laudable Practice

On this day when we rightly give thanks for the failure of the Powder-plot, I turn to Jeremy Taylor's 1634 sermon " upon the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason ". One of the themes running throughout the sermon is the repeated view that, prior to Pius V's 1570 bull  Regnans in exclesis - declaring Elizabeth a "heretic" and "depriv[ing] of her pretended title to the kingdom ... and of all dominion, dignity and privilege whatsoever" - England's Roman Catholics had conformed and worshipped in parish churches. Indeed, as the final extract below indicates, Taylor also noted how this had, in some cases, continued long after Regnans in excelsis :  From primo of Elizabeth to undecimo, the Papists made no scruple of comming to our Churches, Recusancy was not then so much as a Chrysome, not an Embrio. But when Pius quintus sent forth his Breves of Excommunication and Deposition of the Queen, then first they forbore to pray with us, or to have any re...

On this Gunpowder Plot Day, words from a 5th November 1691 sermon by John Sharp, Archbishop of York, on the text of Romans 10:2, "For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge". In our own age of bitter culture wars and heightened partisanship in Church and State (and mindful that today, of course, is the presidential election in the United States), Sharp points us to the Gunpowder Treason as an unfortunately resonant example of zeal "not according to knowledge", destructive of "true Religion" and "Publick peace". Against this, we are to be marked by a right and true zeal "agreeable to the Spirit and Temper of our great Lord and Master Christ": I wish this mark of right Zeal, that it ought to be according to knowledge, were more considered. For it seems not often to be thought on by those that are most zealous in their way, of what perswasion soever they be. This same business of Knowledge, is a th...

in the ruin of thy church among us ... They are, I think, the most haunting words in the ' Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to be used yearly upon the Fifth Day of November '.  They potently remind us what could have been lost, "thy church among us ": in other words, that distinctive pattern and shape which the Reformed tradition took in the ecclesia Anglicana .  If the Gunpowder Treason had been successful, it is this which could have been ruined and - to use words from the opening of Hooker's Lawes - "to passe away as in a dreame". No grand, exalted claims need to be made for what would later be known as Anglicanism in order for us to be grateful for the failure of the Gunpowder conspirators.  It would not have been the ruin of the Church Catholic. It would not have been the ruin of the Churches of the Reformation.   It would have been "the ruin of thy church among us ".  The church characterised by the modest, reverent piety of the Prayer B...