Lancelot Andrewes · 3 of 61

Intoduction

INTRODUCTION.

BY H. B. SWETE, D.D., F.B.A.

LANCELOT ANDREWES was born in 1555; in the parish of All Hallows, Barking. His early education was received at Cooper’s Free School in Stepney, and subsequently at Merchant Taylors’ School; at the age of sixteen he went up to Cambridge, where he became successively scholar, fellow, and (1589‑1605) master of Pembroke Hall. Ordained in 1580, he rose rapidly in his calling, becoming chaplain to Queen Elizabeth in or about 1586, canon of St. Paul’s in 1589, canon of Westminster in 1597, and dean of the Abbey in 1601. Consecrated bishop of Chichester in 1605, Andrewes was translated to Ely in 1609, and to Winchester in 1619. From 1616 he was a member of the Privy Council, and from 1618 dean of the Chapel Royal. His death took place in 1626; his body lies on the south side of the high altar at St. Saviour’s, Southwark.

Andrewes lived through the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, and this bare chronicle of his life is enough to shew how large a part he took in the affairs of both Church and State in those difficult times. By temperament and early habit he was a student; he ‘never loved or used any games;’ if he needed recreation, it’ was found in the study of Nature. Such a man might gladly have spent his days in the learned leisure of College rooms. But circumstances called him to the larger life of public service, and he threw himself into it without reserve. At St. Paul’s he revived the office of penitentiary canon, attending in the aisles of the Cathedral during Lent to give spiritual counsel to any who sought it. At Westminster the boys of the school were not overlooked by the scholarly Dean, who associated himself with them both in their studies and their hours of recreation. Under James I he attended the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, and took part in the preparation of the Authorized Version of 1611. At court he was frequently in attendance on the King, and for many years preached before him on the great festivals. It was Andrewes who was chosen to answer Bellarmine’s attack upon the King and the English Church. His name appears on Royal Commissions, and on more than one occasion he was called to advise the King on perplexing questions of policy. Nor was the work of his own dioceses neglected. As Bishop he was munificent in his benefactions and untiring in his efforts to raise the standard of clerical life, and to secure decency in ritual and conformity to the doctrines and order of the Church.

It was a full life that Andrewes led from boyhood to his death. As scholar, courtier, preacher, controversialist, bishop, he could have had little leisure, and must often have been harassed by the anxieties and wearied by the burdens of his high position and manifold labours. But, as his contemporaries witness, nothing seemed, to disturb his serenity; the same grave, calm gentleness of manner marked him under all conditions. The secret of his victory over outward circumstances is disclosed in this book, which admits us to see the Bishop at his private prayers: Like the Confessions of St. Augustine, like many of the Psalms, the Preces privatae unlock the doors of a sanctuary where a saint kneels in fellowship with God.

The private prayers of Bishop Andrewes were not written for publication. They grew up under the hands of the author in hours of solitude, perhaps when he was on his knees. That they are written in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin confirms this view of their origin; for others he would have used the English tongue; to Andrewes himself the three learned languages were as familiar and more expressive than English. There are other indications that we have here the genuine outpourings of the saint's heart. Personal recollections are numerous: the writer prays for his schools and college, for the parishes he had served; for St. Paul's and. Westminster, for the three dioceses which had been entrusted to him, for the men he had educated or ordained; he calls to mind that he was born, on a Thursday, and thanks God for the church in which he was baptized. Lastly, the original MS., as we learn from one who had seen it, bore marks of long and constant use: it was ‘slubbered with his pious hands, and watered with his penitential tears.’ On his deathbed Andrewes gave a copy to his friend William Laud, then Bishop of Bath and Wells. But there is no reason to suppose that this book was entrusted to Laud for publication, nor. was it in fact published by him, or as a whole and in the original until long after Laud’s death. Some of the devotions appeared in an English translation as early as 1630, and portions of the original in 1668, but the first edition which approached completeness issued from the Oxford Press in 1675.

But private and personal as the Preces were in their intention and original use, they have proved to be eminently fitted for adoption by Church people in general. Experience has shewn that Bishop Andrewes’ private devotions are such as every devout member of the Church of England, and, it may almost be added, every good Christian would desire to make his own. What is personal is usually limited by the circumstances, the outlook, the mentality of the individual; it interests us by its individuality, but the field over which it ranges is necessarily narrow and may be one with which we ourselves have little in common. But the personal devotions of Bishop Andrewes are singularly free from this disadvantage. He has poured into them all the wealth of a rich nature; he has spent upon them all the resources of a mind stored with manifold knowledge, and an experience as wide as his learning. There is no pedantry in his prayers; perhaps there is no conscious use in them of his great store of materials. Yet the Preces privatae embody recollections from most of the great fathers ;of the Church—Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, the Gregories, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine; from medievil writers such as Alcuin, Anselm, St. Bernard, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Bradwardine, Gerson; from sixteenth‑century writers such as Fisher and Erasmus; even the classical writers of Greece and Rome occasionally supply a phrase—Eutipides, Aristophanes, Horace, Seneca have left their mark. Of ancient liturgical books free use is made: we recognize portions of the great Horology and Euchology, of the liturgies of St. James and St. Basil; the Western Hours, Missal and Manual, several of the Primers, the Book of Common Prayer, and Knox’s ‘Book of Common Order’ are all laid under contribution. One of the first scholars of his day, the friend of Casaubon and Francis Bacon, at home both in patristic and classical lore, and in the newly‑opened fields of Nature‑study, Andrewes poured all the treasures of his wide reading and observation into his devotions; yet so utterly free is he from self‑consciousness or love of display that they may be used by the unlearned without a suspicion that they are reaping the fruits of long years of laborious study.

Even more remarkable is the Bishop’s singular mastery, over the words and thoughts of Holy Scripture. It does not lie in the ready stringing together of conventional Scriptural phrases, which neither assists devotion nor evinces, any real knowledge of the Bible Rather it is the art of the Christian scribe who, like an, experienced householders brings forth out of leis treasure things new and old. So steeped is the mind of this: great student and preacher of the Word with, Scripture that he weaves into the texture of his prayers history, psalm, and prophecy, gospel, epistle, and apocalypse, often without regard to the literary history or historical order of the books, yet with such fitness and success that, they blend Band harmonize and gain fresh beauty from contact, as gold and silver and silks of divers colours worked into a glorious whole by the deft hands of a cunning artificer. It is a use of Holy Scripture which is widely remote from the critical and historical methods of our time, but which has its own value as an aid to devotion; nor does it often happen that this habit leads Andrewes into an interpretation which modern knowledge has shewn to be untenable.

Of the quaintnesses and eccentricities which would render the Bishop's sermons, notwithstanding their great merits, inappropriate in the modern pulpit, there is scarcely a trace in his devotions. There are a few verbal tricks or doubtful positions: a fondness for alliteration, as when he twice connects ‘Gethsemane, Gabbatha, Golgotha,’ and often brings together ὀρθοτομεῖν and ὀρθοποδεῖν: a tendency to combine alternative and inconsistent interpretations, as when he explains sanctorum communionem in the Apostles’ Creed as the fellowship of holy persons in holy things: the too ready acceptance of such traditions as that the Angels were created on the second day, and that it was on a Friday that man fell; and the first promise of Redemption was made. But these defects, if they are such, are easily removed in the use of the prayers. More perplexing perhaps to the majority of readers are the occasional references to the events and conditions of Andrewes’ own time:—allusions to the earthquake of 1580, and to ‘those in galleys’ (the slaves in Barbary corsairs), to ‘the foes of our most holy faith’ (the Turks); or the use of the technical language of theology, as when the incarnation is called ‘the Dispensation,’ and the Incarnate is described as the ‘Coal of double nature,’ and the divine Being as the Superessential Essence, or again where penitence after baptism is called ‘a second plank.’ The book, in fact, to impart its bull measure of benefit, should be studied before it is used; the prayers are those of a scholar, and they assume a scholar’s knowledge and interest in history and letters. But they are also the prayers of a saint, and all who aim at the saintly life will find in them, notwithstanding occasional obscurities, one of their best helps in attaining their end.

The Private Prayers begin, like the Book of Common Prayer, with forms for daily Morning and Evening Prayer, and to these are added separate forms for, Morning Prayer on each day of the week. Each of these forms embraces certain chief elements of devotion, such as commemoration, petition, intercession; acts. of penitence, faith, hope; offering of praise and thanksgiving. Beside these forms in which the elements are combined, there are separate offices of penitence, faith, thanksgiving, and petition which occupy nearly half the book.