Anglican Divines Research Articles

Henry Hammond and Covenant Theology

Henry Hammond (1605–60), the learned and practical English priest who during the Interregnum did as much as any man and a good deal more than most to reinforce and renew the ideational underpinnings of his Church, is a familiar figure in seventeenth-century Anglican studies. Historians speak of his captaincy of a circle of Anglican divines. One names him the “oracle of the High Church party”; another sees him as the principal transformer of Anglicanism. The Independent John Owen likened him to a clerical Atlas bearing on his shoulders “the whole weight of the episcopal cause.” The scholars just quoted call Hammond a “Laudian” but are uneasy with the label and loath to defend it. He appears in their work as an exemplary High Churchman standing for de jure episcopacy, Prayer-Book piety, the Eucharist, and royal headship of the Church. His intransigent Churchmanship contrasts in some degree with his character and temperament. He comes down to us as “the spokesman of those who would make no concession,” yet Richard Baxter, who thought him “the fons et origo of the prelatical bigotry of his day, wrote that he “took the death of Dr. Hammond … for a very great loss; for his piety and wisdom would sure have hindered much of the violence” of the Restoration.

Theological Reflections on the Place of the Sacred in Society

This paper attempts an overview of currents of theological thinking on the place of the sacred in society. It considers the long tradition of active engagement between Church and State, which derives its authority from the New Testament and can be traced through St Augustine and Anglican Divines to the present day. Having examined contemporary arguments of those who question the propriety of such an arrangement it concludes that it remains theologically justifiable. The paper then turns to the particular question of the Establishment of the Church of England and engages both with those who support it and those who are in favour of disestablishment. It observes that Establishment functions at various levels in English society and, whilst acknowledging and welcoming the fact that its form will continue to change, argues that it offers distinct advantages to both Church and State. In a country where seventy-one per cent of the population professes itself to be Christian it gives the state legitimacy by reminding the latter that all authority derives from God and ensures that Christian influence for the maintenance of a just and peaceful society remains strong. Establishment reminds the Church that it has a responsibility to the whole nation, not just those who regularly attend its churches, and protects the mission and ministry of the Church throughout the parishes of the land.

Divine Compassion and the Mystification of Power

William Placher and others have charged seventeenth-century theologians with domesticating divine transcendence, with fostering an understanding of God that was clear and comprehensible, but unattractive, unpersuasive, and easily undermined by secular thought. This essay tests that claim by analyzing the discourse of divine compassion which became prominent among post-Restoration Anglican divines. While the second generation of latitudinarians do exemplify the trends Placher traces, the first generation of latitudinarians, notably Cambridge Platonist Benjamin Whichcote, succeeds in finding a way to affirm divine compassion without undermining divine transcendence. Moreover, Whichcote argues that an insistence on divine incomprehensibility fosters a voluntaristic conception of divine power and—contrary to Placher—undermines efforts to promote transformative justice in human society. The present case study suggests that we must reconsider our modes of articulating divine transcendence.

:A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion's Debates at the Tower of London in 1581

In the year 1581, after four days of debating six leading Anglican divines at the Tower of London, Jesuit Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was put to death because he would not deny his faith. In 1970, the martyred Campion was canonized a saint. A Jesuit Challenge is a book-length edition of previously unpublished Catholic manuscript accounts of those debates. As corrective historical documents, these Catholic manuscripts reveal a quite different picture of Campion and his opponents from that represented in the government's published version, and thus offer us a fuller and more balanced understanding of what actually took place. In addition to their historical value, the Catholic manuscripts also include lively exchanges between Campion and his opponents, and provide humanizing details about them. As personalized documents they capture the dramatic flavor of a series of spirited debates dealing with the major theological issues separating Protestant England from Catholic Rome in Elizabeth's reign. Together with a transcription of the Catholic manuscript accounts, Holleran supplies a general historical introduction to the debates, a detailed description of the manuscripts, brief supplementary commentaries about the debates, and a full set of explanatory notes.

