Chapter 3 Spiritual maturity and childishness in Protestant England, c.1600–60¹

Measuring age

In early modern Protestant rhetoric, those with little understanding of scripture, or who lived ungodly lives, were described as children. The Lancashire minister William Harrison, writing in 1625, argued that anyone unmoved by the promises of the gospel ‘wee may compare, as Christ did the Iewes, vnto little children’.⁷ This language had scriptural precedents. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul identified the Corinthians as ‘babes in Christ’, who required meat rather than milk.⁸ In Paul’s analogy, meat stands for complex matters of scripture, while milk describes the most elementary knowledge. This biblical passage was often used in didactic literature to express the spiritual needs of the most unenlightened Christians. William Crashaw, writing in 1618, promised that his catechism would provide ‘either the Milke, or the Meate fit for their soules’.⁹ Catechisms were elementary didactic texts often written in the form of a dialogue. According to Crashaw, milk was appropriate for those that are ‘vnskilfull in the Word of Righteousnesse, for he is a Babe. But strong Meate belongeth to them that are of full age’.¹⁰ In this context, spiritual childishness was an undesirable state denoting a dangerous lack of understanding.

Accusations of spiritual childishness were often levelled by Protestant writers lamenting the benighted state of ordinary people. In a 1636 treatise explaining the steps to salvation, Independent preacher Thomas Goodwin complained that insecure Christians were ‘like children, when their mother is gone aside a little, you fall a crying, as if you were undone’. Goodwin encouraged his readers to meditate on the ‘great deale of trouble your childishnesse put the Spirit of God unto’.¹¹ Catholic polemicists also utilised the language of spiritual infancy. According to the priest Richard Broughton, the truth of Catholic doctrine was so ‘plaine & prespicious that euen children may be able to finde & walkein’.¹² Those who failed to grasp this truth were like ‘children wauering with euerie winde of doctrine’.¹³ Accusations of spiritual infancy were not therefore a Protestant monopoly. Similar language was also used outside of a spiritual context to describe undesirable or inferior peoples. An exact description of the West-Indies, published in 1655, described South American peoples as ‘savage and barbarous, going for the most part naked, eating Mans-flesh … hairy all over like bruit beasts, from whom they seem but little to differ’.¹⁴ Beastliness was akin to childishness – both states denoted a shameful lack of reason and self-control. Negative depictions of immaturity therefore had a broad currency in the early modern world.

While everybody began life as a spiritual babe, the faithful were expected to grow in piety and understanding into a state of spiritual maturity. A fully grown Christian was associated with standard moral virtues. In a 1622 treatise on spiritual growth, Thomas Cooper identified mature Christians as ‘moderate in our affections, more sober in our iudgments, cōcerning indifferent things; more charitable in iudging others, more wise in prouiding necessary things & auoiding vnnecessary troubles’.¹⁵ The process of spiritual growth was captured in the Protestant conversion narrative. Conversion narratives developed in the seventeenth century and charted a person’s progression from spiritual ignorance into a new appreciation and understanding of the gospel. Donatella Pallotti has identified what she has termed a ‘morphology of conversion’ – the faithful could expect to pass through stages of sin, false confidence, doubt, conviction, faith, temptation and assurance.¹⁶ This sense of spiritual maturation was grounded in scripture. In his letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul stated that followers of God’s word would ‘henceforth be no more children’ but would grow ‘unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulnes of Christ’.¹⁷ Those who progressed through the stages of conversion, and lived with piety and wisdom, were described as fully grown, perfect and ripe in years. For example, William Negus, a minister from Lee in Essex, likened the mature Christian to a mighty oak tree. Such trees are ‘longer a growing and slower in attaining to their full growth … but being once growne they will stand any storme’.¹⁸ The slow growth of Negus’s oak tree suggests a lengthy process of maturation for the truly righteous.

The stages of spiritual maturity often corresponded with chronological age. Childhood was a time of inchoate development. An anonymous text published in 1595, which translated Aristotle’s medical theories into English, suggested that boys began to acquire the features of adulthood at age fourteen. At that point a boy’s shoulders would broaden, his voice deepen, his genitalia enlarge and his whole body increase in size.¹⁹ Physical immaturity was accompanied by nascent mental development. In Passions of the Mind, first published in 1600, recusant Thomas Wright commented that children ‘lacke the vse of reason, and are guided by an internall imagination, following nothing else but that pleaseth their sences, even after the same maner as bruite beastes doe’.²⁰ Children were therefore physically and mentally inferior to their adult counterparts.

