'For we too have the star in the East': Keble's Epiphany sermon and Old High piety

In his sermon Epiphany sermon 'The duty of public worship' (from Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany, 1875), we have yet another example of Keble's preaching reflecting the norms of Old High piety, with little - if any - sense of a Tractarian rupture. This is evident in his description of the spiritual formation which shaped his congregation, a formation grounded in home, catechism, parish church, Sunday worship, Scripture, and Christmas celebrations:

For we too have the star in the East: Christ's tokens have shone upon us, and that exceeding brightly. From our very babyhood, as long as we can remember, we have been told of this young Child and of Mary His Mother: our catechisms have told us of Him, we have been taught to name Him in our prayers, and to bow at that Most Holy Name: we have seen His House with the sign of His Cross upon it, far unlike all the other houses around us, and His Day far unlike all the other days of the week: we have been taken into that house, and told how to behave there, because He is there: We have been taught something of the Holy Bible, His Book, and how unlike it is to all other books: We have all our lives long been used to the sights and sounds of Christmas, the carols, and the green boughs, and all the rest. The time would fail me to tell the hundredth part of the tokens that are around us, that we have really and truly seen that star in the East, Christ present by His Church and all His visible tokens here on earth.

In terms of the particular duty of public worship, Keble likewise expounds this in a manner which also was conventionally Old High: 

This He expects of us all, to come and worship Him: not only to pray, not only to exercise ourselves inwardly in good, dutiful, religious thoughts, but to render Him homage in the sight of men and Angels: to confess with lip and knee as well as with heart, that we have none in Heaven but Him; neither is there any upon earth that we desire in comparison of Him. This is a distinct duty, and cannot be satisfied by any devotion which is only between God and ourselves. As our King, He expects that we should wait upon Him in public, and tender Him our reverent adoration in the presence of all His people, Angels and men: but this we cannot do, except we come where Angels and men are assembled around Him, their God: and where is that, but in His own Place, the Church? Thither we must resort, as the Israelites resorted to Jerusalem: willfully to stay away from Church, is to fail in dutiful acknowledgment to our great and holy King.

What of the Eucharist? There are two references to the Sacrament in this sermon:

in Holy Communion; with child-like, earnest lifting up of the heart for ourselves and for all whom we ought to remember ... And if we worship, we must give: we must give alms of our substance; and in Holy Communion we must offer to Him "ourselves, our souls and bodies."

The fact that there are but two such references is itself significant: Keble is referring to public worship in such a way that it is clear that the Eucharist is not the sole or, indeed, the most regular act of public worship. Note, too, how the Sacrament is described in quite conventional terms: 'Holy Communion'. And, perhaps above all, neither reference is suggestive in any way of a distinctive Tractarian sacramental piety.

(The picture is of Keble's parish church, All Saints, Hursley, Hampshire.)