laudable Practice

At this time of year, as October days shorten and the leaves begin to fall, my thoughts usually turn to a certain colonial-era Dutch Reformed church, "in the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson": It stands on a knoll, surrounded by locust-trees and lofty elms, from among which its decent, whitewashed walls shine modestly forth, like Christian purity beaming through the shades of retirement. A gentle slope descends from it to a silver sheet of water, bordered by high trees, between which, peeps may be caught at the blue hills of the Hudson. To look upon its grass-grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace. On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees. Over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church, was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led to...

On 12th June 1775, the Second Continental Congress - weeks after Lexington and Concord, and only days before Bunker Hill - issued a proclamation calling for the inhabitants of the American colonies to observe 20th July as "a day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer", seeking the "gracious interposition of Heaven" in order to aid "a speedy end ... to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American colonies, without farther effusion of blood". And so it was on 20th July that the members of the Continental Congress gathered in Christ Church, Philadelphia , to hear Jacob Duché - Rector of Christ Church - preach on a text from Psalm 80, "Turn thee again, thou God of hosts, look down from heaven: behold, and visit this vine". The sermon's title identified the vine: ' The American Vine '. As with the vine in the psalm, the American Vine was blessed with goodly roots and soil, allowing it to flourish: Our sober Ancestors broug...

In the week of 4th July last year, laudable Practice considered how English, Irish, and Loyalist Anglicans responded to the 'American War' , perceiving it as an unjust rebellion against the liberal constitutional order secured by the Revolution of 1688. This year, in the week leading up to 4th July, we turn to those colonial Anglicans who sided with the Patriots. Their understanding of the Revolutionary War was encapsulated in a resolution of the Maryland Provincial Convention on 25th May 1776 : Whereas his Britannic majesty King George has prosecuted, and still prosecutes, a cruel and unjust war against the British Colonies in America, and has acceded to acts of parliament, declaring the people of the said colonies in actual rebellion: and whereas the good people of this province have taken up arms to defend their rights and liberties, and to repel the hostilities carrying on against them ... As the resolution continued, it demonstrated how it had a particular relevance for A...

One year after Bishop Gibson issued his pastoral letter, Archibald Cummings - Gibson's commissary in the colony of Pennsylvania and rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia - took to his pulpit to challenge the teachings of George Whitefield, then preaching revivalism in the American colonies. Cummings had initially, in 1739, opened his pulpit to Whitefield as a fellow cleric of the Church of England.  Whitefield's teaching, however, appalled him : His doctrine turns mostly on the antinomian scheme and railing against the regular clergy ... I really think he is enthusiastically mad. On Whitefield's return to Philadelphia a year later, while the revivalist was attending Christ Church, Cumming's preached two sermons directly challenging Whitefield's teaching. They were published under the title ' Faith absolutely necssary but not sufficient to Salvation without good Works. In two Sermons ... Publish'd in their own Vindication, from the false and rash Reflections...

Reading this 1974 study of the work of the SPG in Colonial North America and Anglican relationships with the continental Protestant traditions present in the colonies, I was intrigued by its account of how Anglicans allied with the 'orthodox' parties amongst the Lutherans and the Reformed (Dutch, German, and French) against pietistic and revivalist movements. The study, reflective of an earlier historiography, wrongly portrays the dominant Anglican attitude as 'Latitudinarian'.  It was the 'Orthodox' - as defined by Nockles in his classic The Oxford Movement in Context , the pre-1833 High Church tradition - who were dominant in the Church of England. The 'Orthodox' were characterised by a commitment to the Prayer Book, a restrained and modest piety, and an insistence on the apostolic nature of the threefold order, combined with, as Nockles notes, a refusal to unchurch those non-episcopal Lutheran and Reformed bodies for whom, in the 16th century, "...