laudable Practice

On this St Andrew's Day - and as an alternative to the Columba Declaration - laudable Practice proposes a High Church appreciation of the historic vocation, identity, and witness of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Apostolic order Maintaining the episcopal succession in Scotland, Scottish Episcopalianism bore witness to this mark of catholicity and apostolicity being a fundamental commitment of Anglicanism: "to the intent that these Orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed". In his  A Guide to the Church (1804), Charles Daubeny (Archdeacon of Salisbury, 1804-27) pointed to the Scottish Episcopalians as one of the national expressions of the Church Catholic, marked by "bishops coming in succession from the time of the Apostles to the present day": Every Christian society, possessing the characteristic marks of the church of Christ, I consider to be a separate branch of the catholic or universal visible church upon earth. The church of England, t...

'The kingdom of God is near': the Advent hope At the early Eucharist on Advent Sunday - 28.11.21 Luke 21:25-36 (Year C) "When you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near."  On Advent Sunday, over many centuries, these words of Jesus from our Gospel reading have been heard as Christian gather for the beginning of the Advent season. Century after century, as empires have risen and fallen, as fixed assumptions have given way, the ‘nations confused and the powers of the heavens shaken’, Christians have seen the truth of Jesus’ words … It is not the kingdoms of this world which endure.  It is not worldly power, wealth, values, and ambition which last.  It is not the injustices and inequalities of this world which abide. In our own times, in recent years, we have seen ‘the nations confused and the powers of the heavens shaken’: political turmoil, failed wars, global economic crisis, an environmental crisis, a pandemic … the assumptions govern...

The Laudian publication De templis, a treatise of temples wherein is discovered the ancient manner of building, consecrating, and adorning of churches * (1638), reminds us that aspects of Advent devotion are reflected in the design of churches.  Such design orients us, like the season, towards the Advent of the Lord. With the season of Advent falling in the darkest time of year, darkness is caught up in the Advent hope.  Darkness holds us at the beginning of the Advent procession; it is evoked in the ancient Advent hymn Conditor alme siderum /'Creator of the Stars of Night'; and is the theme of Cranmer's collect for Advent III, 'Lord, we beseche thee, geve eare to our prayers, and by thy gracious visitacion lighten the darkenes of our hearte, by our Lorde Jesus Christe'.  De templis  points to the Advent quality of darkness, encouraging devotion, bringing us to seek the Lord's Advent: The number of windoores ought to observe the grace of the whole structure, whi...

Each Thanksgiving Day, laudable Practice gives thanks for an aspect of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.  In past years I have given thanks for The Episcopal Church in general , for Anglican poetry and piety in the American Republic , and for William White . Underlying this annual practice is my experience of worshipping in TEC congregations during family holidays the United States, the ministry and witness of friends in US Episcopalianism and Anglicanism, and the hope for a renewed, generous Anglican orthodoxy in the United States. Today I give thanks for PECUSA's original vocation, here wonderfully summarised in an 1814 sermon by John Henry Hobart , to embody "the primitive faith, order, and worship" it inherited from the Church that is "the glory of the reformed Churches". And, yes, it does sound deeply Laudian. Happy Thanksgiving. The particular Origin of our Church - or the particular Christian communion from which she received that apo...

Words from Jeremy Taylor, suitable to November, on our duties to the dead, including "hearty and constant prayer" for them in light of the advent of "the fearful and yet much to be desired day", after the example of St. Paul's intercession for Onesiphorus.  But then we should do well also to remember, that in this world we are something besides flesh and blood; that we may not, without violent necessities, run into new relations, but preserve the affections we bore to our dead when they were alive: we must not so live as if they were perished, but so as pressing forward to the most intimate participation of the communion of saints. And we also have some ways to express this relation , and to bear a part in this communion, by actions of intercourse with them, and yet proper to our state: such as are strictly performing the will of the dead, providing for, and tenderly and wisely educating their children, paying their debts, imitating their good example, preservin...

