laudable Practice

From an Easter Day sermon of the 1820s , by Charles James Blomfield when he was vicar of St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London and (from 1824-28) Bishop of Chichester, standing in the Old High tradition.  In characteristic Old High fashion, Blomfield here sees our participation in the Easter embodied in prayer, scripture, and sacrament (note this pre-1833 reference to "frequent communion") and in the call to holy living. The scripture references are a reminder of how the Old High tradition robustly and confidently regarded itself as rooted in Holy Scripture. There is a deeply Pauline nature to this emphasis: like the Apostle, the Old High tradition understood the Resurrection as necessarily expressed in ecclesial communion and holy living. In the absence of such witness to and fruit of "distinctness and splendour", the Resurrection is not being confessed. ... the resurrection of our Lord, as recorded by the  Evangelists, and as explained and improved by the Apostl...

The doctrine of the cross is therefore a saving doctrine, a vital doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity; and we hold it to be no less indispensable now, than it was in St. Paul's time, that every minister of the Gospel should be able to say with truth, We preach Christ crucified.  The words are those of Charles James Blomfield in a Good Friday sermon during the 1820s, when he was vicar of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London and (from 1824-28) Bishop of Chichester. Blomfield had associations with the Hackney Phalanx. The preacher at his episcopal consecration in 1824 had been John Lonsdale, who had links to the Hackney Phalanx. The Old High Howley of London, translated to Canterbury in 1828, cultivated Blomfield as his successor. This, in other words, was most definitively an Old High sermon - an Old High sermon proclaiming Christ Crucified as "a saving doctrine, a vital doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity", contrary to the oft repeated misrepre...

In an 1825 Ash Wednesday sermon, entitled ' Penance and Penitence ', Charles James Blomfield - then Bishop of Chichester, appointed to the See of London in 1828 - demonstrated how penitential season was approached in the pre-1833 Church of England. Blomfield had associations with the Hackney Phalanx. The preacher at his episcopal consecration in 1824 had been John Lonsdale, who had links to the Hackney Phalanx. The Old High Howley of London, translated to Canterbury in 1828, cultivated Blomfield as his successor. Blomfield's sermon, in other words, functions as an important indication of how Ash Wednesday and Lent were regarded and observed before 1833. The sermon is abundantly clear on how the season was to be approached with penitential seriousness: A more important, or more awful act of religious duty there can hardly be, than that for which we are met together this day; to make a solemn, a united, and I trust a sincere confession of our sins to him, from whom nothing is...