laudable Practice

As November continues - the days drawing in and getting colder - we continue to read Jeremy Taylor's funeral sermon for the old Cumberland Royalist Sir Gregory Dalston. We do so hearing Taylor set before us a pleasing example of ordinary piety: not heroic, not dramatic, but an ordinary, conventional piety: for he was a great lover of the church, a constant attender to the sermons of the church, a diligent hearer of the prayers of the church, and an obedient son to perform the commands of the church. He was diligent in his times and circumstances of devotion; he would often be at church so early, that he was seen to walk long in the church-yard before prayers, being as ready to confess his sins at the beginning, as to receive the blessing at the end of prayers.  This extract begins with a phrase familiar to many Anglican clergy: faithful Anglicans are often described as 'loving their church'. For the 'godly' - then and now - such language, inevitably, is lacking and...

They seemed to him to be in an entirely different tone from any of the prayers of the Church of England. They were, in his opinion, far too political, far too polemical, for too epigrammatical. They had nothing, as it seemed to him, of that chastened devotion which the Liturgy of the Church of England had derived in the earliest times of the Christian Church. Words from the then Bishop of Oxford's speech in the 1858 House of Lords debate on ' Political Services of the Church of England ' - that is, the 1662 state services - may seem like an odd place to begin to reflect on the place of Remembrance Sunday services in Anglican piety.  The Bishop's critique of the state services, however, does have relevance. Consider some of the language used in those services: cruel and bloody men ... violent and blood-thirsty men ... sons of Belial ( 30th January );  ungodly and cruel men ... deceitful and wicked men ( 29th May );  Popish treachery ... hellish malice of Popish conspir...

Nov. 5. I read Prayers this morning at Cary being the 5 of Novem the day on which the Papists had contrived an hellish plot in the reign of King James the first, but by the Divine hand of Providence was fortunately discovered. Good Parson Woodforde's diary entry for 5th November 1768 is jarring. When the diaries were first published in 1924, editor John Beresford referred to "the peace which breathes from Parson Woodforde's pages". It is this which has made the good Parson beloved to many in the century since. But this entry for 5th November 1768 does not breathe such peace. Or does it? Let us begin with with his opening phrase, "I read Prayers this morning". It is, of course, a very oft-repeated phrase in Woodforde's diaries, marking each Sunday. It was also the conventional clerical language for officiating at divine service in the 18th century and extending into the 19th . The phrase here, then, on 5th November 1768, reminds us of the rhythms and pat...

In his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume I (1796), John Shepherd has established that the Prayer Book's use of precatory forms of absolution (the priest praying for God's forgiveness on the penitent) was the patristic practice, maintained by the Eastern Churches and still found in many of the provisions of the Latin tradition. What, however, of the Prayer Book's use of the indicative form - 'I absolve thee' - in the Visitation of the Sick ?  Of this, he declares, "we have no vestige in the earlier and purer ages of the church": the form of which we are now speaking, has not the usage of 600 years to plead in its behalf. He turns to Ussher, to establish the date for which the indicative form was introduced to the Western Church: Though Aquinas might not introduce it himself, yet he first defended it, a few years after the middle of the thirteenth century.  From the writings of this author, Archbishop Usher has prove...

As we proceed with our readings from the sermons of William Paley, week by week it is increasingly clear that the lazy stereotypes of both Paley and Georgian Anglicanism are deeply unserious. By contrast, we are seeing in Paley's sermons a serious Christianity. Today's reading, from Sermon VI in Volume V of Paley's Works - 'Our Dearest Interest To Be Parted With Rather Than Endanger Our Salvation', on the text Matthew 5.29 - demonstrates how Paley explicitly understood Christianity to require self-denial in the interests of our salvation. "Our real pleasure and happiness" was not to be found in - to again use Newman's caricature of Georgian Anglicanism" - "false cheerfulness" but, rather, in the reality of salvation and the life everlasting: Every sound plan of religion, and consequently the plan of the Gospel, is only putting men in the best way of promoting their own happiness, and providing for their own interest. It is on our own ac...

November. It is the month of the departed - All Saints' Day, Remembrancetide, "the quick and the dead" of Advent Sunday. As the days of late Autumn shorten and grow colder, with the trees now bare of leaves, Winter approaches, and another year's end draws nigh, signs of mortality surround us.  It is a time, then, to profitably read old funeral sermons. Perhaps after a late afternoon walk, the sun low in the sky and sunset not far off. The crunch of walking on fallen leaves. A nip in the air. Then we sit down and mull over words once preached in times past, when an earthly life had ended. Doing so can remind us of the virtues that are to be nurtured in this transitory life. Of what, when the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, is a life well lived. An old funeral sermon I often turn to is that given by Jeremy Taylor in 1657, at the funeral of Sir George Dalston . Dalston was Cumberland gentry, an old Royalist who had served the King in ...