Many thanks to the North American Anglican for publishing my essay ' More Laud than Baxter: the Protestantism of 1662 '. The article builds on the recent Ad Fontes essay by Steven Wedgeworth, ' The Reformation Character of the 1662 BCP '. My emphasis is on the similarities between the rites and ceremonies of 1662 and those in the Churches of the northern Lutheran kingdoms, pointing to "a reformed catholic vision, shared with the Churches of the Augsburg Confession, of liturgical and sacramental life". --- As previously stated, to describe the Book of Common Prayer as Protestant inevitably provokes the question “what sort of Protestantism?” The “ Admonition to the Parliament ” suggests an answer with its description of Prayer Book liturgies: Holydayes ascribed to saincts, prescript seruices for them, kneeling at communion, wafer cakes for theyr breade when they minister it, surplesse and coape to do it in. For the authors of the Admonition, such a form of wor...

It being the anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, and in the midst of leading a parish course on Lewis, I have been wondering about how we might situate Lewis' Anglicanism. Let me suggest something which might possibly provoke some push-back: C.S. Lewis was a 'Rowan Williams Anglican'. What is meant by a 'Rowan Williams Anglican'? By this I mean a Prayer Book Catholic; standing in succession to Lux Mundi ; deeply critical of the Liberal, demythologising theological project; and holding a generous vision of catholicity. What is the evidence for Lewis being a 'Rowan Williams Anglican'? Prayer Book Catholics together Perhaps the figure in later 20th century Anglicanism who most embodied what it is to be a Prayer Book Catholic is Austin Farrer.  He has been described as "a Prayer Book Anglican in the Tractarian tradition". Prepared to challenge the Roman tradition for its uncatholic claims , not joining with those Anglo-Catholics who opposed the Ch...

From Parochial Sermons, from Trinity to Advent Sunday (1846) by Henry James Hastings (who was also the author of A Plea for the Prayer Book As It Is , 1858), an extract from the sermon for the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, the Sunday before Advent. This powerfully combines the collect's opening petition, "Stir up", with the Gospel of the day, St. John's account of the miracle of the loaves: Let us all keep duly in mind that we are now come to the close of another ecclesiastical year. In looking back upon it, have we not reason to fear that much has been lost of spiritual good and advancement, through our own negligence and supineness and sloth and indifference - means of grace have been abused, sacraments have been neglected, sabbaths have been wasted, the word of God has been put aside, religious habits have not been cultivated, the Saviour has not been loved and trusted in. Will not these things lie heavy upon us in eternity? Let us gather up the fragments tha...

Richard Warner in his   The Sermon on the mount; in five discourses  (1840) - five sermons preached "on several successive Sunday afternoons" - offers a short catechesis on the Lord's Prayer, "that simple but sublime, that short but comprehensive, form of supplication adapted, and intended, for the use of all Christians", recognising its significance as a mainstay of popular Christian and Prayer Book piety and devotion: Commencing with an ejaculation to "the high and lofty one, that inhabiteth eternity" - the author and preserver of universal being -under the endearing name of "Our Father" - a name which embraces every idea of love; compassion; kindness; protection; long-suffering and forgiveness - this holy form of supplication goes on to combine and recognize, in a few sentences, all our duties to God and man - "Hallowed be thy Name: thy Kingdom come: thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven" - is a paragraph, which includes o...

I recently noticed in Essays Catholic and Critical (1926) a superb description of Laudianism and its antecedents.  The particular essay in question - 'The Reformation', by A. Hamilton Thompson - begins by pointing to Herberts' poem ' The British Church ', seeing in it a celebration of the order, belief, and piety that Laudianism would promote and defend, "scriptural, primitive and truly Catholic".  Here we see the attraction and meaning of what  Eamon Duffy has described as "the mellow light that plays over the church of George Herbert". To put it another way, here is why we should be affirming Laudianism: from the doctrine and rites of the Church of England, as organised under the Elizabethan Settlement, Herbert derived the spiritual nourishment which satisfied his soul and quickened his pious imagination.  Born in 1593, when Whitgift was prosecuting the struggle between episcopacy and puritanism, he died in 1632, the year before the translati...

