Solomon’s Temple, “The British Church,” and the Central Role of the Heart in The Temple

In the stormy seas of seventeenth-century religious, political, and social controversy it was not only prudent but often necessary by indirections to find directions out. In fact, so compelling was the need for ambiguity and equivocation that it became second nature for writers to write in some sort of code. Annabel Patterson has studied this cultural phenomenon at length, and she concludes that

what we find everywhere apparent and widely understood, from the middle of the sixteenth century in England, is a system of communication in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural force of considerable consequence. . . .Writers . . . gradually developed codes of communication, partly to protect themselves from hostile and hence dangerous readings of their work, partly in order to be able to say what they had to publicly without directly provoking or confronting the authorities.¹

Herbert was nothing if not sensitive and perhaps he deleted the following lines from “The H. Communion” in the Williams MS in order to back away from a contentious controversy about what happens to the elements in communion:

ffirst I am sure, whether bread stay Or whether Bread doe fly away   Concerneth bread, not mee.

(ll. 7–9)²

Fortunately for him, his audience, the coterie group so well described by Cristina Malcolmson, was made up of readers as sensitive to nuance and contemporary crosswinds as could be wished, so he could be confident that his ideas, some of which were very unconventional and controversial, would be discoverable even when not openly stated.³

In The Country Parson, for example, Herbert sometimes writes very elliptically in order to avoid censure while expressing the thoughts he wanted to convey. Ronald Cooley has perfectly described the process in the way Herbert approaches the vexed issue of kneeling or sitting for communion. Herbert’s writing is “neither a simple statement of his own beliefs, nor a slavish formalism, but a complex negotiation among a range of possible formulations: what he thinks he must say, what he might like to say, and what different sorts of readers might need or want to hear.”⁴ Moreover, we may add to Cooley’s list that readers must pay attention to what is said, to how it is said, and to what is left unsaid. For illustration of these principles at work let us turn to an example of Herbert’s handling of a controversial issue of the time, the economic, political, and religious problems presented by poverty.

The most elaborate reference to poverty in The Country Parson is in Herbert’s chapter “The Parson’s Charity,” in which he praises the major source of funds for the poor: tax money appropriated and distributed according to the Poor Law Act of 1601. Beyond the poor box and the Parson himself, the Parson can make use

of that excellent statute [the Poor Law Act], which bindes all Parishes to maintaine their own. If his Parish be rich, he exacts this of them; if poor, and he able, he easeth them therein. But he gives no set pension to any; for this in time will lose the name and effect of Charity with the poor people, though not with God: for then they will reckon upon it, as on a debt; and if it be taken away, though justly, they will murmur, and repine as much, as he that is disseized of his own inheritance.

(p. 244)

In characteristically indirect fashion, Herbert first praises the statute, refers to its third paragraph on assessing the rich to maintain the poor; yet goes right on to ignore the Act to protest against set pensions, about which the Act is silent. Herbert’s praise of the named, national statute is made equivocal by his rejection of a key part of the unnamed, uncited local statute. Clearly, Herbert took issue with the local Salisbury pension scheme. Did he take issue with “that excellent statute” as well? Yes. He goes on to discuss the social benefits of set pensions versus the spiritual benefits of the Parson’s charity, arguing that...