laudable Practice

Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude - Sir Roger Scruton 'My Strange Year', The Spectator , 21st December 2019. Gratitude for Sir Roger Scruton has marked many of the tributes offered since the news of his death yesterday.  I want to suggest that there can be a particular Anglican gratitude for his writings, a recognition of a sense in which he both articulated an Anglican sensibility and contributed to a restatement of a classical Anglican vision.  Today and tomorrow I will seek to outline what might be considered as grounds for such an Anglican gratitude for Scruton, hopefully in a fashion which resonates not only with those of us Anglicans who identify with a traditional Tory/conservative sensibility. A religious animal Scruton's 2010 Gifford Lectures and 2011 Stanton Lectures gave (if I may be forgiven for using the term) fresh expression to the noble tradition of natural theology.  Both series of lectures wer...

On this anniversary of the martyrdom of William Laud, words from the conclusion to The Life of Archbishop Laud (1836) by Charles Webb Le Bas, a representative of the Old High Church tradition with connections to the Hackney Phalanx: Under these impressions it is, that the sons and servants of the church, it is to be hoped, will return from expatiating over those times, when the altar and the throne went down together. And, feeling that an eminent portion of the Church's strength is derived from the unsullied renown of her fathers, her confessors, and her martyrs, they will look indulgently on this attempt to rescue from foul defacement one venerable name. In the endeavour to discharge this sacred duty, it has not been the purpose of the writer of these pages to conceal the frailties of the man; but to vindicate him from unmerited contempt and infamy, and to give him his due rank, among the ancient worthies of the realm. And, so long as perfect integrity and sanctity of purpose...

Yesterday, historian John McCafferty Tweeted that #OTD in 1587, the Puritan Hugh Gray, of Trinity College, Cambridge, preached a sermon against a range of practices in the Church of England - the "Jewish music" used in the liturgy, the superstitious observance of Christmas - and the acceptance of 'crypto-papists' within the Church's life.  As a result of the sermon, Gray was brought before the university's Vice-Chancellor to be admonished. Railing against 'crypto-papists', of course, was a Puritan past-time.  Mindful that the Elizabethan Settlement was by 1587 less than thirty years old, and that many clergy and laity in the English Church had conformed under Mary, attacking 'crypto-papists' was an assault on the ordinary Christian practice and piety of a majority within the Church.  It was, furthermore, an attack on the very idea of 'conformity', that participation in the common life and worship of the parish defined membership of...

From an Epiphany sermon (Sermon XXIX) by John Keble: see how carefully it [the adoration of the Magi] is set down in the Book of God, and how much the Church would have us think of it: keeping the memory of it, as one of the greatest days in the year; appointing the Creed of S. Athanasius to be said, as on a second Christmas Day. To emphasise the significance of the feast of the Epiphany, Keble points to the Prayer Book provision that the Athanasian Creed be sung or said at Mattins (suggesting too, of course, that this sermon was preached at Mattins).  This, he states, emphasises the Christological significance of Epiphany, placing it alongside the celebration of Christmas Day and the other principal feasts.  Keble is here repeating a commonplace point in High Church commentary, that the Athanasian Creed is particularly suited to such high festivals and demonstrates the centrality of these saving events to the Catholick Faith. Mant's 1820 Notes quote Sparrow's 17th c...

If we were to choose one piece of the Anglican patrimony which embodies a rich, traditional Epiphany piety, a strong case could be made that it should be John Henry Hopkins Jr's 'We Three Kings'.  The hymn is a marvellous catechesis on the mystical meaning of the gifts offered by the Magi, rooting Anglican celebration of the Epiphany in a deeply traditional piety. From Irenaeus onwards, of course, the gifts brought to the Christ Child by the Magi were interpreted as having mystic meaning: myrrh because it was for him who should die and be buried for the mortal human race; gold because he was a king 'whose kingdom has no end'; and frankincense because he was God. Ælfric's (10th century) sermon on the Epiphany similarly invokes this meaning: These three astronomers worshipped Christ, and offered to him symbolic gifts. The gold betokened that he is true King; the incense that he is true God; the myrrh that he was then mortal, though now he continues imm...

It is perhaps an indication of how the description of the journey of the Magi by Lancelot Andrewes in his 1622 Christmas sermon captured imaginations long before T.S. Eliot's poem , that Caroline theologian Mark Frank in an Epiphany sermon (either from the early 1640s or after the Restoration) appears to echo the account given by Andrewes. What is more, it is also suggestive of how the traditional piety surrounding the Epiphany - similarly evident in a Christmas sermon by Donne , "a supernatural and extraordinary star, which appeared to the wise men of the East, this day, and brought them to Christ, at Bethlehem, upon Twelfth Day. That day, Twelfth Day, the church now calls the Epiphany" - was sustained by the Prayer Book's provision for the feast. Many a weary step had they trod, many a fruitless question had they asked, many an unprofitable search had they made to find him; and, behold, yet they will not give over. Twelve days it had cost them to come to Je...

By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and Circumcision ... Good Lord, deliver us.  From the Litany. Though therefore the days of the martyrs, which are for our example celebrated in the Christian church, be ordinarily called natalitia martyrum , the birth-day of the martyrs, yet that is not intended of their birth in this world, but of their birth in the next; when by death their souls were new delivered of their prisons here, and they newly born into the kingdom of heaven; that day, upon that reason, the day of their death, was called their birth-day, and celebrated in the church by that name. Only to Christ Jesus, the fulness of time was at his birth; not because he also had not a painful life to pass through, but because the work of our redemption was an entire work, and all that Christ said, or did, or suffered, concurred to our salvation, as well his mother's swathing him in little clouts, as Joseph's shrouding him in a funeral sheet;...