This sure is matter of love; but came there any good to us by it? There did. For our conception being the root as it were, the very groundsill of our nature; that He might go to the root and repair of our nature from the very foundation, thither He went; that what had been there defiled and decayed by the first Adam, might by the Second be cleansed and set right again. That had our conception been stained, by Him therefore, primum ante omnia,to be restored again. He was not idle all the time He was an embyro all the nine months He was in the womb; but then and there He even ate out the core of corruption that cleft to our nature and us, and made both us and it an unpleasing object in the sight of God.
And what came of this? We who were abhorred by God, filii irae was our title, were by this means made beloved in Him. He cannot, we may be sure, account evil of that nature, that is now become the nature of His own SonNHis now no less than ours. Nay farther, given this privilege to the children of such as are in Him, though but of one parent believing, that they are not as the seed of two infidels, but are in a degree holy, eo ipso; and have a farther right to the laver of regeneration, to sanctify them throughout by the renewing of the Holy Ghost. This honour is to us by the dishonour of Him; this the good by Christ an embyro.
–From a sermon preached before King James, at Whitehall, on Sunday, the Twenty-fifth of December, 1614
Thanks, Kendall, for posting this excerpt from one of +Andrewes’ Christmas sermons. Lancelot Andrewes is one of the alltime favorite Anglican saints. And very saintly he was, as his famous book of [b]Private Prayers[/b] amply attests.
This treasure wasn’t published until more than 20 years after his death, since he had never intended it for use by anyone but himself. Besides, he wrote it in Latin! (Andrewes lived from 1555-1626, and his personal prayerbook wasn’t published until 1648). It has been justly said that what ++Thomas Cranmer is for the public liturgy of Anglicanism, +Andrewes is for the private devotions of Anglicans,
Andrewes was certainly one of the most learned scholars of his time (in any nation), but one of the things I love most about him was that he models beautifully the Anglican balance of Word and Sacrament at its best. King James appointed him to be of the chief translators of his famous Authorized Version of 1611, partly because he was highly competent in Hebrew and Greek as well as Latin, but also because he was the best theologian among the CoE bishops of that era. But along with his deep love of Holy Scripture, Andrewes also maintained a deep love of the early Fathers of the Church.
Personally, my favorite saying of his is the famous 1-2-3-4-5 listing of the multiple authorities he recognized as pre-eminent:
One Bible in
Two Testaments,
Three Creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, and “Athanasian”),
Four General Councils (AD 325, 381, 431, and 451), and
Five Centuries of Consensual Teaching by the early Fathers.
Note that the 39 Articles and the English Reformers are glaringly absent from his list. Andrewes was the first great High Churchman in Anglicanism, and one of the greatest of all time.
May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
David Handy+
Oops. Let me correct a glaring error above. +Andrewes famous devotional manuscript was written in GREEK, not Latin. I was going by memory, which is increasingly inaccurate as I grow older. Someday, I hope I learn to check my facts before posting here, as it will spare me (and the readers) these sorts of embarrassing corrections to the record. The point, of course, was that Lancelot Andrewes deliberately wrote his classic collection in another language than English, because he never expected anyone else to read the work. And anyone who might stumble on his manuscript would probably be unable to read it.
Sheepishly,
David Handy+