Adams in his study

 

AI Imagined Interview

This imagined interview takes place in a quiet, book-lined study, modeled after a London parsonage from the early 17th century. The interviewer, a modern visitor, sits opposite Thomas Adams, who is dressed in clerical attire appropriate for the period. Adams's countenance is serious and contemplative, with a glint of the satirical wit that made his sermons so renowned

.

Interviewer: Master Adams, thank you for welcoming me. In our time, you are often called the "prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians". What do you make of this rather grand title?

Thomas Adams: (He offers a slow, thoughtful smile.) It is a worldly praise, and my heart must be wary of such flattery, lest pride creep in like a worm eating at the soul. But I take it to mean that my sermons, though they concern the high and holy things of God, have been understood by the common man. My purpose is not to entertain with cleverness, but to use every rhetorical tool God has given me - be it metaphor, parable, or even a timely wit—to pierce the armor of sin and to lay bare the saving truth of the Gospel. The theater may present man's folly, but the pulpit must expose it in light of eternal judgment and mercy.

Interviewer: Your sermons, particularly works like The White Devil and The Gallants Burden, focused heavily on sin and hypocrisy. Why was this such a recurring theme for you?

Thomas Adams: The human heart, sir, is a white devil indeed—beautiful on the outside, but foul and corrupted within. My sermons sought to peel back this false skin. As a shepherd, I saw my flock beset by many wolves: gluttony, pride, covetousness. But none so dangerous as the hypocrisy which masks these sins with a pretense of piety. A man cannot be saved from a disease he refuses to admit he has. So I speak to the sin first, to drive the sinner to the only physician who can cure him, who is Christ.

Interviewer: In the great controversies of your day, particularly those leading up to the Civil War, you occupied a moderate position, loyal to the King while holding to Calvinist theology. How did you navigate that treacherous path?

Thomas Adams: A man must be loyal to his conscience and to the divine order of things. My theology is unambiguously Calvinistic: that all saving grace flows from God alone. Yet, my loyalty was to the established Church of England and to the monarch, as God’s appointed sovereign. I saw much pride and schism on both sides of the quarrel. Some of the hotter sort of Puritans, with their insistence on new forms and ceremonies, were as dangerous to the unity of Christ’s church as the worldly men they condemned. I had no patience for such sectarianism. The kingdom of God is not built on ceremonies, but on faith in Christ.

Interviewer: You have been described as a "doctrinal Puritan," focusing on theology rather than ecclesiastical rites. Do you consider that an accurate description of your ministry?

Thomas Adams: The heart of my preaching was the doctrine of grace, a robust and pastoral Calvinism, not the fine points of church government. The people need to know their own lostness and God's abundant mercy in Christ Jesus. I was a preacher of the Word, not a debater of forms. My sermons aimed to be "a feast for ministers and all serious Bible students," and that feast consists of solid food, not the mere garnish of rites and ceremonies.

Interviewer: Toward the end of your life, after the Civil War had run its course, your circumstances became quite difficult, and you were left in "necessitous and decrepit old age". What was the state of your spirit during that time?

Thomas Adams: The hand of God, though sometimes heavy, is always just. I was sequestered, and my worldly comfort was taken from me. But a man who has tasted the eternal kindness of God will not complain at the momentary withdrawal of earthly ease. My trust was in Christ, whose mercy, like Himself, is immutable. God teaches his children with a rod of discipline as well as a kiss of favor. The infirmities of the body and the poverty of the purse served to remind me of the true treasure laid up in heaven. It was a time of proving, and by God's grace, my faith endured.

Interviewer: Finally, for a modern world that is so caught up in the affairs of the present, what lesson might your life and writings offer?

Thomas Adams:I would remind your time of two things. First, the infinite value of time. "Every hour hath wings," and no moment is lost to God's reckoning. Do not waste the brief day of your life on idle follies and worldly pursuits. Second, I would point you back to the unchangeable Christ. The world changes like a fleeting shadow, but in Christ, there is "no variableness, nor shadow of turning". All human effort is but a shifting sand. Build your house upon the rock of Christ’s salvation, and it will endure forever. That is the only wisdom worth pursuing.

