"No such infallibility for any church": Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures and the Hookerian vision

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 farther, be called upon to state what I mean, whether I would set up an "absolute" authority in the church; whether I would contend that under no circumstances whatever, a man may lawfully separate from the established communion? Undoubtedly, I claim no such infallibility for any church: undoubtedly, there may be circumstances which will not only excuse but justify such a separation. The case of the Reformation alone would suffice to establish this point.

This, however, does not mean that it was legitimate to separate from duly ordered national churches:

It was the strong and declared opinion of our national church in particular, at that period to which we are all in the habit of looking, when she virtually, nay, actually separated from the church of Rome; when therefore she might have spared herself and the rest of the reformed churches much trouble, when she and they might at once have set themselves above the reach of obloquy and censure, if they could have maintained the broad ground, that there was no guilt in schism, and that neither churches nor individuals were bound to have fellowship with each other in matters of religion. She still, however, maintained the old doctrine, she still reproved and taxed with guilt all those individuals who separated from their proper churches, and all those churches who refused to communicate with each other without the most evident and weighty reasons. She, as well as the rest, held it to be incumbent upon those who so separated to shew that the terms of communion imposed by the church from which the separation was made were actually sinful; either as being in themselves contrary to the word of God, or as by manifest consequence directly leading to evil.

In other words, we might regard Le Mesurier as anticipating an answer to Newman's needless search for a supposedly infallible ecclesial authority. No such exalted claims were required for catholic peace and unity because authority and freedom could be combined in the ordinary life of national churches. There is a deeply Hookerian quality to this rejection of abstract, ideological claims to infallibility in favour of a modest, realistic, organic balancing of authority and freedom in particular churches.

Note, too, how Le Mesurier places the Church of England in the context of "the rest of the reformed churches", with "she and they" not refusing "to communicate with each other". This is a reminder of the greatest rupture occasioned by Tractarianism, the rejection of the inherently Protestant nature of Anglicanism.