The Soteriology of James Ussher: The Act and Object of Saving Faith (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) [1 ed.] 9780199338573, 0199338574

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The Soteriology of James Ussher

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor David C. Steinmetz, Duke University

Editorial Board Irena Backus, Université de Genève 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 Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia

THE JUDAIZING CALVIN Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms G. Sujin Pak

SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–1714 Variety, Persistence, and Transformation Dewey D. Wallace, Jr

THE DEATH OF SCRIPTURE AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL STUDIES Michael C. Legaspi

THE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM OF ALTON Timothy Bellamah, OP

THE FILIOQUE History of a Doctrinal Controversy A. Edward Siecienski

MIRACLES AND THE PROTESTANT IMAGINATION The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany Philip M. Soergel

ARE YOU ALONE WISE? Debates about Certainty in the Early Modern Church Susan E. Schreiner EMPIRE OF SOULS Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth Stefania Tutino MARTIN BUCER’S DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism Brian Lugioyo CHRISTIAN GRACE AND PAGAN VIRTUE The Theological Foundation of Ambrose’s Ethics J. Warren Smith KARLSTADT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSY A Study in the Circulation of Ideas Amy Nelson Burnett READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 Arnoud S. Q. Visser

THE REFORMATION OF SUFFERING Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany Ronald K. Rittgers CHRIST MEETS ME EVERYWHERE Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis Michael Cameron MYSTERY UNVEILED The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England Paul C. H. Lim GOING DUTCH IN THE MODERN AGE Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands John Halsey Wood Jr CALVIN’S COMPANY OF PASTORS Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609 Scott M. Manetsch THE SOTERIOLOGY OF JAMES USSHER The Act and Object of Saving Faith Richard Snoddy

The Soteriology of James Ussher The Act and Object of Saving Faith

z RICHARD SNODDY

1

1 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 New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam 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

© Oxford University Press 2014 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 Snoddy, Richard. The Soteriology of James Ussher : the act and object of saving faith / Richard Snoddy. p. cm. — (Oxford studies in historical theology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–933857–3 (cloth:alk. paper) 1. Salvation—Christianity—History of doctrines—17th century. 2. Ussher, James, 1581–1656. 3. Reformed Church—Doctrines—History—17th century. I. Title. BT751.3.S66 2013 234.092—dc23 2013014199 9780199338573

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Samuel James

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Conventions

xiii

Introduction

1

1. Vae Mihi Si Non Evangelizavero—The Preaching Prelate

12

2. Lubricus Locus—The Nature and Extent of the Atonement

40

3. ‘This Sweet Doctrine’—Justification by Faith

93

4. ‘An Imperfect Kinde of Perfection’—The Sanctified Life and Its Reward

138

5. ‘The Comfortable Assurance of Our Salvation’—A Search for Certainty

177

Conclusion

233

Bibliography

247

Index

279

Acknowledgments

in pursuing my research, I have been helped along the way by many people. I would like to thank the staff of the following libraries and archives: Balliol College Library, Oxford; The British Library, London; Cambridge University Library; Chetham’s Library, Manchester; Essex Record Office; Queen’s College Library, Oxford; National Library of Ireland, Dublin; Northamptonshire Record Office; Trinity College Library, Dublin. Over the years I have greatly valued the help of the librarians and staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and a particular word of thanks is due to Colin Harris and the Special Collections team. This book began life as my doctoral thesis. I shall always consider it a privilege to have had Professor Anthony Lane as my supervisor. He has been patient, encouraging, and most importantly, has made me think harder. Professor Crawford Gribben has been a great encouragement from the time when I was investigating the feasibility of research on Ussher. Some of his advice was memorable. In order to enter into the mind of early modern man, he recommended that I should turn off the central heating and take to wearing a ruff. The ways of the literary scholar are mysterious indeed! Professor Alan Ford was also encouraging at an early stage and kindly sent me two chapters of his book on Ussher long before its publication. I am grateful for the care he took in reading my work as my external examiner and for feedback on revisions made since. I am indebted to Dr John Platt for agreeing to let me see an unpublished paper on the Synod of Dort, and to Professor Anthony Milton for managing to locate what may have been the only surviving copy. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, Dr Arnold Hunt, and Dr Jonathan D. Moore were generous in sharing material in advance of publication, as was Dr Jean Williams in supplying me with a copy of her thesis. Jonathan Yonan and Dan Schwartz read portions of the thesis in first draft but above all else have been good friends and an encouragement on

x

Acknowledgments

this long road. I am thankful for Peter and Susanna Sanlon’s friendship and hospitality on visits to Cambridge. Martin Foord, Alan Linfield, Steve Walton, and Hywel Clifford also provided valuable practical help. Grahame Podmore read the entire manuscript in something approaching its final form and his pains are much appreciated. The few words that I can write here are inadequate to express my thanks to my wife Sarah. It is my hope and prayer that I can show her my gratitude in the days and years to come.

Abbreviations

ACW

Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, 63 vols (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1946–)

Annotations

The Second Volume of Annotations Upon All the Books of the Old and Nevv Testament, ed. by John Downame, 3rd edn (1657)

AV

Authorised Version, 1611

Balliol

Balliol College, Oxford

BL

British Library, London

Bodl.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 194 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953–)

CO

John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. by G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols (Brunswick and Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke, 1863–1900)

CUL

Cambridge University Library

Institutes

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, ed. by John T. McNeill, 2 vols (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960)

JEH

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

NTC

Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, ed. by David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, 12 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1959–1972)

ODCC

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. by F. L. Cross, 3rd edn, rev. by E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Howard Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

xii

Abbreviations

PG

Patrologia Graeca, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 161 vols (Paris, 1857–1866)

PL

Patrologia Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1844–1864)

PRRD

Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003)

TCD

Trinity College, Dublin

WA

D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 73 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2009)

WCF

Westminster Confession of Faith

WJU

The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D.D., Lord Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland, ed. by Charles R. Elrington and J. H. Todd, 17 vols (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1829–1864)

WRH

The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. by W. Speed Hill, 7 vols (vols 1–5, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977–1990; vol. 6, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993; vol. 7, Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998)

WRS

The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. by Alexander B. Grosart, 7 vols (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862–1864)

WWP

The VVorkes of That Famous and VVorthy Minister of Christ in the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1616–1618)

Conventions

where a single volume is divided into parts with individual pagination, the part is denoted by a Roman numeral preceding the page number. Arabic numerals before the page number denote volume number in a multivolume work. In quotations from manuscripts, i/j, u/v, and thorns have been modified in line with modern orthography, and ampersands have been expanded to ‘and’. Conventional abbreviations have been silently expanded. The spelling in quotations from early printed material has not been altered. Italicisation is as it appears in the original unless otherwise indicated. Where the pagination of an early modern printed work is disordered the second occurrence of a page number is denoted by * after the page number. The place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated. Dates are given old style but the year taken to have begun on 1 January.

The Soteriology of James Ussher

Introduction

the esteem in which James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, was held in the seventeenth century is beyond question. The jurist and Hebraist John Selden described Ussher as ‘learned to a miracle’.1 Alexander Morus, or Moir, then professor in Geneva, dubbed him ‘the Athanasius of our age’.2 Even his opponents recognised his significance. The Jesuit Denis Pétau paid Ussher the backhanded compliment of repeatedly referring to his Jansenist opponents as Armacani.3 Given this, it is little wonder that there was competition for his loyalty during his life, and for his legacy after his death. The writings of Nicholas Bernard, Ussher’s first biographer and one of his chaplains, anticipate the treatment that Ussher’s memory would receive at the hands of later generations. Bernard’s account of Ussher’s life, derived from the funeral sermon that he preached during the Cromwellian Commonwealth, paints a portrait of a godly preacher. After the Restoration, however, Bernard wrote of an Ussher who was never happier than when wearing the prescribed clerical vestments and who made it a point of principle that the liturgy was ‘fully observed in each Rite and Ceremony according to the Rubrick or Rule of the Book of

1

John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (1628), sig. §: usq[ue] ad miraculum doctus.

2

Alexander Morus, Oratio Genevæ habita . . . in qua . . . H. Grotius refellitur (Geneva, 1648), sig. A2v: ego certe qui te sæculi nostri Athanasium vocare soleo [reading sæculi for seculi]. 3

Dionysius Petavius, De Lege et Gratia: Libri Duo (Paris, 1648), Epistola, 31, 51, 82, 83, 130, 135, and passim. For further accolades from both friend and foe, see Nicholas Bernard, The Life & Death of the Most Reverend and Learned Father of Our Church Dr. James Usher, Late ArchBishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland (1656), 6–15.

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Common-prayer’.4 Bernard’s fortunes would, of course, rise and fall with the public perception of the late primate. Ussher’s most recent biographer, Alan Ford, has pondered the challenges facing those who would write of Ussher’s life. The immediate problem is painfully transparent: ‘their subject is more learned than they are’. The sheer range of this polymath’s interests, the breadth and depth of his reading, the extent of his network in the Respublica litterarum, and his fluency in a number of languages ancient and modern mean that is impossible for any one writer to apprehend and explain him. Furthermore, his ‘Janus-like ability to face both ways’ easily leads to selective appropriation that refashions the subject to conform to the author’s prejudices and then press-gangs him into service as an authority endorsing some agenda. As a result, a ‘variety of Usshers’ haunt the pages of the literature.5 Perhaps the most frightening apparition lurks within the covers of Peter Heylyn’s polemical writings. Ussher had played a leading role in the ‘Calvinian Project’ to seize control of the Church of Ireland. In drawing up the Irish Articles for the Convocation of 1615, he had been able to intrude all the ‘Calvinian Rigours’ of the Lambeth Articles, strict Sabbatarianism, and ‘almost all the other Heterodoxies of the Sect of Calvin’ into the public confession of the Irish Church. English Puritans had failed to introduce these measures in their own church due to implacable opposition from Queen Elizabeth and King James, so they had turned to Ireland ‘which lying further off might be less looked after’. ‘The out-works being thus easily gained’ in the Irish Convocation, ‘they made from thence their Batteries on the Fort it self ’. During the controversies over English Arminianism in the 1620s, ‘no argument was more hotly prest by those of the Puritan faction, then the Authority of these

4

Bernard, Life; idem, Clavi Trabales; or, Nailes Fastned by Some Great Masters of Assemblyes Confirming the Kings Supremacy. The Subjects Duty. Church Government by Bishops (1661), 58; Alan Ford, ‘“Making Dead Men Speak”: Manipulating the Memory of James Ussher’, in Constructing the Past: Writing Irish History, 1600–1800, ed. by Mark Williams and Stephen Paul Forrest (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 49–69.

5

Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5, 7. See also, John McCafferty, ‘Irish Bishops, their Biographers and the Experience of Revolution, 1656–1686’, in The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland, ed. by Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 253–269.

Introduction

3

Articles, and the infallible judgement of King James, to confirm the same’.6 For these deviations in the confession of the Irish Church and the ‘little esteem’ he had for the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, Ussher was ‘caressed’ and fêted by English Puritans.7 Ussher, according to Heylyn, was a collaborator in their insidious plot to subvert the doctrine and practice of the Church of England. On the contested question of the extent of the atonement, Heylyn noted that Ussher had distanced himself from the doctrine of limited atonement, the view that Christ’s death was intended only for the elect. Ussher had, however, been equally dismissive of the Arminian doctrine of universal redemption as extending the benefits of Christ’s atoning death too far. On Heylyn’s reckoning, it was precisely this doctrine of universal redemption that was encoded in the Church of England’s confessional standards. This was reason enough for Heylyn to disregard the careful nuances of Ussher’s mediating position, assimilating him to a polemically constructed Calvinist and Puritan other. Heylyn’s Ussher swam with ‘the general current of the Calvinian Divines’.8 A rival high-church narrative must be set against Heylyn’s portrait. This narrative emerged soon after Ussher’s death, when Thomas Pierce claimed that late in life Ussher had changed his mind on the doctrines of grace. The primate ‘professed his utter dislike to the whole Doctrine of Geneva in those affairs’ and ‘utterly rejected all those opinions of Mr. Calvin’.9 Pierce reproduced written testimonies from Brian Walton, Peter Gunning, and Herbert Thorndike in support of his claim, and Henry  Hammond was evidently making the same case in private

6

Peter Heylyn, Respondet Petrus (1658), 86–91, 115–117; idem, Aerius Redivivus, or, the History of the Presbyterians (Oxford, 1670), 392–395. Alan Ford argues that it is more likely that the Articles were confirmed by the Lord Deputy Chichester, in the name of the king, the Irish Church exploiting its distance from the centre with ‘Machiavellian subtlety’. Ford, James Ussher, 100f.

7

Heylyn, Respondet Petrus, 116f.

8

Ibid., 102–104. In a detailed study of Heylyn’s polemic, Anthony Milton describes ‘his determination to marginalize an enormous range of beliefs as belonging to a single puritan mind set’. Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 231. 9

Thomas Pierce, The Divine Philanthropie Defended against the Declamatory Attempts of Certain Late-Printed Papers Intitl’d a Correptory Correction. In Vindication of Some Notes Concerning Gods Decrees, Especially of Reprobation (1657), I.15, 77–78.

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the soteriology of james ussher

correspondence.10 Nicholas Bernard contested this claim, convinced that these divines had misunderstood the fine distinctions of Ussher’s moderate Reformed position.11 The debate between Pierce and Bernard will be discussed in chapter 2. For now, it suffices to note Pierce’s work as the fons et origo of a long-standing tradition within Ussher biography. A succession of English biographers echoed this point, often citing Pierce as their source. Thomas Smith related how the vigorous champion of Calvinist doctrine had changed his mind before his death.12 John Aikin followed Smith, speculating that whilst Ussher’s theological system had been ‘strictly Calvinistical’, ‘such a tenet as that of absolute reprobation would be gladly resigned by one of the primate’s temper’.13 Richard Hone’s account differed in that he detected evidence of significant change in Ussher’s position on election and reprobation as early as 1617, but agreed that the testimonies reproduced by Pierce showed that by the end of his life Ussher ‘had altogether forsaken’ the tenets known by Calvin’s name.14 Rivalling Heylyn in its shrill tone is E. W. Watson’s short biographical study. Calvinism, alleged Watson, did great ‘mischief’ to the teenage undergraduates of Trinity College, Dublin, ‘perverting their education into an engine for making partisans’, training them for combat in the cause of this intolerant ‘fighting creed’. Ussher’s role in drafting the Irish Articles was an example of ‘grotesque unwisdom’, and the ‘violence of speech’ inculcated by his Calvinist schooling ensured that ‘so far as he had an effect upon the history of his time, it was for evil’. Despite this, later in life, Ussher ‘emancipated himself from the narrow Calvinism of his education and approached the Anglican type of thought’. Watson concludes his

10 Thomas Pierce, αυτοντιμωρουμενο , or, the Self-Revenger Exemplified in Mr. William Barlee (1658), 154–157; Henry Hammond, Nineteen Letters, ed. by Francis Peck (London: T. Cooper, 1739), 17–19. 11

See especially The Judgement of the late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, and Primate of Ireland. Of Babylon (Rev. 18. 4.) being the present See of Rome . . . Etc., ed. by Nicholas Bernard (1659), 359–380.

12

Thomas Smith, Vitæ Quorundam Eruditissimorum et Illustrium Virorum (London: David Mortier, 1707), I.113f.

13

John Aikin, The Lives of John Selden, Esq., and Archbishop Usher (London: Mathews and Leigh, 1812), 237, 275, 304f. 14

Richard Brindley Hone, The Lives of James Usher . . . Henry Hammond . . . John Evelyn . . . and Thomas Wilson, 6th edn (London: John W. Parker, 1846), 50–53. The first edition of 1833 gave only the most general reference to Hammond’s letter. Later editions, in response to criticism, reproduced Hammond’s letter and also cited Pierce.

Introduction

5

sketch with these words: ‘In the fullness of knowledge, with judgement trained and ripened character, he found that the type of Christianity with which we are familiar, the wide charity and immemorial order of the English Church, was that in which his reason and his affections could rest’.15 A number of Irish churchmen offered similar, if not quite so explicitly partisan, accounts of an Ussher who outgrew the Calvinism and presbyterian inclinations of his youth and came to hold opinions akin to their own high-church Anglicanism. In 1864 Charles Elrington, Professor of Divinity at Trinity College, Dublin, bemoaned the ‘pernicious influence’ of Walter Travers and Henry Alvey on impressionable young men in the early years of the college. Without doubt, the young Ussher ‘had held rigidly the opinions of Calvin’. In later years, however, ‘the effects of this prava disciplina were almost obliterated’. Elrington reproduced Hammond’s letter and the testimonies of Walton, Gunning, and Thorndike to support his argument for a radical change in the mature Ussher’s thought.16 Likewise, John Murray described how the draftsman of the ‘entirely Calvinistical’ Irish Articles ‘modified his views’ late in life.17 James Carr related Ussher’s metamorphosis from ‘an extreme Calvinist’ into ‘a man of more reasonable views’ on the extent of the atonement, election, and reprobation.18 In a memorial discourse preached at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1895, the Irish-born Bishop of Edinburgh, John Dowden, explained that whilst the young Ussher imbibed the ‘Calvinistic influences’ of his teachers, in later life ‘he was able to free himself from beliefs to which he had been so deeply committed’. For Dowden, the testimony of Hammond, Walton, Gunning, and Thorndike ‘leaves no possible doubt’ about the primate’s opinions at the time of his death.19 15 E. W. Watson, ‘James Usher’, in Typical English Churchmen from Parker to Maurice: A Series of Lectures, ed. by William Edward Collins (London: S.P.C.K., 1902), 57–77 (59, 62, 67, 69, 77). 16

Charles R. Elrington, ‘The Life of James Ussher, D.D., Archbishop of Armagh’, in WJU, 1.1–324 (15–17, 289–295).

17

John Walton Murray, Sketches of the Lives and Times of Eminent Irish Churchmen, from the Reformation Downwards (Dublin: George Herbert, 1874), 43, 50. 18

J. A. Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher: Archbishop of Armagh (London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1895), 203f.

19

John Dowden, ‘Archbishop Ussher’, in Peplographia Dublinensis: Memorial Discourses Preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, 1895–1902, ed. by J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1902), 1–36.

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Not all of Ussher’s biographers have taken this line. Some limn the outlines of a decidedly Reformed thinker, making no attempt to chronicle evolution beyond or declension from the ‘intirely Calvinistical’ Irish Articles.20 This may, of course, result from dependence on the earliest biographies by Nicholas Bernard and Richard Parr and lack of awareness of the case advanced by Pierce, but it should also be noted that in each case Ussher’s Reformed theology is seen as no bad thing. Addressing an evangelical audience in nineteenth-century Dublin, Maurice Fitzgerald Day, later Bishop of Cashel and Waterford, categorically rejected the dominant narrative that took its lead from Pierce and insisted that there was no record of substantial theological change. Ussher had required subscription to the Irish Articles by all the clergy whom he ordained to the end of his life. Pierce’s informants must have misunderstood the archbishop. Expressions that they recalled from Ussher’s sermons and conversations were not inconsistent with Reformed thought but ‘only shew that while he held the doctrine of God’s predestination very strongly, he did not feel himself hindered from setting forth, as strongly, the free invitations of mercy in Christ to every human being, and throwing upon man himself the responsibility for their rejection’.21 In the mid-twentieth century, the Irish churchman N. D. Emerson saw ‘no reason to deny’ that Ussher’s opinions were influenced by theological currents evident on the continent but cautioned that ‘the extent of the move cannot easily be estimated’. Ussher’s revision and publication of his two catechisms in 1654 suggest that the predestinarian doctrine taught therein was his settled opinion in his last days. Emerson believed that Ussher remained committed to an

20

Erasmus Middleton, ‘James Usher, D.D.’, in Biographia Evangelica, 4 vols (London: J. W. Pasham, R. Denham, and W. Justins, 1779–1786), 3.309–350 (321); cf. [William Bates], Vitæ Selectorum Aliquot Virorum Qui Doctrinâ, Dignitate, Aut Pietate Inclaruere (London: George Wells, 1681), 734–749 (esp. 739f ). An expanded version of this account can be found in William Dillingham, Vita Laurentii Chadertoni S.T.P. & Collegii Emmanuelis apud Cantabrigienses Magistri Primi. Una cum Vita Jacobi Usserii Archiepiscopi Armachani (Cambridge: Thomas Dawson, 1700), 51–102 (see esp. 64). The account in Dillingham follows its predecessor closely until page 81 (cf. Bates, 747), after which there is considerable expansion. Both are highly derivative of Bernard’s Life. See also [Joseph D’Arcy Sirr], The Life of Dr. James Usher, Late Lord Archbishop of Armagh, and Primate of All Ireland (Dublin: John Jones, 1815), esp. xlii; James Macaulay, Archbishop Ussher, New Biographical Series, 78 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1890). For a recent portrait of Ussher as a paragon of evangelical Calvinism, see Crawford Gribben, The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church (Darlington: Evangelical Press, 2003).

21

Maurice F. Day, Archbishop Ussher . . . His Life and Character: A Lecture (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., 1861), 36.

Introduction

7

Augustinian perspective but in later life was satisfied with its expression in the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England, and ‘no longer cared to define exactly the various providences of God’.22 Those writing most recently are divided on this question. Buick Knox did not trouble himself with the matter, and in any case he regarded the young Ussher’s views as concordant with a moderate and ‘Anglican’ position.23 Hugh Trevor-Roper cited the standard authorities as evidence that Ussher, perhaps through the cognitive dissonance of the revolutionary years, ‘came to doubt absolute predestination’.24 Jack Cunningham, like Emerson, argues from the publication of Ussher’s catechisms in 1654 that predestinarian belief ‘spanned his lifetime’. Cunningham finds in these texts ‘an extreme form of predestination’, nothing less than ‘supralapsarian determinism’.25 Alan Ford also doubts that Ussher’s theology changed substantially late in life, though on Ford’s reading that theology was reflective of a more moderate Reformed position. Ford found no trace of theological change in the notes of sermons that Ussher preached in his final years at Lincoln’s Inn. Moreover, Ford could point to the way that Pierce had misrepresented Robert Sanderson, suggesting that he was ‘not above fixing the evidence’, pursuing the traditional Roman Catholic ploy of announcing the death-bed conversion of a prominent Protestant on the basis of unverifiable testimony. In Pierce’s account, Ford fears, the reader is witness to ‘a high-church kidnapping’.26 It is not inconceivable that a man like Ussher could have changed his mind. This was, after all, a time of profound theological change in the Reformed churches of the British Isles. The limits of orthodoxy in the post-Reformation Church of England had been probed, tested, and debated before, but from the 1620s challenges arose which, in the eyes of 22

N. D. Emerson, An Account of Archbishop James Usher, 1581–1656 (Dublin: A.P.C.K., n.d.), 19–21, 48–50.

23

R. Buick Knox, James Ussher: Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967), 17–21.

24 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), 120–165 (152). On a similar note, see Graham Parry, ‘James Ussher’, in The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 130–156 (140, n. 10). 25

Jack Cunningham, James Ussher and John Bramhall: The Theology and Politics of Two Irish Ecclesiastics of the Seventeenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 53f. 26 Ford, James Ussher, 282f; idem, ‘“Making Dead Men Speak”: Manipulating the Memory of James Ussher’, 64f.

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many, questioned its very identity as a Protestant and Reformed church. The ascendancy of William Laud gave the high-church party the political leverage and ecclesiastical authority to impose changes on the daily round of worship, changes which emphasised the sacraments as channels of God’s grace. Divine grace was freely available to all in the sacraments of the church, not something restricted to an elect few. Some high churchmen clearly gravitated towards a pre-Reformation understanding of grace as substantial, and of justification as a process, a making righteous by the infusion of grace rather than a forensic declaration grounded on the imputed righteousness of Christ.27 This was a seismic shift in doctrine and praxis. Laudian sacramental theology went hand in hand with a marginalisation of Reformed theology’s seemingly arbitrary grace of predestination. The practical changes therefore went beyond the ceremonial, undermining the traditional Reformed piety in which predestination had been a doctrine of comfort. The ‘godly consyderation’ of predestination and election in Christ ‘is full of sweete, pleasaunt, and vnspeakeable comfort to godly persons, and such as feele in themselues the working of the spirite of Christe . . . it doth greatly establyshe and confirme their fayth of eternal saluation to be enjoyed through Christe, as because it doth feruently kindle their loue towardes God’. It could be a ‘daungerous’ doctrine to the ‘curious and carnal’, but most edifying for the faithful. Those who could perceive the grace of God at work in their lives had the confidence that he would complete the work that he had begun, because he had chosen them for glory before the creation of the world and their stories were bound up in the unbroken chain of his eternal purposes. This should not engender pride or complacency, but kindle love and strengthen faith.28 The Laudian agenda threatened this Reformed spirituality. Those who cherished it feared that the clock was being turned back, the Reformation unravelled. Indeed, Laud himself is reported to have spoken of the Reformation as ‘deformation’, and one historian of the period has described the

27

For a helpful introduction, see Dewey D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 79–111.

28

Article 17 of the Church of England (‘Of Predestination and Election’), The Creeds of Christendom: With a History and Critical Notes, ed. by Philip Schaff, 6th edn, 3 vols (New York: Harper, 1931; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998), 3.497–499. This article would come to be read in a variety of ways, necessitating the more precise formulations found in the Lambeth Articles (1595) and the Irish Articles (1615).

Introduction

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Laudian program as England’s equivalent to the Counter-Reformation.29 The 1620s and 1630s were a time of theological turmoil, and Ussher spent those years stubbornly resisting these changes. When Laud fell, there was no return to the status quo ante, but rather a backlash against the episcopal establishment and the rapid surfacing of previously repressed radical impulses. The 1640s and 1650s were therefore a period of incredible theological diversity. Scholars of the period have recently begun to recognise the complexity of its theological milieu. Simple labels such as ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Arminian’ no longer suffice. Whilst convenient, they often misrepresent those so denominated and distort our reading of events. Patrick Collinson complained that the term ‘Calvinist’ was ‘too blunt an instrument for any discriminating purpose’; it exaggerated the influence of John Calvin and Geneva, minimising that of Heinrich Bullinger, Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and a host of other continental Reformed theologians on the churches of the British Isles.30 In some respects, the term ‘Arminian’ is even more problematic in linking Jacobus Arminius and his Remonstrant followers with the sacramental theology of Laud. Within the diversity of British Reformed theology, different positions on questions such as predestination are evident. The fine distinctions between them are increasingly appreciated as well as the way in which they relate to stances taken in similar debates over the doctrine of grace within Roman Catholicism.31 As well as discerning greater theological diversity in terms of opinions held, scholars are also increasingly aware of the various ways in which these opinions were expressed. The pulpit was a long way from the lecture hall, and the doctrine of predestination had to be handled with great pastoral sensitivity, carefully applied so that the hearer would not be led into licentiousness or despair. God’s decree and its ends would not be discussed

29 Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1962), 141; Roland G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1910), 2.268. 30 Patrick Collinson, ‘England and International Calvinism, 1558–1640’, in International Calvinism, 1541–1715, ed. by Menna Prestwich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 197–223 (214). 31 Seán 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. by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 229–249.

