Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 26
that it also did not contain the clear distinctions required to make it easy to categorise one
sect or denomination from another. As Joseph H Summers has noted of the period in
England,
The area of potential agreement included the devotional life and everyday activity.
The “Imitation of Christ,” whether as a volume or a practice, was common to most
of the religious readers and writers of the time. Although Catholic influence was
feared in England, it was often not recognized: Quarles’s translation of the Jesuit
Herman Hugo’s Pia Desideria (with the Counter-Reformation plates intact)
became a favourite volume, particularly among the Puritans. A remarkable
quantity of religious reading was shared by all parties, both within and without the
Church of England. St Augustine and other early Church fathers were considered
generally authoritative, and St Bernard of Clairvaux, having received the approval
of Aquinas, Calvin, and Luther, was widely read. Calvin, Beza, and other leading
continental writers were the property of most English Protestants. Immensely
popular contemporary books of devotion often failed to disclose the ecclesiastical
and theological positions of their authors. 31
Devotional literature could easily move between the various sects of Christianity because
of the shared orthodoxy, and the via media sought by the Jacobean church made the fluid
movement of believers from one sect to another easier to accomplish and more difficult to
distinguish. To again look to Summers, wherein which he discusses diversity of Christian
confessional groups that could practice within the Church of England’s via media:
31 Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London, 1954), p. 54.