laudable Practice

Prior to Lent, laudable Practice shared extracts from two sermons by John Lonsdale, an associate of the Hackney Phalanx and later Bishop of Lichfield (1843-67). The Life of John Lonsdale (1868), by his son-in-law, provides an interesting insight into Lonsdale as a representative of the Old High tradition. The work describes Lonsdale as "a High Churchman of the old school, broadened by experience, and inclining always to moderation and comprehension". In this, he was not dissimilar from other bishops in the Old High tradition as, for example, Christopher Bethell (Bishop of Gloucester then Exeter,1824-30) and William Jacobson (Bishop of Chester, 1864-84). On ritual matters, it is stated that this "High Churchman of the old school" did not at all identify with ceremonies the Tractarians imported into parish churches from cathedrals, such as bowing to the Holy Table or facing east for the Creed: Neither did he, either in the reading desk, or at the Table, or in his ...

Thomas Le Mesurier (born 1756, received orders 1794) is described by Nockles as representative of the 'Warburtonian' school in the pre-Tractarian High Church tradition, characterised by "an aversion to extravagant devotional austerities", regarded as "'useless' and 'anti-social'". Delivering the Bampton Lectures in 1807, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier addressed an enduring High Church theme, how divisions and contentions undermined the "charity and peace which we say that it was the end of our religion to establish". This opening extract illustrates how the High Church tradition continued what Kenneth Kirk famously identified as a defining feature of the Anglican ethos, "combining the principle of authority with that of freedom". Here Le Mesurier does so with regards to the principle of ecclesiastical authority. He begins by rejecting any ecclesial claims to infallibility: I shall perhaps, before I go fa...

Arvo Pärt might not, to say the least, be the most obvious choice of a cultural figure to illustrate aspects of the Old High tradition. The Estonian composer, a devout Orthodox believer, and recent recipient of the Polar Music Prize , is rather far removed from the conventions of Old High piety. That said, Peter C. Bouteneff's study Arvo Pärt: Out of Slience (2015) reminds us of the "ecumenical nature of" Pärt's "Christian faith and identity", contrasting with the reactionary sectarianism of some elements in Orthodoxy, marked by the "kind of impassioned devotion one might have for a nation or a football team".  This, then, might allow us to reflect on some similarities between Pärt's music and the Old High tradition.  And so a  profile of Pärt  by conductor and composer Carmen-Helena Télle did bring to mind aspects of Old High piety: By the mid-1980s, Pärt began to be grouped among other composers labeled colloquially as “Holy Min...

Continuing the consideration of the general Confession in John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we turn to words which can seem like a spiritually unhelpful exaggeration of the fallen condition: "there is no health in us". This, of course, explains the phrase being omitted from, for example, Rite One Morning and Evening Prayer in TEC's BCP 1979.  Shepherd, however, points to the phrase as having a twofold purpose. Firstly, it expresses the reality - testified to in scripture, affirmed by our experience - of the sickness of sin infecting all aspects of our humanity. Secondly, the phrase draws us to recognise that God alone saves. In other words, rather than a gloomy declaration of total depravity, the phrase has a robust realism and is a profoundly comforting theological truth. Having thus confessed our iniquities, we acknowledge, that 'There is no health in us'. In the language ...

Another Eastertide sermon from Cornelius Duffie - rector of Saint Thomas, New York City 1824-27 - in which we see an Old High emphasis on the penitential aspect of Eastertide.  This is reflected in the collects of the First and Second Sundays after Easter: "Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may alway serve thee in pureness of living and truth"; "and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life".  It is a reminder that a straightforward 'the 40 days of Easter are celebratory', a liturgical season in which penitence should be minimised and de-emphasised, obscures a significant aspect of Pauline teaching, that our participation in the life of the Resurrection requires a dying to sin. As the epistle of Easter Day declared, "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth". It is therefore right and proper that the penitential aspects of both Morning and Evening Prayer and t...

In their respective studies of Tractarianism, both Nockles and Herring note that the debates in the Church of England over liturgical innovations in the 1840s and 50s concerned what were, by the standards of later decades, modest practices: bowing to the altar and turning east in parish churches, the occasional stole, chanting of services, the introduction in a few places of candles on the altar. Herring and Nockles both describe this as following what was regarded as "Laudian precedent", "a Laudian pattern". 'Puseyite innovations' tended to be a combination of this and "a restoration of obsolete rubrics". Alongside this was campaign by Old High bishops, such as Blomfield of London, to encourage preaching in the surplice. Modest though such practices may have been when contrasted with the Anglo-Catholicism of coming decades, they did provoke intense debate and controversy, so much so that the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, issued A Let...