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without due regard to the means of execution and human responsibility for neglecting the use of these means.32 Clergy also had to reconcile conflicting instincts within: the predestinarian tendency to view the world starkly divided between elect and reprobate, and the demands of parish ministry in an inclusive, established, national church.33 Such concerns colour the presentation of Reformed doctrine, and students of the period must pay heed to matters of genre and audience. It is against this background of more nuanced scholarship of seventeenth-century theology and religious culture that this study is located. The objective is neither to construct another Ussher nor, especially, to deconstruct existing ones, though some of them will certainly appear less credible in the light of this research. This is a work of historical theology, seeking to understand Ussher’s thought in the context of the seventeenth century rather than attempting to contribute to theological debates of our own day. It aims to explore one facet of his thought, specifically to trace some of the contours of his soteriology. Successive chapters will examine Ussher’s teaching on atonement, justification, sanctification, and assurance. Ussher’s thought on each of these doctrinal loci is worthy of further investigation. Space limitations dictate that the treatment each locus will receive here is relatively brief, but a discussion of the relationships between these loci will be more valuable at this stage than a more comprehensive examination of any individual one of them. This study explores Ussher’s teaching on these doctrines and considers their interconnections in his thought, particularly the way in which a general atonement functions as the ground of justification and the extent to which it functions as the ground of assurance. The study will also document Ussher’s change of mind on a number of important issues, a pattern of change quite unlike that suggested by the older scholarship, and demonstrate the impossibility of pigeon-holing him within certain scholarly paradigms. This study will draw out of Ussher’s literary remains material from a variety of genres: catechetical, polemical and devotional works, correspondence, and notes. The context in which he was most expansive on the

32

Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 343–389.

33

J. F. 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. by Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143–161.

Introduction

11

particular themes under investigation, however, was the pulpit, and most of the evidence for this study comes from his sermons. Ussher himself saw only two sermons through the press in his lifetime, but nearly three hundred survive in his auditors’ notes, the vast majority of which were never published. In addition, dozens of sermon outlines in Ussher’s hand have also been preserved in manuscript. A discussion of the evidential value of these notes will follow below, along with an introduction to the specific sources. Preaching was vitally important to Ussher as the vehicle through which God ordinarily speaks to men and women, and it superseded even the public reading of Scripture: ‘the word does not so much Good Read, as when tis Applyed By Preachinge: God has an Armory laid up in Scripture, And Preachinge takes out these weapons out of Gods Armory, and Applyes them’.34 Ussher recognised that the preaching of God’s word could discomfort and harden the sinner, and that some would hanker after the old ways. ‘Men come easily to the masse: for they say, missa non mordet [the mass does not bite]: But the Word of God brings fire from Heaven’.35 Ussher invested considerable time and energy into proclaiming this word, delivering both its ‘sensible blow’ and its gracious promises of mercy.36 He felt compelled to preach the gospel, even in his last days as his strength failed him.37 In taking this homiletical material seriously, this study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of James Ussher and to a greater appreciation for the diversity within the Reformed tradition in early modern England and Ireland.

34

CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 200v (Sermon on 2 Tim. 3:16, 1651).

35

Ibid., fol. 187r (Sermon on 2 Cor. 6:1, 1650); cf. fol. 244v (Sermon on Eph. 2:3, 1652).

36

WJU, 13.100 (Sermon on Rom. 6:23, 1640).

37

Bernard, Life, 103.

1

Vae Mihi Si Non Evangelizavero— The Preaching Prelate

james ussher was born in Dublin on 4 January 1581, the fifth of ten children. A promising scholar, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1593, one year after it opened. He obtained his B.A. by 1599, his M.A. by 1601, his B.D. in 1607, and his D.D. in 1613. A fellow of the college from 1600, he was appointed Professor of Theological Controversies in 1607, and Vice Chancellor in 1615. An ecclesiastical career was also underway. He was ordained in 1602, and after three years preaching and catechising from various city pulpits, he became Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. This position carried with it the prebend of Finglas, where Ussher preached in the church every Lord’s day. Visiting England, Ussher impressed King James VI and I, who elevated him to the see of Meath in 1621, remitting the payment of first fruits, a rare signal of high favour. Ussher was nominated Archbishop of Armagh just days before James’s death in 1625. Ussher held this office until his death on 21 March 1656, long after he had lost effective control of the Irish Church.1 1. The most significant biographical accounts are Bernard, Life; Richard Parr, The Life of the Most Reverend Father in God, James Usher, Late Lord Arch-Bishop of Armagh, Primate and Metropolitan of All Ireland (1686); Charles R. Elrington, ‘The Life of James Ussher, D.D., Archbishop of Armagh’, in WJU, 1.1–324; R. Buick Knox, James Ussher: Archbishop of Armagh; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh’. Alan Ford restricts the scope of his narrative to the interplay of history, theology, and politics in Ussher’s life and thought, and thus does not seek to be comprehensive in his coverage. Despite this self-imposed limitation, his account is the most important modern contribution to Ussher scholarship. For his survey of earlier biographies, too many to list here, see James Ussher, 5–7. Two further studies worthy of note at this point in view of their breadth of coverage are Amanda Louise Capern, ‘Slipperye Times and Dangerous Dayes: James Ussher and the Calvinist Reformation of Britain 1560–1660’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of New South Wales, 1991); Jack Cunningham, James Ussher and John Bramhall.

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This chapter will place Ussher in his seventeenth-century context, considering the religious climate both in his native Ireland and in England. It will then introduce the major sources on which the following study depends and offer a few necessary caveats related to specific items.

The Irish Context James Ussher was born into a prominent Anglo-Irish family that reflected in microcosm the religious divisions of late sixteenth-century Ireland. His grandfather, John Ussher, was a leading Protestant merchant, and his uncle, Henry Ussher, was the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh from 1595 until his death in 1613. On the maternal side, another uncle, Richard Stanihurst, was an advocate on the continent for the Irish Catholic cause, and his cousin Henry Fitzsimon was a Jesuit controversialist active in the Irish mission. His mother Margaret was, according to Nicholas Bernard, ‘seduced by some of the Popish Priests to the Roman Religion’ while Ussher was visiting England.2 She was never reclaimed to the Protestant faith, a source of much grief to her son. The Reformation had made only halting progress in Ireland.3 The legislation which moved through the Irish Parliament in 1536–1537 transferred supremacy over the Irish Church from Rome to the English crown and thus enacted a constitutional reformation. Change at the level of belief and practice was another matter. The English administration controlled only a small portion of the island, and even here was unable to take a rigorous approach to enforcement in the face of widespread opposition. An exacerbating factor was the perception that the Reformation was not only a novelty, but also that it was English. It became closely associated with a programme of Anglicisation and a steady influx of settlers, clergy, and government officials from England. These ‘new English’ arrivistes were resented not only by the Gaelic Irish but also by the Anglo-Irish, descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman settlers who saw themselves

2. Bernard, Life, 19f. 3. On the Reformation in Ireland, see Henry A. Jefferies, The Irish Church and the Tudor Reformations (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010); Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641, 2nd impression (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). A good overview of the earlier phase can be found in Colm Lennon, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994), esp. 114–144, 305–327. The events are woven into a three-kingdom narrative in Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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as the island’s traditional rulers. The newcomers benefitted disproportionately from the rather patchy dissolution of the monasteries, and later from the confiscation of land from rebels, further threatening the power and status of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Rome regarded sees to which Henry VIII had nominated bishops as vacant and appointed bishops of its own. In time, an illegal parallel episcopate operated in the shadows of the church by law established. This structure was reinforced and reinvigorated by waves of seminary-trained priests, many of them sons of Anglo-Irish gentry sent abroad for an education. The Counter-Reformation had arrived in Ireland, and this presented stark choices, conformity becoming increasingly unacceptable amongst Catholics, and recusancy more widespread.4 Karl Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann have noted the effect of this hardening religious divide. Irish Protestantism ‘took much of its character from the embattled conditions in which it found itself’. In a sense it was ‘perhaps more a reaction to post-Tridentine Rome than to any perceived deficiencies of the medieval church’.5 This certainly contributed to the forging of a distinct Irish Protestant identity and to the complex mosaic of religious and secular motives underlying an intense hostility to the Catholic ‘other’. Two churches were now locked together in a deadly struggle within the confined space of an island kingdom. This has been described as a process of ‘dual confessionalisation’, in which two processes of confessionalisation confronted one another: one a confessionalisation ‘from above’, the other ‘from below’, each an attempt to implement a particular vision of religion, politics, and society, and neither successful by the standard of the cuius regio, eius religio principle.6 The predominance of conservative survivalism did not guarantee an effortless victory for the CounterReformation. Its missionaries faced an uphill struggle in securing the

4. Ford, The Protestant Reformation, 23–28. 5. Karl S. Bottigheimer and Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The Irish Reformation in European Perspective’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 87 (1998), 268–309 (292). 6. Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland: Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); idem, ‘Confessionalisation in Ireland: Periodisation and Character, 1534–1649’, in The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, ed. by Alan Ford and John McCafferty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 24–53. For critical interaction, see Alan Ford, ‘Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland’, in the same volume, 1–23 (6–11); Helga Robinson-Hammerstein, ‘The Confessionalisation of Ireland? Assessment of a Paradigm’, Irish Historical Studies, 32 (2001), 567–578.

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religious affiliation of the people and in transforming the face of Irish Catholicism into one that was recognisably post-Tridentine. The Catholic pole of this dual process thus contained its own internal tension between élite and popular, the resolution of which occurred only slowly, elongating the process and consequently the time-frame within which it should be studied.7 Only after 1603 and the end of the Nine Years’ War did the crown have some semblance of control over the whole island. Many of Ireland’s Protestant élite favoured a policy of coercion and the introduction of stronger measures against recusancy. The new monarch, James, preferred a policy of persuasion. What was actually put into practice oscillated somewhere between these two poles depending on who had the ear of the king, the constraints placed on him by his foreign policy, and the occasional willingness of Dublin officials to take matters into their own hands. Many Irish Protestants thought it a great sin to tolerate false religion and idolatry in their midst, but a thoroughgoing policy of coercion was impractical. The state was too weak to enforce this consistently, having lost the support of the Anglo-Irish gentry.8 The policy of persuasion had greater merit but was never pursued with determination. There were insufficient numbers of indigenous Protestant clergy and few of these spoke Irish. The belated opening of a university in Dublin was not enough to redress the balance and few of its graduates ventured beyond the Pale.9 Ireland therefore knew no popular reformation.

7. The question of success or failure of the Reformation in Ireland and of the date from which the latter verdict can, with hindsight, be pronounced have been the subject of animated debate. See especially, Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), 475–502; Nicholas Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une Question Mal Posée’, JEH, 30 (1979), 423–450; Karl S. Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the Reformation in Ireland: Une Question Bien Posée’, JEH, 36 (1985), 196–207; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The English Reformation and Identity Formation in Wales and Ireland’, in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–111; Karl S. Bottigheimer, ‘Revisionism and the Irish Reformation’, JEH, 51 (2000), 581– 586; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Revisionism and the Irish Reformation: A Rejoinder’, JEH, 51 (2000), 587–591. 8. Alan Ford, ‘“Force and Fear of Punishment”: Protestants and Religious Coercion in Ireland, 1603–33’, in Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, ed. by Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 91–130. 9. Ford, The Protestant Reformation, 76–79.

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Ussher’s career in Ireland was shaped by the polemical context and an eschatologically charged anti-popery suffuses many of his writings.10 His first published work, De successione, was a survey of the first twelve centuries of church history, viewed through the prism of Revelation 20 and finding Satan loosed with the rise of papal monarchy.11 Even prior to this, there are many hints of the concerns that were driving him. His first prominent opponent was Henry Fitzsimon, who in June 1600 was imprisoned in Dublin Castle. Ussher challenged him to a disputation, and notably, the first subject for debate was the identity of the pope as Antichrist.12 Between 1601 and 1619, according to Bernard, Ussher was occupied by reading the entire extant patristic corpus. This was not inspired by some antiquarian urge, but by reading A Fortresse of the Faith, Thomas Stapleton’s response to John Jewel, and realising the importance of this polemical battleground.13 His professorial title at any other British university would have been ‘Professor of Divinity’, but at Trinity College, Dublin, he was styled ‘Professor of Theological Controversies’, a telling insight into Irish Protestantism’s self-perception. Joshua Hoyle, his successor in the

10. On the polemical context, see P. Kilroy, ‘Sermon and Pamphlet Literature in the Irish Reformed Church, 1613–34’, Archivium Hibernicum, 33 (1975), 110–121; Declan Gaffney, ‘The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600–1641’, in The Churches, Ireland and the Irish, Studies in Church History, 25, ed. by W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 145–158; Brian Jackson, ‘The Construction of Argument: Henry Fitzsimon, John Rider and Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1599–1614’, in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. by Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 97–115; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Printing in Early Seventeenth-Century Dublin: Combating Heresy in Serpentine Times’, in Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, ed. by Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 40–65. 11. Ussher, Gravissimæ Quæstionis, de Christianarum Ecclesiarum . . . successione et statu (1613); WJU, 2.1–413 (from revised edition, 1687); cf. the English translation by Ambrose Ussher, his brother, in TCD, MS 2940. On this work and Ussher’s apocalypticism more generally, see Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 80–100; Ford, James Ussher, 70–84. 12. Ussher’s account can be found in Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fols 80r–82v, and his letter protesting against Fitzsimon’s terminating the debate at fol. 83r–v. 13. Bernard, Life, 29; Thomas Stapleton, A Fortresse of the Faith (Antwerp, 1565). John Jewel preached his famous ‘Challenge’ sermon at Paul’s Cross, London on 26 November 1559. He laid down a challenge for defenders of traditional religion to prove their doctrine of the Mass ‘out of any old catholic doctor or father, or out of any old general council, or out of the holy scriptures of God, or any one example of the primitive church . . . for the space of six hundred years after Christ’. ‘Sermon at Paul’s Cross’, in The Works of John Jewel, D.D., ed. by Richard William Jelf, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1848), 1.30.

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chair, put it succinctly: the Protestant theologian’s duty was to ‘love God, and hate the Pope’.14 The theological identity of the Church of Ireland crystallised in the Irish Articles of 1615, and even here the anti-Catholicism is palpable, with Article 80 branding the Bishop of Rome as ‘that man of sin’ (2 Thess. 2:3) and thus elevating belief in the identity of the pope as Antichrist to the status of an article of faith. The Irish Articles were also marked by a strongly predestinarian theology and incorporate the substance of the Lambeth Articles, drawn up in 1595 in order to settle controversy at Cambridge but never accepted by Elizabeth or James. A number of other features such as Sabbatarianism and a conspicuous silence on episcopacy (the only bishop mentioned being that of Rome) would have given the articles a Puritan tinge, and there does at least appear to have been a felt need to accommodate such sensibilities within the fold of the Irish Church, maintaining unity against the Catholic foe.15 The independence and distinct identity of the Church of Ireland were soon challenged. William Laud’s vision of order would not permit such latitude within the dominions of his master, Charles I. Laud became Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1633, the year that he was elevated to Canterbury. Through rewriting the college statutes and the power of patronage, he was able to reshape Trinity’s religious ethos.16 Laud’s ally Thomas Wentworth arrived in Ireland as Lord Deputy in the same year. His attempt to enforce the conformity of the Irish Church to the English met with stubborn resistance in the 1634 Convocation. The Irish Church did adopt the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (whilst retaining the Irish Articles) but not the 1604 Canons for which they substituted their own.17

14. Joshua Hoyle, A Reioynder to Master Malone’s Reply Concerning Reall Presence (Dublin, 1641), sig. a4v. 15. Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1634: A Puritan Church?’ in As by Law Established: The Church of Ireland since the Reformation, ed. by Alan Ford, James McGuire, and Kenneth Milne (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1995), 52–68. On the articles and Ussher’s involvement in drafting them, see idem, James Ussher, 85–103. 16. Alan Ford, ‘“That Bugbear Arminianism”: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. by Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 135–160. 17. Amanda Louise Capern, ‘The Caroline Church: James Ussher and the Irish Dimension’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 57–85; Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or Independent? The Church of Ireland and Its Colonial Context, 1536–1649’, The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995), 163–187.

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This was, in principle, a victory for Ussher, preserving the independence of the Irish Church. In practice, however, he was subsequently marginalised. Increasingly, Laud and Wentworth exercised greater power in the name of the king, and de facto leadership of the Church of Ireland passed into the hands of their henchman John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry. Bramhall was reputed by John Leslie, sixth Earl of Rothes, to be ‘the most unsound man in Ireland, a great Arminiane’.18

The English Context Ussher was a regular visitor to England. His first trips, in 1603, 1606, 1609, and 1612, were book-buying expeditions on behalf of Trinity College, Dublin.19 Later visits, often of several years’ duration, were primarily for the purposes of research in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge and the private collections of scholars such as Sir Robert Cotton. Ussher moved easily in the circles of the intelligentsia and was acquainted with Sir Henry Savile and William Camden. However, he was also well connected amongst those godly folk known as Puritans, counting the likes of John Preston and Richard Sibbes as dear friends.20 The usefulness of the term ‘Puritan’ has been questioned, some seeing it as ‘an admirable refuge from clarity of thought’.21 The word must certainly be used with care, but it seems as good a name as any for that complex of concerns evidenced by England’s more advanced Protestants. Indeed, it has been rehabilitated by post-revisionist historiography and given a new lease of life. For many generations, the historiography of religion in early modern England was dominated by the Puritan/Anglican dichotomy.22 From this

18. A Relation of Proceedings Concerning the Affairs of the Kirk of Scotland, From August 1637 to July 1638, ed. by James Nairne (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1830), 10. 19. Ford, James Ussher, 33. 20. Bernard writes of ‘a most entire affection’ between Sibbes, Preston, and Ussher. Bernard, Life, 83. On Ussher’s Puritan connections, see Elizabethanne Boran, ‘An Early Friendship Network of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1626–1656’, in European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, ed. by Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 116–134. 21. Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), 13. 22. This binary is reflected in the title of John F. H. New, Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Opposition, 1558–1640 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964) which portrays deep theological division between the two. The assertion that James Ussher led the British delegation at Dort (14) will hardly fill the reader with confidence.

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perspective, Puritanism was the oppositional defiant disorder of the Church of England’s malcontents, those who could not live at peace under the terms of the Elizabethan settlement. This basic framework was adopted not only by denominational historians concerned with theology and piety, but also by Whig and Marxist historians whose focus lay not so much in religion itself as in matters of constitutional liberty and socioeconomic dynamics. Within the paradigm, there was a need to keep Puritanism distinct and defined over and against its Anglican ‘other’ in order for it to act as the revolutionary force that would take the ‘high road’ to civil war.23 William Haller’s The Rise of Puritanism is an aptly titled outworking of such Whiggish assumptions.24 This interpretation has been challenged in recent years. Patrick Collinson’s early work on the Elizabethan period revealed strong connections between Puritanism and mainstream Protestantism, in terms of both ideology and patronage. These ties to pillars of the establishment undermined the claims for Puritanism’s revolutionary character.25 Collinson’s findings anticipated the seminal revisionist work of Nicholas Tyacke, who argued that Puritanism effectively disappeared as agitation for reform of the liturgy and church government abated. This left a ‘Calvinist consensus’, in which predestinarian doctrine formed the ‘common and ameliorating bond’ uniting the Church in its evangelical mission, a bond shattered by the Arminian party. Inverting the Whig interpretation, Tyacke claimed that what can be observed to rise in the 1620s was not Puritanism  but Arminianism. This was the truly innovative and revolutionary force, and it provoked a conservative, counter-revolutionary reaction from traditional Calvinists, now labelled ‘doctrinal puritans’ by their adversaries.26 Tyacke’s narrative dovetailed neatly with revisionist approaches to seventeenth-century politics which read the civil war as a conservative reaction to Caroline absolutism. By emphasising religious differences,

23. Peter Lake, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. by John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 346–371 (347–351). 24. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism: Or, the Way to the New Jerusalem as Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938; Harper Torchbooks, pbk edn, 1957). 25. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). 26. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’, in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. by Conrad Russell (London: Macmillan, 1973), 119–143; idem, AntiCalvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

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it enabled the revisionist camp to de-emphasise political ones, reinforcing notions of consensual politics in the years before the civil war.27 Tyacke’s work attracted a barrage of criticism, the most sustained attack coming from Peter White. There was indeed a consensus, claims White, but it was a consensus based on the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Book of Homilies, and it accommodated a spectrum of views on the doctrine of predestination. Events abroad threatened the equilibrium as some English Protestants adopted a hawkish posture, eschewing ties to Spain and eager to join the war against the Roman Antichrist on the continent, whilst others adopted a posture congruous with James’s ill-fated diplomatic strategy of forging a match with Spain. Theological polarisation thus did occur, but strictly between the years 1618 and 1629, and not primarily around the doctrine of grace but rather concerning the appropriate stance towards Roman Catholicism. With the return to a more pacific foreign policy after 1629, the doctrinal consensus was restored.28 Kevin Sharpe has also offered an account in which Charles and Laud are not portrayed as innovators.29 What was distinctive about the Caroline Church according to these authors was not doctrinal innovation, but rather the energy with which the conventional goals of uniformity, order, and obedience were pursued. Laud is portrayed, in the words of Peter Lake, as ‘Whitgift and Bancroft on speed’.30 A post-revisionist school, for which Lake is a prominent advocate, takes issue with both Tyacke and White. Lake accepts the hegemony of predestinarian theology in the Jacobean Church but finds that the idea of a Calvinist consensus is too easily used ‘to deny the existence of any nexus of distinctively puritan interests or concerns’. He also notes a tendency to reduce doctrinal conflict to division over the theology of grace. He locates the fundamental issue at a different point, the ‘disagreement about the

27. See, for example, John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 34 (1984), 155–178. Morrill concluded that ‘the English civil war was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion’ (178). 28. Peter White, ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’, Past & Present, 101 (1983), 34–53; cf. idem, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); idem, ‘The Via Media in the Early Stuart Church’, in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. by Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 211–230. 29. Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 275–402, 731–765. 30. Lake, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, 359.

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visible godliness of the visible church or, stated differently, over the extent and nature of the Christian community’. He employs R. T. Kendall’s taxonomy of credal and experimental predestinarians. Credal predestinarians assented to the doctrine of predestination, but experimental predestinarians based a system of practical divinity upon it; they foregrounded the doctrines of election and assurance and aspired ‘to define the godly community (and in some cases the visible church) in terms of those who both understood those doctrines and acted upon them’. Credal predestinarians would not go so far and found this ‘puritan tendency to insist on visible godliness as a qualification for membership’ of the Church or the Christian community as highly divisive in the context of a national church. Some took a mediating position, limiting experimentalism to the individual and refusing to follow its logic into the realm of ecclesiology.31 The relationship is complex: On the one hand, Puritanism could be seen as a product of tensions between some of the central tenets of Reformed orthodoxy and the structures and operating assumptions of the national church. On the other, emergent styles of Puritan piety and subjectivity were themselves a product of the appropriation and application of the same Reformed orthodoxy to which even the most virulently conformist elements in the Church of England also subscribed. Thus conceived, Puritanism had within it integrative and ameliorative, as well as polarising and fissiparous, impulses. Which set of impulses won out at any given moment depended . . . upon attendant political circumstances.32 This is a more nuanced portrayal of Puritanism than that of one pole of a binary opposition. It also moves beyond the view of Puritanism as agitation for further reform—a voice subsequently lost in the harmony of the Jacobean consensus—by taking experimental piety seriously and allowing the deployment of such apparent oxymorons as ‘moderate Puritan’.33

31. Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, Past & Present, 114 (1987), 32–76; cf. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 8f, 79f. 32. Lake, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, 356. 33. Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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According to Lake, Puritanism ‘became more rather than less distinctive’ with the emergence of ‘Antipuritan and anti-Calvinist styles of piety and doctrine’.34 These traits can be discerned in avant-garde conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes, in the Durham House circle, and in the highly provocative writings of Richard Montagu, but they reached their height in the Laudian program which defined itself against a ‘polemically constructed image of puritan deviance and subversion’. Again, the issues are more complex than a simple divergence on the doctrine of grace and the correspondence, real or imagined, between the Laudians and Jacobus Arminius on this point. More basic were the questions of the visibility of the Church and the nature of true worship. Laudians believed that God’s presence in this world was most intense in the church building, the house of God, which led to a concern for the material fabric of the building and the need to adorn it to inculcate a sense of reverence and awe. The focus of worship was liturgy, in which that reverence was to be manifest, and ceremony, through which the grace of the sacraments was offered to all. This focus entailed a more inclusive view of the Christian community, one which exalted the role of clergy in dispensing sacramental grace and channelled the religious energy of the laity into the narrow confines of the liturgy. Puritan culture, by contrast, was focused on the word of Scripture, in particular on the word preached. From the Laudian perspective this was to set up the household and the conventicle as rivals to the Church, as places where the divine presence was manifest. Laudian attitudes to ecclesiology, especially on the role of the sacraments as the primary means of grace, implied a doctrine of grace quite different from the predestinarian theology of the Reformed mainstream, but the differences were not limited to this issue.35 In view of the Laudians’ sacramental theology and their less aggressive attitude towards Roman Catholicism, it is no surprise that many English Protestants feared the spectre of popery. Alexandra Walsham has speculated

34. Lake, ‘The Historiography of Puritanism’, 356. 35. 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. by Kenneth Fincham (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 161–185. On earlier trends, see idem, ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. by Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113– 133. On ideological development, see Anthony Milton, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain, ed. by Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162–184.

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about the appeal of Laudian religion to ‘vestigial Catholic sympathies’, and it does appear plausible that this was a welcome development for some.36 The Laudians believed that they could win over recusants and church papists by restoring ‘the beauty of holiness’. They were less alert to the embarrassing possibility that their aesthetics of worship might stimulate conversions in the opposite direction.37 There was considerable anxiety, especially amongst Puritans, that Rome would gain ground in England. William Perkins had long before complained that ‘poperie denied with the mouth, abides still in the heart’.38 In the 1620s, it was feared that Laudian religion would encourage those with such inclinations, from the sophisticated, postTridentine élite down to those who held to the ‘rustic Pelagianism’ described by Patrick Collinson.39 Furthermore, the position of the Laudians was assimilated to that of the Dutch Remonstrants. Laudians were branded ‘Arminians’ because of the implications of their sacramental theology for the doctrine of grace. This polemical labelling is evident in the Remonstrance of the Commons presented to the king in June 1628. The MPs protested against the ‘daily growth and spreading of the faction of the Arminians’. These were the ‘common disturbers of the Protestant Churches’, ‘incendiaries’ who threatened to divide England just as they had torn apart the Netherlands. This was ‘but a cunning way to bring in Popery’, the English ‘Arminians’ being ‘Protestants in shew, but Jesuites in opinion’.40 Responding to this perceived threat was an important aspect of Ussher’s involvement in ecclesiastical politics from the 1620s onwards. He was drawn into the heated debate that followed the publication of Richard Montagu’s A New Gagg, a work that questioned the Reformed view of grace and the identity of the pope as Antichrist.41 Preaching before King Charles at Greenwich on 25 June 1626, Ussher warned of the contention caused by ‘that newe doctrine, which hath lately allmost destroyd the Lowe

36. Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, AntiCalvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 49 (1998), 620–651. 37. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 81–83. 38. William Perkins, The Reformed Catholic (1598), in WWP, 1.583. 39. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 37. 40. John Rushworth, Historical Collections (1659), 621. 41. Richard Montagu, A Gagg for the new Gospel? No. A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624).

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Countries’. He noted the way in which those who rejected the new ideas were stigmatised with ‘that odious and contemptible name of Puritanes’, even though they were doing no more than the late King James had done.42 The rhetorical dynamics are noteworthy, with Ussher assimilating the position of Montagu and his defenders to that of the Dutch Remonstrants, just as Montagu assimilated the position of Ussher and his friends to a polemically constructed image of the seditious Puritan.43 Ussher knew the risks of speaking truth to power, adding that it was ‘the last tyme perhapps that I may ever speake unto you’.44 Five days later, Ussher wrote to his friend Samuel Ward: ‘it behoveth you who are heads of colleges, and μφρονε [like-minded] to stick close to one another and (quite obliterating all secret distastes, or privy discontentments which possibly may befall betwixt yourselves) with joint consent to promote the cause of God’.45 Tyacke rightly detected an echo here of Thomas Bradwardine’s De causa Dei contra Pelagium, a fourteenthcentury treatise on the necessity and irresistible efficacy of grace. This had been printed for the first time in 1618 as the Synod of Dort approached, clearly harnessing Doctor Profundus to the Reformed propaganda machine.46 The waning of this cause was a source of great frustration for Ussher. He was anxious about the collateral damage inflicted on the Church of Ireland, complaining to Ward in 1635: while we strive here to maintain the purity of our ancient truth, how cometh it to pass that you in Cambridge do cast such stumbling blocks in our way? by publishing unto the world such rotten stuff as Shelford hath vented in his five discourses . . . The Jesuits of England sent over the book hither to confirm our papists in their obstinacy, and to assure them that we are now coming home unto them as fast as we can.47

42. Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch Hatton MS 247, 190f. 43. Cf. Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church’, 69. 44. Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch Hatton MS 247, 196; cf. the variant reading in WJU, 13.350: ‘This is the last time I shall be called to this place’. 45. Ussher to Ward, 30 June 1626, in WJU, 15.346. 46. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 56. 47. Ussher to Ward, 15 September 1635, in WJU, 16.9. The reference is to Robert Shelford, Five Pious and Learned Discourses (Cambridge, 1635).

