The wealthy and pious layman Robert Nelson's devotional manual, A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England, was without question the most enduring literary monument of the Anglican revival of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Upon its publication in late 1703, the work was immediately adopted by the vanguard organization of that revival, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)—of which Nelson was one of the earliest and most devoted members. The SPCK hailed the “excellent treatise,” conveyed its “hearty thanks” to its author and resolved to distribute the work among the religious societies proliferating throughout London.Footnote 1 A few weeks later, the sibling Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), another Anglican entity with which Nelson was engaged, ordered all of its missionaries equipped with Nelson's book.Footnote 2 Roundly commended by churchman of all stripes, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts, as it was known, immediately became a mainstay of Anglican revitalization efforts in the first half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 3 It was soon listed in SPCK publisher Joseph Downing's indispensable catalogue of tracts for moral reformation and promotion of Anglican piety.Footnote 4 As late as 1740, the Bible Fund established by Nelson's close friend the London banker Henry Hoare was still distributing the Festivals and Fasts to the poor, alongside the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, further evidence of its pre-eminence in Anglican popular piety.Footnote 5 And indeed, from there Nelson's book came to permeate English culture generally.Footnote 6 “Nelson's Feasts and Fasts,” was among the works of piety Clarissa Harlowe discovered in her room at Mrs. Sinclair's, which made her “think the better of the people of the house.”Footnote 7 Samuel Johnson repeatedly quoted from Nelson's Festivals and Fasts throughout the heavily revised fourth edition of his Dictionary. Footnote 8 And James Boswell reckoned Nelson's work as “having the greatest sale of any book ever printed in England, except the Bible.”Footnote 9 Boswell may have been overstating the case, but certainly not egregiously so. Despite its formidable bulk, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was continuously reissued throughout the eighteenth century and beyond—reaching a thirty-second edition in 1812.Footnote 10
The Festivals and Fasts, moreover, could be found at the headwaters of many of the great streams of Anglican spiritual practice throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the primitive liturgical solemnities of the Methodist “Holy Club” at Oxford; the ornate ritualism of the high church Hutchinsonians; the ecclesiastical romanticism of the Tractarians—all testified to the influence of Nelson.Footnote 11 As late as 1837, the eightieth of the Oxford Movement's sensational Tracts for the Times reminds its readers how Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts “advises us thus to realize each day some Christian duty.”Footnote 12
The enduring appeal of Nelson's Festivals and Fasts throughout the long eighteenth century is, of course, a matter for speculation. And, indeed, the mystery is deepened considerably by the work's rather middling literary reputation.Footnote 13 The polemic content of Nelson's rather plodding, catechetical tract, however, presents a more promising line of inquiry. Though a work of popular devotion, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts conceals a rather keen edge of controversial divinity. What does the polemic content of Nelson's prodigiously popular and influential book tell readers about the dynamics of religion in eighteenth-century England?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Nelson's Jacobite and nonjuring politics, the Festivals and Fasts is a fiercely reactionary work. Its complaint, however, is not overtly with the politics of the Glorious Revolution and the ensuing settlement in church and state. Nelson's Festivals and Fasts more subtly protests a broader trend in religious modernization, which might be characterized as the de-institutionalization of the sacred in eighteenth-century English society. The sacred, in the structural sense in which this article employs it, must be understood as an indicator of social and cognitive demarcation, a category of “set-apartness,” by which certain persons, places, objects and occasions are differentiated from the ordinary commerce of the world.Footnote 14 As the Finnish religion scholar Veikko Anttonen usefully put it, the sacred serves as “a category-boundary to set things with non-negotiable value apart from those things whose value is based on continuous transactions.”Footnote 15 Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts is positively fraught with anxiety about the differentiation of the sacred in English public life. Ostensibly a guidebook for the Anglican liturgical calendar, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts is actually a great deal more than that for it takes pains not only to demarcate the solemn occasions of the church from the ordinary course of time, but to affirm the separateness of all aspects of ecclesial life—its rites, personnel, physical habitation, material resources—from the operations of the everyday. From this perspective, the tract's many seeming digressions on the clerical function or tithes or the spaces of worship are, in fact, not digressions at all, but plainly of a part with its primary meditations on the liturgy. These all concern things “set apart” for the worship of God, and the social imperative of maintaining their sequestration from the time and space of everyday life. The alternative, Nelson repeatedly warns, is sacrilege. And in this, Nelson was giving voice to an anxiety that was surprisingly widespread in the period.Footnote 16 The declamation against sacrilege in Nelson's Festivals and Fasts and, as it turns out, a significant number of important Anglican works in post-Revolutionary England, bears testimony to what might be called a crisis of the sacred in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Underlying works of popular devotion as well as learned ecclesiastical debates and controversies in the era was the palpable sense of the deteriorated inviolability of the “set apart” things that ideally constituted the life of the church. The problem of sacrilege, it is not unfair to say, comprised the hidden theme of the English enlightenment.
