An Old High sermon in mid-19th century North America
The preacher was Horatio Southgate, a missionary bishop who was then rector of the Church of the Advent, Boston. Those who know the Church of the Advent today will, of course, recognise it as a lively centre of Anglo-Catholic teaching and worship. Southgate's sermon, however, is much more suggestive of the Old High tradition than Tractarianism.
In well-established Old High fashion, Southgate pointed with filial devotion to the shared origin of Anglicanism in the then Province of Canada and the United States of America:
We are descended from the same Mother in the faith. The same Creed is breathed from our lips. The same prayers ascend from our altars. Along the line of our sacred worship we trace our spiritual ancestry back to the same dear Mother of us all, the good old Church of England ... It is to the use of all the means of grace, and to the administration of the same, according to the laws and usages of the United Church of England and Ireland. Only that which she has sanctioned, can be here adopted. Only the Faith which she professes, can be here preached. Only the Sacraments which she acknowledges, can be here ministered.
In addition to reminding us that the Scottish myth of PECUSA's founding is a rather later and novel idea, it also evidences that Old High native piety, rejoicing in the gift and patrimony of the ecclesia Anglicana, with no wistful, longing gazes cast across the Tiber.
This becomes particularly clear in the characteristic Old High understanding that the Reformation was no rupture with patristic tradition but, rather, stands in continuity with the Primitive Church:
we have one spiritual genealogy, the remembrance of which has never been lost amidst scenes of strife and bloodshed; that it is one unsullied, unbroken chain of holy succession from the Martyrs and the Bishops of the early Church of England; that we look back to the same glorious Reformation as the epoch of our common deliverance from the same corruptions of faith and worship, and farther back to the same origin of our Churches in times where the mists of antiquity obscure the record of the rising of the Sun of Righteousness upon our fathers.
In another expression of Old High native piety, the cradle-to-grave offices of the Book of Common Prayer were recounted in a fashion that brings to mind William Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets:
Hither shall the mother bring her infant, with the deep yearnings of a mother's love, and here shall she consecrate it to her God in the regenerating waters of the Font. Here shall the faithful Pastor rightly divide the word of truth. Here shall the Sacrament of the Eucharist raise its notes of penitence, present its oblation of thanksgiving, and confer upon mortals a "banquet of most heavenly food." Here shall Catechumens kneel to receive the sealing of the Holy Ghost in the sacred Ordinance of Confirmation. Here shall vows be pledged, and troth plighted, and the nuptial tie be blessed by God's Priest, in God's Name. Hither, at the last, when the labors of earth are done, shall men bring their dead, and here with holy prayer and requiem shall they consign them to their mother earth.
Note how the Eucharist here stands within and amidst the Church's offices, not overshadowing all, in a faithful reflection of the Old High reverence for all the offices and rites of the Prayer Book as means of our sanctification.
This is also seen in how Southgate refers to Absolution:
Here shall the penitent hear the soothing sounds which pronounce his pardon in the Absolution.
Quite clearly the Absolution here in mind is that at Mattins and Evensong, with the wording taken from that form: "and hath given power, and commandment, to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins: He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel". This would become a particular source of tension between the Old High tradition and Tractarianism, with the former challenging Tractarian promotion of routine private confession for undermining confidence in the efficacy of the general absolution.
In many ways, then, the sermon exemplifies what Richard Mant termed the "sober delight" which characterised Old High piety. It reminds us that the Old High tradition was still vibrant in the mid-19th century, more than suggesting that it was not the hollowed-out, 'High and Dry' stereotype which the Oxford Movement easily swept aside.
Above all, however, we see in the sermon the attractiveness of the Old High tradition: that rootedness in the experience of the ecclesia Anglicana, seeing there a worthy model of Reformed Catholicism, and recognising how the offices of the Book of Common Prayer could sustain the life of faith throughout our earthly journey.
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