The inchoate nature of childhood negatively impacted a child’s spiritual security. In a 1658 treatise on original sin, the preacher Anthony Burgess warned of ‘the danger that will accrew even to the godly, if they live after the flesh, they shall die’. Believers must therefore ‘study and abound in holiness’ in a manner that reflected their elect status.²¹ Living a holy life was particularly difficult for children, as they lacked an adult capacity for reason – ‘children have not understanding to serve God with, and therefore their memory, which is easily quickned in them, must be the more drawn out, that so they may serve God as they are able’.²² This lack of reason made children particularly vulnerable to sinful temptations. According to Richard Kilby, the souls of children who delight in scornful, mocking words ‘are died in the blacke colour of hell’.²³ Even newborns were tainted with original sin. The puritan minister Sampson Price wrote in 1624 that infants entered the world ‘bathed in bloud, an image of sinne, his first song is the Lamentation of a sinner, weeping and sobbing’.²⁴ As a result, infancy was nothing but ‘an Apprentiship of seuen yeares infirmity’, while childhood, which lasted until the tenth year, was characterised as ‘an vntoward phantasticall toying’.²⁵ The young were therefore viewed as ill-equipped to resist the many faces of the Devil.

Commentators disagreed upon the exact chronological age which marked the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence. While Price identified ten as the beginning of ‘Mans estate’, the gentleman David Papillion argued that this transition took place at age fifteen.²⁶ This conceptual slippage was compounded by the observation that individuals matured at different rates. The physician William Clever noted that adolescence ‘is commonly knowen by hayres, eyther about the chin, or priuie partes’, which might appear at any time between the ages of twelve and fourteen.²⁷ Yet while commentators diverged on matters of chronology, they agreed that a person’s earliest years were often characterised by a dangerous proclivity for sin. Papillion posited a relatively late transition into adolescence, yet he concurred with his peers that the young were full of ‘malice, obstinacy and disobedience’.²⁸ There was therefore a strong vein in early modern Protestant thought which saw the young as spiritually and morally undeveloped.

On the other side of the life span, older individuals were often envisaged as fully grown in the spirit. Unlike other age classification schemas, which located the ‘perfect’ age in midlife, spiritual adulthood was often achieved in a person’s latter years. This laudable state was partially grounded in the physical changes associated with advanced age. In a ballad decrying the various sins of youth, court poet Francis Lenton looked forward to the day when boys are grown, and ‘manly Reason doth controle the vagrant VVill, and thirsting Appetite’.²⁹ Those in the final stages of life were the furthest divorced from youthful passions. Presbyterian preacher William Jenkyn, in a 1654 funeral sermon lauding old age, stated that ‘old age is highly commendable for its safety. An old Saint hath passed through those dangerous storms and difficulties that a poor young one is now sailing toward … he is by death beyond the temptations, the difficulties, the passions, that a young man lies ingaged to’.³⁰ Senescence was often viewed as a time of pitiable weakness and decrepitude, yet here physical decline was viewed in a positive light. Spiritual maturity was therefore a context in which usually emasculating or undesirable qualities could be given a new meaning.³¹

Old age might also be lauded for the experience and wisdom accumulated over a lifetime. Alexandra Shepard has pointed out that the elderly were repositories of memory, making them valuable resources in customs disputes.³² Furthermore, Lynn Botelho has shown that old men, unlike old women, were often positively depicted in woodcut images as regal kings and wise, bearded seers.³³ Aged wisdom also had currency within a religious context. William Jenkyn argued that maturity ‘brings wisdom and experience, and therefore makes men more able to give wise and wholesome counsel to others’.³⁴ As a result, old age was ‘an age of the greatest growth and perfection of grace … Old men (if godly) are spiritual hoarders; they have been laying up grace all of their dayes’.³⁵ The correlation between old age and spiritual maturity was a frequent theme in Protestant funeral sermons. For example, in a sermon from 1652, puritan minister Thomas Hodges encouraged his readers to treat the elderly with respect, as ‘the longer and greater experience any one hath had in religion, he is the more wise, and therefore more honourable’.³⁶ The concept of adulthood cannot therefore be reduced to chronological ‘middle age’ because in situations where culminated experience and education were relevant, the later years might represent a more ‘perfect’ state of maturation.