Another Quotation

Christ is the sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated, to be found in every leaf, almost in every line, the Scriptures being but as it were the swaddling bands of the child Jesus.

See The Works of Thomas Adams (1862; reprint Eureka, Calif.: Tanski, 1998), 3:224

Christ in all the Scriptures

“Christ is the sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated, to be found in every leaf, almost in every line, the Scriptures being but as it were the swaddling bands of the child Jesus.”

The Works of Thomas Adams (1862; reprint Eureka, Calif.: Tanski, 1998), Vol 3:224.

That Elusive Quotation

In his thesis Vincent Cabell Flanagan says

In the nineteenth century ... Adams had several advocates. The most notable of them was Robert Southey. Just about two hundred years after Adams began to publish, Southey, apparently while gathering material for his voluminous works on church history and the lives of churchmen, was caught by the quality of Adams' expression. The earliest of Adams' works were copied into Southey's explanatory notes and commonplace books. 

It must be noted, however, that from a relative standpoint the record of Southey's interest in Adams is not particularly impressive; Adams is but one of several seventeenth century divines in whom Southey indicated interest. Alexander B. Grosart, the ubiquitous nineteenth-century editor, is apparently responsible for giving currency to a dictum on Adams attributed by him to Southey which for almost a century has been cited by one critic after another, but without authentication. As this dictum appears in Grosart's article on Adams in the DNB it reads, 

[Thomas Adams] ... a divine who was pronounced by Robert Southey to be ‘the prose Shakespeare of puritan theologians ... scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy,’ ... 

Grosart cites no specific work of Southey's as a source, and those who have continued the use of the quotation have cited none. This group includes John Brown (who, like Southey, wrote a biography of John Bunyan), whose edition of a selection of Adams' sermons, published in 1909 and reprinted in 1927 by the Cambridge Press, carries a binder's stamping in gold leaf on the front cover which reads, "The prose Shakespeare of Puritan Theologians". 

A general survey of Southey's letters and his prose which has been judged to be pertinent has failed to disclose the sources of the specific quotation Grosart offers. Even so, it is of course unwise to challenge the authenticity of the quotation without making an exhaustive search through all of Southey's prose works, notes and letters. As mentioned above, there are indications in Southey's works of a limited interest in Adams, but if the words which Grosart attributed to Southey are actually contained in a work by that poet, the quotation pulled out of context suggests that Southey's appreciation of, and interest in, Adams was greater than the bulk of Southey's prose would indicate. For example, in Southey's chapters "James I," and "Charles I. Triumph of the Puritans," in his Book of the Church (1824), Southey makes no reference to Adams. Nevertheless, the attention which several nineteenth-century editors and commentators devoted to Adams and perhaps even that of twentieth-century critics may well reflect the result of the currency given to the comment

In his footnotes Flanagan reveals that he had examined The Life and Correspondence of the late Robert Southey ed C C Southey Selections from the letters of Robert Southey ed J. W. Warter (4 vold, 1856) The Correpsondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles ed Edward Dowden (1881); Omniana (ed Robert Southey) (2 vols 1812); The Life of Wesley (2 vols 1820); The Book of the Church (2nd ed 2 vols 1824); Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826); Thomas More or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society (2 vol 1822); The Life of John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress (1830); etc and found nothing.

In another interesting footnote he says that a similar complimentary phrase was applied by nineteenth century critics to John Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Mrs Simpson notes that "Coleridge loved Donne's prose. His highest praise is given to a sentence which he describes as "Worthy almost of Shakespeare" (op cit, p 290) and Edmund Gosse in his biography of Jeremy Taylor writes "It is in this extraordinary vitality and organic growth of his metaphors that Taylor is really what he is so often called, “the Shakespeare of English prose ..." In a footnote Gosse identifies his source: "This epithet was first applied to Jeremy Taylor ... by William Mason, the biographer of Gray" (Jeremy Taylor (1904), p. 219).

