laudable Practice

I A. B do declare that it is not lawfull upon any pretence whatsoever to take Armes against the King and that I do abhorr that traiterous Position of taking Armes by His Authority against His Person or against those that are commissionated by him ... And I do declare that I do hold there lies no Obligacion upon me or on any other person from the Oath comonly called the Solemne League and Covenant to endeavour any change or alteration of Government either in Church or State And that the same was in it selfe an unlawfull Oath and imposed upon the Subjects of this Realme against the knowne Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome. The requirement of the 1662 Act of Uniformity that clergy openly rejected the Solemn League and Covenant as "an unlawfull Oath", contrary to the "Lawes and Liberties" of the realm, was - despite now being usually overlooked by many Anglican commentators - a crucial provision of the Act. The Solemn League and Covenant had its roots in the 1638 N...

In a sermon to his clergy in 1661 (' The Minister's Duty in Life and Doctrine '), during his primary visitation of his diocese, Taylor lamented that "the catholic church hath been too much and too soon divided". He went on, however, to point to that which Christians held in common, those "things simply necessary" for the common ordering of the church catholic: in things simply necessary God hath preserved us still unbroken; all nations, and all ages recite the creed, and all pray the Lord's prayer, and all pretend to walk by the rule of the commandments; and all churches have ever kept the day of Christ's resurrection, or the Lord's day, holy; and all churches have been governed by bishops, and the rites of Christianity have been for ever administered by separate orders of men, and those men have been always set apart by prayer and the imposition of the bishop's hands; and all Christians have been baptized, and all baptized persons were o...

What struck me most when reading Fiona McCall's excellent Baal's Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013), was its identification of an Episcopalian piety emerging out of the experience of the defeat of the Royalist and Episcopalian cause, a piety which would particularly shape and characterise Anglicanism during the 'long 18th century'.  The first reference to this Episcopalian piety ('Episcopalian' is here used in light of the anachronistic nature of 'Anglican') might give us pause for thought, an apparent stepping away from scriptural discourse: During the 1640s, loyalist clergy had been just as inclined as the 'godly' to pepper their discourse with biblical quotations ... But, after defeat, Anglican discourse eschewed this scriptural focus, developing what some have seen as a characteristic 'conservative Anglican' style: meditative, obscure, ambiguous and symbolic (p.28f). This reserve, however, points to, encou...

Now I saw in my dream, that the highway up which Christian was to go, was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said, with a merry heart, "He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death." Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him, that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden. He looked therefore, and looked again, eve...