The Olney Autobiographers: English Conversion Narrative in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Consider the central religious crisis in the life of each of three individuals. First, on 21 March 1748, in the belly of a ship in the dead of night, awakened by a raging North Atlantic storm which threatened to sweep all on board to a watery death, John Newton cries out to God for mercy. Second, at an insane asylum on 26 July 1764, William Cowper emerges from nearly a year of psychological derangement and repeated attempts at self-destruction, and, flinging himself into a window-seat in the parlour, he opens a Bible, reads, and falls into a spiritual reverie as a kind of divine light floods into his soul. And then third, after months of anxiety over his ineffectual pastoral ministry, and remorse over the levity with which he entered holy orders, Thomas Scott shuts himself up in his study with his Bible, the works of Richard Hooker and other Anglican divines, and by Christmas 1777 argues himself into evangelical conviction.

Finding the Way in an Age of Religious Pluralism: The Relevance of William Law and the Christian Mystical Tradition

This article explores some of the important theological dynamics relevant to the Christian mystical tradition and suggests ways in which this tradition, in all its variety, might contribute to Christian self-understanding within the context of religious pluralism. It pursues this through an examination of the spiritual and theological pilgrimage of the eighteenth century Anglican divine, William Law (1686–1761).

An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7–1662) Part I (To 1648)

THE writings of the seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry Holden, played a small but significant part in the development of western religious thought in the centuries following his death. His most important work,Divinae fidei analysis,first printed in Latin at Paris in 1652 and afterwards translated and published in English, was several times reprinted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was later incorporated in two theological collections, J. P. Migne'sTheologiae cursus completus(tom.6, 1839), and Josef Braun'sBibliotheca regularum fidei(tom.2, 1844). It influenced the thinking, in the nineteenth century, not only of avowed liberals such as Dôllinger and Acton, but also, in some degree, of moderate progressives like Newman. In recent years, specialist studies on different aspects of Holden's thought have appeared in English and in French. So far, however, no serious attempt has been made to revise his bibliography: we still have to rely, in large measure, on that published by Joseph Gillow more than a century ago. In this article I want to bring together material that has come to light since Gillow's time and to examine Holden's works afresh against the background of his life and the religious and political developments in England and France at that period. I shall devote particular attention to two themes that run through all his work. One is gallicanism, that amalgam of mediaeval theories limiting the authority of the papacy in relation to secular states and their rulers and national churches and their bishops. It will be seen that plans which Holden advanced in the 1640s for the reform of the Catholic Church in England along gallican lines are based largely on ideas developed in hisDivinaefidei analysispublished a few years later. The other is his analytical and critical approach to doctrine, aiming always to distinguish truths solidly based on Scripture and tradition from the mere speculations of theologians. It is an approach that had been made popular in France by the Catholic controversialist, François Véron, whoseRégula fidei catholicaewas first published at Paris in 1644 when Holden was probably already at work on hisDivinae fidei analysis.It reveals itself in all Holden's writings and distinguishes him from many of the other Catholic apologists who were drawn into controversy with the Anglican divines of the post-Chillingworth era.

Theology's historical task: The problem of the disciplines

John Henry Newman came to see the need to frame what was in effect a new discipline of the history of theology, with rules and subject-matter which would make it a practical working instrument, but with a flexibility which would allow for insights about the interconnectedness and coherence of a living body of knowledge which was sustained in a vital community. This recognition, and Newman’s own response to it are instructive because, mutatis mutandis, we stand in much the same need now. Unlike the history of (say) philosophy or science, the history of Christian theology deals with subject-matter which is understood to be of its nature continuous and semper eadem But it clearly changes within that continuity. And that poses special problems historiographically.We can get a glimpse of the way one thing led to the other in Newman’s arriving at these perceptions in a letter written in 1826. Newman begins by suggesting that it might be put to the test whether the Anglican divines from the sixteenth century onwards, if read so as to eliminate the adversariality of the polemic in which many of them had been engaged, had amongst them set out an account of their beliefs which formed a coherent and harmonious whole.‘My dear Rickards,—In our last conversation I think you asked me whether any use had occurred to my mind to which your knowledge of our old divines might be applied. Now one has struck me,—so I write. Yet very probably the idea is so obvious that it will not be new to you, and. … I begin by assuming that the old worthies of our Church are neither Orthodox nor Evangelical … now it would be a most useful thing to give a kind of summary of their opinions. … if, then, in a calm, candid, impartial manner, their views were sought out and developed, would not the effect be good in a variety of ways?

