'Easy and open, come and conform': Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures on authority and freedom in Anglican practice

In the third of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism, Le Mesurier again points to what Kenneth Kirk would later describe as a characteristically Anglican commitment to "combining the principle of authority with that of freedom". Here Le Mesurier contrasts the traditionally generous provisions for lay communion in the Church England with the radically different appeals for a comprehension which would remove "the foundations of our faith":

Now, if it were only meant by this that no over nice or captious inquiry, nay, that no inquiry at all should be made into the faith of those who come to attend at our established places of worship; if it be only claimed that all who are desirous so to do, should be allowed to join in prayer, and be admitted to the benefit of the sacraments as they are administered among us, this is, in fact, the practice of our church, whose terms of what is called lay communion are as easy and open to all descriptions of men as it is possible. There is no individual whatever who is rejected, if he will come and conform to the order which is established ...

But what is asked is something more, it is indeed much more; it is what, when we come to examine it more closely, we shall find it impossible for us to grant without, in fact, giving up what we conceive to be the foundations of our faith ... It is required of us that we should adopt such a service and mode of worship as should have nothing distinctive or peculiar: which, indeed, except that the reading of the holy scriptures might form a part of it, might as well suit a Deist as a Christian.

Le Mesurier's account has a clear Hookerian emphasis. Rejecting the Disciplinarian call for Recusants to be subject to severe scrutiny before conforming and partaking of the Holy Communion - for, Cartwright had declared, "they are doges, swine, uncleane beastes ... and strangers from the Church of God" (LEP V.68.1) - Hooker emphasised, by contrast, that this was "imposinge upon the Church a burthen to enter farther into mens hartes and to make deeper search of theire consciences then any Law of God or reason of man inforceth". Instead, Recusants should be received "with lenitie and all meeknes ... not to quench with delayes and jelousies that feeble smoke of conformitie ... to ad perfection unto sclender beginninges". The allegiance of Recusants does not at all means that they are "strangers from the Church of God", for the Roman Church "is "to be held and reputed a parte of the howse of God, a limme of the visible Church of Christ" (V.68.9).

This was the same combining of "the principle of authority with that of freedom" that Le Mesurier maintained, with "easy and open" lay communion (assent to the Apostles' Creed alone being required for Confirmation) combined with the episcopal order and reformed catholic doctrine of the Prayer Book. In other words, generously open participation in episcopally ordered communities, administering the holy Sacrament according to the reformed catholic liturgy of the BCP, to those who have received the Sacrament of Baptism and confess (in the liturgy) the Nicene Creed. We might apply words from John Hughes to this "combining the principle of authority with that of freedom":

I suggest that it offers a way of reading our particular ecumenical situation, as well as the characteristic but not unique elements of our tradition and identity that is more theologically interesting than the customary Erastian and latitudinarian lines about pragmatism, compromise, empty inclusion and not having to believe very much.