laudable Practice

I continued, as did all of us, to pray for the king, until Sunday (inclusively) before the 4th of July 1776. So said William White , supporter of the Patriot cause and chaplain to the Continental Congress. It is a reminder of the complexities and nuances of Anglican allegiances and identities in North America during these years. Similarly we might also point to the Loyalist parson Jonathan Boucher's critique of the Administration in Westminster in a 1774 sermon: Their whole conduct, indeed, has been so utterly devoid of counsel, that I seem to have no right to tax those persons with being superstitious, who ascribe to it a preternatural infatuation ... That they wish for a reconciliation, we cannot but believe: yet every step they have taken, since the dispute began, has, through their folly, or our perverseness, or both, tended only to widen the breach; tended to make new enemies and lose old friends. Boucher also admitted, in his farewell sermon the following year to his parish i...

To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence. The famous words of John Wingate Thornton are quoted at the outset of the weighty volume Political Sermons of the American Founding Era . The introduction to this collection similarly points to The History of the American Revolution by Massachusetts pastor William Gordon and his claim that it was the clergy of New England who spoke "boldly for the liberties of the people", against "the parson" who taught the people "slavishly to bow their neck to any tyrant".  The posts over the past few days, exploring the political sermons of Anglicans aligned to the Patriot cause, suggest a rather different account.  The preaching of Anglican political theology was shaped by the Revolution of 1688 with its commitment to constitutional liberties and obedience. It expounded (and understood itself to be) a 'middle way' between ancien regime absolutism and an over-zealous emphasi...

On 9th December 1775, Crown forces engaged Patriot troops in the Battle of Great Bridge. It was the first engagement of the Revolutionary War in Virginia. Only weeks later, on 1st January, the Royal Navy bombarded Norfolk, Virginia, with British landing parties being confronted by Patriot militia. The confrontation resulted in the town being burnt to the ground. On the eve of the shelling of Norfolk, and ending the tumultuous year of 1775, David Griffith - then rector of  Shelburne Parish in Loudoun County, northern Virginia - entered the pulpit of Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg.  Griffith had previously publicly indicated his support for the Patriot cause. Now from the pulpit, amidst the realities of armed conflict and political confrontation, preached on a scriptural text at the heart of Anglican political theology, and often invoked by Loyalist clergy, Romans 13:1&2:  The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth ...

On 12th June 1775, the Second Continental Congress - weeks after Lexington and Concord, and only days before Bunker Hill - issued a proclamation calling for the inhabitants of the American colonies to observe 20th July as "a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer", seeking the "gracious interposition of Heaven" in order to aid "a speedy end ... to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American colonies, without farther effusion of blood". And so it was on 20th July that the members of the Continental Congress gathered in Christ Church, Philadelphia , to hear Jacob Duché - Rector of Christ Church - preach on a text from Psalm 80, "Turn thee again, thou God of hosts, look down from heaven: behold, and visit this vine". The sermon's title identified the vine: ' The American Vine '. As with the vine in the psalm, the American Vine was blessed with goodly roots and soil, allowing it to flourish: Our sober Ancestors broug...

In the week of 4th July last year, laudable Practice considered how English, Irish, and Loyalist Anglicans responded to the 'American War' , perceiving it as an unjust rebellion against the liberal constitutional order secured by the Revolution of 1688. This year, in the week leading up to 4th July, we turn to those colonial Anglicans who sided with the Patriots. Their understanding of the Revolutionary War was encapsulated in a resolution of the Maryland Provincial Convention on 25th May 1776 : Whereas his Britannic majesty King George has prosecuted, and still prosecutes, a cruel and unjust war against the British Colonies in America, and has acceded to acts of parliament, declaring the people of the said colonies in actual rebellion: and whereas the good people of this province have taken up arms to defend their rights and liberties, and to repel the hostilities carrying on against them ... As the resolution continued, it demonstrated how it had a particular relevance for A...

The whole of the hymn, however, having been uttered upon a peculiar occasion, and under extraordinary circumstances, and the latter part being addressed to the infant Baptist in particular, and referring solely to his immediate office, it is seldom read after the second Lesson. In its place therefore with the greatest propriety, we generally use the hundredth psalm, called Jubilate Deo. So said John Shepherd, in his 1796 A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England , of the Benedictus . Secker, in his mid-18th century Six Sermons on the Liturgy of the Church of England , admitted that "we use the more frequently" the Jubilate rather than the Benedictus.  Part of the reason for this was precisely because the Benedictus "was uttered on the birth of John the Baptist", necessitating this note from Secker: The people, in repeating it, should remember, that the words, "And thou, Child, shalt be called the Prophet of ...

