In praise of plain, said services: a May Day meditation

The May Day holiday - a gentle but joyous celebration of Spring - is a now yearly opportunity for laudable Practice to reflect on the pleasing correspondence between Prayer Book piety and the quiet, plain, sober character of the older Anglican parish church.

This year, against the backdrop of The Middle Church, in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country, I am contemplating how, from its consecration in 1668 until it was replaced by a new parish church in 1824, The Middle Church and its parishioners would have known only plain, said services, with metrical psalms being the only singing heard in the church over the century and a half during which divine service was celebrated within it. There certainly would have been no intoning of services.

This came to mind when recently reading Ian Meredith's study of how the 19th century Scottish Episcopal Church lost the allegiance of migrant Irish Episcopalians in the west of Scotland. The Ritualism embraced by elements of the Scottish Episcopal Church was a radical rupture with the previous character of Episcopalian services. The study quoted from an account of Scottish Episcopalian services in early Victorian Scotland:

Her churches had been simple and without chancels; her clergy had worn the black Geneva gown; her services had been lacking in music, the psalms had been said and not chanted ...

As Meredith notes, "In the early decades of the nineteenth century, there would have been few outward differences between Presbyterian from Episcopalian worship". 

By the 1850s, early expressions of Ritualism began to appear in Scottish Episcopalian churches, including some which served migrant Irish Episcopalian congregations. The tensions this created often required episcopal interventions. Amongst the examples provided by Meredith is that of Walter Trower, Bishop Glasgow and Galloway from 1848 to 1859, rebuking one of his incumbents for unsettling a predominantly Irish congregation with a range of innovations in 1851.

Amongst these was chanting of the psalms in place of saying them or singing with simple metrical tunes. Turning east during the Creed was also a matter contention. And then there was intoning. Trower accepted that the practice was suitable in cathedrals and collegiate churches, but gave his "plain and unequivocal counsel against [such] an unwise and hurtful course" in parish churches. As Trower would say regarding the incumbent in question, "I thought it necessary to warm him against intoning".

Here, in other words, was an episcopal defence in the 1850s of the plain, said services known to Episcopalians in these Islands and beyond for centuries. This is a reminder that Trollope's description of the clergy of Barchester was both accurate and relevant when Barchester Towers was published in 1857:

They all preached in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats; they had not candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted; they made no private genuflexions, and were contented to confine themselves to such ceremonial observances as had been in vogue for the last hundred years.

What is more, Trollope goes on to reflect - with some humour - how the introduction of intoned services was an innovation:

The services were decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral, and the science of intoning was unknown. One young man who had come direct from Oxford as a curate to Plumstead had, after the lapse of two or three Sundays, made a faint attempt, much to the bewilderment of the poorer part of the congregation. Dr. Grantly had not been present on the occasion, but Mrs. Grantly, who had her own opinion on the subject, immediately after the service expressed a hope that the young gentleman had not been taken ill, and offered to send him all kinds of condiments supposed to be good for a sore throat. After that there had been no more intoning at Plumstead Episcopi.

"The services were decently and demurely read": such would have been the experience of divine service - plain, said - in The Middle Church from 1668 until 1827, and then in the new parish church for some decades thereafter. Since then, of course, the plain, said service of earlier centuries has faced the condescension of the Victorians and successive generations of Anglicans, condemned as sterile, unimaginative, and inevitably failing to touch the heart. Yet, such was not the view of William Gilpin - parson and author - writing in 1800:

in my opinion, the service well performed in a neat, elegant, simple parish church, comes much nearer the beauty of holiness, than anything to be seen either at York or Canterbury.

A Presbyterian friend recently asked if the apparent popularity of Latin Mass amongst Gen Z converts to Roman Catholicism could have its equivalent in a "return to austere piety in Protestant churches".  There are, of course, no straightforward, easy answers in considering the wider issue, but I do think that there is a place in contemporary Anglicanism for the plain, said services that our Episcopal forebears knew. Plain, said services - common prayer read, spoken, and heard, the Word read and heard, silence, plain furnishings, prayers quietly and soberly offered, the psalms and canticles said congregationally - precisely because they offer an alternative to our intensely visual, loud, and distracting cultural context,  could offer a resonant means of meditating upon and being formed by "the truth of thy holy Word".

Such are my thoughts on this May Day holiday, as I reflect on the simple, quiet beauty of The Middle Church and the plain, said services it would have known. In some places - not in all places and not, obviously, as the only expression of Anglicanism - in this loud time, when we are bombarded with visual images and music, there is surely a role for the austere piety of the plain, said service, with something of the neat, elegant, simple parish churches that Anglicans once knew.