John Donne's verse epistle, "Honour is so sublime perfection;' is his most religious poem, 1 at least in the restricted sense that the word "religion" appears in it more often than in any of his other poems.' This curious fact might surprise both specialist and non-specialist readers of Donne alike. The poem is never printed with or listed among his religious poems. Like Donne's other neglected verse epistles, it lacks the qualities we most readily associate with his best studied religious poetry: the witty profanity of the Songs and Sonnets, the searching skepticism of "Satyre III;' and the devotional intensity of the Holy Sonnets? Indeed, since it takes up Horatian themes of friendship and patronage, ethics and politics, it is unclear how "Honour is so sublime perfection" might qualify as a religious poem in the first place. This problem has been made all the more acute in the wake of the so-called "turn to religion" in early modern literary criticism.' This turn is now far enough advanced that its methods and motives have begun to be challenged. One objection has been that it has tended to equate religion with inwardness, so that religious criticism adopts the agenda of analytic psychology and existentialist phenomenology and searches out a lineage of spiritual self-alienation that links Saint Paul with Levinas via Augustine, Luther, and Freud. In this essay, I will propose a further turn within the "turn to religion" that will enable our conception of Renaissance religion to encompass "Honour is so sublime perfection:' This further turn away from inwardness has been made in other disciplines-i-specifically in biblical scholarship, early church history, and post-secular critical theory-and has only just begun to register in early modern literary criticism.' In "Honour is so sublime perfection;' Donne likewise turns to religion in order to move away from inwardness. His model for doing this is Paul, from whom Donne gleans a strategy for reconciling daring and discretion, two qualities that critics tend to polarize as the hallmarks of Donne's rakish youth and his 27

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This article is primarily concerned with the theories and practice of the Christian Scriptures. It is divided into two main sections, the first being the theory and practice of Scriptures before 1200, where it examines Augustine's legacy and contribution to the history of preaching. The second part of the article is on the theory and practice of Scriptures after 1200. Here the article discusses the theoretical manuals and standardization of preaching that emerged, and introduces the thematic sermon.