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"Definite and tangible": Bishop Bagot's 1842 Visitation Charge and Prayer Book piety

Today begins a series of weekly posts on laudable Practice from a rich seam of Old High teaching, the responses to Tract XC by Old High bishops in the visitation charges of the early 1840s.  The focus of the posts will be not so much on the well-known critique of Tract XC articulated in these charges but, rather, on what these visitation charges reveal about the teaching, piety, concerns, and vitality of the Old High tradition nearly a decade after the emergence of the Oxford Movement.  I begin with the 1842 Visitation Charge of Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford (1829-45, and Newman's diocesan).  

Here Bagot warns against undermining the "definite and tangible" catholic nature of the Prayer Book with devotional material from the Roman Breviary, in pursuit of an "indefinite and elusive ... shadowy Catholicism". This contrast - "definite and tangible" against "indefinite and elusive" - captures the differences between an Old High piety rooted in the Prayer Book, English divines, and parish over generations, and the first signs of the emergence of an artificial, ahistorical stream of Tridentine piety within Anglicanism:

Further I must take leave to tell those persons, whoever they are, that they are doing no good service to the Church of England, by their recent publication of manuals of private devotion, extracted from the Breviary and similar sources by inserting therein no small portion of highly objectionable matter, and tacitly, if not openly, encouraging young persons to be dissatisfied with what God has given them, and to look on the contents of our admirable Liturgy as insufficient to meet the wants of a Catholic mind. Be it ours, my Reverend Brethren, to remind the young and ardent of these days, that it is a most dangerous delusion to wander from any thing so definite and tangible as the Prayer Book, in search of what is so indefinite and elusive as that shadowy Catholicism, which, under the aspect represented by them, has never existed except in their own imaginations.

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  1. Anonymous12 October 2022 at 12:42

    Looking forward to this series! Just recently discovered your blog and have been deeply enriched and blessed by your research. Blessings.

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