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230 ROBERT SANDERSON 1587–1663 The son of a Sheffield clergyman, Sanderson matriculated at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1603, receiving his BA in 1605, his MA in 1607, and his BD in 1617. From 1606 to 1619 he was a fellow of the college and for several years its reader in logic, his lectures forming the basis of his popular Logicae artis compendium (1615). From 1619 to 1660 he served as rector in the tiny Lincolnshire village of Boothby Pagnall. The 1619 sermon reprinted below thus dates from the very beginning of his pastoral ministry, Sanderson having been invited to preach the visitation sermon to the local clergy and episcopal visitors assembled at the much larger Boston church of St. Botolph’s. In 1629 he received a prebend at Lincoln Cathedral, followed by several further such posts over the next decade, including, in 1642, Oxford’s regius professorship in divinity. From 1622 on, volumes of his sermons appeared in print at regular intervals, many of them preached at Paul’s Cross, at the Lincolnshire assize, and at court. Sanderson took his DD in 1636, the same year he published his tract on Sabbatarianism , whose reliance on distinction—between, in this case, two types of divine law—to mediate between seemingly contradictory positions reflects the intellectual habits of the University disputation. In 1643 the Lords named Sanderson to the committee seeking to avert total ecclesiastical meltdown. Although the attempt failed, Sanderson’s moderation led to an offer to join the Westminster Assembly —an offer not taken up. Instead, having refused the Covenant, in 1644 Sanderson was sequestered from his livings and seized by Parliamentary soldiers—although soon after exchanged for a puritan minister held by the Royalists under an agreement whereby both men regained their livings. Having returned to Boothby Pagnall, Sanderson left for Oxford in 1646 to take up his professorship and, a year later, to help compose the University’s official refusal of the Solemn League and Covenant. Subsequently ejected from Oxford, he joined the King on the Isle of Wight. Sanderson spent the Interregnum writing a series of highly regarded casuistical tracts on oaths, political allegiance, and the obligations of conscience. He took the Engagement in 1650 to avoid yet another deprivation , which would have left his family destitute and his parish at the mercy of “ravening 231 Robert Sanderson wolves” (Lake 108). At the Restoration, Sanderson, now seventy-three, found himself bishop of Lincoln, in which capacity he vigorously enforced the Act of Uniformity—and contributed to the 1662 revised Book of Common Prayer. [\ When Sanderson preached the 1619 visitation sermon, he was, as his parenthetic condemnation of Arminianism indicates, a Calvinist; all the evidence suggests that he remained a Calvinist into the late 1650s. In 1619 he was preaching in the church of another Calvinist, John Cotton. Little more than a decade later, however, Cotton would depart for New England, while Sanderson, with Laud’s backing, became a royal chaplain . The divergent trajectories of these two Calvinists divines raise questions about the Calvinist-puritan consensus supposed to characterize the early Stuart Church until the Arminian insurgency of the late 1620s; instead, as Peter Lake notes, their divergence conforms point for point to the old Anglican-versus-Puritan historiographic model, according to which the lines of division that emerged in the 1570s continue down the same channels into the 1640s. For indeed, Sanderson’s position in this sermon is identical to Whitgift’s, but it is also identical to Laud’s. Had it been preached forty years earlier or fifteen years later, its context would be obvious, but 1619 should have been the high-water mark of the Jacobean Calvinist-conformist mainstream; Sanderson, however, makes it clear that someone is denouncing bishops as “locusts of the bottomless pit” and the like.1 The someone, as Lake points out, was almost certainly John Cotton, whose Calvinism was decidedly of the non-conformist, experimental-predestinarian, godly-puritan type and whose ministry at Boston had left both his congregation and the town council split into hostile camps. The auditors in 1619 would have included Cotton’s congregation—the sermon was given from Cotton’s pulpit. Sanderson was venturing into a minefield, not preaching to the choir. Under such circumstances, one can scarcely speak of a Calvinist-puritan mainstream. Sanderson and Cotton, despite their shared Calvinism, end up on opposite sides of the fence. The former’s sermon suggests that the division hinged, above all, on the authority of the visible...

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