laudable Practice

On the Sunday after Ascension Day, many Anglicans will (in one form or another) pray Cranmer's beautiful petition: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before ... In his Sermon VI (from a collection of sermons published in 1675 but preached during the 1640s and 50s), Henry Hammond set forth how the promise of the Comforter was "the main business" of our Lord's Ascension: The third, and in sum, the powerfullest Argument to prove God's willingness that we should live, is, that he hath bestowed his spirit upon us; that as soon as he called up the Son, he sent the Comforter. This may seem to be the main business that Christ ascended to Heaven a­bout; so that a Man would guess from the xvi Chapter of St. John and Vers. 7. that if it had not been for that, Christ had tarried amongst us till this time; but that it was more expedient to send the Spirit...

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...