"Beware of the disorderly and innovating spirit": Bishop Mant's 1842 Visitation Charge on conformity and uniformity

Continuing the series of weekly posts from the responses to Tract XC by Old High bishops in the visitation charges of the early 1840s, today we have a penultimate extract from the 1842 visitation charge of Richard Mant, Bishop of Down and Connor, The Laws of the Church: The Churchman's Guard Against Romanism and Puritanism.

As with the charges of Bagot of Oxford and Phillpotts of Exeter, the point of these extracts is not to focus on the rejection of Tract XC but, rather, on how these charges provide a rich seam of Old High teaching.

In this extract Mant addresses the unauthorised changes to the Prayer Book liturgy made by "modern puritanical ministers", the Church's "less merciful sons". His rebuke of this practice, addressing examples from the Baptism and Burial rites, demonstrates the continued significance of conformity and uniformity for the Old High tradition, even as the disputes occasioned by Tractarians and early Ritualists commenced. Mindful of the liturgical disorder which would follow, and which now is all-too evident in many corners of Anglicanism, we can discern how the Old High commitment to conformity and uniformity, rather than being a stuffy, reactionary stance, wisely provided for a stability which aided the Church's public witness and pastoral ministry:

let us beware of the disorderly and innovating spirit of those who, disapproving of some sentiment or expression in the Book of Common Prayer, and being unwilling therefore to give it utterance from their lips, mould the phraseology of the Church into a form more agreeable to their own private opinions. Thus the avowed doctrine and unequivocal declarations of our liturgy concerning the regenerating grace of holy baptism have been qualified into a sort of conformity with the scruples of the Church's modern puritanical ministers; and her charitable expression of hope for the departed sinner has been suspended from her burial service, in order that she might be made to speak a language more in harmony with the judicial decision of her less merciful sons. Remarkable examples these of Christian simplicity and truth, and withal of tenderness of conscience, which thus sensitively recoils from the use of unpleasing language; but nevertheless, on admission into the ministry, acquiesces in a profession of assent and consent to the same language, and in a solemn promise to use it, and is still satisfied to retain a position in the ministry on the continued pledge of that assent and consent.

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