James Britten gives an attractive picture of growing up in an Anglo-Catholic parish in the late nineteenth century; he is less eirenic describing the violent differences he found in other Anglican churches. For Britten, the sheer contradiction between Anglicanism’s professedly unsacramental evangelical Protestants, and the pastiche Catholicism of its ritualist clergy destroyed its claim to be the proper branch of the Catholic Church in England.Where Britten had been a sympathetic l...

Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and SocialCriticism is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867–68 and collected as a book in 1869. The preface was added in 1869.Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s. According to his view advanced in the book, "Culture [...] is a study of ...

From the Preface"My chief desire is to assist in forming a just estimate of Whitefield's worth. I wish to lend a helping hand towards raising his name from the undeservedly low place which is commonly assigned to it. I wish to place him before your eyes as a noble specimen of what the grace of God can enable one man to do. I want you to treasure up his name in your memories, as one of the brightest in that company of departed saints who were, in their day, patterns of good works, a...

"It is an old and true saying, that nations sometimes know little about some of their greatest benefactors. If there ever was a man to whom this saying applies, it is John Wycliffe, the forerunner and first beginner of the Protestant Reformation in this country. To Wycliffe England owes an enormous debt: yet Wycliffe is a man of whom most Englishmen know little or nothing.In drawing up a few pages about this great and good man, the words of the Apostle St. Peter rise up before my m...

This volume was written upon the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Calvins birth with the intent of increasing awareness and appreciation for the great leader of the Reformation. Aimed for popular use, Vollmer included key aspects of Calvins work, character and historical record in such a way as to engage and intrigue laypeople and scholars alike. Although small in size, with concise language, vivid illustrations and concentration on Calvins person and his contributions, Theologia...

While many of us are familiar with such famous words as, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here. . ." or "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," we may not know that they originated with The Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549. Like the words of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, the language of this prayer book has saturated English culture and letters. Here Alan Jacobs tells its story. Jacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer--from its beginnings as...

The clergy abuse scandal has posed the greatest threat to the traditional understanding of the Catholic priesthood since the Protestant Reformation. Now, as then, the deadliest attacks are coming from within the Church. In an attempt to improve a system that allowed a small minority of the clergy to violate children and ameliorate the gross negligence of some bishops who recycled these predators, the American bishops instituted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in...

How does a just king, a loyal Defender of the Faith, turn on all that he vowed to protect, betraying Church and country? Was it the limitless power he had, the power to decide between life and death, that gave birth to him placing himself above his Pope and Church? Was it the example of other Henrys before him? This chapter is about one man's infamy and the powerful men and Martyrs God raised up to defend His Church. But before we speak of King Henry VIII, and the Martyrs who died rather t...

'The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.' Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society that are as relevant now as they have ever been. Arnold seeks to find out 'what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it' in an age of rapid social change and increasing mechanization....

For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. Here, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of Europea...

Most previous biographers of Thomas More have sought to prove him a saint; in this, the first full-scale biography of More in half a century, Richard Marius, a leading Reformation historian, seeks to restore the man. More’s life spanned a tumultuous period in Western history. He was born in 1478 into a society still medieval in its customs and laws. But by the time of his death in 1535 England was already shaken to its depths by the powerful and unsettling ideas of the Renaissance. Marius ...