'Not a word is added for the purpose of exciting veneration': Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures and the cult of the saints
You may remember that when Moses died, his body was not to be found: and this, as it is well understood, was done in mercy, lest the Israelites should, from the great benefits of which he had been the instrument to them, have been led to worship his remains, or in any other way to pay him adoration. It is striking to see how God appears to have pursued a similar course with respect to the first publishers of the New Testament. Of the Virgin Mary we know absolutely nothing after the ascension of our Saviour, except that she was at one time with the disciples at Jerusalem ...
Going on to others, we may observe that of Joseph, her husband, not a word is said. We are left to collect that he died before our Lady only from what passed at the foot of the cross. The same remark applies to the apostles. Of them nothing is told us in scripture but what is absolutely necessary for the proper publication of the gospel. Not a word is added for the purpose of exciting veneration, or even of gratifying curiosity. Of only one apostle the death is related: and that of Peter is merely intimated in the way of warning and of prophecy.
We can see here how the reserve and modesty of the Prayer Book tradition regarding the saints - two scriptural Marian feasts, avoiding reference in collects to the martyrdom of the Apostles, no observance of a feast of Saint Joseph - is both rooted in Scripture and shapes wider Anglican piety. Such reserve and modesty, shaped by the proportions of the attention given by Scripture to these figures, ensures that reverence for the Blessed Virgin Mary and the witness of the Apostles does not obscure the church's centre, the Ascended and Exalted Christ.
At the same time, note Le Mesurier's use of "our Lady", almost certainly deliberately following the use in the Prayer Book Kalendar for the Annunication, is a reminder that observance of the feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Apostles is a feature of the Prayer Book. Here too, however, Le Mesurier points to a significant contrast with Tridentine liturgical texts. He notes how the collect for All Saints' Day in the Tridentine rite includes reference to "our intercessors being multiplied". There is, of course, nothing whatsoever akin to this in the Prayer Book collects for All Saints or any saints' days. Likewise, the BCP stands completely apart from those invocations of the Blessed Virgin Mary quoted by Le Mesurier from Tridentine Marian offices.
For Le Mesurier and the churchmen of his era, this was all entirely unremarkable, conventional, and straightforward: they were Protestant episcopalians, the Prayer Book was clearly infinitely superior to Breviarium Romanum, invocation of saints was erroneous, and the idea of looking wistfully at Tridentine liturgical sources preposterous. That within a few decades after Le Mesurier delivered his Bampton Lectures, advanced Tractarians would be rejecting the instinctive Old High understanding of these matters is, perhaps, one of the clearest indications of the rupture which followed 1833.
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