John Tulloch · 21 of 27

III. Latimer. · Part 4

The end of all was, that he and Ridley were condemned to suffer; and on the 16th of October 1555 they were led forth to martyrdom “without Bocardo gate,” to a spot opposite Balliol College, where the splendid Martyrs’ Memorial now stands. They embraced each other, knelt in prayer, and at last, when they were about to kindle the pile, he first thanked God audibly for His faithfulness to him, and then, turning to his companion, said, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

Thus perished the great preacher reformer of England, closing his honest, laborious, and intrepid life by a heroic death, shedding its radiance back upon all his previous work, and transfiguring it into a higher glory.

The character of Latimer presents a combination of noble and disinterested qualities, scarcely rising to greatness, but highly significant and interesting. The natural healthiness of his earlier years at the Leicestershire farm, of “three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost,” reappears in all his future career as a student, a preacher, a bishop, a martyr. The same simple spirit, and honest temper, and cheery humour, and unresting faithfulness, are visible in all he said and did. The man is never lost sight of, in whatever special attitude he shows himself; nay, the rustic boy, who was the “father of the man,” is scarcely ever forgotten. A fresh and rough fragrance of nature hangs about him everywhere, impregnating and purifying with a rare and happy heartiness all his work.

A simplicity verging on originality is perhaps his most prominent characteristic—a simplicity as far as possible from that which we noted in Calvin: the one, the naked energy of intellect; the other, a guileless evenness of heart. The single way in which Latimer looks at life, with his eyes unblinded by conventional drapery of any kind, and his heart responsive to all its broadest and most common interests,—of which he speaks in language never nice and circumlocutory, but straight, plain, and forcible,—gives to his sermons their singular air of reality, and to his character the sort of piquancy which vie at once recognise as a direct birth of nature. He is a kind of Goldsmith in theology, exhibiting the same artless feeling and sunny temper in the midst of all difficulties—the same disregard of his own comforts, and warm and kindly play of benevolent humour meeting you at every turn, like a roving and gleeful presence, and flashing laughter in your face. It would be absurd, of course, to push this comparison further. There is beneath all the oddities of Latimer’s character a deep and solemn consistency of purpose, and a spirit of righteous indignation against wrong which, apart from all dissimilarities of work, destroys any more essential analogy between the great humourist of the Reformation in England and the later humourist of its literature. Yet the same childlike transparency of character is beheld in both, and the same fresh stamp of nature, which, in its simple originality, is found to outlast far more brilliant and imposing, but artificially cultured qualities.

In mere intellectual strength, Latimer can take no place beside either Luther or Calvin. His mind has neither the rich. compass of the one, nor the symmetrical vigour of the other. He is no master in any department of intellectual interest, or even of theological inquiry. We read his sermons, not for any light or reach of truth which they unfold, nor because they exhibit any peculiar depth of spiritual apprehension, but simply because they are interesting—and interesting mainly from the very absence of all dogmatic or intellectual pretensions. Yet, without any mental greatness, there is a pleasant and wholesome harmony of mental powers displayed in his writings, which gives to them a wonderful vitality. There is a proportion and vigour, not of logic, but of sense and feeling, in them eminently English, and showing everywhere a high and well-toned capacity. He is coarse and low at times his familiarity occasionally descends to meanness but the living hold which he takes of reality at every point, often carries him also to the height of an indignant and burning eloquence.

Of his private social life we learn comparatively little. His nature was one keenly susceptible of friendship, and must have everywhere drawn to itself objects of affection. We can mark in the dim traces of his life the surrounding footsteps of his friends—Bilney, and Cranmer, and Cromwell, and Dr Butts, and, at the last, Ridley. There is no glimmering, however, of any dearer and more intimate affection,—no light of love, flushing with its soft warm presence the hard and darkening course of his energetic and unwearied labours. The singleness of his aim as a reformer—his untiring spirit of self-sacrifice, “minding not his own things, but the things of others"—his self-sustaining vigour in his work, and equable delight in it may sufficiently account for this absence. It takes an interest from his life, but at the same time simplifies our view of it. The impression remains deepened of a simple and earnest, rather than of a broad and powerful character.