‘The Soul–Sleeping System’; Politics and Heresy in Eighteenth–Century England

Historians of eighteenth–century England have begun to reassess its relationship with the preceding century, creating in the process the now conventional periodisation of a ‘long eighteenth century’ fromc.1660 to 1832. Historical revisionism, however, needs constantly to be revised, and there remains the danger of creating too sharp a separation between this period and that which preceded it. This article aims to introduce just such a complicating factor by linking the turbulent theologies of the 1640s and 1650s with a particular strand of eighteenth century religious thought. This might be described as the legacy of ultra-Protestantism, the insistence on the priority of private judgement and the supremacy of Scripture which were allied with a suspicion of clericalism. Its survival among an articulate and academically well-placed group of eighteenth-century Anglican divines demonstrates that the attempt by the Restoration Church of England to distance itself from ultra-Protestantism was not uniformly successful; the problem of ‘heresy’ continued into a period of Anglican history more usually associated with comfortable doctrinal latitude.

Myth, Microcosm, and Method in George Herbert's "Prayer" (I)

Myth, Microcosm, and Method in George Herbert's uPrayer" (I) by Joan Klingel Ray Barbara Lewalski's observation that George Herbert "all unobtrusively loads every rift with ore"1 applies especially well to "Prayer" (I), in which the poet offers twenty-six highly suggestive — if sometimes puzzling — metaphors to explore the meaning of prayer. The images of which this sonnet is comprised have been well mined.2 Yet delving a bit more deeply into lines six and seven, with their respective descriptions of prayer as "Reversed thunder" and "The six-daies world transposing in an houre," as well as into the overall organization or method of the poem, especially a suggested turn at line four, yields even greater riches in "Prayer" (I) than have been hitherto recognized. Explicating line six's image of "Reversed thunder," critics point to the thunder frequently associated in the Bible with God's presence and to the thunderbolts that pagan lore says were hurled by Jupiter. But how might thunder be "Reversed"? Di Cesare answers that the image "suggests bold, aggressive prayer" and as such is a witty description of how "the thunderbolt of the divine anger against sinful man is absorbed by the lightning rod of the Cross. . . ."3 On the same image, Rickey and Bloch observe that "Reversed thunder" reminds us that God allows his creatures to assume the divine prerogative and use prayer against him — to "storm" in Rickey's words, "the very throne of Grace"; this is implicitly contrasted with the "merely" authoritative and unapproachable throne of Jupiter.4 While cautioning against the "attempt to 'visualise' the metaphor too closely," Greenwood acknowledges Herbert's "allusion to 'profane' literature" and regards the association of Jupiter's thunderbolts with Judeo-Christian prayer as oxymoronic and suggestive of prayer's " 'two-way' direction."5 But even as readers of line six note the biblical and mythological sources for "Reversed thunder," little has been done to specify a relationship between the two traditions beyond Rickey's 38Joan Klingel Ray contrasting God's approachability with Jupiter's inapproachability . Yet Herbert, an Anglican divine and a classicist, would have surely considered a metaphysically witty fusion of the biblical and mythological allusions. That is, the wounded Christian pray-er who would "storm" God's throne with bitter recriminations — with "Reversed thunder" — is reminiscent of the raving, unruly "Child" in Herbert's "The Collar." In mythology, Phaethon was the unruly child who became a victim of Jupiter's thunderbolts. Despite his father's (Phoebus') warnings, Phaethon insisted on driving the huge, fiery chariot of the sun. The chariot so overpowered the boy that he was unable even to heed his father's instructions for directing it. Consequently, it raced chaotically, burning everything in its path until Jupiter, at the behest of Mother Earth, struck and killed the young charioteer with a thunderbolt . This is a "tale of indulgent parenthood," observes Joseph Campbell.6 It is also the tale of the unruly child who proudly assumes the prerogatives of his father, until (in Campbell's words) "chaos supervenes." Similarly, the pray-er who figuratively hurls "thunder" at God — albeit that God, in His loving generosity, gives His creature the freedom to do so — is an unruly child whose spiritually adolescent rebellion will potentially plunge him into chaos. Indeed, this is precisely what happens to the speaker of "The Collar," who "rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde / At every word . . ."(II. 33-34). But whereas Jupiter hurls punitive thunderbolts at a rebellious child, the Christian God lovingly calls the "Child" back to order.7 This occurs not only in "The Collar," but also in "Prayer" (I). To understand this return to order in "Prayer" (I), we turn to the second image of line six, "Christ-side-piercing spear," insofar as it relates to line 7, "The six-daies world transposing in an houre." In the fullest and most cogent interpretation of line 7 that I have encountered, Di Cesare suggests that its final word, "houre," refers not only to the hour of prayer, but also (and more profoundly) to the hour of Christ's death. Thus, he reasons, the "houre" of the Crucifixion, which is also represented by the...

