallibiliter ad vitam aeternam transmittit aut perducit’. 71. Ibid. 72. He cited John 15:22: ‘If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin,but now they have no excuse for their sin’; John 3:19: ‘And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil’; and Hebrews 2:3: ‘How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? 73. Ward, Opera, 132. 74. Ibid. He is quoting Roman 2:15: ‘They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them’. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 133. He cites the Examen Censurae and Simon Episcopius’s Responsio Remonstrantium. 79. ‘Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is ingendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation’. 80. He cited Psalm 51:5 ‘Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me;’ and Ephesians 2:3 ‘Among whom we all once lived . . . and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind;’ Job 14:4 ‘Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? There is not one’. 81. Ward, Opera, 133. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 134. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 135.

356 Notes 87. Fuller, Life, Letters and Writings, 144. 88. Ibid., 163. 89. Ibid., 164. 90. Ibid., 165–​166. 91. Hoyle, Religious Identity, 166, 170–​173, 176–​177. 92. Fuller, Life, Letters and Writings, 166. 93. Ussher, Works, 15:405. 94. I am grateful to Professor Anthony Milton for pointing this Imprimatur out to me. 95. John Davenant, Expositio epistolae D. Pauli ad Colossenses (Cambridge, 1630), Prefatory Material. ‘Praeclare fundatum, & in ministerio Evangelii recte institutum’. 96. Ibid. ‘Scopus itaque totius Epistolae hic est, in solo Christo repositam esse omnem salutis humanae spem’. 97. Ibid., 4. ‘Deus non potest non efficax esse, cume ea media adhibentur ad hominum salute, quae ipse in eum finem ordinavit’. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 11. ‘Gratuitum actum divinae voluntatis acceptantis hominem in Christo, & peccata misericorditer condonantis . . . Hoc amor Dei gratuitus est primum donum, in quo omnia alia dona dantur’. 100. Ibid. ‘Omnia habitualia dona quae Deus infundit ad animam sanctificandam. Sic fides, charitas, atque omnia virtutes & dona salutaria dicuntur gratiae’. 101. Ibid. ‘Actuale auxilium Dei quo renati, post acceptam habitualem gratiam, corroborantur ad exercenda bona opera & ad perseverandum in fide & pietate. Nam homini per gratiam renovato & sanctificato, necessarium est tamen quotidianum adjutorium ad singulos actos’. 102. Ibid., 12. ‘Immediate a voluntate divina, non provocatur bono humano . . . Dei amor non invenit, sed facir amore dignus’. 103. Ibid., 12–​13. ‘Nihil scilicet posse esse causam operantem physice in productione gratiae, praeter solum Deum. Infusio sive productio gratiae accedit ad rationem creationis, in quantum nec habet causam ullam in subjecto; nec materiam e cuius potentia, per agens natural, educi posit; est itaque solius Dei gratiam infundere & imprimere, qui ex nihilo fecit omnia’. 104. Ibid., 13. ‘Nostrorum sententia est, omnem hominem fidelem & vere iustificatum, posse & debere infallibiliter credere, sibi in individuo peccata esse remissa, & Deumesse reconciliatum sibi, id est, se habere gratiam & pacem hanc quam apostolus Colossensibus optavit’. 105. Ibid., 13–​21. 106. Ibid., 33 107. Ibid. ‘Pios certos esse debere de consecutione vitae aeternae’. 108. Ibid., 62. 109. Ibid., 308. ‘Qua Christiani ex faece mundi seliguntur ad serviendum Deo ex praescripto evangelii’. 110. Ibid. ‘Nam consideration electionis nostrae gratuitae ante jacta mundi fundamenta, non animare nos ad inertiam, sed accendere debet ad perpetuum vitat sanctitatem,

Notes  357 quia dues in hunc finem nos elegit’. He referred here to Ephesians 1:4: ‘He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him’. 111. Fuller, Life, Letters and Writings, 267. 112. Ibid., 326. 113. Ibid., 312. 114. Ibid., 313. 115. Davenant’s circumspection was wise. When Downame was deemed to have transgressed the 1626 Proclamation with The Covenant of Grace, Laud ordered it suppressed: Ford, Ussher, 160. 116. John Davenant, Praelectiones de Duobus in Theologia Controversis Capitibus (Cambridge, 1631), 205. ‘Dum cogitatione singulas controversias quae inter nos & papistas agitantur percurro, nullam fere inter nos versari controversiam animadverto in qua adversarii non tueantur illam partem, quae homines & humana omnia immodice extollit; nobis vero illam reliquant, quae contra humanam superbiam Dei causam agit’. 117. Ibid. ‘Dum terram & cinerem efferent & extollunt, divini numinis opem ne sperare quidem possunt’. 118. Fuller, Life, Letters and Writings, 409. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. John Davenant, Determinationes Quaestionum Quarundam Theologicarum (Cambridge, 1639), 15. ‘Vere credentes certi esse possunt de sua salute’. 123. Ibid., 45. ‘Non datur liberum arbitrium in non renatis, ad bonum spiritual. 124. Ibid., 105. ‘Decretum non tollitlibertatem’. 125. Ibid., 115. ‘Praescientia divina non erat causa lapsus humani’. 126. Ibid., 119. ‘Subjectum Divinae praedestinationis est homo lapsus’. 127. Ibid., 234. ‘Non datur omnibusauxilium sufficiens ad salutem’. 128. Ibid., 17. ‘Quia idem Deu, qui fidem inspiravit cordibus filiorum suorum, conservabit eandem ne prorsus extinguatur’. 129. Ibid., 20. ‘Nos enim fidem de remissione peccatorum & propria justification nontalem concedimus renatis, quae perpetuo excluat omnem formidinem contrarii; sed quaein omni lucta & tentatione ad extremum vincat’. 130. Ibid. 131. This preoccupation marked his later polemical work against Samuel Hoard, Animadversions . . . upon a treatise entitled, God’s love to mankind (London, 1641). 132. Davenant, Determinationes, 105. ‘Deus non modo decernit quod fient, sed decernit simul probare cum fiant, cooperari ut fiant’. 133. Ibid. ‘Decrevit permittere eventum, decrevit denique ipsum eventum ordinare: sed not decrevit probare malam actionem si fiat, multo minus malitiam aliquam agenti infundere ut fiat’.

358 Notes 134. Ibid. ‘Nam Deus non decrevit solum, aut praescivit ipsas actions & eventa, sed modus actionum & eventorum: quaedam enim decrevit eventura naturaliter, quaedam necessario, quaedam libere & contingenter’. 135. Ibid., 106. ‘Quia ille, cuius decretum non frangitur, adfuturam mihi in ipsa action libertatem decrevit’. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. ‘Fatemur ipsum velle & nolle non sic positum in libertate nostra, quin Deus posit inclinationem ipsam voluntatis vertere quoquo illi visum fuerit: sed id simper facit in renatis, non cogendo voluntatem, sed suadendo & suaviter flectendo’. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid., 106–​107. 140. Ibid., 115. 141. Ibid., 116. ‘A solo sciente nunquam procedunt effectus, nisi mediante voluntate, per modum inducentis, & potentia, et per modum exsequentis’. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid., 117. ‘Omnia praevidet ex aequo; sed inter haec, quaedam videt eventura necessario, quaedam libere, quaedam contingenter. Vidit Adam peccaturum, sed libere; non igitur vi praescintiae peccavit necessario’. 145. Ibid., 117–​118. ‘Sola siquidem permissio nunquam causa est rei permissae; cum permittentis voluntas hoc tantum intra se statuat & agat, ut not impediat alterius actionem, minime vero ut operando vel efficiendo eandem promoveat’. 146. Ibid., 118. ‘Permittens sinit creaturam voluntario suo defectu in malum a Deo praevisum ruere: efficax statuit, non illud malum efficere, sed dirigendo atque ordinando ex illo malo bonum elicere’. 147. Ibid., 119. ‘Est enim aeternum Dei decretum gratuito eligentis quosdam ad finem aeternae beatudinis, & per media infallibilia ad eundem deducantis: alios autem e contra libere praetereuntis, atque ad aeternmum supplicium juste destinantis’. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 119. ‘Nos in divino intellectu ac voluntate haud statuere realem antcessionem & consecutionem visorum aut decretorum; in Deo enim omnia sunt simul visa & decreta ab aeterno: sed secundum nostrum intelligendi modum, prout res ex se invicem ordine quodam dependent, ita etiam divinis intellectionibus ac decretis prius aut posterius solemus attribuere’. 150. Ibid., 120. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid., 123. ‘Idem sentient planissime & alii theologi nostri, qui quandoque de hac materia duriuscule loquuntur: nam quisquis eorum scripta attento animo & minime malevolo perlegit, statim animadvertet, eos in suis disputationibus non praevisum hominis lapsum Deo pradestinanti subtrahere; sed illud urgere, in hac lapsus consideratione causam reprobationis non esse consitutam’. 154. Ibid.

Notes  359

Chapter 5 1. Ormsby ed., Correspondence, 42. 2. Ibid., 39. 3. Montagu, Gag, 140. 4. Ibid., 142–​143 5. Ibid., Gag, 143. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 144. 10. He cited the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent, chapter VIII: ‘We are therefore said to be justified freely, because that none of those things which precede justification—​ whether faith or works—​merit the grace itself of justification’. 11. Montagu, Appello, 175. 12. Ibid., 168. 13. Ibid., 170-​171. 14. Ibid., 171-​172. 15. Ibid., 172. 16. Ibid., 173. 17. Ibid., 174. 18. Morton pointed out this apparent change of heart at York House. Cosin, Works, 2:50. 19. Montagu, Appello, 180. 20. Ibid., 185. 21. Cosin, Works, 2:48. 22. Ibid., 2:50. 23. Ibid., 2:49. 24. Featley, Second Parallel, 10–​11. Cf Montagu, Appello, 162 & 175. 25. Morton had also objected to the second of these statements at York House: Cosin, Works, 2:48. 26. Morton had got into trouble at York House for doing the same: Ibid., 2:48. 27. Featley, Second Parallel, 12n. 28. British Library, Harley MS 7038, ff 94–​103. 29. Hoyle, Religious Identity, 180. ‘Bona opera sunt efficaciter necessaria ad salutem’. 30. Robert Shelford, Five Pious and learned Discourses (Cambridge, 1635), 120. ‘Nisi sit formata fides, est mortua plane, proque fide fidei triste cadaver habes’. 31. Cf Bellarmino, Disputationes, 3:1044. 32. Shelford, Five Discourses, 120. ‘Vana fides, ubi sola fides: dilectio vera, spes viva accedant; non aliunde salus . . . Virtutum sancta & speciosa caterva salute Divino ex pacto, quam meruere, dabunt’. 33. Hoyle, Religious Identity, 171. 34. Ussher, Works, 15:580. 35. British Library, Harley MS 7038, f 100. ‘Fides sola justificat’. 36. Ward, Opera, 2, 3, 4.

360 Notes 37. Ibid., 1. ‘Ut idem sit iustificare atque in iudicio absolvere, seu a sententia condemnationis liberare’. Cf George Downame, A Treatise of Justification (London, 1633), 2. 38. Cf Downame, Justification, 13. 39. Ibid. ‘Fiduciam recumbentem in Christum Mediatorem ob remissionem peccatorum non tam includentem quam supponentem firmum & indubitatum assensum conditionali promissioni evangelii’. 40. Ward, Opera, 2. Cf Williams, Three Treatises, 113; Morton, Catholic Appeal, 69; Joseph Hall, The Old Religion (London, 1628), 30–​31 & 38; Downame, Justification, 12 & 16. 41. Ward, Opera, 2. Cf Morton, Catholic Appeal, 385–​386. 42. Ward, Opera, 2. ‘Sed peccatorem fide Catholica credentem, timentem poenam, sperantem veniam & desiderantem reconciliationem, & peccatis vere dolentem, prioris vitae pertaesum, novum anhelentem, insitae pravitatis conscium, justitiam & meritum proprium abdicantem’. Cf Downame, Justification, 390–​391. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. ‘Sola facultate naturali a gratia elevata & acta, qua recumbit, conquiescit, innititur, confidit, adhaeret misericordiae Dei promittentis & Christi λυτρον & satisfactioni ob reconciliationem & remissionem peccatorem’. 45. Ibid., 3. 46. Ibid., 3. Downame also discussed Galatians 2:16: Downame, Justification, 454–​455. 47. E.g. Romans 4:4: ‘Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due,’ and Romans 11:6: ‘If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace’. 48. Ward, Opera, 3. 49. Romans 3:25: ‘Whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith’. Cf Downame, Justification, 10. 50. Proverbs 20:9: ‘Who can say, “I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin”?’ Cf Downame, Justification, 133. 51. Ward refers to John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’; Acts 10:43: ‘To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name’; and Acts 13:39: ‘by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses’. 52. Ward, Opera, 5. ‘Nullus est autem inter omnes animi affectus quo magis testamur nos totam iustificationis nostrae gloriam Deo & Christus eius, integre & illibate transcribere quam abrenunciando propriae iustitiae & totaliter confidendo & recumbendo in Dei misericordiam & Christi redemptoris mortem & merita in negotio iustificationis coram Deo’. 53. Ibid. 54. Cf Downame, Justification, 209. 55. Ward, Opera, 5. ‘Te igitur pugilem fortassimum laudum tuarum legitima corona redimitum, dimittimus, liberamus’. 56. British Library, Harley MS 7038, f 100. 57. British Library, Harley MS 7038, f 100.

Notes  361 58. Ward, Opera, 24. ‘An a sola fide justificari excludente spem &dilectionem ut concausas in negotio justificationis, prout habetur in Homilia ad quam refert Articulus XI; sit fide formata spem & charitatem sua notione includente, omnibus sano intellect praeditis, dijudicandum relinquo’. 59. Henry Burton, For God and the King (London, 1636), 123. 60. Shelford, Five Discourses, 102. 61. Ibid., 107. 62. Ward, Opera, 19. ‘Merito haec quaestio instituitur adversus eos,qui opera praeparatoria quae ad justificationem peccatorum disponunt non admittunt’. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. ‘Atque hanc fidem iustificantem solam iustificare dicit confessio nostra. Hanc particulam exclusivam addit non ad excludendem vel in actu iustificationis, vel in persona iustificanda concomitantiam aut coexistentiam operum praeparatoriam & dispositionum praeviarum, sed cooperationem & vim iustificatoriam in negotio iustificationis’. 65. Ibid. ‘Ut Solifidianorum calumniam nobis iniustissime a Romanensibus impactam abstergemus’. 66. Shelford, Five Discourses, 71. 67. Ward, Opera, 19. Ibid., 2. 68. Ibid., 19. 69. Ibid., 20. 70. Ibid. Cf Downame, Justification, 13. 71. Ibid. ‘Infirma sunt & imperfect, nec possunt mereri remissionem pecatorum & iustificationem’. 72. Ibid., 20. ‘Haec ipsa fusius recensui ut liquid omnibus appareat nos in explicatione nostra κατα ποδας insistere in vestigiis Matris Ecclesiae, ne cab iisdem vel latum unguem discessisse’. Downame, by contrast, made no reference to the formularies of the English Church in his own discussion of justification. This may have been because he was an Irish bishop; and, at the time when his Treatise was published, the English Articles and Canons had not yet been imposed on the Irish Church. Ford, Ussher, 185–​188. 73. Shelford, Five Discourses, 71. ‘Thou wilt say, the Fathers taught this doctrine, and our own Church too. But how, and in what sense? To shut out works before faith be come, and to acknowledge faith to be the only beginning in the preparations of our justification: but our young preachers and hearers shut up all in faith only.’ 74. Ward, Opera, 21. 75. ‘Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’. 76. Ward, Opera, 21. ‘Trinitatis in homine mansio seu inhabitatio. Deus autem ad nos inhabitandum venire censetur quando per remissionem peccatorum propitious efficitur’. Downame also underlined the Trinitarian dimension of justification: Downame, Justification, 10. 77. I Timothy 1:5: ‘The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith’.

