"Miraculous restoring": Mark Frank's celebration of a Laudian Restoration

We may tell those who still contrive the ruin of the Church, the best and the best-reformed church in the Christian World ... that God would not so miraculously have snatched this Church as a brand out of the fire, would not have raised it from the grave, after he had suffered it to be buried so many years, by the boisterous hands of profane and sacrilegious persons, under its own rubbish, to expose it again to the same rapine, reproach and impiety.

Thus did Clarendon, Charles II's chief minister 1660-67, describe the restoration of the Church of England. As readers of Paul Lay's excellent Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate (2020) will know, it was a close-run thing.  If the issue of Cromwell's succession had been better managed, there was a likelihood that the Protectorate would have continued, with Royalism militarily defeated and the populace reluctantly reconciled to the peace and order brought by the Cromwellian regime.  Contemporary recognition of this led to a joyful emphasis on the miraculous nature of the deliverance and restoration of the Church of England.

We see this in a Restoration sermon by Mark Frank on the feast of Conversion of Saint Paul in Saint Paul's Cathedral, London, celebrating the return of Anglican rites to the cathedral.  The sermon is not dated, but the context makes clear that it was very early in the Restoration period.  Frank celebrated the restoration of Laudian order and beauty as akin to the Apostle's conversion, "A Day here observed, not only in memory of St. Paul's Conversion, but of the Conversion also of this place":

And it falling out this Year to be a Day crown'd with so honourable an Assembly, I hope it may fall out happily to remember you of some kind offices, some good deeds to it. Now after a third Conversion of it from a Stable, a Magazine, a Market, a Meeting place of Schism and Rebellion, to a Church again, and the Holy Offices in their beauty, to set to your pious hands to help it out of dust and rubbish, and raise it up to its first lustre and glory.

This, he declared, was a "miraculous restoring", akin to Nehemiah's restoration of the Temple (his text was Nehemiah 13:14).  Nehemiah's restoration of the Temple was held up as a model for the Restoration, a re-conversion to Laudian "comely uniformity" after years of "disorder and confusion":

And if you consider how reverently his people demean themselves at holy work, - how devoutly they all stand up at the reading of the law; how unanimously they answer Amen at the prayers and blessing; how they "lift up their hands, and bow their heads, and worship the Lord with their faces to the ground;" how content they are to be bound to the statutes and "judgments" as well as the "commandments" of God - that is, to the ceremonials and judicials, (for so the words statutes and judgments do import,) as well as to the moral law, and how he solemnly binds them to it by an oath, you cannot but say he has wrought a good work indeed upon them, and by this mercy kept them from disorder and confusion. Mercy, I say, for there is none greater than to preserve the sheep within the fold, than to keep all in peace and order, and oblige men by laws and oaths to do their duties, to attend the holy offices diligently in a comely uniformity; who otherwise would some of them never think of it; and others, under pretence of Christian liberty, run every day into all unchristian licentiousness and profaneness, and wander up and down in eternal errors, and perish in them. 

It is worth noting at this point that rather than being merely a reactionary stance, Frank's call for "comely uniformity", in place of the "licentiousness and profaneness" witnessed during the Interregnum, was a commitment to what William J. Bulman has termed 'Anglican Enlightenment', a "defence of Anglican Christianity as civil religion" for an England emerging from "the late unhappy confusions":

To Machiavelli's suggestion that ancient Roman religion was superior to Christianity because of the latter's ill effects on political stability in Italy, English divines replied with accounts of the expansive civil and spiritual benefits of Anglicanism.

The restoration of "comely uniformity", therefore, was a conversion to welcome, a no less miraculous return of civic and ecclesial peace after the apparent triumph of the destructive forces of faction.  The preservation of churches during the years of "disorder and confusion" was another sign of God's goodness and grace, enabling the return of those decent rites which should mark "his Altars" and "his house":

And God has in our days own'd them for his own. That signal preserving them in the heat of War and Plunder, rage and fury, when men were so wrathfully displeased at them, and so implacably set against them ... He has brought us home, and stablisht our Estates, and restor'd our Religion; done more to us, and to our houses than we durst desire or hope ... restoring the whole Service of the Church for days, for Forms, for State, for Beauty, for Order, for all Solemnity. 

The collect for the Conversion of Saint Paul celebrates the Apostle's "wonderful conversion": unexpected, surprising, and miraculous.  It is little wonder that Frank's sermon for the feast saw the "miraculous restoring" of the Church of England as a reflection of the Apostle's conversion.  It was entirely unexpected and miraculous - both on the road to Damascus and in the England of 1659 - that persecution and an apparently settled order would give way to the Church's renewal.  We might regard Frank's celebration of the Restoration as a Laudian conversion, akin to that of the Apostle, as distasteful Anglican triumphalism.  On the other hand, however, it witnesses to a rich sense of providence, of God's purposes worked out in and not remote from the affairs of this world.  It is shot through with thanksgiving for both "all the blessings of this life" and "for the means of grace".  And it rejoices that "the light" celebrated in the collect of the feast is no abstraction but is experienced in the worship, rites, and ceremonies of this portion of the "Catholick Church of Christ".  We might, then, join with Frank in - using words from today's collect - "thankful remembrance" for a Laudian restoration.