King James I Meets John Percy, S.J. (25 May, 1622.)

IN May 1622 a series of private discussions on religion was held in London between representatives of the Anglican Church and the Jesuit, John Percy, alias Fisher. The occasion was the announcement by the Countess of Buckingham, mother of King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Marquess (later Duke) of Buckingham, of her intention to become a Catholic. The King and the Marquess arranged the discussions which occupied three successive days, the 24th, 25th and 26th of May. Two eminent Anglican divines were enlisted to debate with Percy. On the first day the Anglican case was argued by Francis White, at this time a royal chaplain and later a bishop. He was opposed by Percy, in the presence of the Countess, the Marquess and Marchioness (Lady Catherine, who had also influenced her husband's decision to hold these discussions by declaring her intention to return to the Catholic faith in which she had been brought up), Bishop John Williams, (the Lord Keeper), and—possibly—the King. On the second day the King himself took the leading part in putting the Anglican case. On the third day the chief Anglican protagonist was William Laud, at this period Bishop of St. David's, who took the place of Francis White.

Hobbes's Dagger in the Heart

Richard Cumberland, the Anglican divine, concludes his anti-Hobbesian work, Treatise of the Laws of Nature, with the following remarkable observation: ‘Hobbes, whilst he pretends with one hand to bestow gifts upon princes, does with the other treacherously strike a dagger to their hearts.’ This remark sums up a dominant theme of seventeenth-century reactions to Hobbes's political theory; a host of similar complaints could be marshalled from among the ranks of secondary figures such as Clarendon, Filmer and Pufendorf. Today, however, Cumberland's criticism has a relatively unfamiliar ring. Following the lead famously given by John Locke, we are much more likely to be impressed by the totalitarian features of Hobbes's political philosophy than by its subversive character. To preclude initial objections, there is of course a relatively uncontroversial sense in which Hobbes's thought is subversive; in metaphysics, ethics and theology Hobbes's daggers are deliberately aimed at the hearts of the Schoolmen and the Puritans. But Cumberland's concern in the quotation is with Hobbes's theory of sovereignty: the thrust of his criticism is that the theory is top-heavy, and this issue has not received much attention in recent years. One notable exception is David Gauthier who writes that ‘from unlimited individualism only anarchy follows. The theory is a failure.’ Gauthier, however, argues tht Hobbes's presentation of his theory in Leviathan marks a major advance over the earlier De Cive, and if our criterion of success is the strength of the sovereign's position, then this claim seems highly suspect. In the first part of this paper I shall argue that the sovereign of Leviathan is a more vulnerable figure than the sovereign of the earlier De Cive. In the second part of the paper I take up the problem posed by military service for a Hobbesian theory of political obligation. Employing a distinction between act- and rule-prudentialism, I shall argue that here again the position of Leviathan is in some ways less satisfactory than that of the earlier works.

Laurence Sterne: The Later Years.

Laurence Sterne, humorist, sentimentalist and Anglican divine, is recognized of the greatest English novelists, though he wrote only Tristam Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. His interest in women, and his exposure of man's libidinous nature in his novels, have offended moralists. Yet Sir Herbert Read praised him one of the world's greatest humanists and thought him an artist who brought us as close to life we can be. Arthur Cash, without taking sides in this debate, puts the facts of Sterne's life before the reader - his unhappy marriage, his faithlessness, his quarrels with his mother, his ambitons for preferment, but also his sad childhood, the enmity of his powerful uncle, and his conscientiousness parish priest. Not a literary study, but a biography which emphasizes those experiences which informed Sterne's fiction, the book is based on an exhaustive search for original documents, and a study of the social, political and ecclesiastical institutions which shaped Sterne's world. We see the novelist a soldier's child, student, struggling young cleric, Yorkshire farmer and Judge of the spiritual courts, and trace his literary development from political hack to humorist. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of English literature. It is also available a two-volume set, price: #23.00