362 Notes 78. I John 3:1 ‘See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are’. 79. Ward, Opera, 22. 80. Ibid., 22. ‘Neque did potest fidem quae sola iustificat spem & caritatem in sua formali ratione includere, siquidem sic non vere diceret Ecclesia nostra fidem solam justificare’. 81. Ibid., 22. ‘Fidem sine &ante caritatem iustificare’. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 23. 84. Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (1629), 76–​78. ‘The tenor of the Scripture touching our justification, all along runneth in judicial terms . . . . Grace, to justification, as sin, to condemnation. All these show manifestly, we must imagine our selves standing at the bar, or we shall never take the state of this question aright’. 85. Ward, Opera, 23. 86. Ibid., 23. ‘Ergo contra receptam doctrinam nostrae Ecclesiae asseritur haec novella iustificatio . . . per istam coadunationem trium theologicarum virtutum fidei, spei & caritatis’. 87. Ibid., 24. Ward listed Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, Alexander Nowell, Lawrence Humphrey, William Fulke, William Whitaker, John Rainolds, and Richard Field. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 148. ‘Reverendissimi ex hac nostra academia emissi episcopi’. 90. Ibid., 185. ‘Praedecessor noster & primus praefectus collegii apud nos quod gaudet titulo Sanctae & Individuae Trinitatis’. 91. Ibid., 148. 92. Ibid., 149. Downame’s vernacular discussion of justification often echoes the arguments of Davenant and anticipates those of Ward, and these points of similarity will be pointed out in the footnotes. 93. Bellarmine’s five books on justification are in Bellarmino, Disputationes, 3:932–​1311. 94. Downame also focussed his Treatise of Justification on Bellarmine. 95. Davenant, Praelectiones, 310. ‘Quae et qualis illa iustitia sit, quae coram Deo hominem iustificet, hoc est, cuius intuitu, ipse Deum hominem a peccato & poena peccati liberum pronuntiat, atque favore suo & vita aeterna dignum reputat’. 96. Ibid. ‘Apud illum igitur in hac controversia semper forensem significationem obtinet, atque actionem designat Dei, more iudicis absolventis accusatum, iustum pronuntiantis, atque ad praemium iustitiae, hoc est vitam aeternam, acceptantis’. Cf Downame, Treatise, 3–​4. 97. Ibid., 311. 98. Ibid., 311. ‘Aperte affirmamus Deum iustissimum neminem iustificare . . . nisi interveniente vera & perfecta iustitia, quae etiam vere fiat ipsius iustificati iustitia’. 99. Cf Downame, Justification, 290–​291. 100. Cf Downame, Justification, 2. 101. Davenant, Praelectiones, 313. ‘Christi mediatoris in nobis habitantis atque per Spiritum sese nobis unientis perfectissima obedientia, est formalis causa

Notes  363 iustificationis nostrae, utpote quae ex donatio Dei & applicatio fidei sit nostra’. Cf Downame, Justification, 21 & 30. 102. Ibid., 315. ‘Non tamen volumus actionem iustificandi ex parte Dei nil aliud esse quam nudam forensem pronuntiationem, nullo fundamento nixam; nam continent imprimis validem donationem verae & perfectae iustitiae, in qua fundatur illa iusti pronuntiatio & declaratio’. Cf Downame, Justification, 130. 103. Davenant, Praelectiones, 315. Cf Hall, Old Religion, 28. 104. Cf Downame, Justification, 77. 105. Davenant, Praelectiones, 315.Cf Williams, Three Treatises, 115; Morton, Catholic Appeal, 14. 106. Davenant, Praelectiones, 323. ‘Dicit enim nos in imputatione iustitiae Christi iustificationem constituere, quia tegit nos Christus iustitia sua, & eo modo tectos Deus nos videns, pro iustis se habere pronuntiat. Nos vero in hac imputatione iustificationem sitam putamus, non eo nomine solum, quod Christus nos tegit iustitia sua; sed multo magis, quia donat nos iustitia sua. Neque dicimus, Deum nos pro iustis habere solummodo quia tectos conspicit iustitia Redemptoris nostri, sed quia ex sua ordinatione omnes credentes, atque in unam personam cum Christo coalescentes, iustitiae eius & obedientiae vere participes factos intuetur’. 107. Ibid. He referred specifically to Romans 2:22, Romans 3:25, and Romans 4:8. Cf Downame, Justification, 291–​292. 108. Ibid., 324. 109. Ibid., 325. ‘Manifeste falsa est illa proposition; inobedientia Adami non imputative sit nostra, aut non constituit nos iniustos imputative’. Cf Downame, Justification, 228–​229. 110. Ibid., 331. ‘Non iusti censemur, quia inhaeret nobis haec iustitia; sed quia nos inhaeremus illi qui habet hanc iustitiam; atque sic lege fidei nostra sit per beneficium communicationis, non per medium inhaesionis’. 111. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 75. 112. Davenant, Praelectiones, 346. ‘Nos per formalem causam iustificationis nihil aliud intelligere, quam illud per quod stamus in conspectu Dei, a damnatione liberati, innocenti, gratificati, & ad vitam aeternam acceptati’. 113. Ibid., 349. ‘Ipsa iustitia inhaerens, in se considerata, qualis reperitur in viatoribus, imperfecta est, atque caret illis perfectionis gradibus, qui ad iustificationem formalem necessario requiruntur. Nam esse formaliter iustificatum per iustitiam, nihil aliud est quam esse adaequatum divinae voluntati tanquam summae regulae’ 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid., 349 & 351–​352. Cf Hall, Old Religion, 29, 38–​39 & 42–​44. 116. Ibid., 353. ‘Sanctificatio per inhaerentem iustitiam est ordine causalitatis posterior ipsa iustifictione, imos sunt duae actions, quamvis tempore concomitants, tamen reapse & natura distinctae’. Cf Williams, Three Treatises, 120–​121; Morton, Catholic Appeal, 613; Downame, Justification, 2–​3.. 117. He cited Colossians 1:21–​22, ‘And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him’; and Titus 2:14,

364 Notes ‘Who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works’. 118. Davenant, Praelectiones, 354. ‘Remissio peccati est actus individuus, atque in momento temporis perficitur: at infusio gratiae, sive sanctificatio, est actus continuus, atque successive & per gradus perficitur. Remissio a reatu & poena peccatorum liberat; at infusio gratiae a sordibus & foeditate peccati purgat. Remissionem peccatorum consequimur proxime a Deo per imputatam nobis iustitiam Christi: at infusionem iustitiae appropriate per operationem Spiritus sancti’. Cf Downame, Justification, 77. 119. Ibid. ‘Errant itaque Jesuitae, qui condonationem peccati negant esse quiddam distinctum ab infusione inhaerentis iustitiae; atque eo argument inharentem iustitiam esse formam iustificationis nostrae contendunt’. 120. Ibid., 355–​356. He cited Ephesians 1:7 ‘In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace’. 121. Ibid., 357. ‘Formalis causa iustificationis huiusmodi esse debet, qui Christianus tuto & audacter confidere possit in conscientiae lucta, & agone mortis’. Cf Downame, Justification, 140–​141, 122. Prideaux also cited Anselm’s Admonitio Morienti in his lecture on Justification. Prideaux, Viginti-​Duae, 73. 123. Davenant, Praelectiones, 357–​ 358. ‘At nos omnes quotidie peccamus, quotidie remissionem petimus, atque in ipso articulo mortis vehementissime & humillime. Ergo agnoscimus, nos non stare iustificatus aut coelo dignos per qualitatem iustitiae in nobis permanenter harentem, sed per remissionem peccatorum & gratiam divinam nobis indignissimis tribui vitam aeternam propter Christum’. Cf Downame, Justification, 582. 124. Ibid., 359. ‘Imputare igitur aliquid alicui, idem est in hac quaestione, atque inter ea quae sunt ipsius, & ad eum pertinent, illud connumerare & recensere’. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 360 127. Ibid., 362. He referred to John 3:16 (as Ward had), 3:18, & 5:24. 128. Ibid., 363. He referred to Romans 5:19 ‘For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous’. Cf Downame, Justification, 68 & 227–​230. 129. Ibid., 364. He referred to Isaiah 53:12 ‘Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors,’ and 53:5 ‘But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed’. 130. Ibid. ‘Si iustitia Christi satisfacientis nostra fiat per imputationem, cur non etiam iustitia Christi legem implentis?’ 131. Ibid., 364. ‘Intuitu legis a Christo pro nobis impletae acceptat nos ad vitam & praemium gloriae, quasi nos nostra personali iustitia legem implevissemus’.

Notes  365 132. Ibid., 365. He cites Romans 8:3–​4 ‘For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us . . . ’ as well as Romans 10:3–​4 and Galatians 4:4–​5. 133. Ibid., 366. He cites I Corinthians 1:30 ‘Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption’. 134. Ibid., 369. Galatians 3:27 ‘For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ’ 135. Ibid., 370. Hebrews 7:22 ‘This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant’. 136. Ibid., 373. ‘Iustificatio igitur vitae non redundant ad nos ab ulla qualitate in nobismetipsis inhaerente, sed ab hac iustitia completa Mediatoris donata & imputata. Nostra iustitia inhaerens non habet in se δικαιωμα, hoc est, perfectionem iustitiae completam & absolutam; ergo non potest producere in nobis δικαιῶσιν ζόης, iustificationem vitae, quod est perfectissimae causae perfectissimum effectum. Christi igitur iustitia est nobis vice formalis causae ad hanc iustificationem constituendam’. 137. Ibid., 385. 138. Ward, Opera, Preface. 139. Ibid., 148. ‘De fide & potissimum de fide iustificante’. 140. Ibid. ‘1. Propter meritum Domini ac servatoris nostri Jesu Christi, justi coram Deo reputamur. 2. Tantum propter meritum Domini ac servatoris nostri Jesu Christi, justi coram Deo reputamur. 3. Tantum meritum Domini ac servatoris nostri Jesu Christi per fidem justi coram Deo reputamur. 4. Non propter opera & merita nostra justi coram Deo reputamur. 5. Sola fide nos iustificari doctrina est saluberrima & consolationis plenissima. 141. Ibid., 151. Ward saw this opposition in Deuteronomy 25:1 ‘If there is a dispute between men and they come into court and the judges decide between them, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty’; Proverbs 17:15 ‘He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord’; and above all Romans 8:33–​34 ‘Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn?’ 142. Ibid., 151 ‘Fides ergo iustificans illa dicenda est, qua peccator poenitentiam agens, credens in Christum & eius satisfactionem, a peccatorum reatu coram tribunali Dei absolvitur, & iustus pronuntiatur’. 143. Ibid., 151–​152. ‘Nos dicimus objectum fidei iustificantis esse Christum, Christum Mediatorem, Christum Redemptorem, mortem, passionem, satisfactionem, meritum Christi, iuxta illud Apostoli Romans 3:25 “Quem Deus proposuit placamentum per fidem in sanguine eius.” ’ 144. Downame uses the same terminology; e.g. Downame, Justification, 44. 145. Ward, Opera, 153 146. William Laud, A Relation of the Conference between William Laud, then, Lrd. Bishop of St. Davids; now, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit (London, 1639).

366 Notes 147. Francis White, A Reply to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer to Certain Questions (London, 1624), ii, 72. 148. Henry Burton, A Reply to a Relation (Amsterdam, 1640), 139–​140. 149. Shelford, Five Discourses, 77. 150. Ward, Opera, 153. ‘Orthodoxa Ecclesia Protestantium, hanc fidem Catholicam, qua asentimur omnibus divinitus revelatis in sacris scripturis, ad iustificationem peccatoris require ait & necessario praesupponi: addit etiam eandem quatenus assentitur promissioni Evangeliis seu foederis gratuity, basin & fundamentum esse fidei illius qua iustificamur; sed insuper docet, illam fidem qua iustificamur esse longe aliam a priore, utpote quae non dicit nudum generalem assensum ad ea, quae Deus in verbo suo revelavit; sed dicere insuper fiduciam in Christum Mediatorem & Redemptorem ob remissionem peccatorm’. Cf Downame, Justification, 361. 151. Ibid., 153–​154. 152. Ibid., 154. 153. Ibid., 154. Cf Downame, Justification, 356. Downame prefers to describe justifying faith as ‘seated both in the understanding and in the will . . . to believe is an act, both of the understanding, and of the will. Of the understanding, as it is an assent: of the will, as it is voluntary’. But, like Ward, he rejects Bellarmine’s claim that faith is solely a matter of the intellect. 154. Ibid., 155–​159. 155. Ibid., 156. ‘Credere autem in Christum crucifixum non est nude assentiri Christum esse crucifixum; id ipsum credunt ipsi daemones’. 156. Ibid, 157. ‘Ille enim credit in Christum, qui sperat in Christum et diligit Christum’. The quotation is from Augustine, Sermon 61. 157. Ibid., 160. 158. Ibid., 163–​164. 159. Ibid., 165. ‘1. Affectum fiduciae proprie sumptae distinctum a spe. 2. Gradum spei proprie sumptae, quo sensu dici potest spes roborata. 3. Actum intellectus, plenam persuasionem & sic opponitur dubitatione’. 160. E.g. Ephesians 3:12 ‘In whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him’. Or Matthew 9:22 ‘Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” ’ 161. He mentioned, as Ward had done, John 3:16; Acts 10:43, and Acts 16:30. 162. Ward, Opera, 176. ‘Credere autem in Filium Dei . . . est in Filium Dei fiduciam collocare & credere in Filium Dei passum, crucifixum, mortuum, pro peccatis nostris expiandis, est fiduciam in Filium Dei passum, crucifixum, mortuum collocare ob remissionem peccatorum: qui actus est proprius actus fidei iustificantis, atque idem est quod credere in Christum ut salvatorem & redemptorem’. 163. Ibid., 177. 164. Ibid., 183. ‘το credere apud Patres idem esse atque in Deum spem omnem & fiduciam collocare’. 165. Downame also amassed a broad range of Patristic and medieval testimony for his understanding of justifying faith. Downame, Justification, 357–​359.

Notes  367 166. Ward, Opera, 191. ‘Certe si sub nomine & notione του credenda in Christum complectatur Augustinus το ire in Christum, το adhaerere Christo, το sperare in Christum, complectitur quicquid nos fiduciae nomine exigimus’. 167. Downame agreed that, in adults, a range of preparatory dispositions were required before justification; though he did not present them as an ordered sequence as Ward did. Cf Downame, Justification, 390–​391. 168. Ward, Opera, 192–​193. 169. Ibid., 193. 170. Ibid., 201. ‘Nostrae confessionis Theologi . . . recte asserant posse credentes veraciter sibi applicare in particulari generales propositiones evangelii & certo credere & confidere posse sibi in particulari peccata remissa esse’. Cf Williams, Three Treatises, 157; Downame, Justification, 6–​7. 171. Ibid., 201. 172. Ibid., 202. ‘Spem roboratam vel potius firmum assensum seu persuasionem in qua eiusmodi spes fundatur, de peccatis remissis’. 173. Ibid., 25. ‘Quisquis credit in Christum, illi sunt remissa peccata. Ego credo in Christum. Ergo mihi sunt remissa peccata’. Downame also endorsed this practical syllogism. Cf Downame, Justification, 364. 174. Ibid., 202. ‘Quia certus sum me praestare conditionem credendo in Christim Redemptorem, ideo certus sum mihi remissa esse peccata fide speciali applicant mihi rem promissam in foedere’. 175. Ibid., 201. 176. Cf Downame, Justification, 350–​351. 177. Cf Downame, Justification, 6. 178. Ward, Opera, 203. ‘Sunt res promissae in foedere novo, seu benficia foederis, qualia sunt iustificatio, remissio peccatorum, unio cum Christo’. 179. E.g. Acts 16:31 ‘And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” ’ 180. Ward, Opera, 204. ‘Quis vere credit in Christum Redemptorem ob remissionem peccatorum & certo novit se credere in Christum & fiduciam suam collocare in eius satisfactionem & merita ob remissionem peccatorum experimentali cognitione, hinc vi promissionis divinae remittuntur peccata eiusmodi peccatori, & certo & vere novit aut saltem nosse & potest & debet sibi esse remissa pecata’. 181. Ibid., 205. 182. Ibid., 206. 183. Ibid. 184. Ibid., 207. 185. He cites Psalm 25:2 ‘O my God, in you I trust; let me not be put to shame; let not my enemies exult over me’; Psalm 26:1 ‘Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity, and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering’; and Psalm 57:1 ‘Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge’. 186. Ward, Opera, 207. 187. Ibid. ‘Ex hac experimetali notitia pronuntiat & infert categorice, Deum erga se propitium fore, exauditurum preces, se non confundi’.

