'Cheerful, simple, and majestic': a Protestant Episcopalian piety and ethos

On Saint Patrick's Day, Bruce Springsteen posted on social media a series of photographs from the island of Ireland. Amongst the photographs was this one, in a church immediately identifiable as a rural Church of Ireland parish church.

The photograph captures the quiet, modest piety of Irish Anglicanism, a quiet, modest piety which was the traditional characteristic of those churches termed Protestant Episcopalian.

We see here a parish church designed for worship according to the Book of Common Prayer, with its modest ceremonies, its words shaping and sustaining the faith of generations, its rites marking the passage of years and lives; a Reformed Catholick church, in which liturgy and sacrament are reverently, faithfully celebrated, with the plain glass and walls, and absence of imagery, reflecting classically Reformed concerns; in which prayer desk and pulpit embody the good and godly routine of Sunday Morning Prayer and sermon, quietly nourishing the faithful; in which the words 'This do in remembrance of me' behind the Holy Table encapsulate a modest but deeply felt sacramental piety.

John Jebb, a Church of Ireland divine who would become Bishop of Limerick, preaching at the consecration of a chapel in 1818, quite beautifully articulated the piety represented by this ethos - "cheerful, simple, and majestic":

As to appearance and interior decoration, the object has been to make this building what may properly be called a Church-of-England Chapel; that is, on the one hand to avoid all ostentatious ornament and show, but, on the other, to shun all sordid and unseemly negligence: in a word, the attempt has been made, and, it is hoped, not unsuccessfully, to render the building answerable to the service of our Church: which above any public service in the world, is, at once, cheerful, simple, and majestic.

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