laudable Practice

As we abhor the superstitious observation of festival days by the Papists, and detest all licentious and profane abuse thereof by the common sort of professors, so we think, that the inestimable benefits received from God by our Lord Jesus Christ, his birth, passion, resurrection, ascension, and sending down of the Holy Ghost, were commendably and godly remembered at certain particular days and times ... The Articles of Perth , adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1618, restored the observance of the great feasts of our redemption. The Second Helvetic Confession had said of these observances, "we approve of it highly". The opponents of the Articles of Perth, however, invoked the 1560 Book of Discipline , which dismissed these observances as feasts "that the Papists have invented". In particular, opponents viewed the observances as a binding of the conscience: imposed vpon the consciences of men without the expresse Commandement of Gods Word,...

As Cranmer, in his Answer to Gardiner (1553), reviews his opponent's critique of his eucharistic theology, he turns to what is perhaps the heart of that critique - that Cranmer denies the mystery of the Sacrament, reducing it to an empty ceremony: But if it may now be thought seemly for us to be so bold, in so high a mystery to begin to discuss Christ's intent; what should move us to think, that Christ would use so many words, without effectual and real signification, as he rehearsed touching the mystery of this sacrament? The nature of Cranmer's rebuttal of this accusation is significant. He invokes a series of patristic comments affirming that the Lord termed the bread and wine of the Sacrament His Body and Blood: I have alleged Irene saying that "Christ confessed bread be his body, and the cup to be his blood." I have cited Tertullian, who saith, in many places, that "Christ called bread his body." I have brought in for the same purpose Cyprian, who ...

We first encountered the Dutch Remonstrant theologian Episcopius early in Nelson's Life of Dr. George Bull , with the young Bull subversively reading him while under the care of a Calvinistic tutor during the Interregnum. The Remonstrant thinker, said Nelson, "preserved [the young Bull] from the bad Principles of those Times, and directed his Understanding in distinguishing Truths of very great Importance".  Episcopius now reappears as Nelson explores Bull's  Defensio Fidei Nicaenae : the context, however, is much more critical of the great Remonstrant. Part of Bull's motivation in writing this work was, Nelson states, to challenge a tendency amongst Remonstrant writers, while rejecting Socinian error, to yet critique the Council of Nicaea: It is plain Episcopius was far from being a Socinian, as our Author truly observeth, having expresly written against, and solidly overthrown the fundamental Article of Socinianism; and endeavoured from the Testimony of Scriptu...

At Parish Communion and Act of Remembrance, Remembrance Sunday, 9.11.25 Luke 20:38 “He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive.” [1] On 4th August this year, I stood in Nine Elms Military Cemetery, near the village of Thelus in northern France. I was visiting the grave of my great-grandmother’s brother, Private David Henry Beattie, 1st/4th Seaforth Highlanders. David was killed in action in the Battle of Arras, on 10th April 1917 - Easter Tuesday. Standing at his grave was, for me, a personal pilgrimage of remembrance - remembering a young Irishman, born in 1891, a soldier of the Great War, who died, far from home and family, in the fields of France and Flanders. But why do we remember? Why Remembrance Sunday? Why, over a century on, do we on this day remember those who fell in the service of King and Country in the Great War? Why, in this 80th anniversary year of its end, do we remember the dead of the Second World War? We do so, fundamentally, beca...

In mortality there is a sharpness / of perception - everything made bare and elemental. Christopher Yokel, 'Life-In-Death', in Autumn Poems (2019). November.  It is the month in which intimations of mortality are particularly evident .  With the glories of Autumn past, the landscape dulls, quietens, and prepares for Winter's arrival. The trees are bare, the days shorten and grow colder.  Another year of this earthly life is passing.  It is a month when my mind turns to the fitting character of the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead . Yokel's words, written of Autumn's end and November days, could have also been composed to describe the Prayer Book's Burial office. In mortality there is a sharpness / of perception - everything made bare and elemental. The starkness of The Burial of the Dead is, contrary to its liturgical critics and their desire for something much less bracing, its great strength.  All else is stripped away. Death is confronted, not denied...

In his defence of authority by which the Articles of Perth were introduced, in a  1621 account of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth in 1618 , David Lindsay - Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38) - addressed the allegation that the practices required by the Articles were contrary to the order and discipline of the Church of Scotland as praised by Beza. Lindsay, however, points out that this is not what Beza meant by Scotland's "good order or discipline". Beza, rather, was praising the Geneva-like approach to ecclesiastical discipline: "the use of this Ecclesiasticall power in censuring of manners". What is more, not only was Beza not referring to the particular ceremonies that had been previously adopted by the Church of Scotland, it was also the case that those ceremonies did not conform to the Genevan use: But yee, no sooner heare good order or discipline commended but presently yee imagine, that your table ge...