Local Records

Official action against recusancy and other religious offences involving Catholics has left numerous traces in county and municipal records, particularly those of Quarter Sessions, although for two decades near the start of our period that court was deprived of the power to convict persistent recusants. Such offenders may still, however, be found in Sessions’ records during those years, usually en route for the Assizes, perhaps having been first ordered by the Justices to confer with an Anglican divine, and Catholics continued to occupy the attention of the Bench on other grounds, both judicial and administrative, among them Mass-going and possession of popish books on the one hand, certifying their places of abode on the other. J.P.s might also find themselves serving, not always congenially, on special local commissions with widening terms of reference which by 1591 were concerned with both recusants and seminary priests; these bodies, and the religious leanings of their members, have to be taken into account in the regional study of Elizabethan Catholicism. Investigation may uncover evidence of their activities—and of non-co-operation with them—in a variety of sources: returns to the central government, commissioners’ own papers (not necessarily preserved in the county to which they appertain) and the records of parochial, county and municipal authorities revealing liaison with churchwardens and Justices of the Peace, with here a Lord-Lieutenant and elsewhere the city fathers.

Theodicy at Midcentury: Young, Akenside, and Hume

IT IS EMBLEMATIC of the difficulties in understanding mideighteenth-century English poetry and thought that two notable poetic theodicies should have appeared a scant decade after An Essay on Man, the one poem usually regarded by literary historians as a safe summation of period attitudes. Emblematic too, I believe, is the fact that these two answers to Pope in the 1740s, Young's Night Thoughts, the work of an Anglican divine in his sixties, and The Pleasures of Imagination, written by a suspiciously republican Deist in his early twenties, should at bottom have more in common with each other than either does with Pope's vindication of God's ways to man. The present essay is an attempt to make sense of these facts. Because putting the circumstances of the poems' construction in this light already involves several value judgments, I will begin by trying to justify reading Young's and Akenside's now faded poems as significant theodicies at all, before proceeding to examine their instructive similarities to each other and their shared differences from An Essay on Man. In the third and most speculative section of the discussion I will attempt to describe the difference between the poetic world of Pope and the blanker universe of Young and Akenside as analogous to the distance separating the philosophic procedures of Locke and Hume, whose central analytic work appeared first in 1739-40.

The Works of Dr. Darwell Stone

The passing of Dr. Darwell Stone may seem to many of us like the end of an epoch. It is less difficult to believe that he has been taken away from us than to believe that he was, even though in retirement and with failing health, so recently among us. He was, in a sense, the last of the Tractarians. Not that a younger generation of Anglican divines may safely build on foundations other than those which they, and he, have laid—it will be a bad day for Anglican theology if that should ever come to pass. Yet he was the successor of the Oxford Movement in a directness of line which it is hardly possible for a newer generation to follow. And that, in part, by reason of the very completeness of his own work. He consolidated the foundations which the Tractarians had laid, surpassing them in his ability to synthesise, and to extract the essentials from, the patristic data to which the scholars of the Oxford Movement had recalled the Ecclesia anglicana.Darwell Stone’s was not perhaps an adventurous mind, nor was his writing, though always lucid and free from jargon, exactly exhilarating. He was a conservative of the conservatives. The great spiritual and religious upheavals of his day seem (if we may judge from his writings) to have passed him by. The lectures which in igoi he delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and which were published under the title Christ and Modern Life, show that he had indeed devoted considerable attention to many of the questions which were tormenting his contemporaries—questions of comparative religion and of Christian apologetics confronted by ‘modern thought.’ But the very assurance and ease with which he treated of them tend to show that they did not present him with any serious challenge or any deep spiritual problem.

