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294 Michael Sparke (ca.1586–1653) The son of an Oxfordshire husbandman, Sparke probably attended a local grammar school, since he could read Latin. From 1603, when he was apprenticed to a London stationer, Sparke made his living as a bookseller and printer. A staunch puritan and, from 1626 on, Prynne’s invariable publisher, Sparke’s life and work, in the words of the ODNB, reveal a “maniacal devotion to the Protestant religion.” Some of his run-ins with the authorities (leading to several stints in prison) concerned copyright violations, but he also got into trouble for unlicensed printing of predestinarian tracts and, most famously, for publishing Prynne’s Histriomastix. Although lionized by the Long Parliament, Sparke became bitterly critical of the unfolding godly revolution, whose proliferating sects and politique compromises he detested. The bitterness of his final years comes through in his will, which excluded members of the Stationers’ Company and all women (other than his immediate kin) from his funeral, further mandating that those who did attend be given devotional books instead of the usual refreshments. [\ Little in Sparke’s curriculum vitae bespeaks devotional inwardness, yet his demoticCalvinist Crumbs of comfort became perhaps the “best-selling prayer book of the century ,” running through forty-two editions between 1623 and 1656 (Johns 185; Walsham 246n). Such gatherings of prayers constituted a common type of early Stuart devotional literature; like Crumbs, these were usually “less formal, more detailed for specific occasions , more particular in every way than the official book, more homely, and often more intimate” (White 159). The selections that follow are interesting, and unexpected, in several respects. One notes that Sparke affirms what is usually seen as a Laudian claim that outward bodily gesture should “express the affections of the heart” ; that, with the exception of the 295 Michael Sparke brief midnight soliloquy, all the prayers address the Father rather than either the Son or the Triune God; and that the language of the prayers is surprisingly unscriptural.1 In fact, the language of the three prayers given below presents further puzzles. The prayers are quite different from one another. The morning prayer is a model of rhetorical and doctrinal propriety; the prose is quite formal and the theology overtly Calvinist, the core of the prayer being thanksgiving for one’s election—for one’s assurance of that election, which is what Calvinists mean by faith: the inner certainty that Christ died for me. The midnight soliloquy belongs to the devotional genre Sparke terms “ejaculation,” an ancient type of prayer but rarely found in post-Reformation England; Helen White’s survey of English devotional prose from 1600 to 1640 cites no one besides Sparke.2 It is one of the very few prayers addressed to Jesus, and its agonized-erotic emotionalism and fierce yearning for sensuous contact contrasts sharply with the formality, guilt, and dread that characterize Sparke’s prayers to the Father. The latter two qualities dominate the concluding “godly prayer.” The title raises obvious questions since the prayer betrays not assurance but, seemingly at least, its opposite: abjection, failure, and guilt. Given the experimental predestinarian tendencies of Sparke’s brand of Calvinism, one would have expected a godly prayer to express joyful assurance springing from the discovery in oneself of signs betokening elect status.3 This prayer expresses the opposite, so why does Sparke describe it as “godly”? The answer would seem to be that the sense of radical sinfulness it articulates was itself understood as a sign of election. So the British delegates at Dort concluded that the elect can differentiate themselves from reprobates because reprobates “never seriously repent; they are never affected with hearty sorrow for this cause, they have offended God by sinning; nor do they come to any humble contrition of heart.” Such agonized selfaccusation and “earnest desire of reconciliation” is precisely “the peculiar of the elect” .4 The same paradoxical reading of felt desolation and spiritual failure as evidence of sainthood shows up in puritan diarists like Ralph Josselin and Nehemiah Wallington. Josselin thus confesses that “I desire to loathe myself, but yet I attain not to an inward spiritual frame.” Wallington records his sins, “hoping by that means so ‘to break’ his ‘proud heart’ that he would come in humility to recognize his utter need for a savior and his complete dependence on Jesus Christ,” for, he writes, “I glorify God by self-examination and judgment of myself” (Durston and Eales 12–13; Seaver 35). These passages suggest that the...

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