A Bedrock of Calvinism

“It is hardly necessary now to argue that the theological tenor of the English Church in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was firmly Protestant, even Calvinist, though literary critics have been in some danger of forgetting that fact as they stress Roman Catholic influences upon Donne or the medieval literary heritage of Herbert, or the contribution of both to the emerging spirit of Anglicanism . . . Lancelot Andrewes and George Herbert preached within the same tradition of reformed theology as did such Puritans as Richard Greenham, Richard Rogers, Arthur Hildersam, and William Perkins” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, pp. 13-14).