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"The strange spirit of Erastianism": Perceval on the English Church amidst revolution

When Tract Number 1 invoked "our apostolical descent" as the source of the Church of England's authority, rather than parliamentary establishment, and challenged its readers to "choose your side" between these, it was no new teaching and no new rallying cry.  As previously indicated, John Hume Spry's 1817 Bampton Lectures had set forth the Church of England as a "divinely constituted society", with the episcopacy as "confessedly of apostolic origin".  

Another example of Tract Number 1 reflecting common place Old High Church thinking is seen in Arthur Philip Perceval's 1831 Letter on the Subject of Church Reform, a response to a fellow cleric's Whiggish proposals amidst the upheavals of the 'constitutional revolution' of 1828-32.  Perceval here robustly rejects an Erastian understanding of the establishment, pointing to the apostolic authority of the Church of England and the rights of Convocation:

I will proceed, however, to consider the most objectionable feature in your letter. This, as was before observed, is the strange spirit of Erastianism which pervades it, the (apparently) utter oblivion of that apostolical authority in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters, which the Church has received, not from earthly statesmen, but from the Lord himself.

It is, indeed, most remarkable. You propose that alterations should be made, not only in the resources of the Church, - which would merely affect the right she possesses, - in common with every other member of the State, to order and regulate them as shall seem best to her; but in her ecclesiastical laws her Liturgy, and her discipline. 

And by whom do you propose that these important alterations are to be made? By the Church? No. The alterations are to be decreed by ''his Majesty in council, or the parliament, as the case may require:" and the voice of the Church is not to be heard in any stage of the proceedings. For the voice of the Church is known only by the decrees of her councils: and the constitution of the Church of England recognises no other council of the Church than that assembled in convocation.

... But the Erastian proposition in your Letter affects the spiritual existence of the Church of England, as a true and apostolic branch of the Church of Christ. It does not so much call into question, it passes over as totally groundless, the idea of her having received any apostolical authority to regulate and set in order her ecclesiastical and spiritual affairs. But that apostolical authority the Church of England either does, or does not possess. If she does not, then is she no true branch of the Church of Christ, and salvation must be sought in some other. If she does possess it, then, as she did not receive it from the State, so neither can she delegate it to the State. 

Against this background, Tract Number 1 - rather than being a radically new statement of apostolic authority and catholic principles, overturning a supposedly Erastian High and Dry stance - can be seen merely as another expression of a well-established, conventional High Church discourse. 

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