The Early Puritanism of Lancelot Andrewes

Abstract

It is a commonplace that young radicals become old conservatives. Not only does this principle apply in modern life but it also finds illustrations in the history of party movements in earlier times. The English Puritans, who were the progressive group of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in their country, experienced this regular defection of some of their most promising young adherents. The two famous bishops of the English Church in Ireland, James Ussher and William Bedell, were strongly inclined towards Puritanism in their early years. Samuel Ward, the great Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and delegate of the English Church to the Synod of Dort, was another who became more moderate with the years. In the tributes which have been written to the memory of Lancelot Andrewes as a great High Churchman, court preacher, stylist and Anglican devotional writer, the fact that he also passed through such a stage in his development has been generally neglected. Nevertheless such was the case, and during his early years, Andrewes made an important contribution to the development of one of the most characteristic Puritan doctrines, that of the Sabbath.