I. The Limits of Secularization Theory
Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts, alongside a number of other Anglican works in this period, takes great pains to articulate a social vision characterized by disjuncture between the sacred and the profane.Footnote 17 This anxiety is not readily comprehensible within the prevalent historiographical frameworks currently available for understanding religious change in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.Footnote 18 Secularization narratives, to the extent that they entail accounts of religious change as social and institutional differentiation, are somewhat ill equipped to recognize the already differentiated character of the sacred in historical societies.Footnote 19 Historians of the period tend to consider secularization not as religious decline, but rather as social differentiation, that is, the process by which various spheres of life (and their corresponding institutions, discourses and personnel) acquire a measure of autonomy from the religious sphere (and its corresponding institutions, discourses and personnel).Footnote 20 In other words, secularization generally denotes the transformation of a society characterized by the pervasiveness of religion into one characterized by its circumscription. For instance, C. John Sommerville's book-length study of The Secularization of Early Modern England describes the transition from a “religious culture to a religious faith,” that is, a social order where “every aspect of life had involved religious associations,” to one where religion entails a set of largely interiorized commitments with limited purchase on the other spheres of life.Footnote 21 As Roy Porter put it in his celebrated narrative of the English enlightenment, “an all-pervasive religiosity . . . gave way to an order in which the sacred was purified and demarcated over and against a temporal realm dominating everyday life.”Footnote 22 Such an approach seems profoundly inapposite to the problem at hand. As we shall see, Nelson and his allies were not engaged in a defense of religious pervasiveness against the advocates of a more circumscribed religiosity. Quite the contrary, the sacred was already imagined as “set apart,” and their complaints were directed precisely at the undermining of that indispensable segregation.
The historiographical arguments against secularization in this period largely proceed on identical premises as those in its favor. Virtually the entire case against secularization rests upon claims of the non-differentiation of church and state (or religious and political ideologies, more broadly) throughout the so-called the long eighteenth century. In his characterization of eighteenth-century England as an Anglican “confessional state,” for instance, the leading critic of secularization Jonathan Clark describes a society in which “no uncrossable gulf separated the seen from the unseen” during the period between the Restoration and the Reform Act.Footnote 23 Even historians who reject Clark's stridently anti-modern conceit of an English ancién regime often advance frameworks of “Protestant nationalism” no less dependent on the pervasiveness of religion and its unproblematic deployment in the legitimation of ostensibly non-ecclesiastical spheres of life such as regime, foreign policy or empire.Footnote 24 Again, the constitutive tension between sacred and profane is elided. Moreover, the casual ascription of sanctity to national identity or to the whole of the social and political order offers no effective means to track the logistics of religious transgression and contamination. Some historians are content simply to locate the sources of such transgression outside the national or confessional order, amidst, say, the rival denominations of Roman Catholicism and protestant nonconformity.Footnote 25 But to suggest that church, crown, aristocracy and nation were hedged by a common divinity offers scant insight into how the conflicts internal to the English constitution—the impropriation of tithes by the gentry, for instance, or the silencing of convocation by the crown—could in the eyes of contemporaries like Nelson partake of the character of profanation.
Though similarly committed to countering linear secularization narratives of the early modern period, Alexandra Walsham's recent work jettisons the model of unperturbed religious pervasiveness in favor of a turbulent and competitive economy of the sacred, characterized by competing programs of Christianization—Catholic and protestant, establishmentarian and dissenting, popular and elite. In her longue durée considerations of the period stretching from the late middles ages to the early nineteenth century, disenchantment in certain spheres and spaces of life tends to catalyze compensatory re-enchantment elsewhere, in a cycle she describes as “successive loops in a perpetual spiral of desacralization and resacralization.”Footnote 26 Though commendably dynamic, Walsham's cyclical model seems historically unsustainable as a genuine alternative to secularization. Surely, one would presume, such promiscuous sacralizations must have relativizing effects on one another, and over time yield diminishing returns in terms of the social consensus any particular iteration of the sacred could command. But more importantly for our purposes, her account of a society with seemingly limitless potential for realizing the sacred—through folklore, popular martryology, ghost stories, physico-theology, even antiquarianism—never adequately grapples with the anxiety such fecundity produced. Certainly for an ascendant strain of conservative Anglicanism in the period after the Glorious Revolution, the pretense to the general availability of the sacred—outside the canonically established channels of the Church of England—was the very signature of the crisis.
Situated at the intersection of a number of texts and controversies preoccupied with the question of the sacred in post-Revolutionary England, Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts exposes some of the limits of the current debate over secularization. The anxiety underscoring this crisis of the sacred did not concern the mere persistence of belief in a modernizing society, but the question of whether religion could continue to be manifest in English society as disjuncture. This article then will use Nelson's extraordinarily popular tract as a key to a number of interrelated discourses and debates concerning the place of the sacred in early eighteenth-century England. In recovering this animating tension, the article presents what it hopes is a novel way of mapping the fault lines of religious controversy in one of the most bitterly polarized and partisan eras in English church history.Footnote 27 Moreover, it highlights the ways in which ecclesiology functioned as more than a discourse of church polity, but as a vital form of social thought: a means of demarcating the place of the sacred in social life. Finally, by way of conclusion, the article will tentatively consider whether modernity might productively be understood in terms of the de-institutionalization of the sacred—that is, the diminishing capacity of the sacred to demarcate any socially or cognitively distinct sphere of life.Footnote 28 Such an approach may lend credence to the important, albeit contested, conceit of the later seventeenth century and the era of the Glorious Revolution in particular as a watershed in the modernization of Britain.Footnote 29
II. The Contradictions of the Anglican Revival
No work quite embodies the contradictions of the Anglican revival of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries like Robert Nelson's Companion to the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England. Footnote 30 Nelson's tract was, on the one hand, a work in furtherance of the “reformation of manners.” The book's unwavering moralism, its signal concerns with “holy living” and the suppression of vice, placed it and its author squarely amidst the burgeoning movement for “national reformation,” which so preoccupied English society in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688–1689.Footnote 31 On the other hand, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts, with its fulsome vindication of clerical authority and the demarcations of the sacred, unmistakably served the movement for ecclesiastical autonomy which consumed both juring and nonjuring Anglican high churchmen in the decades following the Revolution.Footnote 32 The Festivals and Fasts thus shares with the contemporaneous literature of national reformation a commitment to moral renewal, but it is, on the whole, less promiscuous about the instruments of reform. While advocates of the “reformation of manners” typically welcomed the assistance of the crown, magistrates, clergy, even voluntary associations of private gentlemen, Nelson's book took great pains to channel the work of moral reform exclusively into the offices of the church; to circumscribe the obligations of “holy living” within the sacred time and space of Anglican ecclesial life. As such, the Festivals and Fasts is a slyly subversive text, ostensibly proceeding under the banner of “national reformation,”Footnote 33 while implicitly denigrating the nation and national life as the proper sphere of moral regeneration.
