laudable Practice

On the Sunday after Ascension Day, many Anglicans will (in one form or another) pray Cranmer's beautiful petition: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before ... In his Sermon VI (from a collection of sermons published in 1675 but preached during the 1640s and 50s), Henry Hammond set forth how the promise of the Comforter was "the main business" of our Lord's Ascension: The third, and in sum, the powerfullest Argument to prove God's willingness that we should live, is, that he hath bestowed his spirit upon us; that as soon as he called up the Son, he sent the Comforter. This may seem to be the main business that Christ ascended to Heaven a­bout; so that a Man would guess from the xvi Chapter of St. John and Vers. 7. that if it had not been for that, Christ had tarried amongst us till this time; but that it was more expedient to send the Spirit...

On this Holy Thursday, words from Jeremy Taylor's sermon 'The Miracles of the Divine Mercy', Part I , in which he expounds how our humanity is, in the Ascension of our Lord, exalted to a dignity greater than the angels: human nature is so highly exalted and mended by that mercy, which God sent immediately upon the fall of Adam, the promise of Christ, that when he did come, and actuate the purposes of this mission, and ascended up into heaven, he carried human nature above the seats of angels ... And as the seating of his human nature in that glorious seat brought to him all adoration, and the majesty of God, and the greatest of his exaltation; so it was so great an advancement to us, that all the angels of heaven take notice of it, and feel a change in the appendage of their condition; not that they are lessened, but that we, who in nature are less than angels, have a relative dignity greater, and an equal honour of being fellow-servants.  This mystery is plain in Scripture...

... that the rule of Divine government is one of benevolence, and nothing but benevolence ... sentiments of this character are evidently the animating principle of the false cheerfulness, and the ill-founded hope, and the blind charitableness, which I have already assigned to the man of the world. So said John Henry Newman in his 1832 sermon ' On Justice, as a Principle of Divine Governance '. It may, of course, be due to my rather engrained prejudice against Newman and his tiresome, perpetual angst, particularly in the 1830s, but one does get the impression that benevolence and cheerfulness were not exactly welcome guests in Newman's mind. The phrase "false cheerfulness" is directed by Newman against William Paley's Natural Theology  (1802). My initial reaction, however, is to - admittedly rather unfashionably - instinctively warm to and be grateful for the vision of benevolence and cheerfulness in Paley's great work. In his 2024 paper ' Revisiting Pa...

In late 1645, with Royalist defeat imminent in the first civil war and with Parliament dismantling the Church of England, Jeremy Taylor became chaplain to Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery. The seat of the Carberys was Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire. The name of the estate gave Taylor the title to his two volumes of sermons for " the summer half-year " (1651) and " for the winter half-year " (1653), preached to the Carbery household. I read through the sermons over the space of year, beginning in Advent 2024 and ending in early 2026. There is an abundance of riches in the Golden Grove sermons. Many passages are delightful examples of 'the Shakespeare of divines'. I was also struck by the consistent invocations of classical wisdom, demonstrating how Taylor understood this to cohere with Christian teaching. The allusions to the circumstances of the Interregnum were also noticeable. Amongst all this, however, one particular small, playful detail joyfully am...

Rogationtide. It is a time, surely, for the Benedicite at Morning Prayer. In his 1805 An Exposition of the Book of Common Prayer according to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America , the New Jersey PECUSA cleric Andrew Fowler offered an effective summary of well-established 18th century Church of England commentary on the place and use of the Benedicite in the Prayer Book .  It is worth noting the 1786 proposed PECUSA revision - which provoked a critical response from the bishops of the Church of England - did not include the Benedicite. This was probably influenced by the 1689 Liturgy of Comprehension, albeit that the latter, unlike the 1786 proposals, provided Psalm 148 as a replacement for the Benedicite. It is probable that its restoration in 1789 was to reassure the bishops of the Church of England that PECUSA was not seeking radical reform of the Prayer Book. We can be grateful, then, that the Benedicite was restored to the PECUSA Prayer ...

In early 1623, Francis White was one of the Church of England divines who took part in a disputation , ordered by James I/VI, with Fisher the Jesuit. Later that year, White was appointed Dean of Carlisle, a clearly a sign of royal approval. In 1626, early in the reign of Charles I, he was appointed Bishop of Carlisle, with Cosin preaching at his consecration. He was closely associated with the ecclesiastical policies of the Personal Rule, with his Treatise of the Sabbath Day published in 1635 at the direction of Charles and dedicated to Laud. The trajectory of White post-1623 career in the Church of England - Jacobean and Caroline - is mentioned in order to emphasise that his role in the disputation was clearly highly regarded. It is this which makes his handling of one issue in the debates particularly significant. Regarding the apostolicity of the Church, Fisher had stated: The Church is Apostolicall, and that apparantly descending from the Apostolicall Sea, by succession of Bishops...