He also notes that Thomas Smith notes in his introduction to the Adams volumes in Nichol's Series of Standard Divines, the first volume of which is dated l861, that Adams "has been styled the Shakespeare of the Puritans" (I, xi). He does not identify the source of the phrase. 

Angus in his memoir of Adams in the third volume of this series, which appeared in 1862, in commenting on the style of Adams, writes: "For fancy we may, after Southey, compare him with Taylor, for wit with Fuller". (III, xxii). In concluding his memoir Angus acknowledges both his debt and the publisher's debt to Grosart (see below, p 135).

Paxton Hood on Puritan Adams 4

It was an absurd fashion of speech, here are two illustrations of this most singular mode; from both sermons I leave out, as too long, the more ludicrous of similar passages from the text “Take thou thy son," etc.

Not to preface away any more tyme, please yew to call to mind these four generalls observable in the text.

1. Victima, the Hoast or Sacrifice; described here by a double name. 1. Proper, Isaak. 2. Appellative, or a name of relation, Sonne; which likewise is further illustrated by two other attributes; the one taken ab electione divina, the other ab afleclione humana. 1. Unigcnitus, his onely sonne; there's God’s inscrutable election. 2. Dilectus, his beloved sonne; there's Abraham’s deerest affection.

2. Sacerdos, the Priest which was to ofl'er up this sacrifice. The person not exprest, but in the word Tolle, Take thow. God speakes to Abraham: The Father must bee the Priest and Butcher of his own sonne. .

3. Altare, the Altar or Place where this was to be offered; set downe 1, Generally, the land of Moryah. 2, Specially super uno montium, one particular mountayne in that land.

4. Ritus, the Rite and Manner of sacrificinge, or the kind and quality of the sacrifice: Holocaustum, it must bee an whole burnt ofl'ringe.

Again, from the text, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them,” &tc.

In which Prayer and Supplication of his these six thinges are observable.
l. Quando, the tyme when. When hee was hanginge now on r. the Crosse, and ready to yield up the Ghost; Tune, then Jesus sayd.
2. Quis, the party prayinge. Dixz't Jesus, it was Christ Jesus.
3. Cui or ad Quem, the object to whome his prayer is directed; and that is God his Father.
4. Quid, the matter and subject, or thinge for what he prayed; which is Pardon and Forgivenes.
5. Pro quibus, for whome hee prayeth; Illis, them, his Enemyes.
6. Quare, the ground and reason of his petition; which was theyr Ignorance; for they know not what they doe.
The Tyme, when: the Persons, who; the Person, to whome; the Persons for whome; the Thinge, for what; and the Cause, wherefore.

In a state of transition from the times which produced these curious formularies was the age when Thomas Adams began to preach. He must have been contemporary with Bishop Andrewes and Dr. Donne. I love Bishop Andrewes, but his style, almost through every line of it, abounds with strange readings and words, thus, “Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel ? Let Him be arrayed in scarlet, it is His due. His “Doctor’s weed”

On the birth of Christ at Ephrata

Even so, Lord, saith our Saviour, for so is thy pleasure. And since it is His pleasure so to deal, it is His further pleasure (and it is our lesson out of this Bethlehem minima). Even this, ne minima minimi, that we set not little by that which is little, unless we will so set by Bethlehem and by Christ and all. He will not have little places villified, little Zoar will save the body, little Bethlehem the soul, nor have, saith Zacherie, (dies parvus - little times - despised, unless we despise this day, the Feast of Humility. Nor have one of these little ones offended. Why? for, Ephrata may make amends for, parvula, ex te for in.

