Thomas Adams and John Donne Revisited

Abstract

THE personal and textual relationship between the preacher Thomas Adams (1583–1652) and John Donne (1572–1631) has been noted, not least in these pages. R. C. Bald and Sir Geoffrey Keynes recorded Adams's dedication of his Paul's Cross sermon, The Barren Tree (1623, STC 106), to Donne, while Donald M. Friedman and Guillaume Coatelen have discovered allusions to and quotations from Donne's Anatomy of the World (1611, STC 7022) in Adams's Sinners Passing Bell (in The Diuells banket (1614, STC 110)), Diseases of the Soule (1616, STC 109), The Blacke Devil (1615, STC 107), and Englands Sicknes (1615, STC 114).1 What has not so far been noticed, however, is the perhaps unsurprising fact that Adams read Donne's sermons as well as his poems, and that he made use of them in his own writing. In 1633 Adams published his enormous Commentary or, exposition vpon the diuine second epistle generall, written by the blessed apostle St. Peter (1633, STC 108). The book runs to 1,634 pages (excluding the index), and combines a painstaking exposition of the biblical book that is its subject with an account of Adams's theology (moderate Calvinism).2 In the course of his commentary on 2 Pet. 9, Adams turns his attention to the assertion that ‘the Lord’ is ‘not willing that any should perish’, and proceeds to outline a hypothetical universalist position on justification close to that of the Durham House group, or anti-Calvinist faction of divines in the English Church: ‘God affords the means of Salvation to All, therefore Hee would have None to perish …’ (Sig. 5S4v). As he develops his argument, Adams quotes extensively, almost verbatim and without acknowledgement, from Donne's A Sermon, Preached to the Kings Mtie. at Whitehall, 24. Febr. 1625 (1626, STC 7050). Donne's sermon, delivered on one of his regular preaching days as a royal chaplain, the first Friday in Lent, is not on 2 Peter; his text is Isa. 50:1 (‘Thus sayth the Lord: Where is the Bill of your Mothers Diuorcement whom I haue put away? Or which of my Creditors is it, to whom I haue sold you? Behold, for your iniquities haue you sold your selues, and for your transgressions, is your Mother put away’). But it is concerned with the questions of conditional and unconditional election (it was delivered in the wake of the York House Conference, which had debated the issues), and especially with the dangers of fearing reprobation: Donne, like Adams after him, is determined to emphasize God's offer of grace and to counsel against falling into suspicion or despair.