Chapter 12 Prayer and Providence: Matthew Henry and the Theology of the Everyday (continued)
1. Introduction
The Bible is not only ‘the touchstone we are to appeal to and try doctrines by’, wrote Matthew Henry in his exposition on the Scriptures, it also contains the manner ‘by which we must in every thing order our affections and conversations, and from which we must always take our measures’.1 This extract exemplifies the centrality of feeling to Matthew Henry’s works of religious instruction. Along with the ‘passions’, the ‘affections’ in early modern England were one of the principal categories of ‘emotions’ as we now refer to them. The historiography of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Protestantism in England has, however, not largely stressed the appeal to feeling within contemporary devotion. Other than ‘church-feeling’ and indeed bigotries of party, the period has been understood as reacting against the enthusiasms of the preceding Commonwealth period.2 Moreover, the religiosity of the period is often overshadowed by the boisterousness of Methodism and Revivalist devotion, which has subsequently been understood as succeeding post-Restoration Protestantism from the fourth decade of the eighteenth century.3 The rise of latitudinarian moralism, the infighting and insularism of Dissent, and a more exalted conception of human reason have been accounted as leaving exuberant religiosity rather out of vogue. Partly, such an account has been generated from how pre-modern ‘emotions’ or feeling has been understood. Thomas Dixon has, for example, argued that the early modern ‘passions’ have been presented as synonymous for modern ‘emotions’.4 This simplistic assimilation has often obscured the multiple categories of feeling within early modern discourses. In the modern period a dichotomy between reason and emotion has been constructed. In the early modern period, while the passions may have been understood as inherently unreasonable, not all feeling was understood as such. Indeed the ‘emotions’ of the rational mind and spiritual appetite, the ‘affections’ otherwise so central to the Christian tradition, have been overshadowed.
In the works of Matthew Henry, feeling was a prominent feature, to the extent that devotional practice was often defined by its affectivity. A clergyman of significant reputation in his own period, Henry cultivated friendships from across the conformist divide (that is, with those who took communion and worshipped at the established Church of England and those Protestants, like Henry himself, who did not). He frequently chimed an irenic tone referencing Church of England authors, arguing that the proliferation of Protestant devotional treatises ‘like the setting up of several Candles in the same Room, helps to diffuse the Light, and make it stronger’.5 His printed output was almost wholly in the form of practical divinity, the 1689/90 Nature of Schism and his funeral and ordination sermons aside. These texts provided instruction in how to conduct one’s devotional duties as a Christian, from secret prayer to the receipt of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Within these, the management and fostering of feeling were understood as particularly important, to the extent that feeling often peculiarly characterized these practices. This chapter draws upon nine of Henry’s texts, including his seminal works The Communicant’s Companion (1704) and his Method for Prayer (1710). While these texts served significantly different purposes, they might broadly be considered aspects of practical religious instruction. They were all concerned with the practice of devotions, whether at home or in public worship, and the manner in which to lead a religious life. Moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, they were all concerned with the management of feeling. This took the form of repression of ungodly passions while seeking to place godly affections at the centre of worship.
Matthew Henry took seriously the role of feeling from a young age. On 1 March 1686 (a year before being ordained) he wrote to his friend George Illidge, who would also go on to be a minister. Henry advised: ‘when we are entering either into Duty or into Temptation, to lift up our Heart in these Words, Thou God seest me; and therefore let Duty be carefully done’.6 He continued: ‘Christ died to deliver us from this World; so if our Hearts are glued to present Things and our Affections fix’d upon them, we do directly thwart the great design of our Lord Jesus Christ in coming to save us’.7 ‘Heaven and Hell’ he went on, ‘are great Things indeed, and should be much upon our Hearts, and improved by us as a Spur of Constraint to put us upon Duty, and a Bridle of Restraint to keep us from Sin’.8 This advocating of and commitment to heartfelt appreciation of the presence of God and a strongly affective piety would characterize Matthew Henry’s approach to devotion within his printed works. It demonstrated that such a vital piety was as characteristic of that period which preceded the Evangelical Revival, as it was of the movement which would otherwise succeed the religiosity of this period.
