touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Reformers remained attached to many aspects of the past: a Christian state and society, parish structures, church patronage, infant baptism, a set liturgy with traditional features, adult communion, and many calendar observances. Churches could only be adapted, not rebuilt, for Reformed worship. It was unwise to push congregations too far: there had to be some concession to popular usages, notably seating. People’s habits and preferences continued to determine the extent to which change would happen locally. The Reformation may be likened to a tide washing over a reef. At the upper level the tide carries all before it, but underneath the reef remains: in historical terms, the resistant compound of customs, vested interests, and stubborn human nature.
—Nicholas Orme
Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale Univ. Press, 2021), p. 399
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