laudable Practice

From Donne's Sermon XLV , preached upon All Saints' Day.  Donne here exemplifies the quiet joy with which Anglicanism celebrates the parish church participating in the Communion of Saints. So that it is truly a festival, grounded upon that Article of the Creed, The Communion of Saints, and unites in our devout contemplation, The Head of the Church, God himself, and those two noble constitutive parts thereof, The Triumphant, and the Militant. And, accordingly, hath the Church applied this part of Scripture, to be read for the Epistle of this day, to shew, that All-Saints day hath relation to all Saints, both living and dead; for those servants of God, which are here in this text, sealed in their foreheads, are such (without all question) as receive that Seal here, here in the militant Church. And therefore, as these words, so this festival, in their intendiment, that applied these words to this festival, is also of Saints upon Earth ... The servants of God being sealed in their ...

Autumn is not the season of decay or death, but one of wealth and renewal - nature writer Louise Baker in Autumn: An anthology for changing seasons (2016). All Saints' Day is the third high festival of Autumn (after Michaelmas and Harvest Thanksgiving).  It is then right and proper that it is surrounded by customs which reflect this.  The pumpkins, apples, and nuts of the season are a rich and joyous bounty which should be enjoyed on All Hallows' Eve.  This itself is an anticipation of the feast day.  As Donne famously declared:  in Paradise, the fruits were ripe the first minute, in Heaven it is always autumn, His mercies are ever in their maturity.  The rich bounty of Autumn shared on All Hallows' Eve is a foretaste of what the collect of the feast describes as "those unspeakable joys" which are set before us, the promise declared in the Gospel of the day: "for great is your reward in heaven". The other aspect of All Hallows' Eve, of course, is...

They were constantly observed in the Church of England, from the time of the Reformation till the late Rebellion, when it could not be expected that any thing that carried an air of religion or antiquity, could bear up against such an irresistible inundation of impiety and confusion. But at the Restoration our holy-days were again revived, together with our ancient Liturgy, which appoints proper Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for each of them. Thus does Wheatly refer to the feast days appointed in the BCP Calendar.  He goes on to quote the 1662 rubric: Then the Curate shall declare unto the people what Holy-days, or Fasting-days, are in the week following to be observed. This was no new provision in 1662.  1552 and 1559 had declared: the Curate shall declare unto the people, whether there be anye holy dayes or fastynge dayes the weke folowyn. The observance of feast days, then, was intended to be an integral part of the rhythms of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana .  T...

If we wanted to point to one particular part of the classical Prayer Book liturgy which encapsulated the quiet reverence and reserve of the Old High Church tradition's understanding of the Communion of Saints, perhaps it would be the thanksgiving which concludes the Prayer for the Church Militant in the Communion Office: And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. It is, of course, less fulsome than that in 1549 or the 1637 Scottish rite, but Wheatly describes it as retaining "the substance of the thanksgiving" for the Communion of Saints.  Comber likewise refers to it as "the eucharistical prayer ... praising God for such of them as are departed in the faith and fear of God".  In Wheatly there are hints of regret at the loss of 1549's explicit reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary, ...

It is not denied they pray for us, in regard of that Communion of Saints, whereof this holy performance is a principal and main part; for us in general, out of fellow-feeling and commiseration of our miseries which themselves have tasted in this valley of tears; for their friends in particular, whom they remember, whose state they recommend unto God in prayer; they having lost no endowment in their Soul in Glory, which did accrue unto them upon Earth ... For we say, we may not pray unto them; contrary to our own Bibles ... we and our people will pray unto the Lord, who is ready, willing, able to hear vs every way, without such Advocates or Mediators ... We do not, we dare not pray to Saints, that is speak to them, or entreat them to pray for us. Richard Montagu An Answer to the Late Gagger of Protestants (1624), XXIX-XXX. No doubt, the early Christians, believing in 'the communion of saints,' had a lively conviction that saints departed were still fellow-worshippers with the C...

Let not the churches lie waste and in ruinous heaps, to the diminution of religion, and the reproach of the nation, lest the nations abroad say, that the Britons are a kind of Christians that have no churches; for churches, and courts of judicature, and the public defences of an imperial city, are res sacræ ; they are venerable in law, and honourable in religion.  So said Jeremy Taylor in a sermon to the Restoration Parliament of Ireland .  It provides some insight into the devastation inflicted upon the Church of Ireland during two decades of conflict, first at the hands of the Confederates in their 1641 rebellion, then through the dismantling of the Church by law established through the actions of Parliament and persecution under the Protectorate.  As John McCafferty has stated, the Church of Ireland was the "bright hope of Laudianism in the 1630s", with its revised Canons, adoption of the Articles of Religion, and a renewed commitment to conformity.  This was to...