How quaint and singular reads the following: - 

Will ye now to this inglorious Signe heare a glorious Song; to this cratch of humilitie, a hymne of caelestiall harmonie? If the Signe mislike you, ye cannot but like the Song, and the Queer (choir) that sing it. The song I shall not be able to reach to, will ye but see the Queer?and that shall serve for this time: For, by all meanes, before I end, I would deal with somewhat that might ballance this Signe of His low estate. This the Evangelists never faile to doe; Ever, they look to this point carefully: If they mention ought, that may offend, to wipe it away streight, and the Scandall of it, by some other high regard. See you a sort of poore Shepherds? Stay, and ye shall see a troope of God's Angels. Heare ye one say, layed in the crotch below? abide, and ye shall heare many sing, Glorie on high, in honour of Him that lyeth in it.
Vidisti vilia (saith St. Ambrose) audi mirisiea: Were the things meane you have seen?
Wonderful shall they be, ye now shall heare and see both. Vilescit praesepe, ecce Angelivis cantibus honoratur: Is the Cratch meane? Meane as it is, it is honoured with the musike of Angels, it hath the whole Queer of Heaven to sing about it. This also will prove a signe, if it be well looked into; a counter-signs to the other: That, of His humilities,- this of His glorie.

Lancelot Andrewes illustrates the monastic method in a Protestant Church, listen to him intently, bring to his words what you will certainly meet in them, a spirit of prayerful devotion; forgive the quaintness of the preacher for the holiness which shines through all his words, and you will not listen in vain. His sermons will bear modern adaptation, if the mind adapting them and using them be itself informed and filled with ardent and seraphic reverence for the great truth of the Incarnation ; for indeed there is the glow of a seraph about him - quaint as he is the aureola of a saint shines over him; cloistral and monastic, his sermons are wholly free from the wider inspirations of thought and worldly knowledge, they are narrow in their range but they are intense; the live coal from off the altar has given to all his faculties a pure flame; but even as a coal presents strange and grotesque faces in the fires, so with the ardours of his style, they are as grotesque as they are holy; fancies in words took him captive, often it must be admitted very pleasantly. Thus Christ the Conqueror coming from Edom and from the grave.

And comming backe thus, from the debellation (defeat) of the spiritual Edam, and the breaking up of the true Bozra indeed, it is wondered, Who it should be. Note this that nobody knew Christ at His rising; neither Mary Magdalen nor they that went to Emmaus. No more doth the Prophet here.
Now there was reason to aske this question, for none would ever think it to be Christ. There is great oddes; it cannot be He.
1. Not He: He was put to death and put into His grave and a great stone upon Him not three days since. This Fame is alive and alives like. His Ghost it cannot be: He glides not (as Ghosts, they say, doe) but paces the ground very strongly.
Not He: He had His apparell shared amongst the souldiers; was left all naked. This Partie hath gotten Him on glorious apparell, rich scarlet.
Not He: if He come, He must come in white, in the linnen He was lapped in, and laid in his grave. This Partie comes in quite another colour, all in red. So the colours suit not. To be short, not He; He was put to a foile - to a foule foilc - as ever was any : they did to Him even what they listed; scorned and insulted upon Him. It was then the houre and power of darknesse. This Partie, whatsoever He is, hath got the upper hand, won the field  marches stately, Conquerour-like. His the day sure.

The following little extract illustrates the refreshing way Andrewes had of pressing out comfortable truth in his barbarous Latinities.

There was then a new begetting this day. And if a new begetting, a new Paternitie and Fraternitie, both. By the hodié genuite of Christmas, how soone Hee was borne of the Virgin's wombe. Hee became our brother (sinne, except) subject to all our infirmities ; so to mortalitie and even to death it selfe. And by death that brotherhood had beene dissolved, but for this dayes rising. By the hodie genuite of Easter, as soon as Hee was borne again of the wombe of the grave, Hee begins a new brother-hood, founds a new fraternitie straight; adopts us (wee see) anew againe, by His fratres meos; and thereby, Hee that was primogenitus ad mortius, becomes primogenitus inter multos fratres: when the first begotten from the dead, then the first begotten in this respect, among many brethren. Before Hee was ours : now wee are His. That was by the mother's side ; so, Hee ours. This is by Patrem vestrum, the Father's side; So wee His. But halfe-brothers before; Never of whole bloud, till now. Now, by Father and Mother both, Fratres germanie, Fratres fraterrimi, we cannot be more.

