Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626)

Lancelot Andrewes was a beloved and familiar figure at the very heart of this scholarly nexus in the London of his day.  He possessed, to the full, the characteristics of a good friend.  Generous in spirit and gentle in temper, with a ready wit and a well-stored mind, his company was, at once, restful and stimulating.  One could be sure, in his home, of domestic comfort, good conversation, and spiritual refreshment.  Moreover, he must have been, in his prime, a happy man.  He liked the King, he believed, whole-heartedly, in the episcopacy to which he was proud to belong, he suffered no material hardships, and his hours of devotion gave him, at all times, a sense of the companionship of God.

There was a considerable amount of coming and going between England and the Continent in the decade that preceded the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War.  Andrewes, with his fifteen languages and his European reputation, was one of those whom scholars from abroad made a point of visiting.  It was in the autumn of 1610 that the arrival of the eminent classicist, Isaac Casaubon, brought him a new acquaintance who, during the next four years, came to mean so much to him.  Casaubon was a scholar whose only vice was buying books.  Scion of an ancient Huguenot family, he had lived, for many years, in Geneva, eventually migrating to Paris, where he became royal librarian and rose high in the favor of Henry IV.  He was particularly interested in the problems of the English church, for he hankered after some such compromise, resisting all efforts to convert him to Catholicism but out of sympathy with the Calvinist theology of his Huguenot forebears.  After the assassination of Henry IV, he came over to England and was entertained in London by Overall, the Dean of St. Paul’s, who introduced him to Andrewes, to the mutual satisfaction of the two scholars.  They soon found that, metaphorically, they talked the same language and that, literally, they could converse in Latin and French far more easily than Casaubon could with most of his new acquaintances, for English was a tongue he never learned to master.

From: Lancelot Andrewes by Florence Higham (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1952), pp. 83-84.

 

The King James Version of the Bible

At long last, in 1611, the agreed version was ready to be presented to the King, with a rather fulsome dedication drawn up by the Cambridge scholar, Dr. Smith, which makes one thankful that the text, itself, is free of glosses, and that no contemporary political theory or ecclesiastical divergence has been allowed to mar its beauty.  For, miraculously, this small company of dedicated men had produced a masterpiece, and it was the very subjugation of individuality, upon which Bancroft had insisted from the start, which gave the translation its abiding value.  Each person in the team had given fully and freely of his scholarship and piety, but no self-assertion, no striving after originality, intruded itself to lessen for posterity the potency and relevance of this authorized version of the Scriptures.  For his share in this achievement, much can be forgiven to King James.  One cannot be sufficiently thankful that, just at the time when the English language was at its finest and most expressive, and when the spiritual faculties of its most learned practitioners were exceptionally acute, a King should ordain and see accomplished this mighty undertaking. 

The work was carried out by men immersed, at other hours, in multifarious duties in Church and State; it must have used up, over a space of years, their energy and leisure and time that they might have spent on their own literary compositions; they derived from it neither fame nor fortune; and it does, indeed, seem that the Holy Spirit of God accepted their sacrifice and worked through them to give, to all who speak the English tongue, a possession of lasting and imperishable worth.

Thus, at Westminster, in the ancient Jerusalem chamber, Lancelot Andrewes and his colleagues drenched themselves anew in the pages of the Old Testament, and told, again, the great story of the Creation, which never ceased to be, for him, a special source of wonder and worship.  The figures of the Patriarchs, the journey through the wilderness, Israel’s anointed Kings, seemed at times more real than the life which went on beyond the Abbey precincts…

From: Lancelot Andrewes by Florence Higham (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1952), pp. 40-41.  From Chapter 3: “The Authorized Version: 1604-1611″.