laudable Practice

This being the Day which Custom has devoted to celebrate the Decency of Cathedral service, to set forth its Usefulness, to convince the Gainsayer, to remove the Prejudice of the Ignorant, and the Cavails of the Malicious ... So began the sermon - ' Cathedral Service Decent and Useful ' - of the Reverend William Dingley (a fellow of Corpus Christ College, d.1735), in the University Church, Oxford, on "Cecilia's Day" 1713. What is immediately significant is Dingley's statement that such sermons, in praise of the choral tradition, were customary on Saint Cecilia's Day, 22nd November. Alongside Dingley's sermon, this post will consider two other sermons for Saint Cecilia's Day, Nicholas Brady's ' Church Music Vindicated ' in 1697 and, in 1698, Francis Atterbury's ' The Usefulness of Church Music '. They indicate a pattern in the late 17th/early 18th century Church of England of observing Saint Cecilia's Day with a celebratio...

As we approach the anniversary of the death of surely the most influential Anglican of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, I share a wonderful extract from his English Literature in The Sixteenth Century , discussing Richard Hooker. While Lewis prefaces this extract with a reminder that "Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism", what would become Anglicanism, at its best, embodies this Hookerian ethos, in which an exhausting (and inherently deceptive) spiritual search for 'the true Church' is, thankfully, not ordinarily an Anglican concern. As Hooker declared, such searching is the pursuit of "they [who] define not the Church by that which the Church essentiallie is, but by that wherein they imagin their own more perfect than the rest are" ( LEP V.68.6).  In this, Lewis was truly Hookerian, his writings demonstrating a catholic spirit free of of such a stultifying, narrow spirit. If there is a 'patron saint' of the ordinary Anglican - con...

And this shall suffice here, to show how Christ's intent was to give verily, as he did in deed, his precious body and blood to be eaten and drunken. Cranmer has no hesitation in  affirming  these words of his opponent in the Answer to Gardiner (1551). This is indeed what the Dominical and Apostolic words on the institution of the Eucharist declare: And when this true believing man cometh to the Lord's Supper, and according to Christ's commandment receiveth the bread broken in remembrance that Christ's body was broken for him upon the cross, and drinketh the wine in remembrance of the effusion of Christ's blood for his sins, and unfeignedly believeth the same, to him the words of our Saviour Christ be effectuous and operatory, Take, eat, this is my body which is given for thee; and, Drink of this, for this is my blood which is shed for thee, to the remission of thy sins. And as St. Paul saith, the bread unto him is the communion of Christ's body, and the wine, t...

Having seen in last week's reading from Nelson's 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull , that Bull's chief concern in Defensio Fidei Nicaenae was refute critiques of Nicaea which had emerged and become influential in Remonstrant theology , this week we turn to how this refutation was expressed. Nelson identifies "four principal pillars" of Nicene faith defended by Bull: Now the four principal Pillars of the Catholick doctrine concerning Christ, maintained and defended in this Book, are The Pre-existence, his Divine Substantiality, his Eternity, and his Subordination as Son. For against the Socinians he proveth, that the Son of God did preexist before he was born of the Virgin, and even before the World also was, by many great Authorities. And against the Arians, he sheweth how this Son of God is not of any created and changable Essence, but of the very same Nature with God his Father: and so is rightly called, very God of very God, and of one Substance with the Father. Al...

While no doubt principally written to address Orthodox concerns, the recent statement from the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith,  Mater Populi Fidelis , provides significant confirmation of a central feature of the Christological confession shared by the Roman Catholic Church and the Churches of the Reformation. The Dicastery's judgement that the application to the Blessed Virgin Mary of the titles 'Co-redemptrix' and 'Mediatrix' is "always inappropriate", despite such titles being invoked by some popes, including John Paul II, led to the document robustly affirming "Christ's unique salvific mediation": Given the necessity of explaining Mary’s subordinate role to Christ in the work of Redemption, it would not be appropriate to use the title “Co-redemptrix” to define Mary’s cooperation. This title risks obscuring Christ’s unique salvific mediation and can therefore create confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Chr...

The loss of religion makes real loss difficult to bear; hence people begin to flee from loss, to make light of it with Disneyfying ornaments ... - Sir Roger Scruton, ' The Work of Mourning '. If there is one word that cannot be reconciled with the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead , it is 'kitsch'.  There is no room for kitsch in a Prayer Book funeral.  The seriousness of death and the reality of resurrection are sharply set before us: sentimentality, which attempts to obscure the first and ignore the second, is banished.  In the very midst of death, The Burial of the Dead proclaims a robustly Christocentric vision.  Here "Disneyfying ornaments" have no place for they are exposed as trite and insubstantial. Here hope is firmly rooted in the truth and substance of Christ. O merciful God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the resurrection and the life; in whom whosoever believeth shall live, though he die; and whosoever liveth, and believeth in...

As we abhor the superstitious observation of festival days by the Papists, and detest all licentious and profane abuse thereof by the common sort of professors, so we think, that the inestimable benefits received from God by our Lord Jesus Christ, his birth, passion, resurrection, ascension, and sending down of the Holy Ghost, were commendably and godly remembered at certain particular days and times ... The Articles of Perth , adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1618, restored the observance of the great feasts of our redemption. The Second Helvetic Confession had said of these observances, "we approve of it highly". The opponents of the Articles of Perth, however, invoked the 1560 Book of Discipline , which dismissed these observances as feasts "that the Papists have invented". In particular, opponents viewed the observances as a binding of the conscience: imposed vpon the consciences of men without the expresse Commandement of Gods Word,...

