"No commandment so strongly or so strictly enjoined by Christ": Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures on unity and episcopal order

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 Old High circles - accepts 'superintendent' as an acceptable term for the episcopal office.

This short extract, therefore, brings before us two significant characteristics of the Old High tradition.  Firstly, its rejection of the sectarianism of 'The Weird', instead understanding scripture as routinely lived out in the ordinary and undramatic, the parish church, the household, and the community.  Secondly, a modest account of ecclesiastical authority, striking a balance between by exalted claims which too easily bind the soul, and the ecclesiastical confusion and disorder which accompanies the absence of a duly constituted episcopal order.

He that distorts or misconstrues, or only partially receives the word of God, is undoubtedly guilty of sin, and must bear the punishment to which he is thus become liable. "He that shall break the least of these commandments," says our Lord, "and shall teach men so, shall be least in the kingdom of God." But there is no commandment so strongly or so strictly enjoined by Christ, or his apostles, as that of living at peace and in unity with one another. It is also repeatedly and over and over again applied to the communion of Christians in their worship of God. 

Now, if it clearly appear, as it certainly does, that the apostles, after having established the different churches, left behind them successors regularly appointed to govern them, and to keep up the succession; if such was the authority actually conveyed to Titus and to Timothy, and if the succession have been so kept up, whether under the name of apostles, of angels, of superintendants, or the more general, and now appropriate term, of bishops, can any one imagine or say, that it was, or is  lawful, under any pretence of sincerity, or otherwise, to break that order?

Nay, if, even without reference to the apostles, we say, what nobody can deny, that, from as far back as we have any account of the churches, they have been governed by such officers as the bishops are now; if such was the custom of ages universally acquiesced in, how shall they be justified, who, in later times, under colour of bringing in greater purity or sanctity, or still more, from any private or political views of their own, set up a new mode of governing the church, and thus gave a beginning to the various schisms and dissentions which, from that time to this, have broke, and still break her unity and disturb her peace?