These are not, cannot be, "sermons". They are magnificent meditations on thought processes and devotional sensitivities which speak libraries of consciousness. A man who sought to find hope, in spite of the encounter with idiots which all of us find who are born of woman into this vale of tears. In the fullness of his life, Donne took to the collar, and preached high Faith of the Protestant/protesting persuasion. His joys were grave, his gravity was glorious, but this is not smooth reading for the Faithful. No! He himself knew that those professing a "faith" had no collateral, or in today's vernacular derived from his Elizabethan abundance, "no skin in the game". He keenly ached from the knowledge that his listeners were unlikely to be able to hear the "sermon in the sermon" under their own personal hopes, selfish prayers, disobedience of God's ordinances, distractedness in the poetry, or vanity. In Edmund Fuller's Introduction, "This is no liberal, permissive, comfortable soothing, but rather a firm, sometimes stern, preaching on the demands of the Faith and the obligations that go with professing it." Today, we witness the fact that the preachers today have entirely given up that project.

The natural man can be good, if he "relieve the poor, defend the oppressed". But the godly man must also have faith in the Trinity -- in God as Creator, and in Creation itself, as the Spirit of God. Donne is relentless about this Trinity--and the Holy Spirit is not overlooked--"who gave me comfort in sickness...troubles, and perplexities, and diffidencies of my conscience". [6]

"Challenge him, that magnifies himself above you, to meet you in Adam; there bid him, if he will have more nobility, more greatness, than you, take more original sin than you have." [10]

"Nor can any epitaph be confident in saying, here lies; but, here was laid. For so various, so vicissitudinary is all this world, as that even the dust of the grave has revolutions." [10]

"The Saint cannot accelerate, the reprobate cannot return the Resurrection. And all that rise to the right hand, shall be equally kings; and all at the left, equally, what? ...they shall have bodies to be tormented in...Miserable, unexpressible, unimaginable, macerable condition, where the sufferer would be glad to be but a devil; where it were some happiness, and some kind of life, to be able to die; and a great preferment, to be nothing." [11]

"Our sins are our own, and our destruction is from ourselves. We are not as accessories, and God as principal in this Soul murder: God forbid." [11]

"That which Zipporah said to her husband Moses in anger, the Church may say to Christ in thankfulness, 'Thou art truly a bloody husband to me'." [12]

"The good works that are done openly to please men have their reward, says Christ, that is, shall never have reward." [13]

"But for those men that served God's execution upon the idolaters of the golden calf, it is pronounced in their behalf that therein they consecrated themselves to God; and for that service God made that tribe, the tribe of Levi, his portion, his clergy, his consecrated tribe." [16 noting the qualitative shift following a people's indulgence in murders; cf. Rape of the Sabines creating Rome, annihilation of villages creating the Mongols, etc]

The "image of God" is in the soul. [19-29]

TK reminder from other works, Donne was a Universalist: "In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” ( )

A selection of Donne's best sermons.