368 Notes 188. Ibid. ‘Ex communis & ordinaria experientia et sensu fidelium, qui indubitate certi sunt se eiusmodi actus exercere, nec falli in hac sua assertion seu asseveratione’. 189. Ibid., 208. 190. Ibid., 209. 191. Ward cites Psalm 103:2–​3 ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases’. 192. Ward, Opera, 212. 193. Ibid., 213. He cites Richard Field, Of the Church Five Books (Oxford, 1628), 173. 194. Ibid., 215 195. II Corinthians 1:12 ‘For our boast is this, the testimony of our conscience, that we behaved in the world with simplicity[a]‌and godly sincerity’. 196. Ward, Opera, 216. ‘Augustinus supponit omnes pies posse cognroscere fidei sinceritatem, spei certitudinem, & charitatem esse sine simulation; etiam absque omni formidine contrarii’. 197. Ibid., 217. 198. Ibid., 218. Cf Williams, Three Treatises, 114. 199. Ibid., 218–​ 219. ‘Per Spiritus Sancti ordinariam inspirationem mediantibus verbo & sacreamentis & exercitiis fideai & poenitentiae, in quibus sunt preces fidelium’; ‘Absolutione item sacerdotis dubiae conscientiae succurrentis, & id genus mediis’. Ward’s endorsement of confession and absolution in cases of perplexity of conscience bears interesting comparisons with Montagu’s: cf Montagu, Gag, 83–​85. 200. Ibid., 219. 201. Ibid., 221. 202. Ibid., 225. Downame also underlined the importance of the sacraments to Christian assurance. Downame, Justification, 350: ‘The ministry of the Sacraments, which being the seals of that righteousnesse which is by faith, were ordained to this purpose to confirm our faith in the application of the promise in particular unto our selves, and in the particular assurance of our justification and salvation by Christ . . . That therefore thou mayest learne to apply Christ unto thy selfe, God by his minister delivereth to thee in particular the Sacrament as it were a pledge, to assure thee in particular, that as the Minister doth deliver unto thee the outward signe: so the Lord doth communicate unto thee that beleevest according to the first degree of faith, the thing signified, that is to say. Christ with all his merits, to thy justification, sanctification and salvation’. 203. Ibid. 204. Ibid., 225. ‘Sacramenta omnia quae instituta sunt, ut sint signa foederis, etiam instituta sunt pariter, ut essent sigilla iustitiae fidei, ut obsignarent vere fidelibus, se justus esse fide in Christum’. 205. Ibid., 226. ‘Perceptione digna horum mysteriuorum, participles facti sumus mortis Christi, & omnium beneficiorum quae sanguine pro nobis promeruit; eademque beneficia nobis obsignantur & de eorum collation tanquam sigillo aut pignore certioramur’.

Notes  369

Chapter 6 1. Fincham and Tyacke do not discuss Montagu’s views on the Eucharist in detail. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 129. 2. Montagu, Appello, 285–​287. 3. Montagu, Gag, 245. 4. E.g. the Roman Catholic polemicist William Bishop, writing against Robert Abbot’s defence of William Perkins on this point. William Bishop, A Reproof of M. Doct. Abbot’s Defence (England: English secret press, 1608), 258. 5. Montagu, Appello, 158–​159. 6. This was I Corinthians 10:21: ‘You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons’. 7. Montagu, Appello, 158–​159. 8. Montagu, Gag, 262–​263. He is quoting Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 62, 14:‘Sacrificium verum & plenum tune offert in Ecclesia Deo Patri, si sic incipiat offerre, secundùm quod ipsum Christum videat obtulisse’. 9. Montagu, Gag, 263. Here he is quoting Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 62, 9: ‘Nec sacrificium Dominicum legitima sanctificatione celebramus, nisi oblatio et sacrificium nostrum responderit Passioni’. 10. Ibid. 11. Montagu, Appello, 285–​286. 12. Ormsby, ed., Correspondence, 80. 13. Montagu, Appello, 285. He is quoting Thomas Morton, A Catholic Appeal for Protestants (London, 1609), 162. 14. E.g. Sebastian Benefield, A Commentary or Exposition upon the Second Chapter of the Prophecy of Amos (London, 1620), 170. ‘In regard whereof, Hebrews 13.10. Christ is called an Altar; yea, our Altar: We have an Altar. We have an Altar, whereof they have no right to eat, that serve at the tabernacle. Christ is this Altar; he is our Altar; Christ with all his benefits’. 15. E.g. Gregory Martin, The New Testament of Jesus Christ . . . with arguments of books and chapters, annotations, and other necessary helps (Reims, 1582), 638. ‘ “We have an altar.” He putteth them in mind by these words, that in following too much their old Jewish rites, they deprived themselves of another manner and a more excellent sacrifice and meat: meaning, of the holy altar, and Christ’s own blessed body offered and eaten there’. 16. Montagu, Appello, 286. 17. Ibid., 287. 18. Cf John Rainolds, The Sum of the Conference between John Rainolds and John Hart (London, 1584) 552–​553, ‘So of a sacrifice, to the Lord’s supper; and of an altar, to the Lord’s table. For these things are linked by nature in relation, and mutual dependence (as I may say) one of another’; quoted with approval in Morton, Catholic Appeal, 162. 19. Montagu, Appeal, 287 20. Rainolds, Sum of the Conference, 545. ‘The sacrifice therefore, in respect whereof the Ministers of the gospel are called priests by Isaiah, is a spiritual sacrifice. And as every

370 Notes faithful person is a Priest, because we must offer, each his own body, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God: so that name is given to Ministers of the gospel, because they are called to offer up the bodies of other men in like sort. Wherefore if private Christians are not Mass-​priests, because their sacrifices are spiritual: then sith the Ministers must offer up the like sacrifices, it followeth by your answer that nether they are Mass-​priests’. 21. The Opuscula was entered in the Stationers’ Company Register on 21 May; the XCVI Sermons on 2 June. 22. Fincham and Tyacke touch briefly on Andrewes’s remarks in this work, but suggest that they were made in response to Cardinal Bellarmine rather than Cardinal du Perron. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 160. 23. Lancelot Andrewes, Two Answers to Cardinal Perron (London, 1629) , 6. 24. Ibid. He is quoting Augustine, Against Faustus, bk XX, ch.21. ‘Huius sacrificii caro & sanguis, ante adventum Christi, per victimas similitudinem promittebatur; in passions Christi, per ipsam veritatem reddebatur; post adventum Christi, per sacramentum memoriae celebratur’. 25. Ibid., 7. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Ibid., 21. 28. See Peter McCullough, ODNB s.v. ‘John Buckeridge’. Fincham and Tyacke do not offer a detailed account of this sermon. 29. John Buckeridge, ‘A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of . . . Lancelot, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester,’ in Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), 1. 30. Romans 12:1 ‘I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’; & I Peter 2:5 ‘You yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’. 31. He quoted at length from Augustine’s discussion of sacrifice, in City of God, bk 10, ch 6. He had made much of the same passage in his Discourse Concerning Kneeling at the Communion, and appendix to John Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached before His Majesty at Whitehall, March 22 1617 (London, 1618), 61. 32. Buckeridge, ‘Funeral,’ 4. 33. Cf Buckeridge, March 22 1617, 44. See also Bryan Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines: Sacramental Theology and Liturgy in England and Scotland 1603–​ 1662 (Aldershot, 2002), 87. 34. Buckeridge, ‘Funeral,’ 5. 35. Ibid. Cf Buckeridge, March 22 1617, 72. 36. Fincham & Tyacke, Altars Restored, 115–​116. 37. Ibid., 116. 38. Ibid., 117. 39. Ibid., 181. 40. John Williams, ‘Copy of the Letter written to the Vicar of Grantham,’ in Peter Heylyn, A Coal from the Altar (London, 1636), 67. Another copy of this letter was printed by

Notes  371 Williams himself in his The Holy Table, Name & Thing (London, 1637), 12–​21. There are, however, reasons to believe that the copy in The Holy Table had been altered from the original: Fincham & Tyacke, Altars Restored, 179. 41. Williams, ‘Letter,’ 69. 42. Ibid. 43. Church of England. A Book of Certain Canons (London, 1571), 18. 44. Williams, ‘Letter,’ 70 45. Ibid., 71. 46. Ibid., 72. 47. Williams’s tone in addressing Titley’s argument here, respectful as it is to both cathedral churches and the Chapel Royal, differs sharply from that adopted by the Puritan preacher, Henry Burton, in his attack on altars and the arguments advanced to support them. Burton wrote of Cathedrals that ‘These be the nests and nurseries of superstition and idolatry, wherein the old Beldame of Rome hath nuzzled up her brood of Popelings’. In relation to the Chapel Royal, Burton underlined that ‘The worship and service of God, and of Christ, is not to be regulated by human examples, but by the Divine rule of the Scriptures’; for, as he went on, more provocatively, ‘Suppose (which we trust never to see, & which our hearts abhor once to imagine) Mass were set up in the King’s Chapel; is this a good argument: why it should be admitted in all the Churches throughout the Realm of England’. Burton, For God and the King, 159 & 165–​166. 48. Williams, ‘Letter,’ 72. 49. Ibid., 73. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. ‘Master Morgan’ was Morgan Philips, a Roman Catholic priest who fled England at the accession of Elizabeth I and helped found the English Seminary at Douai. Titley would not have appreciated the comparison. 52. Ibid., 74. 53. Heylyn left this sentence out of his copy of Williams’s letter, though indicating that he had. It is found in John Williams, The Holy Table, Name & Thing (London, 1637), 19–​ 20. The relevant passage of Jewel is from John Jewel, A Reply unto M. Harding’s Answer (London, 1565), 195–​197. 54. Williams, ‘Letter,’ 78. 55. Hacket, Scrinia, 2:102. 56. Ibid., 2:103. 57. Fincham & Tyacke, Altars Restored, 181–​183. 58. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 80. 59. Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-​century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), 29. 60. Heylyn, Coal, 48. 61. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 259. 62. Thomas Morton, Of the Institution of the Sacrament of the Blessed Body and Blood of Christ (London, 1631), Dedicatory Epistle. ‘Utriusque Academiae Cantabrig. & Oxon. praeclaris luminibus ac ornamentis’

372 Notes 63. Ibid. ‘Sacramento Eucharistiae Resp. Christiana nihil unquam sublimius, nihil sanctius habuit atque augustius, quo Christiani quoddammodo in Christum ipsum transformamur’. 64. Morton, Institution, Advertisement. 65. Ibid., Ded.Ep. ‘Ne quis (quod detestabile omen Deus obruat) in Rom. Artolatriam prolabatur’. 66. Morton, Institution, 2:1 (the sixth book begins a separate pagination). He is citing Trent, session 22, canon 1. 67. Ibid., 2:2. 68. Ibid., 2:4 & 9. 69. Ibid., 2:10. 70. Ibid., 2:21. He is referring to Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam B.Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura, 743. 71. Ibid., 2:24. 72. Ibid., 2:32. 73. Ibid., 2:46. 74. Ibid., 2:50. 75. Ibid., 2:56. 76. Ibid., 2:58. 77. Ibid., 2:59. 78. Ibid., 2;60. 79. Ibid., 2:62. 80. Ibid., 2:63. 81. Ibid., 2:63. 82. Ibid., 2:65. 83. Ibid., 2:66. 84. Ibid., 2:67. 85. Ibid., 2:120-​121. 86. Ibid., 2:121. 87. Ibid. 88. DWL Quick MS 38.35, 624. Quick drew his account of Ford’s life from the later reminiscences of Ford’s daughter. She was also the one who had kept a copy of her father’s notorious sermon. Quick MS 38.35, 631. 89. ODNB s.v. ‘John Prideaux’. He was Prideaux’s legatee, and was sufficiently fond of his father-​in-​law to name his son Prideaux Hodges. 90. Quick MS 38.35 649. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 351. 93. Ibid. 626. 94. Ibid. 627. 95. Henry Wharton ed., The Second Volume of the Remains of William Laud (London, 1700), 41. 96. Wharton, ed., Remains of William Laud, 42. 97. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 245. ‘De Missae Sacrificio’.

Notes  373 98. Ibid., 245. ‘Altare autem sensu proprio connotat sacrificium, & requirit sacerdotem ad illud, super illud, debito modo immolandum’. 99. Ibid., 246. 100. Ibid. ‘Exemplo ab omnibus piis pastoribus (periclitante praesertim grege) religiosus imitando’. 101. Ibid. ‘Neque enim cibis, aut ceremoniis, sed gratia cor est stabiliendum’. 102. Ibid. ‘. . . altare Christi, crucem nempe ipsius, super quam semel & sufficienter, pro peccatis nostris Patri seipsum obtulit: & Altare Christus, qui ratione protectionis, expiationis, satisfactionis, & sanctificationis altare nostrum habeatur’. 103. Ibid. ‘Sed altare lapideum, aut sacrificium Missae hinc extundere, & obtrudere, non tam scopum pervertit Apostoli, quam invertit sacramentum coenae, & evertit unicum salvatoris expiatoriam immolationem’. 104. Ibid., 247. 105. Ibid. ‘Utrum sacrificium missae Papalis, sit blasphemum figmentum, & perniciosa imposture’. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 248. 109. Ibid. ‘In quo ipse sacerdos, seipsim exhibuit sacrificum, infiniti valoris, recolendum jugiter a Christianis, sed non reiterandum’. 110. Ibid., 249. 111. The passages from the Prayer Book that he quoted were, ‘O Lord and heavenly Father, we thy humble servants entirely desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving’ and ‘here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee.’ 112. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 249. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid., 250. ‘Nihil habendum est nobis cum talibus comercii; sed fugiendum est nobis ab hac ruitura Babylone’. 115. Ibid., 251. ‘Non inveniatur in thuribulis vestris . . . schismatis ignis aliquis alienus (quam Dominus non praecepit) ad excitandum in doctrina, aut disciplina matris ecclesiae exotica incendia. 116. Ibid., 252. 117. Ibid., 252. ‘Nec sacrificium tunc instituit propitiatorium, satisfactorium, meritorium, aut impetratorium, pro vivis & mortuis; sed sacramentum commemorativum, repraesentativum, applicativum, & obsignativum, consumatissimi istius sacrificii postridie in crucem peragendi’. 118. Ibid., 253. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 254. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. ‘Sacramentum enim datur a Deo & a nobis accipitur. Sacrificium vero, a Deo accipitur, et a nobis datur’.