The Catholic church hath been too much and too soon divided: it hath been used as the man upon a hill used his heap of heads in a basket; when he threw them down the hill, every head run his own way ... and as soon as the spirit of truth was opposed by the spirit of error, the spirit of peace was disordered by the spirit of division; and the Spirit of God hath overpowered us so far, that we are only fallen out about that, of which if we had been ignorant, we had not been much the worse; but in things simply necessary, God hath preserved us still unbroken: all nations, and all ages recite the creed, and all pray the Lord's prayer, and all pretend to walk by the rule of the commandments; and all churches have ever kept the day of Christ's resurrection, or the Lord's-day holy; and all churches have been governed by bishops, and the rites of Christianity have been forever administered by separate orders of men, and those men have been always set apart by prayer and the impositi...

Yesterday was the commemoration in the calendar of The Episcopal Church of the consecration of Samuel Seabury .  Seabury's consecration, however, was not generally regarded by Episcopalians in the newly-founded United States of America as securing an episcopate for their churches: outside of New England, Episcopalians continued to seek an episcopate by means of bishops of the Church of England.  This was delayed as parliamentary legislation was required to exempt such candidates for an American episcopacy from taking the required oath to the Crown.   During that delay, Bishop White's Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America notes that John Adams, then ambassador of the United States to Great Britain, began to consider an alternative means of securing holy orders for a number of "young gentlemen" from the United States then in London seeking orders from the Bishop of London: Mr. Adams, then the minister of the United States at the co...

... a kind of matins for a culture uncertain of what it shares and of where it is going (p.148). Rachel Mann's description of Remembrance Sunday, in her Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God of Remembrance Sunday (2017), captures the profundity of this mid-November day.  As late Autumn gives way to Winter, Remembrance Sunday is often bleak and cold.  This contributes to the day's resonance.  It is almost as if the primeval threat and danger of Winter strips away our pretensions and boasts.  The fact of mortality hangs in the air, with the trees now bare and Autumn glory past. It is 'a kind of matins' because the morning office gathers us after sleep to focus afresh on the Permanent Things, on what is Real, with the cold mornings of November reflecting how this awakes us from our spiritual and philosophical slumbers. Remembrance Sunday is akin to this, the themes of sacrifice, love, and death piercing through the delusions and complacency of our c...

Ending this short Remembrancetide series of extracts from wartime sermons of Anglicans across the centuries, today an extract from John Strachan's sermon in York, Upper Canada, before the Legislative Council and House of Assembly, at the outset of the War of 1812.  (Strachan would, in 1839, become the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto.) Strachan's words are a powerful reminder of the obligations combatants have to the enemy and the need for Christians to mortify the spirit of war: A Christian Soldier is neither animated against his enemy by hatred nor revenge. These malignant passions have no influence on his operations, finding that gentle means have failed in bringing his enemy to reason, he confines himself to such acts of violence as shall bring him back to equitable terms of accommodation. In making war he keeps peace continually in his view, and whatever does not tend to bring it about, he conceives improper to be done. He separates the actions of his enemy from his pers...

Continuing this short Remembrancetide series of extracts from wartime sermons of Anglicans across the centuries, today an extract from a 1781 fast day sermon during the Revolutionary War.  The preacher, while a chaplain to the King and convinced of "the justice of our cause", explicitly acknowledged the evil of war, particularly when waged against those who previously shared the same allegiance.  He went on to declare that victory does not erase the cost of war: War is indisputably amongst the moſt dreadful evils that can afflict a nation; it is one of those scourges with which God chastises his sinful and rebellious creatures; an instrument of vengeance in the hands of the Almighty, wherewith he punishes the grievous sins and offences from time to time committed against him. If there be a circumstance that can render this destructive tyrant still more formidable, that can enhance his severity and double his terrors, it is doubtless that calamity in which we are ourselves...

