laudable Practice

In the fourth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier provides an example of how Newman's thinking in the late 1830s and early 1840s was a complete rupture with the previously dominant Old High tradition. In particular, the seeking after authoritative certainty which became evident in Newman and other Tractarian quarters, culminating in the desire for an infallible authority, ran entirely counter to the Old High recognition of the historical complexities, contradictions, and confusions which inevitably accompanied ecclesial life. As Le Mesurier states: The same question would apply to the claims of infallibility. But, indeed, we might first desire our adversaries to define with whom this infallibility resides, with popes or with councils? separate or united? For, upon this point, there is, and has been, an endless diversity of opinions. We might ask them further, how such a supposition is reconcileable with their many and notorious schisms, the...

In the fourth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier continues with his exposition of how authority functioned amongst the patristic churches. This was the " example of the primitive church " to which the Church of England returned at the Reformation, in which (to use the words of Article XXXIV) "every particular or national church hath authority" to order its affairs: In all this, clearly, there is nothing like what can be properly called jurisdiction in one church or bishop over another: nothing but what I have stated, that when any evils were to be resisted, or any point of doctrine or of discipline to be ascertained, those bishops who could do so, met together and declared their sentiments. Those sentiments were communicated to the other churches, and were adopted and observed according to their apparent reasonableness, and the weight of character which belonged to those from whom they came. Nothing was pretended to but tha...

In the fourth of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier reaffirms the Old High conviction that the Reformation in England was a legitimate restoration of the rights and liberties of a national church, rooted in patristic experience.  Such a confident, positive assertion  by the Old High tradition of the Reformation of the ecclesia Anglicana  contrasts with the (at best) unease about the Reformation increasingly evident in Tractarianism and, also, later progressive Anglican distaste for the Royal Supremacy, failing to recognise its vital historic significance in offering the alternative to papal supremacy: At the reformation, therefore, the church of England did only reassert that independence which belonged to her in the beginning, and which, neither to her nor to any national church can be denied. Again, in recognizing the king of this realm for her head, as supreme in ecclesiastical as well as temporal causes, she only followed the ...

In the third of his 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier addresses the consistent New Testament exhortations to maintain the church's unity and peace. He applies these calls to the episcopal order of the national, Established Church. This is a good example of how the Old High tradition understood the commands and exhortations of Scripture not as a call to ' The Weird ' but, rather, to be lived out in the ordinary, undramatic Christian life. Also noteworthy in this extract is how Le Mesurier provides a Hookerian account of the origins of episcopacy. The authority of episcopal order relies, he states, on the historic practice of the earliest churches, maintained over centuries, derived from apostolic practice. As with Hooker (and as seen elsewhere in the Old High tradition ), no exalted appeal is made to explicit divine institution of episcopal order. Note too, by the way, how Le Mesurier - in common with a long-standing view in Laudian and ...

From Thomas Le Mesurier's 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , a characteristic Old High account of the separation of Dissenters from the Established Church in1662. This may look like a rather straightforward, conventional account but its significance derives from its affirmation that Dissenters and Episcopalians were "united in the same faith". It is precisely this affirmation which the Oxford Movement would increasingly reject in the decades after 1833, viewing the Dissenting traditions as professing a faith different to that of the Church of England: the fundamental difference being in the Tractarians' ahistorical rejection of the Protestant identity of Anglicanism. Ironically, of course, such an understanding justified the separation of 1662. By contrast, Le Mesurier's Old High view emphasised that the separation was not at all necessary. Related to this is Le Mesurier's traditional Old High view - rooted in Cranmer and Hooker - of t...

On a number of occasions, laudable Practice has drawn attention to the pre-1833 Old High tradition robustly affirming the divine institution of the Church and renouncing any reliance for its claims upon establishment status e.g. Horsley in 1790,  Spry in 1816,  Lonsdale in 1827, and  Perceval in 1831. This refutes the suggestion made in Tract One that the 'Two Bottle Orthodox' relied on "secular advantages" - "Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your education, your wealth, your connexions". The evidence from the pre-1833 Old High tradition is quite clear that such a claim was entirely erroneous.  This is also explicit in Thomas Le Mesurier's 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism . Ending the first lecture, Le Mesurier makes it abundantly clear that establishment status and temporal interests are not his concern when it comes to defining the claims of the Church, what Tract One called the Church's "divine missio...

Last week's extract from Thomas Le Mesurier's 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , addressed the challenges to the 18th century Church of England national from both Enthusiasm and radical Latitudinarianism. Today's extract shows how Le Mesurier introduced a modest but serious case for the claims of the national church. It centres around denying that the Reformation's rejection of papal claims can justify schism from the national church. He firstly points to the fundamental difference between the Reformation as a controversy over vital articles of the Faith, and breaking communion with the national church over secondary matters (Dissent in 1662, Methodism) or because of entirely rejecting subscription to Articles and Creeds (the radical Latitudinarian aspiration): And, because it has been a favourite topic with dissenters of all sorts to insist upon our separation from the church of Rome as if it precluded us from objecting to their, or any other s...

If, as suggested in the post introducing Thomas Le Mesurier's 1807 Bampton Lectures, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , he presented an understanding of the Church which Kenneth Kirk would later describe as a characteristically Anglican commitment to "combining the principle of authority with that of freedom", the account given in the lectures of the Church of England in the 18th century portrays the challenges posed to this by both a radical Latitudinarianism and Enthusiasm.  Firstly, the radical Latitudinarian challenge, which Le Mesurier sees as embodied in Bishop Hoadly's stance in the Bangorian controversy: The mode however which was adopted by the then bishop of Bangor ... must be admitted to have been somewhat extraordinary for one, who was by his office, an established ruler in the church. Not content to argue against any abuse or misconception of authority, he proceeded at once to deny that there was any authority whatever given by Christ to any person to r...

Thomas Le Mesurier (born 1756, received orders 1794) is described by Nockles as representative of the 'Warburtonian' school in the pre-Tractarian High Church tradition, characterised by "an aversion to extravagant devotional austerities", regarded as "'useless' and 'anti-social'". Delivering the Bampton Lectures in 1807, On the Nature and Guilt of Schism , Le Mesurier addressed an enduring High Church theme, how divisions and contentions undermined the "charity and peace which we say that it was the end of our religion to establish". This opening extract illustrates how the High Church tradition continued what Kenneth Kirk famously identified as a defining feature of the Anglican ethos, "combining the principle of authority with that of freedom". Here Le Mesurier does so with regards to the principle of ecclesiastical authority. He begins by rejecting any ecclesial claims to infallibility: I shall perhaps, before I go fa...

In another example of what Kenneth Kirk identified as the "ideal of combining the principle of authority with that of freedom", expounded by "a little group of Anglican divines of the seventeenth century - Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, Sanderson, Hall, and their fellows", we might point to Taylor's understanding (in Part III of his sermon 'The Return of Prayers') of how the clergy are "appointed for the salvation of mankind" (the Ordering of Priests ).   First, what Kirk termed "the principle of authority", evident in Taylor's 'high' account of the ministerial office: though it were therefore very well that things were thus with all men, yet God, who takes care of us all, makes provision for us in special manner; and the whole order of the clergy are appointed by God to pray for others, to be ministers of Christ's priesthood, to be followers of His advocation, to stand between God and the people, and to present to God all t...