'Natural and consistent, without pretensions or affectation': Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures and ordinary Anglican piety
Le Mesurier - in a manner which summarises a key thread in 18th century Anglican preaching - sees this exemplified in Our Lord:
Any man who coolly considers the workings of our holy religion, as exemplified in the conduct of our Lord and his apostles, will, I think, agree with me, that there is no quality which so peculiarly and appropriately belongs to it as sobriety. It is throughout natural and consistent, without pretensions or affectation. Our blessed Lord came down upon earth expressly to suffer. It was a part of his mission that he should be placed in an inferior rank of life, that he should be poor, "despised and rejected of men." But we never find him, voluntarily, or by any act of his, aggravating the evils and inconveniences of that situation in which he was found, imposing upon himself, or his followers, unnecessary mortifications. So far from it, we find him reproached by the hypocrites of those days, because, as he expresses it, "he came eating and drinking." So much was he in every respect like unto his brethren, sin only excepted.
When he observed that "the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air had nests, but the son of man had not where to lay his head," it was said not ostentatiously nor by way of complaint, but simply as a warning to those who were mistaking the nature of his kingdom. He was buffeted indeed and spit upon, and he patiently submitted to it ; but he did not provoke or unnecessarily expose himself to these or any other indignities. Nay, in one instance when he was struck, he remonstrated with the man who had committed that outrage.
Likewise, this same sobriety Le Mesurier sees in the apostles:
Similar to this was the conduct of the apostles, those true and faithful followers of their blessed master. In them may be traced the same moderation, the same evenness and steadiness both of life and conversation. They were equally free from rashness and from weakness. Their zeal was fervent and pure, and uniformly active, but never broke out into excess or violence of any sort. They lived with other men, and like other men; nay, at times in houses which they hired sometimes they were maintained by the disciples, at other times they provided for themselves; as was best suited to circumstances and as might best promote or advance the gospel which they preached. They fasted indeed, but only as others fasted, as was common, and as has always been common, more especially in eastern countries. If they journeyed often, if they were often in perils and dangers, it was not that they desired these things, but that they necessarily met with them in the course of their mission. As to scourgings and imprisonments, them they not only did not inflict them upon themselves, but they complained of them and would have avoided them when inflicted by others.
In some cases they actually did escape them by their own act: in others the hand of God miraculously interposed for their deliverance. Above all, their humility was real, it was natural and without parade. There was no ostentatious self- abasement, none of that disclaimer of merit which is only calculated to invite praise. They seemed never to think of themselves : yet when called upon by the occasion they readily and naturally spoke of their labours with all the simplicity of truth, without exaggeration or diminution.
It is, of course, easy to caricature this as worldly, comfortable 18th century Anglicanism, the very piety which Tractarianism reacted against, regarding its proponents as 'Two Bottle Orthodox'. This was a case of Tractarians being aligned with 18th century revivalists who likewise portrayed ordinary, conventional Anglicanism as worldly, insufficiently radical, and lacking in zeal.
Le Mesurier, however, points to the deeply scriptural basis for this conventionally Anglican rejection of radical asceticism and its implicit sectarianism. Within the Gospels, it is the spiritual elitism of the Pharisees and the practices which marked them off from the crowd which are robustly critiqued and overthrown by Jesus. The apostolic exhortation against a radical asceticism is also significant:
Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.
Ordinary Anglican piety, with its suspicion of radical asceticism as a form of Enthusiasm, can embody this evangelical and apostolic understanding. Related to this, such ordinary Anglican piety -with its rejection of the practices and claims of spiritual elitism - might be described in a term from Gregory Dix: it is the piety of "the plebs sancta dei - the holy common people of God".
The rejection of radical asceticism described by Le Mesurier - an enduring feature of Anglican piety - therefore contributes to what John Milbank describes as the "hidden coherence" of Anglicanism:
radically biblical yet hyper-Catholic; sturdily incarnated in land, parish and work, yet sublimely aspiring in its verbal, musical and visual performances.
Rather than a lazy worldliness, the sober, modest piety of 18th century Anglicanism - with its rejection of radical asceticism, Enthusiasm, and sectarianism - provides a crucial contribution to the Anglican vocation, gathering up (not rejecting) the civic, the domestic, the national, the natural environment, the artistic, the goodness of creation in that "hidden coherence" identified by Milbank.
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