I will engage with Henry’s texts and how they approached first personal devotional practice (prayers that were conducted alone, or as solitarily as was possible), then family religion, and afterwards public worship and particularly the receipt of the Lord’s Supper. The chapter demonstrates how Henry conceived of these practices as influencing one another, each being a sequential preparation. It also exhibits how Henry understood the need for and existence of a variety of affective responses to worship, some of which were more sedate and quiet, while others were more vigorous and exuberant. I will finish with a consideration of the role of the activity and passivity of the believer, as well as the role of heart religion, throughout his texts and the practices he sought to guide his audiences through. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how the religiosity of the Evangelical Revival, often understood as succeeding and surpassing that of Henry’s lifetime (1662–1714), had much precedent in works such as Henry’s and their approach to feeling within devotional practice.
2. Affective Instruction and Emotional Range
Henry’s didactic material certainly conceived of some feelings as antithetical to godliness. It is perhaps unsurprising, given early modern medical understandings of the hotness of youthful humoural composition, that his addresses to young people contained the most fervent proscription of the passions.9 Much as Isaac Watts would later assert that ‘the common people confine it only to anger’, Henry seems to have principally associated ‘passion’ with this feeling as well as with lust.10 In Henry’s A Church in the House (1704), among the issues that households were to address in their ‘Family-Confessions’ numbered ‘provoking one another’s Lusts and Passions, instead of provoking one another to Love, and to good Works’.11 This was met by calls in other sermons to bridle one’s anger. His treatises aimed at young people, Self-consideration necessary to Self-preservation (1713) and Sober-Mindedness press’d upon Young People (1713), advised them to be ‘mild and gentle and not indulgent of your Passions … opposed to Frenzy and Violence’; moreover, he dedicated them to the ‘keeping up their dominion over Appetite and Passion, and all the Lusts of the Flesh and of the Eye’.12 Indeed, to a similar audience in The Pleasantness of a Religious Life (1714), he defined religiousness in contrast to passion. Henry argued that ‘To be religious, is to have all our unruly Passion likewise govern’d and subdu’d’.13 This was not, however, solely the preserve of the young; Method for Prayer (1710) recommended confession and repression of ‘irregular appetites towards those things that are pleasing to sense, and inordinate passions against those things that are displeasing’. This direction was given, as indulgence of such passionate feeling might lead to ‘an alienation of the mind from the principles, powers, and pleasures of the spiritual and divine life’.14 Henry demonstrated here that while the ‘Passions’ and ‘irregular appetites’ were to be controlled and repressed, in acknowledgement of one’s sin, he still conceived of divinity through an appeal to feeling, the ‘pleasure’ of a godly and spiritual life. The complementarity of feeling and morality was a consistent theme within his discourses. Indeed, Henry claimed that ‘Religion allows [one] to be cheerful’.15 Such affectivity might seem rather quiet and restrained. For Matthew Henry, as they would be for Methodism’s founder John Wesley, quiet feelings were, however, signs of the sanctified Christian.16
Henry sought to validate a quiet affective range, offering succour to those whose experience of religion was not feverish. In his Exposition of the Old and New Testament, Henry noted that the beatitudes of Matthew were:
designed to remove the discouragements of the weak and poor who receive the gospel, by assuring them that his gospel did not make those only happy that were eminent in gifts, graces, comforts, and usefulness; but that even the least in the kingdom of heaven, whose heart was upright with God, was happy in the honours and privileges of that kingdom.17
He went on to speak of the third verse, specifically saying that ‘poverty in spirit is put first among the Christian graces’ as ‘[t]he foundation of all other graces is laid in humility’ for ‘[t]hose who are weary and heavy laden, are the poor in spirit, and they shall find rest with Christ’.18 As such, poverty of spirit represented both a literal physical exhaustion but also a humble piety which did not necessarily demonstrate itself exuberantly. Henry took seriously the sedate affective effects of piety. He noted in his exposition of Ecclesiastes that:
old age being thus clogged with infirmities, it is the greatest folly imaginable to put off that needful work [the cultivation of Christian faith] … we shall have need of something to support and comfort us then, and nothing will be more effectual to do that than the testimony of our consciences for us …19
