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A ‘fluffy-minded Prayer Book fundamentalist’? F. D. Maurice and the Anglican Liturgy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The Liturgy has been to me a great theological teacher; a perpetual testimony that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the one God blessed for ever, is the author of all life, freedom, unity to men; that our prayers are nothing but responses to His voice speaking to us and in us. Why do I hear nothing of this from those who profess to reform it? Why do they appear only to treat it as an old praying machine, which in the course of centuries gets out of order like other machines, and which should be altered according to the improved mechanical notions of our time?
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 35: Continuity and Change in Christian Worship , 1999 , pp. 345 - 360
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999
References
1 F. D. Maurice, letter to the Revd Isaac Taylor, 10 April 1860, in Maurice, F., The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (London, 1884), 2, p. 359 Google Scholar.
2 Cuming has just one reference in the main body of his text: p. 151.
3 He first published a series of sermons specifically on the Prayer Book in 1849, under the title The Prayer-Book Considered Especially in Reference to the Romish System. The following year appeared a collection entitled The Church a Family: Twelve Sermons on the Occasional Offices of the Prayer-Book. John William Colenso extracted passages from these and other works of Maurice in a compilation entitled The Communion Service from the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1855). Further volumes of Maurice’s sermons on public worship more generally followed: The Worship of the Church. A Witness for the Redemption of the World (London, 1857); The Worship of God and Fellowship among Men: a Series of Sermons on Public Worship (London, 1858); The Faith of the Liturgy and the Doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles (London, 1860); Dialogues between a Clergyman and a Layman on Family Worship (London, 1862).
4 Gilley, S. W., ‘The ecclesiology of the Oxford Movement’, in Vaiss, P., ed., From Oxford to the People; Reconsidering Newman and the Oxford Movement (Leominster, 1996), p. 69 Google Scholar.
5 On Maurice’s resistance to his inclusion with the Broad Church party, see especially his letter to the editor of The Spectator, 2 April 1870, which appeared under the heading The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Broad Church’, pp. 434-5.
6 Maurice, F. D., ‘Dr.Lushington, , Mr.Heath, , and the Thirty-Nine Articles’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 5 (1862), p. 156 Google Scholar.
7 The first exponent of this tradition of interpretation was Gabriel Hebert himself; as his biographer, Christopher Irvine, puts it, in Worship, Church and Society (Norwich, 1993), p. 60: ‘he takes the thought of F. D. Maurice as the framework for his own arguments, and sets out to explain the view that the Church was both a human and a divine institution, given, as it were, to make tangible in the world, the catholicity of God’s dealings with humanity.’
8 Hebert, G., Liturgy and Society (London, 1936)Google Scholar; D. Gray, Earth and Altar. The Evolution of the Parish Communion in the Church of England to 1945 (Norwich, 1986); J. Fenwick and B. Spinks, Worship in Transition. The Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement (Edinburgh, 1995).
9 Gray, , Earth and Altar, p. 1 Google Scholar.
10 Maurice, F. D., The Prayer-Book Considered Especially in Reference to the Romish System (1849; 1880 edn, enclosing also The Lord’s Prayer), p. 185 Google Scholar.
11 Ibid., p. xvi.
12 See, above all, Maurice, F. D., Reasons for not joining a Party in the Church. A Letter to the Ven. Samuel Wilberforce (London, 1841 Google Scholar).
13 Maurice, , Prayer-Book, pp. xiii, 13 Google Scholar.
14 On the work of High-Church liturgical scholars, see P. B. Nocklcs, The Oxford Movement in Context. Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 217-23. Maurice even described Hugh Rose as ‘afterwards a kind friend of mine’, even though he seems, overall, to have regarded his time at Oxford as largely unprofitable: Maurice, , Life, 1, pp. 179–80 Google Scholar.
15 Maurice, , Prayer-Book, p. 12 Google Scholar.
16 Ibid, p. 43.
17 Ibid., p. 147.
18 Maurice, F. D., The Church a Family: Twelve Services on the Occasional Services of the Prayer-Book (London, 1850 Google Scholar).