In his very fine The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633-1641 (2007), John McCafferty points to a 1633 sermon by Bramhall as exemplifying a key change wrought by Laudianism:  John Bramhall’s Christchurch sermon of August 1633 declared Rome ‘merely’ schismatical and the pope a patriarch. However shocking this may have been to his Dublin auditory, his words were part of a wider process of displacement of the Roman Antichrist. The orthodoxy of papacy as anti-Christ was, so it seems, replaced by a "lowering of the theological temperature", a "significant switch from eschatology to institutional history". We might, however, wonder if the Laudian understanding of Rome as a garden requiring weeding, rather than the synagogue of Satan, was actually an innovation.  There was significant precedent in Conformist thought for such an approach.  Hooker, after all, had declared in his Laws: To say that in nothing they may be foll...

From Thomas Rogers' Two dialogues, or conferences Concerning kneeling in the very act of receiving the sacramental bread and wine, in the Supper of the Lord (1608), a rather interesting example of Conformist sacramental piety. Rogers was a conventional rather than avant garde Conformist.  This makes his account, however, all the more significant.   The imaginary Puritan interlocutor with whom he is debating takes issue with Canon XXI of the 1604 Canons , which required the Words of Institution to be repeated over additional Bread and Wine required for the purposes of Communion.  The Puritan condemns this, "As if the words were incantations, and the table like an Altar which sanctifieth the sacrifice".   Rogers' response affirms the use of both 'consecration' and 'altar', terminology that some historical accounts suggest to be Laudian 'innovations'.  Rogers' use of such terms, however, is an example of the continuity between conventional C...

The truth is, if one may venture to say it of one so wise, holy, and venerable, that on this subject, as on the Apostolical Succession, and some others, Hooker was biased by his respect for Calvin and some of his school, in whose opinions he had been educated, and by sympathy with the most suffering portion of the foreign Reformers. Hooker's Eucharistic doctrine was too close to Calvin.  Keble's words in his On Eucharistical Adoration (1859) summarise what would become a standard critique of Hooker by Anglo-Catholics.  This, of course, represented a profound breach with the Old High Church tradition, for whom Hooker's teaching was merely the self-evident teaching of the English Church on the Holy Sacrament. What is particularly interesting, however, is to contrast Keble's assessment with contemporary critics of Hooker.  Rather than seeing in Hooker an obviously Reformed account of the Sacrament, the authors of A Christian Letter  detected the whiff of Lutheranism, a...

There has not been an 'against the Weird' post on laudable Practice for some months, so it is perhaps a good time to return to the theme (see the original post which introduced this occasional series).  A key theme has been heeding how Laudian and Old High Church sources provide a critique of the "radical rejection" and acceptance of cultural marginalisation advocated by proponents of counter-cultural 'Weird Christianity'.   Below, Jeremy Taylor in An Apology for the Liturgy (1649) powerfully rehearses the core of the Laudian and Old High Church refutation of appeals to the 'Weird', expounding the implications of the dictum that 'grace does not destroy nature'.  It is through ordinary habits, means, and actions - not the mystery cult - that we are ordered to our supernatural end: For it is a rule of the School, and there is much reason in it, Habitus infusi infunduntur per modum acquisitorum, whatsoever is infused into us is in the same man...

On this day in 1555, Bishops Latimer and Ridley were martyred.  The witness of the Reformation martyrs is often a cause of some embarrassment for many contemporary Anglicans.  The cause of the embarrassment, of course, is that Latimer and Ridley were - to state the obvious - Protestants.  Or, to be more precise, the cause of embarrassment is that many contemporary Anglicans maintain the historical fiction that they themselves are not Protestants. This contrasts with the Laudian conviction that the marytrdom of Latimer and Ridley was one of the glories of the Church of England.  In his  Ecclesia restaurata , Laudian polemicist Peter Heyln notes his approval of Foxe's Acts and Monuments while praising Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley: Being resolved to wave the writing of a Martyrlogy, which is done already to my hand in the 'Acts and Monuments', I shall insist only upon three of most rank, that is to say, Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, and Bishop Ridley, men of...

