ABSTRACT
Izaak Walton’s beguiling ‘Life’ of George Herbert is one of a series of lives written during the Commonwealth and Restoration to furnish examples of a tradition of high church Anglican piety. Herbert himself had written in ‘The Church Militant’ of his hopes for the spread of Christianity in the New World. Herbert’s poetry is intensely occupied with the surrender of his human will to God’s, and in poem after poem his own human efforts are shown to be self-deluding. Arminians were in consequence in Herbert’s time high churchmen, where Calvinists were usually Low Churchmen or Puritans. The question of Arminianism involves matters of church order and parties within the Church. The Temple was published in 1633 from a manuscript committed by Herbert on his deathbed to Nicholas Ferrar with the instruction that the poems should be published only if he thought they might ‘turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul’.