19 Ibid., p. 32.
20 Below, pp. 359-60.
21 Jasper, , Development of the Anglican Liturgy, p. 48 Google Scholar.
22 Maurice, , Prayer-Book, pp. 158–9 Google Scholar.
23 Maurice, , Life, 2, p. 482 Google Scholar.
24 See Johnston, J. O., Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon (London, 1905), pp. 156–66 Google Scholar.
25 See Prothero, R. E., Life and Letters of Dean Stanley (London, 1893; 1909 edn), pp. 385–90 Google Scholar.
26 Maurice, F. D., ‘A few more words on the Athanasian Creed’, Contemporary Review, 15 (1870), pp. 479–94 Google Scholar; see also Maurice, Life, 2, pp. 618-19.
27 Maurice, ‘A few more words’.
28 Maurice, F. D., Subscription no Bondage, or the Practical Advantages afforded by The Tiiirty- Nine Articles as Guides in all the Branches of Academical Education (Oxford, 1835)Google Scholar.
29 Froudc, J. A., Life of Carlyle: A History of his Life in London, 1834-81, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1897), 1, p. 41 Google Scholar.
30 Maurice, , Subscription, p. 45 Google Scholar. This is one passage which strongly bears out Paul Avis’s attempt to enlist Maurice in support of a baptismal ecclesiology for the Church of England: P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church. Theological Resources in Historical Perspective (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 264-6.
31 Maurice, F. D., Thoughts on the Rule of Conscientious Subscription, on the Purpose of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and on Our Present Perib from the Romish System (Oxford, 1845), pp. viii–ix Google Scholar.
32 Maurice, , ‘The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Broad Church’, p. 434 Google Scholar.
33 Both changes in Maurice’s mind are described in a letter to Charles Kingslcy dated 26 Oct 1865, in Maurice, Life, 2, pp. 505-6.
34 F. D. Maurice, ‘On the revision of the Prayer-Book and the Act of Uniformity’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1 (1860), p. 425.
35 Ibid., pp. 425-6.
36 Ibid., pp. 427-8.
37 Ibid., p. 428.
38 On Maurice’s alleged liturgical conservatism, see for example the judgement of Donald Gray, already mentioned above: Earth and Altar, p. 1.
39 See in particular Stephen Sykes’s critique of Maurice in Sykcs, S. W., The Integrity of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1978), pp. 16–24 Google Scholar.
40 Maurice specifically criticized Arnold’s scheme in Subscription, p. 117.
41 Maurice, F. D., The Kingdom of Christ, or Hints to a Quaker respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church (London, 1838; 2ndGoogle Scholar edn, rev., 1842; all page references arc to the 4th edn, 1891).
42 On the connection between Maurice and the Quadrilateral, see M. Woodhouse- Hawkins, ‘Maurice, Huntington, and the Quadrilateral: an exploration in historical theology’, in J. Robert Wright, ed., Quadrilateral at One Hundred (Oxford, 1988), pp. 61-78.
43 Maurice, , Kingdom of Christ, 2, pp. 28–9 Google Scholar.
44 Maurice, , Kingdom of Christ, 2, p. 37 Google Scholar. The influence of English Platonic and Unitarian traditions of the thought on Maurice can be traced respectively in D. Newsome, Two Classes of Men. Platonism and English Romantic Thought (London, 1974), and D. Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Oxford, 1992).
45 Ibid., 2, p. 29.
46 Young, D., ‘A reverence for the earth: F. D. Maurice and his Unitarian roots’, Journal of the Association of Open University Graduates (1990-1), pp. 15–17 Google Scholar.
47 Maurice, F. D., Three Letters to the Rev. William Palmer (2nd edn, London, 1842), p. 19 Google Scholar.
48 Ibid., p. 16.
49 Maurice, F. D., ‘Rough notes of some lectures on modern history’, Politics for the People, 7 (1848), p. 113 Google Scholar.
50 Maurice, F. D., Sermons on the Sabbath-Day (London, 1853), p. 123 Google Scholar.
51 Maurice, , Kingdom of Christ, 2, p. 29 Google Scholar.
52 The late Peter Hinchliff once replied to my complaint about Maurice’s obscurity: ‘Yes, but he was right on all the main issues.’
53 Quoted in Wood, H. G., Frederick Denison Maurice (Cambridge, 1950), p. 7 Google Scholar.