Quaker Profiles

QUAKER PROFILES7 QUAKER PROFILES By Anna Cox Brinton THE CHARACTERISTIC "Portraiture of Quakerism," to use Thomas Clarkson's phrase, is a portraiture of words. Our Quaker journals form a unique gallery of self-portraits, and the obituaries painstakingly prepared by monthly meetings to be sent up to the quarterly or yearly gatherings add a long array of less complete but still striking delineations. Here inner or spiritual dimensions impress the mind while a pictured likeness tends to fix the eye upon exterior contours. In this brief prefatory paper I shall consider mainly American portraits. A few British antecedents are cited to make clear the connection between testimony and practice here and in England. Actual Quaker portraits by brush and pen offer a largely unworked field, of some interest and importance to the antiquarian . All told, there are more extant likenesses than might at first be supposed in view of the disciplinary insistence on plainness and avoidance of superfluities. In 1760 Franklin wrote in a letter to Lord Kames that "the primitive Quakers used to declare against pictures as a vain expense ; a man's suffering his portrait to be taken was conceived as pride and I think to this day it is very little practised among them." The same was true of other religious people. For example, William Law, the famous Anglican divine, author of the Serious Call, the most widely read religious book of its time, objected to having his likeness taken on grounds of humility. It is true that large and fashionable portraits were consistently discouraged by Friends, but drawings of the simpler and less formal sort, small canvasses and unpretentious engravings , were not infrequently made by professional artists as well as by amateurs, with the result that we can form a fairly clear impression of the features of some at least of the First Publishers of Truth. We know the general aspect of Fox, Naylor, and Penn, and of many of the worthies who came after them. Information is also to be gleaned from satirical representations. One of the best, if not the best, among American Quaker portraits of the early time is the painting of Anne Galloway by Hesselius, father or son, now in the American-Swedish Historical 8 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Museum of Philadelphia. Thomas Story tells us in his famous journal that he visited Samuel Galloway's home at the Ridge in Maryland in 1699. There he rested for the night and was "very easy and well." Anne Galloway, the wife of Samuel, was "the only ministering Friend at that time in all those parts; a very honest, innocent, lively and honorable Friend in the Truth, and everywhere acceptable in her services." Hesselius' canvas is in complete agreement with Story's description. Because Friends never promoted the pictorial arts, the few among them who showed special gifts in this direction sought sponsors outside the Society. Benjamin West of Chester (now Delaware) County, Pennsylvania, and Patience Lovell Wright of Bordentown, New Jersey, both found patronage in London at the court of King George III and Queen Caroline. Edward Hicks, coach painter and minister of the gospel, remained at home and carried on his religious and temporal labors among Friends. He produced several quaint works. Best known among them is "The Peaceable Kingdom," in which the lion is shown lying down with the lamb while William Penn treats with the Indians in the background. Another of his pictures , now exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City with the caption "The Farm of David Twining in 1787," is strongly influenced by the profile style. Edward Hicks suffered severe compunctions because of his addiction to painting, "having been unsuccessful in every attempt to make an honest and honorable living by a more consistent business." He says: "My constitutional nature has presented formidable obstacles to the attainment of that truly desirable character, a consistent and exemplary member of the Society of Friends; one of which is an excessive fondness for painting, a trade to which I was brought up . . . and followed the greater part of my life." TN CONNECTION with the subject of portraits, it is worth¦*¦ noticing that the Quaker folios and...

Doctrine in the Church of England

The fidelity and purity of the Anglican witness to the Gospel of Christ is a matter of utmost concern to all Christians. Least of all can an English Catholic, anxious for the temporal and eternal welfare of the people of his own race and nation, be indifferent to it. It is estimated that, at the present time, some 20,000,000 souls in Great Britain and some 11,000,000 in other parts of the world, are directly dependent upon the Anglican churches for whatever they know, or humanly speaking are likely to know, of the message of salvation. When it is further remembered that, in nearly all parts of the English-speaking world, the Anglican community enjoys a prestige as an authorised representative of organised Christianity far in excess of its numbers, and is to millions of non-Christians the most familiar spokesman of Christianity, the character of its doctrine is seen to be a matter of almost cosmic importance. Distortions of the purity of the Gospel message and of the integrity of the Catholic faith by Anglican divines are as unseemly material for the headlines of sensationalist journalism as they are for the jibes and gloatings of the nagging type of proseltyser. On the other hand, it should be to the apostolic-minded Catholic a subject for praise and thanksgiving when, notwithstanding four centuries of independence from the unity of the Catholica, the Anglican churches still bear witness in an apostate world to the elements of the faith once delivered to the saints.

Isaac Barrow

Isaac Barrow has been described as “an eminent mathematician and classical scholar, and one of the greatest of the great Anglican divines and preachers of the Caroline period.”* His father was a linen draper in London—a man of royalist sympathies who followed the English court to Paris during the period of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649-1660). For a time, Barrow was a pupil at Charterhouse in London. His career there may be judged from his father's statement that “if it should please the good Lord to take one of his children, he could best spare Isaac.” It is not surprising that his son was sent to another school, the one chosen being Felstead in Essex.