There is, in truth, little festivity in Nelson's Festivals and Fasts. Though Nelson is careful to privilege corporate worship, “the Actions of Men, in holy Assemblies,”Footnote 34 over solitary meditation, he is patently uninterested in the materiality of Christian practice.Footnote 35 Those looking to Nelson for an Augustan forerunner of high Victorian Anglican ritualism will be sorely disappointed.Footnote 36 Despite his conscientious nonjuring and his impeccably high churchmanship, Nelson is no less a moralist than his “latitudinarian” friend John Tillotson, the Revolutionary archbishop of Canterbury and the bête noire of the Anglican high church movement.Footnote 37 The Festivals and Fasts is much more a manual for what Nelson calls “holiness of life” than a guidebook to ritual practice, which “may, if thoroughly digested [by members of the Church of England], contribute to their improvement in most of the Vertues of a Christian Life.”Footnote 38 For Nelson, festivals are “days set apart by the Church,” for the acknowledgement of heavenly mercies, commemoration of the saints, and for advancing the salvation of our souls, “by firmly believing the Mysteries of our Redemption and by imitating the Example of those primitive Patterns of Piety that are set before us.” Liturgical considerations are filtered through the imperatives of moral reform. The feast of the Epiphany, for instance, imparts the importance of charity; that of Saints Philip and James, self-denial; the nativity of St. John the Baptist, the imperative of reproving sin; the feast of St. Matthew, the contempt of riches; that of St. Michael, the scandal of evil-speaking, and so on. Festivals for Nelson were the occasions of moral reflection and improvement: “They increase Mens inward Disposition to Vertue for the present, and by their frequent Returns, bring the same at length to great Perfection.”Footnote 39
That concern for the reformation of manners should predominate in the Festivals and Fasts should not be wholly surprising. Nelson was, as his friend and biographer Francis Lee noted, “addicted to piety.” Widely considered among the most charitable men of his age, Nelson stood at the very heart of a network of overlapping Anglican efforts to reform the nation's morals and revitalize the church.Footnote 40 Somewhat unusually for a high churchman, Nelson supported the multiplying societies for the reformation of manners; although he does not seem to have joined one, he warmly recommended them as a worthy endeavor in his posthumously published Address to Persons of Quality and Estate.Footnote 41 Nelson did join the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge just a few months after its founding in March 1699, an organization which set itself up in opposition to “the visible decay of Religion in this Kingdom, with the monstrous increase of Deism, Prophaneness and Vice”; he remained among the most faithful attendants at its meetings throughout his life.Footnote 42 And though his nonjuring most likely precluded his inclusion in William's 1701 charter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, he was present at its very first meeting.Footnote 43 Nelson also sat alongside the high church prelates and laity on Queen Anne's Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in and around London, another key organ of Anglican expansion in the early eighteenth century.Footnote 44 Nelson's will, with its generous bequests to various Anglican societies, churches and charity schools, reads like a précis of the great revival unfolding in the established church in the decades before and after the turn of the eighteenth century.Footnote 45 There was, it was said upon his death in early 1715, “no great undertaking of religion without his help.”Footnote 46
Though clearly situated amidst the manifold works of the Anglican revival, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was highly atypical of the prevailing discourse of national reformation. In the first place, Nelson quite conspicuously (and presumably, quite purposefully) neglected to take the step zealously taken by his more whiggish comrades in these great endeavors at reformation; he refused to yoke their efforts explicitly to the Revolution of 1688–1689.Footnote 47 This was, perhaps, to be expected. Nelson, after all, remained a nonjuror, acknowledging neither the legitimacy of the new monarchs nor the orthodoxy of the established church that acquiesced in their accession.Footnote 48 Second, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts is never content with the general promotion of public morality. Rather, the tract evinces a consistent determination to re-inscribe “holy living” within the offices of established church.Footnote 49 He bid his readers pray that God permit constant attendance at “the public Institutions of thy holy Religion . . . those means which thou hast established for the purifying my corrupt Nature, and for the reforming whatever is amiss in the Frame and Temper of my mind.”Footnote 50 In this light, it is noteworthy that Nelson specifically commended his tract to the Anglican religious societies, those groups of mostly young men that had since the late 1670s been assembling in mostly urban parishes for scripture reading, mutual admonition and preparation for the Eucharist.Footnote 51 Nelson lauded these societies as fit instruments of Anglican revival, eminently praiseworthy for their constant attendance of the public worship and the “deference they profess to their parochial Minister”—supplemental to, rather than corrosive of, parochial religion.Footnote 52 For Nelson, these religious societies presented a model of religious revival internal to the spaces, seasons and spiritual government of the Church of England. Finally, the preoccupation with vice and impiety that was the hallmark of the post-Revolutionary “national reformation” literature was complemented in the Festivals and Fasts by an anxiety regarding the demarcations of sacred and profane that was largely absent from the broader movement. For Nelson, the imperative to reform always proceeded alongside the imperative to segregate, to cordon off the time, space, personnel, and offices of the church from everyday life. While the proponents of reformation believed, on some level, that the nation and empire might be somehow consecrated by protestant revolution and moral renewal, Nelson never relinquished his doubts about the compatibility of the church and the world.
