"It is religion to keep fasting days": Cosin on the Lenten fast

From Cosin's Notes on the Book of Common Prayer (1638), on the rubric in the BCP 1559 Holy Communion requiring the Curate to "declare unto the people, whether there be anye holy dayes or fastynge dayes the weke folowyng". Cosin particularly refutes the Puritan (and later low church) claim that the call to observe the Lenten fast set forth in Edwardine and Elizabethan legislation was merely "politic", that is, for secular purposes. He thus demonstrates - as did Andrewes - that observing the Lenten fast was part of the discipline of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana, a discipline proclaimed in the epistle and gospel appointed for the first day of Lent:

They that speak so much against us, who put some part of our religion in keeping fasting days, as if we had nothing but a politic use of keeping Lent, Fridays, and saints' eves, let them look well to this place, where the curate is bound to exhort the people earnestly towards the religious observation of such times, in abstaining from their own wonted diet, and bestowing their liberality upon the poor. Certainly, if it be religion to give alms, it is religion to keep fasting days too, which are appointed by the Church to be spent in prayer and abstinence. Jejunium, eleemosyna, et oratio, went ever together, as here they do. If fasting days and Lent time be but a politic observation, without any religion in it at all, according to the conceit of some out of the statute of 5 Eliz., and before that 2 and 3 of Ed. VI., c.128 [the Edwardian and Elizabethan statues on the Lenten fast] what should the minister here meddle with it in the Church, the place where all our actions are, or should be, religious; or what should those religious prayers, epistle and gospel, upon the first day of Lent, do among us, seeing they all intend a solemn and a religious preparing of the people, and the whole Church of God among us, to the due keeping of that time with prayer and abstinence?

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Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders. With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter. The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition). Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical). Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition. A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics". Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics. What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition. Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

'Whether the Lutheran Churches have right Ordinations and perfect succession of Bishops': Jeremy Taylor, 'Episcopacy Asserted', and Lutheran orders

Amidst the bitter controversies over episcopacy in the Three Kingdoms during the early 1640s, controversies which had become war in Scotland in 1637 and then in England in 1642, Jeremy Taylor wrote his Laudian defence of episcopal order, The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy Asserted and Maintained . He proposed in this work that the non-episcopal Reformed churches could have had episcopally-ordered clergy: Those good people might have had order from the bishops of England or the Lutheran churches, if at least they thought our churches catholic and Christian. Leaving aside the reality that, for example, French Protestants would have been placed in an invidious political position if they had done as Taylor proposed, it is the reference to "the Lutheran churches" which is significant. To begin with, a large portion of the Lutheran churches - those in the German lands - were governed by a system of superintendency. It is almost inconceivable that Taylor was not aware of th...

laudable Practice

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