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Moderation and Deprivation: A Reappraisal of Richard Sibbes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Mark E. Dever
Mark E. Dever
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge CB2 IRH
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Extract

Among the Puritan ‘martyrs’ celebrated by Samuel Clarke and Daniel Neal, few have been more frequently mentioned and less carefully considered than Richard Sibbes (1577–1635). Sibbes, primarily remembered as Preacher of Gray's Inn and author of The Bruised Reede, has been presented as one of a number of early Stuart preachers who neither approved nor practised bending the knee in communion, nor wearing the surplice, nor signing the cross in baptism, and yet who somehow remained within the Established Church. He was, it is reported, constantly troubled by Laud. Doubly deprived, censured and silenced, Sibbes became a model for his numerous disciples – among them Thomas Goodwin, John Davenport, John Cotton – who would later find their way into dissent. It is supposed that only the power of his lawyer-friends and noble patrons allowed him to retain his ministry at Gray's Inn for almost two decades. After his death, his writings became almost entirely the possession of Nonconformists and Sibbes came to be read through separatist spectacles. And yet, although remembered as espousing a robustly reformed theology, his moderation was particularly admired by those who followed him. Sibbes seemed to stand above the tumult of the times, ‘to preserve the vitals and essentials of religion, that the souls of his hearers, being captivated with the inward beauty and glory of Christ, and being led into an experimental knowledge of heavenly truths, theirspirits might not evaporate and discharge themselves in endless, gainless, soul-unedifying, and conscience-perplexing questions’.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 396 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

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48 Patrick Collinson has convincingly made the point that voluntary religion flourished in the Jacobean period; yet the case of Sibbes is a clear example of at least two forms of voluntary religion which were not tolerated: Religion of Protestants: the Church in English society, 1559–1625, Oxford 1982, 242–83.

49 PRO, SP16/56, items 15 and 16. The extent of Sibbes's concern for the Protestant Churches on the continent in this period: ‘But especially let us consider with what hearts we entertain those doleful and sad reports of foreign churches, and with what consideration and view we look upon the present estate of the church, whether we be glad or no. There are many false spirits that either are not affected at all, or else they are inwardly glad of it… I hope that there are but few such amongst us here, therefore I will not press that. But if we be dead-hearted, and are not affected with the cause of the church, let us suspect ourselves, and think all is not well. The fire from heaven is not kindled in our hearts’: Sibbes, ‘Sword of the wicked’, in Evangelicall Sacrifices, London 1640, pt. ii, 235–6 (Works, i. p. 59).

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61 It is uncertain when or to whom this letter was originally written. Grosart has suggested that it was written to Thomas Goodwin, on his resignation from the vicarage of Holy Trinity, Cambridge in 1633 (Grosart, ’Memoir’, Works, i. p. cxvi).

62 Sibbes, , A Consolatory Letter To an afflicted Conscience, London 1641, 3 (Works, i. p. cxv).Google Scholar

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64 Ibid.. 6 (Works, i. p. cxvi).

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67 Ussher to Abbot, 10 Jan. 1626/7, found in C. R. Elrington (ed.), The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, D.D., Dublin 1847–64, xvi. 361.

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