laudable Practice

Mark Frank's sermons ( First and Second Sermons) for the feast of the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin exemplify how Laudian Marian piety was warm and unembarrassed while yet doctrinally Reformed.  The reverence with which he addresses the Lord's Mother - "blessed Mary", "Mary the blessed", "holy Mary" - was entirely conventional.  Not only did it reflect the works of the Reformers themselves (see, for example, Calvin ), it also was seen in the preaching of Donne, hardly a representative of the avant-garde .  One of Donne's sermons for the feast opened with the words, "The church ... celebrates this day, the purification of the blessed Virgin, the mother of God".  (It is worth noting at this point that the term 'Mother of God' does not appear in Frank's sermons from the Purification or the Annunciation, an indication of the conventional Reformed modesty of Laudian Marian piety.) Similarly, even Frank's referenc...

From Cosin's 1653 Epiphany sermon , a beautiful description of the Christological significance of the daily saying/singing of the Nunc Dimittis at Evensong: For He had long since made a special promise to us all, that this star, by the name of a star, should arise upon us ; orietur stella ex Jacob [Numbers 24:17] . It will take up some time to look upon it well. But there came one from the mountains of the east, fifteen hundred years before, and saw in his prophecy there, (which God Himself had put into his mouth,) the same star that the wise men saw here, and the same light that Simeon saw after, saw it with his eyes; we say one of our hymns for it there every day, in memory that this promise of God was kept, and that this prophecy was fulfilled by it, the prophecy of orietur stella in Jacob ; which is all the light we have now or ever they had before us, to bring us all out of the kingdom of sin and darkness to the kingdom of grace and glory; grace here and glory hereafter. Cosin...