laudable Practice

From a Keble sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent (in his Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide ), another extract which exudes Old High piety. Central to the piety and pastoral practice of the Old High tradition was an understanding of the Christian life as definitively shaped by the covenant of Baptism, the bestowal of regenerating grace in the Sacrament calling us to holiness of life and, therefore, ongoing repentance. One result of this was a caution and reserve regarding 'deathbed repentance', exemplified in Taylor's writings on the matter.  This is precisely what is seen in Keble's sermon. In typically Old High fashion, he refers to the teaching of the Catechism on Baptism: "wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven". Here is our spiritual birthright. That we profane this gift as did Esau with his birthright undergirds the call to repentance. The gracious covenant of redeeming love in...

Continuing with extracts from John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we turn to the Second Collect, for Peace, at Mattins. Shepherd provides a pithy introduction to the collect: This Collect, copied with some little variation from a form in the Sacramentary of Gregory, is not more remarkable for its antiquity, than for its piety and comprehensive brevity. Having noted the antiquity of the collect - reminding us how its place in Matins draws us into an ancient Christian prayer - Shepherd then provides a beautiful reflection on the collect's meaning: The title of this prayer is a Collect for peace. Peace is the happiness of the earth, and a type of heaven. All earthly blessings are nothing without it, and in it all heavenly blessings are comprehended. Peace was the first legacy bequeathed to the world, through our blessed Redeemer, and peace was the last bequest of our dying Lord to his disciples. ...

The moment when I realised that I could not become a Roman Catholic took place in a restaurant in Islington, when we were arguing about the Roman view of Anglican orders being ‘null and void’. It shot in upon me, with terrible force, that I could not join a church that taught that George Herbert was no true priest. The words are those of Caroline Moore , in debate with her journalist husband Charles Moore (now Baron Moore of Etchingham), when the latter crossed the Tiber following the Church of England's ordination of women to the priesthood in 1992. Caroline Moore's words capture something of the significance of George Herbert for many of us. Herbert exemplifies something that is to be particularly cherished in the Anglican way. Ronald Blythe hints at what might lie at the heart of this in his perceptive comment: Lent was Herbert's season. He was born in Lent, married in Lent, and died in Lent.  Lent is the season when grandiose, exalted claims are to wither. When peniten...

Section XII  of Taylor's The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654) abounds with quotations from the Greek Fathers. Taylor demonstrates how the teaching of the Greek Fathers regarding the change effected in the bread and wine in the Holy Mysteries does not support transubstantiation; that is, "the passage and conversion of the whole substance, into the whole substance". He points to the terms used by "the Greek Church" to describe the change occurring in the Eucharist: When the Fathers in this question speak of the change of the symbols in the holy Sacrament, they sometimes use the words of μεταβολὴ, μεταρρύθμισις, μετασκεύασμος, μεταστοιχείωσις, μεταποίησις in the Greek Church: conversion, mutation, transition, migration, transfiguration, and the like in the Latin; but they by these doe understand accidental and Sacramental conversions, not proper, natural and substantial. Such change is also affirmed by the Greek Fathers - and ...

Each Friday of Lent, laudable Practice is presenting words from Jeremy Taylor reflecting on fundamental practices shared by the Christian traditions. Today's practice is repentance, the means of "renewing of us into our first condition". Taylor's robust understanding of repentance echoes earlier traditions of penance, such as those seen in Rowan Williams' Passions of the Soul (2024), a reflection on the Eastern penitential tradition. Williams describes the "diagnostic work" of this tradition, an "honest registering of what is actually going on in us". If this, and Taylor's words below, seem to be too robust to us, it is suggestive of how we fail to take sin seriously. (Recognition of this, by the way, seems to be contributing to a renewed appreciation for the Commination rite .) Williams' words regarding the Eastern penitential tradition are also applicable to Taylor's writing on repentance: seriously helpful in pastoral and perso...

From a Keble sermon for First Sunday in Lent (in his Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide ), an extract demonstrating a quite conventional Old High Lenten piety, shaped by the Commination and the general Confession at the Holy Communion. Again, there is no sense - as in his Ash Wednesday sermon - that the Commination is in any way lacking because of the absence of older, abandoned ceremonies. Likewise, the general Confession is presented as the appropriate confession, with no mention being made of a necessity for another form of confession. These Prayer rites, in other words, can provide a sufficient liturgical and pastoral context for a response to Keble's call - "all have need of penitence". Once more the time of Lent is come; in one year more the Holy Church has cried aloud in our ears and spared not. She has lifted up her voice like a trumpet, declaring as you heard last Wednesday, the sentences of God's wrath against impenitent sinners, who are su...

