'Beauty for Deformity': an 18th century Anglican defence of imagery

Having addressed the violent iconoclasm of the 1640s, The Ornaments of Churches Considered, With a Particular View to the Late Decoration of the Parish Church of St. Margaret Westminster (1761) brings to a close its survey of the place of imagery the Church of England since the Reformation with a short reference to the post-1660 era:

The Restoration of our Monarchy and Constitution not only averted all Dangers of this Kind, but introduced into our Churches, Beauty for Deformity. The Nobility, Gentry, and People concurred with the Clergy in decorating, repairing, or rebuilding such as had been desolated and ruined, or levelled with the Ground. The dreadful Conflagration which happened soon after in our Capital, gave Births to a new Set of sacred Edifices, the Number of which was augmented in Queen Anne's Reign, when great Sums of Money were, by public Authority, provided and applied for the buildings supporting and adorning of Churches.

Post-1660, in other words, witnessed the restoration of the modest acceptance of imagery which had been maintained by the Elizabethan Settlement and upheld by the Jacobean and Caroline Church. After the deformity of the iconoclastic 1640s, there was a renewal of the modest beauty of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana. A fine example of this is seen in St. Stephen Walbrook, rebuilt following the 1666 Great Fire - "judged the Master-piece of Sir Christopher Wren and for Taste and Proportion, one of the most perfect in Europe", according to The Ornaments of Churches Considered - with its 1679 reredos including paintings of Moses and Aaron (below). 

Marcus Whiffen's 1947 classic Stuart and Georgian Churches: The Architecture of the Church of England outside London, 1603-1837 provides examples of this continuing into the Georgian era. Consider, for example, this description of the stained glass work of Joshua Price (1672-1722):

For Oxford he painted, in 1715, a Holy Family in the east window of the chapel of Queen's College. Three years later he painted the east window of St. Andrew's, Holborn, showing the Last Supper in the three lower lights and the Resurrection above ... Between doing the Queen's and Holborn windows he restored and added to the windows of Denton church ... the most important remaining work by Joshua Price is the series of ten windows ... executed for the chapel at Canons and now at Great Witley. The subjects of these are (east window) Resurrection; (north transept) the healing of the lame man by Saints Peter and John; (north side of nave) Baptism in Jordan, Adoration of the Magi, Arrival at the Inn; (south side of nave) St. Peter walking on the waters, Adoration of the Shepherds, Annunciation; (west gallery) the Israelites sacrificing to the golden calf, the marriage at Cana.

As The Ornaments of Churches contends, there was a significant, consistent, broadly accepted defence and practice of modest imagery in the reformed Church of England, from the Elizabethan Settlement into the 18th century. The removal of images deemed 'superstitious' during the Elizabethan Settlement was radically different from the iconoclasm of the 1640s: this iconoclasm was a rejection of the modest acceptance of imagery by the Elizabethan Church, continued by the Jacobean and Caroline Church. At the Restoration, this approach was retrieved, with the suitable, modest adornment of churches continuing into the reign of Anne and her Hanoverian successors.