laudable Practice

Last week we saw how, in his 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) - made the case that the Church of Scotland had authority to alter ceremonies established at the Reformation. Lindsay invoked Reformed insistence that "ceremonies are but temporal" to undermine an exalted claim for fixing that particular ceremonial order as beyond change and reform. In today's extract, Lindsay moves on to consider the various Articles of Perth , demonstrating how it was fitting that they, in changed circumstances, altered the ceremonial order of the 1560 Book of Discipline . He began by again emphasising that changing circumstances justify a change to mere ceremonies: For if by occasion of any of these circumstances, the obseruation, which was profitable at one time, become hurtfull at another, and that which serued for reformation, breedes and fosters corruption, pr...

And albeit this author would not have them bare tokens, yet and they be only tokens ... One can almost hear the contempt with which Gardiner, in the above quote, used the word "tokens" with reference to Cranmer's doctrine of the Lord's Supper. Noting Cranmer's denial that the Bread and Wine are "bare tokens", Gardiner suggests that this denial misses the point - the Bread and Wine are still then "only tokens". Cranmer, however, does not run from the term in his Answer to Gardiner (1551). In fact, he confidently embraces it, affirming that the Bread and Wine in the Supper are indeed "tokens": Is therefore the whole use of the bread in the whole action and ministration of the Lord's holy Supper but a naked or nude and bare token? Is not one loaf being broken and distributed among faithful people in the Lord's Supper, taken and eaten of them, a token that the body of Christ was broken and crucified for them? and is to them spiri...