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The Laudian experiment began to unravel in the late 1630s, and with political circumstances changed beyond recognition, Ussher returned to England in 1640 after a fourteen-year absence. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 prevented him returning home, and he would die an exile. Ussher was drawn into ecclesiastical politics and worked towards compromise at a time when Parliament was under pressure to move beyond the restoration of pre-Laudian Protestantism to ‘reform the Reformation it self’ and tear down the structures of episcopacy.48 Though fêted by both Royalist and Parliamentarian parties, Ussher stood with the king when forced to make a choice. These were turbulent times, and the breakdown of order distressed him. In the sphere of religion, much of the trouble was blamed on ‘blockheads’, those who would ‘run after their owne Phansyes, and draw fooles after them’.49 Behind some of the more shocking charismatic excesses, however, he discerned sinister forces at work: ‘there is an Anabaptistical Fancy abroad now, that persuades Ignorant People, that an unlearned man By the Revelation of the Spirit speakes Greeke and Hebrew, that never knew Either: when this unlearned man is a Cheatinge Jesuite’.50 The fear of popery, it seems, never left him. 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 polemical 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.

Notes on Ussher’s Sermons Beyond the sermons which Charles Elrington included in his edition of Ussher’s Works, a large number of sermons survive in some form. This section briefly introduces the major sources of sermon material on which this study will draw and places those sermons in their historical context. Listed first, because it contains the earliest material, is a pocket-sized notebook which belonged to Ussher and is now preserved in the Bodleian

48. Edmund Calamy, Englands Looking-Glasse (1642), 46. 49. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 195r (Sermon on Jer. 3:14f, 1650). 50. Ibid., fol. 175r (Sermon on Acts 2:4, 1650).

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Library, Oxford.51 Amidst notes on a bewildering variety of biblical, patristic, historical, and controversial subjects, there are over forty sermon outlines in Ussher’s hand. The earliest sermon to which a date is attributed was preached in 1617, and the latest sermon was preached in 1634.52 The outlines range from a bare Ramist skeleton to a more fleshed-out product several pages in length. This notebook contains Ussher’s notes for sermons that he preached on a number of important occasions: to the House of Commons in 1621,53 before King James at Wansted in 1624,54 and before King Charles at Greenwich in 1626.55 Other significant material is found here. Parts of Ussher’s sermon on Genesis 49:10 upon the opening of the Irish Parliament, 14 July 1634, find echoes in his later absolutist tract, The Power Communicated by God to the Prince.56 Another sermon which was preached sometime between early July 1633 and July 1634 sets forth Nehemiah as a model God-fearing governor, one who does not find sufficient warrant in custom and precedent for the continuation of any practice but resolves instead to ‘sayle by an other compass’. Much of the advice is predictable enough, warning against extortion and miscarriages of justice, especially by those to whom the governor delegates authority, but Ussher also inveighs against those who would ‘imitate whatsoever they shall see done at Court’, likening this to Ahaz and his copy of the altar that he had seen at Damascus (2 Kgs. 16:10–14). It is highly probable that Ussher preached this sermon before Thomas

51. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1290. 52. Ibid., fols 29v, 78r. 53. Ibid., fols 49r–53r; first published as The Svbstance of That Which Was Delivered in a Sermon before the Commons House of Parliament . . . 1620 (1621); cf. Balliol, MS 259, I, fols 71r–97v; WJU, 2.415–457; Ford, James Ussher, 112–114. 54. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1290, fols 59r–61v; first published as A Briefe Declaration of the Vniversalitie of the Church of Christ, and the Vnitie of the Catholike Faith professed therein (1624); cf. Balliol, MS 259, II, fols 420r–439r; WJU, 2.469–506. Fragmentary notes on the sermon can be found in CUL, MS Add. 69, fols 130v–129v. 55. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1290, fols 63v–65r; cf. WJU, 13.335–351, where the year is mistakenly given as 1627; other surviving sources are CUL, MS Dd.5.31, fols 94r–103r; Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch Hatton MS 247, 161–197. For analysis of this sermon, see Ford, James Ussher, 140–144. 56. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1290, fols 73v–78r; cf. The Power Communicated by God to the Prince, and the Obedience Required of the Subject (1661); WJU, 11.223–418. On the origins of this work, see Nicholas Bernard, Clavi Trabales, 47f. The notes in MS Rawlinson D1290 pertain to the opening of Parliament, 1634, one of the occasions, according to Bernard, on which Ussher stated his opinion on royal authority; not to the two sermons preached at Christ Church, Dublin, 1639, as stated in Ford, James Ussher, 224f.

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Wentworth, newly arrived as Lord Deputy of Ireland on 23 July 1633. It reveals Ussher on the defensive against Arminian and Romanising encroachments, things ‘utterlye inconvenient’ for the Church of Ireland.57 Some of these sermons thus reflect Ussher at his most politically engaged, but the majority are readily characterised as practical divinity. Another important source of Ussher’s sermons is the collection of notes in a number of hands preserved in Balliol College, Oxford.58 The manuscript was entered on the register of the Company of Stationers on 4 April 1656, two weeks after Ussher’s death, but the plan was never followed through to publication.59 Fifteen of the sermons in Elrington’s edition of Ussher’s works are copied from the text of this volume.60 The manuscript also contains versions of the sermons preached by Ussher before the House of Commons in 1621 and before King James at Wansted in 1624, as well as two sermons on Romans 8:15–16, all of which Elrington included using the text of contemporary printed editions.61 That leaves eighteen sermons (one of which is tantalisingly incomplete) which have never been published in any form, probably dating from circa 1624, with a predominant focus on sanctification and the assurance of faith.62 On New Year’s Day 1626, Ussher began to preach a series of six sermons on Hebrews 9:14 which move from an exposition of the person and work of Christ towards a discussion of the release that his sacrifice brings the believer through the cleansing of the conscience and the new life of

57. Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1290, fol. 72r–v. 58. Balliol, MS 259. 59. A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640–1708, 3 vols (London: The Roxburghe Club, 1913) 2.47. 60. WJU, 13.365–606 reproduces Balliol, MS 259, I, fols 35r–63v; II, fols 1r–213v; cf. Elrington’s note in WJU, 13.iv. 61. The sermons on Rom. 8:15f were published in Twenty Sermons Preached at Oxford, Before His Majesty, And Elsewhere (1678), 155–175, which indicates that the venue was Great St Bartholomew’s but gives no date (155); cf. Balliol, MS 259, I, fols 10r–34r. 62. The unpublished sermons may be found in Balliol, MS 259, II, fols 214r–419v, with the fragment of a sermon on 2 Cor. 5:19 at I, fols 64r–69r. Capern suggests that the entire collection of thirty-seven sermons may date from 1641. See Capern, ‘Slipperye Times and Dangerous Dayes’, 336, n. 187. Setting aside the two sermons published in the 1620s and which could, of course, have been copied into a much later compilation, one sermon in the unpublished series on 1 Jn. 5:7f suggests that King James was very much alive and well (II, fol. 383r). One might argue in reply that preaching in London in 1641 it would have been impolitic to mention Charles’s name when speaking of obedience to the magistrate but Ussher was not exactly bashful on the subject of royal authority, on which see Cunningham, James Ussher and John Bramhall, 119–128; Ford, James Ussher, 224–226.

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service to God that it empowers. This series was recorded and transcribed by ‘W.I.’ and is preserved in manuscript along with a sermon on 1 Peter 4:17 dated 2 July 1626.63 The manuscript maps Ussher’s itinerancy through Essex and London, preaching at Felsted, Bishopsgate Street, Islington, and in July at Great St Bartholomew’s.64 Some of his hearers evidently followed him as he moved from pulpit to pulpit. He speaks of ‘honorable personages here present’ who had heard the preceding sermons at ‘another place’, in all likelihood a reference to the circle around the Earl of Warwick.65 Ussher was closely associated with this group. Alongside John Preston, he had preached at the home of Warwick’s ally Sir Francis Barrington at Hatfield Broad Oak in Essex just weeks before. William Hunt has suggested that this gathering functioned as ‘a sort of regional synod of the godly’ as they prepared for the showdown with the Arminians at York House in February.66 Felsted, where he preached on New Year’s Day, was a living in the gift of Warwick, a great patron of godly clergy. This gives some indication of the company he was keeping at this time and the cause with which he was aligned. He made his own contribution to the defence effort in his outspoken sermon before Charles at Greenwich on 25 June 1626. His sermon at Great St Bartholomew’s the following week reflected the atmosphere in the godly camp. Ussher warned his hearers not to be surprised at their fiery trial.67 The persecution they would experience at the hands of their countrymen was the means by which God would purify his Church. Soon after, Ussher was to depart for Ireland, not to return for fourteen years. In 1640, Ussher once again travelled to England, where he would play a significant role in the tumultuous events of the following years. Staying at the London home of Warwick, he quickly found his way into local pulpits. Bramhall was informed that Ussher ‘is very much followed here

63. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, entitled ‘The mysteryes of Christ unfolded and applyed Togeather with the nature offices Acts and errors of Conscience declared’ (fol. 3r). 64. Ibid., fols 53r, 91r, 109r, 125r. 65. Ibid., fol. 91r; cf. fol. 109r. 66. William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 193; cf. Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9f. For Ussher’s sermons at Hatfield Broad Oak, see Essex Record Office, D/DBa F5/1. 67. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 125r–v.

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upon Sundays’.68 By late summer, he had moved to Oxford, where he was reportedly almost buried among the books and manuscripts of the Bodleian Library.69 It was during this period, prior to his return to London for the opening of the Long Parliament, that he preached a series of eighteen sermons on conversion which were published soon after his death.70 This collection derives from notes taken by Joseph Crabb and fellow ministers, ‘compleated by A strict comparing of several distinct papers’.71 A preface was added by Stanley Gower, Ussher’s former chaplain, eulogising his erstwhile master and justifying the publication of the sermons in view of Ussher’s persistent efforts to suppress unauthorised publications during his lifetime. He anticipated that the sermons would bear fruit through their reading as they had done through their hearing and would also serve to model the plain style ‘to such as think it below them . . . to preach as he did, a Crucifyed Christ in a Crucifyed style’. This careful production would pre-empt the issue of ‘a more surreptitious Copy’ and so serve as a fitting literary monument to Ussher, ‘spices gathered to the Embalming of this Rare Phœnix out of his own ashes’.72 The final major source is a manuscript containing an auditor’s notes from 208 of Ussher’s sermons, 34 preached at Covent Garden in the years 1641–1642 and 172 at Lincoln’s Inn from 1647–1652.73 Soon after leaving Oxford, Ussher was preaching as regularly as other engagements would permit in St Paul’s Chapel, Covent Garden, supported by the voluntary subscriptions of the congregation.74 His ministry there had settled into a more or less weekly pattern by mid-1642, but prior to this there were many

68. Sir George Wentworth to John Bramhall, 11 June 1640, in The Rawdon Papers, ed. by Edward Berwick (London: John Nichols, 1819), 78. 69. John Morris to Jan de Laet, 7 October 1640, in Correspondence of John Morris with Johannes de Laet, 1634–1649, ed. by J. A. F. Bekkers (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1970), 43. 70. Ussher, Eighteen Sermons Preached in Oxford, 1640 (1659). These were included by Elrington and can be found in WJU, 13.1–296. 71. Ussher, Eighteen Sermons, ‘To the Reader’, sig. *2v. 72. Ibid., ‘A Preface’, sigs br–b2r. 73. CUL, MS Mm.6.55. Ussher preached at ‘Roode Church in London’ on 12 December 1647 (fols 50v–52r), and on 24 May 1649 at ‘Mr Jo. Hernes Burial’ (fols 128v–129v). John Herne was a member of Lincoln’s Inn but the manuscript does not specify whether Ussher preached in the chapel or at the graveside. D. A. Orr, ‘Herne [Heron], John (c. 1593–1649)’, ODNB. 74. See the Verney Papers dated 21 December 1641 and 7 December 1642 calendared in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Seventh Report (London, 1879), 435, 443.

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interruptions, including an absence of almost three months between February and May 1641 when he was preoccupied with the business of a House of Lords subcommittee and with the trial of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.75 Ussher voiced his alarm at the growing animosity between king and Parliament in June 1642. He denounced ‘malignant Parties’ on both sides, ‘Those that are possessed with the devill: They that stirr up the kinge Against his People, And They that Alienate the Peoples Affections from their kinge’.76 However, the increasing strain placed upon his mediating position could not be borne indefinitely and, forced to take sides as the country inched towards war, he chose for his king. He preached at Covent Garden for the last time on 6 November 1642 and subsequently joined the court at Oxford. He remained in Oxford until 1645, turning down the invitation to attend the Westminster Assembly, a gathering proscribed by the king.77 After his flight westward from the Parliamentarian armies and some rough treatment at the hands of the ‘rude Welsh’, Ussher returned to London in 1646, residing at the home of the Countess of Peterborough.78 He was appointed Lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn through the influence of Oliver St John and Samuel Browne and began preaching there on 31 October 1647.79 The appointment was not without controversy and was debated in the House of Commons, a narrow majority voting in favour.80 This suggests lingering rancour against one who had ‘formerly adhered to the Enemy against the Parliament’.81 Ussher was well provided for at

75. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 4v, 5v. On this eventful period of Ussher’s life, see Ford, James Ussher, 228–261. 76. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 19r (Sermon on 1 Pet. 5:8, 12 June 1642). 77. Parr, Life, I.49f. There is an entertaining anecdote about John Selden’s reaction to this prospect: ‘The House of Parlement once making a question, whether they had best admit Bish. Usher to the assembly of divines, Mr. Selden said, they had as good inquire, whether they had best admit Inigo Jones, the King’s Architect, to the Company of Mous-trapmakers, &c.’ From papers of Anthony Wood, reproduced in Thomas Hearne, ed., Liber Niger Scaccarii, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Benjamin White, 1774), 2.594. 78. Ussher to Henry Hammond, 14 January 1651, in WJU, 16.174; Bernard, Life, 100f. 79. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 46r; David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 20f. 80. The vote split almost evenly, 92 in favour, 88 against. Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 5, 1646–1648 (London, 1802), 393. 81. John Rushworth, Historical Collections: The Fourth and Last Part, 2 vols (London, 1701), 2.937f.

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Lincoln’s Inn, and was allocated a generous stipend of £200 per annum through a voluntary levy on the Fellows, twice what would be offered to his successor. In practice, the contributions were insufficient to meet this target and the payments ran in arrears.82 Ussher was, however, well received and the chapel was usually full when he preached. In September 1648, Sir Ralph Assheton was bemoaning the cost and inconvenience of Saturday night accommodation at Lincoln’s Inn, a measure he found necessary in order to ensure that he could arrive at the chapel early and thus reduce the risk of being shut out by the crowd.83 Even with influential contacts and the outlay of several shillings, the Dutchmen Lodewijck Huygens and Johannes van Vliet found themselves sitting so far from the pulpit that they struggled to hear the softly spoken ‘old grey man’ with ‘an enormous ruff around his neck’.84 For a time, according to his son, John Bramston, former Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, could be coaxed out of his house only by the prospect of hearing Ussher preach.85 The collection of sermon notes from Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn is not only the most extensive record of Ussher’s preaching but also unique in that here Ussher preaches his way through the system of theology or, as he would call it, ‘the body of divinity’, a practice which he himself recommended to students.86 So he proceeds from a discussion of the knowledge of God by both general and special revelation, through the attributes and operations of God, creation, the prelapsarian covenant with Adam, the fall, sin and its effects, the covenant of grace, Christ the mediator of that covenant, both his person and work, his threefold offices of prophet, priest, and king, the work of the Spirit in applying Christ’s work, faith, justification, sanctification, perseverance, assurance, death and judgement, eschatology, to ecclesiology, within which he deals with

82. The Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. The Black Books. Vol. II. From A.D. 1586 to A.D. 1660, ed. by W. P. Baildon (London, 1898), 376f, 383, 387, 417. 83. Sir Ralph Assheton to Bernard Driver, 12 September 1648, in Chetham’s Library, Manchester, MS A3.90, fols 16v–17r. Of Ussher, Assheton said, he ‘is so rare a man in his profession, that I thinke his fellow is scarce to be mett with all in Christendom, so that I have a greate desire to be one of his constant auditors’. 84. Lodewijck Huygens, The English Journal, 1651–1652, ed. and trans. by A. G. H. Bachrach and R. G. Collmer (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 73f. 85. The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, K. B. of Skreens in the Hundred of Chelmsford, ed. by Lord Braybrooke (London: The Camden Society, 1845), 91. 86. Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 217, fol. 41v.

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discipline, the sacraments, and the ministry of the word. Upon reaching the end, he goes back to the beginning again.87 From time to time, the progress is interrupted. For example, prior to partaking of the Lord’s Supper, the fellows would often hear a sermon focusing their thoughts on the signs and things signified coupled with a call to examine their hearts lest they receive unworthily.88 Ussher could also preach topical sermons on such important occasions as Easter and in order to commemorate the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.89 He had, however, committed himself to preaching through the theological system over a lengthy period. Indeed, upon his return to London and installation at Lincoln’s Inn, he very quickly returned to the point at which he had broken off the series five years earlier at Covent Garden.90 There are a few frustrating breaks in the auditor’s record marked by the words ‘I was absent’, but in reading through this collection one is able to gain a greater sense of how the various doctrinal loci are related in Ussher’s thought.91 Although the last recorded sermon is dated 18 January 1652, Ussher continued to preach at Lincoln’s Inn until 1654, when his eyesight and teeth

87. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 206v–207v. The second cycle beings on 16 February 1651 with a sermon on the knowledge of God, Ussher taking Rom. 1:20 as his text and contrasting the differing functions of general revelation (‘This Booke in folio [that] All the world may read’) and the special revelation of Scripture (‘That little Booke’). This reflects a method common among the Reformed at this time, treating Scripture, the principium cognoscendi theologiae, prior to theology proper, the doctrine of God which is the principium essendi theologiae. This is the pattern adopted in, for example, the Irish Articles. Cf. Muller, PRRD, 1.430–437; 2.151– 153. The record of the sermons in the first cycle begins after Ussher had started the series. In the first recorded sermon Ussher begins with the remark that having spoken on God as he is in himself, he will proceed to speak of God as he is towards us (fol. 4r). This explains why prior to this first sermon of 14 February 1641 there are several pages of notes excerpted from the beginning of A Body of Divinitie, a work which will be discussed below, supplied to make good the deficit. 88. For example, the two communion sermons of 8 and 15 June 1651 are interposed between sermons on the angels and their fall. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 224v–226v. 89. Ibid., fols 213v–214v; fols 99v–100v. 90. Ussher had preached his final sermon at Covent Garden on 6 November 1642 from Phil. 2:6–8 (ibid., fols 44v–45r). On returning to London, his first six sermons focused on the evidences of faith and the profit of godliness (fols 46r–52r). On 19 December 1647, however, he preached on Phil. 2:6 and in the subsequent five sermons took Phil. 2:8 as his text (fols 52r–57v). It does seem that he had intentionally returned to the theme of Christ’s humiliation, and from there he continued on through his lengthy series. Perhaps he would have resumed this even sooner were it not for uncertainty over whether or not Parliament would suffer his presence in a London pulpit. 91. ‘I was absent’ in ibid., fols 21r, 74v, 78v, 179v; cf. fol. 57v.

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began to fail him. He preached occasionally after this, once at Gray’s Inn, at his friend John Selden’s funeral, and elsewhere in and around London. Bernard pictures him in his last days as a frail scholar, following the sunlight from to room to room, using what he could of the day for writing and troubled in his dreams at night by his absence from the pulpit, a natural reaction from one who had made his episcopal motto Vae mihi si non evangelizavero (‘woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel’, 1 Cor. 9:14).92 Even though only a small fraction of Ussher’s sermons survive in any form, those that have been preserved constitute a substantial body of material. These have not excited modern literary scholars in the same way as the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes or John Donne. Fraser Mitchell found them ‘intolerably dull’, the style ‘close-packed and full of incessant argumentation . . . stern and unsympathetic in tone’.93 Ussher had made a conscious decision to adopt the plain style favoured by so many Puritan preachers rather than preach with ‘strong lines and Fustian termes’.94 He urged those setting out in ministry ‘to deliver God’s Message as near as may be in God’s Words’. The message should be plain and thus intelligible to ‘the meanest of your Auditors’, ‘avoiding all Exotic Phrases, Scholastick Terms, unnecessary Quotations of Authors, and forced Rhetorical Figures’. They should strive for a studied simplicity ‘since it is not difficult to make easie things appear hard, but to render hard things easie is the hardest part of a good Orator, as well as Preacher’.95 It should be added, however, that in the extant sources Ussher is usually preaching before welleducated audiences and is not averse to classical references and scholastic distinctions. Ussher preached with a sense of urgency, eager to see men and women repent from their sins, trust in Christ, and know the transforming power of the gospel. He found it frustrating that some came to the sermon ‘as to a Play to see whats done’ or ‘to heare newes in the Pulpit’.96 They ‘bring

92. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 46r; Bernard, Life, 101–103; Elrington, Life, in WJU, 1.272; W. B. Wright, The Ussher Memoirs; or, Genealogical Memoirs of the Ussher Families in Ireland (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1889), 90. 93. W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of Its Literary Aspects (London: S.P.C.K., 1932), 228f. 94. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 189v (Sermon on Jas. 1:21, 1650). 95. Parr, Life, I.88 (emphases removed). 96. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 187r (Sermon on 2 Cor. 6:1, 1650), 79r (Sermon on 1 Cor. 10:12, 1648).

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their Eares, and doe not listen, but talke, or sleepe, or mind other things. If it were a Play, it might bee borne withall, But this is that, your life depends upon’.97 He urged his listeners to prepare themselves to hear the word preached, to take off their shoes, metaphorically, when they came.98 There are hints that he was not unsympathetic to his hearers and was realistic about their attention span. His accounts as Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, show that he authorised the expenditure of two shillings for ‘an howreglasse’ for the pulpit and the necessary fixtures.99 Ussher saw only two of his own sermons through the press. These were the sermons preached before the House of Commons in 1621 and before King James in 1624, and in the case of the former it is clear that he was ordered to publish.100 In this reticence towards publishing his sermons, Ussher was not alone. The printed sermons of early English Protestants often carried something of an apology, such as these words from Laurence Chaderton: Let no man thinke, that the reading of this can be half so effectuall and profitable to hym, as the hearyng was, or might be. For it wanteth the zeale of the speaker, the attention of the hearer, the promise of God to the ordinary preaching of his word, the mighty and inwarde working of his holy spirite, and many other thinges which the Lord worketh most mercifully by the preaching of his glorious Gospell, which are not to be hoped for by readyng the written Sermons of his ministers.101 The printed sermon could not be expected to work with the same efficacy as the preached sermon, and Ussher may have felt that revising old sermons for publication would be an unjustifiable distraction from preparing and preaching new ones.

97. Ibid., fol. 189v (Sermon on Jas. 1:21, 1650). 98. Ibid., fol. 187v (Sermon on 2 Cor. 6:1, 1650). 99. TCD, MS 788, fol. 89v. 100. Ussher, The Svbstance of That Which Was Delivered in a Sermon before the Commons (1621), sig. A3r. 101. Laurence Chaderton, An Excellent and godly sermon (1580), ‘To the Christian Reader’, sig. A3v.

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The vast majority of Ussher’s surviving sermon material is therefore derived from notes taken by hearers.102 These are not the ipsissima verba of Ussher and are a more accurate reflection of what was heard rather than what was spoken, but they need not be dismissed out of hand for that reason. This period witnessed the development of systems of shorthand which enabled listeners to record what they heard with much greater accuracy than had previously been possible. Note-taking during sermons became commonplace, and the notes could afterwards be read out for the benefit of others or written out in full. When Lodewijck Huygens visited the church at Covent Garden in 1652, he estimated that over fifty people were taking down the sermon.103 Arnold Hunt has surveyed the evidence for the accuracy of shorthand during this period and concluded that it cannot be expected to deliver a perfect record of what was said if ‘modern standards of textual purity’ are applied, but ‘when it was skilfully used, it lived up to its promise as the new high-fidelity recording technology of the early modern period’.104 Even the sermons that Ussher published are subject to questions of textual instability. Hunt’s research has shown that when preachers published their sermons, the printed text was frequently something quite different to what had actually been said. Many preachers, Ussher among them, spoke from brief notes. A subsequent publication might be based on these notes, but the medium invariably changed the message with a loss of orality and shifts in emphasis tailored to the literate consumer. The preacher was now an author, with a different audience in mind. The published text might therefore carry a sense of authorial imprimatur, but the reader has been carried away from the sermon as ‘event’, a phenomenon often captured more faithfully by the note-taking auditors. One must therefore be mindful of ‘the indeterminacy of sermon texts and the impossibility of ever establishing an “authentic” version’.105

102. It should be noted that the same can be said for many of the extant sermons of Ussher’s contemporaries such as John Preston and Richard Sibbes. 103. Huygens, The English Journal, 1651–1652, 55. 104. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 142–147 (145f ). Much of the research on early modern shorthand systems has been carried out by literary scholars investigating the possibility that the early Shakespeare quartos were based on shorthand accounts. 105. Ibid., 145. This is frankly acknowledged by Ussher: ‘The very words which then I uttered, I am not able to present vnto you: the substance of the matter I haue truly laid downe, though in some places (as it fell out) somewhat contracted, in others a little more inlarged’, The Svbstance of That Which Was Delivered in a Sermon before the Commons (1621), sig. A3r–v.

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Notes on Other Sources Occasional reference will be made to A Body of Divinitie, a lengthy and highly detailed catechism which provides a degree of precision sometimes lacking in Ussher’s preaching.106 It was published under Ussher’s name by John Downame in 1645, and Ussher was quick to distance himself from it. Writing to Downame, he complained that the catechism ‘is none of mine, but transcribed out of Mr. Cartwrights Catechisme, and Mr. Crooks, and some other English Divines . . . a kinde of Common-place-book, where other mens judgements and reasons are simply laid down, though not approved in all points . . . and in divers places dissonant from mine own judgement’.107 Bernard reports that the material had been used by Ussher in both public and household catechising and that upon hearing that others were finding it useful, his initial displeasure about the publication abated.108 The work exhibits a literary and theological unity quite unlike the commonplaces found in Ussher’s manuscripts, though the extent to which this reflects the editorial intervention of Downame cannot be ascertained. That Ussher had used the material in catechesis does imply a degree of ownership, if not authorship in the strictest sense. References to A Body of Divinitie in the text of this study will therefore be clearly indicated, and no arguments rest on it alone. Another problematic source is the material included in a tract relating the Strange and Remarkable Prophecies of James Ussher. This was first published in 1678 in the early days of the Romophobic hysteria triggered by the fictitious Popish Plot and recycled many times thereafter.109 Building on the Protestant prophet motif found in Bernard’s biography, it focuses on the elderly archbishop’s warning to the narrator of a ‘very great Persecution’ which would befall the Reformed churches of the three kingdoms

106. James Ussher, A Body of Divinitie, or, the Svmme and Svbstance of Christian Religion (1645). 107. Nicholas Bernard, The Judgement of the Late Arch-Bishop of Armagh, Of the Extent of Christs Death, and Satisfaction, &c. (1657), II.24f. For a crude attempt at source division, see the editorial notes and table in James Ussher, A Body of Divinity: Or, the Sum and Substance of Christian Religion, ed. by Hastings Robinson (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1841), vii–ix, xv–xviii. 108. Bernard, Life, 41f; Ford, James Ussher, 81f. 109. Strange and Remarkable Prophesies and Predictions of the Holy, Learned, and excellent James Usher (1678); cf. for example, Bishop Ushers Second Prophesie (1681); The Prophecy of Bishop Usher (1687).

