laudable Practice

As we prepare to receive the holy Sacrament at Christmas, words from a John Henry Hobart sermon  (from a collection published in 1824) for Christmas Day. This short extract may seem quite unremarkable but it is this which has drawn me to it.  The Church calls us, on this day, sacred to the commemoration of his nativity, to display our penitence, our gratitude, and our love, in that holy supper which he hath instituted, to set forth all that he hath done for us, and to assure us of the blessings which he hath purchased for us, and in which we offer to him, who hath visited and redeemed us, ourselves, our souls, and bodies, a holy sacrifice. Its very modesty and reserve aptly captures something important to Anglican piety. Here there is no Enthusiasm, no dramatic asceticism, no urgent revivalism. But, rather, the quiet, prayerful reception of the holy Sacrament on the feast of the Lord's Nativity. How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given. The extract is a succession...

Each Thanksgiving Day, laudable Practice gives thanks for an aspect of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.  In past years I have given thanks for The Episcopal Church in general , for Anglican poetry and piety in the American Republic , and for William White . Underlying this annual practice is my experience of worshipping in TEC congregations during family holidays the United States, the ministry and witness of friends in US Episcopalianism and Anglicanism, and the hope for a renewed, generous Anglican orthodoxy in the United States. Today I give thanks for PECUSA's original vocation, here wonderfully summarised in an 1814 sermon by John Henry Hobart , to embody "the primitive faith, order, and worship" it inherited from the Church that is "the glory of the reformed Churches". And, yes, it does sound deeply Laudian. Happy Thanksgiving. The particular Origin of our Church - or the particular Christian communion from which she received that apo...

Another fine example of the classical Anglican theology of Confirmation is found in Bishop Hobart's ' A Sermon explaining the order of Confirmation ' (published in 1816: Hobart was Bishop of the Diocese of New York). Hobart, indeed, quoted from Secker's sermon , referring to "the words of a prelate whose pastoral fidelity and zeal are still fresh in the memory of the Church which he adorned by his virtues, and benefited by his talents and labours".   The sermon opened by placing the Episcopalian rite of Confirmation as an expression of the "highest moderation and wisdom" which had shaped the Church of England's Reformation: And, not to multiply instances of her wisdom and her moderation - she did not deprive the members of her fold of the benefit of the ordinance of Confirmation, because papal superstition had defaced the simplicity of this rite ; for she found that in the first and purest ages of the Church, the "laying on of hands" wa...

Another example of the Old High Church understanding of the Absolution in "the daily service" is seen an 1818/19 Charge given by John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York:   In the service of the Church the Churchman recognizes the power of authoritative absolution in the Christian ministry, founded on the declaration of Christ to his apostles, and through them to their successors to the end of the world - "Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." While he acknowledges this power in the due administration of the sacraments and of ecclesiastical discipline, he considers it as also exercised in the sentence of absolution in the daily worship, by which he maintains God certifies, to those who truly repent and believe, the pardon of their sins. But while in making this absolution a part of the daily service, he differs from his Protestant brethren in general, he even more essentially differs from the Church of Rome...