374 Notes 123. Ibid., 257 (actually 255). 124. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 257. 125. Prideaux here cited Thomas Aquinas, S.Th IIIa q 83 art 1: ‘The celebration of this sacrament is an image representing Christ’s Passion which is His true sacrifice’. 126. Prideaux, Viginti-​duae, 258. ‘Ergo si altare quod habemus, sub evangelio, sit non proprie, sed tropice sic vocatum’. 127. Ibid., 259. 128. Ibid. ‘Convertas (quaesumus) aut confundas seductores, & aperi seductorum oculos, ut videant per filium tuum, quomodo filii tui institutum, horribili blasphemia mentiuntur, & negotiantur’. 129. Wharton, ed., Remains of William Laud, 31. 130. Ibid., 32–​43. 131. Ibid., 41. 132. Ibid., 44. 133. Fincham & Tyacke, Altars Restored, 185–​186. 134. Andrew Clark, ed, ‘Lincoln College Chapel, 1631,’ in Collectanea IV (Oxford, 1905), 147–​148. 135. Prynne had referred to ‘turning of communion tables altar-​wise, like a kitchen dresser’. William Prynne, Lame Giles His haltings (London, 1636), ‘To the true Protestant Reader’. 136. Heylyn, Coal, 20. 137. Fincham & Tyacke, Altars Restored, 196. 138. Heylyn did exactly that: Heylyn, Coal, 63. 139. William Prynne, A Quench-​Coal (London, 1637), 288. 140. Morton, Institution (1635), 463. 141. Ibid., 416. 142. Fincham and Tyacke’s observation that, in the 1635 edition of his Institution, Morton appeared to be condoning the Laudian altar policy needs therefore to be balanced by the observation of Morton’s reinforcement, in the same edition, of his opposition to the idea that the Eucharist was a proper sacrifice. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 206. 143. Throughout the pamphlet, Heylyn observed the fiction that he did not know who had written the Grantham judgement. 144. Heylyn, Coal, 47. 145. Ibid., 7. 146. Ibid., 9. 147. Ibid., 33. 148. Ibid., 34. 149. Ibid., 14, 19, 50, 51, 53. 150. Ibid., 51–​52. 151. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata, 9. 152. Fincham and Tyacke suggest that Williams’s Holy Table was not a very effective response to Heylyn, but do not set out Williams’s arguments in enough detail for this claim to be assessed. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 163. Even Heylyn

Notes  375 conceded that, at least initially, the ‘subject matter of the book, and the religious estimation that was had of the author, concurring altogether to advance the reputation of it to the very highest’. Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, 332. 153. John Williams, The Holy Table, Name & Thing (London, 1637), 34. Prynne struck a markedly less respectful tone in his response to this argument, and openly entertained the possibility that the current furnishings of the Chapel Royal might be illegal: ‘The tables in cathedral churches, and the King’s chapels stood not altarwise but tablewise till now of late days, when their situation hath been changed without, yea against both law and canon’. Prynne, Quench-​coal, 161. 154. Williams also underlined that cathedrals could not be taken as a guide for what should happen in parish churches, since the canons made distinct provisions for them. Williams, Holy Table, 182–​183. 155. Prynne made a similar point: ‘Admit, that the east end of the chancel or quire be the most honourable part of the church, and that the table for this reason ought there to be railed in: why are not the font and pulpit there placed and railed in as well as the table, and the Bible, and reading pew too, Are not the font, the pulpit, the Bible as honourable as venerable, as worthy to take place and precedency as the table, both in respect of matter, use, relation to God and Christ, and divine institution?’ Prynne, Quench-​coal, 43–​44. Cf Burton, For God and the King, 33. 156. Williams, Holy Table, 75–​76. 157. Ibid., 141. Burton, by contrast, made no allowance for the term altar to be used at all. And while Prynne acknowledged that the Church Fathers had referred to the communion table as an altar in a figurative sense, he denied that the term could legitimately be used in the Church of England. Prynne, Quench-​coal, 155–​156. 158. Williams, Holy Table, 107–​108. 159. Ibid., 108. Williams’s remarks here contrast with William Ames’s insistence that no positive honour should be shown to any external things used for religious worship, outside the time of that use. Ames limited the respect due to the places and instruments of worship to what he called a merely privative reverence, preserving them from defilement. William Ames, De Consientia (Amsterdam, 1631), 242. Daniel Cawdrey agreed: ‘No place, and particularly not the church, separated by men to holy uses, is holy after the public use’. And he concluded that showing any special reverence for church buildings or furniture was superstitious. Daniel Cawdrey, Superstitio Superstes (London, 1641), 8 & 18–​19. Prynne was particularly scathing about the embellishment of places of worship: ‘I must tell you with S. Ambrose, that neither our prayers nor sacrifices stand in need of such trimming, the best adorning of sacraments, is not tissues & silk, or embroidered canopies, or spangled Crucifixes, or painted poppets, or any the like facings, Popery sets forth her Altars, more like pageants then places which favour of Christ’s simplicity’. Prynne, Quench-​coal, 374–​375. 160. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, eds., Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Abingdon, 2013), 208; Hacket, Scrinia, 2:35. 161. Williams, Holy Table, 108. 162. Ibid., 108–​109.

376 Notes 163. Ibid., 102. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid., 104. 166. Ibid., 105. 167. Ibid., 104. 168. Ibid., 106. 169. Ibid., 119. 170. Ibid., 118. Williams quoted the phrase cited earlier ‘Who is of so shallow a brain, as not to discern the notorious unconscionableness of your disputers, who allege the word altar in the text to the Hebrews, for proof of a proper altar?’ 171. Ibid., 120. 172. Ibid. Prynne was not prepared to be so quite charitable towards Andrewes: Prynne, Quench-​coal, 289 & 299. 173. Williams, Holy Table, 120. 174. Ibid., 120–​121. 175. Ibid., 121. 176. Ibid., 207. Unsurprisingly, Williams did not echo Prynne’s argument that placing the table centrally made it easier for people to receive the sacrament in their seats: Prynne, A Quench-​coal, 29. 177. Williams, Holy Table, 213. 178. Ibid., 68–​69. He is quoting Francisco de Toledo, Instructio Sacerdotum (Lyon, 1628), 1014. 179. Prynne and Burton made no reference to the legitimate powers of the Ordinary in resolving a dispute about the communion table: for both of them, Episcopal authority was part of the problem, not part of the solution. Prynne, Quench-​coal, 22–​23: ‘Such is the sottishness, pride, & superstitious wilfulness of many of our domineering prelates, whose will is their only reason, religion, law, that they will be wiser then Christ, then his Apostles, then all the world besides, & no place seems so fitting to them for the communion table’s situation, as that which is most unfit, the east end of the chancel wall, against which one side of it must lean, for fear of falling, & is there imprisoned, impounded with rails & bars, for fear of running away’. Burton, For God and the King, 163–​164: ‘Would the prelates thus make the mother cathedrals, (thus by themselves made & adopted Rome’s daughters) their concubines, whereon to beget a new bastard generation of sacrificing, idolatrous mass-​priests throughout the land, which our good laws, and all our learned and pious divines proclaimed illegitimate, and abominable?’ 180. As Fincham and Tyacke have shown, neither Morton nor Hall enforced the altar policy within their dioceses and Williams merely required the table to be railed in without specifying its position within the Church. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 206–​208. Hacket also records that Williams ‘would not let church-​ wardens be cited, for the placing of the Holy Table: nor the people for not coming to the rail, at the receiving of the elements of the Lord’s Supper’. Hacket, Scrinia, ii, 43. Fincham and Tyacke suggest that Davenant did endorse the construction of railed altars in Salisbury, and they note that he also instructed that the communion

Notes  377 table at Aldbourne should be placed at the east end of the Chancel. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 205. It is worth noting, however, that Davenant’s order for Aldbourne assumed that the table would nevertheless be moved from that position during Holy Communion and underlined that it was erroneous to suggest that doing so was not irreverent, since ‘the placing of it higher or lower in the chancel or in the church is by the judgement of the Church of England a thing indifferent; and to be ordered and guided by the only rule of convenience’. Fuller, Davenant, 424–​425. 181. It should be underlined that while the diocesan bishop most commonly exercised ordinary jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical establishments found within his diocese, there were significant exceptions (e.g. the Chapel Royal; Westminster Abbey; St George’s, Windsor; various royal residences and foundations; the universities and colleges of Oxford and Cambridge etc). As Dean of Westminster, Williams would have been well aware that his assertion of Ordinary jurisdiction was not an unqualified assertion of episcopal authority.

Chapter 7 1. See Milton, British Delegation, 393 n, for a discussion of the dating of this event. 2. Elements of this discussion have been previously published: Stephen Hampton, ‘The Synod of Dordrecht and the Re-​protestantization of the Church of England,’ in Mark Chapman, Friederike Nűssel, and Matthias Grebe, eds, Revisiting the Meissen Declaration after 30 Years (Leipzig, 2020), 62–​77.. 3. George Carleton, John Davenant, Samuel Ward, Thomas Goad, &Walter Balcanquall, A Joint Attestation, Avowing that the Discipline of the Church of England Was Not Impeached by the Synod of Dort (London, 1626) , 9. 4. Ibid., 10–​11. 5. Ibid., 17. ‘Item exceptioni de disciplina adjicitur a reliquis Britannis similis exceptio, si quid contra legitimos ritus externos generaliter ibidem statuatur’. 6. Milton, British Delegation, iv. 7. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 455. 8. Public Record Office, SP 17/​44 f 14. 9. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 470 10. George Carleton, Consensus Ecclesiae Catholicae contra Tridentinos (Frankfurt, 1613) , 239. ‘Singuli episcopi portionem suam in Catholica retinent, nec quisquam mensuram membri excedere debet. Ita tamen isti in singulis partibus exercentur, ut quia partes inter se vinculo pacis & unitatis cohaerent, tanquam unius corporis partis, quicquid agunt in sua parte . . . non tantum pro se, verum etiam pro tota ecclesia agere existimantur. Itaque multi episcopi unum episcopatum constituent. Pulchre Cyrpianus “Nemo fraternitatem mendacio fallat, nemo fidei veritatem perfido praevaricatione corrumpat. Episcopatus unus est, cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur.” ’

378 Notes 11. Ibid., 269–​270. ‘Per successionem . . . & cathedram, constat veteres non privilegium alicuius loci, sed doctrinae Apostolocae integritatem in Ecclesia traditam, ab episcopis conservatam, intelligi voluisse’. 12. Ibid., 266. 13. Ibid., 266. ‘Ex doctrinae consanguinitate cum Apostolica’. He is quoting Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics, ch.32. 14. Ibid., 266. ‘Unicum veritatis testimonium’ 15. Ibid., 270. ‘Quum . . . apud ecclesias nostras sit doctrinae consanguinitas, & conspiratio cum doctrina Apostolica, hoc sufficit ad demonstrandam ecclesiam veram’. Cf Bellarmino, Disputationes, 1:1316. 16. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 464–​465. 17. Carleton, Consensus, 271. ‘Episcopos nostros, qui canonice ordinantur. Nam ut de successione episcoporum nostrorum pauca dicimus, facile probabimus, episcopos nostros multo magis regulariter institutos quam Romanos’. 18. Ibid., 271. 19. Ibid., 273. 20. Ibid., 274. He refers to Capreolus, In 4. Sent. dist.2 q.1 but it should be In 4. Sent. dist.25 q.1. See John Capreolus, In libros sententiarum amplissimae quaestiones, (5 vols (Venice, 1589), 4:268–​269. Carleton also referred to Peter de Alliaco (Cameracensis), Richard FitzRalph (Armachanus), and Gasparo Contarini. 21. Carleton, Consensus, 274–​275’. Ecclesia non est, nec unquam fuit sine episcopis, vel iis qui locum supplent episcoporum’. 22. Ibid., 274. 23. Ibid., 281. ‘Nam melius est ordinare sine episcopis, quam ut ecclesia omnino careat presbyteris’. 24. Ibid., 276. 25. Ibid., 276. ‘Et quia in quibusdam locis aliter fieri non potuit, presbyteris suis contenti erant. Minus enim malum videbatur, non habere episcopos, quam veritatem, & ecclesiae catholicae communionem amittere’. 26. Ibid., 283–​284. 27. Ibid., 284 He cites Gregory the Great, Registrum Epistolarum, book 2 letter 46. 28. Ibid., 277. ‘Post sacrarum scripturarum authoritatem, ecclesiae catholicae consensus tantum apud me semper valuit, ut quaecunque ab hoc consensu confirmata videam, mihi sacrosancta & immutabilia videantur’. 29. Ibid., 277–​278. 30. Ibid., 281. ‘Si omnia ecclesiae secula lustremus ab apostolicis temporibus usque ad patrum nostrorum memoriam, non alia ordinandi ratio invenietur, nisi per episcopos. Quam igitur sacram caeremoniam ecclesia ab apostolis accepit, & per tot secula constanter conservavit: quis potest reiicere, qui ecclesiae catholicae authoritatem non reiiciat?’ 31. Ibid., 281–​282. ‘Quid enim magis decet ecclesias Christi, quam charitas et unitas? Quia una est ecclesia omnes ad unitatem contendere debemus; charitas autem est unitatis vinculum’. 32. Ibid., 282.

Notes  379 33. Ibid., 282–​283. ‘Quum igitur ex sacris literis, & ecclesiae consensus episcoporum officium probetur, debent omnes ecclesiae reformatae ad hanc unitatem accedere, & spes est, accessuras omnes, quum posito contentionis studio, & pertinaci obstinatione, veritas & ecclesiae unitas quaeritur. Spes est, inquam, quod ex necessitate pro tempore constitutum fuerat, mature consilio, & deliberation, ex charitate, ad pristinam ecclesiae catholicae consuetudinem reducendum fore’. 34. B. L. Harley MS 7038, f 95. ‘Ecclesiae Reformatae non dissentiunt in fundamentis fidei’. Ward’s determination of this thesis was published in the Opera: Ward, Opera, 108–​114. 35. Ward, Opera, 109. ‘Nos non dicimus ecclesias reformatas non itidem dissentire in externo ecclesiasticae politeiae aut disciplinae administrandae modo’. 36. Ibid., 109. ‘Immo huiusmodi diversitatem, posse & debere tolerare in externa politeia, absque fraternae unitatis laesione, aut diruptione, praesertim cum ecclesiae omnes reformatae retineant ea quae absolute necessaria sint, puta verbi Dei puram praedicationem, sacramentum debitum administrationem, pastorum publica authoritate ordinationem, morum denique censuram’. 37. Ibid., 109. 38. Ibid., 109. ‘Sancte profiteor, consultissimum esset . . . ut reliquiae reformatae ecclesiae quemadmodum cum nostra ecclesia eiusdem fidei unitate contesserarint, ita & praeminenti & exorti episcopi super presbyterum potestate asserenda, contesserare vellent, ut ita ordinations suas ab ipsis Apostolis certius derivare possint, utque ita sese ecclesiae universalis contestatissimae praxi a temporibus apostolicis rite conforment’. 39. Sidney Sussex Library, Ward MS O3. I am grateful to Nicholas Rogers, who is the Archivist at Sidney Sussex, for making this manuscript available. 40. James Wadsworth, The Copies of Certain Letters which Have Passed . . . between Mr James Wadsworth . . . and W. Bedell (London, 1624) , 139. 41. Ibid., 139–​140. 42. Lancelot Andrewes, Opuscula Quaedam Posthuma (London, 1629) , 159–​200. 43. Ibid., 195. ‘Quid attinet abolere nomen retinere rem? Nam et vos rem retinitis sine titulo, et illorum uterque quos nominabas quid errant nisi abolito nomine, reipsa episcopi’. 44. Sidney Sussex Library, Ward MS O3, f.1r. 45. Ward, Opera, 114. ‘Atque hic liceat mihi, spectatissimi auditores (bona vestra cum venia) paucis vindicare innocentiam tum meam tum collegarum mearum, qui Synodo Dordracenae interfuerant’. 46. Ibid. ‘Non ita pridem scripsit quidam vir doctus, synodum illam consequenter damnare etiam Ecclesiae Anglicanae disciplinam; & alibi ait, Ecclesiae Anglicanam in illa & aliis Belgicis synodis pro illegitima haberi’. 47. Ibid. ‘Quamdiu exteri theologi interfuerunt nec directe, nec indirecte, nec consequenter, Ecclesiae Anglicanae disciplinam in illa synodo vel damnari uspiam, vel pro illegitima haberi, vel aliqua ex parte vel minima laesam’. 48. Montagu was then the Rector of Petworth, which was in George Carleton’s diocese of Chichester. 49. Ward, Opera, 114.

380 Notes 50. See Chapter 3. 51. Davenant, Expositio, 6. 52. Ibid., 130. ‘Cum ecclesia sit Dei familia, nemo debet in ea functionem aliquam exercere, nisi qui ab ipso Deo legitime vocatus 53. Ibid. ‘Qui sic ordinantur, possint recte affirmare se factos esse ministros κατὰ τὴν οἰκονομίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ. Qui caret hac ordinatione, usurpant administrationem familae alienae absque Domini approbatione & ordinatione’. 54. Ibid. ‘Cum in omni οἰκονομία, & administratione alicuius familiae ordo requiritur, non modo in ipso opera dispensationis, sed inter ipsos dispensatores si plures fuerint; perspicuum est illos turbare ecclesiam Dei, & subvertere hanc οἰκονομίαν, qui paritatem ministrorum conantur in ecclesiam inducere’. 55. Ibid. ‘Unus ergo secundum hanc Dei dispensationem & οἰκονομίαν constitutus est episcopus, alii ordinantur presbyteri, alii diaconi; neque debent qui sunt in inferiori loco constituti, illa munia sibi vendicare quae sunt superiorum.. Nam ipse Dominus familiae “deditquosdam apostolos, alios evangelistas, alios pastores & doctores”; Ephesians.4.11. & hisce in perpetuum substitui voluit ministros suis ordinibus distinctos’. 56. Davenant, Determinationes, 187. ‘Diversitas graduum in ministris evangelicis verbo Dei non repugnant’. 57. Ibid., 187. ‘Subtiliter disquirere, utrum episcopatus sit diversus ordo a presbyratu, an alius & altior tantum gradus in eodem ordo’. 58. William of Auvergne, Jean Gerson, and Durandus of Saint-​Pourçain. 59. Davenant, Determinationes, 187. ‘Huc igitur redit Scholasticorum argutatio, episcopatum, ut distinguitur a simplici sacerdotio, non esse alium ordinem, sed eminentiorem quondam potestatem & dignitatem in eodem ordine sacerdotali constitutum’ 60. Ibid., 187. ‘Eos, qui appropriate vocantur episcopi, habere dignitatem altiorem, potestatem majorem, & eminentiora official sibi annexa, quam habent alii presbyteri’. 61. Ibid., 187. ‘Nam in verbo divino adumbratam, delineatam, & ab ipsis Apostolis constabilitam fuisse hanc episcopatum supra presbyteros eminentiam, facile est demonstrare’. 62. Ibid., 187. ‘Ut sciamus traditiones apostolicas sumptas de vetere testamento; quod Aaron & filii eius atque Levitae un templo fuerunt, hoc sibi episcopi, presbyteri & diaconi vendicent in Ecclesia’. 63. Cf Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 458–​459. 64. Davenant, Determinationes, 188. ‘Manifestum est, ipsum Christum ministros ad aedificationem ecclesiae constituisse, non pari autoritate pare dictos, sed dignitatis & potestatis gradu distinctos’. 65. Ibid., 188. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. ‘Qui ministros evangelicos potestate pares esse volunt, aut Christi factum nescire videntur, aut illud ab ecclesiae minime imitandum iudicare’. 68. Ibid., 188. 69. Ibid., 189.

