"We settle ourselves best in the actions, and precedents of the late queen of blessed and everlasting memory": Donne on the Elizabethan Settlement

From Donne's Sermon CLV (1622), praising the memory of Queen Elizabeth for preventing the peace of the ecclesia Anglicana from being disturbed by the Lambeth Articles:

And, because ordinarily, we settle ourselves best in the actions, and precedents of the late queen of blessed and everlasting memory, I may have leave to remember them that know, and to tell them that know not, one act of her power and her wisdom, to this purpose. When some articles concerning the falling away from justifying grace, and other points that beat upon that haunt, had been ventilated, in conventicles, and in pulpits too, and preaching on both sides past, and that some persons of great place and estimation in our church, together with him who was the greatest of all, amongst our clergy, had upon mature deliberation, established a resolution what should be thought and taught, held and preached in those points, and had thereupon sent down that resolution to be published in the university, not vulgarly neither, to the people, but in a sermon, ad clerum only, yet her majesty being informed thereof, declared her displeasure so, as that, scarce any hours before the sermon was to have been, there was a countermand, an inhibition to the preacher for meddling with any of those points. Not that her majesty made herself judge of the doctrines, but that nothing, not formerly declared to be so, ought to be declared to be the tenet, and doctrine of this church, her majesty not being acquainted, nor supplicated to give her gracious allowance for the publication thereof.

It is significant that Donne here presents the Lambeth Articles as going beyond - "not formerly declared to be so" - the doctrinal commitments of the Elizabethan Settlement. This is further emphasised when later in the sermon he states:

In the seventeenth article there is a modest declaration of tho doctrine of predestination; who can go higher?

The sermon, then, is a reminder that the Elizabethan Settlement possessed a moderately Reformed doctrinal statement and that Elizabeth played a crucial role in defending that moderation.

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laudable Practice

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