Paxton Hood on Puritan Adams 3

Spotted Salamander

The mind of Puritan Adams did not express itself in the copious and sonorous eloquence of Hooker, nor had his fancy the solemn, quaintly gargoyled style and thoughtfulness, the subtle paradoxical of Sir Thomas Browne; for, as we have already said, he was a preacher, and he evidently thought constantly of his audience; but in his sermons will be found many of the best characteristics of all the wit of Fuller, and the allegoric lights of Bunyan, and much of the out-of-the-way learning and radiant fancy of Jeremy Taylor. His method and style of treating a text or subject are altogether his own; a style, however, adopted and found very taking since his day. We cannot commend it. Thus in his sermon, “A Generation of Serpents,” from the text, “Their poison is like the poison of a serpent, like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear,” he expounds eleven characters -

1. The Salamander, the troublesome and litigious neighbour, whoever loves and lives in the fire of contention.
2. The Dart, that is, the angry man.
3. The Dipsass, the drunkard. This serpent lives altogether in moorish places: the serpent in the fens, the man at the ale-house.
4. The Crocodile, the hypocrite.
5. The Cockatriee, said to kill with its eyes - the courtesan.
6. The Caterpillar, or the earthworm, emblem of the covetous.
7. The Asp, the traitorous seminary.
8. The Lizard, an emblem of the slothful.
9. The Sea Serpent, the pirate, a very common character in Adams' day.
10. The Stellion, the extortioner.
ll. Draco, the great red dragon.

Sometimes his illustrations are of the very queerest. Thus he speaks of the wonderful making of the tongue: -

To create so little a piece of flesh, and to put such vigour into it: to give it neither bones nor nerves, yet to make it stronger than arms and legs, and those most able and serviceable parts of the body.
Because it is so forcible, therefore bath the most wise God ordained that it shall be but little, that it shall be but one. That so the paruity and singularity may abate the vigour of it. If it were paired, as the arms, legs, hands, feet, it would be much more unruly. For he that cannot tame one tongue, how would he be troubled with twain!
Because it is so unruly, the Lord hath hedged it in, as a man will not trust a wild horse in an open pasture, but prison him in a close pound. A double fence bath the Creator given to confine it - the lips and the teeth - that through those bounds it might not break.

A certain quaint and frequently happy ingenuity characterises all the sermons and the writings of Adams. We have before noticed his resemblance to Herbert: the quaintness of the good parson of Bemerton is found in abundance here, not less than his piety. Churchman as he was, we do not find, indeed, the same temple-er stillness, or carved imagery of thought. Herbert’s life was secluded, lonely, and hermetic; that of Adams was passed apparently for the most part in London. Herbert, too, was a more intense ecclesiastic; his fervours were monastic; and although his poems are not organ-like airs, they are notes from a choir, a strange piercing song. Adams was a man of action, interested in all that went on in the great world; and quaint as he is, his quaintness is rather that we notice in the carved oak traoery of some domestic hall or ancient manor, than the writhing gargoyles, or the dim forms of ancient church window. He did not, like Herbert, invite his fancies in to stay and converse with him; he followed them out; and even while he followed one, a host started up, and we sometimes think he chases them all in rather undignified gait or mood. Yet there are some notes, and they are very frequent, which remind the reader of George Herbert or more aptly Jeremy Taylor.

