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568 Richard Sibbes (ca.1577–1635) Son of a wheelwright with a dim view of higher education, Sibbes entered St. John’s, Cambridge , as a work-study student (a subsizar) in 1595 when he was eighteen, seventeen at the youngest. He remained at St. John’s for the next twenty-one years, taking his BA in 1599, his MA in 1602, his BD in 1610. (His Cambridge doctorate came only in 1633.) He had been appointed fellow in 1601 and then elected senior fellow in 1619. Sometime around 1601 “it pleased God to convert him” and to call him to the ministry. Ordained in 1608, he was in quick succession made college preacher (1609) and chosen to give the public Sunday afternoon lecture at Holy Trinity, where his preaching drew so numerous a congregation that the church had to be enlarged. The Canons of 1604 required all clergy to subscribe to Whitgift’s three articles, and hence to bear witness that they found nothing in the Prayer Book to be contrary to the word of God; like many godly ministers, Sibbes hesitated, principally troubled by the baptismal rubric mandating the sign of the cross. Yet, although he feared the rite could mislead simple souls, he did not consider it per se sinful; thus, after a brief hesitation, Sibbes subscribed in December of 1616. Two months later, he was appointed preacher of Grey’s Inn, where his sermons once again necessitated architectural upgrades to accommodate the multitude that came to hear him. He retained his fellowship at St. John’s until 1626, when he was appointed Master of St. Catharine’s, a post he held, together with that at Grey’s Inn, until his death. In the dissenting hagiographies of the late seventeenth century, Sibbes had been an early non-conformist hero: one who had refused to subscribe and for that refusal been “deprived, censured, and silenced” and thereafter “constantly troubled by William Laud.” This remained the dominant view of Sibbes until Mark Dever’s 2000 study showed beyond question that Sibbes had conformed, and was neither deprived, censured, nor silenced. On two occasions, however, he was troubled by William Laud. In 1625 Sibbes became one of the Feoffees for Impropriations: a group of leading puritans who sought to buy back tithes and other Church revenues that had fallen into lay hands (i.e., been impropriated), with the aim of using the reclaimed income to support godly ministers 569 Richard Sibbes and lecturers across England. Laud was also passionately committed to restoring impropriations —but for the Church, to be distributed by its bishops for its parish clergy. Laud viewed the Feoffees’ attempt to gain control of those revenues in order to endow a ministry operating outside ecclesiastical structures as a serious threat, and in 1633 the Court of the Exchequer dissolved the group on a technicality. The second clash occurred in 1627, when Laud reproved some godly ministers, Sibbes among them, for unauthorized fundraising on behalf of their counterparts in the Palatine. Neither clash brought Sibbes any lasting harm. The same year the Feoffees were dissolved, the Crown presented him to the perpetual curacy of Holy Trinity. On a Sunday afternoon in June two years later, he fell ill shortly after leaving his Grey’s Inn pulpit; a week later, he was dead. [\ A bruised reed, which came out in 1630, is, a handful of prefaces apart, Sibbes’ first published work. The saints’ cordials had appeared under his name the year before, but this gives every appearance of being sermon-notes taken by one of Sibbes’ auditors and printed without his knowledge. As its preface indicates, Sibbes had A bruised reed published to forestall the like “bad quarto” edition of the sermons on which it is based. By 1632 the work was in its fourth edition, at which point Sibbes took up this new ministry of print and started entering titles of his revised sermon collections in the Stationers Register. Of these, only one came out during his lifetime (The saints’ safety [1633]); after his death, however, they poured from the London presses: twenty-four separate works between 1635 and 1641, many in multiple editions; forty-five in toto over six years. A bruised reed, like all Sibbes’ work, belongs to a lineage of puritan piety going back to Greenham and those divines Baxter termed “affectionate practical English writers” (922), whose plain and spiritual preaching sought to comfort wounded consciences rather than quarrel over adiaphora. The genre was not restricted to...

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