The immaturity of childhood and wisdom of the elder suggests that the stages of spiritual growth largely correlated with chronological milestones. Yet there were exceptions to this rule. Studies of childhood have shown that even the youngest members of society might exhibit strong faith. For example, Hannah Newton has shown that sick children drew strength from God’s promises and the examples set by Protestant martyrs.³⁷ Children were also viewed as potentially less sinful than their adult counterparts. According to Anthony Burgess, ‘comparatively to grown persons they [children] are innocent, having not the pride and other sins as men of age have’.³⁸ This vision of childhood piety was part of a pre-Reformation inheritance which posited that, once baptised, a child was washed clean of sin and became sweet, innocent and pure.³⁹ Protestant doctrine cast doubt on the efficacy of baptism, yet this sense of childish innocence lingered on within the early modern imagination.

In special situations, the gerontocracy was turned on its head and the young commanded the old. Anna French has demonstrated how early modern society carved a niche for children to act as prophets of God’s word.⁴⁰ These inspired youths took on an adult role by preaching God’s word to an older audience. For example, Thomas Darling, a thirteen-year-old boy who experienced symptoms of possession in 1586, was praised by his exorcist John Darrell for completing pious exercises which ‘might well have beseemed one of riper yeares’.⁴¹ This sense of childhood spiritual authority was grounded in scripture. Acts 2:17 stated that ‘in the last days, saith God, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’.⁴² Childhood was therefore both a hazard and an advantage; it made children less capable of resisting sin while also enhancing their relationship with the divine.

Just as children could act with spiritual maturity, so old men might be accused of spiritual childishness. A 1634 ballad warned its readers that that while ‘child-hood is a wonderfull simple thinge, yet time and old age more wisdome will bring. Yet some men in age are so Childish grone, as if that true man-hood they had neuer known’.⁴³ In this context childishness was seen as a sinful state. William Jenkyn warned his readers against ‘recollecting former youthfull follies with delight’, while the godly minister John Reading suggested that ‘youth in age is but a second childishnesse of the old; there being nothing more vnreasonable, than to loathe that state and age to which with wishes and feare of failing we haue attained’.⁴⁴ The childishness of old age was also associated with contemptible ignorance. William Jenkyn lamented how ‘shamefull it is to see a man whose hairs and wrinckles speak him an hundred, but his knowledge of Christ speaks him not ten’.⁴⁵ Similarly, influential Arminian churchman Simon Patrick claimed that old men who did nothing positive with their lives were ‘Childish in their desires, as weak in their fears, as unreasonable in their hopes, as impertinantly and vainly imployed, as if they were but newly come into the world, and had not attained to the use of their Reason’.⁴⁶ These commentators were critical of their subjects’ lack of spiritual investment, which brought them down to the level of uneducated children.

This picture of spiritual infancy can be subsumed into a broader stereotype linking old age to terminal decline. The physical realities of an ageing body were often noted and lamented by contemporary commentators. In a treatise on sight, translated into English in 1594, French physician André du Laurens stated that old men suffered from stiff joints, weeping eyes and runny noses, which caused them to constantly spit, cough and drool. Physical symptoms were accompanied by mental degradation. Old people suffered from a loss of memory and judgement, ‘so that they become as they were in their infancie’.⁴⁷ Men who had passed their physical prime were often deemed outmoded and overworn. French theologian Simon Goulart stated in a 1621 treatise that old age was accounted ‘miserable, in regard it makes vs vnseruicable men, and vnfit to manage and meddle with worldy affaires, enfeebles our bodies … being moreouer the next neighbour to death’.⁴⁸ Old bodies lost their youthful strength and vigour and gradually descended into feebleness and incapability. Therefore ‘all men agree in this point, that old age is miserable, being as it were the very sinke of all extreme miseries, where they settle’.⁴⁹ Venerable old age therefore co-existed with narratives which associated longevity with pitiable incapability and weakness.⁵⁰ As Maria Cannon’s contribution to this collection demonstrates, a ‘perfect’ balance of physical and mental prowess was associated with middle age rather than youth or longevity.

This section has suggested that spiritual maturity was not a simple facet of physical and mental development. Growing in the spirit was a lifelong process ideally culminating in a pious old age. Old men became childish when they failed to heed spiritual advice, and young children, if blessed by God, could be mature. Unlike other age classification schemas, which saw middle age as the ‘perfect age’, spiritual maturity was often located at the end of the life span. Yet this developmental pattern was complicated by alternative narratives which saw pitiable decline as the inevitable consequence of longevity. These contradictory notions of advanced age shaped representations of those ideally embodying the pinnacle of spiritual maturity – the ordained ministry.

