When Lancelot Andrewes wittily laboured to discover in the Gunpowder Plot the trappings of an abortive birth he followed out an understanding which is central to his ministry. Andrewes' own justification of his method cannot be in doubt, since it is implicit throughout his sermon. He finds in the very fortuities of the Plot not only an instance or fulfilment of the prescription in Isaiah 37 but the manifestation of a mystery. He had set out the ground of such a reading of occurrences in the world when he spoke of the nature of a sacrament in a Christmas Day sermon preached in the same place to a like audience some nine years earlier:

Andrewes, in sum, simply carries through in events they had all experienced his understanding that we inhabit a creation in which ‘Truth shall bud out of the earth’ and ‘all things answer one another, first and last’. Such unlikely contingencies as the thwarting of a plot to blow up the King in Parliament may discover the divine presence.