laudable Practice

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...

Today is the final post - of a series which commenced in late August last year - on the 1621 account of the 1618 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth , by David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38). I return to the preface of the work, in which Lindsay sets out the very basis for the moderation and eirenicism which accepts the Articles of Perth . Holy Scripture, he stated in Hookerian fashion, provided latitude to the Church in ordering its life and worship: Finally, to end this point of the power of the Church, when the people are conuened in the ordinarie place, and at the times appointed, the Scripture hath not set downe, whereat the Pastour should beginne, how hee should proceed, and wherewith hee should close vp this Seruice: as whether hee should beginne with singing of Psalmes, or praying, or reading, or preaching; and when hee prayes, with what petition he shall beginne, what he shall subioyne next, and so forth: what order ...

In his Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (2018), William Anthony Hay notes that by 1825 "Tory opinion, both elite and popular, had moved from an earlier neutral or even sympathetic view of Catholicism to seeing a resurgent post-Napoleonic Church as a threat to Britain's Protestant constitution". This was the context in which debates surrounding a Roman Catholic Relief Act - enabling Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament without taking an oath denying transubstantiation - took place. It was also the background to Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury, in his August 1826 primary visitation charge to his clergy in Salisbury Cathedral, addressing the matter. He began in an innocuous, fashion, referring to how Canon One of the Canons of 1604 required clergy to teach the Royal Supremacy: One of these subjects respects the very first Canon of our Church, by which you are required, four times every year at the least, in your Sermons and Lectures, to maintain the King's Supremac...