In turning to estimate Latimer’s work as a reformer, we are at first struck very much with the same peculiarity—that is to say, with its comparative simplicity and narrowness of meaning. It possesses neither the national grandeur of the work of Luther, nor the theological and spiritual influence of that of Calvin. It is practical rather than doctrinal; and deep and powerful and abiding as have been its traces, it never attains to that comprehensive sweep and issue which at once impress us in the work of each of our other reformers. And yet Latimer was a true leader in the great movement of the sixteenth century. He did not, indeed, and could not, take up and express the various and complex impulses that were then bearing the national life of England onwards in the direction of reform. There was no single teacher capable of doing this. There were far too great diversity and richness in the impulses then moving England to permit of their finding united expression in any one man. But while Latimer did not, like Luther or Calvin, sum up in himself the great principles of the movement of which he was a leader, he expressed, beyond doubt, the most characteristic features of that movement. He represented those qualities of earnestness, and yet of moderation, of Scriptural faithfulness, and yet traditionary respect,—at once reforming and conservative,—which peculiarly distinguish the English character, and have stamped their, impress more than any other upon the spirit of the Church of England.

The spirit of this Church is not, and never has been, definite and consistent. From the beginning it repudiated the distinct guidance of any theoretical principles, however exalted and apparently Scriptural. It held fast to its historical position, as a great Institute still living and powerful under all the corruptions which had overlaid it; and while submitting to the irresistible influence of reform which swept over it, as over other churches in the sixteenth century, it refused to be refashioned according to any new model. It broke away from the medieval bondage, under which it had always been restless, and destroyed the gross abuses which had sprung from this bondage; it rose in an attitude of proud and successful resistance to Rome; but in doing all this, it did not go to Scripture, as if it had once more, and entirely anew, to find there the principles either of doctrinal truth or of practical government and discipline. Scripture was eminently the condition of its revival; but Scripture was not made anew the foundation of its existence. There was too much of old historical life in it to seek any new foundation; the new must grow out of the old, and fit itself into the old. The Church of England was to be reformed, but not reconstituted. Its life was too vast, its influence too varied, its relations too complicated,—touching the national existence in all its multiplied expressions at too many points,—to be capable of being reduced to any new and definite form in supposed uniformity with the model of Scripture, or the simplicity of the primitive Church. Its extensive and manifold organisation was to be reanimated by a new life, but not remoulded according to any arbitrary or novel theory.

This spirit, at once progressive and conservative, comprehensive rather than intensive, historical, and not dogmatical, is one eminently characteristic of the English mind, and, as it appears to us, in the highest degree characteristic of the English Reformation. It is far, indeed, from being an exhaustive characteristic of it. Two distinct tendencies of a quite different character, expressly dogmatic in opposite extremes, are found running alongside this main and central tendency: on the one hand, a medieval dogmatism on the other hand, a puritanical dogmatism. The current of religious life in England, as it moved forward and took shape in the sixteenth century, is marked by this threefold bias, which has perpetuated itself to the present time. There was then, as there remains to this day, an upper, middle, and lower tendency—a theory of High-churchism, and a theory of Low-churchism—and between these contending dogmatic movements the great confluence of what was and is the peculiar type of English Christianity—a Christianity diffusive and practical rather than direct and theoretical—elevated and sympathetic rather than zealous and energetic—Scriptural and earnest in its spirit, but undogmatic and adaptive in its form.

In the sixteenth century Latimer appears along with Cranmer—although in a more natural manner than the latter, as being comparatively free from the complications of political interest—to be the great representative of this middle movement in the Church of England while Gardiner and Bonner on one side, and Hooper and his followers on the other side, represent respectively the medieval and puritanical tendencies. It may be doubtful to some, whether there is not much in Latimer that seems to ally him with the latter school: whether his principles, in their natural development, would not have led him to join them, had he lived on till they came into more distinct prominence as opposed to the ecclesiastical despotisms of Elizabeth. Such a question cannot be absolutely determined, and is, in fact, irrelevant. For it is idle to speculate what Latimer or any man might have become in very different circumstances from those in which we find him. It appears to us with sufficient clearness that Latimer never would, and never could have become a Puritan, without an entire change of the peculiar spirit of natural sense, of moderation, and of conciliatory doctrinism which distinguishes him. In the early dogmatic puritanism of the Church of England—of Hooper, for example, and subsequently of Travers and Cartwright—there was a distinct foreign element which Latimer, with his genuine English feeling, would have strongly repudiated; and there was, moreover, a dogmatic narrowness and an exaggerated importance attached to form and externality, which were entirely alien to his cast of mind, and the spirit of reform which animated him.

