The “Beauty of Holiness” or “Popish Baits”?

When I picked up Graham Parry’s Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, I expected a heavy academic read, which would have been fine as it covers a subject matter of interest to me.  

Was I wrong!  The book begins with Puritan Peter Smart’s furious indictment of John Cosin and Durham Cathedral in 1630:

…your popish baits and allurements of glorious pictures, and Babalonish vesturs, and excessive numbers of wax-candles burning at one tyme…

Ah yes, the candles.  Always the candles.  Smart was unhappy with much else as well, particularly Cosin’s “upstarting, downesquattings, east-turning, crossings and kissings” and more.

I found myself laughing uproariously.  I was reminded of the Low Churchman’s Guide to the Solemn High Mass except that Smart was quite serious.  Thus I soon discovered that Glory, Laud and Honour is not only scholarly and helpful to further study, but is actually a fun read.

And, yes, much of the fun does come from the adversarial relationship between the Puritans and the Laudians along with others who thought the worship of the Lord called for “the beauty of holiness”.  This holy combat was reflected in church architecture and furnishings and often the destruction of the same.  Parry pays not a little attention to Dowsing’s visitations of Cambridge for one thing.  And he notes that much of what we know about church furnishings under the influence of John Cosin, William Laud and cohorts comes from the Puritans’ disapproving documentation of them.

The Puritans (with an exception or two I will note another time) were rather nasty.  Beheading statues was not enough for them.  They eventually beheaded Laud, Lord of Canterbury and Charles, King and Martyr.  But (And now I will show my talent for alienating just about everybody.) the Archbishop and King in part lost their heads by not following Hooker more closely on the subject of ceremonies and images in worship.  

As Parry points out at length, Hooker approved of traditional ceremonial worship “in the bewtie of holiness,” not unlike the later Laudians, but he considered such to be adiaphora, i. e. among matters on which the faithful can and should be able to agree to disagree.  He thought parishes should be allowed discretion on details of ceremonies and ornaments as long as they stick to the Book of Common Prayer.  Further he thought disputes over such matters risk “a kinde of taking of Gods name in vaine to debase religion with such frivolous disputes, a sinne to bestowe time and labor about them.”

But neither the Laudians nor the Puritans were very interested in allowing discretion in matters of worship.  Instead they bestowed a lot of time and labor and venom upon them indeed, greatly contributing to the ugliness between them.  Many on both sides eventually paid with their lives, both on the executioner’s block and in civil war.

Well, I got rather dark there, didn’t I.  But that does not keep me from having a good laugh or two or three at their liturgical combat.  Yes, I am rather warped that way.

There is much more that is both fun and helpful about Glory, Laud and Honour, to which I may return at a later time.