26 March 2023

Sandford and Faber

Six or seven years ago, the archivist of Sandford upon Thames Church discovered, in a mouldering chest, a Prayer Book and a Bible inscribed by Fr Faber as given to the church while he was serving there.

And they conjecture that their stone altar, very like that at nearby Littlemore, is ascribed to Faber.

This puts me in mind of Chapter 2 of Loss and Gain, Newman's novel of Tractarian life in Oxford back in the 1840s. Here Bateman, a young Ritualist clergyman, proudly shares his pride in the renovation of a country church near Oxford ... which is in the very latest Ritualist style (even though he does not anticipate it having an actual congregation). 'It was as pretty a building as Bateman had led them to expect, and very prettily done up too. There was a stone altar in the best style ...'. ''We offer our Mass every Sunday, according to the rite of the English Cyprian, as honest Peter Heylin calls him; what would you have more?'' explains Bateman; an explanation which mystifies his hearers all the more. 

Not that I am suggesting that Loss and Gain is satirising Faber; the details do not fit. After all, Faber, unlike Bateman did enter into Full Communion. Si monumentum requiris, vade ad Bromptonem et circumspice, preferably at a time when the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite is in use (as it is daily) in that marvellous Church.

In any case, Loss and Gain is not that sort of book. Its relevance lies mainly in the accuracy with which it catches the fashion of a particular moment in English Church life.

Mind you, if Fr Faber did put that stone altar into Sandford church in 1839, it must have been one of the earliest to enter an Anglican church after the 'Reformation'.

3 comments:

Joshua said...

Peter Heylyn (1599-1662), a Caroline divine, wrote a life of Archbishop William Laud entitled "Cyprianus Anglicanus" (published 1668).

Oliver Nicholson said...

And Bishop "I do not love thee" Dr. Fell produced a substantial edition of S. Cyprian which was admired by contemporary French scholars of the late 17th century, that great age of patristic scholarship.

Simon Cotton said...

It was not unknown for stone (or marble) mensae to be installed in Anglican parish churches in the 18th c., in an age before the Cambridge Camden Society, and Dean Close's 'The Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery', for that matter.