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at the hands of the papists. ‘Formal Christians’ or ‘Outward worshippers’ would be swept away, and only those united to Christ and truly consecrated to him preserved. The pamphlet thus served as a call to ‘that Repentance and Reformation, which can only prevent our Ruine and Destruction’.110 The Ussher prophecy pamphlet has been linked to the name of Robert Ware, who was exposed as a shameless forger by Thomas Bridgett in the nineteenth century. Bridgett showed how Ware passed off his own fabrications as the work of his father, Sir James Ware, a respected historian and protégé of Ussher. He thus managed to deceive Gilbert Burnet and, more significantly, John Strype, through whom his inventions live on in Reformation historiography to this day. There was a distinct anti-Catholic edge to Ware’s programme against the background of the Exclusion Bill crisis and the Popish Plot, a context into which the pamphlet spoke directly. Bridgett states that Ware printed the prophecy pamphlet but provides no evidence for this assertion. He stopped short of openly denouncing the work as a counterfeit, but claimed that Ware, having heard of Ussher’s earlier prophetic feats, ‘improved the opportunity’.111 Diarmaid MacCulloch goes further and describes the pamphlet as ‘the first of Ware’s fictions’, the reception of which spurred him on towards something of a career in forgery. MacCulloch makes a strong case for Ware’s involvement on the basis of stylistic features and occasion.112 Should the account of the prophecy therefore be consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps not. MacCulloch’s case, as strong as it appears, relies on circumstantial evidence. Furthermore, there is nothing in the pamphlet that would seem to be out of character when compared with Ussher’s sermons from this late period. Far from mellowing in his old

110. Strange and Remarkable Prophesies, 5–7, 1. For the relationship between this pamphlet and Bernard’s biography, see Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘“The Spirit of Prophecy Has Not Wholly Left the World”: The Stylisation of Archbishop James Ussher as a Prophet’, in Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, ed. by Helen Parish and W. G. Naphy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 119–132. 111. Thomas E. Bridgett, ‘Robert Ware: Or, a Rogue and His Dupes’, in Blunders and Forgeries: Historical Essays, 2nd edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1891), 209–296 (238–241). Bridgett is followed by Philip Wilson, ‘The Writings of James Ware and the Forgeries of Robert Ware’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 15 (1920), 83–94. 112. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Foxes, Firebrands, and Forgery: Robert Ware’s Pollution of Reformation History’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 307–346.

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age, Ussher could still reach the highest pitch of anti-papal rhetoric. In 1650, he warned his congregation at Lincoln’s Inn that afflictions are cominge upon us: wee grow lasye: so God will rowse us up: you must not thinke that the Papists, and Jesuites are idle all this while: they are workinge, and you shall finde it . . . The Jesuites are spitt out of the Devils mouth: they are workinge and gathering to the Battel: cominge to cut your throates. Just as in the 1678 pamphlet, this admonition is linked to a call to sanctification. The one who shall escape the coming wrath is ‘hee that is carefull to doe Good works’.113 This is not untypical. Ussher frequently spoke of a coming ‘storme’ of affliction for which Christians must be prepared.114 Finally, the existence of manuscript accounts of Ussher’s prophecy of a great persecution, which include none of the material found in Bernard’s biography, opens the possibility that this narrative was circulating in manuscript prior to its redaction in the 1678 pamphlet and prior to the Popish Plot.115 None of this is conclusive but rather cautions against a too-hasty rejection of this fascinating text. The solitary reference to it in this study would therefore seem justified but also necessarily qualified. Some use has been made of Ussher’s library. After his death, this vast collection was inventoried and transported to Dublin.116 Major Anthony Morgan, one of the agents appointed by Henry Cromwell to oversee the transfer, found ‘very few books wanting which were in the [earlier] Catalouge’.117 The original intention was to bestow the library on a new college in Dublin, but the plans for this new foundation never came to fruition. After the restoration of Charles II, the library was instead donated to Trinity College and thus returned to Ussher’s alma mater, largely intact

113. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 154v (Sermon on Tit. 3:14, 1650), with reference to Rev. 16:13. 114. For example, ibid., fol. 123v (Sermon on 1 Pet. 4:12, 1649). 115. Bodl., MS Cherry 19, fols 60r–62r; National Library of Ireland, MS 17,853. It has not been possible to date these though the former is likely a copy made in the 1690s of an earlier source. The English is not as smooth and polished as that of the 1678 pamphlet. Their shorter and more difficult readings, by the normal rules of textual criticism, would suggest an earlier date. See also BL, MS Stowe 182, fols 24r–25v. 116. T. C. Barnard, ‘The Purchase of Archbishop Ussher’s Library in 1657’, Long Room, 4 (1971), 9–14. 117. Anthony Morgan to Henry Cromwell, 21 April 1657, in BL, MS Lansdowne 822, fol. 53r.

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despite its owner’s peregrination.118 It has therefore been possible to examine Ussher’s copies of specific works and this has, in some cases, yielded marginal annotations and other evidence of interaction relevant to this study. The concluding chapter of this study discusses some of the possibilities and limitations of this source for the student of Ussher’s theology. A great danger in handling this diverse material is the ease with which one can drift into an ahistorical systematising of Ussher’s thought. It is left for the reader to judge how successful the author has been in resisting this temptation but it will be seen that there is no attempt to iron out every apparent contradiction or harmonise every dissonant note in these sources. In any case, one of the more important contributions of this study to the understanding of Ussher lies in its demonstration of the way in which he changed his mind on a number of important issues.

118. The catalogue of Ussher’s library as presented to Trinity College, Dublin, can be found in TCD, MS 6 (a fair copy of TCD, MS 5). Whilst at Trinity College, Ussher would, of course, have had access to the College’s library and the collections of colleagues such as Luke Challoner. Indeed, it seems that the libraries of Ussher and Challoner functioned to supplement that of the college, the private libraries performing a public service. Lists of titles on loan or missing from Ussher’s library at various times can be found, for example, in TCD, MS 793, fol. 169r–v; Bodl., MS Add. C299, fols iiir–v, 8v–12r; Bodl., MS Rawlinson D1290, fols 1r–2v, 162r–v, and fragment of old parchment cover inside front board. On the evolution of this collection, see Hugh Jackson Lawlor, ‘Primate Ussher’s Library before 1641’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 3rd series, 6 (1900), 216–264; Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Libraries and Learning: The Early History of Trinity College, Dublin from 1592 to 1641’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Dublin, 1995); idem, ‘The Libraries of Luke Challoner and James Ussher, 1595–1608’, in European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation, ed. by Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 75–115; idem, ‘Libraries and Collectors, 1550–1700’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800, ed. by Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 91–110.

2

Lubricus Locus—The Nature and Extent of the Atonement

king james sent the British delegates to the Synod of Dort with the instruction that ‘your endevour shall be that certaine positions be moderatly layd downe, which may tend to the mitigation of heat on both sides’.1 If the delegates were under any illusions about the difficulty of their task, these would have been dispelled in January 1619 at the moment when the Groningen theologian Franciscus Gomarus threw his glove to the floor, challenging Matthias Martinius of Bremen to a duel. This would not be the only time that Gomarus demanded satisfaction. Gomarus was incensed by the way in which Martinius spoke of Christ as fundamentum electionis.2 Gomarus and other Contra-Remonstrants held that God first decreed the salvation of some individual sinners and then decreed the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to fulfil the antecedent decree of election. Christ was portrayed as the executor of the Father’s will. The Remonstrants, by contrast, believed that in positing Christ as the foundation of election, they strengthened their case for inverting the order of the decrees, with that of Christ’s work preceding that of election to salvation and thus assuming broader dimensions. Robert Godfrey has suggested that, as a foreign delegate, Martinius was unaware of the geography of the Dutch polemical landscape. He employed the term to emphasise the centrality of Christ in

1. The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619), ed. by Anthony Milton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 94. On James’s involvement with the Synod in the context of his wider diplomatic policy, see W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; pbk edn, 2000), 260–292. 2. John Hales, Golden Remains, of the Ever Memorable, Mr. John Hales, 2nd edn (1673), II.86–88.

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election, unaware of its connotations.3 Even if Godfrey is correct, this incident shows the temperature to which debates touching on the intent and extent of the atonement could rise in the early seventeenth century. Although today’s debates on the extent of the atonement have not threatened to turn violent in the same way, the doctrine of limited or definite atonement, the belief that Christ died for the elect only, ‘continues to be one of the most controversial teachings in Reformed soteriology’.4 In particular, there is intense debate about John Calvin’s position on the issue and hence the nature of ‘authentic Calvinism’.5 Neither side has been able to claim an outright victory in this debate. This may be the result of tensions intrinsic to Calvin’s thought. The language he used about the cross appears by turns universal and particular, resulting in a legacy that has recently been described as ‘a complexio oppositorum, and therefore inherently unstable’.6 These tensions, however, may be more apparent than real, the confusion produced by his modern interpreters’ attempts to read him through the lens of subsequent debates.7 This chapter is not concerned with Calvin’s views, but will give some consideration to the historiographical model often encountered in the current debate, which pitches the warm, biblical humanism of Calvin against the cold, rational scholasticism of his successors. This chapter explores Ussher’s hypothetical universalism, his belief that Christ died for all humanity, making salvation possible upon the condition of faith. Unlike the Arminians, hypothetical universalists of Ussher’s ilk affirmed special election and maintained the necessity of God’s

3. William Robert Godfrey, ‘Tensions within International Calvinism: The Debate on the Atonement at the Synod of Dort, 1618–1619’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1974), 152. 4. Raymond A. Blacketer, ‘Definite Atonement in Historical Perspective’, in The Glory of the Atonement, ed. by Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James III (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 304–323 (304). 5. Alan C. Clifford, Calvinus: Authentic Calvinism—A Clarification (Norwich: Charenton Reformed Publishing, 1996). See also R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism, 13–28. The opposing view is stated in Paul Helm, Calvin and the Calvinists (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982); Jonathan H. Rainbow, The Will of God and the Cross: An Historical and Theological Study of John Calvin’s Doctrine of Limited Redemption (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1990). 6. G. Michael Thomas, The Extent of the Atonement: A Dilemma for Reformed Theology from Calvin to the Consensus (Bletchley: Paternoster, 1997), 34. 7. P. L. Rouwendal, ‘Calvin’s Forgotten Classical Position on the Extent of the Atonement: About Sufficiency, Efficiency, and Anachronism’, Westminster Theological Journal, 70 (2008), 317–335.

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special grace in the application of the redemption obtained at the cross. This is the sense in which ‘hypothetical universalism’ is used in much modern scholarship and is the convention followed here. Hypothetical universalists challenged the doctrine of limited atonement articulated by Theodore Beza and William Perkins: the teaching that whilst Christ’s death was of infinite value, it was intended for the salvation of the elect alone. They proposed a different reading of Peter Lombard’s distinction between the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice for all and its efficacy for the elect.8 With the escalating tension of the Remonstrant controversy in the Netherlands, hypothetical universalists offered a mediating position between high Calvinism and Arminianism, and thus the hope of peace.

Christ and the Cross Before considering his participation in the controversy over the extent of the atonement, it is worth pausing to examine the wider dimensions of Ussher’s preaching of Christ and the cross. In his seminal study of Puritanism, William Haller emphasises the inward turn in Puritan preaching, a decisive shift from the historia redemptionis towards the ordo salutis. Haller writes: The Puritan saga did not cherish the memory of Christ in the manger or on the cross, that is, of the lamb of God sacrificed in vicarious atonement for the sins of man. The mystic birth was the birth of the new man in men. The mystic passion was the crucifixion of the new man by the old, and the true propitiation was the sacrifice of the old to the new.9 The dominant metaphors in Haller’s account are pilgrimage and battle, ‘wayfaring and warfaring’, and the historical events of nativity and passion 8. Lombard, Libri quattuor sententiarum, 3, dist. 20.3 (PL, 192, col. 799). An important work which promises to reshape the entire scholarly discussion around this issue is Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012), 70–160. It was not available in time for its findings to be incorporated into this study. 9. Haller, Rise of Puritanism, 151. Haller appears to drive Puritanism towards the ‘spiritual religion’ described by Ernst Troeltsch. This ‘feels no need of the doctrine of the Atonement . . . and it has no interest in the doctrine of the Incarnation’. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. by Olive Wyon, 2 vols (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), 2.747.

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‘those episodes of the Biblical story which the Puritans found least congenial and expressive’.10 If Haller were correct — and the veracity of his portrayal is considered below — the extent to which Ussher follows or bucks this trend must be considered in any assessment of the degree to which he should be regarded as a Puritan. In Ussher’s thought, the incarnation of Christ is one of the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, second only to that of the Trinity.11 The incarnation is the most wonderful of God’s mighty works, revealing the height of his wisdom, goodness, power, and glory.12 Christ took on human nature, filling the tabernacle of our flesh with his glory. Unlike the Old Testament Christophanies, when Christ took flesh ‘as a man takes his garment which he puts of againe’, the incarnation is a ‘fast and inseparable union’.13 In the ‘uncompounded and unconfounded’ union of the two natures was tied an ‘indissoluble knot betwixt our human nature and his Deity’.14 Ussher meditates on this deep mystery of ‘our dust and ashes assumed into the undivided unity of God’s own person’, amazed that like the burning bush our nature was not consumed.15 Admitted into the unity of Christ’s sacred person, the assumed human nature was elevated in dignity and worthy to be crowned with glory and honour, but Christ had chosen a different course: ‘He being Son of God, might, as soon as he was born, have challenged a seat with God in glory: he need not have gone per viam, he might be comprehensor in meta: but he would pass on to his journey’s end in a thorny and troublesome way’.16

10. Haller, Rise of Puritanism, 141, 312. 11. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 43v (Sermon on Jn. 1:14, 1642). 12. Ussher, Immanuel, or the Mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God (1638), in WJU, 4.578. For a discussion of this work, see Ian Hugh Clary, ‘“The Conduit to Conveigh Life”: James Ussher’s Immanuel and Patristic Christology’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology, 30 (2012), 160–176. 13. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 15r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 14. Ussher, Immanuel (1638), in WJU, 4.581, 584. 15. Ibid., 4.586. 16. WJU, 13.130 (Sermon on Phil. 2:5–8, 1640); cf. Ussher, Immanuel (1638), in WJU, 4.593. There is implicit disapproval of the Thomist simul viator et comprehensor in Ussher’s teaching on the state of humiliation. See, for an example of this construction, Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae, De veritate, q. 10 a.11 ad 3. For a more strident repudiation, see Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. by G. M. Giger, 3 vols (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1994), topic 13, q. 13.12–13 (2.351f ).

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Christ became Immanuel in the flesh ‘that he might be Emanuel in office’, the medium whereby God and man might be reconciled.17 As ‘a midle person betweene God and man’ he would have an interest in both natures and thus be able to stand between the two parties as mediator of a covenant.18 Incarnation would make possible the only sacrifice that could obtain redemption. Ussher wrote, ‘the Manhood could suffer, but not overcome the sharpness of death: the Godhead could suffer nothing, but overcome any thing’.19 It was necessary that Christ be man in order to suffer and die on the cross, and necessary that he be God in order that the suffering of the human nature be of infinitely great value, that the one sacrificed might take up his life again, and that he might subsequently send his Spirit to apply the benefits of his redemption to sinners.20 His formulation of the doctrine allows Ussher to urge his hearers, ‘Consider the invaluable price that was paid for thee, and how great he was who paid it . . . the second person of the blessed Trinity, in proper speech, without either trope or figure, shed his blood for thee, died for thee’.21 Crawford Gribben sets up his stimulating exploration of Ussher’s position on the intent and extent of the atonement with this quotation;22 however, it is of questionable relevance to the ensuing discussion. Read in context, the accent clearly falls on ‘the second person of the blessed Trinity’ rather than ‘for thee’ and has little to do with the extent of the atonement and everything to do with the propriety of language based on the communication of the attributes of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ. This is the point at which Ussher is on guard against tropological incursion, as can be seen more clearly in an earlier sermon: whatsoever is performed in either nature is most truly verified of the whole person. And that makes the price of our redempcion of infinite valew, whatsoever is done by the divine or humane nature is properlie verified of the whole person of Christ so that, it is as 17. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 20v (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 18. Ibid., fol. 21r. Elsewhere, Ussher illustrates this with the story of the Sabine women who threw themselves and their children between their Sabine fathers and Roman husbands to avert war. Ussher, Immanuel (1638), in WJU, 4.587. 19. Ussher, Immanuel (1638), in WJU, 4.599. 20. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fols 36r–39v (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 21. WJU, 13.131 (Sermon on Phil. 2:5–8, 1640). 22. Crawford Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the Death of Jesus Christ’, The Seventeenth Century, 20 (2005), 53–76 (53).

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true that the second person of the Trinity shed his bloud as it is true the second person of the Trinitie created the world: not by any trope or figure (as some unadvisedlie interpret it) the foundacion of our salvacion stands on the propertie of that speich. That is, that without all tropes or figures the bloud of the second person of the Trinitie was shedd, for this is the ground, whatsoever is done in either nature is verified of the whole person.23 Only insofar as this communication of the attributes confers an infinite value on the sacrifice offered might this remark have a bearing on the extent of the atonement. But both sides in the debate could affirm as much. As discussed below, Ussher found such concepts of sufficiency insufficient. Ussher sees great significance in Christ’s circumcision, the first shedding of his blood. This is a bond to his Father, signed in blood, whereby he put himself under the law on our behalf, binding himself to perform that obedience which we could not perform ourselves.24 This motif was commonplace and is reflected in the Collect for 1st January in the Book of Common Prayer.25 However, Ussher goes further, developing an idea found in the Church Fathers that Christ’s circumcision foreshadowed the perfect circumcision of the cross.26 Christ was not only pledging obedience to the law but also pledging to pay the debt of penalty by which consciences would be made clean. These first drops of Christ’s blood were ‘a pawne and pledge that all the rest should follow, that all the bloud in his veynes should be shed for the redempcion of his Church’.27 The blood shed at Christ’s circumcision was thus an obligation for both his active and passive obedience, the fulfilment of the law in his life and the satisfaction of his suffering and death.28

23. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fols 26v–27r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 24. Ussher, Immanuel (1638), in WJU, 4.594. 25. The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1552: With Other Documents Set Forth in the Reign of King Edward VI, ed. by Joseph Kelly (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 45, 241f. January 1st was the traditional date in the West for the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord, on which see ODCC, s.v. ‘Circumcision, Feast of the’. 26. For example, Ambrose, Epistola, 78.2–4 (PL, 16, col. 1268A–C); Augustine, Epistola 23.4 (PL, 33, cols 96–97). This is also found in The Commentary of Dr. Zacharius Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, trans. by G. W. Willard, 2nd edn (Columbus, OH: Scott and Bascom, 1852), 376. 27. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 5r–v (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1 January 1626). 28. Ibid., fol. 4v.

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As Ussher contemplates the death of Christ, he often lingers on the details. He believed that God created the world in six days rather than one so that we would consider his work of creation piece by piece in our meditations.29 This is also the way to reflect daily on the greater work of redemption, not thinking generally of the cross, but rather envisaging sorrow upon sorrow. ‘Let it cost yow alitle paynes to heare and thinke of it . . . and we shall find it a marvailous meanes to extend our love to Christ, and to fasten our hartes to him’.30 This is why in his preaching he seeks to paint a picture, directing our gaze to the cross of Christ. In one sermon, he invites us to ‘conceive’, to ‘imagine him before your eyes thus represented’, as he catalogues the sufferings of the vir dolorum.31 He ponders the horror of crucifixion, a punishment about which Cicero could scarcely bring himself to speak, the accursedness of dying on a tree in the eyes of the Jews, and the shame of Christ’s nakedness, ‘however the painters may lie in it’.32 Then follows an account of the mechanics of crucifixion and the painful, protracted death that its victims suffered.33 These were outward things, however. Christ suffered not only at the hands of the Jews, but also at the hand of the Father. On the cross, he ‘received the sword of God up to the very hiltes in his soule’.34 This is an important point for Ussher. Christ assumed the whole nature of man and suffered in both body and soul in order to redeem both body and soul.35 Unlike the Christian martyrs who faced death in the body with joy, the

29. An idea found in Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. by John King (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), 78, 92. 30. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fols 40v–41r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 31. WJU, 13.153 (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1640); cf. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fols 41v–51r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 32. WJU, 13.151f (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1640), with reference to Deut. 12:23 and Cicero, In Verrem, 5. 33. Ibid., 13.153f. 34. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 49r–v (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 35. The following syllogism is found amongst notes on the subject in Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 209r: ‘Wherby Adam first, and we ever since do most properlye committ sinne, by the same hath Christ our second Adam made satisfaction for our sinne. But Adam first, and we ever since most properlye committe sinne in our soules, our bodies being but the instruments of our soules, and following the soules direction and will. Ergo Christ in his soule chiefelye peculiarly and most properlye made satisfaction for us.’ Here Ussher makes reference to and clearly draws from the discussion in Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi, 3rd edn (1600), 1003–1008.

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prospect of suffering in his soul brought Christ fear. He knew all along what kind of death he would die and ‘all his joyes in this world were many tymes ecclipsed with the consideracion of it . . . a continewall Crucifixateing to him’.36 In this sense ‘he suffered before he suffered’, enduring this fear so that we might be saved from it.37 On the cross, God condemned sin in the flesh of Christ.38 The human nature was sacrificed on the altar of the divine. Christ’s divine nature had upheld the human so that it might remain spotless and now it sanctified the offering. Just as the Levitical burnt offerings had been upheld by an altar of brass that could withstand the violence of the fire, so Christ’s divine nature upheld the human under the violence of God’s wrath and ‘made it of that infinite valew, that if Adam and all his sonnes had suffered world without end in hell fire it had not beene answerable to this sacrifice’.39 Reflecting on the cry of dereliction (Mt. 27:46), Ussher indicates that the sense of dereliction was in the human nature only, and then only in the lower part of the soul, the seat of passion, not the upper part, the seat of reason. Ussher attributes the words ‘My God, my God’ to reason, and the words ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ to passion.40 This rests on the distinction between the rational soul and the sensitive soul found in the medieval scholastics.41 Aquinas used this distinction to maintain his simul viator et comprehensor model, Christ’s very real sufferings in the sensitive soul in no way impeding, perturbing, or overwhelming his exercise

36. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 45r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 37. Ibid., fol. 46r. 38. WJU, 13.161 (Sermon on Jn. 1:12, 1640). Ussher paraphrases Rom. 8:3 thus: ‘God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and in that flesh of his condemned all our sins’. 39. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 36r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). On Christ’s divine nature as altar, fols 34v–36r; cf. Balliol, MS 259, II, fols 379r–380r (Sermon on 1 Jn. 5:8, c. 1624); WJU, 13.515 (Sermon on Gal. 4:4, c. 1624), 161 (Sermon on Jn. 1:12, 1640). 40. WJU, 13.157 (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1640). This parallels the sermon notes on Mt. 27:46 found in WJU, 17.xxiv–xxvi where the dereliction is of Christ’s human nature, and ‘only so far forth as concerneth the bodie, and of the soul that part wherein passions and affections doe reside’ (xxv; cf. WRH, 5.400.4–6). The notes of this and two other sermons were included in WJU, 17, but their origin has been attributed to Richard Hooker in P. G. Stanwood and Laetitia Yeandle, ‘Three Manuscript Sermon Fragments by Richard Hooker’, Manuscripta, 21 (1977), 33–37. They can be found in WRH, 5.399–417. 41. For example, Lombard, Libri quattuor sententiarum, 3, dist. 17.2 (PL, 192, col. 790); Kevin Madigan, The Passions of Christ in High-Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 79f.

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of reason and his enjoyment of the visio Dei.42 Ussher takes a different line and argues that when Christ prayed in Gethsemane that the cup might pass from him (Mt. 26:39) his words ‘proceeded from the seat of passion, which while it is disturbed, reason suspends its acts’. The turmoil of Christ’s sensitive soul does not therefore overwhelm the rational soul, changing the direction of the will, but it does result in ‘a suspension of his faculties for a time’.43 Christ had not forgotten his mission, but momentarily he did not remember it. If that lower part of his soul was subject to such fear and heaviness in the garden as he approached the maelstrom, what must he have suffered as he cried to his Father from the cross? Ussher rejected the widespread notion that Christ had suffered the pains of hell on the cross. This idea is found in Calvin and was popularised in England by the Geneva Bible44 and served as an explanation of the descent clause of the Apostles’ Creed over against Lutheran and Catholic views of a literal descent into hell.45 Even after some English Reformed divines abandoned it as an explanation for the creedal statement, it remained integral to their formulation of atonement theology.46 Ussher insists that whilst Christ suffered ‘Hellish Paynes’ on the cross, he did not,

42. For example, Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, IIIa q. 46 aa. 7–8. A helpful discussion may be found in Paul Gondreau, The Passions of Christ’s Soul in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2009), esp. 366–372, 441–452. This is also the view evident in the Hooker sermon: ‘concerning the intellectual parte of the soul, that part wherin dwelleth reason, judgement, and the apprehension of truth, the light of the countenance of God therein shining could not possibly be put out’, WJU, 17.xxv (cf. WRH, 5.400.6–9). 43. WJU, 13.156 (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1640); cf. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 59r (Sermon on Isa. 53:10, 1648): ‘the Extraordinary torment, and terror, that was upon Him Suspended His memory of what hee came to doe: the inferior Sensitive Part of his Soule moved Him to that, which the Superior Rational Part yielded not to’. 44. Calvin, Institutes, 2.16.8–12; Geneva Bible, notes on Ps. 16:10; Mt. 26:37; 27:46; Eph. 4:8; 1 Pet. 3:19. For a further example, see George Gifford, A Catechisme conteining the summe of Christian Religion (1583), sigs B4v–B8r. 45. For the range of views abroad in this period and their changing fortunes, see Dewey D. Wallace Jr., ‘Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 69 (1978), 248–287; Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 114–130. 46. Perkins commends the basic idea as ‘good and true’ whilst rejecting it as an explanation of the Creed in favour of ‘hee was held captiue in the graue, and lay in bondage vnder death’. William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (1595), in WWP, 1.233.

