laudable Practice

In late 1645, with Royalist defeat imminent in the first civil war and with Parliament dismantling the Church of England, Jeremy Taylor became chaplain to Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery. The seat of the Carberys was Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire. The name of the estate gave Taylor the title to his two volumes of sermons for " the summer half-year " (1651) and " for the winter half-year " (1653), preached to the Carbery household. I read through the sermons over the space of year, beginning in Advent 2024 and ending in early 2026. There is an abundance of riches in the Golden Grove sermons. Many passages are delightful examples of 'the Shakespeare of divines'. I was also struck by the consistent invocations of classical wisdom, demonstrating how Taylor understood this to cohere with Christian teaching. The allusions to the circumstances of the Interregnum were also noticeable. Amongst all this, however, one particular small, playful detail joyfully am...

Rogationtide. It is a time, surely, for the Benedicite at Morning Prayer. In his 1805 An Exposition of the Book of Common Prayer according to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America , the New Jersey PECUSA cleric Andrew Fowler offered an effective summary of well-established 18th century Church of England commentary on the place and use of the Benedicite in the Prayer Book .  It is worth noting the 1786 proposed PECUSA revision - which provoked a critical response from the bishops of the Church of England - did not include the Benedicite. This was probably influenced by the 1689 Liturgy of Comprehension, albeit that the latter, unlike the 1786 proposals, provided Psalm 148 as a replacement for the Benedicite. It is probable that its restoration in 1789 was to reassure the bishops of the Church of England that PECUSA was not seeking radical reform of the Prayer Book. We can be grateful, then, that the Benedicite was restored to the PECUSA Prayer ...

Upon these premises, I will infer this conclusion ... that the reformed and conformed Protestants, in the Church of England, do justly condemn both Papists and Puritans, as upstarts and novelists, in removing the most ancient bounds of our forefathers ... Boys' Rogation Sunday sermon , on the text Proverbs 22:28, after addressing the need to maintain the ancient landmarks in the polity, turns to the Church of the realm. Against both Papalist and Puritan, Boys refuted the charge directed by both, that the Church of the Elizabethan Settlement was an innovation, a removal of the ancient landmarks.  Today's post considers Boys' response to the charge from Papalist apologists. Against the emotionally powerful Papalist narrative that the Reformed Church of England was a denial of the 'old religion' - that it was, indeed, a 'new religion' - Boys, after the manner of Jewel's Apology , presented the Reformation of the Church as a recovery of the ancient landmarks...

In a Rogation Sunday sermon , on the text Proverbs 22:28, Jacobean cleric and theologian John Boys - Dean of Canterbury 1619-25 - expounded the vision of the justly, rightly ordered community set forth in Articles 37, 38, and 39. He first set out how traditional Rogationtide practices encouraged a respect for established landmarks and inherited rights, necessary for the justly and rightly ordered community: It is the part of every parishioner and party, to preserve, so much as lieth in him, all the liberties, franchises, bounds, and privileges of the town where he dwells. St Paul in a great extremity, pleaded that he was a citizen of Rome, and the chief captain, who had the charge of him, answered, 'with a great sum obtained I this freedom'; the Church of England in the fourth part of the Sermon, for Rogation week, doth advise parishioners, in walking their perambulation, seriously to consider the bounds of their own Township, and of all other neighbour parishes, bordering upon...

On this Rogation Wednesday, words from Jeremy Taylor. The words were written in 1650, as Taylor lived with the consequences of the sequestration of Episcopalian clergy, Royalist defeat in the civil wars, and the victory of the Commonwealth regime: ... what now? let me look about me. They have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still discourse; and, unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they still have left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbour’s pleasant fields, and see the variety of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights - that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself. And he that hath so many c...

Anglicans should have a love for Rogationtide. But, no, Rogationtide is not a peculiarly Anglican observance. Rogation Days are, after all, rooted in the practice of the Latin Church . And it is joy to read, for example, of a Church of Scotland parish observing Rogation. The more Christian traditions that (re)discover Rogationtide, the better. This post, therefore, is not attempting to declare Rogationtide as property of the Anglicans. It is, however, seeking to suggest that Rogationtide should have a particular resonance for Anglicans.  This is partly because Rogationtide reflects a significant strain in Prayer Book piety. The exhortation at the opening of Morning and Evening Prayer calls us to "to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul". In the Litany we petition, week by week, "That it may please thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, so as in due time we may enjoy them". In the General ...