This spirit was throughout pre-eminently practical. He had no special reforming schemes of any kind in view; he had no special doctrines even to urge once more into prominence. The Gospel did not come to him as it came to Luther, in the shape of a new truth; nor yet as it came to Calvin, in the shape of a new system. It came to him simply as a new spirit of life, and earnestness, and Christian activity. As he studied the Bible, and as Bilney and he prayed over it, it was not the fire of dogmatic zeal nor of disciplinary urgency that was kindled in him, but the glow of simple evangelical earnestness. He awoke as from a dream, in which the forms of superstition had haunted him as the only realities, to find that they were no realities at all, but the mere inventions and fancies of men, draping and concealing the great truths of God. The meaning of life and duty—of real service to God in holy obedience and works of mercy—in comparison with mere religious observances and will-works,—this was what dawned upon him. And this was, above all, the kind of reformation after which he sought, and for which he laboured,—a reformation of life—a Church of England once more animated by a Christian spirit, destroying by its very presence and power the gross medieval abuses which had fastened upon it till they seemed a part of its very existence; whereas, in truth, they were only corrupting excrescences. The Catholic faith seemed to him, scarcely less than to Sir Thomas More, to survive in England, and in the old Church of England, if it were only purified from such traditions and corruptions. His own preaching presented to himself nothing new, nor even contrary to the decrees of the Fathers. In his letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1533, we find such a reforming position exactly described as the one on which he considered himself to stand. “If any man has any fault to object against my preaching, as being obscure or uncautiously uttered, I am ready to explain my doctrine by further discourse; for I have never preached anything contrary to the truth, or contrary to the decrees of the Fathers, nor, as far as I know, contrary to the Catholic faith. I have desired, I own, and do desire, a reformation in the judgment of the vulgar. I have desired, and still desire, that they should make a distinction between duties, and regard and maintain each according to its proper value, its place and time, its rank and degree, in order that all men should know that there is a very great difference between those works which God hath prepared for each of us, zealously discharging the duties of our respective callings, to walk in, and those that are voluntary, which we undertake by our own strength and pleasure. It is lawful, I own, to make use of images, to go upon pilgrimages, to invoke the saints to be mindful of souls in purgatory; but those things which are voluntary are so to be moderated that God’s commandments of necessary obligation, which bring eternal life to those who keep them, and eternal death to those who neglect them, be not deprived of their just value. . . . I therefore, hitherto, stand fixed on the side of the commandments of God, so aiming not at my own gain, but that of Christ; so seeking not my own glory, but that of God; and as long as life shall be permitted to me, I will not cease thus to continue imitating herein all true preachers of the Word that have hitherto lived in the world.”

The same supremely practical tendency manifests itself more or less in all his sermons; and in none more than in those preached before Edward VI., which may be supposed to contain his mature views of reform. He is vigilant and urgent against all abuses, alike in Church and State, in society and in private life. He exposes them with homely and crushing invective, sparing no class, passing by no oppression, whether that of the poor vicar having an extensive cure in a market-town, on “but twelve or fourteen marks by the year,” so “that he is not able to buy him books, nor give his neighbour drink”; or that of the gentlewoman from whom a great man kept certain lands of hers, and who in a whole twelvemonth could only get one day for the hearing of her matter; or that of the poor widow lying in the Fleet. He has a sound English heart, hating all evil, and especially all proud and lying evil, all dastardly mockeries of truth, all mere pretences in the Church or out of it, all disorders, all indifference and deadness. His spirit kindles, and his language rises into more concentrated pith and vigour, when he catches sight of some great wrong, or some social folly or immorality, and wishes that it lay in his poor tongue to explicate it “with such light of words that he might seem rather to paint it before their eyes than to speak it.” It is this characteristic of Latimer’s sermons that makes them still so fresh and living to us while we read them. Had they been more doctrinal, we should have examined them perhaps with equal or even greater curiosity, as serving to illustrate the state of Christian thought in his age, but we certainly should not have found in them that vivifying power with which they still touch us; for nothing becomes more dead in the course of transmission than the popular forms of doctrinal teaching, so that one generation finds mere barrenness in what greatly interested and delighted its predecessor. Even the doctrinal sermons of Luther are no exception to this.