The mature minister

Spiritual maturity and the ministerial vocation were inextricably linked in the early modern imagination. According to William Perkins, the ‘holy Ministerie in it selfe is so high and excellent a calling … whose honour and excellencie is such, that as we see here scarce one of a thousand attaines unto it’.⁵¹ According to Perkins, a minister is called ‘a Messenger, or an Angel’.⁵² Such honorifics were common in Protestant sermons. The minister might also be an ‘ambassador’, a ‘shepherd’ and a ‘husband’.⁵³

Ministers emphasised their vocational uniqueness by associating themselves with the advanced age which denoted spiritual maturity. Precocious development signifies the value of the moral virtues related to advanced age, as ministers presented themselves as ‘old’ despite their chronological youth. Eminent preachers were often said to have been unusually mature from childhood. For example, John Murcot was described as exceptionally diligent and industrious during his schooldays: ‘Time was not mispent and prodigally expanded in the eager pursuite of childish vanities.’⁵⁴ Samuel Clarke also pointed to examples of childhood piety in his martyrological accounts of deceased Protestant divines. For example, Clarke described Herbert Palmer as a wonderfully pious child who, at the tender age of four or five, delighted to receive godly instruction.⁵⁵ Similarly, Miles Coverdale, former bishop of Exeter, was characterised by Clarke as one who ‘from his childhood was much given to learning, and by his diligence and industry profited exceedingly therein’.⁵⁶ The early maturation of pious ministers suggests that children were capable of drawing on their spiritual education, especially when their actions were appraised with the benefit of hindsight.

Attitudes towards early maturation were dependent on context. Precocious physical development was viewed with suspicion. A translation of a Latin text entitled The cabinet of Venus unlocked noted that in the Americas there are people who ‘have among them an herb which hath such a mysterious quality, as that it will dilate girles privy members, and magnifie and longifie their boys members … that they may the sooner be capable for to exercise them’.⁵⁷ This was achieved to satisfy their supposedly voracious lust. The transition from childhood to adulthood was therefore tied to numerical age – achieving physical milestones prematurely was viewed as unnatural and undesirable.⁵⁸ Yet early spiritual maturation was viewed in a positive light, revealing a divergence in attitudes towards different developmental schemas.

As well as being precocious in childhood, ministers also emphasised the great numerical ages attained by many in their vocation. The three biblical patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – were all said to have lived to well over 100. The antediluvian patriarchs lived even longer lives. Adam lived to be 930, Noah reached 950 and Methuselah, the longest-lived of them all, finally died at 969. According to Francis Bacon, commenting in 1638, ‘A Life led in Religion, and in Holy Exercises, seemeth to conduce to long Life.’⁵⁹ Many of the ministers described by Clarke also enjoyed long life spans. For example, Arthur Hildersham lived to the ‘great age’ of sixty-eight years, Hugh Clark died at seventy-one and Laurence Chaderton reached the impressive age of ninety-four.⁶⁰ Samuel Clarke also saw fit to include that it was ‘no disparagement’ to John Preston that he died young.⁶¹

Outer appearance might reflect inner maturity, and some ministers were described as seemingly older than they were. Thomas Gataker and William Gouge, both of whom died in the 1650s, were described as prematurely aged in their funeral sermons. Like his illustrious companions, Thomas Gataker had a ‘lovely gravity’ in his youth.⁶² Furthermore, as he grew, he became ‘grey betimes, that made him to be thought elder than he was, because he had long appeared ancient in the eye of the world’.⁶³ William Gouge actively cultivated the impression of advanced age. He grew a long beard, and in doing so ‘did much resemble the Picture that is usually made for Moses. Certainly he was the exact Effiges of Moses his spirit, and in this resembled him to the life’.⁶⁴ Old age and spiritual maturity were therefore intertwined in the early modern imagination.

Ministers who achieved great ages were often presented as having been spared the physical and mental tribulations of senescence. For example, Arthur Hildersham ‘out-lived not his parts, but as his graces increased towards his end, so his abilities of invention, judgement, memory, elocution decayed not in his age’.⁶⁵ Similarly, the minister Samuel Collins was able to live to seventy-seven years without any significant physical or mental decline. In his funeral sermon, Matthew Newcomen expressed his amazement and admiration that Collins was able to preach twice every Sabbath even in his old age. He

[w]ondred that he had the strength of body to do it, being almost fourscore years old … but God had vouchsafed him a singular blessing, that even in his old age he was fat and flourishing … His Understanding, Invention, Memory, Utterance and other Ministerial parts, they were as lively, as fresh and nimble now in his old age as in the prime of his years.⁶⁶