Conversion to an active Christian life was appreciated through feeling. It provided comfort at the end of one’s life and, as such, Henry sought to validate and promote the quiet affectivity of the sanctified Christian. This, almost meditative approach, was further confirmed in his commentary on Ps 60:6, where Henry claimed that ‘the triumphs of the saints’ were ‘not so much upon the account of what they have in possession as of what they have in prospect’.20
Affectivity was at the centre of this piety, even where it was quiet. Elsewhere, as will be explored later, Henry promoted more robust affections and a higher pitch of feeling. Yet, feeling itself was so important as to be the principal medium of accepting the truth of God. It arguably held a more important role than human reason or understanding. Henry argued in his preface to his Exposition that ‘we are concerned not only to understand what we read, but to improve it to some good purpose, and, in order thereunto, to be affected with it, and to receive the impressions of it’.21 Indeed, as such the Scriptures would be made ‘a light to our feet and a lamp to our paths …, to direct us in the way of our duty, and to prevent our turning aside into any by-way’.22 Here, morality, Christian conduct, and godliness were mediated through feeling. Far from conceiving of a dichotomy between a moralist interpretation of religion and one guided by feeling, these aspects were mutually constructive in Henry’s discourse. The moral instruction of religion was only effective as far as devotions, including here the reading of Scripture, were affective. In The Communicant’s Companion, Henry argued, ‘If what is here done do not affect us for the present, it will not likely to influence us afterwards’; he went on to quote from Ps 119:93: ‘I shall never forget thy Precepts, when by them thou hast quickened me’.23 To this end, Henry also argued that ‘the Terrours of the Law are of use to startle us, and put us into a Horrour for Sin’.24 Henry thus conceived of the moral instruction inherent in the study of the Bible through an appeal to feeling. The laws of God were to quicken and yet also be a terror to the believer, by which one would understand the righteousness of them and more strictly follow them.
The Scriptures might have imparted their morality to their audience by way of impact upon the affections, yet they also served a significant function in guiding these devotional affections. Certainly this was strongly witnessed in Henry’s discourses on personal devotional practice. The scriptural sufficiency, inherent within the opening quotation, was reminiscent of the theology of Richard Baxter, perhaps the leading voice of Restoration nonconformity, where theology and creed were to be measured by the contents of the Bible.25 Here, this principle was turned to feeling. In Henry’s divinity, feeling was as central as theological and moral outlook; the three were in fact related. To this end, Henry even defined a number of devotional practices through an appeal to feeling. In Method for Prayer, he set forth that ‘Prayer is the solemn and religious offering up of devout acknowledgements and desires to God, or a sincere representation of holy affections’.26 In his Directions for Daily Communion with God, first published in 1712, he defined prayer as the ‘lifting up the Soul to God, and pouring out the Heart before him’; indeed, Henry argued that the ‘expressing of the Devout Affections of the Heart by Words may be of use to fix the Thoughts, and to excite and quicken the Desires’.27 Thus when properly practiced, prayer was not only defined by its affective nature, it was also itself generative of affections. Within his works, Henry further promoted a sequence, which saw the devotee move from a low to a higher affective state. Given the wanderings of the heart during sleep and the proud desires that might have crept in, Henry suggested that morning prayers were particularly important in purging these feelings and instilling a sense of peace:
Are we not concern’d to confess to him, to complain of them to him as revolting and rebellious Hearts, and bent to backslide; to make our Peace in the Blood of Christ, and to pray, that the Thoughts of our Heart may be forgiven us!28
This was reflective of Barbara Rosenwein’s understanding of devotional practices as comprising ‘emotional sequences’, whereby religious exercises were structured around a movement between emotional states.29 In Henry’s schema, consideration of sin served as a low affective ebb of this sequence, with throwing oneself upon God’s mercy as its high point, followed by the peace instilled in the heart through repentance. Under ‘For Application’, Henry recommended ‘First let this Word put us in mind of our Omissions; for Omissions are Sins and must come to Judgment … Let us be truly humbled before God this Morning for our Sin and Folly’.30 Secondly, he warned against formality; ‘Go about this Duty solemnly’, Henry instructed his audience, ‘Let us learn to labour fervently in Prayer as Epaphras did’.31
God requires … Truth in the inward Part, and it is the Prayer of the Upright that is his Delight … Trust in him; that the Comfort and Benefit your Morning Devotions may not be as the Morning Cloud which passeth away, but as the Morning Light which shines more and more.32
Ending with comfort, Henry demonstrated a sequence defined by the movement from recognition of one’s sin to comfort in the trust and keeping of God.
