George Herbert

Four writers in this century stand out as literary users of the Bible, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, John Milton and John Bunyan. Herbert (1593–1633) says least about the Bible; and his work, saturated with the Bible though it is, has fewest implications for literary attitudes to the book he loved, not above all others, for that suggests comparison, but apart from all others. His intimate friend Nicholar Ferrar writes, ‘next God, he loved that which God himself hath magnified above all things, that is, His word; so as he hath been heard to make solemn protestation that he would not part with one leaf thereof for the whole world if it were offered him in exchange’. In The Country Parson Herbert describes the Bible as ‘the book of books, the storehouse and magazine of life and comfort’. There the parson ‘sucks and lives’, finding four things, ‘precepts for life, doctrines for knowledge, examples for illustration and promises for comfort’. The parson should work to digest and understand these things, so coming to ‘the right understanding’ and entering ‘into the secrets of God treasured in the Holy Scripture’. When he preaches, ‘the character of his sermon is holiness. He is not witty or learned or eloquent, but holy.’ He chooses ‘texts of devotion, not controversy, moving and ravishing texts, whereof the Scriptures are full’, and he makes ‘many apostrophes to God’ as the prophets do, for ‘some such irradiations scatteringly in the sermon carry great holiness in them’, and he includes ‘some choice observations drawn out of the whole text as it lies entire and unbroken in the Scripture itself.