Continuing with extracts from John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we consider his commentary on the collects for Sundays and feast days. Quoting from the Catholic humanist Cassander, Shepherd notes the antiquity of this form of prayer: "the ancient church first called these prayers Collects, from their being used when the people were come together, and collected in religious assemblies". This emphasis on the antiquity of the collects is significant in light of how Shepherd organised the Sunday and feast day collects into three groups.  There are those - 14 in total - "taken from ancient models, but considerably altered and improved by our Reformers, and the Reviewers of the Liturgy". Amongst these, however, is the replacement for the pre-Reformation Breviary collect for the Annunciation, which had referred to her intercession. It was replaced with a collect from the Gregorian Sa...

In Section XI of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), Taylor's use of Fathers of the Eastern Churches continues. He invokes them in the context of affirming that - in the words of the so-called Black Rubric - "the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here" (emphasis added). The first Eastern father to whom Taylor turns in this section is Theodoret of Cyrus: Christ as man according to the body is in a place and goes from a place, and when he comes to another place is not in the place from whence he came ... So Theodoret, Domini corpus incorruptibile resurrexit & impatibile & immortale, & divinâ gloriâ glorificatum est, & à coelestibus adoratur potestatibus; corpus tamen est, priorem habens circumscriptionem. Christs body even after the resurrection is circumscribed as it was before. And therefore as it is impious to deny God to be invisible: so it is profane, not to believe and professe...

Having considered Thomas Wilson's Introduction to The Ornaments of Churches Considered, With a Particular View to the Late Decoration of the Parish Church of St. Margaret Westminster (1761), we now move to the body of the text. The same Laudian vision evident in the Introduction is also seen here. In Section III, the work reviews descriptions of church buildings of the patristic era. This extract, in thoroughly Laudian fashion, notes the patristic basis for use of the term 'altar': The upper Part corresponding to the Division of the Jewish Temple, was the Chancel; here was placed the Communion-Table, or Altar. These Names were promiscuously given, the former in regard to the Use to which it was applied, of partaking of the Communion on it; and the latter principally on Account of the Prayers and Oblations there made; and in this Part were Seats for those whose Office it was to perform the ministerial Functions. This is not the first use of the term 'altar' in the w...

During each week of Lent, laudable Practice will present words from Jeremy Taylor reflecting on fundamental practices shared by the Christian traditions. Today, praying the Psalter. Here Taylor offers a deeply patristic and beautifully Christological account of what it means to pray the Psalms, particularly appropriate for Lent as we prepare to enter into the mystery of the Passion and Resurrection: But that which pleases me most is the fancy of S. Hilary, expounding the Psalter to be meant by the Key of David, spoken of by S. John in his Revelation: And properly enough; for if we consider how many mysteries of Religion are open'd to us in the Psalter, how many things concerning Christ, what clear vaticinations concerning his Birth, his Priesthood, his Kingdome, his Death, the very circumstances of his Passion, his Resurrection, and all the degrees of his Exaltation-more clearly and explicitely recorded in the Psalter, then in all the old Prophets besides, we may easily beleeve th...

From a Keble sermon for Ash Wednesday (in his  Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide ), an extract demonstrating a Reformed Catholic understanding of Lenten fasting no different to that found in Old High sermons for the day and season: there was no hint at all here of a view of fasting incompatible with the doctrinal commitments of the Articles of Religion. We might also note that the sermon (and the other sermon for the day in this collection) includes no references to the past ceremony of ashing and, in referring to receiving the holy Sacrament at Easter, suggests that most of those who heard the sermon were not receiving regularly throughout Lent. All of this points to an Ash Wednesday sermon which differed little - if at all - from those delivered in Old High pulpits on the first day of Lent. For the reason why fasting and abstinence is good at this season, is no merit or goodness in the fasting or abstinence themselves, but because they are useful helps to us in ...

In an 1825 Ash Wednesday sermon, entitled ' Penance and Penitence ', Charles James Blomfield - then Bishop of Chichester, appointed to the See of London in 1828 - demonstrated how penitential season was approached in the pre-1833 Church of England. Blomfield had associations with the Hackney Phalanx. The preacher at his episcopal consecration in 1824 had been John Lonsdale, who had links to the Hackney Phalanx. The Old High Howley of London, translated to Canterbury in 1828, cultivated Blomfield as his successor. Blomfield's sermon, in other words, functions as an important indication of how Ash Wednesday and Lent were regarded and observed before 1833. The sermon is abundantly clear on how the season was to be approached with penitential seriousness: A more important, or more awful act of religious duty there can hardly be, than that for which we are met together this day; to make a solemn, a united, and I trust a sincere confession of our sins to him, from whom nothing is...

In Section X of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), Taylor demonstrates how the eucharistic language of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem cannot be understood to entail transubstantiation. He begins by addressing Cyril's concluding statement in the fourth lecture (9): the Roman doctors pretend certain words out of St. Cyril's fourth 'mystagogique catechism,' ['On the Mysteries'] against the doctrine of this paragraph: "Be sure of this, that this bread, which is seen of us, is not bread, although the taste perceives it to be bread, but the body of Christ: for under the species of bread, the body is given to thee; under the species of wine, the blood is given to thee" ... St. Cyril bids you not believe your sense. For taste and sight tells you it is bread, but it is not. But here is no harm done. For himself plainly explains his meaning in his next catechism. 'Think not that you taste bread and wine,' saith he. No, ...