3. Family Religion and Feeling
In A Church in the House, Henry presented family devotions as a way to secure the comfort of one’s household. Particularly before the 1689 Act of Toleration, family religion carried with it some of the stigma associated with conventicles (clandestine and illegal religious conferences of more than five people in a household). Yet, by 1704 when Henry published, despite the ‘Unhappy Contests … about the Constitution, Order and Government, of Churches’ he was able to speak ‘of Churches, concerning which there is no such Controversie’.33 He elaborated:
All agree that Masters of Families, who profess Religion and the Fear of God themselves, should, according to the Talents they are entrusted with, maintain and keep up Religion and the Fear of God in their Families as such should contribute to the Support of Christianity in a Nation whose Honour and Happiness it is to be a Christian Nation.34
In this appeal, Henry spoke to a shared culture and a belief in the duty of each family to practice religion within the household, which cut across conformity to and dissent from the Church of England. This appeal, also conceived of family religion as the foundation of a national communion and commitment to Christian morality, which was generated through the affections, most notably the fear of God. Henry was keen to note that he would not ‘have these Family-Churches set up and kept up in Competition with, much less in Contradiction to, Publick Religious Assemblies, which ought always to have the Preference’.35 For Henry ‘these Family Churches, (which are but figuratively so) must be erected and maintain’d in Subordination to those more Sacred and Solemn Establishments’; indeed, he argued that ‘The Lord loves the Gates of Sion more than all the Dwellings of Jacob’, following Ps 87:2.36 Affections determined the hierarchy of devotional practice, with public worship valued above familial devotions.
Family religion helped to mediate the manner in which public worship was undertaken. ‘Publick Catechizing’, Henry taught, ‘will turn to little Account without Family Catechizing’ and, more than this, ‘If every Family were a Praying Family, Publick Prayers would be better join’d with, more intelligently, and more affectionately’.37 Within Henry’s treatise, the affectivity of public worship was dependent upon the affectivity of family worship. This followed in some manner the affective sequences seen elsewhere in Henry’s works, where family religion served as a catalyst to the movement towards a more affective appreciation of the word of God preached and the sacraments administered. He argued that it was necessary when speaking ‘to God by Prayer’ in the family to:
be willing to hear him speak to you in his Word, that there may be a compleat Communion between you and God. This will add much to the Solemnity of your Family-Worship, and will make the Transaction the more Aweful and Serious, if it be done in a right manner.38
Such seriousness might be fruitfully understood as affect. Certainly, it was suggestive of a mood under which such duty should be conducted. Seriousness was allied to the personal experience of God in family duty as well as to a sense of awe and indeed the solemnity of practicing religious devotion. It was apathy, even unfeeling, that was the antipathy of religious duty. Conducted properly, the awful nature of family religion was suggestive of Henry’s belief that religious practice must make an impression upon the Christian’s feeling. The solemnity of the practice was also reminiscent of that meditative tone Henry expressed in other works.
Family religion was also conceived of as a medium of family unity as well as personal and collective succour in the presence of God. ‘When you set them forward to come to Family-Worship’, Henry required of head-of-households, ‘let them have the Praise of it, for you have the Comfort of it.’39 Indeed, he claimed that:
A Church in the House will make it very comfortable to your selves. Nothing more agreeable to a gracious Soul than constant Communion with a gracious God.40
Family Religion was understood to ‘establish our Hearts in that Comfort which makes every thing that occurs easie’.41 The affective ends of family devotion were thus lauded by Henry. This is similar to Lauren F. Winner’s exploration of the religion of elite eighteenth-century Virginian Anglicans, in which she has argued that:
It is in the slippage between these two meanings of comfortable – ‘comfort giving’ and ‘solacing’, versus ‘at ease’, ‘cozy’ – that I find the phrase ‘cheerful and comfortable’ a useful interpretation of the household religious practices of Virginia’s Anglican gentry.42
It was a religion that was ‘optimistic, and not unduly speculative’ and moreover, ‘at ease with the world; it did not demand that practitioners be unsettled, nor did it urge them to break from the world’. She nevertheless has defended her subjects from accusations that the comfortable nature of their religion made them ‘secular’ or indeed ‘lax in religious observance’. ‘To the contrary’, Winner has argued, ‘religious practices punctuated life in elite households; elites’ piety overtly and self-consciously figured into their day-to-day routines’.43 Thus, the potential intensity and centrality of religion, in Henry’s text, to everyday life reflected this reading of the concept of ‘comfort’. Indeed, by the proper management of their affections during family devotions, Henry conceived that the godly family might more successfully direct future affect in religious practice: ‘They that pray constantly when they are well’, he claimed, ‘may pray comfortably when they are sick’.44 While seeking affective ends in the form of comfort, the repetition of these practices also ensured that one might be able to cultivate the right affections for the conduct of devotional practice in times of crisis. To this end, the lauding of comfort was a manner in which one might manage one’s affections, so that devotional practice might be properly comported at all times.