III. Demarcating the Sacred
The imperative to demarcate sacred from profane is embedded in the very premise of Nelson's Festivals and Fasts. “Let not the affairs of this Life,” beseeched Nelson in the very first prayer of the work, “nor my eagerness in obtaining the good things of it, so far engross my Thoughts, as to make me neglect those happy opportunities of working out my own Salvation.” This simple orison encapsulates the entire argument of Nelson's tract: the work of holy living, though ideally a practice of everyday life, is particularly cultivated within the time and space demarcated by God for His worship. The Gospel, Nelson assured his readers, enjoins only a disposition at all times to practice Christian virtue, but not “a Perpetuity of Exercise and Actions,” which the necessities of the world prohibit. The purpose of the liturgical calendar then was quite simply “the securing of some Time for the exercise of the Duty against the Frailties of Man and the Disturbances of the World, which otherwise might supplant and rob it of all.” The time of the world, of earthly cares and concerns, was not only merely profane; it was positively corrosive of the sacred. To mind only the time of the world was to squander the scattered opportunities for holiness. “How are festivals profaned?” asked the catechist. “When they are not regarded as distinguished from common days,” ran the reply. Nelson's work repeatedly reminded its readers of the fundamental opposition between these antithetical temporalities of the church and the world. The practice of piety demanded that we “suffer the affairs of the world to interrupt us as little as may be.” But this was hardly possible. Indeed, Nelson thanked God for the liturgical year, necessitated by “the Infirmity of my Nature, which is not capable of an uninterrupted contemplation of thee.” The festivals and fasts of the church existed, graciously set apart, precisely because human beings cannot bear very much holiness.Footnote 53
Nelson was by no means alone in his desire to “rescue the festivals and fasts of the Church of England” both from the prejudices of confessional rivals and from neglect by those of her own communion.Footnote 54 Indeed, the complaint about neglect of holy days was exceedingly widespread in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.Footnote 55 One clergyman complained that “the Holydays of the Church (except Sundays) are scarce otherwise taken notice of, than by School Boys playing upon them.”Footnote 56 In a March 1700 sermon for the reformation of manners, the Warwickshire clergyman Matthew Heynes attributed the profanation of holy days to a general “contempt of all things sacred.”Footnote 57 Another wrote the neglect of holidays was a greater offence than larceny. “We should be more afraid to steal away God's time,” he wrote, “than to steal away Mans Goods: the one is Theft, but the other Sacriledge.”Footnote 58 And indeed, Nelson's tract entered a literary marketplace already rather crowded with guidebooks to the Anglican liturgical calendar. One of two such books produced by the Interregnum Anglican underground, Edward Sparke's Scintilla altaris, originally published in 1652, was circulating in an eighth edition as recently as 1700.Footnote 59 After the Revolution, a tract entitled The Holy Days, Or, the Holy Feasts and Fasts, As they are observed in the Church of England Explained, began circulating, first as an appendix to a devotional work of private prayers, but then independently.Footnote 60 A little over a year after Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was published, a rival liturgical guide entitled Historia sacra; or, the holy history appeared. The anonymous author (perhaps the Canterbury prebdendary John Grandorge) took pains to stress that his book was substantially complete at the publication of Nelson's work, affirming, “I have not inrich'd my self with any one Observation that I had not made before.” Interestingly, the Historia Sacra shared Nelson's concern for the moral renovation afforded by Christian festivals, “holy intervals,” in which “we may be call'd off from the World, and remember the End of our Creation.”Footnote 61 This was followed immediately by the Norfolk clergyman Charles Buchanan's The nature and design of holy-days explained, “adapted to the meanest capacity” and intended for distribution by Nelson's own SPCK.Footnote 62 Nelson himself praised this work, when a second edition was brought out in 1708, as appropriate for “young people who ought to be educated with principles that will fix them to the communion of ye Church.”Footnote 63
While the post-Revolutionary flush of Anglican liturgical guidebooks was avowedly aimed at rectifying the manifest neglect of church holidays, a secondary motive must also be considered. The period immediately following the Revolution of 1688–1689 witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of national holidays, fast days and public commemorations, nearly all of them predicated upon securing providential superintendence of the protestant monarchy and nation. The Revolution monarchs inherited a calendar already thick with the holidays of national protestantism: the anniversaries of the Gunpowder Treason (November 5), the accession of Queen Elizabeth (November 17), the martyrdom of Charles I (January 30), and the restoration of his son, Charles II (May 29).Footnote 64 To these, William and Mary added each year a host of ad hoc fasts and thanksgivings, enlisting the pulpits of the established church to help sanctify the new regime and steel the nation in its long struggle against Bourbon France.Footnote 65 The calendar was suddenly crowded with occasions for publicly interjecting God into the political and military vicissitudes of English national life. Predictably, these holidays soon became sites of contestation. Opponents of the regime attempted to hamstring its sacralization by openly disrupting the newly authorized solemnities or not observing them at all.Footnote 66 Partisans of the new regime, significantly, branded such