"In strict accordance with the articles and homilies of our Church": Bishop Bagot's 1842 Visitation Charge and the Sacraments

Continuing the new series of weekly posts on visitation charges of Old High bishops in the immediate aftermath of the Tract XC controversy, today we turn again to the 1842 Visitation Charge of Richard Bagot, Bishop of Oxford.  As stated in the introductory post of the series last week, the focus is be not so much on the well-known critique of Tract XC but, rather, on what the 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.

In today's post, an extract from Bagot's charge on the significance of the sacraments.  This notably follows his praise for the Tracts:  "they have successfully laboured to impress the necessity and efficacy of the Sacraments, as the appointed means, in and by which God is pleased to impart the vital and saving grace of Christ". Against this, Bagot contrasts some opponents of Tractarian teaching on the sacraments, accusing such opponents of having forgotten the Articles of Religion,  "to which they have solemnly and repeatedly subscribed". Also noteworthy is a footnote in which he suggests "that Socinus symbolizes very strikingly with ultra-Protestants, in his doctrine of baptism".

While praising the sacramental teaching of the Tracts, however, Bagot emphasises that a rich understanding of Baptism and Eucharist is found in "the fathers of our reformed Church" (emphasis added).  In contrast to Tract XC, there is no need - or desire - to invoke as somehow normative the sacramental teaching of another Christian tradition, for the native tradition of the English Church has an abundance of riches when it comes to the sacraments, an abundance of riches to be taught and experienced within Anglicanism:

While the Sacraments are thus unhappily depreciated by good men of our own day, it is refreshing to look back to the fathers of our reformed Church, and to listen to their sounder teaching. Let me, then, contrast with what I have just cited from our contemporaries, Hooker's brief, but pregnant, declarations on this subject. "Sacraments", says he, "are those visible signs which, in the exercise of religion, God requireth every man to receive, as tokens of that saving grace which Himself thereby bestoweth". Again, after describing "Grace, as the word of God teacheth," first, "His favour and undeserved mercy towards us"; secondly, "The bestowing of His Holy Spirit, which inwardly worketh"; thirdly, "The effects of that Spirit whatsoever, but especially saving virtues, such as are faith, charity, and hope"; lastly, "The free and full remission of all our sins": he immediately subjoins, "This is the Grace which Sacraments yield, and whereby we are all justified" ...

Such is the doctrine of one who is, by common consent, recognised as "the judicious Hooker," in strict accordance with the articles and homilies of our Church. Such, too, is the doctrine of a no less illustrious luminary of the next century, Isaac Barrow. He says, "The benefits which God signifies in Baptism, and (upon due terms) engageth to confer on us, are these: first, The purgation or absolution of us from the guilt of past offences by a free and full remission of them his freely justifying us". Be such our teaching. Sacraments, in the fullest and truest sense, are not merely acts of men acts of worship sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving; they are all these, but they are far more, far higher, than all these. Their great, their distinctive characteristic is, that they are God's acts applications of God to man His means, His instruments, of giving to us that oneness with Christ, by which we are saved, and wherein we stand. Until we teach our people thus to think and feel of the Sacraments, we shall have left one main part of our office, as stewards of the mysteries of God, miserably neglected.