Holy Mr Herbert - Christianity Today

George Herbert took 37 years to decide he wanted to be a pastor. After just three years of service, he died. But the man who wrote that every word of a sermon must be “heart-deep,” and who left a moving account of his struggle to “subject mine to the will of Jesus my master,” possessed a commitment to ministry that nothing but death could have shaken.

Hopes, high and unholy

The Herbert family had sent generations of sons to the royal court and to battle by the time George was born, in 1593. His aspirations tended toward politics, and he possessed both the wits and the connections to succeed. He had merely to play the game.

First, Herbert got his education and a fellowship at prestigious Trinity College, Cambridge. Next, he eyed the office of public orator, which he called “the finest place in the University.” The job consisted of delivering flowery, flattering speeches whenever important people visited campus. Public orators made many powerful friends.

As a university fellow, Herbert would be expected to seek ordination in the Church of England. The retiring orator warned that the post might distract him from his holy duties, but Herbert didn’t care. He pulled strings, endeavoring, he said, to “work the Heads to my purpose.” In 1619, he got the job.

Even by Jacobean standards, Herbert laid the flattery on thick. He liked the social circle he had entered. His first biographer, Izaak Walton, admits that the young orator “enjoyed his gentile humour for cloaths, and courtlike company, and seldom look’d towards Cambridge, unless the King were there, and then he never failed.”

Then two of Herbert’s best-placed friends died, followed in 1625 by King James. With the king, Walton reports, died “all Mr. Herbert’s Court hopes.” As a fall-back, he sought ordination as a deacon in 1626, but he stayed out of active ministry.

In 1627, Herbert’s mother also died. He became ill. During his worst spells, he prayed that God would either abate his affliction or increase his patience. Yet he followed these requests with the recognition that he really had no right to question God’s ways, however murky or painful they might be.

He was beginning to learn submission.

From here to obscurity

Herbert regained his strength and traveled to the home of some family friends, the Danverses, to complete his recovery. “And then,” Walton records, “he declared his resolution both to marry and to enter into the sacred orders of priesthood.” Charles Danvers offered him the choice of his nine daughters, and Herbert selected the pious Jane, who had already fallen in love with him on her father’s glowing recommendation. Three days after the two met, Jane changed her name.

All that remained in Herbert’s plan was to enter the Anglican priesthood, but when a church position was offered to him three months into his marriage, he froze. He could scarcely imagine taking responsibility for a parish-worth of souls. As he weighed the job offer, he later said, he “endured such spiritual conflicts as none can think, but only those that have endured them.”

The earl who had recommended Herbert for the position told William Laud, then bishop of London and later archbishop of Canterbury, of his protégé’s reluctance. The next day, Laud paid Herbert a visit. The bishop told him that to refuse the commission would be a sin, and in any case, a tailor was on his way to fit Herbert for his vestments. And so, on April 26, 1630, Herbert accepted his first priestly assignment: the tiny parish of Fuggleton-cum-Bemerton.

Why they called him “holy”

The church at Bemerton had little use for florid Latin speeches or courtly connections. Its chapel, which still stands about two miles from Salisbury, holds just 30 people. Of the group that gathered to hear Herbert preach on a given Sunday, perhaps only six or seven members could even sign their names.

Herbert struggled with feelings of unworthiness. After ringing the church bell on his first day, a legal requirement for all newly inducted priests, he lingered so long in the sanctuary that his friends waiting outside the church door got worried. One peeked in the window and saw him lying prostrate before the altar. He later said he had used that time to “set some rules to himself, for the future manage of his life; and then and there made a vow to labor to keep them.”

Herbert preached about rules for holy living, too, explaining to his parishioners why they should attend catechism classes, what they should do on religious holidays, and how they should pray. But he knew that his actions would carry more weight than even the most polished words.

“I will be sure to live well,” he told a friend, “because the virtuous life of a clergyman is the most powerful eloquence to persuade all that see it to reverence and love, and at least to desire to live like him. And this I will do, because I know we live in an age that hath more need of good examples than precepts.”

By all available accounts, Herbert lived up to his ideals. He diligently visited the ill and the grieving-a continuous task in a society in which 12 percent of babies died before their first birthday and the plague could strike at any time. He slipped food and blankets to desperate families. He repaired the church and the parsonage with his own money. He inquired after the spiritual health of everyone he met, whether they attended his services or not.

Herbert’s how-to manual for country pastors, A Priest to the Temple, is not autobiographical, but those who knew him—and gave him the nickname “Holy Mr. Herbert”—said it might as well have been. The book mixes reflections on a pastor’s most awesome duties, such as caring for souls and administrating Christ’s body and blood, with homey advice on topics like sermon length (no more than one hour, unless you want your congregation to loathe you) and stubborn traditions:

“The country parson is a lover of old customs, if they be good, and harmless; and the rather, because country people are much addicted to them, so that to favor them therein is to win their hearts, and to oppose them therein is to deject them. If there be any ill in the custom, that may be severed from the good, he pares the apple, and gives them the clean to feed on.”

Published posthumously, A Priest to the Temple became a standard text for Herbert’s peers. Walton deemed it “a book so full of plain, prudent and useful rules that that country parson that can spare 12d. and yet wants it, is scarce excusable.” He should have said the same about Herbert’s poems, which reveal the passionate and sometimes painfully divided heart behind those useful rules.

The hard part

How should I praise thee, Lord! how should my rhymes
    Gladly engrave thy love in steel,
    If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
        My soul might ever feel!

The Temper (I)

Aside from his wife, a true spiritual companion, probably no one suspected the anguish Herbert expressed in the poems that would be published, again posthumously, as The Temple. Herbert wrote the verses for himself and God. They only gained a larger audience because, on his deathbed, Herbert asked a friend to have his manuscript printed, “if … it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.”

“To write a verse or two, is all the praise, / That I can raise,” he admitted in “Praise (I).” “O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue / To crie to thee, / And then not heare it crying!” he complained in “Deniall.”

Herbert also knew frustration, for his ambitions did not all die with King James. His life did not develop as he had planned.“[T]hings sort not to my will,” he noted in “The Crosse,” “Ev’n when my will doth studie thy renown: / Thou turnest th’edge of all things on me still, / Taking me up to throw me down.”

The poem “Submission” lays out the case even clearer, as Herbert confesses his divided attention, which he calls his two “eyes”:

But that thou art my wisdome, Lord,
    And both mine eyes are thine,
My minde would be extreamly stirr’d
    For missing my designe.

Were it not better to bestow
    Some place and power on me?
Then should thy praises with me grow
    And share in my degree.

Fortunately, in this poem and in his life, Herbert found his answer. God’s plan may not be pretty, and a proud heart may need copious prodding to stay on track, but God’s rewards are the only ones worth seeking. The poem continues:

How know I, if thou shouldst me raise,
    That I should then raise thee?
Perhaps great places and thy praise
    Do not so well agree.

Wherefore unto my gift I stand;
    I will no more advise:
Onely do thou lend me a hand,
    Since thou hast both mine eyes.

Both The Temple and A Priest to the Temple became bestsellers, drawing countless pastors to Herbert’s ideals. Yet few found it possible to combine his humility, good sense, brilliance, and commitment to wrestling with the best and worst of his nature.

Biographer Walton wrote in 1670, “[I] profess myself amazed when I consider how few of the clergy lived like him then, and how many live so unlike him now.”

Elesha Coffman is managing editor of Christian History.