I was really interested to read extracts from two sermons by the Elizabethan Divine, Lancelot Andrewes, at the Gloriana Day last Saturday, because it highlighted the vast change of emphasis between preaching in 1590 and preaching today. For a start there is lots of allegorising of Old testament stories so that Elizabeth I became Deborah and England became Israel in one passage. And the text clearly assumed a wide knowledge of the Old Testament: at one point there was a reference to Zoar in which we were to understand that under Elizabeth England had been delivered by God from the equivalent of the fire and brimstone that rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah. Also there were a number of Latin quotations, which I took partly to be an indication of the fact that in the sixteenth century having the Bible publicly read in English and the liturgy celebrated in English was a comparatively new thing, such that in a transitional period one might expect to have plenty of Latin quotation from clergymen who had been schooled in Latin. Of course the court sermons of a man like Lancelot Andrewes were doubtless more self-consciously learned than one might expect in a Cornish church or in rural Lincolnshire, where a far less well educated curate might be more homespun. I think the density and allusiveness of Andrews made me attempt to be much more explicit when I preached my own sermon the next day. Anyway, congratulation to Penny Boxall and all our team for putting on such a splendid show.