laudable Practice

On previous occasions, laudable Practice has noted both Jeremy Taylor's critique of the indicative form of absolution ('I absolve thee') and how this was reflected in 18th century High Church caution regarding this form of absolution in the BCP's Visitation of the Sick, as seen in the comments of Secker and others. One of Taylor's most famous works, Holy Dying (1651), demonstrates his desire for a form of absolution in private confession after the declaratory and precatory forms: Then let the sick man be called to rehearse the articles of his faith; or, if he be so weak he cannot, let him (if he have not before done it) be called to say Amen when they are recited, or to give some testimony of his faith and confident assent to them. After which it is proper (if the person be in capacity) that the minister examine him, and invite him to confession, and all the parts of repentance, according to the foregoing rules; after which he may pray the prayer of absolution. O...

Last Friday, we commenced Lenten readings from one of the more controversial of Jeremy Taylor's Golden Grove sermons, ' The Invalidity of a Late, or Deathbed Repentance '. It is too often presented as a Caroline rupture with Reformation thought. The previous post emphasised how such an interpretation did not do justice to Luther and Calvin on repentance, and how Taylor's understanding of repentance cohered with the Reformation. Today's extract continues on this theme. Here Taylor contrasts authentic repentance, "a deep sorrow", with a mere "superficial sigh". Crucially, Taylor insists that repentance must be such a sorrow "must be productive" of both a hatred and a declining of sin: Repentance implies a deep sorrow, as the beginning and introduction of this duty; not a superficiall sigh, or tear, not a calling our selves sinners, and miserable persons; this is far from that godly sorrow that worketh repentance; and yet I wish there were...

Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws ... The general Confession at Morning and Evening Prayer opens by invoking our "most merciful Father", placing us alongside the Prodigal - ashamed, hungry, journeying back from the far country, utterly reliant on the Father's grace in Christ: And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. 'Almighty' does not contradict this. In fact, it assures us that this love and mercy flows eternally from our "most merciful Father". In the words of Article XVII, this "is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort". We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep ... It is a phrase deeply rooted in the scriptures of the Old and New T...

Then shall this general Confession be made, in the name of all those that are minded to receive the holy Communion, by one of the Ministers: both he and all the people kneeling humbly upon their knees and saying - BCP 1662 Holy Communion, rubric before the General Confession. In his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Book of Common Prayer, Volume II (1801), John Shepherd notes the significance of the above rubric produced by the 1662 revision: Till the Restoration the Rubric here stood thus: "Then shall this general confession be made in the name of all those that are minded to receive the Holy Communion, either by one of them, or else by one of the ministers, or by the priest himself, all kneeling humbly on their knees." Does it not hence appear that the confession was made by one only in the name of all? At the Savoy Conference, the Presbyterians requested, that it might be made by the minister only, but at the revision that followed, the Rubric was changed into i...

From a Keble sermon for First Sunday in Lent (in his Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide ), an extract demonstrating a quite conventional Old High Lenten piety, shaped by the Commination and the general Confession at the Holy Communion. Again, there is no sense - as in his Ash Wednesday sermon - that the Commination is in any way lacking because of the absence of older, abandoned ceremonies. Likewise, the general Confession is presented as the appropriate confession, with no mention being made of a necessity for another form of confession. These Prayer rites, in other words, can provide a sufficient liturgical and pastoral context for a response to Keble's call - "all have need of penitence". Once more the time of Lent is come; in one year more the Holy Church has cried aloud in our ears and spared not. She has lifted up her voice like a trumpet, declaring as you heard last Wednesday, the sentences of God's wrath against impenitent sinners, who are su...

In the last year of his life, 1867, John Lonsdale, Bishop of Lichfield, had to address one of the most theologically and culturally divisive aspects of Anglo-catholic practice in Victorian England: auricular confession. The promotion of auricular confession, as Nockles notes, was one of the most profound differences between the Old High tradition and the Tractarians: "Forgiveness was effectively made conditional upon the sacramental absolution administered by a priest in private confession in a way which the old High Churchmen deplored". As recorded in The Life of John Lonsdale (1868), the Bishop was required to address the matter because of the controversy surrounding a boys' school in his diocese allowing pupils "by the permission of their parents only, to come to confession, and to receive absolution, if they are unable (as the Prayerbook says) by the usual means to satisfy their own conscience, and require further comfort or advice". Lonsdale carefully defe...