Notes  381 70. Ibid. ‘Quod autem de huius προεστῶτος munere minime perpetuo attexit, id ex historia ecelesiastica tam clare refellitur, ut mirum sit, a viro docto, & antiquitatis minme imperito, fuisse affirmatum’. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 190. 73. Ibid. ‘Haec ipsa singularitas episcopalis successionis, conjuncta semper cum amplitudine quadam autoritatis, per se sufficit ad debellandum errorem nuper natum de paritate omnium ministrorum’. 74. Ibid. ‘Ius & potestas ordinandi; quae ab ipsis Apostolis ad episcopos transmissa, presbyteris autem inferioribus denegata est’. 75. Ibid., 191. Davenant also saw this in Paul’s instructions to Timothy at I Timothy 5:22. 76. Ibid. ‘Huic instituto apostolico semper acquievit ecclesia catholica, nec aliam ordinationem legitimam agnovit quam quae ab episcopo legitimo celebratur’. 77. Ibid. ‘Cum ordines sacros conferre ex institutione apostolica sit actus officii episcopalis, si presbyteri in ecclesia bene instituta id facerent, actum hunc illorum non modo illicitum esse, sed irritum & inanem . . . Sed in ecclesia turbata, ubi episcopi omnes in haresin aut idolatriam inciderunt, ubi minostros orthodoxos ordinare recusarunt, ubi solos factionis & erroris sui participes sacris ordinibus dignos reputarunt, si orthodoxi presbyteri (ne pereat ecclesia) alios presbyteros coganur ordinare, ego non ausim huiusmodi ordinationes pronnunciare irritas & inanes’. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 191–​192. 80. Ibid., 192. ‘Hac freti necessitate, si ecclesiae quaedam protestantium, quae ordinationes ab episcopis papistis expectare non poterant, consensus presbyterorum suorum presbyteros ordinarunt, non inde dignitati episcopali praejudicasse, sed necessitate ecclesiae obtemperasse, judicandi sunt’. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 193. 86. Peter does this in I Peter 5:1. 87. Davenant, Determinationes, 194–​195. ‘Haec et huiusmodi alia, sine quibus ecclesia constituta, nec bene consistere, nec rite gubernari potest, transmissa sunt ad epicopos, eosque constituunt caeteris presbyteris gradu altiores, poteste majores’. 88. John Rushworth, Historical Collections, (8 vols (London, 1721–​22),III, 957. 89. ODNB, s.v. ‘Joseph Hall’. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 468, 460–​461. 90. Joseph Hall, Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted (London, 1640), 1. 91. Ibid., 27. 92. Ibid., 28–​29. 93. Ibid., 91. 94. Ibid., 96 95. Ibid., 30. 96. Ibid., 106–​117.

382 Notes 97. Ibid., 116–​117. 98. Ibid., 121–​122. 99. Ibid., 170–​171. 100. Ibid., 86. 101. Ibid., 32–​33. 102. Ibid., 91. 103. Ibid., 99. 104. Ibid., 100. 105. Ibid., 102. 106. Ibid., 87. 107. Ibid., 66–​67. 108. Ibid., 84. 109. Ibid., 180–​181. 110. Laud, Works, 6(2):573. 111. Ibid. 112. Hall, Episcopacy, 6. 113. Ibid., 161. 114. Carleton, Consensus, 281 115. Ibid. 116. Prynne, Canterbury’s Doom, 275. 117. Hall, Episcopacy, 103. 118. Ibid., 104. 119. Ibid., 105. 120. Andrewes, Opuscula, 168. 121. Hall, Episcopacy, 105. 122. Andrewes, Opuscula, 167–​168. 123. Hall, Episcopacy, 105. 124. Dewey D. Wallace, for example, is happy to claim that it was not ‘merely accidental that with the English Arminians sacramentalism and rejection of predestinarian theology converged’. Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant theology, 1525–​1695 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 99. Lori Anne Ferell clearly assumes an inherent tension between an attachment to the Church of England’s polity, and Reformed soteriology, when she speaks of ‘the “Jacobean” religious settlement, under which Calvinist orthodoxy was assumed, and ceremonial practice was adiaphoric, transformed into a settlement under which Calvinism was contested and ceremony took on an unprecedented soteriological significance’. Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetoric of Conformity, 1603–​1625 (Stanford, 1998), 167. Susan Hardman Moore assumes the same tension, writing of ‘The mismatch between the establishment’s broad acceptance of Reformed theology but sharp rejection of Reformed practice’. Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Reformed Theology and Puritanism,’ in Paul T. Nimmo & David A..S. Fergusson, The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology (Cambridge, 2016), 213. Cyndia Clegg clearly does too, suggesting that ‘Many Church of England preachers practiced outward conformity, wearing vestments and using the Book of

Notes  383 Common Prayer, but their sermons reflected the Calvinist zeal for the “word truly preached” ’. Cyndia Clegg, Shakespeare’s Reading Audiences: Early Modern Books and Audience Interpretation (Cambridge, 2017) 100. 125. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, 1978), 574. 126. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 10. 127. Downame’s Two Sermons were by attacked the Puritan clergyman Paul Baynes in The Diocesan’s Trial (Amsterdam, 1621), as well as by an anonymous pamphleteer in An Answer to a Sermon . . . by George Downame (Amsterdam, 1609) and A Reply Answering a Defence (Amsterdam, 1613). Downame responded to the 1609 Answer with his A Defence of the Sermon (London, 1611). 128. Milton, British Delegation, xxxii–​xxxxiii & 32–​42. 129. George Downame, Two Sermons the One Commending the Ministry in General: The Other Defending the Office of Bishops in Particular (London, 1608) , 1–​2. 130. Ibid., 20–​21. 131. Ibid,, 25. 132. Ibid., 26–​28. 133. Ibid., 30–​31 134. Ibid., 37. 135. Ibid., 41–​42. 136. Ibid., 42–​43. 137. Ibid., 43. 138. Ibid., 44. Downame responded angrily when his sermons were attacked for allegedly unchurching the foreign Reformed churches. George Downame, A Defence of the Sermon (London, 1611). 4:145–​146: ‘I plainly declared my resolution to be this, that although we be well assured, that the form of government by bishops is the best, as having not only the warrant of Scripture for the first institution, but also the perpetual practice of the Church from the Apostles’ times to our age, for the continuance of it; notwithstanding we doubt not, where this may not be had, others may be admitted; neither do we deny, but that silver is good, though gold be better, which objection and answer, I inserted of purpose into the sermon, to preserve the credit of those reformed Churches, where the Presbyterian discipline is established, and that they might not be exposed, or left naked to the obloquies of the Papists’. Downham also took the opportunity to distinguish between the potestas and the modus potestis of episcopacy, ‘the power or authority itself being the perpetual ordinance of God, the manner or form of government wherein that power is exercised being mutable’. Downame, Defence, 4:147. On that basis, he then argued that the majority of Protestant Churches in Europe actually enjoyed a form of episcopacy: Downame, Defence, 4:149–​150. 139. Downame, Two Sermons, 94–​95. 140. In a sermon preached before the King at Woodstock on 24 August that year, Prideaux explained that Uzzah had perished for ‘his inconsiderate laying hold of the Ark, beyond his vocation, flat against God’s ordinance’. John Prideaux, ‘Perez-​Uzzah,’ in Certain Sermons (Oxford, 1636), 22. For a fuller treatment of Prideaux’s ecclesiology,

384 Notes see Stephen Hampton, ‘Mera Chimaera: The Reformed and Conformist Ecclesiology of John Prideaux (1578–​1650), The Seventeenth Century, 33:3 (2018), 279–​302. 141. John Prideaux, XIII Orationes Inaugurales (Oxford, 1648) , 72. ‘Expectanda itaque est necessario ordinaria vocatio’. 142. Ibid., 73. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid. ‘Ac necessitas quidam vocationis, non ratione ordinis tantum & decoris, sed praecepti & divini mandati elucescit’. 145. Ibid. 73. ‘Extra vocationem . . . ausus sit, vel verissima praedicare’. 146. Ibid. ‘Nam de vocatione non constet legitima, qua fiducia, aut praecipiet pastor, aut recipient oves pabulum’. 147. The Apostolic Canons was a set of ecclesiastical regulations purporting to be from the Apostles, but probably dating from the 6th century. 148. Prideaux, Orationes, 73. ‘Non furtim, non perfunctorie, sed ceremoniis debitis & precibus, in aperto ecclesiae theatre, ut agnoscat populus, quos attendat legitimos pastores, & fidenter obeant pastores illud munus quod authoritate legitima norunt, illis esse delatum’. 149. Ibid., 75. 150. Ibid., 76 ‘A legitimis episcopis & debita solennitate consecrati’. 151. Ibid. ‘Ago causam hac vice Anglicanae solius ecclesiae; transmarinis non desunt e suis patroni, quibus alias videant adversarii quid reponant’. 152. Prideaux did, however, defend the legitimate vocations of both Luther and Calvin, indicating that these had been conceded by Becanus and Bellarmine respectively. Ibid. 153. Ibid. 154. The marginal note was presumably added after Prideaux had delivered the oration, since Mason’s Vindiciae was not published until 1625. 155. Prideaux, Orationes, 76. ‘E spinis pontificiis reformatae religionis uvae sunt colligenda, episcopi Christo ab Antichristo sunt accersendi?’ 156. Ibid. ‘In huiusmodi, non a ministrantis sinceritate, sed ab instituentis authoritate effectus pendet salutaris. Alia siquidem est docendi potestas, alia doctrinae puritas. Nec qui per superstitionem aut haeresin ammittet doctrinae puritatem, privatur statim ordinandi facultate’. 157. Daniel Featley, Clavis Mystica (London, 1636), Epistle Dedicatory. 158. Ibid., 129. 159. Prideaux later made clear in a private letter to an aristocratic pupil, which was only published at the Restoration, that like Carleton, Ward, and Davenant, he held bishops and presbyters to be of the same order: John Prideaux, De Episcopatu Epistola (London, 1660), 4. 160. Prideaux evidently agreed with Downame, Carleton, and Ward on this point. Prideaux, De Episcopatu, 8. Nevertheless, like the other Reformed Conformists, Prideaux argued that the episcopal hierarchy of the English Church was distinctly preferable, ‘as more consistent with the institution of the Saviour and the Apostles, and the practice of the whole Catholic Church until now’. (Ut Salvatoris

Notes  385 & Apostolorum institutioni, adeoque totius Ecclesiae Catholicae praxi magis consentaneam.) Prideaux, Fasciculus, 216.

Chapter 8 1. Thomas Paget, ‘An Humble Advertisement,’ in A Defence of Church-​government, ed. John Paget (London, 1641). 2. David Calderwood, Perth Assembly (Leiden, 1619), 10. 3. Morton’s work was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 10 September 1618 4. Letters from and to Sir Dudley Carleton (London, 1757), 389. 5. William Ames ed., Puritanismus Anglicanus (Frankfurt, 1610), Ad lectorem. 6. Milton, British Delegation, pp xxxiv, 216, & 376 n.100. 7. Morton never graced Ames’s pamphlets with a reply. However, Ames’s father-​in-​law, John Burges, took up cudgels in Morton’s defence with An Answer Rejoined, a work that existed in manuscript during the 1620s and was published by royal command in 1631. Ames produced a response to Burges that was posthumously published as A Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship (1633). Burges had been involved in the production of the original Abridgment, but he was later persuaded of the case for conformity: John Burges, An Answer rejoined (London, 1631), 16–​21. 8. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 6. 9. William Ames, A Reply to Dr Morton’s General Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies (Amsterdam, 1622) , 25. 10. Ibid., 28. Ames’s remark here accords with Judith Maltby’s observation of popular discontent when the Prayer Book ceremonies were neglected: Maltby, Prayer Book and People, 45 (surplice), 48 (kneeling communion), 54–​56 (sign of the cross). 11. Thomas Morton, A Defence of the Innocency of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England (London, 1618), Letter to the Right Honourable George, Marquis of Buckingham. 12. Ibid., 44. Morton argued that his opponents were responsible for separatist schism, although they were not necessarily separatists themselves. His ‘Nonconformists’ could therefore be found within, as well as outside, the Church: ‘Know that schism, which is the dividing of affections, taketh beginning from the difference of opinions, albeit in points of less moment; and then reckon the multitude of Separatists, who have had their first principles of opposition against our Church, out of your school of contradiction, by your vile aspersion of no less a crime then idolatry itself: and after judge, whether there be not some cause to call your opinion schismatical, as still nourishing the cause of a cursed schism, although not always effectuating the same.’ Ibid. 13. ODNB s.v. ‘Thomas Morton.’ 14. Ibid. 15. Buckeridge, March 22 1617, 17. 16. Morton, Defence, 184–​185.

386 Notes 17. Ibid., Epistle to the Nonconformists. 18. Ibid., 189. 19. Ibid., 185. 20. Morton’s assertion of the positive religious value of conformity contrasts sharply with another contemporary defence of conformity by the Puritan minister John Sprint in Cassander Anglicanus. Sprint said nothing in favour of the ceremonies; arguing instead that, no matter how bad the ceremonies were, it was contrary to Apostolic practice, and sinful, to allow such things to impede a preaching ministry. John Sprint, Cassander Anglicanus (London, 1618), Letter to Samuel Burton & 1–​2. 21. Morton, Defence, 19. Ames rejected Morton’s interpretation of this verse: ‘The only scripture he bringeth is, 1. Corinthians 14. 26. 40. [sic] concerning order and decency, a place much profaned by the patrons of our ceremonies . . . But 1. it is not used by all divines, to prove the institution of such ceremonies as ours lawful. For they are much mistaken which think our ceremonies to be mere matters of order: and, as for decency, they have been often proved to be far from it . . . 2. It is not used to this purpose by any that have authority sufficient to persuade us that it will bear such a conclusion . . . 3. This scripture being rightly understood, doth not only not justify such ceremonies as ours, but plainly condemneth them’.William Ames, A Reply to Dr Morton’s General Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies (Amsterdam, 1622), 9. 22. Morton, Defence, 19. Ames insisted, by contrast, that ‘the Church maketh no laws (properly so called) to appoint any new things to be used, but only canons, orders, directions, ordering in seemly manner those things which Christ hath appointed: and that if she addeth any thing of her own, she doth decline. The reason is, because unto her is committed no authority of appointing new things, but a ministry to observe and do such things which Christ hath appointed.’ Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 10. 23. Morton, Defence, 25–​26. He referred to Calvin, Institutes, IV.10.30. 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Ibid., 32. Ames rejected Morton’s distinction between essential and non-​essential parts of God’s worship: ‘For 1. if all those ceremonies be essential parts of God’s worship, which are such as the contrariety of them must needs displease God, then certainly all ceremonies which serve for decorum and edification must needs be essential parts of God’s worship: because the contrary of decorum and edification must needs displease God in his worship. 2. What kind of wedging is this, so to distinguish the parts of God’s worship, as that the accidental only, and not the essential shall serve for edification? . . . 4. What worship of God is there that is not essential? If it hath no essence of worship in it, surely it is no worship.’ Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 16–​17. 26. Morton, Defence, 53. Ames insisted, by contrast, that ‘all human ceremonies, appropriated to God [sic] service, if they be ordained to teach any spiritual duty by their mystical signification, are unlawful.’ Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 33. 27. Morton, Defence, Epistle to the Nonconformists. 28. Ames was sceptical about this argument: ‘I dare appeal to the consciences of the best conforming Christians, whether ever they found themselves truly stirred up to holiness, by the surplice, or to constancy by the cross? One thing I am sure of,