At the Parish Eucharist on the Sunday before Lent, 11.2.24 Mark 9:2-9 “And he was transfigured before them.” It is at the centre-point in Mark’s Gospel.  The accounts of miracles and parables - revealing the Kingdom of God - have been the focus of Mark’s Gospel up to this point. Saint Peter, on behalf of the Twelve, has just confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. Mark is about to turn towards Jerusalem and the week of the Cross and the Resurrection. And it is at this pivotal point in his Gospel, that Mark brings us, following Jesus, with Peter, James, and John, up the mountain, to behold this mysterious event: “And he was transfigured before them”. The word Mark uses - now translated ‘transfigured’ - means transformed, mystically changed. The clothes of Jesus, we are told, “became dazzling white”, a description which speaks of a brilliant, light-filled glory. He adds, “such as no one on earth could bleach them”. He is reaching for words and phrases which will communicate ...

From a Keble sermon, in his collection Sermons for the Christian Year: From Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday , on the Litany.  Here Keble introduces the significance of praying for the Church in the Litany. In doing so, he refers in a very traditional Old High manner to the dangers facing the ecclesia Anglicana : from, on the one hand, the Low Church denial of the sacramental order of the Prayer Book; and, on the other, from those who cross the Tiber, likewise denying the Prayer Book's sacramental order. This extract exemplifies how Keble's sermons witness to the deep and profound influence of the Old High tradition upon this Tractarian leader: But for the spiritual condition of our English Church, believe me, my brethren, when I tell you that it is indeed very distressing. We are hard beset on both sides: and why? Because people have not the faith which they ought to have in the blessed Sacraments of Christ, whereby He both received us at first, and hath fed us all our lives long...

In Section IX of The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament (1654), we see further evidence of Taylor's commitment to 'breathing with both lungs' by again turning to Origen.  The key part of this Section is a commentary on Origen's eucharistic theology: we might regard it as part of Taylor's contribution to the ' Origenist moment in English theology '. He sees in Origen an understanding of the Eucharist which coheres with that of the English Church - "say we too" - in which heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material realities are affirmed, with the Lord's body "eaten in a spiritual sense", for "this is the plain and natural sense of the words of Origen": he plainly distinguishes the material part from the spiritual in the sacrament, and affirms, that "according to the material part, that meat that is sanctified by the word of God and prayer, enters into the mouths, descends into the belly, an...

Continuing with extracts from John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we consider the versicles and responses after the second Lord's Prayer at Matins and Evensong. Shepherd begins by identifying the source of these versicles and responses: From the recital of the Lord's Prayer we proceed to the interlocutory petitions, all of which except two are taken out of the psalms.  These versicles, in other words, root the Church's daily prayer in the Psalter. In doing so, they also illuminate other characteristics of the Church's prayer, for - as Shepherd notes - they provide a summary of the Sunday and daily collects: Whether it be entirely the effect of design, or something must be attributed to accident, these versicles are an epitome of the collects that regularly follow. The duty of the congregation is to join in the one, and to listen with attention to the other. Shepherd then proceeds to...

When Thomas Wilson, Prebendary of Westminster, turned to the Homily against Peril of Idolatry in his Introduction to The Ornaments of Churches Considered, With a Particular View to the Late Decoration of the Parish Church of St. Margaret Westminster (1761), he did not avoid the fact that the Homilies contained a strident critique of images. He addressed this in a manner which reflected wider and established Anglican thought regarding both the Homilies and other aspects of the Reformation era. Wilson began by recognising the context in which the Homilies were written, a context in which reformation of the Church was necessary and robust challenge had to be made of erroneous teaching and practices: the Compilers of the Homilies proceeded like Philosophers, who knew that when the Minds of Men were warped, it was necessary even to bend them into a contrary Direction. This, of course, echoed how Article 35 described the Homilies as "necessary for these times", wisely discerning ...

There are also obvious reasons why a Christian should never attend a gay wedding. Many wedding liturgies, including that of the Book of Common Prayer, require the officiant to ask early in the service if anyone present knows any reason why the couple should not be joined together in matrimony. A Christian is at that point obliged to speak up ... Of course, that applies beyond the issue of gay marriage. A marriage involving somebody who has not divorced a previous spouse for biblical reasons involves that person entering into an adulterous relationship. No Christian should knowingly attend such a ceremony either. Thus did Carl Trueman recently declare in First Things . It is rather odd that a conservative Presbyterian should invoke the Book of Common Prayer, rejected by the Presbyterian tradition when its representatives embraced schism rather than conformity in 1662. This, however, might explain why Trueman badly misinterprets the robustly Anglican 1662 rite.   To begin w...