laudable Practice

Throughout the late 18th and well into the mid-19th century, the relationship of the Church(es) of England and Ireland with the Scottish Episcopal Church was a matter of theological and political controversy.  While the Low Church tradition regarded Scottish Episcopalianism with obvious hostility - due a mixture of older Whig fears and a narrow, populist Protestant suspicion of the Scottish Liturgy - the Old High tradition had a deep and profound respect for Episcopalians in the northern part of the Kingdom, and a very high regard for the Scotch Communion Office. In 1824, the then Bishop of Down and Connor, Richard Mant - a leading Old High figure - became publicly involved in the debate when he published a letter to a Scottish Episcopalian cleric, rebuking an Irish cleric who had refused to share in the Sacrament according to the Scottish rite.  Mant had no hesitation in stating what he would do if he were in that part of the Kingdom: if I were passing through Scotland, as,...

This final extract from Mant's 1842 Visitation Charge offers a quite beautiful depiction of Old High piety.  It follows from Mant challenging evangelical clergy who were organising for the purposes of agitation and campaigning.  Against such disorder, disturbing the Church's peace, he points to Hooker, quoting from Walton's Life : And surely a parochial clergyman were better employed at home, serving God and waiting upon his people, in the quiet and unobtrusive walk of his legitimate and prescribed ministrations, and, like the venerable Richard Hooker, "as he expressed the desire of his heart, being free from noise, and eating his bread in privacy and quietness," than in seeking abroad the means of feeding the morbid appetite of an inordinate, indiscreet, and indiscriminating zeal. Then, for the very closing words of the Charge, Mant turned to the  Lawes , invoking the peaceable, ordered vision which those volumes wonderfully and reverently expound: in the magnif...

Continuing the series of weekly posts from the responses to Tract XC by Old High bishops in the visitation charges of the early 1840s, today we have a penultimate extract from the 1842 visitation charge of Richard Mant, Bishop of Down and Connor,  The Laws of the Church: The Churchman's Guard Against Romanism and Puritanism .  As with the charges of Bagot of Oxford and Phillpotts of Exeter, the point of these extracts is not to focus on the rejection of Tract XC but, rather, on how these charges provide a rich seam of Old High teaching. In this extract Mant addresses the unauthorised changes to the Prayer Book liturgy made by "modern puritanical ministers", the Church's "less merciful sons". His rebuke of this practice, addressing examples from the Baptism and Burial rites, demonstrates the continued significance of conformity and uniformity for the Old High tradition, even as the disputes occasioned by Tractarians and early Ritualists commenced.  Mindful of...

Resuming the series of weekly posts from the responses to Tract XC by Old High bishops in the visitation charges of the early 1840s, today we turn to the 1842 visitation charge of Richard Mant, Bishop of Down and Connor:   The Laws of the Church: The Churchman's Guard Against Romanism and Puritanism .  As with the charges of Bagot of Oxford and Phillpotts of Exeter , the point of these extracts is not to focus on the rejection of Tract XC but, rather, on how these charges provide a rich seam of Old High teaching. This first extract from Mant's charge demonstrates how the Old High tradition robustly reaffirmed Article VI and the sufficiency of Scripture, significantly distinguishing Old High thought from the increased willingness in Tractarian circles to reject Article VI's affirmation and exalt the authority of 'tradition'. Also noteworthy is the quotation from Burnet's commentary on the Articles, another indicator of how the latitudinarian Burnet was regarded ...

To continue the ' Old High/New Low ' theme, words from Richard Mant's 1845 Charge, Horae Ecclesiasticae; The Position of the Church with Regard to Romish Error , a critique of Tractarianism.  Amongst the Tractarian errors challenged by Mant was the desire restore "ceremonies which our Church has abolished or disused in her reformed Liturgy".  He provides examples of such ceremonies: the innumerable and reiterated gesti culations of the officiating priests, and the variety  and continual changes of the sacerdotal vestments:  of the exorcisms and chrisms, and the mixing of  oil and balsam with the water used in holy bap tism: of the reserving, carrying about, lifting up,  and worshipping of the consecrated bread and  wine in the holy communion: of the creepings to  the cross: of the multitudinous bowings and cross ings of the person: of the sprinkling of holy  water: of the ringing of little hand bells, and the  lighting of numerous c...

The singing of Psalms has been on my mind recently, for two reasons.  The first is the reference to psalm singing in Matthew Myer Boulton's excellent Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology (2011).  He describes the importance of signing the Psalter in Calvin's reform of the Genevan churches: Accordingly, for many in the sixteenth-century reform movements, the psalms became identified as the music of the people, God's Word once only accessible to a few, now sung by one and all.  Indeed, in an era when women's voices were prominently heard in public worship only in convents, and children's voices only in specialist choirs, the joyous roar in Genevan churches rose from the entire assembly, men, women, and children singing together (p.34). Secondly, The Observer last weekend had a wonderful story on a new album, ' The Edge of the Sea ', of Gaelic psalm singing from the western isles of Scotland: In the north-weste...