"Cause of delight and thankfulness": Bishop Mant's 1842 Visitation Charge on the Prayer Book

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 again turn to 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 contrasts the tendency in the later Tracts to admire the Roman Breviary with an Old High reverence for the Book of Common Prayer. The Prayer Book is primitive and Reformed, wisely reducing the seven daily offices, admired by some of the Tractarians, to two. This, Mant notes, provided for a "more agreeable to a reasonable service", terms which reveal something of the pleasing nature of Old High piety. While elements of Tractarianism - anticipating later Anglo-catholic desires - were praising Breviarium Romanum as superior to the BCP, Mant exemplified Old High piety as he describes the Prayer Book as a "cause of delight and thankfulness":

it is the evident tendency of the Tracts, in which the services containing them are inserted, to raise the character of the Romish Church to an elevation exceeding that of our own, for her devotional exercises. Let the unbiassed reader examine the account given of the Breviary, whence our service was derived, and let him judge in the first place whether the Breviary, as it was practised in the Catholic Church, is not holden up to admiration, as preferable to the English Book of Common Prayer ...

Following the example of the primitive Catholic Church in her mode of worship as well as in her constitution, the Reformed English Church had provided a liturgical form for her people ... To those who with a right mind contemplate the Anglican Church in her reformed state, it is cause of delight and thankfulness that she made such liturgical provisions as her Book of Common Prayer contains for the worship and edification of her people ...

Reducing the seven-fold daily offices of the Romish Breviary to a number more agreeable to a reasonable service, and better adapted for the observance and benefit of her congregations, the reformed Anglican Church appointed a daily order of morning and evening prayer.

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laudable Practice

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