Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/232

212 Jonson has not Bacon's fine rhetoric, his abundant illustrations and images. But his prose is well phrased, and, by its happy mingling of short and long sentences, acquires an easy and dignified movement. The work which Hooker began, the statement and defence of the Anglican position against Rome on the one hand and Geneva on the other, with a superabundance of learning, and in grave, elaborate, and sonorous style, was continued in the seventeenth century by a series of controversialists and preachers. To Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), indeed, the Laudian school looked back with hardly less reverence than to Hooker. A scholar who had mastered fifteen languages, and was familiar with the whole range of patristic theology, he was not only a controversialist able to enter the lists with Bellarmine, but, during the last years of Elizabeth and the first of James, the greatest preacher of his day, "stella predicantium." His method is characteristic both of his age and of the position which he claimed for the Church whose representative he was. In all the preaching of the day the sermon took the form of a minute analysis of the text, word by word, with a view to eliciting its full significance, doctrinal and practical. But to this exposition Andrewes brought, not the narrow, rigid interpretation of orthodox Calvinism, but all the