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Honnold Library Record: Mr. John Hales
From the Honnold Library Record, Volume 5, Number 2. Fall 1962:
The Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales
The caption of this short article is actually the title of a book published in 1659, a copy of which is in the Honnold Library Rare Book Room. John Hales went to Holland in 1616 as chaplain to the English ambassador, at a time of religious turmoil in Holland. As a result of that turmoil in 1618 the famous Synod of Dort was summoned. Sir Dudley dispatched his chaplain John Hales to report on the proceedings, since the Synod was of great interest to him and indeed of great significance to all Englishmen. The Golden Remains contains the reports which Hales wrote from Dort to his master, the ambassador at the Hague. The churchmen at Dort were debating a point as vital in their day as a discussion of capitalism versus communism would be in ours, with the added drama that the debaters in this instance had the power to fix the religious beliefs for hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen. The question was the perennial one of free-will versus predestination. The teachings of Calvin and hence of the Dutch Reformed Church upheld predestination. For many Dutchmen this doctrine had been shaken by a famous Dutch theologian, Arminius. The reasoning of Arminius, and of his predecessors and followers, loosely stated, was that if God had destined some men to be saved and others damned, then He had destined some men to be sinners. Thus God had decreed that there should be sin and thereby God had sinned himself—a monstrous idea which Arminius and his associates rejected. So the pillars of the Dutch Reformed Church sat in solemn session at Dort and defended Calvinism against the dangerous doctrines of the Arminians, or Remonstrants as they preferred to be called, and John Hales sat in the gallery amid the dogs, children and tourists, and in the poor light took notes for his reports to Sir Dudley Carlton. His letters comprise one of the best accounts of the famous Synod and one which is most familiar to Englishmen and Americans.
In Hales’ account the Synod comes to life. It is not an awful and august event of history. It is a convention, with the characteristics of conventions which we have known. There are the interminable hours of petty business, unimportant except to professional conventioneers; there are the longwinded speakers, the feebly humorous speakers, the yes-men, profoundly advocating what has already been approved. There is also the spectacle of the Calvinist majority, as cruel and heartless as any majority can be, ruthlessly crushing their Arminian opponents. Hales reports the proceedings with a Calvinist bias, but such was the reasonableness, the good temper, the cogency with which the Arminians presented their doctrine that he was convinced against his will and sometime later concluded that he would have “to bid John Calvin goodnight.”
When Hales returned from Holland he lived quietly at Eton, going occasionally to London where he had a great many literary friends who valued him highly. One of them, John Suckling, wrote a poem bidding Hales to “come to town.” Dryden told a story that when Ben Jonson spoke at length on Shakespeare’s lack of learning, Hales remarked that if Shakespeare “had not read the ancients he had likewise not stolen anything from them.” Clarendon said Hales had a better memory for books than any one except Falkland. Anthony a Wood thought him a veritable walking library, and Andrew Marvell thought that he had “one of the clearest heads and best prepared breasts in Christendom.” He died at the age of seventy-three and was at that time described as “a pretty little man, sanguine—of a cheerful countenance, very gentle and courteous.” Aside from this report on the Synod of Dort, Hales did not write much; indeed, as to writing, he is said to have been “obstinate against it.” One thing he did write in addition to the Golden Remains is an item of particular interest to librarians and bookmen, the funeral oration of Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library.
The materials mentioned here are physically located in Special Collections. For more information on those materials, contact Special Collections.
What is the Honnold Library Record?
The Honnold Library Record, published from 1958 until 1975, was the publication of the Honnold Library Society, the friends of the library group, founded in 1954. All the issues of the Honnold Library Record are available online in the CCDL in the Honnold Library Record Collection.
— michael | September 3, 2008 11:31 AM | The more you know