To end our readings from The Life of John Lonsdale (1868) - Bishop of Lichfield 1843-67 and exemplar of the Old High tradition - two extracts from sermons preached by Lonsdale in the last years of his life. Both extracts point to the Old High tradition continuing to present in English parish, over three decades after the beginning of the Oxford Movement.  The first sermon was delivered at the restoration of a parish church in 1863. It is implied in the sermon that the restoration followed Victorian norms, moving away from some 18th century features.  Despite this, Lonsdale emphasised a continuation of simplicity: And still the work is of a simple kind: it is still ... characterized by that simple grace which best becomes the sacred edifices of the Church of England; simple, solemnly simple, as that Church is in its ritual, and forms of worship. Here was the authentic voice of the Old High tradition, rejoicing in - rather than mocking and rejecting - the modest, quiet liturgic...

In the third of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier addresses the consistent New Testament exhortations to maintain the church's unity and peace. He applies these calls to the episcopal order of the national, Established Church. This is a good example of how the Old High tradition understood the commands and exhortations of Scripture not as a call to ' The Weird ' but, rather, to be lived out in the ordinary, undramatic Christian life. Also noteworthy in this extract is how Le Mesurier provides a Hookerian account of the origins of episcopacy. The authority of episcopal order relies, he states, on the historic practice of the earliest churches, maintained over centuries, derived from apostolic practice. As with Hooker (and as seen elsewhere in the Old High tradition ), no exalted appeal is made to explicit divine institution of episcopal order. Note too, by the way, how Le Mesurier - in common with a long-standing view in Laudian and ...

Reading through John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we come to the Gloria Patri at the opening versicles and responses. Shepherd terms the Gloria Patri a 'creed', echoing the well-established approach of ' Trinitarian minimalism ', for this short hymn of praise to the Triune God contains "the substance" of the Faith: The Doxology, Gloria Patri, is not merely an admirable hymn, containing a particular adoration of each of the persons, in the holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity. But it is likewise a compendious Catholic Creed; for the substance of a Christian's faith is, to believe in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This understanding continues as Shepherd quotes from Hooker, who was echoing Basil. Faith in the Holy Trinity is sufficiently expressed through Baptism in the Triune Name, confessing the Apostles' Creed, and declaring the praise of the Triun...

What struck me most when reading Fiona McCall's excellent Baal's Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013), was its identification of an Episcopalian piety emerging out of the experience of the defeat of the Royalist and Episcopalian cause, a piety which would particularly shape and characterise Anglicanism during the 'long 18th century'.  The first reference to this Episcopalian piety ('Episcopalian' is here used in light of the anachronistic nature of 'Anglican') might give us pause for thought, an apparent stepping away from scriptural discourse: During the 1640s, loyalist clergy had been just as inclined as the 'godly' to pepper their discourse with biblical quotations ... But, after defeat, Anglican discourse eschewed this scriptural focus, developing what some have seen as a characteristic 'conservative Anglican' style: meditative, obscure, ambiguous and symbolic (p.28f). This reserve, however, points to, encou...

The long season of Trinitytide now stretches before us.  On the Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, 26th November, Trinitytide will draw to a close with Stir-up Sunday. This is part of the reason why I particularly value Trinitytide.  It journeys from late Spring, through the long, warm days of Summer, into the rich hues and fruitfulness of Autumn, bringing us to the cusp of dark Winter. Today, here in Jeremy Taylor country, the sun will set at 10:03pm, after 17 hours of daylight.  On the last day of Trinitytide this year, Saturday 2nd December, the sun will set at 4:03pm, after a mere 7 1/2 daylight hours. And so does Trinitytide reflect something of our earthly pilgrimage, through days of growth, into long, full, busy days, moving into times of quieter maturity, bringing us to that season when "the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done". The weeks of Trinitytide are marked by the ordinary...

From  The Life of John Lonsdale (1868) - Bishop of Lichfield 1843-67 and exemplar of the Old High tradition - a description of his commitment to comprehension, wonderfully summarised in the phrase "the fair limits of the Church of England".  I do not mean that his impartiality ever led him to promote men of very extreme opinions: for he considered all such opinions mischievous in themselves and tending to division - the great evil always before his eyes. He did 'mark them which cause divisions.' Where he found such men in possession he made the best of them: often saying that such a person was a capital man' (a favourite phrase of his), but it was a pity he was such a high or low churchman, as the case might be.  He said to one of his Rural Deans, of a low-church clergyman to whom he had given a living, 'I am not placed here to be the bishop of the high church, or of the low church. It is my duty to look with equal eyes upon all who do their work heartily and...