John Brown on Adams
This is from John Brown's book Puritan preaching in England; a study of past and present by John Brown (1830-1922). Having spoken of William Perkins and Henry Smith he moves on to Adams
Alongside
of Henry Smith, and to be accounted even greater than he as a Puritan
preacher, must be placed that Thomas Adams who has been called the
Shakespeare of the Puritans. Southey seems to have been the one to
start the comparison when he pronounced him to be the "prose
Shakespeare of Puritan theologians, scarcely inferior to Fuller in
wit or to Taylor in fancy." This judgement of Southey's may be
qualified and at the same time extended by saying that while Adams is
not so sustained as Jeremy Taylor nor so continuously sparkling as
Thomas Fuller, he is surpassingly eloquent and much more
thought-laden than either. He is like Shakespeare in one thing at
least; while we have his works we know extremely little about the man
himself. In 1612 he was a ''preacher of God's Word at Willington,"
a village in Bedfordshire, four miles from Bedford town. And it may
be noted by the way that a walk of twenty minutes from his vicarage
door would have brought this Puritan Shakespeare to Cardington
village, where, in the previous century, George Gascoigne, our
earliest English satirist, was born, and that if he had extended his
walk some fifteen minutes more he might have looked in at the cottage
in Elstow parish where sixteen years later John Bunyan, our greatest
English allegorist, first saw the light.
Adams was
afterwards vicar of Wingrave in Buckinghamshire and then preacher in
one or two London churches, and when we have said this we have said
nearly all that can be said to purpose about the man himself. It is
with his work as ''a preacher of God's Word," as he styles
himself, rather than with his own personal history we are now
concerned. As such we may describe him as one of the doctrinal
Puritans, though he differed widely from many of the Puritans on the
ecclesiastical and political questions of the time. Many of his
sermons, like others of the period, were sermons on manners rather
than on doctrine and lead us to think of him as a divine moralist
rather than as a theologian. Yet a theologian he was, his theology
being Calvinistic and Evangelical. He has a great belief that God
will make that sure which we cannot make sure. He was not far wrong
there, though we may not always be able to accept his way of stating
this conviction of his as when he says that the Church is a number of
men whom God hath set apart by an eternal decree. Still, he tempers
even this when on the other side we find him saying:
"It
was not one for one that Christ died, not one for many: but one for
all ... and this one must needs be of infinite price."
"Some
affirm," says he, "that I have made the gate of heaven too
narrow, and they hope to find it wider; God and the Scriptures are
more merciful. True it is that heaven-gate is in itself wide enough
and the narrowness is in respect of the man who enters; and though
thy sins cannot make that too little to receive thee, yet they make
thee too gross and unfit to get in."
As for
the preacher himself, he would have him consecrate to the service all
gifts and the ripest scholarship: "Learning," says he, "as
well as office, is requisite for a minister. An unlearned scribe,
without his treasure of old and new, is unfit to interpret God's
oracles. The priest's lips shall preserve knowledge, is no less a
precept to the minister than a promise to the people."
Then,
too, the life must correspond to the teaching:
"He
that preaches well in his pulpit but lives disorderly out of it, is
like a young scribbler: what he writes fair with his hand, his sleeve
comes after and blots."
He who
serves Christ must not be too eager after the applause of man:
"I
do not call thee aside to ask with what applause this sermon passeth,
but (it is all I would have and hear) with what benefit ? I had
rather convert one soul than have a hundred praise me."
In a
sermon on the Fatal Banquet to which Satan invites his guests,
he has, he says, many bidders to his feast. Take a short muster of
these inviters, these bidders to this banquet of vanity: they have
all their several stands. In the Court he hath set Ambition to watch
for base minds, that would stoop to any villainy for preferment, and
to bring them to this feast. This is a principal bidder. In the Law
Courts he sets inviters that beckon contention to them, and fill the
world with broils. I mean the libels of the law, pettifoggers,
Satan's firebrands which he casteth abroad to make himself sport, and
wlio do more hurt among the barley, the commons of this land, than
Samson's foxes with the fire at their tails. "Oh," says he,
"that they were shipped out for Virginia, for they cannot live
without making broils " - which is a little hard upon Virginia,
as we cannot but think. Pride is another bidder, and keeps a shop in
the city. You shall find a description of her shop and take an
inventory of her wares from the prophet - "the tinkling
ornaments, the cauls, and the moontires." "She sits upon
the stall, and courts the passengers with a What lack ye?"
"Making
a corner " in the market seems not to have been so modern an
invention as we had supposed, for Adams tells us that Engrossing is
another of Satan's inviters and hath a large walk; sometimes he
watcheth the landing of a ship; sometimes he turns whole loads of
corn besides the market. This bidder prevails with many a citizen,
gentleman, farmer, and brings in infinite guests. Bribery too is an
officious fellow, and a special bidder to this feast. He invites both
forward and freward: the forward and yielding, by promises of good
cheer, that they shall have a fair day of it; the backward honest
man, by terrors and menaces that his cause shall else go westward.
This kind of talk from Puritan books is now three centuries old, but
I think you will feel with me there is a very modern ring about it
and that it would not be much out of place even in some of the
pulpits of to-day.
We
remember how Shakespeare makes Hamlet exclaim, "What a piece of
work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form
and moving how express and admirable!" Here is an exclamation by
this other Shakespeare - this Shakespeare among the Puritans, not
unworthy to stand beside it. "Oh, how goodly this building of
man appears when it is clothed with beauty and honour! A face full of
majesty, the throne of comeliness wherein the whiteness of the lily
contends with the sanguine of the rose; an active hand, an erected
countenance, an eye sparkling out lustre, a smooth complexion arising
from an excellent temperature and composition. Oh, what a workman was
this, that could raise such a fabric out of the earth, and lay such
orient colours upon dust!"
Yet on
the other hand this same preacher has to pour forth his sorrowful
lament that a being so nobly formed as man should yet spiritually be
so insensible. "Isaiah," he says, "had not more cause
for Israel than we for England to cry - 'We have laboured in vain,
and spent our strength for nought.' We give God the worst of all
things that hath given us the best of all things. We give God measure
for measure, but after an ill manner. For His blessings 'heapen and
shaken and thrust together,' our iniquities 'pressed down and yet
running over.'" With his pleading words we will close our words
to-day: "Come, then, beloved to Jesus Christ, come freely, come
betimes. The flesh calls, we come ; vanity calls, we flock; the world
calls, we fly; let Christ call early and late. He has yet to say: '
Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.'"
