laudable Practice

As I mentioned last week , a recent visit to The Middle Church this view of a simple, plain pew caught my attention. It somehow embodies the simplicity of Prayer Book worship that would have been known in The Middle Church, through the late 17th century, across the 18th, and into the 19th.  Part of such simple Prayer Book worship would have been metrical psalmody. A metrical version of the Psalter was usually bound with the Prayer Book and was a characteristic of Anglican worship across the 'long 18th century'. Bishops Bull and Beveridge extolled the practice of singing metrical psalms. John Shepherd in his Prayer Book commentary at the end of the 18th century described the singing of metrical psalms as "a pleasing and affecting part of divine worship". Into the mid-19th century , bishops urged the singing of metrical psalms, contrasting their sober character with the enthusiasm of the new hymns. It is almost certainly metrical psalmody to which Jeremy Taylor refer...

Visiting The Middle Church during a heritage day on Saturday past, it was this view of a simple, plain pew that caught my attention. My thoughts turned to these words from Jeremy Taylor, in Ductor dubitantium (1660), words which capture the simple Prayer Book worship that would have been known in such pews of The Middle Church: For although significant ceremonies can be for edification to the Church in some degree, and in some persons; yet it is to be considered whether the introducing of such things does not destroy the Church, not onely in her Christian liberty, but in the simplicity and purity and spirituality of her religion, by insensibly changing it into a ceremonial and external service. To the Ceremonial law of the Jews nothing was to be added, and from it nothing was to be subtracted; and in Christianity we have less reason to adde any thing of ceremony, excepting the circumstances and advantages of the very ministery, as time and place, and vessels and ornaments and necessa...

When discussing the plain character of older Anglican and Episcopal churches - such as The Middle Church , King Charles the Martyr, Shelland , and Old Wye Church, Maryland - it is not uncommon to hear this character and its lack of imagery dismissed as somehow 'unAnglican', an unfortunate expression of a thankfully long-forgotten, ill-considered theology, replaced by richer Victorian tastes, not at all averse to imagery. Plain windows, whitewashed walls, with a simple, wooden God's Board: this is deemed to be little more than prejudice at work, with the lack of imagery regarded as a denial of the sacred. This is where we turn to Jeremy Taylor. He can hardly be regarded an unimpressive divine or a purveyor of shallow theological thought. Nor, to state the very obvious, was he a 'Puritan' or, indeed, even a Reformed Conformist. Taylor's critique of Calvinist soteriology, his robust defence of episcopal order, and his commitment to the "holy Liturgy" of...

In a recent essay , Alan Ford - a leading historian of the Church of Ireland - considered the Jacobean and Caroline Irish Church in the context of what he termed "the wider perspective of Atlantic Protestantism". Alongside Ford's essay, I was also reading Plantation Churches: Places of worship in early Seventeenth-century Ulster (2025). In its concluding chapter, the book refers to The Middle Church, at the heart of Jeremy Taylor country. While built at Taylor's direction and consecrated in 1668, it is noted that a worshipper "would have seen little difference" between The Middle Church and Jacobean churches in Ireland. Around the same time, I also stumbled across online pictures of the Reformed church in Vámosatya , on the eastern edge of Hungary's Northern Great Plain. Ford's essay and the pictures of Vámosatya church provoked me to consider looking in the other direction - not across the Atlantic, but across Europe, to the continent's eastern...

The May Day holiday - a gentle but joyous celebration of Spring - is a now yearly opportunity for laudable Practice to reflect on the pleasing correspondence between Prayer Book piety and the quiet, plain, sober character of the older Anglican parish church. This year, against the backdrop of The Middle Church , in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country, I am contemplating how, from its consecration in 1668 until it was replaced by a new parish church in 1824, The Middle Church and its parishioners would have known only plain, said services, with metrical psalms being the only singing heard in the church over the century and a half during which divine service was celebrated within it. There certainly would have been no intoning of services. This came to mind when recently reading Ian Meredith's study of how the 19th century Scottish Episcopal Church lost the allegiance of migrant Irish Episcopalians in the west of Scotland. The Ritualism embraced by elements of the Scottish Episcopal...