4. Public Worship, the Affections, and the Eucharist
In The Communicant’s Companion, Henry similarly defined the rite of the Eucharist itself in affective terms, asking his audience to consider how they ‘should be affected when we are attending on the Lord in this Solemnity’.45 Classifying communion as a ‘solemnity’ and, indeed, asking them to consider the manner in which they should engage feeling, was to understand communion in strongly affective terms. Henry’s emphasis on the solemn nature of communion echoed a longer tradition, characterized by Alec Ryrie as encompassing ‘any attempt to practice Protestantism which is, or which appears to be, intended seriously – as opposed to practices engaged in cynically for form’s sake or from habit’.46 Moreover, Henry’s discourses of solemnity mirrored the language used in Richard Hooker’s defence of church ceremonies. Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Politie argued that the purpose of ‘such Solemnities’ was ‘to leave in the minds of Men that impression which might somewhat restrain their boldness, and nourish a reverend affection towards the House of God’.47 Much like Hooker then, Henry seems to have interpreted solemnity as affect.
The Communicant’s Companion took the issue of feeling so seriously that a whole chapter was dedicated to ‘Helps for the Exciting of those Pious and Devout Affections which should be working in us while we attend this Ordinance’.48 Henry noted again the relative and variable experience of feeling:
Tempers vary … Some are soon mov’d, and much mov’d with every thing that affects them … there are others whose natural Temper is happily more calm and sedate, that are not conscious to themselves of such Stirrings of Affection as some experience at this Ordinance and yet have as comfortable Communion with God, as good Evidence of the Truth and Growth of Grace, and as much Real Benefit by the Ordinance, as those that think themselves even transported by it.49
Quiet feelings were once again lauded, nothing that ‘The deepest Rivers are scarce perceived to move, and make the least Noise’.50 Indeed, Henry claimed that ‘Bodily Exercise, if that be all, profits little’, while asserting:
there may be a true and strong Faith informing the Judgement, bowing the Will, commanding the Affections, and purifying the Heart and Life where yet there are not any Transports of Pathetical Expressions …51
This robust defence of quiet feelings in preparation for and partaking of communion presents moderate affections and a calm exterior as reflective of religious certainty, perhaps even election, typical of other theologians within his tradition. There was a certain scepticism concerning the authenticity of those who claimed to be assaulted by more boisterous feeling and thus moved in body.
Henry was keen that his audience must not mistake his purpose with regards to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and he promoted a rigorous and at times exuberantly affective piety. He argued that the sacrament ‘is design’d that the Eye should affect the Heart’; indeed, one ‘must not rest in bare Contemplation of what is here set before us, but the Consideration thereof must make an Impression upon our Spirits’.52 Henry’s understanding of the sacrament rejected formalism and simple memorialism. This took the form of an affective sequence: ‘Penitential Grief and Shame’ as the first stage ‘are not at all unsuitable to this Ordinance, tho’ it is intended for our Joy and Honour, but excellent Preparatives for the Benefit and Comfort of it’.53 The Eucharist here was bound up with a number of affections. They led the communicant from shame and sorrow to the affective high of joy before ultimately being comforted by reception of the sacrament. Indeed, Henry cemented this later: ‘If we had not a Christ to hope in, being guilty and corrupt, we could not have a God to rejoice in’.54 The feeling of shame and grief, therefore, allowed a greater appreciation of the solacing aspects of the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, in A Method for Prayer, Henry gave a defence of boisterous affective display, claiming that:
if we have spiritual senses exercised, true devotion, that aspiring flame of pious affections to God, as far as in a judgment of charity we discern it in others, though in different shapes and dresses, which may seem uncouth to one another, cannot but appear beautiful and amiable, and as far as we feel it in our own breasts, cannot but be found very pleasant and comfortable.55
The relativism inherent in his discourse is notable. While some might have deemed an ostentatious display of feeling in prayer to be unseemly, they were not without their place for those who were more disposed to a fervent display of their feelings. In whatever form they took, Henry conceived of feeling as essential to devotional practice. The cultivation of the affections at communion and prayer were important, whether they were moderate and measured, or exuberant.
