The plague, the bible

Plague was a sign of God's wrath provoked by men's 'own inventions', the taste for novelty, for specious newness, which was so widespread in the world. The very word 'plague' — and there is something unsettling about this pedantic scholarship in the face of catastrophe — came from the Latin plaga meaning 'a stroke'. It was 'the very handy-worke of GOD'. He admitted that there was a natural cause involved in the disease but it was also the work of a destroying angel. `There is no evill but it is a sparke of God's wrath.' Religion, he said, was filled by Puritan preachers with 'new tricks, opinions and fashions, fresh and newly taken up, which their fathers never knew of'. The people of England now 'think it a goodly matter to be wittie, and to find out things our selves to make to our selves, to be Authors, and inventors of somewhat, that so we may seem to be as wise as GOD, if not wiser'. What could be more wicked than the idea of being an Author? Let alone wittie? New-ness was the sin and novelty was damnable. 'That Sinn may cease, we must be out of love with our own inventions and not goe awhoring after them . . . otherwise, his anger will not be turned away, but his hand stretched out still.' The educated, privileged and powerful churchman preaches his own virtue and ignores his pastoral duties, congratulating himself on his own salvation. The self-serving crudity of this stance did not escape the attentions of the Puritans. If Andrewes sincerely believed that the plague was a punishment for sin and `novelty', and if he was guiltless on that score, then why had he run away to Chiswick? Surely someone of his purity would have been immune in the city? And if his pastoral duties led him to the stinking death pits of Cripplegate, as they surely did, why was he not there? Did Andrewes, in other words, really believe what he was saying about the omnipotent wrath of the Almighty? In a way he didn't; and his hovering between a vision of overwhelming divine authority and a more practical understand-ing of worldly realities, in some ways fudging the boundaries between those two attitudes, reveals the man. Henoch Clapham, the angry pamphleteer, lambasted Andrewes in his Epistle Dis-coursing upon the Present Pestilence. All Londoners, Andrewes included, should behave as though plague was not contagious. Everybody should attend all the funerals. There was no need to run away. It was a moral disease. If you were innocent you were safe. And not to believe that was itself a sin. How innocent was Andrewes in running to save his own skin?
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Throughout that exciting summer of 1603, as it felt for a moment that England was going to change, the Puritans were busy raising the stakes. Word was sent around the counties that the old complaints could be given new life. Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, as revised in 1552, embodying the English compromise between Protestant language and Catholic ceremonies, had always been for the Puritans 'an unperfect booke, culled and picked out of the popishe dunghill, the Masse boke full of all abhominations'. Now they could say so. Bishops, they claimed, were nowhere endorsed by the word of Christ. Trumped up, fat 'pomp-fed prelates' could not 'clayme any other authorities than is geeven them by the statute of the 25 of Kynge Henry the 8'. They were royal placeholders, para-sitical government officials, nothing to do with God or his church. A sudden electric current ran through the English shires. The Puritans arranged public debates on the question of the wearing of the surplice, and on the use of the cross, on the bishops' laying on of hands at confirmation, and on the all-important question of whether ministers should be learned or not. In a Catholic or sub-Catholic church, where the visual and the ceremonial dominated the verbal and intellectual, it scarcely mattered if the priest was well qualified; he was simply the con-duit for divine meaning. But in a proper, pure reformed church, the minister needed to be, more than anything else, an effective preacher of the word, not a mere `dumme dogge', as the phrase went at the time — it came from Isaiah — who would go through the motions and convey nothing of the intellectual spirit of reformed Christianity.
All these old issues which had riven the church in the 15 7os and 'Sos, and which had been effectively shut down since then by rigid suppression, were now to be given new life. James's all-too-Scottish and intellectual readiness to talk through difficult ques-tions was going to release a log-jam, Everything in the new Jacobean England suddenly felt more fluid than before and a conference with the Puritans on the future governance and doc-trines of the English Church was going too far. One needs reminding, perhaps, of just how passionate was the loathing among Puritans of that symbolic strain in the English Church. Few modern Christians, however severe, would be quite as brave as Richard Parker, the author of A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with AntiChrist in Ceremonies: especially in the Signe of the Crosse, published in London in 1607, who was keen to point out to the ignorant, at some length, 'the idolatrie of the Crosse, the Superstition of the Crosse, the Hipocrisie of the Crosse, the impietie of the Crosse, the injustice of the Crosse and the soule murther of the Crosse'. The cross was 'a part of deuill worship . . . The vsing of the Crosse is but an idle apishe toye, and lighter than the surplice, which is also too light.' Why did these things matter so much? Why did people care about the wearing of a surplice, or the emblem of the cross, or the use of a ring in the wedding service? Why was so much agony expended on the relative weight of symbol and word, of text and ceremony, on the precise bodily movements of English-men at prayer? There is a straightforward answer: two entirely different and opposing worldviews, and two views of the nature of human beings, are bound up in this debate. For the strict reformers, only the naked intellectual engagement with the com-plexities of a rational God would do. All else was confusion and obfuscation. The word was the route to understanding. Every-thing else was mud in the water. Men were essentially thinking and spiritual creatures. Bodily observance was an irrelevance. A Calvinist religion, as Milton later said, was `winnow'd, and sifted, from the chaffe of overdated Ceremonies'. It was free of irrelevance. The only desire of ceremonialists like Lancelot Andrewes and his disciple William Laud was to distort this precious purified religion of the word. 'They hallow'd it, they fum'd it, they sprincl'd it, they be deck't it,' Milton raged, 'not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure Linnen, with other deformed, and fantastik dresses in Palls, and Miters, gold, and guegaws fetcht from Arons old wardrobe.' For those like Andrewes who held on to the place of symbol in the life of religion (and they were a small if powerful minority even among the bishops of the Jacobean church), and who saw God not as an intellectual system but as a mystery, the stripping of the altars was an unpardonable arrogance. The church had always used ritual and ceremony to approach the divine. It was the conduit through which grace could reach the believer. Only big-headed modern 'novelists' could assume that, without any guidance from the wisdom of the church fathers, ordinary people could approach God direct, as no one had done since the Apostles. Mystery for Andrewes required ceremony and a respect for the inherited past. Bowing to the name of Jesus was the hinge and fulcrum of this debate. The later pamphleteer William Prynne (whose cheeks were to be branded on the orders of William Laud with the letters SL standing for 'Seditious Libeller' — Prynne called them 'Stigmata Laudiana') considered the habit of bowing 'a meere Popish Inuention of punie times'. And, anyway, bowing at the name of Jesus `disturbes and interupts men in their devotions, by auocating their bodies and minds from those serious duties about which they are imployed and to which they should be wholy intent'. Prayer was as serious and technical as a law lecture; and what did bobbing and dipping have to do with that?