laudable Practice

When discussing the plain character of older Anglican and Episcopal churches - such as The Middle Church , King Charles the Martyr, Shelland , and Old Wye Church, Maryland - it is not uncommon to hear this character and its lack of imagery dismissed as somehow 'unAnglican', an unfortunate expression of a thankfully long-forgotten, ill-considered theology, replaced by richer Victorian tastes, not at all averse to imagery. Plain windows, whitewashed walls, with a simple, wooden God's Board: this is deemed to be little more than prejudice at work, with the lack of imagery regarded as a denial of the sacred. This is where we turn to Jeremy Taylor. He can hardly be regarded an unimpressive divine or a purveyor of shallow theological thought. Nor, to state the very obvious, was he a 'Puritan' or, indeed, even a Reformed Conformist. Taylor's critique of Calvinist soteriology, his robust defence of episcopal order, and his commitment to the "holy Liturgy" of...

... the Church of England is the best Reformed Church in the world. Jeremy Taylor's declaration in his sermon at Bramhall's funeral would have won the vigorous agreement of Bramhall's predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, Ussher. Something of this was indicated by  Richard Parr , a chaplain to Ussher and later biographer, describing how the Archbishop viewed the fate of the Church of England in the 1640s as "the greatest blow that had been ever given to the Reformed Churches". When Charles Richard Elrington - Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College Dublin - edited the works of Ussher in the mid-19th century, his introduction used the same phrase to describe Ussher's view of the Churches of England and Ireland: "the best reformed in the world". For Taylor, no less than for Ussher, the Churches of England and Ireland were Reformed . Both Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist were sons of the Reformation. In controversy with Count...

We now reach our last extract from The Ornaments of Churches Considered, With a Particular View to the Late Decoration of the Parish Church of St. Margaret Westminster (1761). Appendix IX is entitled 'Testimonies from some of our most eminent Divines, in Confirmation of what has been advanced'. A range of divines are quoted - Hammond, Henry More, Wake, Stillingfleet, Butler. I turn, however, to the extract from Thomas Tension's 1678 work,  A Discourse of Idolatry .  Tension privately received episcopal orders in 1659, becoming a significant Latitudinarian voice in the Restoration Church and a staunch Whig critic of James II's Roman Catholicism. Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury after Tillotson's early death in 1694, he remained at Canterbury until his death in 1715, despite Queen Anne's well known dislike of his Low Church tendencies. In other words, if we were looking for voice likely to be disapproving of imagery in the Church of England, surely it would be ...