In The Communicant’s Companion, Henry required his audience to contemplate the sufferings of Christ at his crucifixion. This was intended to be a source of affections suitable to the sacrament, and it demonstrated the precedent that Methodist discourses on the crucifixion had within this divinity of the early eighteenth century.56 Henry asked:
Can we see him thus suffering for us and shall not we suffer with him? was he in such Pain for our Sins, and shall not we be in pain for them? was his Soul exceeding sorrowful even unto Death, and shall not ours be exceeding sorrowful, when that’s the way to Life? Come my Soul, see by Faith the Holy Jesus made Sin for thee; the Glory of Heaven made a Reproach of Men for thee; his Father’s Joy made a Man of Sorrows for thy Transgressions. See thy Sins burthening him when he sweat, spitting upon him and buffeting him, and putting him to open Shame, crowning him with Thorns, and piercing his Hands and his Side; and let this melt and break this hard and rocky Heart of mine, and dissolve it into Tears of Godly Sorrow. Look on Christ dying, and weep not for him (tho’ they who have anything of Ingenuity and Good Nature, will see reason enough to weep for an innocent Sufferer) but weep for thy self, and thine own Sins, for them be in bitterness as one that is in bitterness for an only Son.57
This was a direct call for imitation of Christ’s suffering in consideration of one’s own sin. ‘Can we look upon a humbled broken Christ’, Henry asked, ‘with an unhumbled, unbroken Heart?’58 Sorrow, self-reproach, engagement of the heart and even tears were necessary for this sacrament. Much as elsewhere, the progression in this narrative was from unfeeling to feeling. Contemplation of Christ’s suffering was clearly employed as a means to foster vigorous affections within the communicant. Indeed, it served to understand the ability to feel as characterising a Christian:
Come, my Soul, and sit down by the Cross of Christ as a true Mourner; let it make thee weep to see him bleed. That Heart is frozen hard indeed, which these Considerations will not thaw.59
Henry told his audience that ‘our Sins have not only pierced him’ and been ‘Reproach of his Holy Name, and the Greif of his Holy Spirit’, but ‘have crucified him afresh’.60 The crucifixion was also the scene of affective relief, however, as ‘The Blood of Christ will be the more healing and comforting to the Soul, for its bleeding afresh thus upon every remembrance of Sin’.61
5. Activity and Passivity of the Devotee
Throughout his texts and practices, Henry demonstrated a significant interplay between activity and passivity of the believer in the cultivation of the proper affections for devotion. In his Method for Prayer, he opened one prayer with a call to:
Stir up thy self (My Soul) to take the Comfort which is here offr’d thee. Let this strengthen weak Hands, let it confirm the feeble Knees.62
This direction was repeated: ‘Let us stir up ourselves to take hold on God, to seek his face, and give him the glory due unto his name’.63 Here, as above, the believer has significant agency in warming their feelings towards God. Yet, certainly in the first quotation, this was coupled with passivity, depending upon God’s own strength. This was echoed in other texts, such as his treatise on family religion where Henry called his audience to ‘Let God by his Providence dispose of the Affairs of my Family, and by his Grace dispose the Affections of all in my Family, according to his Will, to his own Praise’.64 Here, God takes the active role in directing the feelings of believers, indeed, in directing proper devotional affect. The Communicant’s Companion also demonstrated this. The text called the audience to ‘stir up the Gift that is in us, endeavouring to affect our selves with the great things of God and our Souls; and let us pray to God to affect us with them by his Spirit and Grace’.65 At other times within the discourse, the call was to greater passivity:
Come my Soul, weary as thou art, and rest in Christ; cast thy Burthen upon him, and he shall sustain thee; commit thy way to him, and Thy Thoughts shall certainly be established.66
Please thy self (my Soul) with this Thought, that thou art not thine own, but his that made thee; not left to thine own Will, but bound up to his.67
Here, Henry presented the abrogation of agency in affective terms, as a pleasure for the believer. Throughout, he called the believer to allow God to work upon their affections and direct them to worship. The interplay between activity and passivity demonstrated Henry’s understanding of the need for a spectrum of affective responses to worship. At times vigorous feeling was prescribed, at others contemplative affect.
