laudable Practice

John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of Saint Andrews 1615-39, has made occasional appearance on laudable Practice . He offered a masterly defence of the Articles of Perth , emphasising how they restored to the Church of Scotland practices common elsewhere in some of the Reformed Churches. He - along with the Laudian divine Brian Duppa - regarded the Church of Scotland's previous system of superintendency as exercising episcopal office, thus providing precedent for the restoration of episcopacy under James VI. His presbyteral orders, received before the restoration of episcopacy in Scotland, were also accepted by Bancroft , the robust champion of Jacobean Episcopalian Conformity. Spottiswoode, in other words, embodies what could have been - indeed, should have been - the future of the Church of Scotland: episscopal order with elements of presbyterian government; Reformed doctrine with liturgical practices and ceremonies known in England and other Reformed Churches. It was the crisis foll...

It is the contention of this book that the abolition of order of bishops and the establishment of Presbyterianism in Scotland was not a foregone conclusion ... The fall of episcopacy in Scotland was neither expected nor inevitable (pp.1 & 7). Ann Shukman's Bishops and Covenanters: The Church in Scotland 1688-1691 (2012) is a story of missed opportunities.  Perhaps surprisingly, it is King William III who emerges as the wise figure in this account of the Scottish church settlement, his desires for comprehension frustrated by a combination of radical Covenanters and Jacobite bishops.  William's initial desire was for the Restoration Church of Scotland to continue, with its combination of episcopacy and presbytery. As Shukman states, "his attitude towards the Scottish Church was rather on balance to have favoured episcopalianism" (p.12). Henry Compton, the Williamite Bishop of London, had made this clear to Alexander Rose, Bishop of Edinburgh, in 1688/89, declaring ...

Throughout the late 18th and well into the mid-19th century, the relationship of the Church(es) of England and Ireland with the Scottish Episcopal Church was a matter of theological and political controversy.  While the Low Church tradition regarded Scottish Episcopalianism with obvious hostility - due a mixture of older Whig fears and a narrow, populist Protestant suspicion of the Scottish Liturgy - the Old High tradition had a deep and profound respect for Episcopalians in the northern part of the Kingdom, and a very high regard for the Scotch Communion Office. In 1824, the then Bishop of Down and Connor, Richard Mant - a leading Old High figure - became publicly involved in the debate when he published a letter to a Scottish Episcopalian cleric, rebuking an Irish cleric who had refused to share in the Sacrament according to the Scottish rite.  Mant had no hesitation in stating what he would do if he were in that part of the Kingdom: if I were passing through Scotland, as,...

In the fifth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier, in the midst of a critique of transubstantiation, makes this comment: When you are told that the words of our Lord "this is my body, and this is my blood," are plain words, you may answer with a learned prelate of our church, "very plain indeed, for they are a very plain figure." The words are interesting for two reasons. Firstly, they they provide a convenient example of how Old High eucharistic theology was conventionally Reformed (and, indeed, this is abundantly clear elsewhere in Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures). Secondly, there is the reference to "a learned prelate of our church" which, as the relevant note indicates, is James Sharpe, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Primate of Scotland 1661-1679. The fact that Le Mesurier describes Sharpe as "a learned prelate of our church" (emphasis added) indicates both an unembarrassed affinity with the Scot...

As touching the Government of the Church, I am verily persuaded that the Government Episcopal is the only Right and Apostolick Form. So declared John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of Saint Andrews 1615-39, in his last will and testament at his death in 1639.  It is, of course, what we would expect of a Laudian.  The words were quoted in the life of Spottiswoode, prefacing The History of the Church of Scotland . Again we would expect these words to be quoted as the author of the life was another Laudian, Brian Duppa (Bishop of Salisbury 1641-60, Bishop of Winchester 1660-62). Before, however, regarding this as a high-flying Laudian view of episcopacy contrasting with Hooker's caution and moderation - and thus another example of supposed Laudian innovation - we should take care to read both Spottiswoode and Duppa on the post-Reformation Church of Scotland.  Consider Spottiswoode's defence of the restoration of episcopacy in Scotland under James VI: For did men understand how thi...

In 1618, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland accepted the Five Articles of Perth , proposed by James VI/I. These Articles restored to the Scottish Church practices quite common elsewhere in Churches of the Reformation: kneeling to receive the holy Sacrament; administering holy Communion to the sick in the home; administering the Sacrament of Baptism, when necessary, in the home; Confirmation administered by bishops; and observance of the festivals of our Lord. Contrary to the populist polemics found in Presbyterian histories, these Articles were not 'imposed' on the Scottish Church. No, the Church of Scotland acceded to the direction of the magistrate who had a concern for the good order of the ecclesiastical estate.  As the preacher at the Perth Assembly noted, such a synodical process was right and proper, "for what Christian king did euer determine in ecclesiasticall matters any thing without aduice of his clergie?". The preacher was John Spottiswoode, A...

From The History of the Church of Scotland  (published posthumously in 1655) by John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrews 1618-39, the account of an incident at the episcopal consecration of the author and two other Scottish clerics in 1610.  James VI/I had restored bishoprics to the Church of Scotland but - as the King himself stated (also quoted by Spottiswoode) - "the adversaries mouths be stopped, who said that he did take upon him to create Bishops, and bestow Spiritual Offices, which he never did nor would he presume to do, acknowledging that authority to belong to Christ alone, and those he had authorized with his power".  James therefore directed the Bishops of London, Ely, and Bath to consecrate the Scotch clerics, the absence of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York providing assurance that the Church of England was not claiming jurisdiction over the Church of Scotland. That said, the Archbishop of Canterbury - Richard Bancroft - did crucially intervene...

On this Saint Andrew's Day, a day when a Laudian gives thanks for the witness of Scottish Episcopalianism over centuries, I turn to a work of Alexander Jolly, Bishop of Moray, Ross and Caithness 1798-1838.  Jolly was ordained deacon in 1776 and priest in 1777. At this time, the failed '45 rebellion still cast a shadow over Scottish Episcopalians, as James Walker - a later Primus - said of the rebellion in his memoir of Jolly's life: That unfortunate and ill-advised measure [i.e. the '45], in which, so far as I know and believe, the clergy of this Church had no general nor active concern whatever, caused them to be immediately silenced through the whole land. In Edinburgh, where their chapels were numerous and their congregations respectable, they were shut by authority, and the clergy compelled to silence, under a penalty rigidly exacted or enforced ... After the accession of George the Third, they [i.e. the penal laws] were seldom enforced, and never with the rigour o...

On this St Andrew's Day - and as an alternative to the Columba Declaration - laudable Practice proposes a High Church appreciation of the historic vocation, identity, and witness of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Apostolic order Maintaining the episcopal succession in Scotland, Scottish Episcopalianism bore witness to this mark of catholicity and apostolicity being a fundamental commitment of Anglicanism: "to the intent that these Orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed". In his  A Guide to the Church (1804), Charles Daubeny (Archdeacon of Salisbury, 1804-27) pointed to the Scottish Episcopalians as one of the national expressions of the Church Catholic, marked by "bishops coming in succession from the time of the Apostles to the present day": Every Christian society, possessing the characteristic marks of the church of Christ, I consider to be a separate branch of the catholic or universal visible church upon earth. The church of England, t...