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properly speaking, suffer the pains of hell.47 What makes hell to be hell is the gnawing worm of a guilty conscience, hopeless desperation, separation from God and aversion to him. Christ was innocent, and unlike those in hell could not curse God. Christ suffered not the pains of hell, but the wrath of God against sin, by immediate impression of torments upon his soul. Nor did Christ’s soul descend into hell. Ussher envisages a journey in the opposite direction. Christ ‘entered through the vail of his flesh unto his Father . . . his soul and body were pulled asunder, and through the vail of his flesh, as it were with blood about his ears, he entered the Holy of holies, saying, Lord, here am I in my blood’.48 Christ presented himself before the Father, presented the blood of expiation which opened up a way for sinners to enter boldly the holy place. Thus far Ussher’s thought corresponds closely to that of Hugh Broughton, the most querulous of the polemicists to debate the matter,49 but Ussher goes further. In An Answer to a Jesuit, as he concludes his most extensive discussion of the subject, he seeks to preserve the patristic language of the ‘spoiling’ or ‘harrowing’ of hell, albeit in a restricted sense. By ensuring that his people would never go there, Christ delivered their souls from hell. In this sense Christ did descend to hell, ‘in a virtual manner’.50 Christ’s death had an effect on the infernal regions even if he did not visit in person. On a number of occasions Ussher touches on the question of whether Christ’s death as a satisfaction for sin was necessary on the basis of God’s essential justice or a matter of God’s decree. If God were to forgive sinners, was Christ’s death demanded by God’s being or merely his will? In addressing this question Ussher makes use of the medieval distinction

47. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 58r (Sermon on Isa. 53:10, 1648); cf. WJU, 13.155f (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1640). 48. WJU, 13.158 (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1640). 49. For a representative sample, see Hugh Broughton, Two little workes defensiue of our Redemption, That our Lord went through the veile of his flesh into Heaven, to appeare before God for vs (Middleburg, 1604); idem, An Explication of the Article κατθεν ε δου, of our Lordes soules going from his body to Paradise (Amsterdam?, 1605). In addition to his polemical onslaught against Bishop Thomas Bilson and others who held to a literal descent, Broughton made himself unwelcome in Geneva by attacking Calvin’s interpretation. John Strype, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift, D.D., 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), 2.322f. 50. Ussher, An Answer to a Challenge Made by a Jesuit in Ireland (1625), in WJU, 3.278–419. On the ‘harrowing’ of hell, see 414–417.

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between the absolute power (potentia Dei absoluta) and ordained power of God (potentia Dei ordinata). The most explicit statements are these: Christ might have said to his Father, have mercy upon these, for my Sake: And whatsoever He askt of his Father, hee would give it him. wee dispute not his Absolute Power. But Sinne is so hatefull to God, that there must bee visible Amends made: Christ is the Propitiation.51 God out of his Power could have forgiven us freely: as Princes can doe without impeachment of justice: God would not use His free pardon; He would not justifie a Sinner By bare forgivenes, but Christ must Pay a Price for it, His owne Pretious bloud: which shewes both the love and justice of God, And the uglines of Sinne: a base affront offered to God by dust, and ashes, God would not put up By a bare forgivenes but hee must have satisfaction for the wrong that hee had from the hand of man.52 Ussher clearly states that according to his absolute power God could have freely granted remission of sins without Christ’s satisfaction. This was a course of action within the realm of possibility but not actually chosen. The implication is that Christ’s satisfaction is simply according to God’s ordained power. That remission depends on Christ’s satisfaction is thus a function of God’s will rather than something necessitated by his being. It is a means that God has chosen and to which he has committed himself. This was a position adopted by Aquinas and Calvin, and that was common among Reformed theologians.53 That the cross serves as a demonstration of God’s love is clear from the second of these passages, but the dominant note in both is the cross as a 51. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 52v (Sermon on Phil. 2:6, 1647). 52. Ibid., fol. 214r (Sermon on Rom. 4:25, 1651). 53. Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, IIIa q. 46 a. 4; Calvin, NTC, 5.100, on John 15:13; idem, Institutes, 2.12.1; 17.1; cf. CO, 46, col. 833 (Sermon on Mt. 26:36–39): ‘Et defait il nous pouvoit bien retirer des abysmes de mort d’une autre façon: mais il a voulu desployer les thresors de sa bonte infinie, quand il n’a point espargné son Fils unique’. Just before this Calvin says that one of the ‘trois fins’ that Scripture proposes to us when it speaks of our salvation is ‘que nous ayons nos pechez en telle detestation qu’il appartient, et que nous soyons droitement confus pour nous humilier devant la maiesté de nostre Dieu’. For an account of another British theologian’s change of mind on this question, see Carl R. Trueman, ‘John Owen’s Dissertation on Divine Justice: An Exercise in Christocentric Scholasticism’, Calvin Theological Journal, 33 (1998), 87–103.

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demonstration of God’s justice. Sin is ‘hatefull’ and an ‘affront’ to him. God hates sin but not, it seems, so much that he has to punish it according to the nature of his being. Christ’s death makes ‘visible Amends’ and ‘shewes . . . the justice of God’. Ussher has already posited free remission within the realm of God’s absolute power, so at the cross justice is seen to be done rather than done out of absolute necessity if sin is to be forgiven. It demonstrates ‘the uglines of sinne’ and consequently the gracious mercy of God in salvation. Returning to Haller’s comments, it is clear that Ussher does not fit his stereotype of the Puritan. But one must wonder how many Puritans would fit this stereotype. There certainly were subjective tendencies in Puritanism, taken by some to extremes, but to deny that Puritans cherished the cross is an overstatement. Often, it was simply presupposed. For example, although Richard Rogers began his Seven Treatises on the Christian life with a discussion of the primacy of faith, that faith was faith in the completed work of Christ.54 For Rogers and many others, the ordo salutis was grounded firmly in the historia redemptionis. That said, Ussher does not simply presuppose the cross, but expounds the events of the passion at some length. Why the difference? Two reasons may be suggested. First, unlike many Puritans, Ussher never broke entirely free from observing the liturgical calendar, the cycle of which brought the events of Christ’s life to mind again and again. Second, he was an historian gripped by an all-encompassing vision of God’s sovereign purposes in history. Historical events mattered. Another striking feature of Ussher’s preaching on the cross is the imaginative dimension. This is not the ‘invisible, abstract and didactic word’ that Patrick Collinson found this side of the Reformation watershed, in a culture suffering from ‘visual anorexia’ and in which an extreme iconoclasm penetrated even the recesses of the human mind.55 When Ussher invited his hearers to meditate on Christ’s passion and ‘imagine him before your eyes thus represented’ he was doing little more than Paul did in Galatia (Gal. 3:1). English Protestants were realistic about the limits of iconoclasm. William Perkins taught that the preached word brings a

54. Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (1603), 7f. 55. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 99, 119f. For an alternative view on the extent to which the residue of pre-Reformation visual culture influenced English Protestantism, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131–140.

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real presence of Christ. When the word is preached ‘the sound comes to the eare; and at the same instance the thing signified comes to the mind; and thus by relation the word and the thing spoken of, are both present together’.56 Both signifier and signified are present in what William Dyrness calls ‘a kind of mental transubstantiation’.57 Ussher’s aim in painting on the canvas of the imagination was affective. In directing the gaze to the crucifixion he sought to turn the heart to the crucified one. The cross was not a relic to be venerated, but ‘the foundacion of our rejoiceinge’.58

The Extent of the Atonement On the eve of the Synod of Dort deeper fissures became apparent in the English ‘Calvinist consensus’. Whilst some instinctively entrenched themselves in comfortably familiar particularist positions, for others the news of the Remonstrant crisis in the Netherlands was the occasion to question certain widely held tenets of Reformed doctrine. It was at this time that the elderly Essex non-conformist Ezekiel Culverwell circulated in manuscript his opinions on the preaching of the gospel. Culverwell took issue with the particularist interpretation of John 3:16, which limited ‘the world’ to the elect Jews and Gentiles.59 Whilst he acknowledged that God had decreed some to life and some to death, ‘his reveiled will is hee would have many to beleive and to bee saved who by ther owne fault perish and that god loves thees, and offers his sonn to them, that they might therby bee moved to accept his mercye offered, and bee saved’.60 The gospel should be preached to all because Christ was truly offered to all on the condition of believing, reprobate included, even if enjoyment of the benefits of that general offer are restricted to the elect. David Como has highlighted the pastoral concerns behind Culverwell’s hypothetical universalism and his desire to establish faith on a sufficient ground. Culverwell would further

56. William Perkins, A Reformed Catholicke (1598), in WWP, 1.590. 57. William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139; cf. 143–147, 181f. 58. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 40v (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). 59. For example, William Perkins, An Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles (1595), in WWP, 1.296. 60. Bodl., MS Rawlinson C849, fols 282r–283r (fol. 282v).

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develop this idea in A Treatise of Faith (1623), in which he sought to ground assurance on Christ rather than the evidence of the believer’s sanctification. Como writes, ‘if assurance was to be had by looking to Christ, Culverwell reasoned, it was necessary to stress the fact that Christ had died for all; otherwise Christ’s passion and death could hardly be seen as a source of security’.61 Culverwell’s manuscript issued a challenge to the doctrine of limited atonement and had the effect of drawing Ussher into the debate. Culverwell had given the manuscript to his brother-in-law Laurence Chaderton, octagenarian master of Emmanuel College and a supralapsarian particularist in the mould of Beza and Perkins.62 He in turn passed the manuscript to Ussher, and the surviving copy is annotated in Ussher’s hand.63 On 3 March 1618, Ussher sent his own thoughts to Culverwell in a paper entitled The True Intent and Extent of Christ’s Death and Satisfaction.64 He acknowledged that this was a slippery subject (lubricus locus) which ‘doth now much trouble the Church’, the dialogue dominated by ‘two extremities of opinions’.65 At one extreme, the benefits of Christ’s satisfaction were extended too far as if God were actually reconciled to mankind, discharging every man from his sins, with only lack of faith preventing them enjoying those benefits. The other extremity ‘contracts

61. 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. by Peter G. Lake and Michael C. Questier (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 64–87 (73); Ezekiel Culverwell, A Treatise of Faith (1623), 25f, 41f. 62. Chaderton had married Culverwell’s sister Cecily circa 1576: Patrick Collinson, ‘Chaderton, Laurence (1536?–1640)’, ODNB. On his relationship with Chaderton, see Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 37, 257–261. 63. Bodl., MS Rawlinson C849, fols 282r–283r. It is important to note that the critical annotations in Ussher’s hand which follow Culverwell’s treatise reflect Chaderton’s concerns rather than Ussher’s. These annotations are much more critical than one would expect from Ussher, whose own position was not that far from Culverwell’s, even if he chose to express himself in more judicious language. The comments and questions are Chaderton’s, copied onto the manuscript by Ussher. ‘Mr. Chaderton’ in the margin by the annotations does not denote the addressee, but mirrors ‘Mr. Culverwell’ at the head of the treatise. The note in the margin at the beginning of the document, ‘To his worshipfull his dear brother’, suggests that the treatise was sent first to Culverwell’s brother-in-law Chaderton, before being passed on to Ussher, rather than first to Ussher and then to Chaderton, contra Ford, James Ussher, 108. 64. This was published by Bernard after Ussher’s death in The Judgement of the Late ArchBishop of Armagh, . . . Of the Extent of Christs death, and satisfaction, &c., ed. by Nicholas Bernard (1657), I.1–18; reproduced in WJU, 12.551–560. 65. Ibid., 12.553.

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the riches of Christ’s satisfaction into too narrow a room; as if none had any kind of interest therein, but such as were elected before the foundation of the world’.66 Ussher sought to steer a middle course by positing a distinction between the satisfaction of Christ and its application. That satisfaction renders ‘the sins of mankind fit for pardon’, whereas ‘the particular application makes the sins of those to whom that mercy is vouchsafed to be actually pardoned’. ‘God is made placable to our nature’ by satisfaction, but not truly appeased until man receives Christ and his benefits. In this sense ‘all men may be said to have interest in the merits of Christ’, though not all are willing to partake.67 Ussher used the analogy of medicine prepared and medicine applied, an illustration which recurs frequently in his preaching.68 He safeguarded divine monergism by insisting that ‘when the remedy is prepared, we are never the nearer, except he be pleased of his free mercy to apply the same to us . . . for the universality of the satisfaction derogates nothing from the necessity of special grace in the application’.69 God would be glorified in our redemption and sinful man left with nothing of which to boast. Although this letter was probably intended for Culverwell’s eyes only, the recipient, finding in it support for his own ideas, began to circulate it amongst the Puritan clergy. By July, Ussher’s views were widely known, as his London correspondent Jasper Heartwell reported: there are now many copies of it scattered abroad, and it is much divulged, by some liked, and by some not . . . Divers who much reverence you, and know your sober carriage in the letter, think that, you expounding your own meaning, the universalists would get little by you, who are now glad that, as they conceive of it, you draw a little towards them.70

66. Ibid., 12.553f. 67. Ibid., 12.554f. 68. Ibid., 12.557, 559. 69. Ibid., 12.557f. 70. Heartwell to Ussher, 7 July 1618, in WJU, 16.356. Two years later Ussher’s letter was still raising eyebrows. In April 1620, one Thomas Aris wrote to Ussher: ‘there is a writing about this city of the sufficient satisfaction of Christ conteining in it sundry unsound assertions: many doubtfull, and all of them of very ill consequences: and it is sayd to be yours’. He desired a reply from Ussher disclaiming or retracting a list of twenty-eight objectionable propositions, or proving them ‘sound and Orthodoxall’. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 189r–v.

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Heartwell also warned Ussher to expect a written refutation from the Scottish pastor John Forbes, in exile at Middleburg. Bernard’s later account relates how a member of the British delegation carried a copy to the Synod of Dort, where objections were compiled in a letter to Ussher.71 Ussher lamented that his letter ‘without my privity came to so many men’s hands’, and was astonished at the opposition which it had provoked.72 Perhaps most hurtful was ‘Mr. Stock’s public opposition in the pulpit’. This ‘Mr. Stock’, most likely Richard Stock, favourite pupil of William Whitaker and now rector of All Hallows, Bread Street, London, had counted him among those ‘who make the universality of all the elect, and all men to be one’.73 Stock’s own insistence that the objects of atonement and the objects of election were co-extensive classes led to a reading of Ussher which, in the words of Crawford Gribben, ‘took the “hypothetical” out of hypothetical universalism’.74 Heartwell’s comments also demonstrate that the letter was being read in a variety of ways. Ussher felt pressured to clarify his position. Ussher’s second letter, An Answer of the Archbishop of Armagh, to Some Exceptions Taken Against his Aforesaid Letter, begins defensively in response to the accusations made against him. He rejected the charge of crypto-Catholicism because whilst he distinguished satisfaction and intercession, Christ remained the sole mediator in each case.75 He also rejected the charge of Arminianism, explaining that his first letter had been written specifically ‘to ward off the blow given by the Arminians’, and that although ‘I failed of mine intent, I ought to be accounted rather an oppugner than anywise an abettor of their fancies’.76 His difference with the Arminians was not on the point of the extent of the atonement, but rather

71. Bernard, in The Judgement (1657), sig. A3v, claims that this was the occasion of Ussher’s second letter. In the absence of supporting evidence, Jonathan Moore disputes Bernard’s account, thinking it more probable that an An Answer was written to pre-empt Forbes’s criticism. See Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 175f. 72. Ussher, An Answer of the Archbishop of Armagh, to Some Exceptions Taken Against his Aforesaid Letter, in WJU, 12.561–571 (563). This letter was first published in Bernard, ed., The Judgement (1657), I.19–40. 73. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.566. 74. Crawford Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology’, 68. 75. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.563. 76. Ibid., 12.565.

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its efficacy and application. They believed that Christ’s satisfaction ‘hath impetrated reconciliation and remission of sins’ for the world, and that consequently ‘God offereth unto every man those means that are necessary to salvation, both sufficiently and effectually’, the acceptance or rejection of the means depending on human free will.77 Ussher had also been accused of endorsing Culverwell’s opinions. If Culverwell had indeed taught that Christ so died for all that his death made reconciliation between God and all humanity, and that the reason why all did not enjoy this reconciliation was lack of faith, it was only because he was driven thereunto by the absurdities, which he discerned in the other extremity. . . . But those stumbling blocks being removed, and the plain word of truth laid open, by which faith is to be begotten, I dare boldly say he doth not hold that extremity wherewith he is charged, but followeth that safe and middle course, which I laid down.78 Ussher recognised the polarising tendencies of this theological debate, with participants on both sides driven to extremes by what they found objectionable in their opponents’ teaching. He discerned this process at work in William Ames’s reaction, in Ussher’s eyes an over-reaction, to the Remonstrant Nicholaas Grevinchovius: ‘in seeking to make straight that which was crooked in the Arminian opinion, he hath bended it too far the contrary way’.79 Ussher’s problem with the strict particularist position was its ‘extreme absurdity’.80 If Christ died for the elect only and in no sense (nullo modo) for others, it is preposterous to bind men and women to believe that Christ died for them. The reprobate are thereby bound in conscience to believe that which is untrue, encouraged to take hold of that in which they have no interest, condemned to eternal punishment for their lack of faith in a falsehood. The God of truth would command belief in an untruth. Ussher saw no hope for resolution of the present controversy as long the

77. Ibid., 12.564f. By contrast, Ussher locates impetration in Christ’s intercessory work rather than the satisfaction on the cross. 78. Ibid., 12.566. 79. Ibid., 12.564. 80. Ibid., 12.565.

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Arminians thought this was the only alternative open to them. His middle way had the potential to disarm the Arminians, vitiating some of their central arguments. It also reflected his pastoral concern, as he sought, like Culverwell, to establish faith on a sure foundation. Ussher acknowledged that ‘the principal end of the Lord’s death’ was the salvation of the elect. Particular language in Scripture itself precludes the possibility that all share in Christ’s death in the same way.81 Christ might be said to die ‘in a special manner’ for the elect, ‘but to infer from hence, that in no manner of respect he died for any others, is but a very weak collection’. Ussher repeated his earlier assertion that in offering himself for the sins of the world, Christ ‘intended by giving satisfaction to God’s justice to make the nature of man which he assumed, a fit subject for mercy’.82 All humanity, elect and reprobate alike, thus stand in a new relationship to God on account of Christ’s work. Christ can therefore be said in one respect to have died for all, and in another respect not to have died for all.83 If God is rendered placable, sins are now pardonable. Ussher’s previous letter had explained this fundamental change by a surprising appropriation of Roman Catholic vocabulary. All sins, wrote Ussher, are mortal in respect of the penalty due under the law, demonstrated by the necessity of Christ’s death to obtain redemption. However, ‘all the sins of mankind are become venal [lege venial], in respect of the price paid by Christ to his Father’.84 The distinction between mortal and venial sin is not employed to categorise sins by heinousness, but rather to consider the entirety of sin in these two different respects. If sins are now venial and therefore pardonable, the reason why all do not obtain actual pardon is that ‘most offenders do not take out, nor plead their pardon as they ought to do’.85 The satisfaction is sufficient nonetheless; truly sufficient, rather than hypothetically. Unlike the ‘bare sufficiency’ of the particularist which gives

81. Ibid., 12.567, with reference to Lk. 22:19; Jn. 10:15; 15:13; Eph. 5:23. 82. Ibid., 12.567. 83. Ibid. Ussher approvingly cites Ambrose: Etsi Christus pro omnibus mortuus est, tamen specialiter pro nobis passus est, quia pro Ecclesia passus est (Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, 6.25; cf. PL, 15, col. 1675A). 84. Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.554. Elrington’s text reads ‘venal’, but see Bernard, ed., The Judgement (1657), I.4. 85. Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.554.

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only ‘cold comfort’, Christ’s death for all brings true comfort through the gospel’s word of promise.86 Stung by the accusations of Arminianism, Ussher seems to have felt the need to underscore his Calvinist credentials. There are two obstacles to reconciliation, one respecting the party offended, the other, the party offending. The work of Christ in his priestly office is directed towards removing the former obstacle, but the latter remains. Man’s ‘blindness, stupidity, and hardness of heart is such, that he is neither sensible of his own wretchedness, nor God’s goodness’.87 In this natural condition, the things of the spirit are foolishness. The sinner’s mind must be enlightened and the heart softened, and these are effects of Christ’s prophetic and kingly offices. This protects divine monergism. Special grace is required for sinners to believe and trust in Christ’s satisfaction for them. Without this work, they remain blind, hard-hearted, and unwilling. Turning to Christ’s priestly work, in both letters Ussher posits a radical disjunction between the ‘divers parts of his priesthood’. He attributes a different scope to each. He voices the catchy particularist objection that ‘he prayed not for the world, therefore he payed not for the world’ only to dismiss it.88 These roles are different and distinguishable. The first, the work of satisfaction, ‘doth properly give contentment to God’s justice’, the second, the work of intercession, ‘doth solicit God’s mercy’.89 One ‘prepares the way for God’s mercy, by making the sins of all mankind pardonable . . . and so puts the sons of men only in a possibility of being justified’, the other ‘produceth this potentia in actum, that is, procureth an actual discharge from God’s anger; and maketh justification, which before was a part of our possibility, to be a part of our present possession’.90 Ussher concludes that the former ‘may well appertain to the common nature, which the son assumed’, whilst the latter is ‘a special privilege’ of the

86. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.568; cf. WJU, 13.128 (Sermon on Phil. 2:5–8, 1640). 87. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.568. 88. Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.558. 89. Ibid., 12.559. 90. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.569; cf. 564: ‘That impetration, whereof the Arminians speak, I hold to be a fruit, not of his satisfaction, but intercession . . . application and impetration, in this matter we have in hand, are of equal extent; and, that forgiveness of sins is not by our Saviour impetrated for any unto whom the merit of his death is not applied in particular’.

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elect.91 The difference is analogous to the preparation of a medicine and its application. The medicine is prepared through Christ’s work on the cross, ‘a potion confected of the blood of the Lamb of God’, a medicine of such potency ‘that if all did take it, all without doubt should be recovered’.92 This distinction between the scope of Christ’s satisfaction and intercession is one that Ussher appears to have maintained throughout his career.93 In later sermons, Ussher elaborates on the position laid out in 1618. Some ideas are developed, others introduced. Whether this reflects the necessary brevity of the two letters, or a genuine progression in his thought, is difficult to determine. One example of elaboration is seen in the Adam–Christ motif. In his first letter, Ussher had concluded that Christ, in his death, was ‘a kind of universal cause of the restoring of our nature, as Adam was of the depraving of it’.94 This idea is developed in a later sermon. Adam’s sin is made Ussher’s on the basis of a bond in nature: ‘I am his Child, I am his generacion, he was the stocke and foundacion of the naturall life which I have’. Redemption must be accomplished by one in whom Ussher has as great an interest as he does in Adam. Christ is the second Adam, the ‘one who hath the very stocke of our being in him, so that what our Saviour hath done is made a common thinge, he being one in whom all the stocke consistes’.95 The universal extent of Christ’s atoning work is plain to see in this discussion of the first and second Adams. At around the same time, covenantal structures appear in Ussher’s preaching on the extent of the atonement. Ussher posits a conditional covenant alongside an absolute covenant. By the conditional or general covenant the door of hope is pushed open for all if they will believe and receive

91. Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.559. 92. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.570f. 93. Three decades later, from the pulpit of Lincoln’s Inn, Ussher explained that Christ’s ‘satisfaction is indefinite, Tis, not only Sufficient, but is proposed as a Comon Remedy to all men . . . Let whosoever will, take of the water of life, freely. Every Body is invited: But Intercession is more restrayned: Intercession, for those, whome God hath given him’. A few weeks later he reiterated: ‘Intercession is not of that large Extent, as the Passion’. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 53r, 60r (Sermons on Phil. 2:8 and Rom. 8:34, 1648). 94. Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.559. The description of Christ as ‘an universal Cause of Salvation’ is also found in CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 26r (Sermon on Rom. 5:12, 1642). 95. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fols 31v–33r (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626).

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Christ. Just as all bishops are called to a general council but not all attend, so by virtue of the general covenant a general invitation is issued though not all respond to this call. ‘Besides’ this conditional covenant is an absolute covenant, ‘made by Christ; by which hee Merits Grace for a Certaine Companie, who are Elected, unto whom, in time, grace and Power is given to beleeve in Christ, and receive him’.96 This covenant, ‘made by Christ’, would seem to contain elements of the pactum salutis of later debates.97 The discussion of covenant leads Ussher to a treatment of ‘that great Question, which hath troubled the world so long’, the intent of Christ in his suffering. ‘Christ in his suffrings’, claimed Ussher, ‘had no further intention to save anie, then as hee hath revealed, and hath set downe in his word. That if Anie, or Whosoever would beleeve in him, and accept of him, hee should bee reconciled by him, and bee saved’. In this conditional sense ‘wee may say, that Christ dyed for all the world in generall’. There is, beyond this conditional intention, ‘a speciall Intention of Christ to merit Grace for a few, who shall beleeve’.98 This echoes Ussher’s concern in his second letter of 1618 to affirm that in some sense Christ can be said to have died for all, but that he died ‘in a special manner’ for the elect.99 Just before the record of this sermon breaks off Ussher insists that ‘A Christian man must have no other Universall Grace, but what GOD hath set forth in his word; and wee must restraine the same from All, unto a few: For it is Presumption to say, that by the merit of Christs death, the sins of all are remitted’. The benefits of Christ’s death are offered to all. Those who trust in him will receive forgiveness of sins; those who do not lay hold of him will be rejected.100 The emphasis is again on the conditionality of grace but the language chosen suggests that Ussher still found it necessary to distinguish his teaching from that of the Arminians.

96. Balliol, MS 259, I, fol. 66r (Sermon on 2 Cor. 5:19, c. 1624); cf. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 47r (Sermon on Rev. 22:17, 1647), 230r (Sermon on Rom. 5:12, 1651). This feature is not innovative and should be regarded as a point on the trajectory plotted in Richard A. Muller, ‘Divine Covenants, Absolute and Conditional: John Cameron and the Early Orthodox Development of Reformed Covenant Theology’, Mid-America Journal of Theology, 17 (2006), 11–56. 97. Such a structure does later emerge in Ussher’s preaching as an intra-Trinitarian ‘Consultation for the Redemption of man’. CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fol. 213v (Sermon on Rom. 4:25, 1651). 98. Balliol, MS 259, I, fol. 66v (Sermon on 2 Cor. 5:19, c. 1624). 99. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.567. 100. Balliol, MS 259, I, fol. 69r (Sermon on 2 Cor. 5:19, c. 1624).

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The Pedigree of the Position Jonathan Moore has portrayed Ussher as a theological innovator, and his hypothetical universalism as a mutation within the Reformed tradition. Having portrayed William Perkins as the embodiment of mainstream Elizabethan theology, Moore closes his book with this qualification: ‘I have not argued that there were no moderates in late Elizabethan England, nor that Perkinsian particularism was the only option for mainstream Elizabethan divines’. However, he claims that as Ussher reacted to the theology of Perkins, he ‘consciously believed that his resultant position of hypothetical universalism was a new position for his contemporaries, and not generally held at that time’. Furthermore, in rightly distancing English hypothetical universalism from the theology of Saumur, he comments, ‘its origins were neither Scottish (Cameron) nor French (Amyraut), but Irish (Ussher)’.101 Moore is undoubtedly right in believing that Ussher held deep misgivings about Perkinsian particularism and was convinced that it provoked attacks on the Reformed faith which imperilled the unity of the Church. Contemporary events certainly provided the occasion for Ussher’s epistolary adventure in the atonement debate. There is, however, evidence of a broader perspective. Ussher’s notes on this locus in the writings of patristic and medieval authors reveal that his views were worked out in dialogue with those who had wrestled with this very question in earlier generations. Under the heading ‘An Christus passus fuerit pro omnibus’ (whether Christ suffered for all), Ussher gathered together dozens of citations and references to patristic and medieval authorities.102 Typical of his commonplace notes, often-lengthy quotations are separated by sparse editorial comment. Two figures who stand out among the rest are Ambrose of Milan and Prosper of Aquitaine.

101. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 228, 212, 219. Moore’s otherwise helpful analysis of Ussher’s hypothetical universalism is skewed by an emphasis on discontinuity with the tradition of Perkins and a failure to explore points of continuity with earlier thinkers. The account is somewhat more nuanced in Jonathan D. Moore, ‘The Extent of the Atonement: English Hypothetical Universalism versus Particular Redemption’, in Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism, ed. by Michael A. G. Haykin and Mark Jones (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 124–161; idem, ‘James Ussher’s Influence on the Synod of Dordt’, in Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619), ed. by Aza Goudriaan and Fred van Lieburg (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 163–180. 102. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fols 185v–187v.