Newcomen and his sprightly peers transcended many of the negative qualities associated with old age and continued in their physical prime. A distinction was therefore drawn between ‘green’ old age, in which physical and mental functions remained largely intact, and ‘decrepit’ old age, when the body and mind began to weaken. The physician Thomas Newton noted in 1586 that some old men remain ‘lustie in bodie, constant in mind and in strength seruicable and actiue’.⁶⁷ These fortunate men are ‘not much tainted, nipped, or bitten with yeeres’, yet they stand at the threshold of ‘reuerend stowping Age: and it seazeth and catcheth some bodies sooner, and some later’.⁶⁸ In was in a similar vein that the politician Henry Cuffe noted in 1607 that while some old men retain ‘a will and readinesse to bee doing’, their slightly older counterparts were ‘so farre decaied, that not onely all abilitie is taken away, but euen all willingnesse, to the least strength and motion of our bodie’.⁶⁹ Old age was therefore divided into at least two stages – the first characterised by minor decline, the second suffering from the full infirmity of senescence. Spiritual maturity was associated with ‘green’ old age, which can be viewed as an extension of adulthood, while ‘decrepit’ age bore the brunt of physical and mental decline.

God’s ministers were presented as enjoying the advantages of ‘green’ old age even as they entered their seventies and eighties. This extended period of good health was often interpreted as a sign of divine approval. Elderly Protestant martyrs were depicted as unusually healthy and strong as they approached their place of execution. John Foxe’s influential Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563, described how the martyred evangelist Rawlins White appeared ‘crooked, through the infirmity of age, having a sad countenance and a very feeble complexion’ as he approached the pyre. Yet as he stood at the stake he stretched ‘bolt upright, but also bare withall a most pleasant and comfortable countenaunce’. White embodied the best of both worlds – his posture resembled that of a younger man, yet he also appeared exceedingly old. The hair in his beard and on his head seemed ‘more inclined to white then to grey, whiche gave such a shewe and countenaunce to his whole person, that he seemed to be altogether angelicall’.⁷⁰ White’s unusual health and vigour was portrayed as a blessing from heaven, bringing spiritual maturity into dialogue with physical strength. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments went through multiple editions and remained an important framework influencing depictions of Protestant exemplars into the seventeenth century.

Physical rejuvenation often corresponded with an inner spiritual revitalisation. The culmination of the conversion experience, when the sinner was transformed into a true believer, was sometimes spoken of as a second birth. This foundational transition led some Protestant writers to count their age from the date of their conversion. For example, Ignatius Jurdian, the puritan mayor of Exeter, died in 1640 in his seventy-ninth year, yet was also said to be sixty-five ‘according to his account for the New-birth’.⁷¹ In this context, youthfulness was a descriptor of spiritual maturity rather than childish ignorance, as the spirit was renewed and refreshed through a close relationship with the divine. Fulk Bellers, a ‘preacher of the gospel’, likened the faithful Christian to a ‘renewed Eagle, inabled to mount up in duties with winges as Eagles, to run in the ways of Gods Commandments … his flesh was restored as the flesh of a little Childe, and hee became clean’.⁷² Comparisons between the faithful Christian and the eagle come from Isaiah 40:31, which in the King James Bible states ‘they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint’.⁷³ The analogy of the renewed eagle suggests that while spiritual youth might denote dangerous ignorance, it could also describe an exalted spiritual state, revealing the complex relationship between spiritual growth and chronological age.

Representations of spiritual maturity were further complicated when praiseworthy ministers moved from ‘green’ to ‘decrepit’ old age. Not every early modern minister was as fortunate as Newcomen – many elderly ministers suffered from the infirmities of age. In his later years, William Gouge experienced ‘the bitternesse of his pains and sharpnesse of urine, and … Asthma or difficulty of breathing’.⁷⁴ Similarly, Daniel Featley, who died in his sixties, was towards the end of his life ‘very ill affected with the Asthma in saburra stomachi, and with the Dropsie’.⁷⁵ It was also suspected that ‘he was distracted of his wits’.⁷⁶ These ailments were not unique to the elderly. Robert Daniel has pointed out that godly ministers were often laid low by sickness, sometimes as a result of their unrelenting preaching.⁷⁷ Yet infirmity was particularly associated with advanced age, when the body lost its youthful resilience and the mind began to weaken.

Ministers dealt with the problem of physical decline by emphasising the continuing ability of sick ministers to fulfil their pastoral functions. Samuel Clarke’s martyrologies contained multiple examples of sick and suffering elderly ministers. For example, Thomas Cartwright suffered in his later years from the stone and gout, yet he would ‘not intermit his labours, but continued preaching when many times he could scarce creep to the pulpit’. Those without the strength to stand and preach continued to minister from their sickbeds. When ninety-six-year-old John Dod lay on his deathbed, he spent his time ‘breathing out such speeches, as tended to the praise of God, and to the edification of those who attended him’.⁷⁸ Rather than an unwelcome sign of physical decline, these representations used the infirmities of age to emphasise the commitment and perseverance of God’s ministers.

