laudable Practice

On this commemoration of the martyrdom of Bishops Latimer and Ridley, words from Jeremy Taylor indicating the esteem in which Episcopalian and Laudian thought held them and the other martyrs of the Reformed Church of England: ... thus as it [i.e. the Book of Common Prayer] was framed in the body of its first constitution and second alteration, those excellent men whom God chose as instruments of His honour and service in the Reformation, to whom also He did shew what great things they were to suffer for His name's sake, approved of it with high testimony, promoted it by their own use and zeal, and at last sealed it with their blood. That they had a great opinion of the piety and unblameable composure of the common-prayer-book, appears, in the challenge made in its behalf by the archbishop Cranmer, to defend it against all the world of enemies; by the daily using it in time of persecution and imprisonment; for so did bishop Ridley, and doctor Taylor, who also recommended it to his w...

He saith that I deny, that we receive in the sacrament that flesh which is adjoined to God's own Son ... I have written in more than an hundred places, that we receive the selfsame body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified and buried, that rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. And the contention is only in the manner and form how we receive it ... For I say (as all the old holy fathers and martyrs used to say), that we receive Christ spiritually by faith with our minds, eating his flesh and drinking his blood: so that we receive Christ's own very natural body, but not naturally nor corporally - Archbishop Thomas Cranmer responding to a Roman apologist in his Answer to Smyth's Preface , 1551. For both you and I agree herein, that in the sacrament is the very true and natural body and blood of Christ, even that which was born of the Virgin Mary, which ascended into heaven, which sitteth on the r...