Part Two - Selections from Dialogues on Regeneration, 1850–51

Summary

Introductory Dialogues

Passage 1: ‘Introduction’

The title page of the manuscript is headed ‘Introduction to the “Dialogues on Regeneration” ‘. In the opening dialogue, Markright and Marvell discuss various styles of preaching and discourse in the contemporary Church of England. Markright critiques both the methods and the theology of Anglo-Catholic preachers, whom Marvell is inclined to defend. When Una and Irenia join their brothers, the discussion at length turns from theology to poetry.

Part I

Marvell: Did you attend to the Sermon, this afternoon, Markright; at all particularly I mean?

Markright: I almost wish I could help attending to Sermons, Marvell, such as it is commonly my lot to hear. I wish it were possible to snack what one cannot inwardly digest, but which on the contrary causes severe pains of indigestion.

Marvell: I feel in much the same way about such discourses as those of Mr. Oldways. He seems to think as little about the Truth –truth of Scripture and Catholic Antiquity – as an old nurse thinks about the growth of the cane plantations in the West Indies, and the management state and circumstances of the planters, when she distributes barley sugar drops among her little charges, or slips a teaspoonful of moist sugar into her own dish of tea. All he cares is to say neither more nor less on doctrinal points, than just what is said in the formularies of our Church; and formal enough is the preaching that is formed in such a negative principle; it is all form and no substance.

Markright: Nay, it cannot be right even in form, if the substance is wanting, for the substance must determine the form, and when that begins to wane the form shrinks and twists like a withered husk; and if it is not one with itself, how can the form have unity and symmetry? The Liturgy and the Articles are founded on different systems of thought – indeed I doubt if the former is perfectly accordant with itself, much less with its appendix, and no living body of truth can grow in two discordant directions. Oldways tells us that infants in Baptism certainly are, in one sense, really regenerated because our Church says so; in some sense really become members of Christ and receive a new nature; but in what sense,