"To correct an impropriety"? Bishop Mant's 1842 Visitation Charge and preaching in the surplice

They all preached in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them.

It is one of the lines I particularly enjoy from Trollope's description of the clergy of Barchester, high church but not Puseyite. Bishop Mant, however, would not approve. In his 1842 visitation charge The Laws of the Church: The Churchman's Guard Against Romanism and Puritanism, Mant explained why clergy should preach wearing the surplice (a highly controversial practice in the 1840s, often opposed on the grounds that it was 'Puseyite'):

The case is the difficulty experienced in resuming the service after the sermon, by reason of the requisite change of the dresses, appropriated in practice respectively to the pulpit and the communion table. My solution of the difficulty is comprised in the following suggestions:- First, what is the obligation on a clergyman to use a dress in the pulpit different from that which he wears during his other ministrations? Secondly, does not the order for his dress, during his ministrations in general, include his ministration in the pulpit? and thus would not the surplice be properly worn at any time for the sermon by the parochial clergy, as it is by those in cathedral churches and college chapels? But, thirdly, at all events, where the circumstances of the case make that dress desirable, does there appear any impropriety in its use?

If, indeed, it were at all times worn by the preacher, it might tend to correct an impropriety, not to say an indecency, which is too apt to prevail in our churches, by reason of the change which takes place before the sermon: when the preacher, attended, perhaps, by the other clergy, if others be present, quits the church for the vestry room, after the Nicene Creed; thus leaves his congregation to carry on a part of the service, admitting psalmody to be such, without their minister; an absolute anomaly, as I apprehend it, in Christian worship, that the people should act without their minister; deprives them of his superintendence during that exercise, and of his example in setting before them the becoming posture and a solemn deportment in celebrating God's praises; and, at length, after an absence of several minutes, during which he has been employing himself in any way but that of common worship with his people in God's house, returns at the close of the psalm to the congregation, and ascends the pulpit in the character of the preacher.

Now all this is, in my judgment, open to much animadversion. And the best mode of correcting it appears to be, for the minister to proceed immediately after the Nicene Creed, to the pulpit, attired as he is, for the Church certainly gives no order or sanction for the change of his attire, and so be prepared to take part with his people in the singing, if singing be at that time desirable, or, if not, to proceed at once with his sermon.

But, however this may be, it is evident and incontrovertible, that much awkwardness and inconvenience must be the result of detaining a congregation after the sermon, whilst the minister leaves the church, and retires to a perhaps distant vestry room, in order that he may again attire himself in the dress fitted for prayer: for that he should proceed to the succeeding prayers in any other attire than the surplice, is palpably opposed to the directions of the Church. The sole mode of obviating this difficulty appears to be for the minister, in such cases at least, to preach in his surplice.

Mant here shows how the Old High tradition was developing in the 1840s: it was not, contrary to some Tractarian polemic, a 'frozen' tradition. And Mant's case was, of course, convincing.  Within a few decades, preaching in the surplice was an entirely uncontroversial, normative practice. 

That said, I cannot but help regard the practice of the Barchester clergy with some nostalgia, seeing in the preaching gown a recognition of the particular ministry of parochial preaching. Nor did Bishop Mant entirely carry the day in the Church of Ireland.  Our Canons on ecclesiastical apparel continue to carry an echo - though never (to my knowledge) invoked - of Barchester:

Provided that any member of the clergy shall be at liberty to wear a plain black gown while preaching.