obstruction as “sacriledge,” and the proponents thereof as “equally Traytors to the Kings of Earth and Heaven.”Footnote 67 Anglican clergymen, for their part, bristled at those who “religiously observe the Fast-days and Thanksgiving days appointed on account of or in relation to the Present War,” but refused participation in the holy seasons of the established church.Footnote 68 And indeed, the Irish lawyer John Hooke, one of the founders of Nelson's beloved SPCK, went so far as to proclaim all Christian holidays save for the Sabbath as lacking biblical sanction. But he was more than willing to allow the legitimacy of “occasional Days appointed by Authority, for Fasting and Praying, or Feasting and Thanksgiving, whether pro hac vice only, or Annual with Respect to some National Deliverance” as plainly unobjectionable to all English protestants, and “Authorised by Presidents [precedents] in the Jewish Church.”Footnote 69 Nelson's Festivals and Fasts is by no means immune to this mounting tension between civic and ecclesiastical holidays in the post-Revolutionary era. The author chastised those “ready to celebrate any other Fast, enjoyed upon the Occasion of temporal Calamities,” while refusing “to joyn in Humiliation, assigned for much more weighty spiritual Reasons, for the saving of immortal Souls.”Footnote 70 Nelson, moreover, rather provocatively offered no consideration of the Stuart dynasty's “three great solemnities” for the death of Charles I, Royal Oak Day and Gunpowder Day, all of which were routinely featured in Anglican liturgical guides of the era. Given the general tenor of the work with respect to the sacred, it seems fair to speculate whether such an omission amounted to a gesture of defiance against the general sacralization of the protestant nation that had become the stock-in-trade of Williamite propagandists and the proponents of national reformation. The sacred was, of course, threatened with inundation by the profaneness of everyday life; but it was, perhaps more insidiously, threatened by what the historian John Bossy famously described as “the migrations of the holy” away from the church toward the nation itself.Footnote 71
Curiously, Nelson did not initially make the seemingly obvious leap from the segregation of sacred time to that of sacred space.Footnote 72 Though absolutely unwavering in his preference for public worship “above private Devotions,”Footnote 73 Nelson did not, in the early editions of the Festivals and Fasts, present any sustained meditation on the peculiar space of worship. While contemporary works, such as the Devonshire clergyman John Prince's The beauty of God's House, were making formidable positive cases for the indispensability of consecrated places for religious worship, Nelson's thoughts on the matter were tentative and somewhat eccentric. “Common things then should be done in common Places,” Prince preached to his parishioners at Berry Pomeroy around 1700, “but Holy things in Holy Places.” Prince took aim at the entire spectrum of profanation: the deists who presumes God not confined to any particular place; the enthusiasts, who “fancy God hath no other Church but themselves, no other Sanctuary but their hearts”; the curious and the fashionable, who gad from sermon to sermon in search of novelty or polite company; the puritanical zealot, whose allergy to superstition and idolatry will permit them no commodious place for the worship of God.Footnote 74 By contrast, Nelson's musings were unfocused, lacking the sharp fear of encroachment that informed his other ecclesiological demarcations. In his consideration of the Feast of St. Michael and the Angels, he suggested that angels were “peculiarly present in the publick Assemblies of God's Worship,” adumbrating thereby a certain holiness in the congregation. Indeed, he even recommended his readers behave themselves “with Gravity and Reverence in the Publick Worship of God, because those excellent Beings attend to observe our outward Carriage and Deportment,”Footnote 75 but the notion of angelic presences manifest in the Prayer Book service was the closest Nelson initially came to thinking of religious space as set apart.
Such ambiguity was perhaps unaffordable amidst the religious controversies of the reign of Queen Anne. The persistence of toleration and the practice of occasional conformity threatened to render parish church, chapel and private conventicle legally (and perhaps morally) equivalent.Footnote 76 And freethinkers increasingly railed against the putative holiness of consecrated places as but another ploy of priestcraft.Footnote 77 Anglican clergymen responded to these pressures by routinely insisting from pulpit and press that performance of public worship required “a decent Place, set apart for that sacred Use.” God was everywhere present, conceded the royal chaplain Peter Nourse, “but to argue from hence that he does not vouchsafe his Presence to some Places in more peculiar manner, and by more gracious effects, is against the sense and experience of good men of all ages.”Footnote 78 Interestingly, this clamor on behalf of consecrated places impelled one of the first serious revisions of the Festivals and Fasts. Nelson added a disquisition on sacred space to the fourth edition published in 1707, explaining that Christians since the apostolic age had assembled in “Places set apart for the Performance of Divine Worship.” Even in times of persecution, Christians did not “meet Promiscuously in any Place,” Nelson insisted. “How ought we to reverence Holy Places?” asked Nelson, catechetically. “By building and erecting such Places where they are wanting,” he answered, “and furnishing them with all imaginable Decency for the Worship of God. By repairing and adorning them when Time or the Iniquity of the Age has made them ruinous. By keeping them from all profane and common Usage, and applying them wholly to the business of Religion.”Footnote 79 This revision, in favor of a much sharper disjuncture between sacred and profane space, is telling evidence of the polemical import of the work.