The interplay between activity and passivity was also reflected in Henry’s discourses on the heart. Phyllis Mack has observed within the devotional practice of the early Methodists a synthesis of ‘useful activity’ with the Pietist concept of ‘heart-religion’, a brand of piety which ‘emphasized passivity and feeling’.68 This balancing of the pious activity of the believer and the passivity of his heart might also be seen within Henry’s texts. Henry recommended consideration of providence, Christ’s suffering, and supplications to God as those ‘Things especially you should have upon your Heart in your Family Prayer’.69 Yet, while this gave agency to the believer, Henry also stressed God’s activity upon one’s heart: ‘When your Hearts, like Lydia’s, are open’d to Christ, let your House, like hers, be open’d to him too, Act. 16. 14, 15’.70 Through the imagery of heart religion, Henry again demonstrated the importance of passivity to the believer. To remedy the hardness of heart caused by sin, Henry called his audience to submit themselves to God’s control:
When thou hast chastised us, and we were chastised, we have been as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke; and though our own foolishness hath perverted our way, yet our heart hath fretted against the Lord; and thus in our distress we have trespassed yet more against the Lord.71
His Exposition also recommended passivity: ‘A mind rightly disposed by a humble, sincere subjection to its Maker, will easily discover the image of God’s wisdom in the awful depth of its mysteries’.72 The believers in Henry’s text thus had significant agency over their own hearts. They were to cultivate within their hearts an affective appreciation of their own sin, for example. They were also, however, to leave themselves open to the machinations of God upon their hearts. A free heart might pull against God and into sin; however, that heart which subjected itself to God allowed him to direct the affect of their devotions and dispose them to godliness.
6. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate that the management of feeling was at the centre of Matthew Henry’s texts of practical divinity. While he recommended the repression of dangerous and ungodly passions, this only served to highlight the feeling he sought to engender within his audience. Drawing upon the Christian tradition and the strong role of the ‘affections’, feelings of the higher intellectual and spiritual appetite, he infused his rhetoric with a strongly felt element. It was through an appeal to the affections that his audience was to be made conscious of the righteousness of the law. Moreover, though he seems to have defended quiet feeling without display, there was still room for intense appreciation of godliness within his texts. This was most apparent in his discussion of the receipt of the Lord’s Supper and the role of contemplating the crucifixion within this practice. He may have primarily seen the affective products of divinity as comfortable, but that represented a significant appeal to feeling within itself. Henry’s treatises, moreover, emphasized both active engagement of feeling and, indeed, passive receipt of God’s control over one’s affections. This dynamic conceived of devotional practice, in a number of different forms, as essentially guided by feeling. Where the current historiography has largely presented mainstream Protestants of the period as hesitant over the issue of exuberant religiosity, an examination of Henry’s discourse demonstrates the centrality of an intensely felt dimension to devotional practice. This dimension might be seen as having been paralleled in the rise of Methodism and Revivalism later in the century.
1. From Matthew Henry’s preface to vol. 1 (1707) of his Exposition of the Old and New Testament. The preface itself is dated 2 October 1706.
2. Michael Heyd, ‘The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 258–80; Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 40; John Spurr “‘Rational Religion” in Restoration England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 563–85 (564); John D. Walsh, ‘ “Methodism” and the Origins of English-Speaking Evangelicalism’, in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990, ed. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19–37 (22); George Williamson, Seventeenth-Century Contexts (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), ch. 9.
3. Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 16, 45–46; Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1:26–27; Roger Thomas, ‘Parties in Nonconformity’, in The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism, ed. C. Gordon Bolam et al. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), 96–165; John D. Walsh, ‘Origins of the Evangelical Revival’, in Essays in Modern English Church History: In Memory of Norman Sykes, ed. Gareth V. Bennett and John D. Walsh (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), 132–62 (142); John D. Walsh, ‘Elie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 1–20 (7); Walsh, ‘Methodism’, 29; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: Volume I – From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 287–91.
