"The fair limits of the Church of England": Lonsdale on comprehension and the Church's peace

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 well within the fair limits of the Church of England.'

This commitment of the Old High tradition to a comprehension serving the peace and quiet of the Church on the basis of generous conformity to Prayer Book and Articles can also be seen, for example, in early 19th century statements by Horsley.

It represents quite different concerns and commitments to those seen in the aggressive, divisive populism of Sacheverell and the early 18th century High Church tradition during the 'Rage of Party'. It does, however, have deep roots in older, formative, irenic currents of thought in the Church of England: in the nature of the Elizabethan Settlement; in Hooker's vision; in the concerns of the Jacobean and Caroline Church amidst doctrinal controversy; in aspects of Cambridge Platonism and Latitudinarianism; and in the words of Jeremy Taylor, for "The Church of England speaks moderate words, apt to be construed to the purposes of all peaceable Men that desire her Communion".

Gratefully receiving this peaceable vision, and protecting it against those who would disrupt the church's common life in pursuit of their own narrow, partisan visions, was a defining feature of the Old High tradition. It is a characteristic that contemporary Anglicanism might wisely retrieve in a cultural and ecclesial context marked by embittered culture wars and renewed sectarianism.

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