laudable Practice

But this emphasis [in Restoration Episcopalian accounts] on martyrdom, ejection and exile has obscured the extent to which prominent episcopalian conformists were subsequently prepared to defend their Interregnum careers, presenting their ministries in these years as evidence of steadfast commitment to both the Church of England and the king. By staying within the Church, ministers had acted as a bulwark against heresy and error, the last bastions of ‘true Protestantism’, and thereby worked to protect and to ‘undeceive’ the distracted laity - (re)shaping attitudes towards liturgy, episcopacy and even monarchy. William White, in ' Remembering Episcopalian Conformity in Restoration England ', thus reminds us that alongside the narrative of persecution and martyrdom promoted by formerly non-conformist Episcopalians at the Restoration, there was another narrative to be told, that of the Episcopalian Conformists in the Cromwellian Church. As we saw last week , George Bull was amongs...

To celebrate Yale Apostasy Day, the day in 1722 when seven sons of Puritan New England - all Congregationalist ministers - declared that they were convinced on the need for episcopal ordination, we hear from one of the Yale Converts , James Wetmore . Wetmore received episcopal orders, alongside his fellow converts Timothy Cutler and Samuel Johnson, in England in 1723, before returning to the colonies, appointed by the SPG to be rector of Rye Church, New York.  In 1747, he responded to an attack on episcopal orders by Connecticut Congregationalist minister Noah Hobart. Hobart declared that because the Church of England was an episcopal church, claiming only for its bishops succession to the apostles, its presbyters lacked apostolic commission: "They to whom it does not belong, are no Ministers of Christ, nor do they derive any Authority from him". Apostolic ministry in New England, therefore, was to be found in the presbyters of the Congregationalist establishment, claiming an...

In his defence of an eirenic vision of the churches of the British Isles and of Europe - amidst bitter division and bloody conflict - Taylor invoked two towering eirenic figures, Erasmus and Grotius. That he did so in his highly controversial works outlining a non-Augustinian account of Original Sin ( Unum Necessarium and Deus Justificatus ,   published in 1655) only added to the controversy: the Papist Erasmus and the Arminian Grotius were hardly likely to endear Taylor to his critics.   The praise Taylor heaped on Erasmus and Grotius in these two works gives some idea of the esteem in which he held them and their thinking: I shall not be ashamed to profess what company I now keep ... the great Erasmus, and the incomparable Hugo Grotius ; Erasmus and Grotius, who are to be reckoned amongst the greatest, and the best expositors of Scripture, that any age since the Apostles and their immediate successors . What Taylor valued in how Erasmus and Grotius handled Scripture is...

On this St Andrew's Day - and as an alternative to the Columba Declaration - laudable Practice proposes a High Church appreciation of the historic vocation, identity, and witness of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Apostolic order Maintaining the episcopal succession in Scotland, Scottish Episcopalianism bore witness to this mark of catholicity and apostolicity being a fundamental commitment of Anglicanism: "to the intent that these Orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed". In his  A Guide to the Church (1804), Charles Daubeny (Archdeacon of Salisbury, 1804-27) pointed to the Scottish Episcopalians as one of the national expressions of the Church Catholic, marked by "bishops coming in succession from the time of the Apostles to the present day": Every Christian society, possessing the characteristic marks of the church of Christ, I consider to be a separate branch of the catholic or universal visible church upon earth. The church of England, t...

Many thanks to The North American Anglican for publishing my latest essay, ' Feast of Faith: High Church Eucharistic Theology and Piety in the Church of England, 1800-1830 '.  What might perhaps be of some interest to readers is the essay's denial that a separate stream of (Scottish and American) Episcopalian Eucharistic theology can be invoked against the Reformed norms of the late Georgian High Church tradition.  This applies to both understanding the presence of the Lord in the Sacrament and the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist. On the Lord's presence: The consistent theme of Scottish Episcopalian writers during these decades was not how they represented a different stream of sacramental theology. Their emphasis, rather, was on how Scottish Episcopalianism shared the same sacramental theology as the English Church. William Skinner – later Bishop of Aberdeen and Primus – commenced his 1807 defense of the Scottish liturgy with such a declaration: "The Episcopa...