laudable Practice

In March 1900, the US publication Literary Digest provided a fascinating glimpse of life in the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Noting the "marked demarcation in matters of doctrine and worship" within PECUSA, the article provided a breakdown of "the relative strength of the High-, Low-, and Broad-Church parties". High Church is defined as "not elaborate ritual alone" but also "the importance of the sacraments" and a belief "in the place of the church, as preceding the Bible, not founded upon it". Low Church is taken to mean "attach[ing] less importance to the sacraments", being "evangelical in method, and sometimes "employ[ing] extempore prayer". As for Broad Church, it refers to "the liberal constructionists, sometimes of the Bible, oftener of church practises". Perhaps what is most significant about these introductory comments is that a Low Church, evangelical tradition...

The services were decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral, and the science of intoning was unknown. One young man who had come direct from Oxford as a curate to Plumstead had, after the lapse of two or three Sundays, made a faint attempt, much to the bewilderment of the poorer part of the congregation. Dr. Grantly had not been present on the occasion, but Mrs. Grantly, who had her own opinion on the subject, immediately after the service expressed a hope that the young gentleman had not been taken ill, and offered to send him all kinds of condiments supposed to be good for a sore throat. After that there had been no more intoning at Plumstead Episcopi. It is an amusing incident from Barchester Towers , Trollope's 1857 novel. Amusing as it is, it also reflects mid-19th century Anglican experience. We hear something of Mrs. Grantly in the 1862 edition of Reading the Liturgy , a work which originally had the subtitle "addressed ...

It might make regular readers of this blog choke on their morning tea. What on earth has happened to the sound, pleasing Georgian tastes of laudable Practice ? Were not the Victorians responsible for what Thomas Hardy, in A Pair of Blue Eyes , called "the craze for indiscriminate church-restoration". Do we not, with Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree , lament "regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical bandsmen" - the west gallery musicians and singers - "by an isolated organist"? Is it not the case that good Parson Woodforde is to be celebrated and lauded over and above the Victorians J.H. Newman and J.C. Ryle? The answer to all these questions is a hearty 'yes'. But, those of us who are 'New Georgians' (seeking to promote an appreciation of 18th century Anglicanism, Georgian churches, and the ordinary, stolid piety that characterised the Georgian Church of England) do live in an Anglican landscape defined by the Victorians. To simply ...