Sorrow and Solace: Richard Hooker’s Remedy for Grief

Abstract

The elizabethan sermon became a vehicle for instruction and exhortation, often covering a very wide range of topics from purely doctrinal expositions, to political commentary, explanations for war, deliverance, pestilence, crop failure, unpredictable weather, and, no less, the evangelical call to faith. The quality of sermons varied with the abilities of the preacher as is true in any age. Alan Herr has pointed to the positive historical value of the Elizabethan sermon in tracking the transition from the dominance of Rome to that of Geneva in the realisation of a viable church establishment.¹ Egil Grislis emphasises the assumption of religious uniformity as “the cement of society”² that held its common interests together, and within which, the sermon came to have its characteristic reformation identity as the exposition of Scripture towards a particular occasion, a response to the new doctrine of sola scriptura. Since the religious life of England was therefore not separate from its political and social identity, sermons reflected the inner trajectory of a reformation that had sought its own character through observation of the continental experience, toward the notion of an established English Christianity whose roots were both Catholic and Protestant. One distinguishing feature of the period was the appetite of Elizabethan society for the printed sermon, and the popular or entertainment value they had for audiences, who would typically be drawn from the educated classes. Herr’s assessment of Richard Hooker situates him at the point of normalisation where the excesses of Rome and Geneva could be sufficiently intellectually muted to allow the emergence of an established church capable of speaking authoritatively.³ This paper considers one of Richard Hooker’s surviving sermons, his funeral sermon on John 14:27.⁴ The rationale for the paper is the observation that sermons received new weight during the Elizabethan period as a fresh expression of reformation piety.