Today we bring our extracts from Jelf's 1844 Bampton Lectures -  An inquiry into the means of grace, their mutual connection, and combined use, with especial reference to the Church of England  -  to a close (the  first extract  was posted in late June 2022). At the end of the final lecture, Jelf portrays how the varied means of grace in Anglicanism shape and sustain a life of faith, hope, and love. In this extract he describes the means of grace at the hour of our death: And so, at length, the day is far spent, and "the night cometh, in which no man can work." The hand of sickness and death is upon God's weary servant. Still, even then he is mindful that the means of grace are not yet exhausted; his spiritual friend and guide is once more at hand to warn, to support, to pray with him and for him; to receive, if he desire it, his last confession, and, by Christ's authority committed unto him, to "absolve" him "from all" his "sins, in the n...

Having considered the exposition of the Exhortation and Absolution at Morning and Evening Prayer by John Shepherd in his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we turn to the Confession. He notes how the opening words of the Confession draw attention to a wider characteristic of the Prayer Book liturgy, the titles by which it addresses God: Before we enter upon the first part of the confession, we shall here particularly notice, once for all, a beauty and propriety, which, in our admirable Liturgy, we may everywhere observe. I mean the extreme care of the church in framing introductions to her prayers and collects. In all her addresses to the Deity, she has, it may almost be said, uniformly selected such titles, attributes and perfections, as are most appropriate to the petitions to which they are prefixed, and best calculated to produce correspondent affections in the minds of those that use them. Whoever, with an eye...

Three recent articles contain insights which should give us a renewed appreciation of Cranmerian Morning and Evening Prayer.  The first is by Fergus Butler-Gallie (and, by the way, his recently published Touching Cloth is required reading), an article for The Critic on the need to understand our vices: That we are good and rational and, most importantly today, have a right to pursue these ends is taken for granted. The problem is that ... it isn’t true. A cursory look at the history of humanity should be more than enough. Yet we have had people who read history at university at the forefront of government for a number of years and remain stuck in a rut around human nature. How many public policy mistakes have been the result of the basic miscalculation that people are good and rational and will behave accordingly? From the right to buy scheme to Covid marshals, the last 40 odd years of British politics are littered with ideas that were presented as sensible in the abstract until...

An Eastertide sermon from Cornelius Duffie - rector of Saint Thomas, New York City 1824-27 - in which we see how a distinctive Old High emphasis on the necessity of sanctification and good works is related to the hope of the Resurrection (note the staple Old High references to 'working out our salvation with fear and trembling' and 'making our election sure'). Sanctification prepares us to share in the Easter hope. Without the renewal of sanctification, we do not bear the fruit of the Resurrection life. We might, then, consider the sermon an exposition of the call of the  Easter Anthems : "Not with the old leaven ... reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin". Now, my brethren, seeing that life and immortality are brought to light, is there nothing in the hope set before us in the Gospel, to make us anxious to know whether we are doing what God requires us to do, in order to secure it? Is not the prospect of a future and better existence the most e...

For as Death is the end of our lives, so is the Resurrection the end of our hopes; and as we die daily, so we daily hope: but Death, which is the end of our life, is the enlargement of our Spirits from hope to certainty, from uncertain fears to certain expectations, from the death of the body to the life of the soul; that is, to partake of the light and life of Christ, to rise to life as he did; for his Resurrection is the beginning of ours: He died for us alone, not for himself; but he rose again for himself and us too. So that if he did rise, so shall we. ... as Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to day, and the same for ever; so may we in Christ, become in the morrow of the Resurrection the same or better then yesterday in our natural life; the same body and the same soul tied together in the same essential union, with this only difference, that not Nature but Grace and Glory with an Hermetic seal give us a new signature, whereby we shall no more be changed, but like unto Christ...

And Buried. That he might suffer every thing of humane nature, he was by the care of his friends and disciples, by the leave of Pilate, taken from the Cross, and embalmed (as the manner of the Jews was to bury) and wrapped in linen, and buried in a new grave, hewn out of a Rock; and this was the last and lowest step of his humiliation. He descended into Hell. That is, He went down into the lower parts of the earth, or (as himself called it) into the heart of the earth; by which phrase the Scripture understands the state of separation, or of souls severed from their bodies: by this his descending to the land of darkness, where all things are forgotten, he sanctified the state of death and separation, that none of his servants might ever after fear the jaws of Death and Hell; whither he went, not to suffer torment (because he finished all that upon the Cross) but to triumph over the gates of hell, to verify his death, and the event of his sufferings, and to break the iron bars of those l...

