"Herbert's Religious Exposition Through The Temple".

When Herbert's vocation as an Anglican priest is considered, attention usually focuses on The Country Parson as a revelation of how he applied his Christian faith in early seventeenth-century rural England. However, although this work had a literate, clerical group as its intended audience (and not agricultural labourers, of whom most of Herbert's parish comprised), this fusion of the spiritual with the temporal makes The Country Parson a clumsy device for the transmission of the finer doctrinal tenets of Herbert's faith (and was unlikely to have been composed for this purpose by Herbert anyway).

Yet, in an age when detail on an Anglican priest's religious leanings was vital in establishing precisely where they were positioned on the denominational spectrum, some sort of information on Herbert's personal preferences in this area would help to contextualise The Country Parson, and possibly reveal how it fits into the framework of Herbert's overall religious constitution, instead of being a mere instruction manual for colleagues following in his footsteps.

There are at least two main elements of pre-Interregnum Puritanism - that extreme wing of Protestantism - which are identifiable in The Temple, and which provide compelling indications of Herbert's religious stance during a period of rapid expansion and politicisation of Protestantism in England. These elements are: a desire to return to a `raw' and essential form of Christianity, uncluttered by the trappings that had grown around it over the centuries; and an underlying acceptance of the doctrine of predestination.

The first of these features - which is readily identifiable in The Temple - is that desire for the Church to return to a more unadulterated form of Christianity. In The Altar, Herbert proposes that humans are the true altars of the Church, and in a reference to himself, asks God to "Sanctify this ALTAR to be thine" (16). By the 1620s, church altars had become one of the defining issues of the Puritan movement. There was growing resentment among many Puritan sects at the way in which Anglican altars were becoming raised, in the style of the Catholic Church. Emphasis was put on altars needing to be level with the rest of the church building, thus implying an equality between clergy and congregation. Yet, Herbert does not engage in this argument directly. Instead of taking sides, he promulgates his Puritan views by simply dismissing the importance of the physical altars to the Christian experience, stating that the only connection between an altar and the experience is: "A HEART alone/Is such a stone" (5-6).

A similar vein of attack on the worldly nature of the Church, and its emphasis on the physical, can be found in The Collar. In this poem, Herbert seems to be crying out at the restrictions on behaviour imposed by the Church: "Forsake thy cage/Thy rope of sands/Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee/Good cable, to enforce and draw/And be thy law" (21-25). The implication is that the Church of England - Herbert's Church - has evolved as a restricting rather than a nurturing agent, and therefore is no longer serving the needs of the genuinely devout.

The second of these elements which is recognisable in The Temple is the Puritan belief in predestination: the notion that everything that happens conforms to a pre-ordained plan which, paradoxically, does not deprive humans of their free will. In The Pulley, God allows humans to exercise their free choice, but still remains in control of people's destiny.

In The Pilgrimage, the literary motif of a spiritual journey through life, which was common in writing throughout this period, has similar echoes of predestination. There is a pervading sense in The Pilgrimage, that although the pilgrim is making their journey by themselves, in the background there is some guiding force which gives the journey a sense of inevitability: a very neat summation of the essence of predestination.

In Redemption, Herbert portrays God as a landlord, and himself as a dissatisfied tenant. And despite Herbert's grumblings, God remains in charge, and does not abandon Herbert because of Herbert's sense that his relationship with God at that time is not fruitful.

For Herbert to openly express these views during his lifetime, especially by the 1630s, would have ensured his censure by the Church of England, which was by that stage coming under the tighter grip of the fanatical bishop William Laud. Yet, it is evident from much of Herbert's poems in The Temple that his sympathies were tilting towards the energy and apparent righteousness which the Puritan movement was displaying, and which had become sparse in the increasingly barren environment of the Anglican Church. The Temple therefore served as an ideal channel for Herbert to vent his religious views in a way that was sufficiently encoded to avoid admonition, but which also permitted him to subtly expose those personal sentiments about his vocation and his beliefs for which he obviously held deep feelings.

There are, however, exceptions to this movement towards Puritanism. In The Windows for example, Herbert denounces the Puritan's claims that music and religious art were forms of idolatry, and that only the spoken word carried weight in church. Herbert's response to this strand of thinking is succinct and compelling: "Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one/When they combine and mingle, bring/A strong regard and awe; but speech alone/Doth vanish like a flaring thing/And in the ear, not conscience, ring" (11-15).

This sort of exception is evidence of the individuality with which Herbert approached his Christian faith. He was willing to embrace all those elements, regardless of their origins of political flavour, which he believed would enhance his Christian experience. The saturation of the details of his beliefs throughout The Temple is a testament to the intensity with which he approached the subject.