This Scepter'd Isle 4: George Herbert: Sunday 29 July 2012

George Herbert died, aged forty, in 1633. He had been parish priest of Bemerton near Salisbury for barely three years. Revered for nearly four centuries as the archetypal English country parson, his ministry was brief - and he appears to have been curiously reluctant to begin it. Educated at Westminster, Herbert shone at Cambridge, reading Divinity, lecturing in rhetoric and proceeding to a role as the University's Public Orator, before being elected as Member for Montgomeryshire in James I's Parliament of1624.

 That Parliamentary session is remembered for the bellicose  campaign waged by Prince Charles in favour of war with Spain. The King eventually capitulated and tore up the peace treaty that existed between the two countries. Herbert had a horror of war: two of his brothers had lost their lives in conflict, and in his Cambridge orations he had spoken against its costly ravages. With England now set on this course he obtained leave of absence from his University duties, and sought ordination as a deacon, probably at Advent 1624.

 How might we understand this change? Herbert's immersion in the prayer of the Church, begun at Westminster and continued in Cambridge, combined with his theological studies, seem first to have persuaded him to attempt to serve God through the legislative agencies of a Godly monarch - an unimpeachably Reformed intent. When that service was frustrated through the declaration of war he turned to the Church as a preferable forum for such service. Yet even now his progress towards priesthood was remarkably slow. He served as a canon of Lincoln Cathedral for a number of years, and was only ordained priest when, eventually, he accepted the living of Bemerton in 1630. He devoted the last three years of his life to the service of that small rural community, living with his family in the rectory opposite St Andrew's Church, and accompanying them there for twice-daily prayer.

Priesthood was thus for Herbert the culmination of his life and career, the culmination of a lifetime of searching and exploration of how he might best fulfil God's purposes. The searching and exploration were not always easy. We caricature Herbert as blissfully happy among the Wiltshire shepherds with his God, and in these struggles his voice speaks to us as clearly as it did to his Stuart contemporaries. The scholars assume that his two literary works, the clerical manual The Country Parson, and the collection of poetry The Temple, were largely written before his Bemerton years. In the poems we hear him rebelling against the inexorable claim that God appears to have on his life:

I struck the board, and cried, No more.

   I will abroad.

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode...

   Shall I still be in suit?

The frustration is palpable and resonates deeply with anyone who has ever contemplated doing the thing that is right but deeply unattractive. But Herbert discovers God to be patient even if he is not:

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild

   At every word,

Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:

   And I replied, My Lord.

Herbert's Church had emerged from the long years of Elizabeth's reign with its Protestantism re-established but also with its liturgy and holy order intact. It was a Church both Catholic and Reformed. One consequence of this is the very high view that Herbert takes of the sacraments. He writes poems on Holy Communion, Holy Baptism and Priesthood. It is in one of these that he writes:

But th' holy men of God such vessels are,

As serve him up, who all the world commands:

When God vouchsafeth to become our fare,

Their hands convey him, who conveys their hands.

Oh what pure things, most pure must those things be,

               Who bring my God to me!

Herbert understands that in  the consecrated elements of Holy Communion God himself visits the faithful, and this divine use of commonplace things becomes for him a complete way of looking at the world. In the poem that we will sing as our final hymn this morning he asks:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see...

Sacramental presence is not confined to the altar. With instruction and assistance the divine is visible in any- and everything. Recalling an image from St Paul he continues:

  A man that looks on glass,

  On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

  And then the heav'n espy.

If we choose we can discern the hand of God wherever we look.

Yet this profoundly incarnational theology is balanced by Herbert's Reformed inheritance. It's not just that the poems are saturated with Biblical references, whether explicitly cited or implicitly relied upon. It's not just that the poems assume a regular diet of worship founded upon Cranmer's Prayer Book. It's that they also constantly emphasize the individual's responsibility before God. The first person predominates: I struck the board; Teach me, my God and King - as we have already seen. Yet this individual responsibility is never full of terror because of the nature of the God to whom it is owed. The Temple reaches its climax in the third of three poems to bear the name 'Love'. Herbert writes of the soul's encounter with the divine and fro that encounter offers his reader the hope of acceptance and the assurance of salvation. The scene is not a law-court or a battlefield but a hospitable dining-table at which Love invites the soul to sit and eat. Conscious of its sin, the soul shies away. But Love, the soul's maker and the bearer of the blame that attaches to its sin, insists:

You must sit down...and taste my meat:

       So I did sit and eat.

Herbert is more than the unworldly priest of popular imagination. His history is  the history of the age in which the English Church was beginning to understand itself anew, and he both reflects and forms that understanding. Rooted in the transience of the world, rooted in God's word, and rooted in the sacraments; convinced of God's immanence in all things, and convinced of our personal responsibility before God; and, above all, fed by constant prayer, Herbert's words still enjoin all the world, in every corner, to sing 'My God and King'.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,

  God's breath in man returning to his birth,

  The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth.

Engine against th'Almighty, sinners' tower,

  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

  The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear.

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

  Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

  Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

  Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

  The land of spices; something understood.

Something understood. Amen.