"Nothing sectarian, nothing that is not Catholic": Bishop Phillpotts' 1842 Visitation Charge and Prayer Book piety

Today laudable Practice resumes the series of weekly posts 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 these posts is 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.

Having considered the 1842 charge of Newman's diocesan, Bagot of Oxford, we turn now to the charge given in the same year by Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter 1831-69. In this extract from the charge, Phillpotts expounds an enduring Old High conviction - that the Prayer Book offers a much richer proclamation of the Gospel than a reliance on preaching alone. Central to this was the recognition of Prayer Book as deeply rooted in evangelical, catholic faith, against sectarian alternatives. Here Phillpotts offer a vision of Old High parish ministry, with the Prayer Book a means of ministering to us life in Christ, "from the font to the grave":

what is to preach the Gospel? Is it merely the delivery of oral discourses? In proclaiming the Gospel to the heathen, this may, indeed, be the best or the only way. But in the instruction of those who have been already brought, by God's mercy, into the fold of Christ, can the same be truly said? What is catechising? What the reading publicly in the congregation the written Word of God? What the intelligent and devout use of our own admirable Liturgy? Can any sermons bear comparison, even as instruments of Christian instruction, with the wisdom, the perspicuity, the fulness, the wonderfully proportioned exhibition of the whole Will of God, which that blessed book presents? Of all its praises, this, its observance of the just analogy of faith, is perhaps the highest. In it, no one portion of evangelical truth is unduly exalted above the rest; no favourite doctrine can be there detected - nothing sectarian - nothing that is not Catholic, in its tone, as in its sense. Only teach your people to know the method, the system, of the whole book, and the purpose, as well as the meaning, of every part. Teach them, in short, to know the riches of the treasure which is there given into their hands. Shew to them, that it is not merely a manual of daily devotion, but also an epitome of a Christian's life: of his life, said I? - ay, and of his death. From the font to the grave, it seeks to shed its enlightening, its chastening, its consoling influence on all we do and all we suffer your part to teach your people to use it as they ought; to pray its prayers; to "pray with the spirit, and to pray with the understanding also". And then be assured that they will listen even to the preacher, if not with the same barren wonder at his fancied talents, or the same brief subjection of their feelings to his rhetoric, yet with minds and hearts better fitted to receive, and to retain, whatever of good they may hear from him.