1. Neglecting God
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Neglecting God
I have never forgotten the impression that one word of his [i.e. Lancelot Andrewes]1 in one of his confessions of sin made on my own imagination and heart the first time it leaped out upon me. “I have neglected thee, O God!” Andrewes cried, and I trembled as I heard him cry it. And I have never come upon that awful word from that day to this without a shudder. That I should neglect God! A man who has all his life neglected God—Andrewes has made me see that to be my true description. If I make my bed in hell at last Andrewes has made me hear them pointing me out and saying, That is the man lying there who neglected God. It is this neglect of God that makes so many men infidels and atheists and outcasts.… “God,” said John Donne2 in a sermon that Andrewes may very well have heard, “God is like us in this also, that he takes it worse to be slighted, to be neglected, to be left out, than to be actually injured. Our inconsideration, our not thinking of God in our actions, offends him more than our sins.” “Pardon,” cries Bishop Wilson3 in his Sacra Privata, “that I have passed so many days without admiring, without acknowledging and confessing thy wonderful goodness to the most unworthy of thy servants. Preserve in my soul, O God, such a constant and clear sense of my obligations to thee, that upon every new receipt of thy favour, I may immediately turn my eyes to him from whom cometh my salvation.”
*From Lancelot Andrewes and his Private Devotions: A Biography, A Transcript and An Interpretation (2nd ed.; Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1896), 53-54.
1. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) was Bishop of Winchester and a principal figure in the development of a distinctive Anglican theology and spirituality over against Puritanism.
2. John Donne (1571/1572-1631) was the Dean of St. Paul’s, London, a favorite preacher of both James I (r. 1603-1625) and Charles I (r. 1625-1649). He is usually remembered for his secular and religious poetry.
3. Thomas Wilson (1663-1775) was Bishop of Sodor and Man. His devotional writings, especially his posthumous Sacra Privata, were widely read.