Continuing this short Remembrancetide series of extracts from wartime sermons of Anglicans across the centuries, today words from Jonathan Boucher's sermon in Virginia celebrating the ending of the Seven Years War with the Peace of 1763. Boucher was, as future events were to clearly demonstrate, a loyal subject of "the mother country".  Such allegiance, however, did not result in a triumphalist sermon at the conclusion of the War but, rather, a lament for war and a celebration of the blessing of peace: It is no part of my purpose at present to enter into the question how far war is, or is not, lawful to Christians. Merely as a point of casuistry, it might (perhaps) after all my pains, remain with you, (as I confess is the case as to myself) undecided: but neither you nor I can for a moment entertain a doubt, that war is one of the severest calamities with which the Almighty has ever seen fit to chastise the sons of men ... I cannot avoid here remarking, that, wherever war...

During Remembrancetide this year, laudable Practice will be sharing extracts from some wartime sermons from Anglicans across the centuries.  The purpose of this exercise is to indicate the nuances, reserve, and moderation in such preaching.   Today, a Taylor sermon from his Golden Grove collection (printed in 1651).  Preached in the aftermath of Royalist defeat in the civil war - Taylor had been a chaplain to Royalist forces and was taken prisoner by Parliamentarian forces in 1645 - the sermon challenged pronouncements that the enemy was evil, that God's judgement upon the enemy was to be expected, and that God's purposes in time of war could be easily identified. This sermon was preached to the members of a household firmly committed to the defeated Royalist cause. Whoever suffer in a cause of God from the hands of cruel and unreasonable men, let them not be too forward to prognosticate evil and death to their enemies; but let them solace themselves in the assuran...

The never enough wondered at and abhorred Powder-Treason ... The words are those of James I in his 1616 Premonition , addressed to the princes of Christendom, a preamble to the re-printing of his 1609 Apology for the Oath of Allegiance .  The Premonition contains an account by James of his faith as "a Catholic Christian".  It is a significant statement from the Supreme Governor of the Jacobean Church, the Church the Gunpowder plotters sought to overthrow and extirpate. In many ways, it answers the question 'why should we give thanks for the failure of the Gunpowder Plot?'. We should do so because the failure of the plotters secured the future of the catholic and reformed faith of "our Church", a faith given expression by James in this work. In James's account of the faith of the ecclesia Anglicana we see how the Church of Laud and of 1662 has continuity with the Church of the Elizabethan Settlement and Hooker's Lawes ; we see the roots of the belief...

From Laudian Mark Frank's second sermon for All Saints' Day , an example of how Laudianism provided a Reformed Catholic account of why the liturgical calendar should rejoice in the Saints and why All Saints' Day should be celebrated. They pray for us, but prayer should not be directed to them.  And in honouring them, we give honour to God who has sanctified them: Such honour have all his Saints. So the Text; So the day; a day dedicated to God in honour of all his Saints. Such honour has God allowed them, such honour has the holy Church bestow'd upon them. Because they are his, and as his here they are had in honour, because his holy ones, as his Saints or holy ones honour'd with a holy day, or, if you will, God honoured in them on the day. For this honour also have all the Saints, that all the honour done to them, all the honour done by them, by the Saints in earth to the Saints in heaven, all the virtues of the one, all the praises of the other are to the honour an...

There is no Hookerian Movement - Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: Writings on the English Reformation (2017), p.319. MacCulloch's statement comes to mind on this commemoration of Richard Hooker because I have just finished reading Paul Anthony Dominiak's Richard Hooker: The Architecture of Participation (2021). This superb work is a very effective rebuttal of MacCulloch's portrayal of Hooker.  The conclusion of the latter's essay 'The Reputation of Richard Hooker' suggests that Hooker had immense energy ("protean") but little direction: no one since his death in 1600 has been able permanently to pin him down or to say exactly what constitutes the message of his huge, his enormous - his great book. Dominiak convincingly demonstrates otherwise and - contrary to some 'Old Hat' Anglican accounts of Hooker, which find an echo in MacCulloch - emphasises the systematic nature of Hooker's thought: Hooker intends the arguments of the La...