4. Thomas Dixon, From Passion to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53–54.
5. Matthew Henry, A Scripture-Catechism, in the Method of the Assemblies (London: n.p., 1703), i. Italics are Henry’s own throughout, unless otherwise stated.
6. William Tong, An Account of the Life and Death of Mr. Matthew Henry, Minister of the Gospel at Hackney (London: E. Matthews, M. Lawrence, and S. Cliff, 1716), 37.
7. Tong, An Account, 38.
8. Tong, An Account, 39.
9. Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (London: Chicago University Press, 2004), 13.
10. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (New York: AMS Press, 1967; first published 1755), quoted in Dixon, From Passion, 62. Henry refers to passions as ‘Lusts of the Flesh and of the Eye’ (as well as drunkenness and liberal living) in Self-consideration necessary to Self-preservation; or, the Folly of despising our own Souls, and our own Ways; open’d in Two Sermons to Young People (London: n.p., 1713), 98, 119.
11. Matthew Henry, A Church in the House: A Sermon concerning Family Religion (London: n.p., 1704), 24.
12. Matthew Henry, Sober-Mindedness press’d upon Young People, in a Discourse on Titus II.6, 5th ed. (London: n.p., 1735), 40. Henry first delivered the sermon on 3 January 1712. Henry, Self-consideration, 98.
13. Matthew Henry, The Pleasantness of a Religious Life: open’d and prov’d; and recommended to the Consideration of all, particularly of Young People, 2nd ed. (London: n.p., 1715), 46.
14. Matthew Henry, ‘A Method for Prayer’, in The Select Works of the Late Revd. Mr. Matthew Henry: Being a Complete Collection of all his practical pieces. Together with an Account of his Life, and a Sermon preached on the occasion of his death, both by the Revd. Mr. William Tong (Edinburgh: n.p., 1772), 150.
15. Henry, Sober-Mindedness, 40 (also 38–39, 57).
16. Mack, Heart Religion, 34–35.
17. Henry on Matt 5:3–12.
18. Henry on Matt 5:3–12.
19. Henry on Eccl 12:1–7.
20. Henry on Ps 60:6–12.
21. Henry, preface to Exposition vol. 1 (1707).
22. Henry, preface to Exposition vol. 1 (1707).
23. Matthew Henry, The Communicant’s Companion (London: n.p., 1704), 197.
24. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 201.
25. Jeremy Goring, ‘The Break-Up of the Old Dissent’, in Bolam et al., English Presbyterians, 175–218 (179–80).
26. Henry, ‘Method for Prayer’, 143.
27. Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God; in Three Discourses, showing how to begin, how to spend, and how to close every Day with God, 3rd ed. (London: n.p., 1715), 10.
28. Henry, Directions, 36.
29. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8.
30. Henry, Directions, 38.
31. Henry, Directions, 41–42.
32. Henry, Directions, 42.
33. Henry, Church in the House, 7.
34. Henry, Church in the House, 8.
35. Henry, Church in the House, 8.
36. Henry, Church in the House, 8.
37. Henry, Church in the House, 18, 45.
38. Henry, Church in the House, 16.
39. Henry, Church in the House, 32.
40. Henry, Church in the House, 39.
41. Henry, Church in the House, 41.
42. Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 3.
43. Winner, Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, 4.
44. Henry, Church in the House, 41.
45. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 197.
46. Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9.
47. Richard Hooker, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, containing Eight Books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and several other Treatises (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1793), 42.
48. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, xi.
49. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 196.
50. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 196.
51. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 196.
52. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 197.
53. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 198.
54. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 205.
55. Henry, ‘Method for Prayer’, 143.
56. Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, ‘Introduction’, in Noll, Bebbington, and Rawlyk, Evangelicalism, 3–15 (6).
57. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 199–200.
58. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 200–201.
59. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 201.
60. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 200.
61. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 202.
62. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 208.
63. Henry, ‘Method for Prayer’, 145.
64. Henry, Church in the House, 12.
65. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 197.
66. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 202.
67. Henry, Communicant’s Companion, 207.
68. Mack, Heart Religion, 45, 13.
69. Henry, Church in the House, 22, 23–30.
70. Henry, Church in the House, 46.
71. Henry, ‘Method for Prayer’, 151.
72. Henry, preface to Exposition vol. 1 (1707).