'These reformed churches do not at all scruple communion with us': Reformation Day and an 18th century high church Tory bishop

To mark Reformation Day, words from a sermon - 'Objections against the Ceremonies used in our Church answered' - by George Smalridge, Bishop of Bristol 1714-19, in which he points to how such ceremonies did not separate the Church of England from "other reformed churches". The fact that Smalridge was a Tory with Jacobite allegiances, and a close friend of Francis Atterbury, emphasises that this was no Whiggish, low church declaration serving partisan Hanoverian purposes: rather, this was a sermon by a bishop who, unlike his low church colleagues, was pronounced in his criticisms of Dissent and supported Tory legislation against the Dissenting interest. This, in other words, was a thoroughly high church statement of the 18th century Church of England's care and affection for, and communion with, the other Churches of the Reformation, Lutheran and Reformed.

I proceed now to consider another objection urged against them [i.e. ceremonies] in order to render them odious and unpopular, which is this; that as by the practice of them we show too much resemblance with the Romish, so at the same time we show too little correspondence with the reformed churches abroad ...

But we have no reason to complain of other reformed churches upon this article; for they do not bring these accusations against us, but are grieved to find their names made use of to our disparagement. We can safely appeal to their public confessions, and to the suffrages of their most eminent divines; they are very large in the praises of our establishment, and their judgments concerning the rites and ceremonies prescribed and practised in our church are very different from the opinions of those among ourselves who dissent from us ...

Those who are acquainted with the practices and opinions of foreign churches know very well that the Lutheran churches, those which made the first and earliest protestations against the corruption of Rome, and to whom therefore upon that account a great respect is due from such as are their younger brethren, do use the very same ceremonies with those that are practised by us; that they have retained all that we have, and many that we have dropped; that their aversion to popery, though as strong and as deeply rooted as that of any the greatest abhorrers of it, hath never carried them so far as to make them look upon every rite used in that church as an accursed and abominable thing; that they neither look upon the surplice as an anti-christian garment, nor upon the cross in baptism, or kneeling at the sacrament, as badges and symbols of idolatry, but do observe these usages in the worship of God without any fear of contracting any defilement therefrom, or of offending God, or of scandalizing good Christians thereby; that those churches which are emphatically called the reformed, though they have not retained the same ceremonies, yet neither do they condemn those that have; that these never scruple to communicate with the others on account of such ceremonies; that when they have sometimes held

communion with each other, the Calvinist with the Lutheran, they have each alternately conformed to the rites of the other; that when they have refused to communicate together, they have never assigned this difference of rites as the ground of such refusal, but have declared, that if other obstacles were removed, this disagreement would be no hinderance of their mutual communion; that these reformed churches properly so called, having not the same objections against us as they have against the Lutherans, do not at all scruple communion with us, or refuse compliance with our ceremonies; that both their people and their pastors join with us in our public worship, and in the observance of such rites; that it is their avowed doctrine, as well as ours, that every national church hath power to make laws for herself in indifferent things. 

(The first illustration depicts the administration of the Sacrament of Baptism in the Georgian Church of England; the second, in an early 18th century French Reformed church.)