NOTES ON DONNE. [1]

There have been many, and those illustrious, divines in our Church from
Elizabeth to the present day, who, overvaluing the accident of
antiquity, and arbitrarily determining the appropriation of the words
'ancient,' 'primitive,' and the like to a certain date, as for example,
to all before the fourth, fifth, or sixth century, were resolute
protesters against the corruptions and tyranny of the Romish hierarch,
and yet lagged behind Luther and the Reformers of the first generation.
Hence I have long seen the necessity or expedience of a threefold
division of divines. There are many, whom God forbid that I should call
Papistic, or, like Laud, Montague, Heylyn, and others, longing for a
Pope at Lambeth, whom yet I dare not name Apostolic. Therefore I divide
our theologians into,

1. Apostolic or Pauline:
2. Patristic:
3. Papal.

Even in Donne, and still more in Bishops Andrews and Hackett, there is a
strong Patristic leaven. In Jeremy Taylor this taste for the Fathers and
all the Saints and Schoolmen before the Reformation amounted to a
dislike of the divines of the continental Protestant Churches, Lutheran
or Calvinistic. But this must, in part at least, be attributed to
Taylor's keen feelings as a Carlist, and a sufferer by the Puritan
anti-prelatic party.

I would thus class the pentad of operative Christianity:--