An Ethos Peculiar

In the end the Elizabethan settlement endured by reason of its own spiritual integrity. By 1593 the Church of England possessed an ethos peculiar to itself, characterized less by mere negations on the side of Rome or Geneva than by a coherent and distinctive embodiment of the Christian tradition that claimed continuity with all that was best in the Middle Ages and in the ancient Catholic Church. Bred within the comprehensive limits of the Elizabethan formularies, nurtured upon the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer, the generation that came to manhood in the ‘nineties brought Anglicanism to its maturity. A scornful condemnation of the late Elizabethan Church as a position born of compromise timorously defended, and maintained only because the political exigencies admitted no deeper commitment, cannot stand in the face of the piety, learning and loyalty that flowed in the first generation of men whose religious experience was wholly within the life of Elizabethan Anglicanism. Bilson, Field, Mason, Hall, Morton, Montague, Overall, Andrewes, Laud – here is a numbering of the stars in the firmament of the early Stuart Church.

Powel Mills Dawley, John Whitgift and the English Reformation (1954), p. 193