Commentators also stressed that while these men might have weakened bodies, their mental faculties were still acute. Gouge retained his mental acumen even as his body decayed: ‘the blade of his mind was too sharp for the sheath of his body, the wine too strong for the cask, and his abilities of minde to vigerous for his weak diseased carkass’.⁷⁹ Therefore, while he may have suffered ‘craziness of body’, no one could accuse him of craziness of mind.⁸⁰ Similarly, William Loe was quick to dismiss rumours that Daniel Featley had lost his mental sharpness. Rather than descend into elderly senility, Featley continued to produce lucid and didactic tracts during his sickness, showing that he ‘was ever the same man’ up to the point of death.⁸¹ These representations suggest that it was possible to remain spiritually engaged even when the body was in decline.

Elderly decline complicated attempts by ministers to use the behaviours and qualities associated with chronological age to bolster their claims to a perfect spiritual age. When youth and old age were brought into conflict, the multiple narratives lurking behind a long life span were thrown into relief. In the 1640s Thomas Gataker, then in his seventies, became embroiled in a published dispute with John Saltmarsh, a younger man. In 1646 Gataker published A mistake, or misconstruction, removed, in which he criticised a recent treatise by Saltmarsh. Gataker used his own advanced years to justify his condemnation. Despite being ‘one wel nigh spent with age’, Gataker compared himself to an ‘old steed’ who ‘bestirs him as wel as he can, and by his neying and prancing incites others of his kind and rank to that imployment of service, which himself is unable to perform’.⁸² Gataker’s self-effacement was a common rhetorical convention. His choice to focus on his own advanced age also resonates with contemporary tracts, including Clarke’s Lives, in which elderly ministers heroically bestirred themselves to advance God’s cause.

Saltmarsh published an answer to Gataker’s comments that same year. Unlike Gataker, who saw his advanced age as a spur to those younger than him to take up their pens, Saltmarsh took Gataker’s age as proof of his incapability. He stated that ‘I should not rebuke your yeers, but that I find you Comicall and Poeticall … though I am young, having tasted straines of a more glorious Spirit, how much more you that are old, and call your selfe a Divine, ought not to have any fruit in those things?’⁸³ According to Saltmarsh, while Gataker’s age should have made him wiser than a younger writer, in reality it had landed him on the other side of the semantic divide by making him into a weak, comical old man. Saltmarsh claimed that Gataker had ‘too much of that which Solomon calls frowardnesse in old men’. His ‘frowardnesse’ was directly linked to his age, as it was a reminder ‘of your disease, rather than your judgement; and the infirmity of your body, not the strength of your spirit’. Saltmarsh asked why Gataker ‘chose you not a better time to trie Truth in, when you were not so much in the body?’⁸⁴ For Saltmarsh, Gataker was too old to be engaging in theological debate. As a result, many of his words amounted ‘not to any thing of, substance, but of quarrelsome and humerous exceptions’. The ‘Old steed which neighs and prances, but is past service’ did not therefore validate Gataker’s words, but explained their inadequacy.⁸⁵

Conflicting attitudes towards different life stages have been explored by Alexandra Walsham, who has argued that generational conflict inflected linguistic choices. Young men might mock the apparent senility of the elderly and highlight their own spiritual youth. In contrast, old men frowned on childish impulsivity while pointing to their own patriarchal authority and wisdom.⁸⁶ In his response to Saltmarsh’s criticism, Gataker reminded his young rival to ‘scof not at old age: you may live if God pleas, to come to it your self’.⁸⁷ Gataker sought to prove that he was a wise, venerable old man, while Saltmarsh pulled on the other side of the semantic thread, employing the language of age-based foolishness to discredit his opponent. Spiritual maturity was therefore a flexible concept that could be reworked and reformed to fit different agendas.

Conclusion

In the early modern world, spiritual development followed a pattern of maturation mirroring chronological growth. Everyone began life as a spiritual infant, yet with education and experience, God’s children might grow into a state of spiritual maturity. Spiritual age was closely tied to biological age. As a person grew in bodily stature and mental capacity, so their understanding of the gospel also increased. Old age was therefore a time of piety and understanding, while children were unable to resist Satan’s temptations. Yet this narrative was open to reinterpretation. Precocious children could demonstrate unusual spiritual development, while sinful old men were viewed as pitifully childish. Spiritual maturity correlated with markers of adulthood – the fully grown Christian was sober, moderate and, when ordained, an authoritative preacher of the gospel. Yet unlike most chronological schemas, a perfect spiritual age was often located at the end of the life span. Adulthood was not therefore always grounded in ‘middle age’.

