laudable Practice

In a recent post addressing Jeremy Taylor's understanding of episcopacy at the Restoration, I sought to demonstrate that the maximalist Laudianism (to use Peter Lake's terminology) of his 27th January 1661 consecration sermon was not reflected in his attempts to reconcile both the political nation and his dioceses to episcopacy. Instead, I characterised these attempts as defined by the Hookerian Conformist case for episcopacy: an emphasis on the antiquity of episcopacy, but not making jure divino claims; the relationship between episcopacy and ecclesiastical and political stability, after "the late unhappy confusions"; and how the exalted claims of jure divino  presbytery contrasted with the fidelity of the bishops to the Royal Supremacy.  Taylor's deployment of the discourse of Hookerian Conformity placed him firmly within the Restoration Episcopalian mainstream. Laudian jure divino claims for episcopacy were not characteristic of how the restored Church and M...

On this Gunpowder Plot Day, words from a 5th November 1691 sermon by John Sharp, Archbishop of York, on the text of Romans 10:2, "For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge". In our own age of bitter culture wars and heightened partisanship in Church and State (and mindful that today, of course, is the presidential election in the United States), Sharp points us to the Gunpowder Treason as an unfortunately resonant example of zeal "not according to knowledge", destructive of "true Religion" and "Publick peace". Against this, we are to be marked by a right and true zeal "agreeable to the Spirit and Temper of our great Lord and Master Christ": I wish this mark of right Zeal, that it ought to be according to knowledge, were more considered. For it seems not often to be thought on by those that are most zealous in their way, of what perswasion soever they be. This same business of Knowledge, is a th...