Notes  387 that in some one congregation where these ceremonies have not appeared for 20 or 30 years together, there hath been more holiness and constancy of faith, then in many cathedral churches where they were never omitted.’ Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 37. Sharon Arnoult has observed a growing tendency among Jacobean writers to argue that Prayer Book ceremonies might not merely express but encourage religious attitudes. Sharon Arnoult, ‘Prayer Book, Polemic and Performance,’ in Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book, Pete Langman ed., (Farnham 2011), 45–​56, 52–​54. 29. Morton, Defence, 52. Ames rejected this distinction: ‘This is a most unhappy wedge indeed, which riveth in sunder the holy sacraments of God, and maketh way for human inventions to creep into their place. The sacraments (saith he) do signify grace conferred: and moral signs do signify a duty of man in some moral virtue. But the Scripture teacheth us that the Sacraments doe also signify the duty of man towards God. For by the sacraments the whole covenant is signed and sealed betwixt God and man: so that not only God’s conferring of grace, but man’s duty through grace is there professed and represented.’ Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 36. 30. Morton, Defence, 54. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 57–​58. 34. Ibid., 59. 35. I Maccabees 4:59 describes the institution of the Feast of Dedication. John 10:22 relates Christ’s observance of it. 36. Morton, Defence, 65. 37. Ibid., 67 & 71. Ames rejected all these examples, and underlined that Bellarmine had used them as well: Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 45, 46 & 48 (misnumbered as 52). 38. Ames rejected these examples as well: Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 50–​52. 39. Morton, Defence, 79. 40. Ibid., 131. 41. Ibid., 132. 42. Ibid., 197–​198. 43. By contrast, Ames defined Christian liberty as he claimed Calvin had done, which was not ‘that Christ had given liberty unto men for to prescribe at their discretion mystical signs in the Church: but only to dispose of such circumstances as in their kind are necessary, but in particular determination do vary. He instanceth in the next section in the circumstance of time, what hour the congregation should meet: in the place, how large, or in what fashion the Church should be built: in mere order, what Psalms should be sung at one time, and what another time. These and such like circumstances of order and comeliness, equally necessary in civil and religious actions are understood by Calvin: not significant ceremonies, proper unto religious worship, such as ours are now in controversy.’ Ames, Morton’s General Defence, 3. 44. Ames, Morton’s General Defence, Preface. 45. Anon., An Abridgement of that Book which the Ministers of Lincoln Diocese Delivered to His Majesty (Leiden, 1617), 90.

388 Notes 46. Joseph Hall, A Common Apology of the Church of England against the Unjust Challenges of the Over-​Just Sect, Commonly called Brownists (London, 1610), 100. Hall printed extracts from Robinson’s otherwise lost pamphlet in the margin of his work. 47. Hall, Common Apology, 100. 48. Ibid., 101. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Cf Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 495. 52. Webster, Godly Clergy, 65. 53. Featley, Ancilla, Preface. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 111–​112. 59. Ibid., 112. 60. Ibid., 113. 61. Ibid., Epistle dedicatory to the Countess of Denbigh. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 419. 64. Ibid., 420. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 421. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 422. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 423–​425. 71. Ibid., 426–​429. 72. Ibid., 430. 73. Ibid., 431–​432. 74. ibid., 433–​434 75. Ibid., 509. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 510. 78. Ibid., 543. 79. Ibid., 543–​546. 80. Ibid., 264–​266. This edition is STC10725. 81. Ibid., 520. 82. Ibid., 521. For the significance of voluntary fasting days within the puritan community, see Webster, Godly Clergy, 64–​73. 83. Ibid., 522. 84. Hooker, Laws, V.lxxii. 85. Featley, Ancilla, 523–​524. Ignatius’s letter to the Philippians is now widely recognized to be inauthentic.

Notes  389 86. Ibid., 525–​526. 87. Ibid., 526–​528. 88. Ibid., 528. 89. Ibid., 529. 90. Ibid., 530. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 530–​531. 93. Ibid., 531. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 532. 96. Ibid., 536. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 537. 99. Ibid., 540. 100. Ibid., 541. 101. Ibid., 543. 102. Ibid., 542. 103. Ibid., 543. 104. Ibid., 547. 105. Ibid., 548. 106. Ibid., 553. 107. Ibid., 548 (actually 558). 108. Ibid., 562. 109. Ibid., 562. 110. Ibid., 564–​565. 111. Ibid., 566. 112. For more detail about the Post-​ Reformation discussion of Lent, see Stephen Hampton, ‘ “Welcome Dear Feast of Lent”: Rival Understandings of the Forty Day Fast in Early Stuart England’, Journal of Theological Studies, l 63 (2): 608–​648. 113. John Cosin, A Collection of Private Devotions (London, 1627), 253–​254. 114. Cosin, Private Devotions, 192. 115. Cosin, Private Devotions, 192–​193. 116. William Prynne, A Brief Survey and Censure of Mr Cosin His Cozening Devotions (London, 1628), 16. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. 119. Holdsworth began to lecture at Gresham College in 1630, and was expected to offer around 30 lectures every year. There are two series of lectures in the published collection, 50 lectures on Matthew 13:52 and 27 lectures on Matthew 4:1–​2. The lectures on Lent are the 21st to the 27th lectures of the second series. The second series followed the first, but only after a gap of at least two terms, caused by Holdsworth’s absence from London. Richard Holdsworth, Praelectiones Theologicae (London, 1661), 463. Consequently, although they are not dated, the seven lectures on Lent were probably delivered in late 1632 or early 1633.

390 Notes 120. Holdsworth, Praelectiones , 673. 121. Ibid., 674. 122. Ibid. ‘Verum alii in extremis versantur, idque & ad dextram & ad sinistram. Ad dextram illi qui institutionem originaliter divinam faciunt; ad sinistram, qui constitutionem mere humanum. Inter utrosque sunt alii interjecti qui mediam viam sequuntur.’ 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 675. 125. Ibid., 675–​676. 126. Ibid., 676. ‘Hoc rei caput est, quod ab ecclesia ortum suum habuit quadragesimale jejunium, robur autem & authoritatem accepit a legibus principium.’ 127. He mentions Cesare Baronio and Miguel de Palacio. 128. Holdsworth, Praelectiones, 684. 129. Ibid., 685. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 686. ‘Quod non est evangelicum, suspiciosum est non esse apostolicum.’ 132. Ibid. ‘Quod non est uniforme & sui simile, probabile est apostolicam traditionem non fuisse. Quod enim Apostoli instituebant, cum eodem essent Spiritu docti eodem ubique instituebant, ut ab omnibus eodem tenore servaretur.’ 133. Ibid., 687. 134. Ibid., 690. 135. Ibid, 688. 136. Ibid., 690. ‘Jejunia . . . ex eorum numero non est quae simpliciter & per se bonum sunt, & propter se expetenda, sed eorum quae ad aliud relata, eatenus bona sunt & laudabilia quatenus as aliquid seipsis melius finemque bonum ordinantur.’ 137. Ibid., 691. 138. Ibid., 692. 139. Ibid., 693. 140. Ibid., 695. 141. Ibid., 696–​697. 142. Ibid., 700. 143. Ibid. ‘In pietatis officia ad legitimam institutionem sufficit, si ad certum & definitum tempus authoritate humana officia ea revocentur quae γένικως & sub tempore indefinito in scriptures divines praecipiuntur.’ 144. Ibid., 700. 145. Ibid., 702. 146. Ibid., 707–​710. 147. Ibid., 711–​714. 148. Ibid., 717–​718. Cf Bellarmino, Disputationes, 3:1433. 149. Ibid., 718. ‘Quia & divinis literis est verbum contrarium, & divinae gratiae benignitati adversum, & divinis Christi meritis contumeliosum, & ratione etiam rectae repugnans.’ 150. Ibid., 719. He cites I Corinthians 8:8 and Matthew 15:11 & 17. 151. Ibid., 721.

Notes  391 152. Ibid., 723. ‘Multipliciter peccant contra omnes jejunii leges, contra ipsam, quod caput est omnium, definitionem.’ 153. Featley, Clavis Mystica, 864–​865. Featley had already used the term ‘heteroclite’ to describe those heretics who refused to observe Lent: Featley, Ancilla, 532. It is worth noting that he is here extending his defence of the Lent Fast to include the Ember Days and the eves of festivals. 154. Ibid., 865. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 865–​866. 160. Featley, Ancilla, 874–​875. 161. John Prideaux, ‘A Christian’s Freewill Offering,’ in Certaine Sermons (Oxford, 1636), 3–​4. 162. Ibid., 6. 163. Ibid., 9 & 11. 164. Ibid., 21. 165. Ibid., 22. 166. Prideaux was clearly targeting arguments of the sort that Sprint had advanced in Cassander Anglicanus. 167. Prideaux, ‘Freewill Offering,’ 23. 168. Ibid. 169. Ibid., 23–​24. 170. Hall had also made this point: Hall, Common Apology, 101. 171. Ryrie, Being Protestant, 6.

Conclusion 1. Stephen Hampton, ‘A “Theological Junto”: the 1641 Lords’ Subcommittee on Religious Innovation,’ The Seventeenth Century, 30 (4): 433–​454. Copyright ©2015 The Seventeenth Century. Elements of this article have been reprinted here by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://​www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of The Seventeenth Century. Of the three who did not attend the subcommittee, Carleton and Downame were dead, and Davenant was mortally ill. 2. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), 81–​82; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990), 250–​276; Daniel Doerksen, ‘Polemist or Pastor: Donne and Moderate Calvinist Conformity,’ in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit, 2003), 12–​34, 12 & 15. 3. I am grateful to John Adamson for this observation.

392 Notes 4. James Ussher, John Williams, John Prideaux, Samuel Ward, Ralph Brownrigg, Daniel Featley, & John Hacket, A Copy of the Proceedings of Some Worthy and Learned Divines (London, 1641), 1–​2. 5. Ibid., 4–​5. 6. Ibid., 3–​6 7. Hampton, ‘A “Theological Junto,” ’ 443–​446. 8. John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (London, 1693), 2:147. 9. Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), 250. 10. Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), 445.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbot, George (1562–​1633), 16, 60–​61, 70, 76, 82, 112, 151, 300–​1, 318n.2, 321n.60, 331n.4, 333n.63 Abbot, Robert (1560–​1617), 33, 55, 104–​5, 125, 189, 326n.163, 326n.167, 327n.187, 334–​35n.122, 369n.4 adiaphora, 270, 291–​92 altar controversy, the, 26, 207–​16, 217–​19, 222–​36, 304, 306–​7, 311n.8 Alvarez, Diego (1555–​1632), 29–​30, 40, 104–​5, 300–​1 Ambrose, 31, 141–​42 Ames, William (1562–​1633), 103, 269–​70, 275–​76, 375n.159, 387n.43 Anabaptists, 163 Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–​1626), 11, 117, 189, 210–​11, 212–​13, 214–​15, 234, 244–​45, 257–​58, 266–​67, 270 angels, 34, 39, 84, 126, 153–​54, 155, 157–​ 58, 248–​49, 254 anti-​Arminians and anti-​Arminianism, 30, 83, 107–​8, 120, 269 anti-​Calvinists and anti-​Calvinism, 12–​13, 19–​20, 28, 151, 190–​91, 194, 235–​ 36, 259, 303–​4, 344n.48 anti-​puritanism, 6, 10–​11, 124, 130, 297, 299 Anyan, Thomas (d.1632), 111 Apostolic Church, The, 61, 62–​63, 251, 271–​72 as precedent, 3, 5, 36, 65, 131, 163–​64, 225, 226–​27, 230, 234, 237, 248, 251–​52, 253–​54, 258, 263, 266, 274, 284–​85, 288–​89, 290, 298–​99 succession of, 22, 67, 237–​38, 239–​40, 241–​44, 245, 246–​50, 251–​52, 253–​ 55, 261–​62, 265, 266, 305 Aquinas, Thomas (1225–​1274), 31, 49, 89–​ 90, 156, 218–​19, 227–​28, 301–​2

Aretius, Benedict (1552–​1574), 99–​100 Arminianism, Arminians, 9–​10, 11, 14, 28–​30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 39, 46, 50, 55–​ 56, 66, 78, 83, 88–​89, 90, 93, 104–​5, 107–​8, 111–​13, 118–​19, 120–​23, 128–​29, 131–​32, 140–​41, 142, 146, 147, 148, 150–​51, 168, 205, 222, 258–​59, 300, 301–​2, 306–​7, 308 Arminius, Jacob (1560–​1609), 28–​30, 41–​42, 68, 88, 96, 112, 120, 121, 131–​32, 142 Ash Wednesday, 287–​88, 294 assurance of election, 21–​22, 27, 42, 54–​ 58, 67, 73, 81, 97, 107, 128, 133, 167, 171, 204–​6, 280–​82, 287–​88, 294–​95, 298–​99, 301, 302, 305 Augustine of Canterbury (d.604), 240 Augustine of Hippo (354–​430), 28–​29, 31, 34, 37, 38, 45–​46, 47, 49, 50, 61–​62, 66, 76, 82, 84–​85, 87, 89, 90–​91, 96, 99, 118–​19, 122–​23, 129, 133, 134, 135, 139–​40, 141–​42, 146, 147–​48, 154, 158–​59, 160, 174, 199, 200, 203, 210, 212, 215, 241, 248, 284–​ 85, 290, 300–​1 avant-​garde conformity/​conformists, 7–​8, 158–​59, 165–​66, 189, 205, 207, 217–​18, 229 Bac, Martin, 14–​15 Bainbrigg, Thomas (d.1646), 165–​66 Balcanquhall, Walter (c.1586–​1645), 69, 136, 151, 313n.27, 331n.4 baptism, 56–​57, 58, 159–​61, 163–​64, 175–​ 76, 204–​5, 219, 221, 227–​28, 241, 250, 261–​62, 273, 308–​9 infant baptism, 159–​61, 175–​76, 250, 307 sign of the cross at, 21, 269–​70, 272–​73, 275–​76, 307

404 Index Baro, Peter (1534–​1599), 28–​29, 35, 125, 135, 137 Barrett, William, 137 Bedell, William (1571–​1642), 244–​45 Belgic Confession, The, 237, 238, 245–​ 46, 268 Bellarmine, Robert (1542–​1621), 4, 42–​43, 52, 53, 57–​58, 63, 153, 182, 185–​86, 190–​93, 195, 196, 197, 199–​200, 204, 227–​28, 240, 284–​85, 290, 291, 292, 370n.22, 384n.152, 387n.37 Benedict, Philip, 13 Benefield, Sebastian (1559–​1630), 55, 319–​20n.33, 321n.54, 322–​23n.88 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–​1153), 45–​46, 48–​49, 129, 133, 141–​42, 157–​58 Bertius, Peter (1565–​1629), 28–​29, 32, 88 Beza, Theodore (1519–​1605), 31–​32, 84, 248–​49, 254 Bible, The Authorized Version, 17, 212, 337n.182 Reims New Testament, 369n.15 Vulgate translation, 62 bishops. See episcopacy Bogerman, Johannes (1576–​1637), 69, 237, 269 Book of Common Prayer, 2, 7, 9, 21, 27, 76, 106–​7, 108–​9, 128, 129, 148, 159–​60, 161, 163, 175–​76, 214, 219, 225–​26, 231–​32, 268–​69, 270, 275–​76, 277, 278, 281–​82, 283, 285, 298, 307 Book of Homilies, 21, 112–​13, 115–​16, 163, 178–​79, 181, 183, 185, 187, 188–​ 89, 199, 213–​14, 233, 235–​36 Bradwardine, Thomas (1300–​1349), 38, 46, 66, 83, 95, 120, 134, 135, 300–​2 Brewster, William (1568–​1644), 268–​ 69, 276 Brownrigg, Ralph (1592–​1659), 20, 165–​ 66, 306–​7 Brydon, Michael, 12, 349n.150 Bucer, Martin (1491–​1551), 130–​31, 137 Bucerus, Gerson (1565–​1631), 259 Buckeridge, John (1562–​1631), 11, 116–​17, 210, 211–​12, 218–​19, 224, 270–​71