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Ambrose provides something of a programmatic statement in his exposition of Luke’s gospel: ‘And if Christ died for all, yet he suffered particularly for us, because he suffered for the church’.103 Ussher has rejected ‘if Christ suffered for all’ (passus est), the reading of the majority textual tradition, in favour of the variant ‘if Christ died for all’ (mortuus est), a move which he also made in his second letter of 1618.104 The change appears to be purposeful. Ussher may simply have sought to heighten the rhetorical impact, but perhaps he intended to allow greater room for nuance. In his second letter, the Ambrose quotation is introduced to bolster the argument that Christ can be said to have died for all and not to have died for all in different respects. Perhaps here, as there, the underlying thought is that whilst Christ can be said to have died for all, in that all receive the benefit of his death in some manner, he sanctified himself, consecrating himself to the atoning sacrifice of the cross, in order that the people given to him by the Father might be sanctified (John 17:19).105 The bishop of Milan was not always so accommodating. Ussher had to confront passages with a less inclusive tone. Ambrose could speak of the gates of heaven shut up and guarded against those who did not believe. He could also frankly state that Christ had not come, nor had he suffered, for those who did not believe.106 Ussher remarked that if unbelievers did not share in the ‘effect’ of the death of Christ, it did not necessarily follow that Christ could in no manner be said to have died for

103. Ibid., fol. 185v: Et si Christus pro omnibus mortuus est, pro nobis tamen specialiter passus est; quia pro Ecclesia passus est (Ambrose, Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, 6.25; cf. PL, 15, col. 1675A). 104. On the variant textual tradition of mortuus est, see CCSL, 14.183. 105. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.567. Ussher’s arrival at this rendering may be reflected in Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186r. Ussher has written pro omnibus mortuus sit, then above it written the majority passus est, before striking through passus and sit, to settle on mortuus est. The original mortuus sit is probably derived from the polemical work of the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Paul Windeck, Controversiæ de mortis Christi efficacia, inter Catholicos et Caluinistas hoc tempore disputatæ (Cologne, 1603), 236. This supposition is strengthened by the bracketed quoad efficaciam sc[ilicet] following the Ambrose citation, which echoes Windeck’s bracketed quoad efficaciam. Ussher cites Windeck’s work twice in his notes, in reference to Prosper and Faustus of Riez (fols 186v, 187r). 106. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186r; Ambrose, De fide ad Gratianum Augustum, 4.2 (PL, 16, cols 620B, 621D–622A): Clausæ sunt portæ, non cuicumque aperiuntur: non quicumque vult, nisi qui fideliter credit, ingredietur. Custoditur aula imperialis . . . propterea enim descendit ut credas: si non credis, non descendit tibi, non tibi passus est.

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them, underlining this with a reference back to Ambrose’s comment on Luke.107 Of greater help were the sermons in which Ambrose taught that Christ became incarnate for all and suffered for all, but that those who did not believe cheated themselves out of the benefit of Christ’s death, just as a man who shuts up his windows deprives himself of the light of the sun.108 Ambrose’s message? Open those windows! In these passages, Ambrose’s preaching on the death of Christ and the universal offer of the gospel, whilst using different analogies, exhibits strong parallels with Ussher’s. Ussher found his middle way embodied in Prosper of Aquitaine. He believed that Prosper succeeded in maintaining the position of Ambrose, affirming both the death of Christ for all, and in a special manner for the elect: Prosper I am sure in his oppositions against the Semipelagians (the great patrons of universal grace) laboureth to uphold bothe: whose moderation if some of our men would follow in their disputes against the Arminians (the right heyres of the Semipelagians;) they would not runne themselves upon those rockes of absurdityes, that a man should be bound in conscience to beleeve that which is untrue, and charged to take that which he hath nothing to do with.109 In Prosper, a case for the universal extent of Christ’s atoning death is built upon the incarnation. Christ was born in the likeness of sinful flesh, assuming the nature which all share. As all shared in one nature, they all shared in one plight, alienated from God because of the sin of Adam. It was because Christ took this common nature that Prosper believed that Christ intended to deal with this common plight. Christ was crucified for

107. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186r: at non sequitur, si non participat infidelis effectum mortis Christi ergo pro eo plane nullo modo mortuum esse. 108. Ibid.; Ambrose, In Psalmum David CXVIII Expositio, Sermo 8 (PL, 15, col. 1318C): Mysticus autem sol ille justitiæ omnibus ortus est, omnibus venit, omnibus passus est, et omnibus resurrexit . . . Si quis autem non credit in Christum, generali beneficio ipse se fraudat: ut si quis clausis fenestris radios solis excludat, non ideo sol non ortus est omnibus, quia calore ejus se ipse fraudavit: sed quod solis est, prærogativam suam servat: quod imprudentis est, communis a se gratiam lucis excludit. Cf. Sermo 19 (PL, 15, col. 1481C–D). 109. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 185v.

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the redemption of the world, and the value of the sacrifice offered on the cross ensured that the atonement extends that far.110 Whilst all are redeemed, not all are freed from the bondage of sin. It is not enough that Christ should be born a man and be crucified for the redemption of the world. Individual sinners must be born in Christ through the same Holy Spirit through whom he was born and die with him through the burial of baptism.111 Those who do not come to faith and baptism remain strangers to the redemption purchased.112 In this sense they can be said to have lost their salvation.113 For the reason that redemption is not applied to all, Prosper acknowledges that it is as true to say that Christ was crucified only for those who would profit by his death as it is to say that he died for all.114 The most obvious influence of Prosper on Ussher’s thought is the provision of the medicinal analogy.115 The image of the gospel as medicine has a pedigree dating back to Ignatius of Antioch, for whom the Eucharistic bread was φρμακον θανασα , the medicine of immortality and antidote to death.116 It was Prosper, however, who made the distinction between the properties of the gospel medicine and its application. This metaphor

110. Ibid., fol. 186v; Prosper, Pro Augustini doctrina responsiones ad capitula objectionum Vincentianarum, 1 (PL, 45, col. 1844; ACW, 32.164): Quod ergo ad magnitudinem et potentiam pretii, et quod ad unam pertinet causam generis humani, sanguis Christi redemptio est totius mundi . . . Cum itaque propter unam omnium naturam, et unam omnium causam a Domino nostro in veritate susceptam, recte omnes dicantur redempti. 111. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186v; Prosper, Pro Augustino responsiones ad capitula calumniantium Gallorum, 1.9 (PL, 45, col. 1838; ACW, 32.149f ): Sicut itaque non sufficit hominum renovationi, natum esse hominem Jesum Christum, nisi in ipso eodem, de quo ipse ortus est, Spiritu renascantur: sic non sufficit hominum redemptioni, crucifixum esse Dominum Christum, nisi commoriantur ei et consepeliantur in Baptismo. 112. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186v; Prosper, Pro Augustini doctrina responsiones ad capitula objectionum Vincentianarum, 1 (PL, 45, col. 1844; ACW, 32.164): Sed qui hoc sæculum sine fide Christi et sine regnerationis Sacramento pertranseunt, redemptionis alieni sunt. 113. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 185v; Prosper, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.2 (PL, 51, col. 688B; ACW, 14.92): habente quidem salutis suæ damnum rebellium portione. On Prosper’s authorship of this work, see ACW, 14.6–9 and the literature cited there. 114. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186v; Prosper, Pro Augustino responsiones ad capitula calumniantium Gallorum, 1.9 (PL, 45, col. 1838; ACW, 32.150): potest tamen dici pro his tantum crucifixus, quibus mors ipsius profuit. 115. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186v; Prosper, Pro Augustini doctrina responsiones ad capitula objectionum Vincentianarum, 1 (PL, 45, col. 1844; ACW, 32.164): habet quidem in se ut omnibus prosit; sed si non bibitur, non medetur. 116. Ignatius, Ad Ephesios, 20 (PG, 5, col. 661).

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recurs frequently in Ussher’s preaching. For example, he claimed that Christ’s blood shed on the cross is ‘not sufficient for thy redempcion, for though it give contentment to Gods justice, yet it is but as a medicyne that is prepared, now the medicyne helpes not by being prepared but by being applyed’.117 Numerous themes and ideas which are present in Ussher’s writing on the extent of the atonement are addressed in this patristic and medieval material. Incarnation is a prominent motif. Christ shares in the common nature of all humanity, and his divine nature confers infinite value and sufficiency on his sacrifice. The belief in God’s universal salvific will demands a universal intent in Christ’s death as its corollary. Christ therefore embraced the punishment of all humanity on the cross and this is the message which must be proclaimed to all people without distinction. Not all are saved, however. The reason lies in God’s election and the necessity of grace, but this does not detract from the culpability of unbelief. Ussher is, of course, selective in his citations. The vast majority support his views. Others are glossed over or abruptly dismissed. There are also scattered references to early modern continental authors. Ussher cites from Johann Jacob Grynaeus’s Orthodoxographa, a collection of apocryphal and patristic material, published before the editor’s conversion from Lutheranism to Calvinism;118 from the moderate Heidelberg theologian Jacobus Kimedoncius’s treatise on redemption and grace;119 and from the work of the Roman Catholic controversialist Johann Paul Windeck, who clearly enjoyed capitalising on the differences amongst Protestants.120 In each case, Ussher simply acknowledges the source of a patristic citation or the author’s inclusion or handling of a comment

117. Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fol. 74v (Sermon on Heb. 9:14, 1626). Other occurrences of this analogy may be found in Balliol, MS 259, II, fol. 227v (Sermon on 1 Cor. 11:28, c. 1624); Bodl., MS Eng.th.e.25, fols 38v, 54r, 55r, 91v, 112v (Sermons on Heb. 9:14, 1626); WJU, 13.160f (Sermon on Jn. 1:12, 1640), 176 (Sermon on Eph. 1:13, 1640), 270 (Sermon on Rom. 5:1, 1640); CUL, MS Mm.6.55, fols 53r (Sermon on Phil. 2:8, 1648), 60r–v (Sermon on Rom. 8:34, 1648). 118. Johann Jacob Grynaeus, Monumenta S. Patrum Orthodoxographa hoc est, Theologiae Sacrosanctæ ac Syncerioris Fidei Doctores, 2 vols (Basel, 1569). 119. Jacobus Kimedoncius, De Redemtione Generis Hvmani. Libri tres: Quibus copiosè traditur contoruersia, de Redemtionis et Gratiæ per Christvm Vniversalitate, et Morte ipsivs pro Omnibvs. Accessit tractatio finitima de Diuina Prædestinatione (Heidelberg, 1592). 120. Johann Paul Windeck, Controversiæ de mortis Christi efficacia, inter Catholicos et Caluinistas hoc tempore disputatæ (Cologne, 1603).

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rather than drawing on them for substantive argumentation. All the same, the presence of such citations is evidence of interest in and engagement with authors of the previous generation ranging across the confessional spectrum. In assessing the significance of Ussher’s notes on the extent of the atonement, any conclusions drawn must be tentative. First, it is impossible to date these notes precisely. The latest definite citation from a published work shows that this project was in progress in or began after 1612.121 A less certain reference brings this forward to 1618, the year that Ussher wrote his two letters.122 The date at which these notes began cannot be determined. Even if these notes are to be dated late in the second decade of the seventeenth century, it is almost inconceivable that this marks the beginning of Ussher’s interest in the matter. Whatever attention this locus received during his earlier education, his appointment as Professor of Theological Controversies at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1607, a post which he held until his elevation to the episcopacy in 1621, would have brought a responsibility to familiarise himself with this point of inter-confessional debate. Second, it is impossible to be sure whether these notes represent the development of Ussher’s thinking on the extent of the atonement led by the Fathers, or fortification of a position already held with patristic authority. The selectivity of the sources, and the tone of the editorial comments, suggest the latter. Third, whilst there is clear evidence that a small number of patristic quotations are derived from early modern compendia or polemical works, the extent to which Ussher relied on these cannot be ascertained. One of the great patristic scholars of the age, he was fully capable of independent research, and this would entail a longer time-frame, Ussher adding to his notes as he discovered more material. On the other hand, if the need was pressing, as the Synod of Dort approached for example, the literature of the recent debate would provide grist for the mill. Even if hard conclusions about the historical circumstances and impetus behind Ussher’s notes on this locus remain out of

121. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186r. The citation is from the fourth volume of John Chrysostom, ν ερισκομνων τμο πρτο (-!γδοο ), ed. by Sir Henry Savile, 8 vols (Eton, 1610– 1613). 122. Bodl., MS Barlow 13, fol. 186r. The note ‘vid. Abbot’ occurs above the citation from Ambrose’s commentary on Luke. This is likely a reference to Robert Abbot’s, De Gratia, et Perseverantia Sanctorum Exercitationes aliquot habitae in Academiae Oxoniensi (1618), 94, where he discusses Ambrose’s use of specialiter.

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reach, the notes do show that Ussher stood self-consciously in continuity with a stream of thought within the Christian tradition or at least sought to portray himself as doing so. Jonathan Moore gives the impression that hypothetical universalism sprang from Ussher’s mind like a spring from the rocks. In reality, Ussher stood a considerable distance downstream, a recipient and shaper of a tradition dating back more than a millennium. Whilst Moore rightly distinguishes between English hypothetical universalism and the wider universal redemptionist tradition, the former did not arise in a hermetically sealed compartment. Had he cast his net wider amongst Ussher’s manuscripts, Moore would have discovered abundant interaction with patristic, medieval, and early modern sources on this doctrinal locus. There is therefore an imbalance in his reading of Ussher, with an emphasis on discontinuity between hypothetical universalism and Elizabethan particularism, and with insufficient attention to areas of continuity with aspects of the broader Western tradition.123

English Hypothetical Universalism Ussher was not the first British theologian to make use of Prosper’s medicinal analogy. In his Learned Discourse of Justification, as he turned to the means by which justification is appropriated, Richard Hooker had stated: ‘Christ hath merited to make us juste: But as a medecine which is made for health doth not heale by being made, but by being applied: so by the merites of Christ there can be no justification without the application of his merittes’.124 Hooker’s debt to Prosper is clear in the following excerpt from the draft of his subsequent defence against his critics: Christ is a meane unto God for us. Butt this suffiseth not, unles there be alsoe the meanes of application which God requireth, the decree of whose good pleasure touching mans salvation includeth both the one and the other. Christ in himselfe hath that cup of life,

123. This paragraph reproduces material from my review of Moore’s English Hypothetical Universalism published in The Seventeenth Century, 23 (2008), 164f. 124. Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith Is Overthrowne (1621), in WRH, 5:110:3–6. This work is a compilation of several sermons preached in 1585–1586 at the Temple Church, London.

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which is able to doe all men good. Sed si non bibitur, non medetur, saith Prosper, If wee taste it not, it heales not.125 Neither of these works was available in print at the time Ussher wrote his two letters, but Hooker’s advocacy of a universal saving will in God must have been well known. Hooker’s views were a source of controversy as early as his Paul’s Cross sermon, circa 1581, in which he argued the case from a distinction between antecedent and consequent wills in God, who antecedently wills the salvation of all humans upon fulfilment of a condition expressed by his consequent will, namely a right response to the grace offered to them.126 This same distinction, as Hooker’s defence against his critics would later make clear, lies behind statements on the salvific will of God in the fifth book of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, published in 1597. Hooker explained that God accepts the prayers of the faithful for the salvation of all humanity ‘in that they are conformeable unto his generall inclynation which is that all men might be saved, yeat allwaies he graunteth them not for as much as there is in God somtimes a more private occasioned will which determineth the contrarie’, which determines, in other words, to save only some.127 According to Hooker, God’s purpose in sending his Son, and Christ’s intent in offering himself up as a sacrifice, was to open the way of salvation for all through payment of a ransom for the whole world. Indeed, Christ’s deepest wound was foreknowledge of the ingratitude of many for whom he died for that which had cost him so much, the medicine ‘made to so few effectual through contempt’.128 The light of gospel goes out to the nations under God’s sovereignty and ‘whensoever it least shineth, ministereth

125. Hooker, Dublin Fragments, in WRH, 4.153.13–15 (italics in original). These notes, now known as the Dublin Fragments, were first published in 1836, appearing as an Appendix to Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. by John Keble, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1836), 2.683–753. 126. The Paul’s Cross sermon is now lost, but see the account given in Isaac Walton’s Life of Hooker, in Keble, ed., The Works of Richard Hooker, 1.23f. The terminology of antecedent and consequent wills, a concept originating with Chrysostom (Homilias in Epistolam Pauli ad Ephesios, 1.2; PG, 62, col. 13) and echoed by Aquinas (Summa Theologiæ, Ia q. 23 a. 4 ad 3), is not used explicitly by Ussher. On this point, Hooker draws on John of Damascus, an important conduit of Eastern theology to Westerners such as Thomas. Dublin Fragments, in WRH, 4.143.12–20, 4.146.14–18. 127. Hooker, Lawes, 5.49.3, in WRH, 2.204.28–32. 128. Hooker, Dublin Fragments, in WRH, 4.144.18–23.

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always if not sufficient light to guide in the way of life, yet competent to give men that introduction, which clearer light would make complete’.129 Love of darkness results in the offer of further grace being withdrawn and the removal of that which has already been given. There is a ‘grace which abideth not’, perpetuity of grace belonging only to elect who cannot finally  fall.130 There is therefore a strong warning about the culpability of unbelief. The same ideas are found in a sermon on Hebrews 2:14–15, a copy of which survives in Ussher’s hand. This was published under Ussher’s name in the nineteenth century but the sermon has since been attributed to Richard Hooker. It reads, concerning the largenes of this benefit which the God of our salvation hath not prepared for a few: if any be thereof deprived, the falt is their own. Let not men therefore dig the cloudes to find out secret impediments; let them not, according to the manner of infidels and heathens, stormingly impute their wretched estate unto destinie: Fatis agimur, cedite fatis [By fate we are driven, so yield to fate]. Let no such cogitation take place in the hart of any man . . . that any hath bene ever withhelde otherwise than by the malice of an indisposed will, averting itself from the offer of grace, and striking back the hand of the offerer even with obstinat malicious contempt . . . The fatall barr which doth close the doore of the saving mercy of God is man’s wilful contempt of grace and salvation offered. Wherefore upon this as a sure foundation let us build. Christ hath died to deliver all. The hearer is therefore warned: ‘Let not the subtiltye of Satan beguile you  with fraudulent exceptions’ to the true general scope of the gospel invitation.131 There are remarkable parallels with the attenuated Augustinianism of Prosper. In his mediating work De vocatione omnium gentium, Prosper averred that God ‘did not refuse to all mankind what he gave to some men,

129. Ibid., 4.156.1–4. 130. Ibid., 4.163.29–165.1, 166.28–31. 131. WJU, 17.xxxi–xxxii; cf. WRH, 5.406.29–407.15; Stanwood and Yeandle, ‘Three Manuscript Sermon Fragments by Richard Hooker’. The Latin tag is from Seneca, Oedipus, 980.

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but that in some men grace prevailed and in others nature recoiled’ (in aliis prævaluisse gratiam, in aliis resiluisse naturam).132 Prosper’s exposition of divine grace, in which both general and special grace have exterior and interior aspects, and in which the difference between the two would appear to be a question of degree, introduces considerable ambiguity here.133 If one tries to harmonise this statement with a strong affirmation of election then one might interpret it in the sense of nature recoiling because it did not receive grace. The basic sense, however, appears to be that some did not receive grace because ‘nature recoiled’. The special grace required for salvation is not received because it is rejected, and the fault lies in the free will of man: ‘If many refuse this help, it is only their malice that is the cause. If many accept it, then this is due to both divine grace and their human will’.134 This easily leads to a reading of Prosper that sets him at some distance from Augustine. Whereas Augustine had taught that grace effects the choice of the will for good, in Prosper there is no necessary efficacy of special grace. Grace simply opens the eyes of the will rather than determining its choice. God inspires the human will with his own and the response is one of ‘free consent’.135 A greater role is thereby given to human agency. Even those who are assisted with special grace can choose to turn away.136 However, as Alexander Hwang explains, all the foregoing is predicated of those non-elect who receive a measure of special grace. Special grace is also received by some who are elect, predestined to salvation. In their case,

132. Prosper, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.25 (PL, 51, col. 711B; ACW, 14.134). 133. See the editorial comments of Girolamo and Pietro Ballerini in PL, 55, cols 380D–381B; and of P. de Letter in ACW, 14.209f, n. 226. See also the discussions in M. Cappuyns, ‘Le Premier Représentant De L’Augustinisme Médiéval, Prosper D’Aquitaine’, Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, 1 (1929), 309–337 (329–334); Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996), 146–152. 134. Prosper, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.26 (PL, 51, col. 711C; ACW, 14.135). 135. Ibid., 2.27 (PL, 51, cols 712C–713A; ACW, 14.136f ): ‘when God inspired their will with His own, they willingly followed Him’. De Letter here translates et quod eos voluit Deus velle, voluerunt in the light of 2.26. Cf. Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency, 150. 136. Prosper, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.29 (PL, 51, col. 715B; ACW, 14.141). Prosper can speak of those who ‘though they enjoyed His general gifts or were even aided with His special helps, still stray from the path of truth and life and take the broad road of error and death’ (Qui sicut præscivit ante sæcula, quanta totius mundi hominum multitudo vel communibus usa donis, vel specialibus adjuta præsidiis, declinans tamen ab itinere veritatis et vitæ, ingressura esset latitudinem erroris et mortis).

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God’s will for salvation is ‘efficacious and irresistible’.137 Prosper, for all his attempts at mediation, is not quite so far from Augustine as he might at first appear. Hooker regarded Prosper of Aquitaine and Fulgentius of Ruspe as the true successors of Augustine and his most faithful interpreters.138 Limited atonement was an aberration within the Augustinian tradition, a doctrine never taught by Augustine himself. It was one of the ‘phrenetical opinions’ renounced by Lucidus and condemned at the Synod of Arles (473).139 In Hooker, one finds a well developed system of hypothetical universalism, the consolidation of a stance that he had taken publicly as early as 1581. Hooker held to a universal intent in Christ’s death on the basis of a universal saving will in God, and he articulated this within the context of a moderate predestinarian theology, arriving at his views long before the eruption of the Remonstrant controversy among the Dutch. John Overall, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and subsequently Norwich, was another prominent churchman who articulated similar views in the decade before the Synod of Dort. He was the author of a number of tracts which were widely circulated in manuscript, one copy evidently accompanying John Davenant to Dort.140 On each of the five controverted points, he laid out the doctrine of the Remonstrants, then the ContraRemonstrants, and then the middle way of the Church of England, assuming the position of an Aristotelian mean between two extremes. Anthony Milton is surely correct in interpreting this as an intentional polemical strategy, noting the remarkable sympathy that Overall professed for the Arminian cause in his private correspondence with Hugo Grotius.141 This middle way, Overall contended, was in agreement with Augustine’s

137. Alexander Y. Hwang, Intrepid Lover of Perfect Grace: The Life and Thought of Prosper of Aquitaine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 214f, 217; cf. Prosper, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.33–37 (PL, 51, cols 717B–722B; ACW, 14.145–153). 138. Hooker, Dublin Fragments, in WRH, 4.160.3–19. 139. Ibid., 4.151.23–34. 140. The tracts are reproduced in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 64–92. For further comments, see Anthony Milton, ‘“Anglicanism” by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall’, in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, ed. by Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), 159–176 (172–174). 141. John Overall, ‘On the Five Articles disputed in the Low Countries’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 64–70 (66): inter quas [sententias] nostra Ecclesia multo rectius (ut mihi videtur) mediam viam tenet; Milton, ‘“Anglicanism” by Stealth’, 173.

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teaching on predestination, and, like Hooker, he regarded Prosper and Fulgentius as Augustine’s true interpreters.142 Overall observed how a change in the order of the divine decrees affects the contours of soteriology. If God first predestined some individuals out of the mass of fallen humanity, forsaking the remainder by absolute decree, then Christ died for the elect, not for all, and the elect alone receive grace, their perseverance certain by the power of the divine decree. If, however, God first determined to give Christ with a general promise to all humanity, out of which he then chooses individuals whom he marks out for salvation, then Christ died for all and all receive common grace corresponding to the general promise of Scripture, grace which is not irresistible, nor once received indefectible. Overall found this emphasis on receiving the general promise in Article 17 of the Church of England, and insisted that this presupposes the necessary and sufficient means, by external word and internal grace, for receiving the promise.143 This general promise is the ‘evangelical covenant’ (foedus Evangelicus) by which all may hope to approach the throne of grace through faith, in the knowledge that if they do not trust in God’s promise or obey his commands the fault is their own. Although necessary and sufficient aid and means are given to all, salvation depends on God’s predestination. He gives to his elect a more abundant supply of grace, by which they are certainly led to faith, perseverance, and eternal salvation.144 Overall’s scheme exhibits strong parallels to Hooker’s, translating the distinction between antecedent and consequent will into conditional and unconditional decrees. The impact of these tracts was significant. John Davenant appears to have been influenced by Overall’s Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae de Praedestinatione, borrowing concepts, terminology, and even liturgical examples as he argued his case within the British delegation at Dort.145 Christ offered himself up for all, he maintained, ‘and by this Oblation once made,

142. John Overall, ‘Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae De Praedestinatione’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 71–84 (67f ). 143. Ibid., 74f. For his more expansive discussion of Article 17 and the general promise, see ‘The Judgment of the Church of England concerning divine predestination’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 85–92 (87–90). 144. Overall, ‘Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae De Praedestinatione’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 77; cf. ‘On the Five Articles’, in ibid., 69. 145. John Platt, ‘The British Delegation and the Framing of the Second Head of Doctrine at the Synod of Dort’ (unpublished paper).

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did found, confirm, and ratifie the Evangelical Covenant, which may and ought to be preached seriously to all mankind without exception’.146 The language of universal promise and ‘euangelicall covenant’ was carried over into the suffrage presented to the Synod by the British Delegation. Wherever this covenant is preached ‘there also, together with it, ordinarily such a measure of supernaturall grace should be dispensed, as may suffice to convince all impenitents and unbeleevers of contempt, or at least of neglect, in that the condition was not fulfilled by them’.147 If this accompanying grace was not irresistible, insofar as it could be ‘stifled and utterly extinguished by the fault of our rebellious will’,148 it was certainly efficacious, though in the case of the non-elect that efficacy was limited to leaving them without excuse, radicalising their unbelief. The lectures which Davenant gave at Cambridge in the wake of the Synod of Dort exhibit the development of his covenantal formulations.149 Two covenants are established in the death of Christ. The first, the ‘evangelical covenant’ is confirmed with all humanity, promising salvation to all on the condition of faith. The second, ‘secret and absolute’, pertains to particular individuals.150 The latter is God’s determination to ensure that

146. John Davenant, ‘Doctour Davenant touching the Second Article, discussed at the conference at the Haghe of the Extent of the Redemption’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 219. An annotated copy in Ussher’s hand may be found in Bodl., MS Rawlinson C849, fols 278r–281v. 147. ‘The Collegiat Suffrage of the divines of Great Britaine, concerning the Five Articles controverted in the Low Countries’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 223–293 (245). See also 243, n. 26, where Milton identifies Davenant and Samuel Ward as the likely suspects behind a change in the order of theses on the atonement in the 1633 edition of the suffrage. As presented to the Synod the articles on Christ dying for the elect preceded the theses on Christ’s death for all. In 1633, after the death of the delegation’s leader, Bishop George Carleton, the theses on Christ’s death for all come first. This suggests a defeat for Davenant in the original drafting, one which he could now reverse. In doing so, he brought the order of the theses into harmony with the order of the decrees as set out by Overall. 148. Ibid., 254. 149. John Davenant, Dissertationes Duæ: Prima de Morte Christi, Quatenus ad Omnes Extendatur, Quatenus ad Solos Electos Restringatur. Altera de Praedestinatione & Reprobatione, ed. by Thomas Bedford (Cambridge, 1650); idem, A Dissertation on the Death of Christ, as to Its Extent and Special Benefits, in An Exposition of the Epistle of St Paul to the Colossians, trans. by Josiah Allport, 2 vols (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1832), 2.309–569. Although these lectures were ready for the press by November 1628 (Letter from Davenant to Samuel Ward, 4 November 1628, in Bodl., MS Tanner 72, fol. 298v), their publication would have to await a more favourable political climate after the author’s death. On the dating of the lectures themselves, see Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 187, n. 70. 150. Davenant, Dissertation, 2.404.