It is very much, therefore, because Latimer was no dogmatist that he remains so interesting to us, and his words still retain such a zest, and flavour, and power. He contends for no particular theory of the truth; his new-born life does not need any new doctrinal vehicle of expression; it is slow even to cast off the least worthy additions that have gathered round the Catholic faith, and out of which have sprung, by a sure process, the worst abuses which he deplores. He nowhere takes up an attitude of doctrinal hostility to the old Church, nor aims to set forth any specific doctrinal principles to which the whole line of the reform movement should be attached, and from which it ought to proceed. And yet it would be a total misapprehension of his spirit and position to suppose him latitudinarian, or indifferent to dogmatic truth; he simply does not realise its separate importance. Trained in the scholastic philosophy, he of all our reformers retains no trace of its rationalising and controversial spirit. He had obviously little or no faith in controversy—a wonderful point of advance for that age. He is no theologian: dogmas in and by themselves have no interest for his homely, healthy mind. He apprehends all, and clues for all, only in the concrete. Truth for him is not this or that view or theory, but the life of faithful obedience towards God, and of active charity towards man. This is the highest truth, and the only worthy reality or him in all the world—“To fear God, and keep His commandments.” And it is his great mission as a reformer to awaken men everywhere to the need of this living truth, to recall them from shadows and-superstitions, from “inventions and fancies,” from will-works and fantasies of their own, to the reality of true Christian work, and the glory of this only divine service.

It was as a preacher, above all, that he discharged this great mission; and his sermons remain, as a whole, its most interesting and graphic expression. Their highest qualities are exactly those that characterise his general work—life, reality, and earnestness. He uses the pulpit not so much as a vehicle of instruction, but as a means of impulse and movement. He never uses it as a mere theatre of eloquence. He is eloquent, not because he thinks of being eloquent, and tries to be so, but simply because there is in him a living and honest meaning which he desires to communicate to others. The fire burned within him, and he spake as it moved him. His sermons, accordingly, while frequently deficient in all method, and sometimes—where they aim to be explanatory or argumentative—vague and unimpressive, are yet, in the main, instinct with a vigorous and fresh and happy interest. To interest, and so move and reform, was the great aim of all of them; and so everything is sacrificed to the necessity of making those whom he is addressing feel the truth and force of what he is saying. The most homely illustrations, and most startling and ludicrous conjunctions, headlong and unsparing invective, and wayward and joyous humour, are all given full play to—each impulse obeyed as it comes—in order that the hearers may be touched by his own obvious and irresistible inspiration. The result is what sometimes appears to us, reading them with the cold eye of criticism, coarseness rather than power, meanness of language rather than impressiveness of idea, and caricature rather than humour; but the manly and genial critic will acknowledge the natural healthiness and vigour even of many illustrations which have incurred the censure of more fastidious tastes—while there is a relish as of good old wine, sound and ripe after three centuries, in many more; and the intellectual appetite, jaded with the weak mixtures of modern religious sentiment, grows keen and glad over the numerous passages of vigorous and racy sense, homely and joyous picturesqueness, and pungent, earnest, and happy humour.

