Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan by David Gay

Reviewed by: Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan by David Gay Andrew Breeze Gifts and Graces: Prayer, Poetry, and Polemic from Lancelot Andrewes to John Bunyan. By David Gay. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2021. xiv+ 209 pp. $70; £52.99. ISBN 978–1–4875–3192–8. A Canadian study of seventeenth-century writers (Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, Henry Vaughan, Milton, Bunyan) is not only outstanding as a guide to their spirituality and its tougher sibling, dogma; it is also a pleasure to read. It abounds with insights, its author reminding one of C. S. Lewis (if without his obtrusive knowingness). The result is a book of permanent value. There are five chapters. The theme of the first is charity in the work of Andrewes and Herbert. The second turns to nature and art in the writings of Taylor and Vaughan. Then follow two chapters on Milton, tracing his course from youthful Anglicanism to a final departure from orthodox Christianity of any kind, the constant therein being that, whatever his shiftings, Milton was (in his own opinion) always right. We end with Bunyan, persecuted, imprisoned, but never flinching. [End Page 701] Together, these six authors all have seriousness and stature. The same goes for others mentioned in passing, such as Augustine Baker the Welshman or George Fox the Quaker. A further presence is the Book of Common Prayer: a document with divisive spiritual and political implications, not (as often thought now) a mere repository of stately prose. Behind the above is revolution and civil war. Gifts and Graces is not about some remote and dusty past, but perennial questions, often those of a Saint Augustine or Pascal or Newman or T. S. Eliot. Hardly a page lacks insights, of which the following is a mere selection. Dissenters hostile to set forms of worship saw the Book of Common Prayer as ‘a vestige of a past Catholic tradition or a present instrument of government coercion’ (p. 4). George Herbert ‘affirms the prayers and sacraments of the official Church in richly didactic meditative poems’ (p. 36). Jeremy Taylor is quoted as having ‘a poet’s mentality’ (p. 50). Claims of Independents in 1645 that Cranmer would approve abolition of the Book of Common Prayer prompt the remark, ‘Making the dead speak is going to some lengths’ (p. 57). We hear how ‘The ecclesiastical calendar of early modern England was a site of conflict’ (p. 123). In dramatic accounts of John Bunyan on trial, we are reminded that, tinker or not, he ‘had far more knowledge of the Bible than his judges imagined’ (p. 130). It yet brought him inner turmoil, wherein zeal was ‘a sacred flame’ endangered by blasphemy, ‘a vicious flood’ (p. 139). A further dynamic comes from present-day controversy. ‘Secularism demands tolerance to religions so long as they break no civil laws’ was John Locke’s submission of 1689; yet ‘that tolerance is contradicted when the state regulates religion’, following what a Muslim critic terms a secular ‘claim to a monopoly on reason’ (p. 164). Plenty for reflection, then, in this moderate and yet eloquent book, which is also quietly Canadian in reference to that country’s philosophers or constitution (as also those of the USA). On one level we encounter ancient struggles for justice or power, and reasons (specious or compelling) used to back them up. Of deeper interest are an Anglicanism taken in earnest, as also poetry and prayer (often the same thing, as with George Herbert). David Gay is hence among those few scholars who help us to ‘think the thoughts of the past’, to enter the lives and emotions of people long dead. In short, a golden volume. It should be recommended, bought, studied. Its issues of freedom and order, of authority and tradition, are as timely as ever. It would be a poor reader who went through Gifts and Graces and was not greatly rewarded. Andrew Breeze University of Navarre, Pamplona Copyright © 2022 The Modern Humanities Research Association

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