The close association between spiritual adulthood and longevity shaped portrayals of Protestant ministers. Ideally, ministers represented the pinnacle of spiritual growth and wielded a patriarchal authority which brought religious maturity into dialogue with other markers of adulthood. Ministers presented themselves as prematurely aged and long-lived, bringing their appearance in line with biblical precedents. Many ministers also apparently enjoyed an extended ‘green’ old age characterised by physical and mental competency. Yet others suffered from symptoms of elderly decline which conflicted with their exalted state. Furthermore, spiritual maturity was often captured in the language of youth and rejuvenation, revealing a semantic flexibility within depictions of religious growth. This conceptual malleability gave the language of spiritual maturation a cross-denominational, intergenerational appeal, revealing its importance within early modern religious debate.

Notes

1. 1. This research was partially funded by the Archbishop Cranmer studentship and by the Belmont Education Trust.

2. 2. Richard Kilby, Hallelu-iah: praise yee the Lord (Cambridge, 1618), p. 82. See also Christopher Haigh, ‘Success and Failure in the English Reformation’, Past and Present 173, no. 1 (2001), 28–49.

3. 3. Anthony Milton, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

4. 4. Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, c. 1500–1700’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (2011), 93–121; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Second Birth and the Spiritual Life Cycle in Protestant England’, in Caroline Bowden, Emily Vine and Tessa Whitehouse eds., Religion and Life Cycles in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 17–39; Alexandra Walsham, Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapter 1, ‘Youth and Age’, 22–96.

5. 5. For Clarke’s influence on Puritan self-representation, see Peter Lake, ‘Reading Clarke’s Lives in Political and Polemical Context’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker eds., Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity, and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 293–318.

6. 6. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 147–63.

7. 7. William Harrison, A plaine and profitable exposition (London, 1625), 53.

8. 8. 1 Corinthians 3:1–2, King James version.

9. 9. William Crashaw, Milke for babes, or, a north-countrie catechisme (London, 1618), sig. A2v.

10. 10. Crashaw, Milke for babes, sig. A6r.

11. 11. Thomas Goodwin, A childe of light walking in darknesse (London, 1636), 12.

12. 12. Richard Broughton, The conuiction of noueltie (Douai, 1632), 158–49.

13. 13. Broughton, The conuiction of noueltie, 152.

14. 14. N.N., America: or an exact description of the West-Indies (London, 1655), 441.

15. 15. Thomas Cooper, The vvonderful mysterie of spirituall growth (London, 1622), 47.

16. 16. Donatella Pallotti, ‘ “Out of their owne mouths”? Conversion Narratives and English Radical Practice in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern Studies 1, no. 1 (2012), 73–95, 76.

17. 17. Ephesians 4:13–14, King James version.

18. 18. William Negus, Mans actiue obedience (London, 1619), 166.

19. 19. Anon., The problemes of Aristotle with other philosophers and phisitions (Edinburgh, 1595), sig. M9v.

20. 20. Thomas Wright, Passions of the minde in generall (London, 1604), 7.

21. 21. Anthony Burgess, A treatise of original sin (London, 1658), 105.

22. 22. Burgess, A treatise of original sin, 267.

23. 23. Kilby, Hallelu-iah: praise yee the Lord (London, 1618), 29.

24. 24. Sampson Price, The two twins of birth and death (London, 1624), 8. See also Anna French, ‘ “All Things Necessary for Their Saluation”? The Dedham Ministers and the “Puritan” Baptism Debates’, in Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood eds., Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 75–98, 93–5.

25. 25. Price, The two twins of birth and death, 9.

26. 26. David Papillion, The vanity of the lives and passions of men (London, 1651), 4–5.

27. 27. William Clever, The flower of phisicke (London, 1590), 69.

28. 28. Papillion, The vanity of the lives and passions of men, 7.

29. 29. Francis Lenton, The young gallants whirligigg (London, 1629), 17.

30. 30. William Jenkyn, A shock of corn coming into its season (London, 1654), 28.

31. 31. For more on alternative depictions of undesirable attributes, see Anu Korhonen, ‘Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 41, no. 2 (2010), 371–91.

32. 32. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 221–30.

33. 33. Lynn Botelho, ‘Images of Old Age in Early Modern Cheap Print: Women, Witches, and the Poisonous Female Body’, in Susannah R. Ottaway, Lynn A. Botelho and Katharine Kitteridge eds., Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-Industrial Past (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 225–46, 231–3.

