laudable Practice

What struck me most when reading Fiona McCall's excellent Baal's Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013), was its identification of an Episcopalian piety emerging out of the experience of the defeat of the Royalist and Episcopalian cause, a piety which would particularly shape and characterise Anglicanism during the 'long 18th century'.  The first reference to this Episcopalian piety ('Episcopalian' is here used in light of the anachronistic nature of 'Anglican') might give us pause for thought, an apparent stepping away from scriptural discourse: During the 1640s, loyalist clergy had been just as inclined as the 'godly' to pepper their discourse with biblical quotations ... But, after defeat, Anglican discourse eschewed this scriptural focus, developing what some have seen as a characteristic 'conservative Anglican' style: meditative, obscure, ambiguous and symbolic (p.28f). This reserve, however, points to, encou...

These and many more evils, and the perpetual unavoidable necessity of sinning by much talking, hath given great advantages to silence, and made it to be esteemed an act of discipline and great religion. St. Romualdus upon the Syrian mountain severely kept a seven years silence; and Thomas Cantipratensis tells of a religious person in a monastery in Brabant that spake not one word in sixteen years. But they are greater examples which Palladius tells of; Ammonaz who lived with three thousand brethren in so great silence as if he were an anachoret; but Theona was silent for thirty years together; and Johannes, surnamed Silentiarius, was silent for forty-seven years. But this morosity and sullenness is so far from being imitable and laudable, that if there were no direct prevarication of any commands expressed or intimated in scripture, yet it must certainly either draw with it, or be itself, an infinite omission of duty; especially in the external glorifications of God, in the institution...

It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it. Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, was the author of the Preface to the revision of 1662.  These opening words of the Preface almost certainly have their roots in an earlier statement by Sanderson, in his 1647 Oxford lectures On Conscience and Human Law :  but in this, as in many other debates, the mean between the two extremes seems to be the truer opinion , and safer to follow . In the 1662 Preface, Sanderson also applied this moderation and prudence to the description of the bitterly divisive events of the 1640s and 1650s, the civil wars and the Interregnum: the Preface refers to "the late unhappy confusions".  It would, of course, have been easy to give expression to a triumphalist Royalism and Laudianism.  Such a spirit...

The response in the The Spectator by Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, to suggestions that the late Prince Philip embodied a form of 'epitomised a very British stoicism' represents a contemporary version of Tertullian's 'what has Athens to with Jerusalem?'.  The answer to this question by historic, orthodox Christianity - beginning with St. Paul quoting "your own poets" as he spoke to the Stoics and Epicureans in the Areopagus - has tended to be 'quite a bit, actually'. Now Tomlin does seem to recognise this when he says of Stoic teaching "there is real wisdom in all this" and admits that "many early Christian thinkers in the days when Stoic thought was at its most popular recognised it". This, however, is entirely overshadowed by the article's 'what have the Stoics to do with Christianity?' stance, beginning with the rather silly suggestion that "The Monty Python sketch depicting Christ on the cross, calml...