Buckingham, Duke/​Marquis of (1592–​ 1628), 1, 60–​61, 116–​18, 150, 151, 270 Bullinger, Heinrich (1504–​1575), 99–​100 Burges, Cornelius (c.1589–​1665), 160 Burton, Henry (1578–​1648), 185, 198, 371n.47, 375n.157, 376n.179 Calderwood, David, 268–​69 Calvin, John (1509–​1564), 13, 30–​31, 84, 99–​100, 123, 138, 175, 244–​45, 272–​73, 278–​79, 384n.152 Cambridge University, 1, 17–​20, 26, 84, 130–​31, 135, 136–​37, 151, 159, 161, 164, 165–​66, 169, 176, 303–​4 colleges of Christ’s College, 165–​66 Clare College, 152 Corpus Christi College, 165 Emmanuel College, 161 Jesus College, 243 Pembroke College, 159, 185 Queen’s College, 68 Sidney Sussex, 17, 68 St Catherine’s College, 165–​66 St John’s College, 19–​20 Commencement theses and determinations at, 26, 150, 151–​64, 176, 182–​89, 197, 199, 200, 205, 217–​18, 228–​29, 236, 243–​46, 252–​53, 303–​5 lectures/​sermons at, 17–​19, 25, 82–​106, 122–​23, 131–​32, 160, 164–​65, 168–​ 69, 175, 176, 189–​90, 196, 205–​6, 301–​2, 306–​7 canon law, 26, 213–​14, 215–​16, 223, 231–​ 32, 235–​36, 241, 263, 269 Capreolus, John (c.1380–​1444), 240–​41 Carleton, Dudley (1573–​1632), 70, 71, 238–​39, 268–​69, 331n.4, 331n.10 Carleton, George (1559–​1628), 18, 26–​27, 68, 69–​71, 82, 131, 237–​38, 244–​ 45, 248, 250, 251, 253–​55, 256–​57, 266–​67, 303, 304–​5, 347n.121 and his Consensus, 26–​27, 237–​43 and his Examination, 25, 135–​43, 148, 241, 254

Index  405 catechisms, 125–​26 Chapel Royal, the, 213, 231–​32 Charles I, King (1600–​1649), 1, 60–​61, 82, 106–​7, 115, 116, 149–​50, 165–​66, 168–​69, 189, 228–​29, 232, 236, 264–​65, 288–​89 Chemnitz, Martin (1522–​1586), 201–​ 2, 272–​73 Christian Liberty, 23–​24, 272, 274–​75, 284, 298 Christmas, 280–​82, 295–​97 Chrysostom, John (c.347–​407), 3 Church of Scotland, 252–​53, 256, 266–​67, 268–​69, 295, 331n.4 Collegiate Suffrage, The, 25, 68–​83, 85, 96, 106–​7, 108–​9, 143–​45, 148, 161, 301, 302 communion, 26, 58, 128, 204–​5, 207–​16, 315n.68 as a sacrifice, 26, 207–​12, 215–​16, 217–​22, 223–​28, 230, 231, 232–​34, 235–​36, 304, 306–​7 communion tables, 2, 207–​9, 210–​11, 213–​15, 219, 226–​27, 230–​31, 232–​ 33, 234, 236, 311n.3 kneeling to receive at, 21, 23–​24, 268–​ 76, 307–​8 location of communion tables, 212–​15, 216, 222, 223, 229–​30, 231–​32, 235, 376–​77n.180 Contra-​Remonstrants, 46, 71–​72, 76, 82, 102–​3, 133 conversion, 28, 43, 45–​54, 59–​60, 70, 76–​ 78, 97–​98, 133–​35, 142, 145, 158, 186, 202, 261, 306–​7 Corbett, Richard (1582–​1635), 229 Corvinus, Johannes (c.1582–​1650), 28–​29, 47, 96, 338n.193 Cosin, John (1594–​1672), 110, 111, 112–​14, 116–​17, 118, 119–​20, 121, 136, 150, 177, 208–​9, 288–​89, 295, 302–​3 Council of Nicaea, The, 249 Council of Trent and Canons of, The, 61, 64, 177, 178–​79, 180–​81, 218–​ 19, 238–​39 Cyprian (c.200–​258), 208, 239, 240, 249, 251, 266–​67

Davenant, John (1572–​1641), 9, 18–​19, 25, 26, 68, 74, 82–​96, 110, 140–​41, 189–​90, 308–​9, 376–​77n.180 and episcopacy, 224, 246–​52, 253–​55, 261–​63, 266–​67 and Ward, 26, 69–​70, 82–​83, 130–​32, 134–​35, 150, 160, 161, 164–​69, 170–​75, 176, 194, 205–​6, 303–​4 his Determinationes, 170–​75, 246–​52, 253, 304–​5 his Expositio, 164–​69, 246–​52 his Praelectiones, 26, 169, 170, 189–​96 lectures, 82–​99, 106–​9, 164–​65, 301–​2 deacons and the deaconate, 235, 246, 247, 248, 263 death of Christ, The, 25, 31–​32, 44, 45, 69–​70, 74–​75, 76, 82–​83, 93–​94, 95, 99–​106, 107, 108–​9, 144–​45, 147, 160, 164, 168, 176, 204, 301–​ 2, 308–​9 despair, 37–​38, 52, 67, 97–​99, 105, 122–​23 divine concurrence, 152–​59, 172 Dixon, Leif, 14–​15, 67, 120–​21 Doerksen, Daniel, 9–​10 Dominicans, 29–​30, 39–​40, 46, 49–​50, 51, 64, 66, 301 Donatists, 241 Donne, John (1572–​1631), 9–​10 Dort, Synod of, 15–​16, 18, 25, 45, 46–​47, 102, 110, 118, 131, 134, 146, 237, 245–​46, 259, 266, 269 British delegation to, 33, 56–​57, 68–​82, 91–​92, 130–​32, 136–​37, 237–​38, 243, 268, 298, 303, 304–​5, 308, 340n.232 Canons of, 46–​47, 51, 66, 82, 85, 106, 107, 238, 301 Downame, George (c.1566–​1634), 17–​18, 189–​90, 259–​62, 263, 265, 267, 357n.115, 360n.46, 361n.72, 361n.76, 362n.94, 366n.165, 367n.167, 368n.202 Duncon, Eleazar (d.1660), 182–​83, 185–​ 86, 188–​89, 190 Duppa, Brian, 228 Easter, 277, 281–​82, 283, 285, 288, 291–​ 92, 294–​95

406 Index election, doctrine of, 32–​33, 34–​36, 37, 43, 45, 56, 67, 68–​82, 83–​84, 85–​86, 87–​96, 97, 98–​99, 105–​7, 118, 125–​ 27, 128, 134, 145–​46, 150, 159–​60, 167–​68, 174–​75, 261, 301, 302, 306–​7, 309 episcopacy, 9–​10, 21, 130, 285, 307–​8 and ordination, 26–​27, 237, 238–​39, 241–​42, 243–​44, 246–​47, 250–​51, 252, 255, 256, 257–​58, 260, 261–​ 62, 265–​67, 305 Reformed Conformist defence of, 26–​ 27, 130, 131, 237–​65, 266–​67, 298, 304–​5, 307–​8 Eucharist. See communion fast and feast days, 119, 129–​30, 275–​89, 293, 298–​99, 305 Catholics abuse of, 292–​93 Lenten Fasting, 25, 276, 277, 283–​87, 288–​95, 298–​99, 305 Fathers, The, 3, 4, 38, 53, 66, 105, 129, 141–​42, 154, 176, 187, 196, 200, 209, 219, 220, 227–​28, 230, 236, 239–​40, 248–​50, 261–​62, 283–​84, 285, 288, 290–​91, 296 Featley, Daniel (1582–​1645), 16–​17, 20, 23, 27, 60–​61, 112–​13, 114, 118–​ 24, 130, 142–​43, 147, 180–​82, 205, 229–​30, 289–​90, 291–​92, 303, 306–​7, 308–​9, 328n.208, 328n.215, 328n.216 and his Ancilla Pietatis, 16, 25, 27, 124–​30, 147–​48, 275–​88, 293, 295, 298–​99, 305 and his Clavis Mystica, 264–​65, 267, 293–​98 and his Parallels, 25, 118–​25, 143, 147, 180–​82 Fincham, Kenneth, 9–​10, 11–​12, 207, 212, 213, 216, 223–​24, 229, 374–​75n.152 Fisher the Jesuit -​John Percy (1569–​1641), 60–​61, 198 Five Articles of Perth, 295 Five Articles of Remonstrance, 70, 82–​83, 143–​44, 301–​2 Flathers, William, 183, 185

Ford, Thomas (1598–​1674), 222–​23, 225, 228–​29 Frederick, V, the Emperor Palatine (1596–​ 1632), 18–​19 free will, 25, 37–​38, 41–​42, 45–​46, 47–​49, 50–​51, 56, 70, 76–​79, 82, 87, 91, 92, 107, 126, 127, 132–​33, 134–​ 35, 140, 147–​48, 152–​59, 171–​ 73, 306–​7 Frewen, Accepted (1558–​1664), 216, 222, 227–​28 Fulgentius, of Ruspe (462/​467-​527/​533), 28–​29, 31, 46, 133, 174 General Assembly (Of the Church of Scotland), 252–​53, 268–​69 Goad, Thomas (1576–​1638), 69, 70–​71, 112–​13, 114, 135, 136, 151, 331n.4 God ‘the Cause of ’, 114, 120, 124, 135, 136, 167–​68, 300–​2 as cause of sin and evil, 36–​37, 41, 42, 91–​92, 94, 122–​23, 171–​74 as First Agent, 155 as First Cause, 37, 39, 40–​42, 49–​51, 152, 153–​57 decrees and ordinances of, 4, 36–​37, 38, 39, 41–​42, 43–​44, 56, 71, 73, 80–​81, 85–​86, 88, 90–​91, 92, 93–​94, 95, 97, 100, 101–​2, 104, 122–​23, 126, 139, 140–​41, 144–​45, 146, 157–​58, 164, 167–​68, 171–​72, 174, 195–​96, 259, 260, 261–​62, 271, 288 dispensation for episcopacy, 246–​48, 256, 258–​65 eternity of, 35 foreknowledge of, 33, 36, 38–​42, 50, 85, 86, 88, 89–​92, 94, 122–​23, 126, 138, 173–​74 goodness and mercy of, 70–​71, 75–​76, 77, 80–​81, 87, 92–​94, 97, 98–​99, 103–​4, 105–​6, 126–​27, 133, 139–​ 40, 141, 144–​45, 162, 167–​68, 174–​ 75, 177–​78, 181, 183–​86, 187–​88, 200–​1, 279 immutability of, 49, 247 instruments of his grace, 21

Index  407 judgements of, 32–​33, 35–​36, 44, 49, 91, 191 justice of, 33, 35–​36, 54, 74, 104, 108, 126, 162, 164, 184, 199–​200, 221 knowledge of, 29–​30, 38–​42 nature of, 83 omnipotence of, 36, 95–​96 omniscience of, 33, 36 perfection of, 83, 141, 158–​59 will of, 39, 77, 95–​96, 97, 104–​5, 132, 134, 138–​40, 144, 146, 153, 259 will of, absolute, 44–​45, 72–​73, 87 will of, approbative, 86 will of, conditional, 39, 44–​45, 146–​ 47 (see also Middle Knowledge) will of, effectual, 70–​71, 72–​73 will of, efficacious, 37, 86, 87, 93, 134, 156–​57, 166, 167–​68 will of, free, 39, 73–​74, 75–​76, 85, 87, 92, 93–​94, 98–​99, 105–​6, 108, 157–​58 will of, hidden, 93–​94, 100 Gomarus, Francis (1563–​1641), 70–​72 grace, 40–​41, 59–​60, 65, 95, 127, 132, 139, 146 and conformity, 27, 175–​76, 277, 281, 287–​88, 293, 309 and episcopacy, 258–​65, 304–​5 and ministry, 259–​62, 264, 267 certainty of, 196–​205 converting grace, 78, 145, 298 efficacious grace/​the efficacy of, 45–​54, 78–​79, 88, 92–​93, 102, 103–​4, 105, 115, 128–​29, 134, 144–​45, 152, 153–​54, 162–​63, 166, 167–​68, 205–​ 6, 259, 295, 299 enlightening, 79, 80 fall from, 56, 118, 122–​24, 130–​31, 135–​ 36, 141–​42, 144, 145, 306–​7 habitual grace, 43, 133–​34, 153, 166–​67 instruments of/​and the sacraments, 11, 21, 204–​5, 259, 264, 273 moving grace, 43 nature and workings of, 28, 42–​45, 70, 89–​96, 141, 145, 166–​67, 178–​81, 185–​86, 193–​94, 224, 259, 264 operative grace, 47–​49, 90

predestinating grace, 49, 77, 127, 141, 174–​75, 259, 305 Reformed Conformist vision of, 21, 22, 24–​26, 42–​43, 66–​67, 68–​89, 107–​8, 127, 131–​37, 138, 147–​48, 151–​69, 170–​75, 205–​6, 238, 241, 291, 300, 301, 303–​5 regenerating grace, 80, 181–​82 resistance of, 47–​51, 78–​79, 95–​96, 132–​ 34, 140, 172 restorative grace, 46–​47 saving grace, 22, 42–​45, 51, 72, 75–​77, 104–​5, 128 special grace, 91, 93–​94, 95, 233 supernatural grace, 75–​76, 144–​45 the duration of, 54–​58 the universality of, 43–​45, 125, 306–​7 Graham, George (1565–​1643), 252–​53 Gregory, the Great (540–​604), 225, 240, 241 Gregory, Nazianzen (329–​390), 31, 248–​49 Gresham College, 19–​20, 289 Grevinckhoven, Nicholas (d.1632), 28–​30, 41, 105 Hacket, John (1592–​1670), 20, 215–​16, 306, 376–​77n.180 Hakewill, George (1578/​9-​1649), 1, 6, 18, 20, 331n.4 Hall, Joseph (1574–​1656), 15–​17, 18, 26–​ 27, 68, 113, 114, 248, 276–​77, 303, 331n.4, 376–​77n.180 and his Episcopacy by Divine Right Asserted, 26–​27, 252–​58, 266–​67, 304–​5 and his Via Media, 25, 143–​47, 148 Hampton Court Conference, The, 123–​24 Harsnett, Samuel (1561–​1631), 168–​69, 212–​13, 351n.1 Henry, Prince of Wales (1594–​1612), 16 Herbert, George (1593–​1633), 9–​10 Herbert, Philip (1584–​1650), 19, 217 Herbert, William (1580–​1630), 2, 16, 169, 216 Heylyn, Peter (1599–​1662), 24, 30–​31, 217, 229, 230–​33, 234, 235, 236, 304

408 Index Hilary, of Arles (403–​449), 118–​19, 248–​49 Hodges, William (d.1684), 222, 228–​29 Holdsworth, Richard (1590–​1649), 19–​20, 27, 288–​93, 298–​99, 305 Hooker, Richard (1554–​1600), 6, 10, 11–​ 12, 129–​30, 284 House of Lords Theological Subcommittees, 306–​8 Howson, John (1557–​1632), 1, 2–​3, 4, 5, 7, 11–​12, 116–​17 Hunt, Arnold, 14–​15 Hunt, Richard (d.1638), 212–​13 Hutton, Matthew (1529–​1606), 30, 137 Hyde, Alexander (1598–​1667), 217 Hyde, Francis (1617–​1667), 217 Hyde, Laurence II (1562–​1641), 217 James I, King (1566–​1625), 17–​18, 45, 60–​61, 68–​69, 70, 76, 82, 112, 114, 119, 268, 269, 295, 302–​3 Jerome (d.420), 244, 248, 249–​50 Jesuits, 4, 28–​30, 35, 39–​40, 42–​43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 64, 84, 86, 90–​91, 93, 140–​41, 153, 157, 158–​59, 175, 194, 202–​3, 227, 235, 300, 301–​2 Jewel, John (1522–​1571), 16–​17, 189, 215, 272–​73 justification, doctrine of, 28, 45–​58, 77, 97, 118, 123–​24, 138, 141, 159–​61, 177–​205, 261, 303–​4, 306–​7 by faith alone, 26, 43, 52–​53, 56, 79–​80, 115, 127, 128, 178, 183–​85, 186–​ 88, 194, 196–​205 by works, 53–​54, 169, 182, 185–​ 86, 306–​7 Kerry, William, 217 Kirk, The. See the Church of Scotland Lake, Arthur (1569–​1626), 69–​70, 189 Lake, Peter, 8–​9, 10–​14, 21–​22, 143–​44, 146, 147, 347n.108 Lambeth Articles, The, 35, 70, 137, 301 Laud, William (1572–​1645), 19, 24, 26–​27, 30–​31, 60–​61, 116–​17, 136, 198, 210, 211, 212–​13, 216–​17, 222,

