laudable Practice

I continued, as did all of us, to pray for the king, until Sunday (inclusively) before the 4th of July 1776. So said William White , supporter of the Patriot cause and chaplain to the Continental Congress. It is a reminder of the complexities and nuances of Anglican allegiances and identities in North America during these years. Similarly we might also point to the Loyalist parson Jonathan Boucher's critique of the Administration in Westminster in a 1774 sermon: Their whole conduct, indeed, has been so utterly devoid of counsel, that I seem to have no right to tax those persons with being superstitious, who ascribe to it a preternatural infatuation ... That they wish for a reconciliation, we cannot but believe: yet every step they have taken, since the dispute began, has, through their folly, or our perverseness, or both, tended only to widen the breach; tended to make new enemies and lose old friends. Boucher also admitted, in his farewell sermon the following year to his parish i...

Continuing this short Remembrancetide series of extracts from wartime sermons of Anglicans across the centuries, today words from Jonathan Boucher's sermon in Virginia celebrating the ending of the Seven Years War with the Peace of 1763. Boucher was, as future events were to clearly demonstrate, a loyal subject of "the mother country".  Such allegiance, however, did not result in a triumphalist sermon at the conclusion of the War but, rather, a lament for war and a celebration of the blessing of peace: It is no part of my purpose at present to enter into the question how far war is, or is not, lawful to Christians. Merely as a point of casuistry, it might (perhaps) after all my pains, remain with you, (as I confess is the case as to myself) undecided: but neither you nor I can for a moment entertain a doubt, that war is one of the severest calamities with which the Almighty has ever seen fit to chastise the sons of men ... I cannot avoid here remarking, that, wherever war...