As Cranmer, in his Answer to Gardiner (1553), reviews his opponent's critique of his eucharistic theology, he turns to what is perhaps the heart of that critique - that Cranmer denies the mystery of the Sacrament, reducing it to an empty ceremony: But if it may now be thought seemly for us to be so bold, in so high a mystery to begin to discuss Christ's intent; what should move us to think, that Christ would use so many words, without effectual and real signification, as he rehearsed touching the mystery of this sacrament? The nature of Cranmer's rebuttal of this accusation is significant. He invokes a series of patristic comments affirming that the Lord termed the bread and wine of the Sacrament His Body and Blood: I have alleged Irene saying that "Christ confessed bread be his body, and the cup to be his blood." I have cited Tertullian, who saith, in many places, that "Christ called bread his body." I have brought in for the same purpose Cyprian, who ...

We first encountered the Dutch Remonstrant theologian Episcopius early in Nelson's Life of Dr. George Bull , with the young Bull subversively reading him while under the care of a Calvinistic tutor during the Interregnum. The Remonstrant thinker, said Nelson, "preserved [the young Bull] from the bad Principles of those Times, and directed his Understanding in distinguishing Truths of very great Importance".  Episcopius now reappears as Nelson explores Bull's  Defensio Fidei Nicaenae : the context, however, is much more critical of the great Remonstrant. Part of Bull's motivation in writing this work was, Nelson states, to challenge a tendency amongst Remonstrant writers, while rejecting Socinian error, to yet critique the Council of Nicaea: It is plain Episcopius was far from being a Socinian, as our Author truly observeth, having expresly written against, and solidly overthrown the fundamental Article of Socinianism; and endeavoured from the Testimony of Scriptu...

At Parish Communion and Act of Remembrance, Remembrance Sunday, 9.11.25 Luke 20:38 “He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive.” [1] On 4th August this year, I stood in Nine Elms Military Cemetery, near the village of Thelus in northern France. I was visiting the grave of my great-grandmother’s brother, Private David Henry Beattie, 1st/4th Seaforth Highlanders. David was killed in action in the Battle of Arras, on 10th April 1917 - Easter Tuesday. Standing at his grave was, for me, a personal pilgrimage of remembrance - remembering a young Irishman, born in 1891, a soldier of the Great War, who died, far from home and family, in the fields of France and Flanders. But why do we remember? Why Remembrance Sunday? Why, over a century on, do we on this day remember those who fell in the service of King and Country in the Great War? Why, in this 80th anniversary year of its end, do we remember the dead of the Second World War? We do so, fundamentally, beca...

In mortality there is a sharpness / of perception - everything made bare and elemental. Christopher Yokel, 'Life-In-Death', in Autumn Poems (2019). November.  It is the month in which intimations of mortality are particularly evident .  With the glories of Autumn past, the landscape dulls, quietens, and prepares for Winter's arrival. The trees are bare, the days shorten and grow colder.  Another year of this earthly life is passing.  It is a month when my mind turns to the fitting character of the Prayer Book's The Burial of the Dead . Yokel's words, written of Autumn's end and November days, could have also been composed to describe the Prayer Book's Burial office. In mortality there is a sharpness / of perception - everything made bare and elemental. The starkness of The Burial of the Dead is, contrary to its liturgical critics and their desire for something much less bracing, its great strength.  All else is stripped away. Death is confronted, not denied...

In his defence of authority by which the Articles of Perth were introduced, in a  1621 account of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held at Perth in 1618 , David Lindsay - Bishop of Brechin (1619-34 and Bishop of Edinburgh 1634-38) - addressed the allegation that the practices required by the Articles were contrary to the order and discipline of the Church of Scotland as praised by Beza. Lindsay, however, points out that this is not what Beza meant by Scotland's "good order or discipline". Beza, rather, was praising the Geneva-like approach to ecclesiastical discipline: "the use of this Ecclesiasticall power in censuring of manners". What is more, not only was Beza not referring to the particular ceremonies that had been previously adopted by the Church of Scotland, it was also the case that those ceremonies did not conform to the Genevan use: But yee, no sooner heare good order or discipline commended but presently yee imagine, that your table ge...

On this day when we rightly give thanks for the failure of the Powder-plot, I turn to Jeremy Taylor's 1634 sermon " upon the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason ". One of the themes running throughout the sermon is the repeated view that, prior to Pius V's 1570 bull  Regnans in exclesis - declaring Elizabeth a "heretic" and "depriv[ing] of her pretended title to the kingdom ... and of all dominion, dignity and privilege whatsoever" - England's Roman Catholics had conformed and worshipped in parish churches. Indeed, as the final extract below indicates, Taylor also noted how this had, in some cases, continued long after Regnans in excelsis :  From primo of Elizabeth to undecimo, the Papists made no scruple of comming to our Churches, Recusancy was not then so much as a Chrysome, not an Embrio. But when Pius quintus sent forth his Breves of Excommunication and Deposition of the Queen, then first they forbore to pray with us, or to have any re...