34. 34. Jenkyn, A shock of corn, 27.

35. 35. Jenkyn, A shock of corn, 26.

36. 36. Thomas Hodges, The hoary head crowned (Oxford, 1652), 18.

37. 37. Hannah Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204–208.

38. 38. Burgess, A treatise of original sin, 415.

39. 39. See Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 209–10.

40. 40. Anna French, Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

41. 41. John Darrell, The most wonderfull and true storie (London, 1597), 2.

42. 42. Acts 2:17, King James version.

43. 43. I.D., The praise of brotherhood (London, 1634).

44. 44. Jenkyn, A shock of corn, 31; John Reading, The old mans staffe, two sermons shewing the onely way to a comfortable old age (London, 1631), 13.

45. 45. Jenkyn, A shock of corn, 30–1.

46. 46. Simon Patrick, Divine arithmetick (London, 1659), 35.

47. 47. André du Laurens, A discourse of the preservation of the sight (London, 1599), 175–6, at p. 175.

48. 48. Simon Goulart, The wise vieillard, or old man (London, 1621), 49.

49. 49. Goulart, The wise vieillard, 44–5.

50. 50. For more on the benefits and tribulations of old age, see Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), 205–48.

51. 51. William Perkins, The works of that famous and worthy minister of Christ (London, 1631), vol. 3, part 2, 434.

52. 52. Perkins, The works of that famous and worthy minister, 430.

53. 53. See Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Carline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 102.

54. 54. John Murcot, Several works of Mr. Iohn Murcot (London, 1657), 4.

55. 55. Samuel Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines (London, 1660), 218. Clarke was not the original author of many of these martyrological accounts. His drew much of his material from existing work, including published funeral sermons and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

56. 56. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 4.

57. 57. Giovanni Benedetto Sinibaldi, Rare verities. The cabinet of Venus unlocked (London, 1658), 21.

58. 58. See Sarah Toulalan, ‘ “Unripe” Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern Europe’, in Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan eds., Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 131–50. For precocious childhood development in a modern context, see Laura Tisdall’s contribution to this volume.

59. 59. Francis Bacon, Historie naturall and experimentall (London, 1638), 159–60.

60. 60. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 156, 165, 170.

61. 61. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 140.

62. 62. Simeon Ashe, Grey hayres crowned with grace (London, 1654), 42.

63. 63. Ashe, Grey hayres crowned with grace, 62.

64. 64. Samuel Clarke, The lives of thirty-two English divines (London, 1677), 242.

65. 65. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 156.

66. 66. Matthew Newcomen, A sermon preached at the funerals of the reverend and faithful servant of Jesus Christ in the work of the gospel Mr. Samuel Collins (London, 1658), 54.

67. 67. Thomas Newton, The old mans dietarie (London, 1586), sig. B3r.

68. 68. Newton, The old mans dietarie, sig. B3v.

69. 69. Henry Cuffe, The differences of the ages of mans life (London, 1607), 120.

70. 70. John Foxe, Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable (London, 1583), 1559 – original pagination.

71. 71. Samuel Clarke, A collection of the lives of ten eminent divines (London, 1662), 487.

72. 72. Fulk Bellers, Abrahams internment, or, the good old-mans buriall in a good old age opened in a sermon (London, 1656), 21.

73. 73. Isaiah 40:31, King James version.

74. 74. Jenkyn, A shock of corn, 37.

75. 75. William Loe, A sermon preached at Lambeth (London, 1645), 25–6.

76. 76. Loe, A sermon preached at Lambeth, 28.

77. 77. Robert W. Daniel, ‘Godly Preaching, in Sickness and Ill-Health, in Seventeenth-Century England’, Studies in Church History 58 (2022), 134–49.

78. 78. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 25, 211.

79. 79. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 45–6.

80. 80. Clarke, The lives of two and twenty English divines, 45.

81. 81. Loe, A sermon preached at Lambeth, 28.

82. 82. Thomas Gataker, A mistake, or a misconstruction, removed (London, 1646), 43.

83. 83. John Saltmarsh, Reasons for vnitie, peace, and love, with an answer (called shadowes flying away) to a book of Mr Gataker (London, 1646), 127.

84. 84. Saltmarsh, Reasons for vnitie, peace, and love, 130.

85. 85. Saltmarsh, Reasons for vnitie, peace, and love, 141.

86. 86. See Walsham, ‘The Reformation of the Generations’.

87. 87. Thomas Gataker, Shadowes without substance (London, 1646), 15.

References