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some individuals are given the ability and will to fulfil the condition of the former, so that the redemption accomplished will certainly be applied.151 It is ‘a kind of special design subordinate to the infallible fulfilment of this universal compact’, without which none would be saved and the blood of Christ would have been shed in vain.152 In setting out his covenantal framework in this way, Davenant followed Overall’s conceptual order of the decrees, the conditional decree with its general promise preceding the infallible decree to apply salvation to the elect. Whatever the differences between Hooker, Overall, and Davenant, and differences there certainly were, there are striking parallels in the structure of their thought on this question, the arguments they put forward and the authorities to whom they appealed. There is evidence of Overall’s influence on Davenant, but could Hooker have influenced Overall? It is possible that Overall arrived at his position with no direct or indirect influence from Hooker, but Lancelot Andrewes may be suggested as a mediating figure. It appears that he was the custodian of a number of Hooker’s manuscripts, which after Andrewes’s death in 1626 passed to Ussher.153 These probably included Hooker’s fragmentary notes on predestination and grace discussed above, which came into Ussher’s hands by some route. Overall and Andrewes served alongside each other for many years, Overall a member of Andrewes’s company working on the Authorised Version, and later sitting with him on the Court of High Commission. Both men sympathised with the anti-Calvinist Peter Baro in the predestinarian disputes in Cambridge in the 1590s. The French-born divinity professor had caused controversy by teaching, among other things, that Christ died for all, and there were complaints about Overall teaching the same doctrine.154 Andrewes was more cautious but his agreement is discernible in his Good Friday sermon of 1604. Speaking of Christ’s passion, he said, ‘It pertains to all but all pertain not to it. None pertain to it

151. Ibid., 2.364. 152. Ibid., 2.555, cf. 2.405. 153. On Ussher’s acquisition of the manuscripts and his role in the publication of Books 6 and 8 of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in 1648, see WRH, 3.xxv–xxviii, xxxvi–xliv, li–lv; P. G. Stanwood, ‘The Richard Hooker Manuscripts’, Long Room, 11 (1975), 7–10. 154. H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 383–385, 407f; Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 234.

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but they that take benefit by it . . . Behold, consider and regard it; the profit, the benefit is lost without regard’.155 For Andrewes, the unbeliever defrauds himself of the benefits of Christ’s death. The evidence is circumstantial. Andrewes was reticent about such subjects and his views are not elaborated, but he could be the missing link in the genealogy of this idea. The position of Ussher in the genealogy is somewhat problematic. In Moore’s account he is the paterfamilias, but in the trajectory from Hooker to Davenant proposed here the relationship is more ambiguous. Where Davenant appears to have read Overall with critical appreciation, and fellow-delegate Joseph Hall was prepared to acknowledge Overall’s lead openly,156 Ussher’s only recorded reaction to Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae de Praedestinatione was negative and visceral. Thomas Bedford had mistakenly attributed this tract to Davenant and published it in his edition of Davenant’s Dissertationes Duæ.157 George Kendall reported how Ussher had denied that the treatise was Davenant’s, but rather ‘that ragge was fetcht but out of a half-lighted shop, where Thomson (belike in one of his wet nights) took up all his good stuffe’.158 Richard Thomson (d. 1613) was born in the Netherlands to English and Dutch parents. His friendship network included Arminius and leading Remonstrants. He was closely associated with Overall, who arranged for the posthumous publication of his Diatriba de Amissione et Intercisione Gratiae, et Iustificationis at Leiden in 1616, a controversial work in which Thomson claimed that a man could be justified and finally fall from grace.159 Even the elect could temporarily lose their faith and hence their justification. Kendall’s account of this discussion was published two years before Ussher’s death so the balance of probability is that it does reflect Ussher’s sentiments. However, an angry note in Ussher’s hand at the end of his copy of Dissertationes Duæ reveals

155. Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons, 5 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841–1854), 2.155. 156. Joseph Hall, Via Media: The Way of Peace. In the Five Busy Articles, Commonly Known by the Name of Arminius, in The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, D.D., ed. by P. Wynter, 10 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1863), 9.506, 510f. The political tensions of the early to mid-1620s prevented the publication of this treatise. 157. Bedford explained his reasons in Davenant, Dissertationes Duæ, Lectori Benevolo, sig. A3v. 158. George Kendall, Sancti Sanciti, or, The Common Doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints (1654), epist. ded., sig. *2v. 159. Jonathan D. Moore, ‘Thomson, Richard (d. 1613)’, ODNB.

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that he knew the Sententia were Overall’s.160 Although referring to Thomson, Ussher’s vituperative outburst was undoubtedly directed at Overall. Ussher no doubt felt that this tract had swerved off the via media in an alarmingly Arminian direction, especially on the subject of perseverance, where Overall taught that the truly regenerate may finally fall.161 Whilst there was much in this tract that finds parallels in his own teaching, Ussher regarded it as an Arminian work. This leaves the extent of Overall’s influence on Ussher in question. Ussher’s two letters of 1618 articulate a doctrine of general atonement but lack the structure found in Overall and developed by Davenant. Something approximating that structure has appeared in Ussher’s preaching by 1624. It is possible that the appearance of covenantal terminology in these sermons reflects the influence of Davenant. If Ussher had led Davenant to subscribe to hypothetical universalism as Richard Baxter claimed,162 then the pupil was soon instructing the master. These men had been acquainted since 1609 and presumably enjoyed a frank exchange of ideas before and after Dort.163 Ussher eagerly anticipated the publication of Davenant’s lectures and these did not disappoint him.164 His remarks to Baxter may reflect pride in his protégé’s accomplishments, both in debate and in print. Maybe Ussher did steer Davenant away from the high Calvinism of his youth as Baxter alleged.

160. This volume is preserved in the early printed collections of Trinity College, Dublin (shelf mark GG.g.33). 161. Overall, ‘Sententia Ecclesiae Anglicanae De Praedestinatione’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 82–84. 162. Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ: or, Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times (1696), I.206; cf. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 173f. 163. Elrington, Life, in WJU, 1.29. 164. Ussher to Samuel Ward, 28 July 1631, 30 April 1634, and 15 September 1635, in WJU, 15.542, 578; 16.9f. Moore feels the need to emend the date of the first of these letters to 1634, claiming that ‘the thread of this correspondence means that Elrington’s date of 28 July 1631 . . . cannot be accurate’ (English Hypothetical Universalism, 209, n. 188). Ussher writes, ‘for the Arminian questions I desire never to read any more than my lord of Salisbury’s lectures touching predestination, and Christ’s death’, which Moore reads as a grateful response to Ward’s loan of the manuscript in June 1634 (Ward to Ussher, 14 June 1634, in WJU, 15.581). These words have rather the tone of anticipation and the original is dated in Ussher’s hand ‘Juli 28 1631’ (Bodl., MS Tanner 71, fol. 100r). It seems that he had been asking Ward for a copy of these lectures the year before also (Ussher to Ward, 10 December 1630, in WJU, 15.540). Ussher’s heartfelt thanks come in the letter of 1635.

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But perhaps Ussher’s relatively simple formulation of hypothetical universalism, if his letters of 1618 are a fair reflection of how he expressed it, was insufficient for one about to engage in combat at close quarters in the polemical arena of Dort. Davenant needed a sharper weapon, and to that end he appropriated concepts and arguments from the anti-Calvinist John Overall to produce a synthesis of great sophistication. At some point Ussher himself underwent a similar conversion from the high Calvinism in which he was schooled to hypothetical universalism. Gribben has suggested that there is evidence of Ussher holding this position as early as 1602 on the basis of his early catechisms.165 These were composed ‘about the age of two or three and twenty yeares’ and published with revisions by Ussher in 1653. Ussher voiced concern about the ‘very faulty manner’ in which impressions of these had gone abroad under his name but without his authority.166 Gribben was right to sound a note of caution in evaluating this evidence, for the revisions include changes to language used to describe the atonement. In Ussher’s published version, Christ’s death provides ‘a perfect sacrifice for the sinnes of the world’.167 In a manuscript draft, however, Christ offers ‘a perfect sacrifice for all the sinnes of Gods children’.168 This language is carried over into the unauthorised editions of 1644, 1645, 1647, and 1650.169 In the early years of the

165. Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology’, 64. 166. James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion: With a briefe Method of the Doctrine thereof. Now fully Corrected, and much enlarged by the Author (1653), sig. A2r–v. Elrington gives the date as 1654 when reproducing this in WJU, 11.177–220 (177; cf. 179). 167. Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion (1653), 21; cf. WJU, 11.188. 168. TCD, MS 291, fol. 16v. The questions and answers under the heading ‘A briefe Method of the Body of Christian Religion’ (fols 12r–26v, 28r) contain much of the material found in the two catechisms published by Ussher. This manuscript appears to be a draft, possibly the first, as in places Ussher has scored out whole paragraphs before moving on to cover the same points in greater depth. Another early version of one of the catechisms, this time in another hand (TCD, MS 777, fols 1r–7v), reflects these editorial changes but still differs from his published catechism, characterising Christ’s offering as ‘a perfect sacrifice for all the sinnes of Gods people’ (fol. 4r). 169. James Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion: With a Briefe Method, of the body of Christian Religion (1644), 20; idem, The Principles of Christian Religion: Summarily sett dovvne according to the word of God: Together with A Breife Epittomie of the Bodie of Divinitie (1645), 20; idem, The Principles of Christian Religion: Summarily sett downe according to the Word of God: Together with a Breife Epitomie of the Bodie of Divinitie (1647), 20; idem, The Principles of Christian Religion, Summarily set downe according to the Word of God: Together, with a Briefe Epitomie of the Body of Divinity (1650), 20.

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new century Ussher’s catechetical language implied a restricted view of the atonement. Half a century later, he obviously felt that such language did not reflect his position and needed to be changed. He was quietly distancing himself from his earlier opinion under the guise of setting the record straight as a victim of catechetical piracy. The resulting expression does not amount to an affirmation of hypothetical universalism but it is a noticeable shift in emphasis.170 Precisely who, or what, caused Ussher to adopt hypothetical universalism must remain a mystery. What is certain is that he was not the first in the British Isles to do so. This idea was already circulating in the avantgarde conformist circle that looked to Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. But it would also have been current amongst those who took their lead from the more moderate Reformed theologians on the continent. Hypothetical universalism within a predestinarian soteriology may be found throughout the writings of Heinrich Bullinger,171 in the Loci Communes of Wolfgang Musculus,172 and in Zacharias Ursinus’s lectures on the Heidelberg Catechism.173 Bullinger arguably exerted more influence on the Elizabethan Church than any other continental theologian.174 Ursinus’s lectures went through many editions in England in both Latin and English

170. It should also be pointed out that whilst the other marginal Scripture references for this section remain unchanged, Ussher adds Jn. 1:29 and 3:16f, absent in TCD, MS 291 and the unauthorised versions. 171. This is stated very clearly in one sermon where Bullinger insists that Christ died for all and that God excludes no one from this redemption save those who exclude themselves through rebellious unbelief. Heinrich Bullinger, A Hvndred Sermons vpo[n] the Apocalips of Iesu Christe (1561), 173. Other examples from works available in English translation from the late sixteenth century onwards are cited in Thomas, The Extent of the Atonement, 74f. 172. Wolfgang Musculus, Common places of Christian Religion (1563), fol. 240v. Elsewhere, in exploring the sufficiency side of the sufficient–efficient distinction, Musculus writes: Omnium peccata tulit, si sacrificium illius secundum uirtutem ipsius in se consideres, & cogites neminem excludi ab hac gratia, nisi qui illam respuit. Idem, In Esaiam Prophetam Commentarii (Basil, 1570), 705f. 173. For example, ‘the reason why all are not saved through Christ, is not because of any insufficiency of merit or grace in him – for the atonement of Christ is for the sins of the whole world, as it respects the dignity and sufficiency of the satisfaction which he made – but it arises from unbelief; because men reject the benefit of Christ offered in the gospel, and so perish by their own fault’. The Commentary of Dr. Zacharius Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism, 106. 174. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Heinrich Bullinger and the English-Speaking World’, in Heinrich Bullinger: Life—Thought—Influence, ed. by Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz (Zürich: TVZ, 2007), 2.891–934.

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translation, and by the end of the sixteenth century, according to Christopher Dent, the work ‘bears all the marks of a standard Oxford textbook’.175 The need to study the thought of British Reformed theologians within the wider context of European Protestantism is clear. This understanding of the sufficient–efficient distinction harmonised with the Church of England’s confessional standards. Article 31 affirms that ‘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’. In the ‘Catechism for Children’, the candidate for confirmation professes belief in ‘God the Son, who hath redeemed me and all mankind’.176 The prayer of consecration at the Lord’s Supper recalls Christ’s ‘full, perfect and sufficient Sacrifice, Oblation, and Satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’.177 More suggestive is Jewel’s homily on the worthy reception of the sacrament where he proclaimed that ‘the death of Christ is available for the redemption of all the world’.178 It was to such language that Overall and Davenant could appeal in arguing that their via media was the true doctrine of the Church of England. One must exercise caution in interpreting such expressions. Taken by themselves, they do not prove that the Church of England explicitly affirmed a general atonement rather than particular redemption. When such language occurs in a sacramental context, the emphasis surely falls on the once for all time sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as opposed to the week by week repetition of the Roman Catholic Mass.179 This is the burden of Article 31 where the statement of sufficiency is followed by a reminder that there is no other sacrifice for sin and that the Mass is thus a blasphemous deceit. Similarly, Jewel’s remark about sufficiency is followed by an exhortation to ‘applicate’ Christ’s merits and the encouragement that

175. C. M. Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 186. 176. The Book of Common Prayer (1559), in Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. by William Keatinge Clay (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1847), 212. 177. Ibid., 194. 178. ‘An Homily of the Worthy Receiving and Reverent Esteeming of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ’, in The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, ed. by John Griffiths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), 444. 179. Lee Gatiss, For Us and Our Salvation: ‘Limited Atonement’ in the Bible, Doctrine, History, and Ministry (London: The Latimer Trust, 2012), 100–109.

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‘herein thou needest no other man’s help, no other sacrifice or oblation, no sacrificing priest, no mass, no means established by man’s invention’. Beyond the official formularies and the liturgy, the idea can be found functioning at the level of assumption. In Thomas Becon’s prayer for the dying, Christ is implored thus: ‘Thou sufferedst thy blessed body and thy precious blood to be shed for his sins, and to bring him unto the glory of thy heavenly Father: let it not therefore come to pass that thou shouldest suffer so great pains for him in vain’.180 Likewise, in a prayer for the avoidance of sin: ‘Suffer not thy blessed body to be broken, and thy precious blood to be shed for us in vain’.181 Becon was a great admirer of Hugh Latimer, a man known for neither equivocation nor subtlety.182 Latimer insisted that ‘Christ shed as much blood for Judas, as he did for Peter: Peter believed it, and therefore he was saved; Judas would not believe it, and therefore he was condemned; the fault being in him only, in nobody else’.183 In these earlier generations of English reformers one does not find a general atonement framed by a carefully constructed predestinarian scheme as in early seventeenth-century hypothetical universalism. Other matters, such as eucharistic theology, were more pressing concerns. It is clear, however, that a general atonement was a view held by at least some. The hypothetical universalism taught by James Ussher should therefore not be regarded as a theological novelty, but rather as another reading of the sufficiency–efficiency distinction which developed the inclusive biblical language of the Church of England’s formularies in opposition to the strict particularism of Beza and Perkins. Ussher’s achievement lies not in the originality of his thought, but in his advocacy of this idea in high Calvinist and Puritan circles, winning John Davenant to the cause and indirectly, through Davenant’s influence at Dort, ensuring that there remained a latitude in the range of opinions tolerated within Reformed theology on the extent of the atonement. The Synod backed away from a strict

180. Thomas Becon, The Flower of Godly Prayers (1551), and repeated in The Sick Man’s Salve (c. 1559), both found in Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, S.T.P., ed. by John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 68, 186. The latter piece, a dramatic death-bed dialogue, contains an amusing example of sixteenth-century advertising. One of the characters twice asks for, and proceeds to read excerpts from, The Flower of Godly Prayers (186, 190). 181. Becon, The Flower of Godly Prayers, in ibid., 62f. 182. Seymour Baker House, ‘Becon, Thomas (1512/13–1567)’, ODNB. 183. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. by G. E. Corrie (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844), 521.

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particularist definition and accepted a degree of theological diversity.184 Advocates of hypothetical universalism at the Westminster Assembly also ensured that there was a sufficient degree of ambiguity in the confessional standards to prevent their being excluded from the Reformed orthodox camp. During the debate on this point, Edmund Calamy argued for an understanding of the extent of the atonement ‘in the sence of our devines in the sinod of Dort’. Christ paid the price for all, his intention ‘absolute for the elect, conditionall for the reprobate, in case they doe beleive’.185 Ussher therefore exerted an indirect influence on two of the most significant public statements of Reformed theology.

An Anti-Calvinist Ussher? As in life, so in death, Ussher proved a controversial figure. His body had not lain long in the grave when debate began about the true nature of his position. The presbyterian William Barlee had numbered Ussher among the ‘orthodox authors’ that his anti-Calvinist opponent Thomas Pierce should read.186 Pierce took exception to Barlee’s enlisting the late primate against universal grace and made the shocking claim, on the authority of a number of unnamed, but allegedly respectable witnesses, that shortly before his death Ussher had rejected the opinions of Calvin and ‘professed his utter dislike to the whole Doctrine of Geneva in those affairs’.187 Barlee

184. Moore, ‘The Extent of the Atonement’, 144–148. 185. Chad van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3.692–702 (692); cf. Alex F. Mitchell and John Struthers, eds., Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1874), 152–160 (152). See also, Lee Gatiss, ‘“Shades of Opinion within a Generic Calvinism”. The Particular Redemption Debate at the Westminster Assembly’, Reformed Theological Review, 69 (2010), 101–118; ‘A Deceptive Clarity? Particular Redemption in the Westminster Standards’, Reformed Theological Review, 69 (2010), 180–196; Moore, ‘The Extent of the Atonement’, 148–152; Robert Letham, The Westminster Assembly: Reading Its Theology in Historical Context (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 176–182. 186. William Barlee, Prædestination, as before Privately, So Now at Last Openly Defended against Post-Destination in a Correptorie Correction Given in by Way of Answer to, a (So Called) Correct Copy of Some Notes Concerning Gods Decrees, Especially of Reprobation, Published the Last Summer by Mr. T.P. (1656), 194* (sig. Ccv). 187. Pierce, The Divine Philanthropie Defended (1657), I.15, 77–78; cf. II.14; idem, A Correct Copy of Some Notes Concerning Gods Decrees, Especially of Reprobation Written for the Private Use of a Friend in Northamptonshire, but Published at First to Prevent Calumny, and Now Reprinted to Stop Its Mouth (1657), postscript.

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turned to Nicholas Bernard, formerly Ussher’s chaplain and now preacher at Gray’s Inn, to set the record straight. In two published letters, Bernard reassured Barlee that it was not unprecedented for opinions, or even entire books, to be foisted on Ussher. Pierce’s sources were undoubtedly in error, having either mistaken the doctrine of Geneva for its discipline, or perhaps, having assumed that Ussher was an extreme Calvinist, they had taken what they heard him preach of all men made salvabiles as a retraction. They had listened to him speaking of universal redemption but heard him speak of universal grace. On the basis of his last meeting with Ussher in London, five weeks before his death, and on hearing his last sermon preached there, Bernard was confident that Ussher held firm to his published opinions and the Articles of the Church of Ireland. Others who had spoken with Ussher subsequently were in agreement. Bernard could see how Pierce would be helped by having Ussher as a patron of his cause, but his claim was most improbable. Ussher maintained a middle way between Pierce and Barlee. Whilst that might leave him vulnerable to criticism from both sides, it also provided a means of reconciliation, although Bernard saw little hope of that in view of the temperature of their exchanges.188 At this point Pierce began correspondence with Bernard and subsequently published his own letters.189 He intended to liberate Ussher from ‘the unjust Usurpers of his Authority, and bold Invaders of his Name’.190 Bernard had not gone far enough in putting distance between Ussher and Barlee. His account of a middle way suggested that Ussher was equidistant between Barlee and Pierce, when in reality Ussher’s opinion at the end of his life was barely distinguishable from that of Pierce, and in ‘perfect Concurrence with Bishop Overal’.191 When compared with the views that he held when he wrote his history of Gotteschalk in 1631, it was clear Ussher had changed his mind. Bernard’s argument was based on

188. Bernard, ed., The Judgement (1657), I.41–72. On ‘salvabiles, or put into a capacity of salvation’, see 64. The term salvabiles parallels Ussher’s language of humanity’s sins made ‘fit for pardon’ and was also deployed during the debate on redemption at the Westminster Assembly. Edmund Calamy, for example, spoke of Christ’s dying so ‘that all men should be salvabiles, non obstante lapsu Adami’. Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 3.692, 695; Mitchell and Struthers, eds., Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, 152, 154. 189. His five letters to Bernard are found in Pierce, Self-Revenger (1658), 125–163. 190. Ibid., 125. 191. Ibid., 131.

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probability whereas Pierce’s claim was based on knowledge, according to the testimony of eminent divines. Having teased Bernard that one day he would name names, in his fifth letter he finally revealed their identities as Brian Walton, Peter Gunning, and Herbert Thorndike, and reproduced their written testimonies.192 Aggrieved that Pierce had only published one side of their conversation, Bernard published his response to Pierce’s fifth letter.193 He believed that these witnesses had misunderstood Ussher and their accounts did not necessarily support Pierce’s contention. Walton reported that Ussher had denied absolute reprobation but in all likelihood Ussher had been speaking of the supralapsarian order of the decrees, and hence his differences with Geneva were with Beza, not Calvin. On the question of the intent of Christ’s death, there was nothing here at variance with Ussher’s published remarks, and he could be said to be in concurrence with Overall insofar as each ‘joynes the universality of redemption with the speciall intention of God, effectually to save the elect’.194 Of greater interest is Bernard’s response to Gunning’s claim. Gunning related how Ussher had told him that ‘God together with his word preached, doth give internal Grace to all who are called by it, that they may repent and be converted, if they will’. Assuming that Gunning had heard correctly, internal grace should perhaps be taken in the sense of ‘some good motions offered unto the hearts of sinners, which if they did not extinguish . . . they should be seconded with more effectual grace . . . that speciall grace, whereby their Wills are changed, and their conversion wrought’.195 In the absence of qualifying statements, this would appear to drive Ussher into the arms of Pierce and the anti-Calvinists.196 For some,

192. Ibid., 154–157; cf. Hammond, Nineteen Letters, 17–19; Henry John Todd, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Brian Walton, D.D., Lord Bishop of Chester, 2 vols (London: F. C. & J. Rivington and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1821), 1.203–209. 193. Bernard, ed., The Judgement (1659), 359–380. 194. Ibid., 366. 195. Ibid., 367f. Thorndike had added ‘the sufficience of grace . . . that the gospel bringeth to all that hear it preached’ (Pierce, Self-Revenger, 156). Had Bernard side-stepped Gunning with the riposte that Ussher was speaking of effectual calling, he would have still had to deal with Thorndike. 196. Cf. Bernard, ed., The Judgement (1659), 365. Earlier in the letter, in response to Walton’s claim that Ussher denied that the grace of conversion was irresistible, Bernard conceded that this much could be said if it was recognised that grace was effectual by the decree of election and was not resisted by the elect.

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these remarks would have confirmed their suspicions about the direction of Ussher’s thought. Others perhaps feared that Ussher had been misrepresented and that a Reformed theologian could not have expressed himself in these terms. It is impossible to tell whether Bernard’s comments on this point are an accurate reflection of Ussher’s settled position or an attempt to think his thoughts after him. It is conceivable that Ussher adopted such a position as it closely parallels the thought of John Davenant. In justifying the posture of the British delegation at Dort, Davenant had written, In Ecclesia uti juxta hoc Promissum Evangelii salus omnibus offertur, ea est administratio gratiae suae quae sufficit ad convincendos omnes impoenitentes, & incredulos, quod sua culpa voluntaria, & vel neglectu, vel contemptu Evangelii perierint, & beneficia oblata amiserint . . . we hold that there are sundry initial preparations tending to Conversion, merited by Christ, and dispensed in the preaching of the Gospel, and wrought by the Holy Ghost in the hearts of many that never attain to true Regeneration or Justfication, such are Illuminatio, & Notitia dogmatum fidei, Fides Dogmatica, Sensus peccati, Timor poenae, Cogitatio de liberatione, Spes veniae &c.197 Davenant postulated ‘the Communication of Grace in some measure and degree tending to Conversion, to all to whom the Gospel is preached’. If the gospel promises are not effectual to all ‘the defect is inherent in Man, who will not receive that grace, that is truly and seriously offered on God’s part’.198 Ussher says nothing quite so explicit but one can discern subtle notes in his preaching suggestive of concurrence. For example, in

197. Davenant, ‘Doctour Davenant touching the Second Article, discussed at the conference at the Haghe of the Extent of the Redemption’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 219, with reference to Heb. 6:4–6 and 10:15–17; cf. Ussher’s copy in Bodl., MS Rawlinson C849, fol. 279r. The first portion passed into the ‘Collegiat Suffrage’ of the British divines: ‘In the 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 unbeleevers, that by their own voluntary default, either through neglect or contempt of the Gospell, they perish, and come short of the benefit offered unto them’. In support of this, the divines reason from John 15:22 that ‘it is certaine, that Christ in propounding the Gospell, did withall dispence that internall grace, which so far forth sufficed, that in that they accepted not, or rejected the Gospell, they might bee justly taxed of positive infidelity’, in Milton, ed., The British Delegation and the Synod of Dort, 245f. 198. Davenant, ‘Doctour Davenant touching the Second Article’, in ibid., 220.