From Thomas Rogers'  Two dialogues, or conferences Concerning kneeling in the very act of receiving the sacramental bread and wine, in the Supper of the Lord (1608).  Here Rogers points to the example of the Lutheran churches (and Basel, which historically sought  rapprochement with the Lutherans) in defence of the Prayer Book practice.  It is another example of Conformist discourse invoking Lutheranism and a wider Protestant Christendom against the Puritan focus on the practices and polity of Geneva. And yet false is it that we Christians in England only, when we communicate, do Kneel. For all the Churches in Basel, Saxony, Denmark, and many in Germany, by the orders of their several Churches at the Communion, as well as we in England, do kneel. Either therefore those Churches be not in the number of Churches reformed in your judgement; or they dishonour God by their said Kneeling, so well as we: the former of which you will not, I think, say, and if you should, a...

To read Thomas Rogers' commentary on the final (and too often overlooked) Articles of Religion, Articles 35-39, is to read a sustained Conformist critique of those Brown describes as "the Puritan faction".  Rogers is unrelenting in his assault, demonstrating how the Puritans unsettle the peace of the Church through their rejection of the basic norms of ecclesial life enshrined in the Articles, norms commonly accepted in other Reformed churches. Article 35 Noting the practice of "the primitive church" in the reading of apostolic and patristic epistles, and how in "the reformed churches in Flanders and France ... and in the Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish churches", Calvin's sermons and catechism were read and expounded "before the whole congregation", Rogers robustly defends the reading of the Homilies, accusing (after the manner of Hooker) the Puritans of unduly exalting "preaching by the mouth": Too highly, as do the Purit...

The Book of Common Prayer is defined by a generous pastoral approach, a charitable assumption that all participating in its rites partake of the spiritual benefits in Christ.  We see this generosity in the assumption that we are those who "truly repent, and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel"; that we feed upon "the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son" (and, thus, per Article 29, are not "void of a lively faith"); that "we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son"; that we are "regenerate, and grafted into the body of Christ's Church"; that we are those whom God "hast vouchsafed to regenerate ... by Water and the Holy Ghost"; and that we die "in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life".   For the Puritans, such pastoral generosity quickly became a focus of criticism.  Regarding, for example, the BCP burial rite, Judith Maltby notes that for Puritan...

The days are noticeably shorter and colder.  The leaves are gathering on roads and footpaths.  We are in the midst of Autumn, with its transitory richness both a moment of joy but also an intimation of our mortality. Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; Lengthen night and shorten day; Every leaf speaks bliss to me Fluttering from the autumn tree - Emily Bronte, ' Fall, leaves, fall '. October is also the season of Harvest Thanksgiving in these Islands, with parish churches giving thanks for the bounty of the harvest. We yield thee hearty thanks that thou hast safely brought us to the season of harvest visiting the earth and blessing it, and crowning the year with thy goodness - Church of Ireland BCP 1926, A Form of Thanksgiving for the Blessings of Harvest. In Canada, today is Thanksgiving Day, celebrated amidst the bounty of Fall and harvest.   O MOST merciful Father, we humbly thank thee for all thy gifts so freely bestowed upon us - Canadian BCP 1962, Collect f...

And we most humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen. The Order for the Ministration of the Holy Communion, 1662. O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed ... The Second Collect at Evening Prayer. She [the Christian] understands herself to be enrolled in God's great school of sanctification, and so understands that her primary task, precisely as a discipline, is to learn.  Accordingly, she is active and vigorous, awake and striving, but her basic, underlying mode of being is not acquisitional, not trying to obtain God's gifts by her own good works, but rather receptive, making the most of what God provides, living with confidence into a destiny already appointed and prepared....

In reflecting on the strengths of the Cranmerian daily office, we might consider how it combines flexibility with stability.  Flexibility is inherent to Cranmer's Morning and Evening Prayer because of his gathering of the main pre-Reformation offices - Matins, Lauds, Prime, Vespers, Compline - into two offices, a scheme more suitable for parochial clergy and for laity.  Prayer Book Morning Prayer combines the old Matins as an office of readings, Lauds as morning praise and prayer, Prime as the commending of the new day to God. Prayer Evening Prayer also retains the character of an office of readings (reflecting Cranmer's Reformed concern for the reading of Scripture, while also an echo of pre-Reformation Matins being a night-time office), while combining Vespers as evening praise and prayer, and Compline as prayer at day's end.   Thus Prayer Book Mattins includes Te Deum from the old Matins and Benedictus from Lauds.  The Creed was a feature of Prime, the Lord's...