Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/233

Rh of patristic learning, his aim being to elicit what he considers the primitive and catholic significance. Tracking every word to its last lair, it is not strange that in the fashion of the time he often quibbles and plays on it. "If it be not Immanuel, it will be Immanu—hell; . . . if we have Him, and God by Him, we need no more: Immanuel and Immanu—all." A modern reader misses a well-marshalled, lucidly-developed argument. He feels, as in reading the controversial literature of the day, that he cannot get enough away from the parts to survey the whole. Yet Andrewes' sermons have a charm of their own, if one is not too entirely out of sympathy with the thought to care for reading sermons at all. His style is colloquial, even careless, but saturated with biblical and patristic phraseology; and the unction which these phrases had for himself he communicates to his reader, and doubtless did so in a still higher degree to his audience.

John Donne (1573-1631), satirist, amorist, soldier, courtier, and finally (1615) priest and ascetic, the eloquent Dean of St Paul's, was a scholar hardly inferior, in profundity and variety of learning, to Andrewes. "An immoderate hydroptic thirst of learning" had been, he complained, a barrier to his worldly advancement in early life. His transition from the Romanism which he inherited from a distinguished ancestry, to Anglicanism, was dictated