laudable Practice

From Thomas Le Mesurier's 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , a characteristic Old High account of the separation of Dissenters from the Established Church in1662. This may look like a rather straightforward, conventional account but its significance derives from its affirmation that Dissenters and Episcopalians were "united in the same faith". It is precisely this affirmation which the Oxford Movement would increasingly reject in the decades after 1833, viewing the Dissenting traditions as professing a faith different to that of the Church of England: the fundamental difference being in the Tractarians' ahistorical rejection of the Protestant identity of Anglicanism. Ironically, of course, such an understanding justified the separation of 1662. By contrast, Le Mesurier's Old High view emphasised that the separation was not at all necessary. Related to this is Le Mesurier's traditional Old High view - rooted in Cranmer and Hooker - of t...