This chapter explains how the centrality of the sacrament and the reorientation of worship towards the altar were used to give external shape and expression to crucial divisions within the social body of the church. The sacerdotal authority of the clergy was embodied through their role in dispensing the sacraments, and given physical expression in their sole access to the holy of holies beyond the rails. There they administered the sacrament to the laity kneeling at the rails. Division between different sorts of Christian were also expressed in terms of their distance from and access to the sacrament. Here some Laudians espoused an attachment to physical forms of differentiation, expressed through the structure of the church to which, in practice, the church of England did not aspire, but which arguably expressed how Laudians thought about the Christian community and its relation to the church, the clergy and the sacrament.

This chapter analyses Andrewes’ account of the central ordinances of divine worship – preaching, prayer, the sacrament and the right conduct of the public worship of God. It argues that Andrewes produced a significant re-evaluation of the roles of those ordinances and practices in the life of the church and of the life of faith; one which downplayed the role of the word preached, and played up those of public prayer and, in particular, of the sacrament. For Andrewes, it was the sacrament that was at the centre of both corporate worship and the devotional life of the Christian; a view founded on his deeply incarnational and Trinitarian theology. As for the reverent conduct of divine worship, that was a natural, indeed a necessary, corollary of the divine presence in the church and the sacrament. All of which was presented as in stark contrast to, and indeed in reaction against, what Andrewes presented as the characteristic religious values and practices of the puritans.