laudable Practice

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...

Last Rogationtide, I turned to Mole in The Wind in the Willows to explore the ordinary joys of the Anglican tradition. This Rogationtide, days which reflect a joy in the ordinary, I turn to another fictional account, this time rather more ecclesiastical: Trollope's description of St. Ewold's in Barchester Towers .  We are introduced to St. Ewold's during Archdeacon Grantly's campaign against Mr. Slope, chaplain to the newly-appointed low church, Whig Bishop. The Archdeacon's resistance to the Whiggery and 'Sabbath schools' of the Bishop, his wife, and Mr. Slope are not my concern on this Rogation Monday (though regular readers of laudable Practice will, no doubt, be aware of my allegiances in this particular controversy).  So let our attention turn to St. Ewold's, "the pretty church and parsonage". 'Pretty' is an appropriately modest phrase. It does not suggest a loud, overpowering beauty but, rather, a pleasant, gentle attraction. Y...