223, 228–​29, 252–​53, 256–​57, 266–​ 67, 351n.1, 357n.115 Laudianism and Laudians, 8–​15, 22–​23, 29, 213, 216–​17, 235, 259, 300, 304, 305–​6, 308 altar policy (see altar controversy) and censorship, 252–​53, 256–​57 and episcopacy, 239, 240 and Puritanism, 8–​9, 305–​6 and similarities with Reformed Conformity, 22, 239 and the invisible Church, 295–​96 definition of, 8, 22 Reformed Conformist condemnation of, 14–​15, 26, 213, 215–​16, 235, 236, 304, 305 style of piety, 22, 23, 26, 215–​16, 235, 259, 289 liturgical year, the, 21, 22, 27, 147–​48, 275–​ 88, 291, 293–​99, 305, 307–​8 Lord’s Supper, The. See communion Love, Richard (1591–​1661), 165–​66 Luther and Lutherans, 31, 44, 46, 47, 55–​57, 60–​61, 62–​63, 64–​65, 76, 130–​31, 177, 188, 201–​2, 205, 296, 384n.152 Maltby, Judith, 9, 385n.10 Martyr, Peter (1499–​1562), 137, 214–​15, 234, 274 Mason, Francis (c.1566–​1621), 263–​64 Mass, the (and the Sacrifice of), 26, 64, 209, 212, 215, 217–​19, 223–​28, 304 McCullough, Peter, 7–​8, 211 meditation, 127–​28, 129, 265, 277, 281–​82, 290–​91, 296 Melanchthon, Philip (1497–​1560), 99–​100 Merritt, Julia, 14–​15 Middle Knowledge, 29–​30, 38–​42 Milton, Anthony, 9, 143–​44, 147, 238, 239 ministry and the theology of, 9–​10, 11, 37–​ 38, 43, 47, 77, 244, 246–​47, 254–​55, 259–​62, 263–​65, 267 Montagu, James (1568–​1618), 17–​19 Montagu, Richard (1577–​1641), 16, 18, 25, 110, 118–​24, 125, 130, 147, 161, 228, 243, 245–​46, 277 and Arminianism, 120–​22

Index  409 and George Carleton, 135–​43 and his A New Gag for an Old Goose, 111, 112, 115, 127, 147, 177, 178–​79, 180–​82, 207, 208, 210, 302–​3 and his Appello Caesarem, 113–​14, 115, 116, 124, 127, 130–​32, 136, 147, 177, 178–​79, 180–​81, 198, 207, 208–​9, 302–​3 and John Cosin, 110, 111, 112–​14, 116–​17, 136, 150, 177 and John Davenant, 166 and John Hall, 143–​47 and John Williams, 112, 119–​20 and justification, 177–​82, 193, 205 and the Lord’s Supper, 207–​16 and the Royal Proclamation of 1626, 149–​52, 175–​76 and the York House Conference, 117–​18 Moore, Johnathan, 31–​32, 99, 101, 102 Morton, Thomas (1564–​1659), 16–​17, 27, 113, 117, 180, 189, 205, 208–​10, 359n.25, 376–​77n.180 and his Defence of the Innocency of the Three Ceremonies, 268–​76, 285, 298 and his Of the Institution of the Sacrament, 216–​22, 229–​30, 233–​ 34, 236, 304, 305 Muller, Richard, 13, 31–​32, 33 Musculus, Wolfgang (1497–​1563), 99–​100 music, in churches, 1, 2, 7–​8, 307–​8 Neile, Richard (1562–​1640), 112, 113–​14, 117, 150, 152, 153–​54, 161, 165–​ 66, 182, 212–​13, 351n.1 Novell, John, 185, 186–​89, 190 original sin, 43, 47, 48–​49, 51, 59–​60, 70–​71, 73, 76–​77, 87, 102, 107, 160–​61, 162–​64, 172–​74, 175, 192–​93, 195–​96 Overall, John (1559–​1619), 11, 55, 69–​70, 82, 108–​9, 123–​24, 130–​31, 141–​ 42, 143–​44, 146–​47, 148 Oxford University, 1–​2, 15–​16, 19, 28, 55, 112–​13, 115–​16, 118–​19, 136–​37, 159–​60, 216–​18, 236

Act Lectures at, 24–​25, 26, 28–​58, 59–​ 67, 110, 115, 121, 147, 205, 215–​16, 217–​18, 222–​29, 258, 262–​64, 300–​ 2, 304, 331n.20 colleges of All Souls College, Oxford, 216 Corpus Christi College, 111 Exeter College, 1–​2, 5, 7–​8, 15, 16, 19, 23, 65, 222 Lincoln College, Oxford, 229, 233 Magdalen College, Oxford, 216, 219, 222 sermons and lectures at, 214–​15, 229, 304, 306–​7 Parliament, 111–​12, 113, 114, 115–​16, 136, 149, 205, 215–​16, 217, 232, 302–​3, 307–​8 House of Commons, 111, 112, 113, 116 House of Lords, 116, 306–​8 pastoral motivations of Reformed Conformists, 9–​10, 14–​15, 24–​25, 37–​38, 42, 52, 56, 58, 67, 76, 95, 96–​99, 100–​1, 104–​5, 108, 122–​23, 162, 167–​68, 171, 194, 200, 201–​2, 205–​6, 222, 233, 302 Pelagians and Pelagianism, 28–​29, 30, 37, 45–​46, 47, 48, 59–​60, 88, 96, 99, 118–​19, 120, 121–​22, 133, 134, 135, 137–​38, 139, 140, 146, 147, 154, 163, 300, 303 Perkins, William (1568–​1602), 30, 84, 103, 125, 179, 331–​32n.23, 369n.4 perseverance and doctrine of, 28, 54–​58, 70, 72–​73, 74, 79, 80, 81–​82, 88–​91, 95–​96, 102, 106, 133–​34, 141–​42, 144–​45, 147, 159–​61, 164, 171, 281–​82, 301 predestination, 29, 33–​34, 35, 36, 37, 40–​41, 42–​43, 51, 72–​73, 82–​99, 100–​1, 105–​ 6, 118, 122–​23, 126, 127–​28, 135–​36, 137–​39, 140–​41, 142–​43, 146, 167–​ 69, 174–​76, 259, 262, 301–​2 Presbyterians and Presbyterianism, 131, 237, 256–​57 Presbyters and the presbyterate, 237, 241–​ 42, 243–​45, 246, 247–​52, 254–​55, 256–​58, 261–​62, 263, 266–​67

410 Index Preston, John (1587–​1628), 117, 118 Presumption, 37–​38, 67, 97–​98, 108, 171, 175 Price, William (b.1596/​7), 217 Prideaux, John (1578–​1650), 2, 15, 26–​27, 83, 134–​35, 136–​37, 140–​41, 180–​ 81, 217, 223, 228–​29, 306–​7 and Absolute Reprobation, 32 and Davenant, 83, 84, 107–​8, 110, 301–​2 and episcopacy, 262–​64, 265, 267 and his Act Lectures, 24–​25, 26, 28–​58, 59–​67, 110, 115, 121, 147, 205, 215–​16, 217–​18, 222–​29, 258, 262–​ 64, 300–​2, 304, 331n.20 and his Certain Sermons, 293–​98, 299 and his preaching and sermons, 2, 23, 27, 65 and Middle Knowledge, 32–​38 and Montagu, 112–​13, 114–​16, 118–​19, 125, 130, 302–​3 and salvation and justification, 51–​54 and sympathy with Roman Catholic writers, 31–​32, 47, 83 and the British Delegation at Dort, 70, 73, 74, 301 and the duration of grace, 54–​58 and the efficacy of grace, 45–​54 and the extent of grace, 42–​45 and the role of the Church, 59–​66 Prosper, of Aquitaine (390–​455), 31, 46, 90, 99, 118–​19, 141–​42, 160, 174, 300–​1 Providence, 42–​43, 45–​46, 80–​81, 83–​84, 92, 93, 94, 156–​59 Prynne, William (1600–​1669), 229–​30, 288–​89, 375n.153, 375n.155, 375n.159, 376n.172, 376n.176, 376n.179 Puritanism and Puritans, 8–​15, 21–​23, 24, 25, 103, 111, 120–​21, 129, 147–​48, 149, 207, 217, 235, 259, 270, 284, 299, 305, 306 and fasting, 284, 288–​89, 293, 305 and Middle Knowledge, 38, 40–​41 and separatism, 103 and the liturgical year/​the Book of Common Prayer, 7, 268, 272, 273, 275–​76, 293, 296, 297, 307–​8

and the Sabbath, 288 as a label, 8–​15, 24, 121–​22, 137, 149, 269–​70, 303, 306 condemnation of, 6, 121–​22, 124, 137, 297, 299, 308 definition of, 8–​15, 24, 148, 269–​70 doctrinal Puritanism, 119–​20, 121, 138, 302–​3 nonconformity of, 269, 299 on the saints, 6, 23 relations with the established church, 137, 259, 307 style of piety of, 21–​22, 129 Pym, John (1584–​1643), 111, 112 Quick, John (1636–​1706), 222, 228–​29 Quintrell, Brian, 270–​71 Rainolds, John (1549–​1607), 209–​ 10, 272–​73 Reformed Conformists against Richard Montagu, 25, 143, 147, 148, 205, 303 and episcopacy, 26–​27, 259, 261–​62, 266–​67, 304–​5, 308 and justification by faith, 205 and the Laudians, 13–​14, 23–​24, 26, 213, 235–​36, 304 and pastoral concerns, 15 and Puritans, 13–​14, 23–​24, 308 and the House of Lords Theological Subcommittee, 306–​7 and the liturgical year/​Book of Common Prayer, 27, 176, 289, 292–​93, 298, 305, 307–​8 and the sacraments, 205–​6, 207, 306–​7 and their place within the Church of England, 21, 110 as a label and definition of, 13, 20, 21, 22–​24, 176, 259, 266–​67, 306, 308–​9 and their understanding of Grace, 24–​ 26, 137, 205–​6, 304–​5, 306–​7 Remonstrants, 28, 29–​30, 32, 44, 46–​47, 48–​49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56–​57, 59–​ 60, 68, 69, 70, 88–​89, 103, 131–​32, 133–​35, 143–​44, 146, 152, 153–​54, 157, 158–​59, 163, 301–​2

Index  411 reprobation, doctrine of, 29, 31, 32–​38, 43–​44, 73–​74, 78–​79, 82, 84–​86, 89–​96, 98, 107, 108, 125–​27, 132, 139–​40, 144, 145, 161–​64, 174–​ 75, 306–​7 Rich, Robert (1587–​1658), 117 Ripa, Raphael (d.1611), 39, 300–​1 Roman Catholics and Roman Catholicism, 30, 46, 55–​56, 60–​61, 65, 122, 147, 167, 171, 179, 197–​98, 207, 208–​9, 263–​64, 274 Reformed Conformist rejection of, 26, 28–​29, 53–​54, 56–​57, 63, 83, 133, 169, 170, 186–​87, 190–​91, 199–​200, 205, 217–​19, 220, 221, 224, 240–​41, 246, 289–​91, 292–​93, 303, 305 Reformed Conformist use of, 29–​30, 31–​32, 47, 83, 84, 107–​8, 175, 196, 199, 226, 234, 300–​1, 302 Royal Proclamation of 1626, The, 26, 149–​ 52, 159, 168–​69, 175–​76, 303–​4 Ryrie, Alec, 12–​13, 14, 15, 128–​29, 269–​70, 346n.94 Sabbath, The, 21–​22, 276–​77, 278, 288, 297, 298–​99 sacraments, 6, 10, 11–​12, 22, 207, 217–​ 19, 227, 242, 243, 251–​52, 255, 259, 260, 269–​70, 273. See also communion and their place in Reformed Conformist piety, 58, 128, 164, 204–​6, 260, 273, 278–​79, 285, 309 saints’ days. See Eucharist: fast and feast days sanctification, doctrine of, 5, 81, 97–​98, 133–​34, 166–​67, 177, 178–​80, 181–​ 82, 189, 193–​94, 205, 261, 271 Sandcroft, William (1617–​1693), 161 Second Council of Orange, 54, 134 Second Helvetic Confession, The, 5, 7, 286, 332n.30 Semi-​Pelagians, 28–​29, 46, 96, 99, 118–​19, 121–​22, 135, 147, 300, 303 Separatists, 12, 103, 268–​69, 270, 276 Shelford, Robert (c.1563–​1638/​9), 185–​88, 190, 198

Shuger, Debora, 10 Smith, William (1582–​1658), 223, 228 Socinianism, 47, 53, 54, 115 special faith, 127, 183, 189–​90, 201–​2, 204 Sprint, John (d.1623), 386n.20, 391n.166 Stephens, Isaac, 8–​9, 12–​13, 14 Suarez, Francisco (1548–​1617), 50, 84, 106, 202 sublapsarianism, 34–​35, 70–​71, 85, 107, 126 supralapsarianism, 34–​35, 70–​71, 84–​ 85, 175 surplices, 1, 21, 269–​70, 272–​73, 275–​ 76, 307–​8 Thirty-​nine Articles, The, 25, 35, 55, 59, 70–​71, 76, 82, 99, 101, 106–​7, 108–​ 9, 112–​13, 115–​16, 118, 138, 141, 143–​44, 148, 160, 163, 180, 181, 183, 185, 188–​89, 197, 213–​14, 224, 231, 233, 235–​36 Thomson, Richard (d.1613), 55, 104 Thorne, Giles (c.1595–​1671), 217, 222, 228–​29 Titley, Peter (d.1633), 213–​14, 231–​32 Tourney, John, 183, 190 transmarine reformed churches, The, 244, 245, 250–​51, 256, 257, 263–​64 Twisse, William (1578–​1646), 38, 40–​42 Tyacke, Nicholas, 9, 11–​12, 28, 32, 115, 151, 207, 212, 213, 216, 223–​24, 229, 259, 374–​75n.152 Ussher, James (1581–​1656), 20, 29, 113, 132, 150–​51, 159, 165–​66, 183, 306–​7, 333n.61 Vasquez, Gabriel (1549/​1551-​1604), 86, 87 Vere, Horace (1565–​1635), 269 visible Church, The, 61–​63, 64–​65, 67, 107, 260 Vorstius, Conrad (1569–​1622), 28–​29 Ward, Samuel (1572–​1643), 17, 19–​20, 26, 68, 130–​35, 136, 151, 165–​66, 303, 306–​7, 308–​9 and Commencement Determinations, 26, 151–​64, 182–​89, 197, 199, 200, 201–​2, 205, 243–​46, 303–​5

412 Index Ward, Samuel (1572–​1643) (cont.) and Davenant, 26, 130–​32, 134–​35, 150, 160, 161, 164–​69, 170–​75, 176, 194, 205–​6, 303–​4 and episcopacy, 243–​46, 253, 255, 266–​67 and his Joint Attestation, 25, 130–​35, 147–​48, 237–​38, 243, 245–​46 and his lectures, 189–​91 and his Tractatus, 189–​91, 196–​206 Weber, Max, 259, 309 Whitaker, William (1548–​1595), 84, 125, 175, 179, 331–​32n.23 White, Francis (1564–​1638), 60–​61, 114, 115–​16, 117, 180, 189, 198 Whitgift, John (1530–​1604), 10–​11, 12, 135, 137 Wilkinson, John (1588–​1650), 223, 228–​29

Williams, John (1582–​1650), 18–​20, 112, 217, 229, 235–​36, 306–​8 and his Grantham Judgement, 207–​16, 217, 223, 229, 230–​31, 235–​36, 304 and his The Holy Table, Name and Thing, 19–​20, 229–​35, 236, 304, 370–​71n.40 Wood, Anthony a (1632–​1695), 15, 16 Wren, Matthew (1585–​1667), 26–​27, 159, 161 York House Conference, The, 117–​18, 147, 180, 302–​3, 359n.18, 359n.24, 359n.25 Zanchi, Girolamo (1516–​1590), 30, 99–​ 100, 146–​47, 244, 273