For Nelson, the delineation of the sacred times and spaces of Anglican worship corresponded to the differentiation of the Anglican clergy from lay life. “To such Assemblies,” Nelson wrote, “our Saviour promises his special Presence and has appointed a particular Order of Men, to offer up our Prayers in such places.”Footnote 80 The entire project of demarcating the Anglican sacred, it was clear, depended on an ardent vindication of the authority of the clergy of the Church of England.Footnote 81 The clergy were, after all, an order of men “set apart,” and for Nelson, their removal from everyday life served as the very guarantor of the differentiation of the sacred in English society. Anticlericalism then threatened the very viability of religion—at least as Nelson understood it. “Among those crying abominations, which like a torrent have overspread the nation,” he wrote, “this age seems to distinguish itself by a great Contempt of the Clergy,” to which he attributed “the decayed state of Religion among us.”Footnote 82 Though a popular devotional tract, Nelson clearly intended the Festivals and Fasts as a response to the freethinking anticlericalism that is widely considered the hallmark of the early English enlightenment.Footnote 83 His liturgical meditations, he hoped, would serve as a bulwark against “those vile and wicked pamphlets that daily abound among us, to undermine the Christian priesthood and ridicule the mysteries of our redemption.”Footnote 84 In the face of withering anticlericalism, Nelson and other Anglican high churchmen advanced an aggressive sacerdotalism, which affirmed the indispensability of the ordained priesthood and its sacramental ministrations to the salvific mission of the Christian church.Footnote 85 As Nelson bluntly put it, that “there could be no Church without Priests.”Footnote 86
Nelson cannily reserved his meditations on the Christian priesthood for his considerations of the four rounds of Ember Days in the Anglican liturgical calendar. Ember Days were days of fasting and abstinence observed seasonally on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday following the first Sunday in Lent, Whitsunday, Holy Cross Day (September 14) and St. Lucy's Day (December 13).Footnote 87 On account of the fasting and penitence required, these “Ember Weeks” had traditionally been designated as proper opportunities for the ordination of the clergy. Nelson could not resist the echo of days “set apart for consecrating to God the four Seasons of the Year” doubling as the occasions in which persons were “separated . . . for the Work of the Ministry.”Footnote 88 Nelson's account of the priesthood was otherwise utterly typical of the stridently sacerdotalist writings of his fellow nonjurors.Footnote 89 Like them, he considered the church a spiritual society founded by Jesus Christ, “distinct from and independent of all other Worldly Societies,” and provided at its foundation with a regular system of government comprised of the three orders of bishops, priests and deacons. The clergy derived their spiritual authority from Christ himself, who “invested his Apostles with the same Commission his father had given him,” and which delegation implicitly contained “a Power of transferring that Commission upon others, and those upon others to the end of the World.” That spiritual authority, Nelson stressed, derived neither from popular approbation nor from the munificence of civil government. The dignity of the priesthood consisted largely in its sacramental, rather than its pastoral, function, “being ordained for Men in things pertaining unto God.” They were the stewards of the mysteries of God:
‘Tis by the Execution of the Priest's Office that Men are made Members of the Church of Christ by Baptism, and without being baptized of the Water and of the Spirit, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That our spiritual Life is maintained by the holy Eucharist, and except we eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, we have no Life in us. That the Pardon of our Sins is signed and sealed to us; for by the Administration of the Sacraments are the Benefits of Christ's Sacrifice really convey'd to all worthy Receivers. And that our Minds and Consciences are quieted by the Comfort and Benefit of Absolution.
Nelson considered the ordained clergy as ambassadors, “God's Vice-gerents and visible Representatives here on Earth,” bearing the character of their master and authorized to effectuate pardons and seal covenants in his name.Footnote 90
This plenipotentiary character of the Anglican clergy, their status as God's “Agents and Embassadours,” informed Nelson's defense against anticlericalism. “'Twill startle the boldest sinner,” he predicted, “to find that in contemning this order of men he affronts his maker, and in despising the ministers of the Gospel, he despises him that sent them.” It was their commission, and the sacramental functions it allowed them to effectually perform, that entitled the clergy to the reverence Nelson believed them due. “The Authority they have received to preside over Christians as Governours of the Church must always be owed to come from God,” Nelson wrote, “and this religious regard to their divine Mission must be exprest in the whole Course of Conduct towards them.” This argument, he believed, successfully inoculated the order of the clergy from the individual moral failings of any of its members. In considering whether immoral or impious clergy were worthy of reverence, Nelson concluded in the affirmative. He admonished his readers, “to throw a Veil over their real Infirmities, never to make them the Objects of our light Mirth, nor to proclaim their Failings in order to reproach their Persons, because it may tend to disparage or debase their Office.” The clergy did not need to exhibit the “inherent Holiness” of utter saintliness, because they possessed what Nelson called the “relative Holiness, which consists in some peculiar Relation to God's Service, of which Things, Times, Places and Persons are capable.”Footnote 91 This distinction epitomizes the entire framework of Nelson's Festivals and Fasts: that the sacred resided not in the inherent significance or superiority of certain days, buildings or people, but simply in their being set-apart for the worship of God; and that, moreover, their imbrication in everyday life ultimately compromised their efficacy in divine service.
The conception of the Anglican clergy as bearing, by virtue of their episcopal ordination, an exclusive commission to administer in spiritual things allowed Nelson to pivot his criticism from enlightenment anticlericalism to protestant nonconformity. The freethinker slighted God by defaming his representative. The protestant nonconformist, on the other hand, was a counterfeiter and a cheat, pretending to a spiritual authority to which he had no real title. Spiritual power derived from Christ through his Apostles and their successors, the bishops, who conveyed it via ordination. “The sacerdotal Powers none must undertake,” Nelson explained, “but such as have received their Commission from Bishops, who only have Authority to send Ministers into the Lord's Vineyard.” Though he never addresses protestant dissenters directly, Nelson excoriates what he deems “the greatest piece of Presumption imaginable, to pretend to sign and seal Covenants in God's Name, without receiving any Power and Authority from him in order to that Purpose.” This was, for Nelson, merely a different form of profanation. The generalization of spiritual authority, promiscuously claimed by any preacher or enthusiast whose heterodoxies were now protected under the law, was not different in effect from the denial of spiritual authority propagated by anticlerical freethinkers. Both compromised the differentiation of the Anglican clergy from the laity or from the lay (that is, not episcopally ordained) pretenders to spiritual authority, which for Nelson amounted to the same thing. Nelson counseled pity and compassion for those protestant Christians, both at home and abroad, who subsisted without the soteriological guarantees putatively embodied in apostolic episcopacy. He prayed they “endeavour to get the ancient primitive apostolical Church Government, and by it an undoubted Mission reestablished among them.”Footnote 92
