Elsewhere, in his famous sermon The Sermon on the Plough, Latimer positively and in succinct Reformation fashion, described saving faith as “a faith that embraceth Christ, and trusteth to his merits; a lively faith, a justifying faith; a faith that maketh a man righteous, without respect of works.” Little wonder that Latimer affectively described this faith in the finished work of Christ in the first sermonic extract cited above: “O what a joyful thing was this!”

The English Reformer, Hugh Latimer (c.1485-1555) is probably best remembered today for his stirring statement at the time of his Oxford martyrdom in the autumn of 1555 when he urged his co-martyr Nicholas Ridley, “Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” But in previous generations Latimer was equally remembered for his preaching. The twentieth-century historian Patrick Collinson, for instance, once described him as one of the greatest English-speaking preachers of the sixteenth century.1 And according to Augustine Bernher, a Francophone pastor who was mentored by Latimer and later pastored during the reign of Elizabeth I, “if England ever had a prophet, he was one.”2

Latimer preached hundreds of sermons, but there are only forty-one extant. These sermons were copied down as Latimer preached, which proved to be quite difficult, as the copyists struggled to keep up with what Allan G. Chester has called “the torrent of the preacher’s eloquence” and fluency.3 The sermons especially reveal a preacher who was able to adapt himself to his audience: he explicates a biblical text in its context, explains points of doctrine, emphasizes moral lessons, warns against the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, and all the while the sermons are suffused with what Allan Chester has called a “heartfelt earnestness.”

Here, for example, is Latimer speaking about salvation being by faith alone in Christ in a sermon that he preached on December 27, 1552:

“… by [Christ’s] passion, which he hath suffered, he merited that as many as believe in him shall be as well justified by him, as though they themselves had never done any sin, and as though they themselves had fulfilled the law to the uttermost. For we, without him, are under the curse of the law; the law condemneth us; the law is not able to help us; and yet the imperfection is not in the law, but in us: for the law itself is holy and good, but we are not able to keep it, and so the law condemneth us; but Christ with his death hath delivered us from the curse of the law”

Read More