It is difficult to give any adequate specimens of his style. The good things of such a preacher appear poor when extracted and apart from their setting. The reader, therefore, must study the sermons themselves, if he care to appreciate them. The following passage, in which irony mingles with earnestness and the picture, if somewhat low and audacious, is exceedingly graphic and powerful—may stand by itself perhaps as well as any other:—“But now for the fault of unpreaching prelates, methinks I could guess what might be said for excusing of them. They are so troubled with lordly living, they be so placed in palaces, couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions, burdened with embassages, pampering of their paunches, like a monk that maketh his jubilee, munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions, and so troubled with looking on their lordships, that they cannot attend it. They are otherwise occupied, some in the King’s matters, some are ambassadors, some of the Privy Council, some to furnish the court, some are lords of the Parliament, some are presidents and comptrollers of mints. Should we have ministers of the Church to be comptrollers of the mints? Is this a meet office for a priest that hath cure of souls? Is this his charge? I would here ask one question—I would fain know who controlleth the devil at home in his parish while he controlleth the mint? . . . Who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know him who it is—I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will you know who it is? I will tell you—it is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all others. He is never out of his diocese, he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish; he keepeth residence at all times; ye shall never find him out of the way; call for him when you will, he is ever at home; he is ever at his plough, no lording nor loitering can hinder him—you shall never find him idle, I warrant you. And his office is to hinder religion, to maintain superstition, to set up idolatry. When the devil is resident and hath his plough going, then away with books, and up with candles; away with Bibles, and up with beads; away with the light of the Gospel, and up with the light of candles, yea at noonday. . . . Down with Christ’s cross, and up with purgatory pick-purse, up with him—the Popish purgatory, I mean. Away with clothing the naked, the poor, and the impotent, up with the decking of images and gay garnishing of stocks and stones; up with man’s traditions and his laws, down with God’s traditions and His most holy Word; down with the old honour due to God, and up with the new god’s honour.”

There is no feature of Latimer’s sermons more pervading than their invective. He is ever on the watch for wrong and abuses, and he pours out upon them the most free and startling rebukes. He spares no class, and he spurns no weapon of ridicule or denunciation against the powers of misrule, indolence, superstition, and bigotry, that he would strike down. It is now the bishops, and now the lawyers and judges, among whom he sends his swift and piercing arrows. “But I will be a suitor to your grace,” he says, in his second sermon before King Edward VI., “that you will give your bishops charge, ere they go home, to look better to their flock, and to see your Majesty’s injunctions better kept, and send your visitors in their tails; and if they be found negligent or faulty in their duties, out with them! I require it on God’s behalf: make them quondams, all the pack of them. But peradventure ye will say, ‘Where shall we have any to put in their rooms?’ . . . If your Majesty’s chaplains and my lord protectors be not able to furnish their places, there is in this realm (thanks be to God!) a great sight of laymen well learned in the Scriptures, and of virtuous and godly conversations, better learned than a great sight of us of the clergy.” Speaking of a certain bishop of Winchester in “King Henry VI.’s days,” who opposed Humphrey, the “good Duke” of Gloucester, and to whom the Pope sent a cardinal’s hat, he says, “He should have had a Tyburn tippet, a halfpenny halter, and all such proud prelates. These Romish hats never brought good into England.” “Bishops!” he cries, “nay, rather buzzards!” And ridiculing the mode of pronouncing the Episcopal blessing, he asks, “What is blessing? Not wagging of the fingers, as our bishops are wont.” He does not hesitate, with a somewhat Dantesque severity, to lift the veil from the pit of suffering, and point to the unpreaching prelates in torments. “If one were admitted to view hell thus, and behold it thoroughly, the devil would cry, ‘On yonder side are punished unpreaching prelates.’” On turning to the judges and magistrates, his comments are not less outspoken. “They are bribe-takers,” he says. “Nowadays they call them gentle rewards: let them leave their colouring, and call them by their Christian names—bribes. Wo worth these gifts! they subvert justice everywhere. A good fellow on a time bade another of his friends to breakfast, and said, ‘If you will come you shall be welcome; but I tell you beforehand you shall have but one dish, and that is all.’ ‘What is that?’ said he. ‘A pudding, and nothing else.’ ‘Marry!’ said he, ‘you cannot please me better; of all meats, that is for mine own tooth: you may draw me round about the town with a pudding.’ These bribing magistrates and judges follow gifts faster than the fellow would follow the pudding.” And in a higher vein he exclaims that the matters of the poor “are not heard: they are fain to go home with weeping tears that fall down by their cheeks and ascend up to heaven and cry for vengeance. Let judges look about them, for surely God will revenge His elect one day. . . . God hath pulled the judges’ skins over their heads for the poor man’s sake. Yea, the poor widow will one way do him more hurt with her poor paternoster in her mouth than any other weapon; and with two or three words she shall bring him down to the ground and destroy his jollity, and cause him to lose more in one day than he gat in seven years.”