The notion, barely adumbrated in the Festivals and Fasts, that sacraments performed in non-episcopal churches were of dubious soteriological efficacy was at the time gaining ground among both the juring and nonjuring wings of the Anglican high church movement.Footnote 93 Nelson's close friend the nonjuring historian Henry Dodwell advanced an extreme and downright bizarre version of this argument in his infamous Epistolary Discourse of 1706, in which he posited that the naturally mortal human soul only received and maintained its eligibility for immortality through the sacraments and offices of an episcopal church—baptism by an ordained priest and confirmation by the bishop himself.Footnote 94 The backlash against Dodwell was both instantaneous and ferocious.Footnote 95 And while most of his critics tarried at the rank heresy of mortalism, some rightly bristled at the un-churching of most of the protestant world. Dodwell's intention, charged John Turner, vicar of Greenwich, was “to doom all those Christians who are out of his Episcopal Peculium.”Footnote 96 But even shorn of Dodwell's sacerdotalist mortalism, the conceit of the defectiveness of non-episcopal sacraments never quite left the bloodstream of early eighteenth-century Anglican high churchmanship. In March 1708, the nonconformist layman Roger Laurence, no longer assured of the validity of non-episcopal sacraments, sought re-baptism at the hands of a London clergyman; and anonymously defended the rite in a scandalous tract entitled, Lay Baptism Invalid. Footnote 97 Laurence's publication, and the surprising degree of support it elicited among the conformist clergy, sparked an intense and wide-ranging controversy regarding the sacerdotal powers of the episcopal clergy and the legitimacy of foreign protestantism that lasted well into the reign of George I.Footnote 98 For his part, Nelson hoped a future convocation might append some questions to the church catechism, clarifying “those who have the power of administering Sacraments, and how they receive such an Authority.”Footnote 99
Nelson's vindication of the Anglican clergy required not only that their order be inoculated from irreverence and derision and that their ministrations be accorded an instrumentality unavailable to rival confessions. He wished to see them removed wholesale from the commerce of civil society. The ministry was not a mere profession like the law or medicine. Ordination, he explained, “sets Men above the low and mean Concerns of this Life.” But the enemies of the clergy, Nelson warned, omit no opportunity of plunging clergymen into the muck of exchange, “representing their sacred Function only as a Trade whereby they procure an advantageous Subsistence.” Nelson was keen enough to perceive the ways in which the attribution of material interest to the clerical order undermined its pretensions to differentiation; as if demonstrating that “the Interest of the Clergy is supported by what they plead for,” one could expose “all Revealed Religion is only Priestcraft.”Footnote 100 Nelson therefore devoted his final Ember Day meditation to the obligation of paying tithes. He had to show that the tithes owed to the clergy of the established church were not mere wages paid to hirelings, but rather the material expression of the sacredness of the priestly order.Footnote 101 In gratitude to God, “to whose Bounty we owe all that we enjoy,” the laity was obligated “to dedicate a part of what we receive to his immediate Service.” The reservation of this portion corresponded to the reservation of the clergy from the commerce of everyday life. The clergy, Nelson explained, “renounce all ordinary Means of advancing their Fortunes; they surrender up their Pretensions to Court and Camp, to the Exchange and the Bar.” In recognition of this withdrawal, the laity on whose behalf the clergy labor devote a tenth of their income to support and maintain the performance of their sacred function. The neglect of tithes was sacrilege. In withholding from the clergy their maintenance, Nelson explained, we commit “the grievous Sin of Sacrilege,” which entailed “taking what is set apart for their subsistence, when we employ it to other Uses, as to our own particular Profit, or when we are guilty of any fraud in paying what is due to them.” This then was nothing less than the “robbing of God.”Footnote 102
Inveighing against sacrilege, Nelson's Festivals and Fasts was channeling the remonstrance that had seized the breadth of the post-Revolutionary Church of England. In 1698, the stalwart Whig cleric White Kennett published for the first time the early Stuart antiquary Sir Henry Spelman's History and Fate of Sacrilege, originally written in 1632.Footnote 103 Spelman's History was, essentially, a compendium of cautionary tales, assembled from scripture, pagan antiquity and Christian history, detailing the calamities that ultimately befell the perpetrators of sacrilege—that is, “the invading, stealing, or purloining from God, any Sacred thing, either belonging to the Majesty of his Person, or appropriated to the Celebration of his Divine Service.”Footnote 104 Spelman's treatise lent a distinguished Caroline pedigree to the rich body of scholarship and advocacy concerning the revenues of the Anglican clergy produced in this period, most notably the Irish nonjuror Charles Leslie's Essay concerning the Divine Right of Tythes, Humphrey Prideaux's The original and right of tithes and Kennett's own The Case of Impropriations. Footnote 105 All of these resorted to the language of sacrilege to bemoan the parlous state of ecclesiastical revenues, but none more vociferously than Leslie who assailed sacrilege as England's “national sin.”Footnote 106 In 1699, the Yorkshire clergyman Edward Marston preached a sermon decrying “the Profanation of things Hallow'd,” in which sacrilege entailed not just the misappropriation of clerical revenues, but the transgression of all things set apart. “As God is holiness in himself, so hath it pleas'd him to communicate the same to his Church, to make her not only a Catholick, but an Holy Church,” Marston told his auditors. “To this end hath he Sanctify'd special Means, that is, separated them or set them apart from common use to effect Holiness in the Hearts of People.” Among the things “Sanctify'd and set apart,” Marston anatomized “Time, Place and Person for the Ministry of the Word, Prayer and Sacraments.”Footnote 107 The cumulative sense of this Anglican popular, scholarly and homiletic literature around the turn of the eighteenth century was of the interrelatedness of these religious segregations; and that the transgression of one—neglect of holidays, say, or impropriation of tithes—threatened the viability of all of them. Surveying the state of post-Revolutionary England, Charles Leslie proclaimed “there is not Now any such [thing] as Sacrilege! Or some Men are not Capable of Committing it!”Footnote 108 The widespread declamation against sacrilege and the increasingly vituperative assurances of divine retribution betrayed a profound anxiety about the nature of contemporary English society. As the barriers between sacred and profane deteriorated, post-Revolutionary England seemed to be in danger of losing its capacity for sacrilege altogether.
