CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 1

O N TUESDAY, 2 July 1661, the newly appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge delivered his inaugural lecture before a distinguished company, including the Lord Chancellor Clarendon. John Pearson had already done much to merit Bumet's future description of him as "in all respects the greatest divine of the age." Two years before, when he was still enjoying the enforced leisure provided by the Puritans for the "Prelatist" clergy, he had published his Exposition of the Creed-"within its limits the most perfect and complete production of English dogmatic theology." Eleven years later, and almost on the eve of his own elevation to the episcopate, he was to produce, in his Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii, aimed especially at the criticisms of the French Reformed scholar Jean Daille, the definitive defence of the authenticity of one of the weightiest ancient testimonies to episcopal church order. Meanwhile, as he faced his new audience from his professorial chair, he undertook to make plain what they must expect from him. He could hardly have made it plainer. He proposed (he said) to teach theology, the "science of God and divine things"-and, more precisely, to teach scholastic theology, because of its sense of order, its clarity, its effectiveness against doctrinal error. After noting both the older scholastic practice of using the Libri Sententiarum of Peter Lombard as a textbook and the newer custom of following the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, and with a graceful reference to the influence of the noted commentary of Cardinal Cajetan in promoting the latter alternative, he announced his own decision in favour of Aquinas' great work as "more accurate, more lucid, ... [and] more famous." The twenty incomplete lectures that remain of his own projected Summa Theologiae suggest that Pearson was well equipped in learning and judgment to carry out his plan, and we can only regret that so little of his work is now at our disposal.