The sermon as a literary form has fallen on hard times, and no wonder. Fiddle the dial to your heart’s content; at best you’ll hear soporific rants, larded with sob stories festooned with the most incredible saccharin endings. Sometimes on a long road trip I listen to these harangues on the radio, in the hope of diversion if not edification, and I’m sorry to say that nowadays even the hell-fire preachers are working with damp brimstone. Once in a while an old-timer is put on the air, but just as he’s beginning to work up a righteous lather, some anodyne hymn intervenes, sounding for all the world like a massed choir of spayed cats purring in unison.

It wasn’t always thus. In fact, in the hands of a John Donne or a Jonathan Edwards, the sermon could be truly awe-inspiring, and not solely as oratory. The best preachers possessed a sure instinct for the secrets of the human heart. That instinct allowed them to elucidate a scriptural text in a way that had meaning for their auditors, but it also guided them in the best devices for catching and holding the attention (sometimes, in earlier ages, for two or three hours at a sitting). A successful sermon operated like a good metaphor: It brought remote things together in astonished conjunction and made vivid that the man or woman or child slumping in the pew faced the same urgent moral dilemmas as Abraham or Esther or Doubting Thomas.

Not surprisingly, the greatest masters of this discredited form were Protestant, since the Reformation put such emphasis on the scriptural word. And in the English tradition the greatest preacher of them all, by common consent, was the oddly named Lancelot Andrewes. Andrewes, who was born in 1555, is remembered today by devout Anglicans, especially for his private prayers, but is more celebrated for his incomparable prose, thanks largely to the advocacy of T.S. Eliot.

Eliot took the first line of “The Coming of the Magi” from one of Andrewes’s Christmas sermons, and he wrote a highly influential essay in 1926 on the Elizabethan divine that helped to resuscitate Andrewes’s reputation as a writer. But literary genius was not Andrewes’s sole claim on immortality. This becomes strikingly evident in “Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons & Lectures (Oxford University Press, 531 pages, $175), edited by Peter Mc-Cullough. This splendid volume, with its authoritative introduction, exemplary selection, and voluminous notes, is worth every penny of its (rather horrendous) price.

To Eliot we owe the recognition that Andrewes was probably the most original prose writer of the Elizabethan period; and yet, such praise based purely on notions of style somehow misses an essential point. Andrewes’s peculiar style cannot be divorced from his subject matter: the precise words, and the wording, of the Bible. To say that the words of holy writ inspired him would be the grossest of understatements. Andrewes was as obsessed with extracting the last drop of meaning from every phrase as a starfish is with sucking the ultimate succulence from a clam. A phrase or even a single word set his refined imagination seething with interpretative possibilities.

Andrewes’s sermons bedazzled high and low. Courtiers and commoners flocked to hear him. Queen Elizabeth and then King James doted on his homilies, many of which he delivered in their presence. Even the profane playwright Thomas Nashe, no pillar of piety, was wonderstruck, commenting on “the incomparable gifts that were in him.” His language was certainly unusual. He laced pungent colloquialisms drawn from the common street with snippets of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; he favored abrupt, jagged sentences, curt interjections interwoven with beautifully cadenced phrases.

Though all of his discourses are memorable, perhaps the most impressive is the sermon he preached at Whitehall in the presence of King James on Easter Day 1620, based on the passage in John X:11-17, when Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb of Jesus at daybreak and finds it empty. “It is Easter day abroad,” he begins and goes on, “And it is so in the text.” The day and the text are parallel actualities, each authenticated by the other. In the extraordinary discourse that follows, Andrewes pries and winkles every nuance of significance from the bare and homely episode, a mere six verses. The theme of the sermon is love and Mary Magdalene, the common whore who bathed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair, becomes in Andrewes’s eloquence the very figure of the most passionate human ardor.

The conception wasn’t new but the treatment of it was. The Magdalene embodies the extreme instance. Her redemption occurs not because she believes – in fact, Andrewes stresses her incredulity – but because she loves. “Love running down her cheeks” is how Andrewes puts it, unforgettably. And when the risen Christ appears to her in the guise of a gardener, Andrewes remarks, “Christ rising was indeed a gardener, and that a strange one, who made such an herb grow out of the ground this day, as the like was never seen before, a dead body, to shoot forth alive out of the grave.” That clinching phrase, which conflates the burgeoning of a shoot in spring with the resurrection, would be taken up again, not long after, by the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, who wrote of “bright shoots of everlastingness.”

Lancelot Andrewes went to school with Edmund Spenser. As a student he mastered not only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but Arabic and Syriac, as well as some 15 modern languages. He was a friend of Richard Hooker, whose great work on ecclesiastical polity he edited. King James appointed him to the committee of translators for the Bible that bears that monarch’s name (he had responsibility for Genesis to Kings). He knew and inspired George Herbert, and the young John Milton composed a Latin elegy for him when he died in 1626. Andrewes was in a very real sense a literary man and a scholar to the nerve endings in his fingertips at the same time as he pursued an ever more distinguished career in the church, becoming royal almoner and bishop of Winchester; and yet, neither his ecclesiastical distinction nor his wizardry with language fully explains his genius.

Andrewes possessed to an unusual degree an analogical imagination that all his learning, rhetorical adeptness, and mastery of language incessantly nourished. Another sermon included in this volume elaborates the three words, “Remember Lot’s wife.” Out of those “five syllables,” as Andrewes puts it, he spins an amazing homily on faintheartedness, on time and memory and the loyalty they require. Andrewes’s rambunctious use of the English language in all the vigor of its youth worked in concert with his erudition and wit to quicken his message but it was his faith that shaped his style. Perhaps this is why, almost four centuries later, his words still shoot forth alive out of the grave.

eormsby@nysun.com