IV. The Social Ecclesiology of the Festivals and Fasts
Robert Nelson's life and works testify to the “desire to see religion flourish” expressed at the commencement of his Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England. There can be no doubt that Nelson intended that work as an instrument of Anglican revival; he wrote repeatedly about “restoring to the Church that Discipline she has a right to.”Footnote 109 But as a program of confessional renewal, the Festivals and Fasts stands apart. Nelson's tract never traffics in the godly nationalism that had become so integral to the self-understanding of the Revolution monarchy.Footnote 110 The work never sounds the notes of virtuous patriotism that would inform the rhetoric of the country opposition throughout the early eighteenth century.Footnote 111 Somewhat more surprisingly, the Festivals and Fasts never resorts to the histrionic throne-and-altar revanchism that was indelibly associated during the reign of Queen Anne with the high toryism of Henry Sacheverell.Footnote 112 All of these presupposed a commensurability between sacred and profane that Nelson could by no means concede. All of these implied that holiness might be made manifest in civic or national life. And thus, for Nelson and many others at the time, all of them threatened the differentia specifica of the church, that is, the church's capacity to demarcate a qualitatively distinct form of life. Nelson's program of Anglican renewal thus consisted in reaffirming the differentiation of the Anglican ecclesial sphere from the commerce of everyday life, “to preserve Religion,” as he put it, “in its greatest Purity.”Footnote 113 The ecclesiology outlined in the Festivals and Fasts was thus a social ecclesiology, an account not simply of the internal constitution of the Church of England, but rather of the mise-en-scène of the church in society. Nelson continuously described the situatedness of the church in society not as overlap or fusion with civic life, but in terms of reservation and withdrawal. The clergy were removed from the self-seeking of civil society; holidays were withheld from the ordinary course of time. Nelson had recourse to a category of “set-apartness” that we have at least since Durkheim recognized as the signature of the sacred. Nelson and many of his contemporaries then deployed a traditional language of sacrilege to rhetorically and ideologically police the cultural and institutional boundaries between church and society.Footnote 114 In their eyes, attenuated religious participation and belief—the familiar hallmarks of secularization—were merely symptoms of a greater crisis: the diminished capacity of religion to designate any distinct sphere of life.
This social and ecclesiological vision must be grasped in order to fully understand the deluge that would engulf the Church of England in the second decade of the eighteenth century. On March 31, 1717, Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, preached his infamous sermon on The nature of the kingdom, or church, of Christ before George I at the royal chapel at St. James. The sermon was the culmination of Hoadly's relentless, decade-long campaign against the principles of Anglican high churchmanship, particularly those of the nonjurors. From the pulpit at St. James, Hoadly preached the radical invisibility of the Christian church, a kingdom not of this world comprised only of “the Number of Men, whether Small or Great, whether Dispersed or united, who truly and sincerely are Subjects to Jesus Christ alone.” Christianity, he claimed, consisted of nothing but virtue and charity. And yet, perversely, it had come to mean “the Performance of everything almost, except Virtue and Charity; and particularly, a punctual Exactness in Regard to particular Times, Places, Forms and Modes, diversified according to the various Humours of Men; recommended and practiced under the avowed Name of External Religion.”Footnote 115 Hoadly would emancipate religion, a matter of individual behavior and belief, from the suffocating formality of the sacred as his antagonists understood it. He would evacuate the world of any trace of the church, save for its residual presence in the individual conscience; and perhaps, its administrative presence in the machinery of the state. Hoadly's sermon seemed to embody the very threat that so palpably haunted the pages of Nelson's Festivals and Fasts. The threat, again, was not that of disbelief, but rather, de-institutionalized belief: a faith that, however ardent, simply no longer requisitioned any particular time or space for its realization. As is well known, Hoadly's sermon provoked what has been labeled “the most bitter domestic ideological conflict of the century,” encompassing hundreds of publications and, arguably, destroying post-Revolutionary Anglican high churchmanship as an substantive movement for ecclesiastical independence.Footnote 116 Robert Nelson, alas, did not live long enough to participate in the Bangorian controversy; although it might be noted that the year of Hoadly's notorious sermon also saw the publication of a tenth edition of the Festivals and Fasts.
The enduring popularity of Robert Nelson's Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England throughout the long eighteenth century suggests, perhaps, an established church in permanent danger. The peril, to which Nelson's work so capably spoke, is virtually inexplicable without recognition of the constitutive tension between the sacred and its alternatives—whether the abjectly profane, or rival claimants to holiness. The Festivals and Fasts maintained its appeal in an age in which the Church of England was perennially threatened with displacement: into the meretricious confessionalism of the monarchical state; into unchecked pluralism of the protestant nation; into the sovereign depths of the individual conscience. Even the celebrated Boyle Lectures of the early eighteenth century deployed natural theology to consecrate virtually the whole of creation. Post-Revolutionary English society seemed to confront the individual with a surfeit of social and political frameworks for practicing piety. The temporal worlds of nation and nature appeared arrayed as angels of light. If these promiscuous sacralizations impress historians committed to re-conceiving enlightenment England as an “age of faiths,” they surely offered cold comfort to Robert Nelson and his readership.Footnote 117 The latter were not placated by the operations of some law of the conservation of the sacred, which ensured that secularization in some aspects of social and political life engendered re-enchantment elsewhere. On the contrary, Nelson and his allies plainly considered any such “migrations of the holy” as evidence of the unwholesome liquidity of the modern world. Their response was to affirm the fixity of the sacred in the traditional institutions and seasons of Anglican ecclesial life. Nelson's Festivals and Fasts thus served as a talisman against religious modernity—an anatomy of the English sacred, painstakingly rendered and set against the world.