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the course of distinguishing between the faith which justifies and the ‘faith’ that arises from the ‘temporary’, and therefore ‘ineffectual’, motions of the Spirit in the heart, Ussher speaks of ‘conceptions that will never come to birth, to a right and perfect delivery’. He describes ‘conception’ as ‘certain dispositions to a birth, that come not to full perfection’.199 Ussher does not claim that such conception occurs everywhere the seed of the gospel is scattered, but this language of latent potential is interesting, his ‘dispositions to a birth’ paralleling Davenant’s grace ‘tending to Conversion’. The argument is reminiscent of Prosper’s account of how ‘in some men grace prevailed and in others nature recoiled’.200 Special grace is not received because God’s initial overtures are rejected. Certainly Ussher did not go as far as Prosper in the extent to which he ascribed a role to human volition in the process of salvation. However, the parallel with the structure of Prosper’s thought is intriguing. Ussher clearly regarded Prosper as a model of moderation, and perhaps here one may detect the traces of Prosper’s influence on Ussher’s thought, or at least on that of Bernard as he attempted to think through its implications. Such a scheme does not entirely circumvent the mystery of election, but in attributing the fault for resisting God’s gracious overtures to the will of the sinner, it acts as a middle way between strict particularist and universalising stances. These ideas were not developed further in print. Bernard ended his letter with a call for an armistice to let Ussher’s name ‘rest in peace, without any further strife of tongues or pens’, allowing men to judge his opinion from his published works.201 Meanwhile, it seems that Bernard was engaged in defending Ussher on another front, this time from the animadversions of a strict particularist202 who feared that in dealing with his slippery subject, Ussher had

199. WJU, 13.228; cf. 247, 263 (Sermons on Rom. 5:1, 1640). 200. Prosper, De vocatione omnium gentium, 2.25 (PL, 51, col. 711B; ACW, 14.134). 201. Bernard, ed., The Judgement (1659), 380. 202. This altercation can be found in Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 280, fols 13r–31v, and consists of two animadversions (fols 18v–25v, 26v–31v; one on each of Ussher’s letters from 1618, published by Bernard in 1657) and two responses (fols 13r–15r, 16r–17r). The attribution to ‘Doctor Bernard’ in the title of each of the responses has been struck through but the challenge laid down by the animadverter to ‘the learned publisher’ (fol. 31v) and the way in which the responder felt able to speak freely on Ussher’s behalf suggests that Bernard did pen the responses. The animadverter makes frequent references to Pierce’s Self-Revenger

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found himself on a slippery slope and was in danger of falling into ‘the Arminian Gulfe’.203 This particularist believed that to grant universal redemption would be to concede universal grace, and to concede this would be to surrender on the other four points of the Arminian controversy. He was troubled by Ussher’s assertion that the medicine of Christ’s death ‘should bee denyed to none that intended to take the benefit of it’, ‘which in my judgment after the Arminian Dialect insinuates sufficient and effectual grace to bee given to all, and supposes a possibility in their wills to receive, or reject it’.204 This is not a fair reading in the context of Ussher’s original letter, but in view of the rumours circulating about the opinions Ussher expressed in his final weeks, this critic was clearly concerned about the trajectory of Ussher’s thinking. There was no disagreement over the sufficiency of the satisfaction considered absolutely, though this particularist critic believed that it was sufficient by nature rather than by special decree. It could be considered to have made human nature salvable in contrast to the angelical nature, but should not be thought to put every individual human being into a salvable condition. This critic sought to exploit a tension in Ussher’s thought at the point of distinction between Christ’s satisfaction absolutely considered and as applied. In restricting the latter to the elect, surely Ussher destroyed any argument for the universal intent of the former. People could not be considered to have been made salvable when they did not and never would receive the gift of faith, without which the satisfaction could not be applied. The sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction is as nothing

(1658) but none to Bernard’s 1659 response to Pierce. This would lead to a tentative dating of 1658–1659. His references to Bernard as ‘D.B.’ (e.g. fol. 27v) rather than a direct address mean it is probable that the manuscript was intended for circulation. The name of the animadverter has been added as an annotation to the heading in three of the four manuscripts but is heavily effaced. In one instance (fol. 13r), the name ‘Mr. Cawdre’ is just discernible, suggesting that the animadverter was Daniel Cawdrey, former member of the Westminster Assembly, and, as rector of Great Billings, the Northamptonshire neighbour of both Barlee and Pierce. Cawdrey had already entered the battle in contributing a commendatory epistle to Prædestination, As Before Privately, So Now At Last Openly Defended Against Post-Destination (1656), Barlee’s first salvo in Pierce’s direction (sig. d4r). The hand is not a match with Cawdrey’s, but if the animadversions were intended for circulation it is not unlikely that copies would have been made. They do, however, closely reflect the views expressed and arguments employed in Cawdrey’s theological notebook where his indebtedness to Perkins on this subject is manifest. Northamptonshire Record Office, MS 31p/21, esp. fols 210r, 320r, 340r. On Cawdrey, see J. Fielding, ‘Cawdrey [Cawdry], Daniel (1587/8–1664)’, ODNB. 203. Queen’s College, MS 280, fol. 19v. 204. Ibid., fol. 18v, citing Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.559.

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to those to whom God does not intend to give faith. The case could be put another way: The pinch then of the question lyes here, whether Christ intentionally died for all, as to purchase, or procure faith, and repentance unto all. If soe [(]as Mr. P[ierce] asserts) then either absolutely, and soe all must have those graces, or conditionally; and then I desire to know what condition can bee given, but meere workes of nature, the good use of our talent, which is pure Pelagianisme. If not, as the Primate holds, then Christ intended not the satisfaction for all, but for the elect onely, and soe there is no universall redemption.205 Satisfaction and application are ‘of equall latitude in regards of the intention of God’.206 The satisfaction was only intended for those same persons for whom the application was intended. The argument from the unity of the divine purpose is bolstered by an appeal to the unity of the acts of Christ’s priesthood: ‘it seemes most improbable, that Christ should pay the price of his pretious blood for them for whom hee would not soe much as putt up a prayer, how easie were the application procured by his intercession, when the satisfaction was made for all their sinns by his death, and passion’.207 A second animadversion highlights the ‘double jeopardy’ argument. If God’s justice has been satisfied for all humanity through the death of Christ, the author asked, how can God demand that justice be satisfied again at judgement? If a surety has paid the debt, the creditor cannot exact payment again. The answer that satisfaction is made upon condition of applying it by faith is altogether unsatisfactory. ‘Satisfaction was actually made to justice at Christs death, if not before in acceptation of it, wee say for the elect onely . . . satisfaction was actually accepted for them, and they virtually reconciled there, though not actually till they beleive’.208 This particularist critic wanted to affirm that something was accomplished at the cross, something more than a possibility. Satisfaction was made, redemption

205. Queen’s College, MS 280, fol. 25v, cf. fols 21v–22v. 206. Ibid., fol. 20v. 207. Ibid., fol. 24v. 208. Ibid., fol. 30v. Note the nod towards satisfaction obtained through the forging of a pactum salutis.

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accomplished. With satisfaction made for the elect, God resolves never to impute their sins to them; they have a virtual justification before faith.209 This critic also answered Ussher’s charge that the strict particularist would bind the conscience of the reprobate to believe an untruth. He replied that no one is bound to believe that Christ died for him in particular until he trusts in Christ. The ‘first tender of the gospel’ is the sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction and this is offered upon the condition of belief.210 Ussher’s position ‘is not fairely Construed to be a graunting of all to the Arminians’, replied Bernard.211 Universal redemption did not necessarily entail universality of grace and free will. This universality of redemption was established on the sufficiency of the satisfaction, not only on a sufficiency of inherent value (valorem naturalem), but on a sufficiency deriving from God’s decree (valorem positivum et a deo institutum), by which Christ’s death is the basis of a new covenant with humanity. The death of Christ makes all humanity salvable, reconcilable rather than actually reconciled. Bernard dismissed the distinction between virtual and actual reconciliation as ‘new and groundlesse’, there being no change in the estate of the elect before they come to faith.212 The death of Christ for all is to be preached and believed. Sinners are called to believe that Christ died for all, and so for them in particular. Assent to this truth is an act of ‘dogmaticall or Catholicke faith’, a precognitum to the ‘relyance, confidence, acceptance of Christ’ which constitutes justifying faith, and by which the benefits of that death are applied.213 It does not follow that because Christ died for all, all will hear the message and be given sufficient grace to respond. Bernard freely conceded this, noting that on this point, against the claims of Pierce, Ussher upheld

209. Ibid., fol. 19v. On the basis of his reading of 2 Cor. 5:19, the author concludes, ‘God may virtually justify them before they believe’; cf. fol. 30v. This should be distinguished from justification before faith as it appears in the thought of William Twisse, William Pemble, and others, where justification proper takes place either in the immanent divine will or at the cross, and where ‘justification by faith’ is a subjective experience, in foro conscientiae. By this time, such thinking had become less acceptable, having been condemned at the Westminster Assembly (WCF 11.4), and through guilt by association with antinomianism. The following chapter discusses this at greater length. 210. Ibid., fol. 27v; cf. fol. 22v. 211. Ibid., fol. 13r. 212. Ibid., fol. 13r. This is also the basis of his rejection of the ‘double jeopardy’ argument, fols 16v–17r. 213. Ibid., fol. 13v; cf. fol. 16r.

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Article 32 of the Church of Ireland. He proceeded to speak of common motions and effectual grace: those within the church have not that sufficient grace alwayes tendred them, ’tis hodie but not quotidie of such offers of grace . . . they may have some good motions stirred up in them, to those preparative workes required to conversion, as some sorrow for sinne, feare of hell, desire of pardon, which they doe not pursue, and make good use of them, and soe ’tis just with God to deny them that effectuall grace which should worke their conversion.214 This is reminiscent of his reply to Gunning, with the donation of ‘effectuall’ grace apparently suspended on the response to preparative motions. However, earlier in this answer, he had insisted that whilst all ‘may’ be saved by the redemption purchased by Christ’s blood, the elect would ‘certainely’ be saved through effectual calling and conversion.215 The above remarks could therefore be interpreted as speaking of God’s righteousness in withholding effectual grace from those who will not turn to him, rather than a denial of irresistible efficacious grace in the case of the elect. Neglect of preparative grace ‘doeth convince them of a wilfull neglect of those meanes which are prerequired of them unto conversion’.216 Again, the emphasis is on the culpability of those who reject the approaches of a gracious God.217 The parallels with Prosper are striking. These long-neglected manuscripts are noteworthy. The animadversions are the most substantial surviving critique of Ussher’s stated views on the extent of the atonement by a contemporary particularist.218 This critic recognised Ussher’s abhorrence of Arminianism but pointed to 214. Ibid., fol. 14r–v. 215. Ibid., fol. 13r. He goes on to speak of a ‘speciall and absolute intention made to the elect’, fol. 14v. 216. Ibid., fol. 15r. This leaves sinners without excuse, radicalising their disobedience. Cf. fol. 14r: ‘the refusall of it [Christ’s satisfaction] contracts novum reatum and makes them privative infideles’. 217. Ibid., fol. 16r: ‘an actuall voluntary refusall and soe it is obstinata voluntas not necessaria, et naturalis impossibilitas; ligamur vinculis propriæ voluntatis’. 218. A case for limited atonement may also be found among Ussher’s papers in Bodl., MS Rawlinson C849, fols 284r–285r. In places the language used suggests a response to Ussher’s letters of 1618, but it lacks the sophistication of the animadversions and their point-bypoint interaction with Ussher’s argument.

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some aspects of his thought which appeared, at least to him, to tend toward universal grace, and at the same time tensions which would tend to undermine universal redemption. Bernard’s responses are highly technical, Latinate defences of his mentor’s views, and perhaps reflect a development of his ideas. Along with the debate between Barlee and Pierce, these documents reflect a continuing interest in Ussher’s opinions after his death, and a desire to enlist him in support of various causes. There is a measure of truth in Sara Clausen’s observation that Ussher’s ‘moderate Calvinist synthesis’ was ‘often ambiguous and of a sophistication that too easily lent itself to misinterpretation’.219 However, in the case of Pierce the reader would be forgiven for suspecting what Alan Ford has described as ‘Anglican, anti-Calvinist wish-fulfilment’, if not premeditated abduction.220

Conclusion This chapter has quarried Ussher’s writings to provide a more wideranging account of his thought on the atonement than previously available. It is evident that at some point between 1602 and 1618, Ussher rejected limited atonement, the doctrine in which he had been schooled, in favour of hypothetical universalism within a predestinarian framework. He advocated a general atonement but insisted that its saving benefits were applied only through the workings of special grace. Ussher became an advocate for this view, arguing its merits within the circles of the godly, and through his convert, John Davenant, indirectly influencing the proceedings of the Synod of Dort. Ussher’s self-conscious engagement with the patristic past reveals that he considered hypothetical universalism no novelty, but rather truly catholic. If one were to accept the ‘Calvin and the Calvinists’ historiographical paradigm at face value, one would expect to find a humanist rather than scholastic cast to the theology of a hypothetical universalist such as Ussher. However, scholasticism is clearly a feature of Ussher’s work on the atonement. The language of causality is present as are a number of medieval scholastic expressions. This tendency is even more obvious in

219. Sara J. Clausen, ‘Calvinism in the Anglican Hierarchy, 1603–1643: Four Episcopal Examples’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1989), 253, 359. 220. Ford, James Ussher, 283; idem, ‘“Making Dead Men Speak”: Manipulating the Memory of James Ussher’, 64f. There is some evidence that Pierce was not incapable of such distortions of the truth. See Peter Lake, ‘Serving God and the Times: The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 81–116 (113).

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Davenant’s published work and in Bernard’s defence of Ussher. Jonathan Moore has demonstrated that John Preston’s hypothetical universalism ‘involved the multiplication of the very scholastic categories that allegedly produce increasing rigidity in doctrinal formulation’.221 Similarly, Donald Sinnema has pointed out that at the Synod of Dort, those most inclined towards scholastic terminology were the delegates from Bremen and England who showed a modicum of sympathy towards the Remonstrants, whereas those most suspicious of scholastic terminology were rigorous Contra-Remonstrants, such as Gomarus and Sibrandus Lubbertus.222 One of the critical errors made by the ‘Calvin and the Calvinists’ school, the folly of which has recently been exposed, is the assumption that scholasticism entails a certain doctrinal content, whilst in reality it is a methodological approach.223 Ussher’s writings are further evidence that on the important question of the extent of the atonement, the ‘Calvin and the Calvinists’ hypothesis falls down. Ambiguity remains in Ussher’s teaching on the relationship between the extent of the atonement and its nature. Whilst the language found in his two letters of 1618 displays shades of the Anselmic,224 his clear preference was for the diction of substitution and penal justice. In his sermons, Ussher frequently used the typology of the Levitical sacrifices, and the image of the hands placed on the head of the sacrifice in the imputation of sin. Applying this to Christ, he encourages his hearers, ‘Wee come before the Lord, and wee putt our sinnes upon the head of his Sonne, his Father slayeth him, hee powreth forth his blood, and wee are sprinckled therewith’.225 However, he generally uses this as an analogy of faith, the means of appropriating the 221. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism, 222. 222. Donald Sinnema, ‘Reformed Scholasticism and the Synod of Dort (1618–1619)’, in John Calvin’s Institutes: His Opus Magnum, ed. by B. J. van der Walt (Potchefstroom: Institute for Reformational Studies, 1986), 467–506 (487). 223. Richard A. Muller, ‘Calvin and the “Calvinists”: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities between the Reformation and Orthodoxy’, in After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63–102 (74–83); idem, ‘The Problem of Protestant Scholasticism: A Review and Definition’, in Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise, ed. by Willem J. van Asselt and Eef Dekker (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2001), 45–64. 224. For example, Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.554: ‘the injury done to God’s majesty being so great, that it could not stand with his honour to put it up without amends made’. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.568: ‘God the party offended, whose justice hath been in such sort violated by his base vassals, that it were unfit for his glorious majesty to put up such an injury without good satisfaction’. 225. Balliol, MS 259, II, fol. 378v (Sermon on 1 Jn. 5:8, c. 1624).

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cross work of Christ, and the pleading of one’s pardon. For example, ‘Unlesse a man can come to lay his hand upon the Lamb of God, there is no hope for him . . . lay his hand, and all his sinnes upon him, and shew him unto the Father’.226 There are clearer statements. Christ ‘did both deliver us from the punishment, which we had deserved, and also translate it upon his own person . . . when he bare our sins on the tree, then were our sins condemned’.227 This language is strongly penal and substitutionary, and yet his hypothetical universalism leads him to speak elsewhere of Christ’s satisfaction ‘making the sins of all mankind pardonable’.228 In the sermon just mentioned, Ussher is therefore forced to back-pedal. The Lamb of God ‘doth not actually take away all the sins of the world, but virtually’.229 There was power in Christ’s blood, but only if it was rightly applied. Fundamentally, the atonement was not made to deal decisively with the sins of the elect. It was made for fallen human nature, rendering God placable and hence sins pardonable. The same cannot be said for the angelical nature which was not assumed.230 There are therefore deep and seemingly irreconcilable tensions in Ussher’s thought on the nature of the atonement and its extent. The conditionality of such a model of the atonement was unacceptable to the animadverter who conceived of a redemption actually accomplished at the cross. Application of the atonement to the elect followed on from the event itself, but something happened on Calvary. The sins of the elect were paid for in full and expiated, and only the sins of the elect, otherwise the law of double jeopardy came into play. Crawford Gribben also charges Ussher with ‘evacuating the accomplishment of salvation from the historic death of Christ’. He adds, ‘the atonement has become, in Ussher’s thinking, only a sign pointing to its signified, the salvation wrought by the existential application of the death of Jesus Christ in the life of the believer’.231 If this is true, perhaps Ussher resembles Haller’s Puritan more than appeared at first glance.

226. Ibid., I, fols 67v–68r (Sermon on 2 Cor. 5:19, c. 1624). 227. WJU, 13.159, 162 (Sermon on Jn. 1:12, 1640). 228. Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.569. 229. WJU, 13.160 (Sermon on Jn. 1:12, 1640). 230. Ussher, The True Intent and Extent, in WJU, 12.555, 559; Ussher, An Answer, in WJU, 12.569. 231. Gribben, ‘Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology’, 67.

3

‘This Sweet Doctrine’—Justification by Faith

in june 1626, Ussher received a letter from his friend Samuel Ward informing him of a prodigious event in Cambridge. A large cod had been brought to market, and when it was gutted, a small sextodecimo volume wrapped in canvas was found inside. Joseph Mede, another of Ussher’s correspondents, had braved the foul stench to inspect the partially digested book, discovering that it consisted of a number of evangelical tracts from the reign of Henry VIII. One of the titles, Praeparatio Crucem or Of the Preparation to the Cross, appeared to be laden with portent: ‘it may be a special admonition to us at Cambridge’.1 Ussher quickly responded, warning that ‘the accident is not lightly to be passed over, which, I fear me, bringeth with it too true a prophecy of the state to come’. He agreed that ‘it may well be a special admonition’ to Cambridge, ‘which should not be neglected’.2 The tracts were soon published under the title Vox Piscis in which they were attributed to John Frith who had died a martyr in 1533. This first generation Reformer was ‘in a sort reuiued . . . so that like another Ionas hee now speakes to thee out of the belly of the Fish’.3 This prophetic voice spoke directly to anxieties surrounding the Church of

1. Ward to Ussher, 27 June 1626, in WJU, 15.344f. The chapter title is from Ussher, A Body of Divinitie (1645), 194. 2. Ussher to Ward, 30 June 1626, in WJU, 15.346. 3. Vox Piscis: Or, The Book-Fish. Contayning Three Treatises which were found in the belly of a Cod-fish in Cambridge Market, on Midsummer Eue last, Anno Domini 1626, ed. by Thomas Goad (1627), 18, 35f.

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England’s confessional position in the wake of the publication of Richard Montagu’s writings, anxieties which were shared by Ussher and Ward.4 Something of Ward’s pessimism regarding the ongoing doctrinal declension at Cambridge is manifest in his letters to Ussher. In June 1634, he complained about John Tourney, a fellow of Pembroke Hall. Tourney had preached a sermon at St Mary’s in which he argued from James 2:22 that faith cooperated with works, and that ‘in the attaining unto the encrease of justification they are partiall causes and both concurre’.5 He subsequently signed a recantation, professing himself in accord with the Thirty-Nine Articles, but was soon in trouble again. Preaching in Latin, pro gradu, he claimed that he had come not ‘to recite a recantation, but rather to sing the same song’, the tune being that we are justified in part by works and inherent righteousness.6 Refusing to provide the vice chancellor with a written copy of the sermon, he was denied his B.D. until friends in high places intervened on his behalf. Ward lamented that ‘innovators are too much favoured now a-days’.7 This episode was symptomatic of the loss of cohesion in English Protestantism on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. For Ward, Ussher, and their circle, the defence of the doctrine of justification by faith alone was a vital concern. It may not have dominated the Reformed theological system as it did in Lutheranism,8 but it was central to the gospel which they held so dear. In the following three decades they would witness not only the continued rejection of the Church of England’s doctrine of justification by recalcitrant Roman Catholicism, but also the 4. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Vox Piscis: Or the Book–Fish: Providence and the Uses of the Reformation Past in Caroline Cambridge’, English Historical Review, 114 (1999), 574–606. On the interpretation of such signs and wonders within the matrix of providential beliefs, see idem, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167–224. 5. BL, MS Harleian 7019, fol. 53r. 6. Ward to Ussher, 14 June 1634, in WJU, 15.580: ‘not, palinodiam canere, sed eandem cantilenam canere’. Ward was almost certainly one of the sources for the 1641 Commons committee report on religious abuses in the universities found in BL, MS Harleian 7019, fols 52r–93r. For further discussion, see David Hoyle, ‘A Commons Investigation of Arminianism and Popery in Cambridge on the Eve of the Civil War’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986): 419–425; Margo Todd, ‘“All One with Tom Thumb”: Arminianism, Popery, and the Story of the Reformation in Early Stuart Cambridge’, Church History, 64 (1995), 563–579. 7. Ward to Ussher, 14 June 1634, in WJU, 15.580. 8. Justification approaches the proportions of a central dogma in Luther. See, for example, ‘Die Promotionsdisputation von Palladius und Tilemann. 1. Juni 1537’, in WA, 39/I.205.2–5: Articulus iustificationis est magister et princeps, dominus, rector et iudex super omnia genera doctrinarum, qui conservet et gubernat omnem doctrinam ecclesiasticam et erigit conscientiam nostram coram Deo.

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new moralism of Henry Hammond and Jeremy Taylor, the antinomian bedlam of the revolutionary years, and the arrival of Socinianism on England’s shores.9 The letters that passed between them betray their anxiety, and they would spill much ink in defence of the Protestant distinctives. Alister McGrath has argued that it is inadequate to characterise the classic Protestant formulations of the doctrine of justification as merely anti-Pelagian. Instead, he writes, the notional distinction, necessitated by a forensic understanding of justification, between the external act of God in pronouncing sentence, and the internal process of regeneration, along with the associated insistence upon the alien and external nature of justifying righteousness, must be considered to be the most reliable historical characterisation of Protestant doctrines of justification.10 This rather dense sentence helpfully draws together three distinctive features of pre-Enlightenment Protestant accounts of justification. First, justification is forensic. To be justified by God is to be declared righteous and acquitted. Second, and for McGrath the heart of the matter, a systematic distinction is made between justification and sanctification. The former is the change of the believer’s standing before God, the latter the transformation of the believer. Whilst justification and sanctification are formally distinct they are also inseparable, both being received together in Christ. Finally, the ground of justification is Christ’s righteousness reckoned or imputed to the believer rather than the believer’s own inherent righteousness or faith itself counted as righteousness. Catholic tradition, following Augustine, did not make this systematic distinction between justification and sanctification. It seems that Augustine’s lack of proficiency in the biblical languages led him to interpret the Latin word iustificare within the context of post-classical Latin, rather than against the Semitic background of the Hebrew qyDIc.hi and Greek δικαι#ω that  iustificare had been used to translate. Apparently taking ficare as the

9. For discussion of developments in this period see, C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (London: S.P.C.K., 1966); Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 277–292; idem, ‘The Emergence of the Anglican Tradition on Justification 1600–1700’, Churchman, 98 (1984), 28–43; James I. Packer, ‘The Puritan Treatment of Justification by Faith’, Evangelical Quarterly, 24 (1952), 131–143. 10. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 209f. For McGrath’s survey of early Protestant views, see 208–292.

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unstressed form of facere (‘to make’), he interpreted iustificare as ‘to make righteous’.11 This understanding of justification as process became dogma at the Council of Trent. From the Reformers’ perspective, to conflate justification and sanctification in this way was to bring human works into the reckoning in justification, undermining grace and leaving the Christian in perpetual uncertainty. The doctrine of justification by faith alone therefore made a difference at the level of personal piety, encouraging a reliance on Christ’s work rather than on self, and offering assurance of salvation. This chapter will introduce James Ussher’s thought on justification, focusing on its nature, its formal cause in the imputed righteousness of Christ, the spiritual union with Christ through which that righteousness is appropriated, and the instrumentality of faith in that union. Once again, a pattern of change emerges.

The Nature of Justification In classic Protestant formulations of the doctrine, justification is the declarative act of God, reckoning the believing sinner righteous, rather than a transformative process in which the sinner is made righteous. Justification is God’s binding, legal pronouncement that notwithstanding sin and guilt, the sinner is acquitted, no longer standing under the condemnation of the law but accepted as righteous on the basis of Christ’s work. Justification is forensic, an actus forensis (legal action) occurring in foro divino (in the divine forum or court), and a declaration of one’s legal standing. This forensic understanding of justification is clearly seen in the writings of John Calvin, with the identification of remission of sin and imputation of righteousness as its constituent parts: We explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.12

11. Ibid., 46f. 12. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.2. For introductory discussion of justification in Calvin’s thought, see Anthony N. S. Lane, Justification by Faith in Catholic-Protestant Dialogue: An Evangelical Assessment (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002), 17–43; W. Stanford Reid, ‘Justification by Faith According to John Calvin’, Westminster Theological Journal, 42 (1980), 290–307; H. Paul Santmire, ‘Justification in Calvin’s 1540 Romans Commentary’, Church History, 33 (1964), 294–313; Karla Wübbenhorst, ‘Calvin’s Doctrine of Justification: Variations on a Lutheran Theme’, in Justification in Perspective: Historical and Contemporary Challenges, ed. by Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006), 99–118.

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‘To justify’ means nothing else than to acquit of guilt him who was accused, as if his innocence were confirmed. Therefore, since God justifies us by the intercession of Christ, he absolves us not by the confirmation of our own innocence but by the imputation of righteousness, so that we who are not righteous in ourselves may be reckoned as such in Christ.13 Calvin notes that in the New Testament justification is opposed to accusation or condemnation. ‘This antithesis’, he argues, ‘clearly shows that the expression was taken from legal usage’, so that the Protestant forensic understanding of the term is consonant with its biblical use.14 The younger Ussher displays a similar clarity in his use of the term. In catechetical material written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he explains that in justification, ‘in Christ we are accounted righteous; and so are freed from condemnation’.15 Again, remission of sins and imputation of righteousness are taken together as the constituent elements of God’s declarative act. In A Body of Divinitie justification is ‘the sentence of God, whereby he . . . doth free us from sin and death, and account us righteous unto life’. Justification is not the infusion of righteousness into human nature, but rather ‘the word signifieth to pronounce just, to quit and discharge from guilt and punishment; and so it is a judicial sentence opposed to condemnation’. Just as condemnation does not involve the infusion of evil into the nature of the one condemned, but the declaration of a guilty verdict and the handing over to punishment, ‘so justifying is the Judges pronouncing the Law to be satisfied, and the man discharged and quitted from guilt and judgement’.16 Here, justification is presented in clear, forensic terms and carefully distinguished from sanctification. In a sermon dating from the 1620s, Ussher warns the unbeliever, ‘if thou therefore wouldest bee freed from Hell, looke that thou beest sure of a Quietus est, from Heaven, signed with the Bloud of the Lambe, otherwise noething but death abideth for thee’.17 In another sermon from the

13. Calvin, Institutes, 3.11.3. 14. Ibid., 3.11.11. 15. TCD, MS 291, fol. 17r. This differs only slightly in wording from the later published version found in Ussher, The Principles of Christian Religion (1653), in WJU, 11.188; cf. Ussher, The Method of the Doctrine of Christian Religion (1653), in WJU, 11.212. 16. Ussher, A Body of Divinitie (1645), 193f. 17. Balliol, MS 259, II, fol. 261r (Sermon on 1 Jn. 5:12, c. 1624).

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same period this ‘quietus est from heaven’ is described as ‘a free discharge and acquittance of all former debts’.18 Quietus est is a legal formula of release from debt or discharge from obligation, a term which passed from medieval Latin into Middle English.19 Ussher speaks of a quietus est which is opposed to condemnation and which will spare the sinner the full measure of God’s eschatological wrath against sin. It acts as a ground for present assurance, which merit cannot purchase. Although it is not here linked directly with the imputation of righteousness, the quietus est is a striking example of Ussher’s homiletical use of forensic imagery.

‘Double Justification’ The picture is more complicated in the series of sermons which Ussher preached in Oxford in 1640. He begins his discussion of justification by considering the origin of the concept in the Hebrew words qd