laudable Practice

The May Day holiday - a gentle but joyous celebration of Spring - is a now yearly opportunity for laudable Practice to reflect on the pleasing correspondence between Prayer Book piety and the quiet, plain, sober character of the older Anglican parish church. This year, against the backdrop of The Middle Church , in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country, I am contemplating how, from its consecration in 1668 until it was replaced by a new parish church in 1824, The Middle Church and its parishioners would have known only plain, said services, with metrical psalms being the only singing heard in the church over the century and a half during which divine service was celebrated within it. There certainly would have been no intoning of services. This came to mind when recently reading Ian Meredith's study of how the 19th century Scottish Episcopal Church lost the allegiance of migrant Irish Episcopalians in the west of Scotland. The Ritualism embraced by elements of the Scottish Episcopal...

The May Day holiday - a gentle but joyous celebration of Spring - is now a yearly opportunity for laudable Practice to reflect on the correspondence between Prayer Book piety and the quiet, plain, sober interior of a Georgian parish church. This year the church is Old St. Stephen's, Whitby, Yorkshire : it provides our setting for Matins on a Sunday morning in Spring. For an accompanying text to guide our thoughts, we turn to Timothy Puller's 1677 work The Moderation of the Church of England . Puller was priested in 1664. His work rejoices in the latitude of the Church of England, seeing therein a reflection of the "mild Oeconomy of the Gospel": Which cannot but afford a rare and serious pleasure as well as use; as it must be very delightful to behold any imitation of the Divine Wisdom, which hath made all things in number, weight, and measure; which governs the World and all his Creatures, according to unsearchable measures of Righteousness and Equity, who dispenseth...