Anglicanism Quotes

“To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”
― John Henry Newman

“One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith.”
― Lancelot Andrewes

“Roman Catholics have always been able to appeal to the traditions of holy Mother the Church. But the Church of England, as such, has nothing to appeal to. How can we [Anglicans] pretend to appeal to Church traditions, when we have cut ourselves off from the main stream of it and any exposition of it must needs be a raking up of old dead documents, instead of obedience to a living voice? And how can we pretend to appeal to the Bible, when the Bible is for everyman's private interpretation, and not expounded by authority?”
― Ronald Knox, University and Anglican Sermons of Ronald A. Knox

“We are at our best when we love the Lord and his church more than our style of life. We do not believe in our country, right or wrong. If evil has such a grip upon the institutions of government, we know that evil must be overthrown by one means or another. We are not monarchists, republicans or socialists, although our membership includes them all and more. We are pilgrims, who want to pass through a land that will support our journey to the Kingdom; and, if need be, the noblest of us will choose to occupy that land for a bit shorter time than usual rather than deny the Lord of the Kingdom.”
― Urban Tigner Holmes, What Is Anglicanism?

“There is no doubt that the biblical concept of the Kingdom calls for a ministry to the suffering, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the hungry and whomever is dehumanized by an unjust society. In abstract, almost all of us can affirm this with enthusiasm. When it is the vocation, however, of one of our number to make this Gospel imperative, a matter demanding and requiring us to change our comfortable ways, then many of us fall away. The prophet has never been popular among his other contemporaries. He has been stoned, beheaded, crucified and shot. If not killed, we have been all too ready to vilify him or her in the name of God, little realizing that it may well be God who sent the prophet to challenge our complacency.”
― Urban Tigner Holmes, What Is Anglicanism?

“Don't speak of your Protestant minister,
Nor of his church without meaning or faith,
For the foundation stone of his temple
Was the bollocks of Henry VIII Brendan Behan”
― Brendan Behan

“He wished to kneel beside him and pray. It was not shyness prevented him from doing it on Southampton railway station...It was the fear of being overcome with emotion. This was his flaw, the crack in his clay, and the more dreadful for being so unexpected...”
― Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

“The use of incense and processional lights has been of late discussed in the Anglican Church with considerably more fervour than knowledge, and it has assumed an importance in controversy all out of proportion to its merits.”
― E.G. Cuthbert F. Atchley, A History of the Use of Incense in Divine Worship

“I’m kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition for its benign tolerance... I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.”
― Richard Dawkins

“We often speak of Anglican "comprehensiveness." If this is a way of making relativism palatable or a means of accommodating all shades of opinion with no regard for truth, then it needs to be rejected. If by comprehensive we mean the priority of a dialectic quest over precision and immediate closure, then we are speaking of the Anglican consciousness at its best.”
― Urban Tigner Holmes, What Is Anglicanism?

“Anglicans don't really forbid anything,' Kelly said. 'We just decide we're above it.”
― K. D. Miller, All Saints: Stories

“The church of England could never become the church of England's Empire. . . The sovereign and his heir [Charles II and James], by policy if not by conviction, were religious tolerationists even more in the empire than in England. In the colonies, the royal brothers were free from the predominance of the church, and they wielded overseas an authority far less fettered than it was in England. The duke and the king therefore ordered their viceroys to tolerate all religions privately practiced and peaceably conducted. Under the later Stuarts, "Greater Britain" became truly tolerant. Great Britain did not. (p193)”
― Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence

“Yeah, it is said that my father wasn't around much so I learned to play catch through the television.”
― Jordan G Kobos

“The biography of John Wesley is surely unique. Here is a man born in the first decade of his century, who sees it through into the last; a man so far in reaction from the tendencies of his age that he seems a living commentary on them, yet so much the child of his age that you cannot think of him as fitting in with any other. A High Churchman in his youth, he makes for himself in the unsympathetic surroundings of Oxford an enclave of primitive observance and of ascetic living; such is his personal influence that he seems destined, if that were possible, to shake Oxford out of its long dream. Dis aliter visum; he undergoes an experience of conversion before his lifetime has reached its mid-point. A sensational conversion; the finished product of the schools becomes the disciple of a foreign visitor to our shores, by no means his match in intellect. Thenceforward, he must fight by other methods, and for the most part with other companions, that battle against irreligion to which he has dedicated his youth. He has made his own soul, but the battle is not yet over; he finds himself in conflict with the men who had been his closest comrades in arms, and who still share his own beliefs but exaggerate their emphasis in a degree which he thinks dangerous. A man who once seemed likely to do great things for the Church of England, yet whose influence, on the whole, was to damage her position in the eyes of his contemporaries; a man, nevertheless, who lived to see something of the old bitterness against him die down, whose age was cheered by public recognition at once welcome, unsought, and unexpected.

So far, however, there is nothing unique about John Wesley. A careful reperusal of the foregoing paragraph will show that it all applies equally to the career of Cardinal Newman.

Wesley and Newman-you might think that some elfin fate had arranged this odd consent between the stars of the two men, just so as to throw into relief the vast difference there was between them. Newman, so sensitive, so warm in his attachments, so revealing in This content downloaded from his literary confidences, Wesley, so unruffled by opposition, so half-hearted in his familiarities, so circumspect in his admissions; Newman, the recluse, Wesley, a lifelong vagabond in the service of his gospel; Newman, painstaking in his judgements, fastidious in his style, Wesley, leaping to infallible conclusions and throwing them at you with the first words that came to hand; Newman, such a child of the Renaissance, Wesley, so fundamentally a Puritan. And, deeper down, Newman the apostle of religious authority, Wesley, a cheerful experimentalist who in all the hesitations of a lifetime never asked himself by what right he ruled, or on what basis of intellectual certainty he believed.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion