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Richard Kilby: A Study in Personal and Professional Failure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Peter Lake
Peter Lake*
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London
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Extract

The image of the minister of the word current amongst English evangelical protestants and puritans was both exalted and ambiguous. Ministers were ‘the lord’s ambassadors, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the dispensers of God’s mysteries, the builders of God’s church and the chariot and horsemen … of a Christian kingdom.’ However, the qualities and qualifications necessary successfully to fulfill that role were onerous in the extreme. To be a true minister it was necessary firstly and essentially to preach, which in turn entailed the mastering a large range of scholarly skills, involving knowledge of the original languages, of logic, rhetoric, church history, and theology. But it was necessary also for a true minister to be personally godly, first because he had to lead his flock toward a Christian life not merely through exhortation but also through example and, second, because his own spiritual condition, the integrity of his calling both as a Christian and as a minister, vitally effected the efficacy of his ministry. After all, the deeper his own understanding of the word—always as much a function of spiritual insight as formal learning—and the more completely his own character had been made over by the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit, the more effectively he could communicate his saving message to his flock.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 26: The Ministry: Clerical and Lay , 1989 , pp. 221 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989

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References

1 Some, Robert, A godly treatise of the church (London, 1582), sig. A4v.Google Scholar

2 Morgan, J., Godly Learning (Cambridge, 1986),Google Scholar chapters 5—7; for a list of the learned skills necessary for the ministry drawn up by Laurence Chadcrton, sec Lake, P., Moderate puritans and the Elizabethan church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 36–7;CrossRefGoogle Scholar on the need for personal godliness, sec Bernard, R., The faithful shepherd (London, 1621), pp. 73–8.Google Scholar ‘For he stands in God’s room and speaks for God, is the instrument appointed by Christ to publish the gospel, the word of grace and to guide the people in the way of grace. It is therefore necessary that he be endued with grace and with the gifts of God’s most holy spirit… He must have the spirit of illumination to sec into the mysteries of God’s word farther than nature or art can teach.’ He must have ‘the gift of supplication and prayer’ of ‘inward sanctification’ and of ‘outward reformarion and holy conversation’.

3 For lives centred around university conversions see those of John Preston and John Cotton in Clarke, S., A general martyrology (London, 1677)Google Scholar and that of Thomas Goodwin at the front of volume 5 of The works of Thomas Goodwin (London, 1681–1704). On this phenomenon, see Seaver, P., Wallington’s world (London, 1985), pp. 14–15;Google ScholarPubMed fora typical ministerial success story, see the life of Samuel Fairclough in Clarke, S., The lives of sundry eminent persons (London, 1683);Google Scholar on the seminaries for aspiring ministers held in the households of established divines, see in particular the life of Richard Blackerby in S. Clarke, Eminent persons; on the running of the household as a little church, see the lives of John Cotton, John Carter and Thomas Gataker in S. Clarke, Martyrology.

4 For figures on employment opportunities for ministers, see I. Green, ‘Career prospects and clerical conformity in the early Stuart church’, P & P 90 (1981). Green’s figures are intended as a corrective to those of M. H. Curtis and present a fairly optimistic picture of the number of openings relative to the numbers of graduates entering the ministry. The point being made here is that to pursue the vision of the ministry described in the lives required a certain level of prosperity and esteem, required, that is, a good living and that by the early seventeenth century the pressure on good livings from formally well qualified candidates was increasing. See O’Day, R., The English clergy (Leicester, 1979).Google Scholar

5 Kilby, Richard, The burthen of a louden conscience or the misery of sin (Cambridge, 1608);Google Scholar this was followed by Hallelujah praise the lord for the unburthening oj a loaded conscience (Cambridge, 1618). I should like to thank Patrick Collinson for drawing these fascinating volumes to my attention.

6 Burthen, p. 88.

7 Ibid., pp. 59, 82.

8 Burthen, p. 84; Hallelujah, pp. 127–8.

9 Ibid., pp. 81–2.

10 Haigh, C. A., ‘Puritan evangelism in the reign of Elizabeth 1’, EHR 92 (1977).Google Scholar It is perhaps worth pointing out that Kilby’s point, stressing as it does the readiness of the people to respond to a simple exposition of central truths straight from the bible, does not square with Dr Haigh’s perhaps overly pessimistic view of popular imperviousness to all sorts of protestant preaching.

11 Hallelujah, pp. 36–7, 54, 79; Burthen, pp. 48, 61.

12 Burthen, pp. 87–8.

13 Curtis, M. H., ‘The alienated intellectuals of early Stuart England’, P & P 23 (1961),Google Scholar reprinted in T. H. Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe (London, 1965); for details of Kilby’s career see Hallelujah, pp. 34–44. He went first to Gloucester Hall in Oxford, then spent ‘not so long’ at Emmanuel Cambridge ‘but to that college I am singularly bound’. He became a minister in 1596, having been ordained by Bishop Young of Rochester and been granted a preaching licence by Whit-gift. He became curate to the parson of Southfleet in Kent, only to be put out by Bishop Barlowe. Thence he went to a curateship in the parish of St Alkmunds in Derby, gained through connections made at Emmanuel. He left there and ended his days (in 1617) as curate of All Hallows also in Derby.

14 Burthen, p. 72.

15 Burthen, pp. 55–8, 72.

16 Ibid., pp.93-5.

17 Ibid., pp. 95–6.

18 Hallelujah, pp. 76, 138-9, 113.

19 Hallelujah pp. 81, 85, 83, 110.

20 Ibid., p. 42; die complaint had always been with him (‘Gravel hath bred in me from my youth and of ten times I was pained with it’), but it became more serious and then excruciating in the period between July 1612 and November 1613; ibid., pp. 109–10, 122–3. ‘I am fully persuaded that had not this disease come upon me yea and prevailed more and more even to the putting of me quite out of all hope of a recovery I should never have been divorced and separated from the love of this world.’ For an example of Kilby bargaining with God for both physical and spiritual relief in return for repentance, see ibid., pp. 104, 108–9, 48–68.

21 Hallelujah, p. 79; Burthen, pp. 97, 40.

22 Hallelujah, pp. 37–43.

23 Ibid., p. 87; Burtlten, p. 22.

24 Hallelujah, pp. 87–9, 120–1.

25 Ibid., pp. 89–90.

26 Thus he felt that he had refused God’s ‘preferred grace’ by ‘taking upon thee to be a preacher of my righteousness and denying the power thereof. (Hallelujah, p. 92.) His status as a minister served simply to render already serious faults the more unforgiveable—’of all counterfeits’ he observed, ‘the most incurable is a counterfeit preacher of thy righteousness’. (Ibid., p. 75)

27 Very much the line taken by Green (‘Career prospects and clerical conformity’) who largely ignores questions of ideology or the subjective apprehension of individual career trajectories.

28 Some sense of the range of individual experience that can lie behind careers, which, taken at face value, for statistical purposes, might appear almost identical can be gained by comparing Kilby with Dr Hughes’ account of Thomas Dugard. Dugard was a schoolmaster for fifteen years before he became a minister in 1648—a classic victim of the crush of qualified applicants for clerical employment during this period—except that his job at Warwick school was well paid, brought him into frequent contact with local godly notables, up to and including Lord Brooke, as well the leading members of the local puritan clergy. Through friendship networks of this sort he was able to enjoy the benefits of learned and godly conversation and even to try out his gifts in the pulpit, long before he was ordained. For Dugard, see A. L. Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his circle in the 1630s—a ‘parliamentary-puritan’ connexion?’ HJ 24 (1986).