As Rogationtide draws to a close for another year, words from Jeremy Taylor for this Rogation Wednesday: God is everywhere present by his power. He rolls the orbs of heaven with his hands; he fixes the earth with his foot; he guides all the creatures with his eye, and refreshes them with his influence ... he it is that assists at the numerous productions of fishes; and there is not one hollowness in the bottom of the sea, but he shows himself to be Lord of it by sustaining there the creatures that come to dwell in it: and in the wilderness, the bittern and the stork, the dragon and the satyr, the unicorn and the elk, live upon his provisions, and revere his power, and feel the force of his almightiness ... Let everything you see represent to your spirit the presence, the excellency, and the power of God; and let your conversation with the creatures lead you unto the Creator; for so shall your actions be done more frequently, with an actual eye to God’s presence, by your often seeing hi...

Amongst the days when the Benedicite should be used in place of Te Deum at Morning Prayer, Rogationtide must surely be included.  Surveying commentaries on the Prayer Book over the centuries, it is consistently recognised that the Benedicite is particularly appropriate when we are rejoicing in the natural world.  Sparrow's Rationale (first published in 1655) states: [when the lessons] set before us the wonderful handy-work of God in any of the Creatures ... Then it will be very seasonable to return this Song. Comber's A Companion to the Temple and the Closet (1676) similarly declares that Benedicite is "always proper to be used" when reflecting on the created order: it is always proper to be used after the History of the Creation ... And then we may in this Form learn the order of God's works, for the method is exact, and beginning with the Heavens and the hosts thereof descends to the air, the Earth and Sea reckoning up all the furniture of them; and concluding...

Last Rogationtide, I turned to Mole in The Wind in the Willows to explore the ordinary joys of the Anglican tradition. This Rogationtide, days which reflect a joy in the ordinary, I turn to another fictional account, this time rather more ecclesiastical: Trollope's description of St. Ewold's in Barchester Towers .  We are introduced to St. Ewold's during Archdeacon Grantly's campaign against Mr. Slope, chaplain to the newly-appointed low church, Whig Bishop. The Archdeacon's resistance to the Whiggery and 'Sabbath schools' of the Bishop, his wife, and Mr. Slope are not my concern on this Rogation Monday (though regular readers of laudable Practice will, no doubt, be aware of my allegiances in this particular controversy).  So let our attention turn to St. Ewold's, "the pretty church and parsonage". 'Pretty' is an appropriately modest phrase. It does not suggest a loud, overpowering beauty but, rather, a pleasant, gentle attraction. Y...

During long months of the pandemic, millions of us turned to nature. Our research on the mental health impacts of the pandemic showed going for walks outside was one of our top coping strategies and 45% of us reported being in green spaces had been vital for our mental health. Websites which showed footage from webcams of wildlife saw hits increase by over 2000%. Wider studies also found that during lockdowns, people not only spent more time in nature but were noticing it more. It was as if we were re-discovering at our most fragile point our fundamental human need to connect with nature. So said the UK's Mental Health Foundation , introducing the theme of this year's Mental Health Awareness Week: nature.  This builds, of course, on an increasingly well-recognised body of research, ably summarised - with compelling personal accounts of mental health - by Lucy Jones in Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild (2020) and Isabel Hardman The Natural Health Service: how nature can...

"The solemn daies of Rogation which we observe in the Church of England". So said Jeremy Taylor in Ductor Dubitantium (2.III.IV), published in 1660.  It was a sign of the renewal of the observance of Rogationtide in the Restoration Church, after the long, fallow years of the 1640s and 1650s.  As Taylor would also say to his clergy in Down and Connor in 1661: Let the people be exhorted to keep Fasting days, and the Feasts of the Church ... ever remembring that as they give but little Testimony of Repentance and Mortification, who never fast. Prayer and fasting for the flourishing of the land and community had a particular resonance after what the Declaration of Breda had described as "the general distraction and confusion which is spread over the whole kingdom ...  after so long misery and sufferings".  Little wonder, then, that Cosin's 1662 Articles of Inquiry for the Diocese of Durham required the return of the Rogationtide procession and homily: Doth he, or...

From a 1677 Rogationtide sermon preached in Norwich Cathedral.  The sermon opens with an explanation of the Rogation Days: If because there appear some remarks of ancient Solemnity upon this time, and because the established Liturgy doth oblige us to a religious regard to it, any man should inquire after the reason and intention of both, the question will be easily solved, if he do but heed the name and appellation of it, as it is commonly called the Rogation-week, or the Week of Prayers, that is, a time chosen and separated by the Church's Wisdom and Authority for Fasting and Prayers, the more solemnly to implore the mercy of God upon the World at a season, when commonly the rage of Epidemic diseases takes its beginning, the fruits of the Earth are in greatest danger to miscarry, and Wars are then ordinarily commenced, and Campaigns opened. Now this pious custom was so early an off-spring of Primitive Devotion, that it was made a Constitution of the Church from a considerable Ant...