laudable Practice

In March 1900, the US publication Literary Digest provided a fascinating glimpse of life in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Noting the "marked demarcation in matters of doctrine and worship" within PECUSA, the article provided a breakdown of "the relative strength of the High-, Low-, and Broad-Church parties". High Church is defined as "not elaborate ritual alone" but also "the importance of the sacraments" and a belief "in the place of the church, as preceding the Bible, not founded upon it". Low Church is taken to mean "attach[ing] less importance to the sacraments", being "evangelical in method, and sometimes "employ[ing] extempore prayer". As for Broad Church, it refers to "the liberal constructionists, sometimes of the Bible, oftener of church practises". Perhaps what is most significant about these introductory comments is that a Low Church, evangelical tradition...

In recent years, laudable Practice has turned to the commentary of John Shepherd on the Book of Common Prayer. Beginning in March 2023 , we considered his  A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796). June 2024 commenced a series of posts - concluding in August 2025 - on the Holy Communion in his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801). Today, at the beginning of June, the month when ordinations usually take place in Anglican churches, we begin a series on Shepherd's review of Absolution in the theology and practice of the Prayer Book.  Shepherd opens his consideration of Absolution in the Prayer Book by stating his intention to place it in the context of "the primitive Church": Without stating in detail the disputes that have existed between Christians of different denominations, and which have oftentimes terminated in contrary extremes, I propose to give a concise...

What were the parochial clergy of those days ? The vast majority of them were sunk in worldliness, and neither knew nor cared anything about their profession. They neither did good themselves, nor liked any one else to do it for them. They hunted, they shot, they farmed, they swore, they drank, they gambled. They seemed determined to know everything except Jesus Christ and him crucified. When they assembled it was generally to toast "Church and King," and to build one another up in earthly-mindedness, prejudice, ignorance, and formality. This description of the 18th century Church of England could have come from a Tractarian. Indeed, they would not have been at all out of place in Tract No. 1 . But, no, this was J.C. Ryle's description of the 18th century Church of England. The unholy alliance of Victorian Evangelicals and Tractarians were united in their contempt for 18th century Anglicanism. That contempt has, unfortunately, continued to shape Anglican attitudes into t...

In the closing days of December 1660, as the Convention Parliament was about to be dissolved, the Earl of Clarendon - Charles II's Lord Chancellor - declared in the House of Lords that the Church of England was "the best and the best-reformed church in the Christian world". It was a phrase which captured what Eamon Duffy has described as "the new assurance" amongst Episcopalians at the Restoration that the restored Church of England was "primitive Christianity revived". This confidence and pride in the Church of England resounded across the decades. In 1684, William Beveridge - who had received episcopal orders in 1660 and would be made Bishop of Asaph in 1704 - preached his sermon ' Steadfastness to the Established Church Recommended '. He echoed Clarendon's words as he challenged critics of the Church of England: if such would but lay aside all prejudices, and impartially consider the constitution of our Church, as it is now reformed, th...

On this day after Trinity Sunday, we turn to words from Jeremy Taylor's Ductor dubitantium (1660), in which he gives a negative answer to the question of whether it is is lawful to depict in imagery the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. He begins by considering what would be necessary for the explicit prohibition contained in the Second Commandment to be set aside: if it should please God any person of the Blessed and most holy Trinity should appear in any visible shape; that shape might be depicted; of that shape an image might be made; I mean, it might naturally; it might if it were done for lawful ends, and unless a Commandement were to the contrary; and therefore so long as God keeps himself within the secret recesses of his sanctuary, and the Majesty of his invisibility, so long it is plain he intends the very first sense and words of his Commandement: but if he should cancel the great reason of his Commandement; and make that by an act of his own to become possible which in...

I had occasion this week, in preparation for delivering a presentation on Charles Inglis, to re-read his 1768 work An Essay on Infant Baptism: In which the Right of Infants to the Sacrament of Baptism is Proved from Scripture . While not the focus of this work, Inglis did address the meaning of the references to regeneration in the Prayer Baptismal rite. He expounded what he clearly understood to be the settled, consistent, and uncontroversial view of Church of England divines - that the Sacrament of Baptism bestows that grace which brings us into the covenant of Jesus Christ, but it is not that grace which renovates, or regenerates, the heart. The latter is a "a progressive, internal Renovation of the Soul"; the former, in the words of the Prayer Book rite, "graft[s] into the body of Christ's Church".  Three things are particularly significant with regards to Inglis' account of this "relative and federal" regeneration by Holy Baptism. Firstly, thr...