The increasing licentiousness of the age, the extravagance of ladies’ attire, especially the laying out of the hair in “tussocks and tufts,” the assumptions of ladies themselves—“because they will be quartermasters with their husbands. Quarter-masters! Nay, half-masters; yea, some of them will be whole masters, and rule the roast as they list themselves.” The indolent effeminacy of the rich and noble, “who now have taken up whoring in town instead of shooting in the fields”—the misunderstood exactions of the aldermen, “who nowadays are become colliers—I would wish they might eat nothing but coals for a while till they had amended it”—are all painted by him with a breadth of brush, and a strong light of piquant satire, that enable us to understand his popularity. He never minces epithets: “dodipoles,” “hoddypecks,” “velvet coats,” “upskips,”—such are some of the round names that he scatters about; and we can imagine the thrilling effect with which they fell among auditories accustomed to monkish trifling or ecclesiastical commonplaces. It was as a denouncer of flagrant and widely felt abuses, and as an unceasing preacher of righteousness and benevolence against wrong and hardness of heart, that the people above all looked upon him and loved him; and the strength and prevalency of the popular feeling are sufficiently shown in the cry with which the boys used to follow him in the streets—“Have at them, Master Latimer!” In every time of extensive change, when old oppressions are relaxing and new responsibilities dawning, honest and hearty denunciation is sure to be popular; and it is easy, therefore, to imagine the enthusiasm which greeted the great preacher who had the courage in such an age to utter manful and unsparing words in the ears of the wealthy and powerful, the corrupt and tyrannical.

The humour of the sermons is eminently notable—a pungent, nipping, pursuing humour, lacking the richness and depth and boisterous freedom of Luther’s, but singularly funny, seizing one in the oddest ways and at the most unexpected turns. As when speaking of coming to church, he says: “I had rather ye should come, as the tale is by the gentlewoman of London. One of her neighbours met her on the street, and said, ‘Mistress, whither go ye?’ ‘Marry,’ said she, ‘I am going to St Thomas of Acres, to the sermon; I could not sleep all this last night, and I am going now thither; I never failed of a good nap there.’” Again, when in one of his perorations he adds, in allusion to Elias stopping the rain,—“I think there be some Elias about at this time, which stoppeth the rain; we have not had rain a good while.” Such turns—some broader, some more delicate—flash upon us every now and then. You are never sure, even in the most solemn passages, that his humour will not peep out with its wayward and comic glance, and start a reactionary smile as the shadow of thought is beginning to steal over the countenance. Explosive and striking in its effect, it is gentle in its spirit. There is not a touch of ill-nature in it. It cuts to the quick, not because the preacher delights in giving offence, but because his keen eye and pure heart cannot help seeing through the mockeries and vanities and wrongs which he exposes. He sees always their absurdity as well as their iniquity, and he cannot help saying so. If stupidity is offended, and superstition alarmed, and oppression indignant, so much the worse for all of them. The preacher is not to blame who lights them up as he paints them with the lambent glances of a humorous scorn, which has merely searched them through and through. As with all other preaching humorists, his fun is no doubt sometimes out of place. A chill taste will shrink from some of its displays, and certain tempers may feel offended. Identifying religion not only with gloom but with stupidity, such tempers find harm where there is merely amusement, and wrong where there is merely the free play of innocent strength. A hearty religious feeling, though sometimes startled, will never be shocked by our Reformer’s oddest sallies, but will recognise in them only the radiant sparks from an ever bright and warm heart looking out upon life with an intense gaze of reality, and apprehending its marvellous contrasts in the sunlight of an ever-cheerful temper.