"Our own holy Apostolic Church, as she is": an Old High sermon during the Tract XC controversy

Over the next few weeks, laudable Practice will be featuring excerpts from the works of Richard William Jelf (1798-1871).  Ordained in 1821, Jelf was one of those whom Peter Nockles lists as the 'Zs': the post-1833 continuation of the Old High tradition.

Jelf's January 1842 sermon - preached amidst the outcry against Tract XC, with Old High bishops issuing a series of highly critical charges - exemplifies the alternative to Newman's proposal.  The title of the sermon itself captured the Old High vision - The Via Media: Or, The Church of England our Providential Path between Romanism and Dissent. 

Jelf's preface to the published version of the sermon immediately indicates Old High concerns in the aftermath of Tract XC. In a pithy expression of characteristic Old High piety, Jelf - with the emphasis in the original - rejected the notion that Anglicanism needed to be remade in the image of Newman:

in the bosom of our own holy Apostolic Church, as she is, we may find rest and peace.

The threat of conversions to Roman Catholicism (used by Newman and others to justify Tract XC) received short shrift from Jelf, echoing Old High confidence in the catholicity of Anglicanism and its traditional critique of Rome:

It is his hope and belief, that the fears entertained of a considerable defection to Romanism will turn out to be exaggerated, and that not many will be prepared to follow the example of those few unhappy persons (surely worthy of all commiseration), who have been seduced to leave a sound branch of Christ's Church, and to cling to an unsound and corrupt one.

Turning explicitly to Tractarianism, Jelf - while acknowledging, as most of the Old High tradition had done, approval of the early Tracts - noted how "sober-minded men" (a description indicative of the nature of High Church piety and thought) recognised dangerous teaching both in the later Tracts:

the objectionable and ambiguous teaching, which sober-minded men (while they are not backward to acknowledge the general usefulness of the work, and the seasonableness of its first appearance), cannot but recognise in certain of the Tracts for the Times, particularly in some of the later numbers.

The Preface closed with an explanation of the sermon's critique of non-episcopal Protestant Churches. Jelf explains, again in typical Old High fashion (what Nockles terms "in the best traditions of Laudianism"), that this critique does not apply to the continental Protestant Churches.  And, mindful of Tractarian polemics during the then ongoing Jerusalem Bishopric controversy, Jelf's invocation of the words of Bishop Bull, together with his declaration that continental non-episcopal Protestant churches were merely "imperfect", was a clear rejection of the Tractarian stance:

[these] remarks ... are not intended to apply to foreign Protestant communities. With respect to some of them at least, (such as those whom Bp. Bull designates as "Fratres nostri Lutherani") it is at once charitable and true to say, that they are at present imperfect Churches, and that by a few modifications, and with the addition of one important element (which they never wilfully lost) they may be enabled to approximate to our own branch of the Church, with which it has ever been their wish to be at one.

The Preface to the sermon is but two and a half pages but is itself a significant indication of how the Old High tradition, articulated by the younger 'Zs', held to a very different vision to that proposed by the Tractarians.