laudable Practice

In his   Answer to Cardinal Perron  (1612), Casaubon noted the call of James I for key reforms to the Roman liturgy: use of the vernacular; communion in both kinds: an end to private masses; no adoration of images or relics; and the removal of invocation of saints.  Alongside this, James, as he had stated in  his 1616  Premonition  concerning the Bishop of Rome, would, if "the forme of the ancient Church be restored ... acknowledge his primacie". Such reforms, according to Casaubon, would be a basis for intercommunion between the Churches of Europe: For the communion of the faithfull consisteth much in the publike exercises of pietie: and this is the chiefe bond of union so much desired by good men. Wherefore if Christians could but agree about this, why might not all Europe communicate together? only, granting a libertie to schoole-Diuines with moderation to debate other opinions. Which were a thing much to be wished, and that foundation once laid, by the ...

R.W. Jelf's January 1842 sermon -  The Via Media: Or, The Church of England our Providential Path between Romanism and Dissent   - was preached amidst the Tract XC controversy.  The contrast between Jelf's sermon and Tract XC was stark.  While Newman sought to conform Anglican formularies to Tridentine doctrines,  Jelf restated the Old High critique of "the aberrations of the Church of Rome". Demonstrating how "innovation by addition" resulted in the Roman Communion "maintaining and enforcing doctrines and practices which are not Catholic at all", Jelf overturned Newman's approach in Tract XC by calling for the Church of Rome to follow the example of the Church of England: Yet, after all, it is painful thus to dwell upon the failings of a sister Church, which, amidst all her corruptions, has retained many Christian truths and holy practices in common with ourselves. Would God, that she would "remember from whence she is fallen, and repent,...

As our Mother, you love us and know us: no concern of our hearts is hidden from you. Mother of mercy, how often we have experienced your watchful care and your peaceful presence! ...We now turn to you and knock at the door of your heart. We are your beloved children. In every age you make yourself known to us, calling us to conversion ... You are able to untie the knots of our hearts and of our times. In you we place our trust ... O Mother, may your sorrowful plea stir our hardened hearts. May the tears you shed for us make this valley parched by our hatred blossom anew ... Accept this act that we carry out with confidence and love. Grant that war may end and peace spread throughout the world ... Our Lady of the “Fiat”, on whom the Holy Spirit descended, restore among us the harmony that comes from God. May you, our “living fountain of hope”, water the dryness of our hearts ... You once trod the streets of our world; lead us now on the paths of peace. Amen - the Act of Consecration of ...

John Bramhall (then Bishop of Derry, Archbishop of Armagh 1661-63), responding to a Roman Catholic apologist who claimed that the Anglican episcopate ("the Protestant Bishops") had abandoned the communion of the Catholic Church: I deny, that the Protestant Bishops did "revolt from the Catholic Church". Nay, they are more Catholic Bishops in that, than the Roman Catholics themselves; maintaining a communion, for the foundations and principles of Christian religion, both with the Western and Eastern Churches, whom the Church of Rome excommunicates from the society of the mystical Body of Christ, limiting the Church to Rome and such places as depend upon it, as the Donatists did of old to Africa. It is true, the Protestants separated themselves from the communion of the Roman Church; yet not absolutely, nor in such fundamentals and other truths as she retains, but respectively, in her errors, superstructions, and innovations. And they left it with the same mind, that o...

In his very fine The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland: Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633-1641 (2007), John McCafferty points to a 1633 sermon by Bramhall as exemplifying a key change wrought by Laudianism:  John Bramhall’s Christchurch sermon of August 1633 declared Rome ‘merely’ schismatical and the pope a patriarch. However shocking this may have been to his Dublin auditory, his words were part of a wider process of displacement of the Roman Antichrist. The orthodoxy of papacy as anti-Christ was, so it seems, replaced by a "lowering of the theological temperature", a "significant switch from eschatology to institutional history". We might, however, wonder if the Laudian understanding of Rome as a garden requiring weeding, rather than the synagogue of Satan, was actually an innovation.  There was significant precedent in Conformist thought for such an approach.  Hooker, after all, had declared in his Laws: To say that in nothing they may be foll...