laudable Practice

If the Tory idyll of 1685 was threatened by Non-Conformists in Avening , much darker clouds were also gathering. The reign of James II, which had been joyfully welcomed by High Churchmen and Tories as a reaffirmation of the constitutional order, and of the Church of England's place in that order, took on a character which profoundly disturbed the bastions of Tory support for James: parsons and country gentlemen. Contrary to the assurances James had given at his accession, he was determined to undermine the position of the Church of England and to overturn the Church of Ireland.  The response of parsons across the kingdoms was almost unanimous. Their pulpits began to echo with warnings of 'Popery'. This, as Nelson states in his 1713 Life of Dr. George Bull ,  was no less so with Parson Bull: During the Reign of King James the II when our Apprehensions of the increase of Popery were no ways groundless, but founded in those Measures, which we apparently saw were taken to adva...

... the Church of England is the best Reformed Church in the world. Jeremy Taylor's declaration in his sermon at Bramhall's funeral would have won the vigorous agreement of Bramhall's predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, Ussher. Something of this was indicated by  Richard Parr , a chaplain to Ussher and later biographer, describing how the Archbishop viewed the fate of the Church of England in the 1640s as "the greatest blow that had been ever given to the Reformed Churches". When Charles Richard Elrington - Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College Dublin - edited the works of Ussher in the mid-19th century, his introduction used the same phrase to describe Ussher's view of the Churches of England and Ireland: "the best reformed in the world". For Taylor, no less than for Ussher, the Churches of England and Ireland were Reformed . Both Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist were sons of the Reformation. In controversy with Count...

From the Laudian Bramhall - then Bishop of Derry, appointed Archbishop of Armagh at the Restoration - in his  A Fair Warning, To take heed of the Scotish Discipline (1649), demonstrating that his critique of the attempt to impose the Scottish presbyterian system on England was not at attack on "forreign Churches": I foresee that they will suggest that through their sides I seek to wound forreign Churches. No, there is nothing which I shall convict them of here, but I hope will be disavowed, though not by all Protestant auctors [authors], yet by all the Protestant Churches in the world ... If it were not for this Disciplinarian humour, which will admit no latitude in Religion, but makes each nicity a fundamental, and every private opinion an Article of faith, which prefers particular errours before general truths. I doubt not but all reformed Churches might easily be reconciled. Before these unhappy troubles in England, all Protestants both Lutherans and Calvinists did give u...

Thomas Le Mesurier (born 1756, received orders 1794) is described by Nockles as representative of the 'Warburtonian' school in the pre-Tractarian High Church tradition, characterised by "an aversion to extravagant devotional austerities", regarded as "'useless' and 'anti-social'". Delivering the Bampton Lectures in 1807, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier addressed an enduring High Church theme, how divisions and contentions undermined the "charity and peace which we say that it was the end of our religion to establish". This opening extract illustrates how the High Church tradition continued what Kenneth Kirk famously identified as a defining feature of the Anglican ethos, "combining the principle of authority with that of freedom". Here Le Mesurier does so with regards to the principle of ecclesiastical authority. He begins by rejecting any ecclesial claims to infallibility: I shall perhaps, before I go fa...

Each Thanksgiving Day,  laudable Practice  gives thanks for an aspect of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States.  In past years I have given thanks for  The Episcopal Church in general , for  Anglican poetry and piety in the American Republic , for  William White , and for the Hobartian vision . This is now the fifth year of this practice.  It emerges from my own affection for Episcopalianism in the Great Republic, rooted in happy experiences in years past of worshipping in Episcopal congregations in the north-east during visits to the United States. It also reflects a sense of gratitude for those I know in Episcopalianism in the States who are encouraging a generous orthodoxy. (And, mindful of "unhappy divisions", I also think of those in the Reformed Episcopal Church who give expression to the traditions of Protestant Episcopalianism.) On this Thanksgiving Day, I give thanks for the magisterial Protestantism of the early PECUSA, in the ...

One of the purposes of Rogers's The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England  (1586/1607) was to demonstrate that the Articles of Religion were - in the words of the original title -  "agreeable both to the written word of God, and to the extant Confessions of all the neighbour Churches, Christianly reformed". This was a key Conformist perspective: there was no need for 'further Reformation' of the Church of England precisely because the "confession of the Church of England" was "correspondent to the confessions of all reformed churches in Christendom". Throughout the work, Rogers references parallels to the Articles in the various Confessions of the Reformation, Lutheran and Reformed.  This inclusion of the Lutheran Confessions - the Augsburg Confession and its restatements in the Saxon Confession (prepared by Melanchthon) and the Würtemberg Confession (the work of Brentius, and see here on these two later confessions) - is itself worthy of...