'Much more extensive and much more glorious': heeding a 1786 Ascension Day sermon

Peter Williams was a Welsh clergyman (b.1756) who received holy orders in 1783 and was shortly thereafter appointed chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford. He returned to Wales in 1790, serving a number of Welsh cures thereafter, becoming archdeacon of Merioneth in 1809. He published A Short Vindication of the Established Church in 1803 (which received a very favourable review in The Orthodox Churchman's Magazine). There is, in other words, nothing to suggest that Williams was anything other than a faithful cleric of the Church of England, having a quite ordinary, conventional clerical career. 

It is this which makes this 1786 Ascension Day sermon before the University of Oxford interesting. The sermon was published: this itself was nothing unusual, as many university sermons were published. It does allow us, however, to read an Ascension Day sermon by a quite ordinary clergyman of the late 18th century Church of England. What we read contrasts sharply with the conventional and oddly enduring caricatures of 18th century Anglican preaching - caricatures which continue to be repeated despite the decades of serious historical work which have demonstrated the need for a serious recognition of the theological and spiritual vitality of 18th century Anglicanism. 

Williams' sermon is a robust declaration of the meaning of the Ascension according to what he describes as "the tenets of the orthodox Believer", opposed to the teaching of "the Socinians and modern Unitarians". There is a pleasingly disapproving reference to Dr. Priestly in the sermon's footnotes, contrasting the infamous Unitarian with the orthodox champion, Bishop Horsley. This brings to mind, by the way, an equally pleasing 1791 reference by good Parson Woodforde to "Dr. Priestly the Apostate".

In the sermon, Williams declares how the Ascension was no mere indicator of divine approval of the teaching of Jesus. Much more significantly, it was a revelation of the divinity of Our Lord and a manifestation of the saving purposes of the Holy Trinity:

If Christ was a mere man only extraordinarily inspired, and that for no other purpose than to promulge a more perfect scheme of living, his office must have been finally discharged at his death: His Resurrection and Ascension could answer no other end than to give a sanction to the truth of what he taught, and serve as a pledge for the future reception of mankind into heavenly places. But is this the Doctrine of Scripture? Certainly not. On the contrary, we are there told that the Ascension of our Lord and Saviour was a necessary part in the scheme of Divine Providence in the Christian Dispensation. Two consequences of the greatest moment are particularly mentioned in the Sacred Writings: The one is the descent of the Comforter: The other, the intercession of Christ himself at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

... viewed in the light, in which we think it represented in the Gospel, it appears much more extensive and much more glorious. It opens to us not only the knowledge of the second Person in the Trinity, the Word Incarnate, but of the Holy Ghost withal, proceeding from the Father and the Son, co-operating with both in the wonderful work of man's Salvation, and to this very end continually watching over the thoughts and actions of the heart. In it too we see the authority and great goodness of our Saviour Christ, displayed in the mission of this Holy Being; and from the completion of his Promises as well as the display of his Miracles, we stand awed before him, and accede to the claims he made to divinity. Miraculous actions performed here on earth, and promises no less miraculously fulfilled after his Resurrection and Departure from among us, do equally claim our attention: or rather we should say the latter must preponderate. The first proclaims perhaps only an Authority imparted; the last, a Mind omniscient and a Power incontrollable: And these are the attributes of God alone.

The next time we read a lazy, predictable comment on the supposed 'moralism' of 18th century Anglican preaching, think of Peter Williams on Ascension Day 1786, declaring - against the Socinians and Unitarians - the orthodox doctrines of the Holy Trinity and Our Lord's Divinity. It also the case that more than a few contemporary Anglican sermons for Ascension Day will have offered nothing at all like the robust proclamation of Trinitarian belief and the divinity of Jesus Christ seen in Williams' sermon. Instead, in some sermons, the Ascension will have been invoked as a mere illustration for what John Hughes termed "a liberal secularizing humanism that sells out on the Church's central task of making new disciples of Christ". Inevitably, the usual fashionable causes will have been the predictable focus of particular affirmation, rather than the salvific purpose of the Ascension of Our Lord.

During Ascensiontide, therefore, we Anglicans could do with a rather more 18th century approach to sermons on this feast, grounded, after the example of Williams' sermon, in the truth of the Incarnation and Trinity - for the Ascension of Our Lord was "much more extensive and much more glorious" than transitory concerns and causes.