Continuing the consideration of the general Confession in John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), today's extract is a reflection on the quietly beautiful, deeply ecumenical phrase "According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord": From the universality of the promise, ALL men, because they are men, even the chief of sinners, if they repent, may receive comfort and consolation. But let none arrogate to himself, or his sect, any peculiar interest, in the promises made through Jesus Christ. If any private individual, or particular society imagine, that they have any special interest in the redeemer's merits, or God's promises, I scruple not to pronounce, that the suggestion is the delusion of the Devil, and betrays a kind of spiritual pride, which the grand Apostate himself could never surpass. As men and Christians, we are thankful, that we are not particula...

Continuing the consideration of the general Confession in John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we turn to words which can seem like a spiritually unhelpful exaggeration of the fallen condition: "there is no health in us". This, of course, explains the phrase being omitted from, for example, Rite One Morning and Evening Prayer in TEC's BCP 1979.  Shepherd, however, points to the phrase as having a twofold purpose. Firstly, it expresses the reality - testified to in scripture, affirmed by our experience - of the sickness of sin infecting all aspects of our humanity. Secondly, the phrase draws us to recognise that God alone saves. In other words, rather than a gloomy declaration of total depravity, the phrase has a robust realism and is a profoundly comforting theological truth. Having thus confessed our iniquities, we acknowledge, that 'There is no health in us'. In the language ...

Having considered the exposition of the Exhortation and Absolution at Morning and Evening Prayer by John Shepherd in his A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we turn to the Confession. He notes how the opening words of the Confession draw attention to a wider characteristic of the Prayer Book liturgy, the titles by which it addresses God: Before we enter upon the first part of the confession, we shall here particularly notice, once for all, a beauty and propriety, which, in our admirable Liturgy, we may everywhere observe. I mean the extreme care of the church in framing introductions to her prayers and collects. In all her addresses to the Deity, she has, it may almost be said, uniformly selected such titles, attributes and perfections, as are most appropriate to the petitions to which they are prefixed, and best calculated to produce correspondent affections in the minds of those that use them. Whoever, with an eye...

In the seventh of his1844 Bampton Lectures,  An inquiry into the means of grace, their mutual connection, and combined use, with especial reference to the Church of England , Jelf - one of the Zs, those whom Nockles highlights as the post-1833 continuation of the Old High tradition - addresses the issue of private confession and absolution. Proposed by Tractarians as a regular, routine feature of the spiritual life, Jelf robustly reaffirms the Old High understanding that this Prayer Book provision must not be regarded as Tridentine "compulsory auricular confession". Jelf begins by pointing to the radical difference between the primitive penitential practice and the much later Sacrament of Penance: And let it be acknowledged that it [i.e. the primitive practice] is now to be found nowhere in Christendom as it existed in the Primitive Church; and, considering the change of circumstances and habits, it is, perhaps, hardly to be expected that any Church will ever succeed in resto...

From Protestants' Ordination Defended - a response to a Roman Catholic critique of Anglican orders - by Bramhall, then Bishop of Derry, addressing the allegation that Anglican formularies had removed private confession and the priestly authority to absolve sins: Neither have the Protestants "pared away" all manner of mariner of shrift, or confession and absolution. I have shewed before in this answer five several ways [he had previously stated that the priestly authority to remit sins was found in administering Baptism, the Eucharist, prayer, preaching, and absolution], whereby the Protestants hold, that their Presbyters put away sins. Nay, they condemn not private confession, and absolution itself, as an ecclesiastical policy, to make men more wary how they offend; so as it might be left free, without tyrannical imposition. No better physic for a full stomach than a vomit. Bodily sores do sometimes compel a man to put off natural shamefacedness, and to offer his less co...

Bramhall, then Archbishop of Armagh, in a sermon - 'The Right Way to Safety after Shipwreck' - before the Irish House of Commons, June 1661, recommending private confession and absolution: Confession, with its requisites, contrition and amendment of life ... do make a complete repentance: which some Fathers style a "second table after shipwreck", others a "Baptism of pains and tears" ... Thrice happy are they, which use this plank aright, to bring them through the raging billows of this sinful world to the haven of eternal bliss. Confession is as ancient as our first parents, whom God Himself did call to the performance of this duty. It was  practised among the Israelites, by Divine precept; by those  Jews that repaired to the Baptism of John; by those Ephesian converts; prescribed by St. James, "Confess one  to another, and pray one for another" ... There is no better physic for a full stomach, than a vomit; nor for a soul replete with sin, than c...