Jesus was led out of the gates of Jerusalem, that he might become the sacrifice for persons without the pale, even for all the world. And the daughters of Jerusalem followed him with pious tears till they came to Calvary; a place difficult in the ascent, eminent and apt for the publication of shame, a bill of death and dead bones, polluted and impure; and there beheld him stripped naked who clothes the fields with flowers, and all the world with robes, and the whole globe with the canopy of heaven; and so dressed, that now every circumstance was a triumph. By his disgrace he trampled upon our pride; by his poverty and nakedness he triumphed over our covetousness and love of riches; and by his pains chastised the delicacies of our flesh, and broke in pieces the fetters of concupiscence. For as soon as Adam was clothed, he quitted Paradise; and Jesus was made naked, that he might bring us in again ... And now behold the priest and the sacrifice of all the world laid upon the altar of the...

The blessed sacrament is of great efficacy for the remission of sins; not that it hath any formal efficacy, or any inherent virtue to procure pardon, but that it is the ministry of the death of Christ, and the application of his blood, which blood was shed for the remission of sins, and is the great means of impetration, and, as the schools use to speak, is the meritorious cause of it. For there are but two ways of applying the death of Christ, an internal grace, and an external ministry. Faith is the inward applicatory; and if there be any outward at all, it must be the sacraments; and both of them are of remarkable virtue in this particular; for by baptism we are baptized into the death of Christ, and the Lord's Supper is an appointed enunciation and declaration of Christ's death, and it is a sacramental participation of it. Now to partake of it sacramentally, is by a sacrament to receive it; that is, so to apply it to us, as that can be applied; it brings it to our spirit; i...

He entered into the world with all the circumstances of poverty.  He had a star to illustrate his birth; but a stable for his bedchamber, and a manger for his cradle. The angels sang hymns when he was born: but he was cold and cried, uneasy and unprovided. He lived long in the trade of a carpenter; he, by whom God  made the world, had, in his first years, the business of a mean and ignoble trade. He did good wherever he went; and almost wherever he went was abused. He deserved heaven for his obedience, but found a cross in his way thither: and if ever any man had reason to expect fair usages from God, and to be dandled in the lap of ease, softness, and a prosperous fortune, he it was only that could deserve that, or any thing that can be good. But, after he had chosen to live a life of virtue, of poverty, and labour, he entered into a state of death; whose shame and trouble were great enough to pay for the sins of the whole world.   And I shall choose to express this...

For after that Christ had done all this by the direct actions of his Priestly Office, of sacrificing himself for us, he hath also done very many things for us which are also the fruits of his first love and prosecutions of our redemption.  I will not instance in the strange arts of mercy that our Lord uses to bring us to live holy lives;  things are so ordered, and so great a value set upon our souls since they are the images of God, and redeemed by the Blood of the holy Lamb, that the salvation of our souls is reckoned as a part of Christ's reward, a part of the glorification of his humanity. Every sinner that repents causes joy to Christ, and the joy is so great that it runs over and wets the fair brows and beauteous locks of Cherubims and Seraphims, and all the Angels have a part of that banquet; Then it is that our blessed Lord feels the fruits of his holy death, the acceptation of his holy sacrifice, the graciousness of his person, the return of his prayers. For all that ...

For as for me, I am not worthy to be called thy servant, much less am I worthy to be thy son, for I am the vilest of sinners and the worst of men, a lover of the things of the world, and a despiser of the things of God, greedy of sin, and impatient of reproof, desirous to seem holy, and negligent of being so, transported with interest, fool'd with presumption and false principles, disturb'd with anger, with a peevish and unmortified spirit, and disordered by a whole body of sin and death. Lord pardon all my sins for my sweetest Saviour's sake; thou who didst die for me, Holy Jesus, save me and deliver me, reserve not my sins to be punished in the day of wrath and eternal vengeance; but wash away my sins, and blot them out of thy remembrance, and purify my soul with the waters of repentance and the blood of the cross, that for what is past thy wrath may not come out against me, and for the time to come I may never provoke thee to anger or to jealousy. O just and dear God be ...

And now begins that great triumph in which the holy Jesus was pleased to exalt his office, and to abase his person. He rode, like a poor man, upon an ass, a beast of burden, and the lowest value; and yet it was not his own; and in that equipage he received the acclamations due to a mighty Prince, to the Son of the eternal King: telling us, that the smallness of fortune, and the rudeness of exterior habiliments, and a rough wall, are sometimes the outsides of a great glory; and that, when God means to glorify or do honour to a person, he need no help from secular advantages. He bides great riches in renunciation of the world, and makes great honour breathe forth from the clouds of humility, and victory to arise from yielding and the modesty of departing from our interest, and peace to be the reward of him that suffers all the hostilities of men and devils: for Jesus, in this great humility of his, gives a great probation that he was the Messias, and the King of Sion; because no othe...