A PUSEYITE OF THE MOST FLEXIBLE KNEE, EXETER, 1843.

Parsons were different 180 years ago.  When the Reverend Harold Browne of Saint Sidwell's Church felt that one of his parishioners was about to leave him for the Exeter Dissenters at Saint George's Meeting in South Street (now a Witherspoon's pub.)  he sat down and wrote to him a personal tract, some 2000 (two thousand!) words long, pointing out that, on the grounds of 'apostolic succession' only the Anglicans could 'really' baptise his child.   

This parishioner, we are not given his name, already had six other children who had been baptised at Saint Sidwells's without any fuss but the Reverend Browne was a Puseyite of the most flexible knee and had introduced a form of baptism at Saint Sidwell's which involved the babe attending a full church service.  Our parishioner was having none of it  - all those people and his wife might catch cold;  he was off to the Meeting House.  

Apostolic Succession was a hot topic in Exeter in1843, not least because Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter made much of it  (which was the source of Sydney Smith's famous quip: I must believe in the Apostolic succession, there being no other way of accounting for the descent of the Bishop of Exeter from Judas Iscariot.) and The Western Times (11th March 1843) was pleased to get hold of this letter and publish it in full.  Below is an extract from the parson's letter:  

"The church was ordained and founded by our Lord Himself, He commanded baptism to be used as the way of entering His church.  He ordained that baptism should be administered by certain persons authorised and sent by Him Himself.  He promised inestimable blessings to those baptized.

"Now the church is the very same as that which Christ ordained; and the dissenters are rebels against it.  The clergy of the church derive their authority from Christ Himself, by unbroken succession through the apostles;  and therefore baptism administered by them is real baptism, because it is administered as our Lord commanded it to be administered,  But dissenting teachers do not derive their authority from Christ or His apostles, but from man; and who, therefore, can say that they have any power to give real baptism."

The Times dismissed all of this as jabber and unadulterated nonsense.

And so it is but the Anglicans still officially subscribe to the daft notion that supernatural grace is imparted by the laying on of hands from bishop to bishop and bishop to clergy way back to Roman Palestine but then, I suppose, we are all of us, to some extent or another poor, deluded children!