much and earnest

If Winnie-the-Pooh ever took to the bottle, this is exactly what he’d want.

Slate.

Upright and simple men are difficult to deceive on account of their simplicity. Traps and clever pretexts do not fool them. They are not even clever enough to be duped. When, among the happiest people in the world, bands of peasants are seen regulating their affairs of state under an oak tree, and always acting wisely, can one help scorning the refinements of other nations, which make themselves illustrious and miserable with so much art and mystery?

- Rousseau, On the Social Contract, IV.1

…wee have many sudden ejaculations in the forme of Prayer, sometimes inconsiderately made, and they vanish so; but if I can reflect upon my prayer, ruminate, and return againe with joy to the same prayer, I have Gods Seale upon it. And therefore it is not so very an idle thing, as some have mis-imagined it, to repeat often the same prayer in the same words; Our Saviour did so; he prayed a third time, and in the same words.

- Donne, from a sermon on Psalm 90:14 [date uncertain; probably 1620-1622]; with that last clause he is referring to Matthew 26:44

Sermons at St. Paul’s were generally expected to be at least an hour long, and at St. Paul’s Cross they might be prolonged to two or even three hours. [...] He never read his sermons, but neither did he preach extempore. He prepared his sermons very carefully, made voluminous notes, and then committed the whole discourse to memory.

- Evelyn M. Simpson’s introduction to a volume of ten of Donne’s sermons

Several weeks ago I bemoaned the cultural expectation that our little ones not fully participate in the Church’s worship. Today S.M. Hutchens provides a thoughtful, gracious rationale:

In churches that have sermons worth hearing by people of adult understanding, though, I am for bringing children into the service at certain points and dismissing them at others, telling them that cannot stay for the whole until they are old enough quietly to pay attention. This treats them as the catechumens they are, and gives them an adult privilege at which to aim.

God, which moveth mere natural agents as an efficient only, doth otherwise move intellectual creatures and especially his holy angels; for beholding the face of God, in admiration of so great excellency, they all adore him; and being rapt with the love of his beauty they cleave inseparably for ever unto him. Desire to resemble him in goodness maketh them unweariable and even unsatiable in their longing to do by all means all manner of good unto all the creatures of God, but especially unto the children of men: in the countenance of whose nature, looking downward, they behold themselves beneath themselves; even as upward in God, beneath whom themselves are, they see that character which is nowhere but in themselves and us resembled.

- qtd. in Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, ch. 5

We should never let ourselves forget that the orthodox scheme of salvation was pervasive in the Elizabethan age. You could revolt against it but you could never ignore it. Atheism not agnosticism was the rule. It was far easier to be very wicked and think yourself so than to be a little wicked without a sense of sin.

- Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, ch.3

The modern reader, to whichever side he leans [i.e., puritan or Anglican - my note], will misunderstand this whole affair if he thinks that either party was defending liberty as we now understand it. This often appears to be the case, but the appearance is deceptive. ‘It is allowed and commaunded to Christian men’, says the Second Admonition [a puritan tract - me again], ‘to holde that which is good, whosoever forbidde without exception, Prince or other.’ It sounds like a manly assertion of religious freedom. But next moment we read that when proper ecclesiastical rules have been deduced from scripture it is the prince who ’should see euery one of these things put into practice and punish those that neglect them’. How this would work we learn later. The civil power must force Papists to attend sermons and ’cause them to be examined, how they profit, and if they profit not, to punish them’ and gradually increase the punishment, and finally ‘cut them off’ [T.C. i. 34, 35]. Similarly, when the Learned Discourse [another puritan tract - sch] says that princes are ’seruantes of the Lawes and of the common wealth’ (p. 143) we seem to hear the voice of Bracton: and when Bridges (xvi. 1370 [an Anglican writing against the puritans - sch]) replies that princes make the laws, he sounds like the spokesman of Tudor sovereignty treading out the last sparks of medieval justice. But in their context both passages have a rather different value. The Learned Discourse is arguing that as the prince is guided by wise counsel in civil matters, so he must be guided by a consistory, that is, by the puritan party, in setting up an ecclesiastical regimen to which he must then bind his people by law. Those who are ecclesiastically censured will be also ‘punished in body’ (p. 141). To be sure, the Church is to be distinct from the State, not (as now), ’shuffled wyth the common wealth’ (T.C. i, Ep.). She will not punish any Papist, adulterer, or blasphemer ‘in body’: she will only hand him over to the civil power–as the Inquisition did.

- Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, III.2.iii

…the most characteristic common mark of the whole school, was the Platonic theory of inspiration. On this Politian (in the Nutricia), Ficino (De Furore Poetico), Scaliger, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton are agreed, and Horace’s rationalism is ignored.

It is important to realize that these claims to inspiration are not, like similar claims in the Romantics, rhetorically or hyperbolically made. They are serious and literal. Tasso and Milton invoke the Holy Ghost; but inspiration could also be traced to a lower, though still superhuman, source. When Scaliger (Poet. III.xxv) attributes compositions to his Genius he does not mean by that word some condition of his own mind. He means an objective, created, personal being, distinct from himself, known to him, indeed, only by its effects, but to some favoured people actually audible or visible. This pneumatology may lie behind Shakespeare’s line about the rival poet and his ’spirit by spirits taught to write’.

- Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, III.1

The freedom then of man, and liberty of acting according to his own will, is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom of his own will.

- Locke, Two Treatises, II.vi

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule. The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it. Freedom then is not what Sir Robert Filmer tells us, O, A. 55. “a liberty for every one to do what he lists, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws:” But freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: As freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.

- John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II.iv

The process whereby ‘faith and works’ become a stock gag for the commercial theatre is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call this history of the Reformation. The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under those conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant–I had almost said the Pauline–assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention both of government and the mob. When once this had happened, Europe’s chance to come through unscathed was lost. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks or the round-abouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police forced who frequently changed sides. Each party increasingly misunderstood the other and triumphed in refuting positions which their opponents did not hold: Protestants misrepresenting Romans as Pelagians or Romans misrepresenting Protestants as Antinomians.

- Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), Introduction, p. 37

Historians of science or philosophy, and especially if they hold some theory of progress, are naturally interested in seizing those elements of sixteenth-century thought which were later to alter Man’s whole picture of reality. Those other elements which were destined to disappear they treat as mere ’survivals’ from some earlier and darker age. The literary historian, on the other hand, is concerned not with those ideas in his period which have since proved fruitful, but with those which seemed important at the time.

- C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), Introduction, pp.5-6