Latimer is the best example the English Church can show of the popular preacher. The sermons of Andrewes or Donne make their appeal to a trained intelligence which can “divide,” even to the last scruple, “the word of truth”; Latimer, whether he is preaching in a country town or before the king at Westminster, always speaks so that the servants and handmaids shall carry away as much as the gentler sort. He has but one subject, that of righteousness, and the appeal of righteousness is not to the intellect, but to the conscience.
This is not to say that Latimer was himself unlearned. As a young man he was elected fellow of his college (Clare Hall) at Cambridge, and was one of twelve preachers licensed by the University to preach in any part of England. When his university suspected him of the Lutheran heresy, and he was summoned before Wolsey, he is said to have shown himself more at home in Duns Scotus than Wolsey’s chaplains, who were set to examine him. It is probable that he was not deeply versed in the New Learning, being born a little too early for that. The year 1510, in which Erasmus went to Cambridge to teach Greek, was the year in which Latimer took his degree, and we know that at first the new professor found but few pupils.
The story of Latimer’s first attraction to the Reformed doctrines is told by himself in the first sermon on the Lord’s Prayer:
Master Bilney, or rather Saint Bilney, that suffered death for God’s word sake, the same Bilney was the instrument whereby God called me to knowledge; for I may thank him, next to God, for that knowledge that I have in the word of God. For I was as obstinate a papist as any was in England, insomuch that when I should be made bachelor of divinity, my whole oration went against Philip Melancthon and against his opinions. Bilney heard me at that time, and perceived that I was zealous without knowledge; and he came to me afterward in my study, and desired me, for God’s sake, to hear his confession. I did so: and, to say the truth, by his confession I learned more than before in many years. So from that time forward I began to smell the word of God, and forsook the school-doctors and such fooleries.
This was in 1524, and already the next year we find that he had become suspected of favouring what in his bachelor’s thesis he had attacked; for his diocesan, Bishop West of Ely, came up “suddenly and secretly” to Cambridge to hear a Latin sermon he was to preach ad clerum, and entered the church with unepiscopal astuteness after the sermon was begun. But for once the greatest diplomatist of his age was overmatched. With extraordinary readiness Latimer changed his text, and preached a sermon extempore from the text Christus existens Pontifex futurorum bonorum, “A new auditory requireth a new theme, therefore it behoveth me to entreat of the honourable office of a bishop.” The bishop thanked Latimer for his “good sermon,” and asked him to preach against Martin Luther’s doctrine. To which Latimer very fairly replied that he could not refute what he was prohibited from reading. It is ill setting one’s wits against authority; and according to Cranmer’s secretary Morice, from whom this story comes, the bishop, who had the last word, replied, “I perceive that you somewhat smell of the pan, Mr. Latymer; you will repent this gear some day.” He was inhibited by the bishop from preaching in the university, but continued to use the church of the Austin Friars, which was extra-diocesan. It was on occasion of this dispute that Wolsey interfered and had Latimer examined, with the result that he licensed him to preach anywhere in England.
Of the Cambridge period we have two sermons preserved, those on the Card, preached about 1529, which raise the question what it was that the Bishop of Ely and the party of the Old Learning found to complain of in Latimer’s preaching. The answer of course is that here, as in all theological controversies, it was not the heresy, but the heretic, that was attacked. The sermons only “smelt of the pan.” They disparaged “voluntary works” — church-building, pilgrimages, gilding of saints, and so forth, not absolutely, but in comparison with “necessary works” of righteousness and mercy. Still it is not prudent for the clergy to disparage works of popular religion. Responsible rulers must “doubt whereunto this will grow.” The conceit of comparing the Commandments to playing-cards is not to our modern taste; but Latimer was wise in his generation and knew what he was doing. Probably by such a trick he caught the ear of the undergraduates of the day, who were younger then than now. It is interesting to compare these early sermons of Latimer’s with the almost contemporary sermons of Bishop Fisher.
In reading Fisher there rises to memory the wonderfully beautiful and suffering face that we know from Holbein’s drawing, a face that is certainly not of the world. And the sermons also are not of the world. They are full of a sense of the hollowness of all earthly satisfaction; but they do not strike us as showing any acquaintance at first hand with what they despise and renounce. In one place, for example, commenting on the text “Can a woman forget her sucking child?” Fisher lays down that “the affection of fathers is longer-during than that of mothers.” Throughout we feel the lessons to be a little too abstract, the similes a little forced, the examples conventional; although there is no mistaking the passion of the preacher. Now, whatever we may think of Latimer’s divinity, about his humanity there can be no manner of doubt. From the first his sermons display a quite remarkable insight into the working of the human mind and will. In the second Sermon on the Card, on the words, “Go first and reconcile thy neighbour,” he has this penetrating counsel:
Be not ashamed to do thy Master’s and Lord’s will and commandment. Go, as I said, unto thy neighbour that is offended by thee, and reconcile him whom thou hast lost by thy unkind words, by thy scorns, mocks, and other disdainous words and behaviours, and be not nice to ask of him the cause why he is displeased with thee: require of him charitably to remit; and cease not till you both depart, one from the other, true brethren in Christ. Come not to thy neighbour whom thou hast offended, and give him a pennyworth of ale, or a banquet, and so make him a fair countenance, thinking that by thy drink or dinner he will shew thee like countenance. I grant you may both laugh and make good cheer, and yet there may remain a bag of rusty malice, twenty years old, in thy neighbour’s bosom.