laudable Practice

The most natural testimonies of our rejoicings in God are first his praises set forth with cheerful alacrity of mind, secondly our comfort and delight expressed by a charitable largeness of somewhat more than common bounty, thirdly sequestration from ordinary labours, the toils and cares whereof are not meet to be companions of such gladness.  Festival solemnity therefore is nothing but the due mixture as it were of these three elements, praise, and bounty, and rest - Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.70.2 Hooker's words are a reminder that festivity requires cultural and social expression alongside the liturgical.  His description of this as "natural" points to our creation as cultural and social beings, alongside our vocation as liturgical beings.  Festivity which fails to embrace the cultural and social fails to address fundamental aspects of our nature.  This being so, there is a missional imperative for the Church to foster and nurture the cultural hi...

Below, examples of the consistently robust nature of the rejection of the invocation of the Saints by avant garde and Laudian figures: Lancelot Andrewes And therefore St. Augustine often denies temples, altars, and sacrifices inward and outward, visible and invisible, to all martyrs and saints, as being proper and peculiar to God only. And I trust prayers and invocation be in this number. For as 'praying and praising, we direct our signifying words to Him to Whom we offer the things signified in our hearts; so sacrificing, we know the visible sacrifice is to be offered to no other but to Him Whose invisible sacrifice in our hearts we ourselves ought to be'. And then ... : 'The true Mediator, inasmuch as taking upon Him the form of a servant the Man Jesus Christ became a Mediator of God and man, whereas in the form of God He takes sacrifice with His Father, yet in the form of a servant, He chose rather to be a sacrifice than to receive sacrifice, lest even by this occ...

From Laud's Conference with Fisher , a critique of the invocation of Saints: And for invocation of saints, though some of the ancient Fathers have some rhetorical flourishes about it, for the stirring up of devotion, (as they thought,) yet the church then admitted not of the innovation of them, but only of the commemoration of the martyrs, as appears clearly in St. Augustine. And when the church prayed to God for any thing, she desired to be heard for the mercies and the merits of Christ, not for the merits of any saints whatsoever. For I much doubt this were to make the saints more than mediators of intercession, which is all that you acknowledge you allow the saints. For I pray, is not by the merits more than by the intercession. Did not Christ redeem us by his merits? and if God must hear our prayers for the merits of the saints, how much fall they short of sharers in the mediation of redemption? You may think of this. For such prayers as these the church of Rome makes at th...

... ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints - Ephesians 2:19. The Second Lesson, from Ephesians 2, at the First Evensong of the feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude was suggestive of how the feast prepares us for All Saints' Day, a theme also evident in the collect, with its declaration that the Church is "built ... upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets".  This was echoed in the Psalms at Mattins, for the 28th day of the month: let thy saints sing with joyfulness ... and her saints shall rejoice and sing - Ps. 132:9 & 17. The Epistle and Gospel at Holy Communion anticipate the celebration of the Communion of Saints.  The readings unfold two aspects of our Communion with the Saints: "the faith once delivered unto the saints" (Jude), "These things I command you, that ye love one another" (John 15), drawn together in the collect of All Saints' Day with its "knit together ... in one com...

... a spiritual partaking of the Redeemer's Blood, of which, mysterious as the symbol may be, the sacramental Wine is no mere or arbitrary memento. Coleridge's comment in Lay Sermons  (1817) regarding the Cup of the Lord in the Sacrament is indicative of the High Church Receptionism which he embraced.  As with other examples from the pre-1833 High Church Eucharistic tradition, such Receptionism nurtured a vibrant and vital Eucharistic piety.  We get a sense of this when, in Notes on the Book of Common Prayer (published in 1836, after his death), Coleridge describes how to prepare for the Sacrament: The best preparation for taking this sacrament, better than any or all of the books or tracts composed for this end, is to read over and over again, and often on your knees–at all events with a kneeling and praying heart–the Gospel according to St. John, till your mind is familiarised to the contemplation of Christ, the Redeemer and Mediator of mankind, yea, of every cr...

In his now classic study English Society 1688-1832 (1985), J.C.D. Clark emphasises the explicitly anti-Lockean nature of the dominant philosophy articulated by Anglican thinkers throughout the 18th century, from Bishops George Berkeley and Blackall in the earlier part of the century, to Horne and Horsley who revitalised the High Church tradition in the century's latter decades.  John Milbank identifies this legacy as one of the key aspects of Anglican resistance to "a dubious metaphysical and political Newtonianism" which characterised the post-1688 Whig oligarchy: Many Anglicans tended often to resist the turning of Newtonian science into a crude metaphysics. They sustained a sense of a genuine divine transcendence beyond any immanent heights, so allowing for the equal closeness of God to all of his creatures ... many "country" as opposed to "court" Anglicans ... did not tend to accept the dead matter of the Newtonian universe but ... continued ...

Until 1859 and the suppression of the State services, the Church of Ireland marked this day as one of thanksgiving.  Alongside the State services also commemorated in the Church of England (the Martyrdom of King Charles I on 30th January, the Restoration on 29th May, and the Gunpowder Plot on 5th November), the Church of Ireland commemorated on 23rd October the outbreak of the Rebellion of 1641.  According to the rubric introducing the service (included in the Irish Prayer Book of 1666), it was "an Anniversary Thanksgiving" for the failure of the rebellion. The rebellion had a profound impact on the physical presence and infrastructure of the Church of Ireland.  Cathedrals and parish churches were destroyed, settlements served by the Church of Ireland attacked, and a significant proportion of parishioners killed or expelled.  For example, in what would become Jeremy Taylor's diocese, both Dromore Cathedral and the parish church - later cathedral - at Lisnagarvey...

In Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2017), Malcolm Guite refers to the "affectionate exhortation" Coleridge addresses in Biographia Literaria (1817)   to "young men of literary gift and inclination".  Guite says of this: Coleridge's prose suddenly opens up and lifts as he proposes a union of Christian and literary excellence and encourages young writers to deepen their faith and seek holy orders.  What Coleridge sees is a rich new vision of the parish, and a central place for the Church in the education and cultural life of the nation. Here again we get a sense of Coleridge's restating of the High Church ideal, of the national Church sanctifying and blessing human society, and orienting society towards an authentic flourishing: That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighte...

From the description given by John Hughes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's restatement of the High Church tradition in On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830): synthesiz[ing] elements of the English Common Law tradition going back to Richard Hooker with the Romanticism and historical idealism of post-Kantian German philosophy.  It also means he shares with Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried von Herder and others much of the wider Romantic critique of the Enlightenment philosophy which had found expression in the French Revolution . In itself, the work points to how the High Church tradition could be restated and given (forgive the term) fresh expression in a radically changed constitutional context and with reference to the cultural influence of Romanticism.  Hughes invoked it as, alongside T.S. Eliot, a key expression of an Anglican defence of "the traditional Christian belief in the possibility of baptizing culture against the rising individualistic political cult...

... the Prayer Book captures so resonantly the deep texture of life and connects it well to our salvation - from an article in the most recent edition of The Prayer Book Today (the magazine of the Prayer Book Society). The above words came to mind today when reflecting on Cranmer's collect for Saint Luke's Day: ALMIGHTY God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. What particularly caught my attention while praying the collect at Mattins was the plural "medicines". It reflects, of course, the subsequent reference to "all the diseases of our souls". There is something here of the fullness of sacra doctrina .  And we need this fullness. Our "sins and wickedness", to quote the exhortation...

Some more words from  the Preface to Keble's  Sermons, Academical and Occasional  (1848), in which the path taken by Newman is critiqued for abandoning the Old High Church virtues of order and conformity: We will suppose, on the one side, a great array of facts, authorities, and arguments, which a person does not know how to refute, (though he cannot say but it is very possible some refutation may exist, as yet unknown to him, or that counter statements equally strong might be made): and on the other side, only the simple principle, “quieta mon movere: wherever a man is called, there let him abide with God:” even this alone ought assuredly to go a good way. Mere contentment and resignation to the Divine will, which has cast our lot where it is, in spiritual and intellectual no less than in temporal respects, ought in all reason to make us slow to change. “I am where God has seen fit to place me; surely this one consideration entitles me to throw the burden of proof en...

From the Preface to Keble's Sermons, Academical and Occasional (1848), a critique of the path taken by Newman, regarding it as a denial of catholicity on the basis of mere private judgement: For see, first, what is involved in the conclusion, when a person trained in Greece or in England gives in his name to the Church of Rome. It is deciding on his own authority what are the limits of the Kingdom of Christ, what the evangelical terms of salvation. He is pronouncing not only on the truth, but on the importance also, of the many and various propositions, which being in debate among those who call themselves Catholics, are settled under anathema by the Roman councils. He is consigning millions, who had no other thought than to live and die true subjects of the visible Catholic Church, to the comparatively forlorn hope of incurable ignorance and uncovenanted mercy. He is doing all this, I say, on his own authority: for although he may declare that he does but accept the Church...

As Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving Day, from the other side of the Atlantic let me give some reasons to give thanks for Anglicanism in the True North, for Canadian Anglicanism. Firstly, Canada has its roots in the establishment of an Anglican polity, an alternative to the Lockean Republic to the south.  George Grant said of this polity created by the United Empire Loyalists: If Lockean liberalism is the conservatism of the English-speaking peoples, what was there in British conservatism that was not present in the bourgeois thought of Hamilton and Madison? If there was nothing, then the acts of the Loyalists are deprived of all moral significance.  Many of the American Tories were Anglicans and knew well that in opposing the revolution they were opposing Locke.  They appealed to the older political philosophy of Richard Hooker. We might, as Grant did so famously and eloquently, lament the passing of this political order, but it can remain a source of inspiration...

Differing from the traditional practice, the feast day of Cardinal John Henry Newman will not be celebrated on the day of his death. Instead, in his memory the Church will celebrate his feast on the day he converted to Catholicism - Catholic News Agency , 10th September 2010, in the approach to Newman's beatification. One might have thought that in an ecumenical age the date of Newman's Baptism would have been considered for feast day (the date of his death, 11th August, already the feast of St. Clare of Assisi).  But, no, 9th October was chosen.  Rather than complain about Roman triumphalism, Anglicans should accept that Newman would, in all likelihood, be pleased with the choice: he did, after all, abandon Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism.  That said, I would therefore expect our Roman Catholic brethren to forego any accusations of Anglican triumphalism when we commemorate 5th November. Sunday's canonisation of John Henry Newman has produced a range of responses...

The baptism service in the Book of Common Prayer [1662] is focused on the child, not the beliefs of the parents.  This should still be the focus of Kingdom parish ministry ... The words are from a recent Church Times article by Alan Bartlett setting forth an understanding of the Occasional Offices shaped by the pastoral wisdom of classical Anglicanism (and see Bartlett's  book  for further insights).  Such a welcome affirmation of the 1662 Baptismal rite (and, we might also say, the PECUSA 1928 and Canadian 1962 rites) brings us to recognise the distinct lack of pastoral wisdom in many contemporary Anglican Baptismal rites: the assumption (contrary to both historic experience and existing practice in the vast majority of parishes) that adult baptism is the norm; that the faith of parents, rather than the grace bestowed in the Sacrament, is the determining factor in the rite; excluding liturgical recognition of godparents (a term replete with theological meani...