Men and brethren, let us be thankful. Let our meditations travel with David in the 148th Psalm, first up into heaven. Even the very heavens and heights praise Him. And those blessed angels in His court sing His glory. Descend we then by the celestial bodies, and we shall find the sun, moon, and all the stars of light praising Him. A little lower, we shall perceive the meteors and upper elements, the fire and hail, snow and vapour, magnifying Him, even the wind and storms fulfilling His word. Fall we upon the centre -  the very earth. We shall hear the beasts and cattle, mountains and hills, fruitful trees and all cedars, extolling His name. rl'he chirping birds still sing sweet psalms and carols to the Creator’s praise, every morning when they rise, every evening when they go to rest. Not so much as the very creeping things, saith the Psalmist, noisome dragons, and crawling serpents in the deeds, but they do, in a sort, bless their Maker. Let not man, then, the first-fruits of His creatures, for whose service all the rest were made, he unthankful.

And the following is very sweetly expressed: - 

Pride, fraud, drunkenness, is as Mount Seir to the lovers of them. But, alas 1 how unsafe : if stronger against, and further removed from, the hand of man, yet nearer to God’s hand in heaven, though we acknowledge no place far from God or from His thunder. But we say, it is not always the safest sailing on the top of the mast. To live on the mountainous height of a temporal estate is neither wise nor happy. Men standing in the shade of humble valleys, look up and wonder at the height of hills, and think it goodly living there, as Peter thought Tabor. But when, with weary limbs, they have ascended, and find the beams of the sun melting their spirits, or the cold blasts of wind making their sinews slack, flashes of lightning, or cracks of thunder, soonest endangering their advanced heads, then they confess (checking their proud conceit) the low valley is safest. For the fruitful dews that fall fast on the hills stay least while there; but run down to the valley: and though, on such a promontory, a man further sees, and is further seen, yet, in the valley, where he sees less he enjoys more!

Again

There is so much comfort in sorrow as to make all affliction to the elect, a song in the night. Adversity sends us to Christ, as the leprosy sent those ten. Prosperity makes us turn our backs upon Christ and leave him, as health did those nine (Luke xvii.) David’s sweetest songs were his tears. In misery he spared Saul, his great adversary; in peace, he killed Uriah, his dear friend. The wicked sing with grasshoppers, in fair weather; but the faithful (in this like sirens) can sing in a storm. When a man cannot find peace upon earth, he quickly runs to heaven to seek it. Afflictions sometimes maketh an evil man good, always a good man better.

We could imagine the author of the Urn Burial had the following in his mind in a famous passage: 

No, they that are written in the eternal leaves of heaven, shall never be wrapt in the cloudy sheets of darkness. A man may have his name written in the chronicles, yet lost; written in durable marble, yet perish; written on a monument equal to a Colossus, yet be ignominious ; written on the hospital gates, yet go to hell ; written on his own house, yet another come to possess it. All these are but writings in the dust, or upon the waters, where the characters perish so soon as they are made. They no more prove a man happy than the fool could prove Pontins Pilate a saint, because his name was written in the Creed. But they that are written in heaven, are sure to inherit it.

But it was the age of strange conceits; and absurdities inwrought themselves with every department of taste, the age had not recovered from the grotesque freaks of the Elizabethan time. From those outrageous leaps, and acrobatic displays of genius, even Shakespere is not free, and the architecture of the time, like the speech, we know abounds with strange displays; allegoric lessons were constantly offering their teachings from classic forms and allusions, and essays on the wisdom of the ancients were written in a way which often to us seem ludicrous enough, graceless and tasteless in the different departments of domestic architecture. The pulpit of those times has often been found in harmony with the taste which only employed the power of its genius

To raise the ceiling’s fretted height,
Each panel in achievement's clothing,Rich windows that exclude the light,And passages that lead to nothing.

And quaintness and queerness did assuredly inspire not only many of the lines of the poets and designs of the architects, but the plans and conceptions of the preachers too. Few could preach without interlacing the English with little bits of Latin, - to our ears and eyes it seems the merest pedantry - purposeless, for nothing is illustrated, and nothing proved. ....