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Style and the Man: Thomas Adams, Prose Shakespeare of Puritan Divines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2011
Extract
In 1629, emboldened to believe that “Our books may come to be seen where ourselves shall never be heard,” Thomas Adams, London preacher, published his “Workes,” a massive folio which brought together the sermons, meditations, and “other divine and moral discourses” of seventeen years.1 “You see I have venturously trafficked with my poor talent in public,” he says in his preface. “If the grain be good, it doth better in the market than in the garner…. If it were profitable being spoken, sure it cannot be unnecessary being written.” The only other work to appear during his lifetime was a lengthy but close-reasoned “Exposition upon the Second Epistle General of St. Peter,” an epistle which he considered “a magnificent and beautiful structure” having “many a column of comfort, many a door of hope, many a window of light.”
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1955
References
1 A copy, “printed by Tho. Harper for John Grismand … to be sold at his shop in Ivie Lane, at the Sign of the Gunne,” may be found in Houghton Library, Harvard University. The size of the work, running to 1240 pages, makes one appreciate the phrase “life and labors.” The earliest of its sixty-three sermons is one delivered in 1612 at St. Paul's Cross, though Adams was at the time “Minister of the gospell” at Willington, Bedfordshire, not far from the village where John Bunyan was born. Houghton Library also possesses copies of more than a score of the sermons issued in small quartos from 1612 to 1626 under theatrical titles like The Gallant's Burden, The White Devil, The Black Saint, The Fatal Banquet, The Sinner's Passing Bell, Mystical Bedlam, The Soul's Sickness.
2 An available edition is one “revised and corrected” by James Sherman, London, 1848. None of Adams' writings seems to have been reprinted until 1847, when the Rev. W. H. Stowell revived twelve sermons under the title The Three Divine Sisters, London and Edinburgh, “bringing them,” as he says in his introduction, “out of the obscurity of two centuries,” and hazarding the guess that no other edition would likely appear. But Adams was of sufficient interest to be included in Nichol's Series of Standard Divines, Puritan Period, as The Works of Thomas Adams: Being the Sum of His Sermons, Meditations, and Other Divine and Moral Discourses, 2 vols., Thomas Smith, editor, Edinburgh, 1861–2; a promised third volume in this set, which was to include a life by “Professor Angus,” seems never to have materialized. Half a century later, the Cambridge Devotional Series issued a small volume of twelve sermons edited with an introduction by John Brown: The Sermons of Thomas Adams, the Shakespeare of Puritan Theologians, London, 1909. Most recently, in 1939, World's Classics included “The City of Peace” in its volume of Selected English Sermons, 16th–19th Centuries, edited with an introduction by Rt. Rev. Hensley Henson. Half a dozen of Adams' interesting characters appear in Gwendolyn Murphy's Cabinet of Characters, London, 1925. The citations in the present paper are, except where noted otherwise, from the 1861–2 two-volume edition of The Works.
3 Adams is included in the Dictionary of National Biography, I, 102, the sketch by Alexander B. Grossart; W. H. Stowell's “Introduction” to The Three Divine Sisters provides a fuller account.
4 The address “To my dearly beloved charge” immediately follows the dedications in the 1629 edition of the Workes.
5 A. B. Grossart, D.N.B., I, 102.
6 Quoted in Stowell, op. cit., lix.
7 “The Spirituall Navigator Bound for the Holy Land,” Workes (1629), 397.
8 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 237.
9 “The Sinner's Passing Bell,” Works, I, 348.
10 “The Sacrifice of Thankfulness,” Works, I, 126 ff.
11 “Works, I, 107, 346, 384, 385, 452, 463, 469.
12 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 185.
13 “The Devil's Banquet,” Works, I, 24, 153; “The Gallant's Burden,” I, 300.
14 “The Sacrifice of Thankfulness,” Works, I, 140.
15 “The Sinner's Passing Bell,” Works, I, 349.
16 “The Spirituall Navigator,” Workes (1629), 392.
17 “The City of Peace,” Rt. Rev. Henson, Hensley, ed., Selected English Sermons, 16th–19th Centuries, London, 1939, p. 106Google Scholar.
18 “The Sinner's Passing Bell,” Works, I, 340–1.
19 Ibid., I, 366.
20 “The Way Home,” Works, II, 17–18.
21 “The Sinner's Passing Bell,” Works, I, 348.
22 Ibid, I, 386–7.
23 Ibid., I, 348.
24 Ibid., I, 386–7.
25 Lot cit.
26 “A Generation of Serpents,” Works, I, 72.
27 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 243.
28 “The Crucifix,” Works, II, 422.
29 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 220.
30 “The Rage of Oppression,” Works, I, 89.
31 Exposition on the Second Epistle of St. Peter, quoted in Stowell, op. cit., liv.
32 “The Sinner's Passing Bell,” Works, I, 331.
33 “The Spirituall Navigator,” Workes (1629), 406.
34 Ibid., 407.
35 Works, I, 504.
36 Ibid., I, 390.
37 The Problem of Style, London, 1925, p. 127.
38 The phrase is W. Fraser Mitchell's, used in his extensive discussion of the schemata in English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson: a Study of Its Literary Aspects, London, 1932, passim.
39 “The Way Home,” Works, II, 17, 18.
40 Quoted in Stowell, op. cit., xliii.
41 “Mystical Bedlam, or the World of Madmen,” Works, I, 254.
42 “The Black Saint,” Works, I, 501.
43 “The Spirituall Navigator,” Workes (1629); the other sermons may all be found in the 1861–2 edition.
44 “Mystical Bedlam,” Works, I, 284.
45 Mitchell, op. cit, discusses Adams' use of the character as an advance over the moral descriptio.
46 “Mystical Bedlam,” Works, I, 284.
47 “Christ's Star,” Works, II, 216.
48 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 216.
49 “The Spirituall Navigator,” Workes (1629), 406–7.
50 Exposition on the Second Epistle General of St. Peter, quoted in Stowell, op. cit., liv.
51 Loc. cit.
52 “The Sinner's Passing Bell,” Works, I, 376.
53 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 240.
54 Ibid., I, 220.
55 Ibid., 1, 158.
56 Ibid., I, 241.
57 Ibid., 1, 243.
58 “The City of Peace,” Henson, Selected Sermons, 124.
59 Ibid., 118.
60 Quoted in Hayakawa, S. I., Language in Action, New York, 1939, p. 186Google Scholar.
61 “God's Bounty,” Works, I, 153.
62 “The Fatal Banquet,” Works, I, 216.
63 “The Spirituall Navigator,” Workes (1629), 402.
64 “The Divells Banket” (1614), quoted in Mitchell, op. cit., 215.
65 Southey, quoted in Brown, John, Puritan Preaching, New York, 1900, p. 89Google Scholar; Haller, William, The Rise of Puritanism, New York, 1938, p. 31Google Scholar; W. Fraser Mitchell, op. cit., 221, 224.