The Day-spring from on High

By Paul C Hewett

An epic battle in raging between the Church and the emerging church of the anti-Christ. Is Jesus God in the flesh or not? Gnostics, feminists and other ideologues want to marginalize and eliminate orthodox and biblical Christianity. Is Jesus merely an ethical teacher from Palestine, or is He the divine Logos? In the massive re-alignment of globa

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Dec 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647535520

Paul C Hewett

The Rt. Rev. Paul C. Hewett is the Bishop of the Diocese of the Holy Cross, based in Columbia, South Carolina and one of four jurisdictions in the Anglican Joint Synods. He holds the M.Div. from Philadelphia Divinity School, and an A.B. from Temple University. His interest in the origins of English came from the Book of Common Prayer.

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The Day-spring from on High

And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; To give knowledge of salvation unto his people for the remission of their sins, Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us… (Luke 1: 78)

Paul C. Hewett

2nd Edition

The Day-spring from on High

Copyright © 2021 by Paul C. Hewett. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020922708

ISBN 978-1-64753-551-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64753-552-0 (Digital)

04.11.20

Dedication

Here is a story that begs to be told: our 40 years in the wilderness, from 1977 to 2017, and God’s plan for us in the Promised Land, from 2017 until our Lord comes again.

This book is dedicated to my family, and to all the bishops, priests and deacons who have served and who now serve in the Diocese of the Holy Cross, and to all those in the Anglican Exodus and Continuum, and all traditional, orthodox Episcopalians -- all our people, and our ecumenical partners, who enrich the ranks of the plebs sancta Dei.

Michael P. Martin, Editor

The King James Version of the Bible is used throughout.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Anglican Patrimony

The Episcopal Church

The First Paradigm – The Continuing Church Movement, 1976-2006: The Epic Journey

The Second Paradigm — The Federations, 2006 – 2010: Provisionality And Conciliarity.

Third Paradigm: Geographic Alignments In A New Conciliar Province, 2010 — Present

Purified And Re-Aligned Anglicanism, 2013 – Present

Back on Track and Fulfilling our Vocation

Conclusion

Endnotes

Bibliography

Introduction

The Church is stark on Good Friday. We are shocked when we go in, to see the Cross veiled in black, the Sanctuary and Altar stripped bare. The Tabernacle veil is gone, the Tabernacle is empty, its door open, and the Sanctuary Lamp has been taken away. There is no music. The Sacred Ministers enter in silence, wearing only albs. They reach the gate of the Altar Rail, and prostrate in silence before the Cross, and lie on the groun4d for a good while, lined up three in a row.

All of us are symbolically prostrate before the crucified One. We are utterly unworthy of what has been done for us by our Lord. We are helpless. And we are awe-struck by the magnitude of what is happening. And we are grateful, grateful beyond all telling, because our hearts whisper the truth: I know this is done for me. Jesus is here, on the Cross, doing the terrible work that gives life to the world. For us, and for those who follow Him to Calvary, there is nothing to do. We prostrate, helpless. On Good Friday, all one’s fine feelings count for nothing. If there is to be anything new about life after today, it has to come from some source beyond myself.

The Sacred Ministers arise, and a sub-deacon reads, without any announcement, the Word of God that suddenly breaks the silence, pleading with us, and saying all that can be said at this time:

Come, and let us return unto the Lord: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain upon the earth. O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away. Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgements are as the light that goeth forth. For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. Hosea 6: 1-6.

Last evening, Maundy Thursday, we began the Triduum, the three days that reveal to us the paschal mystery, our passover from sin and death to new and indestructible life-in-Christ. Christ is Himself our Passover, sacrificed for us. Jesus is the Paschal Lamb of God, prepared for us in the furnace of His passion. In the first Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, in the Upper Room, He gives us the Holy Eucharist, whereby He is with us in the mysterium tremendum, which Pope Paul VI called the Source and Summit of our lives. After Holy Communion, we moved the Blessed Sacrament to an Altar of Repose, a kind of Garden of Gethsemane, and then stripped the Altar and Sanctuary, had the Foot-Washing, then the Watch, the all-night Vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, to watch with Him for an hour, along with Peter, James and John.

The next day’s Good Friday Liturgy is so ancient that it is the same, East and West, going back many centuries before the Great Schism, to the Church’s earliest celebrations of the paschal mystery. The prophet Hosea sets the tone. Our sin, our spiritual adultery, leads to the suffering that the Father, in His compassion, uses to steer us back to Him. His Son redeems and restores us, and the Cross is the ultimate and cosmic means by which He does this. The Redeemer will not answer the problem of suffering. He will take it all upon Himself. He will bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. His precious Blood will remake the universe. His Blood, and His righteousness.

We repent and return, on Good Friday, to stand with the remnant: our Blessed Mother and Mary Magdalene and John the beloved apostle. We do not know at this point how the devastation and staggering suffering before us can heal us or bind us up or restore anything. We are utterly shattered by what is before us, the shamed, condemned, ripped, torn, pierced, and blood-soaked body of God incarnate. What does Jesus’ Mother do when the heavenly Father appears as the enemy of His own work? She lets the sword of inexpressible grief and martyrdom pierce her own soul, and she trusts. She, more than anyone else ever created, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the womb of God, the new ark of the new Covenant, and she trusts the Father for what is to happen with her Son. Radically trusts.

The little remnant – Jesus’ Mother, and her uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene, Nicodemus and John the Apostle — seek Jesus’ Body. What they want from Pilate is Jesus’ Body. More than anything else we, too, must want this: His Body and His Blood. He, who is our life. He, the One who restores life as love. They enshroud and bury Him, and the tomb is secured.

Jesus’ Resurrection, the most powerful and magnificent thing that has ever happened in the universe, in all time, and in all space, takes place very quietly, very peacefully, in the Father’s typical blend of infinite power and majesty, with infinite peace and quietude, in the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ Resurrection is the impossible possibility, the Father’s masterpiece, the reality that now defines all reality, the truth that defines and contains all truth, the light by which we now see all reality. We do not define the resurrection in terms of the world; we now define the world, and all reality, in terms of the Resurrection.¹ We see everything in its light. Jesus’ Resurrection is at once infinitely personal, and totally related to my present, and my future, and totally cosmic, and totally related to the destiny of all creation, all time and all space.

The Liturgy that opens this up for us begins at sunset on Holy Saturday, the Vigil of Easter. It is the most radiantly and intensely and exuberantly joyful Liturgy of the Church’s year, during which we light the new fire, and bless the Paschal Candle. The Deacon sings the Exsultet, dating from the 7th century or earlier:

Rejoice now, all ye heavenly legions of Angels, and celebrate the divine mysteries with exultation: and for the King that cometh with victory, let the trumpet proclaim salvation…

The Exsultet even thanks God for His creatures the bees, for gathering and making the wax for the Candle, because all creation is now dizzy with joy at the Resurrection of the divine Logos, through whom all things were made. Now, everything and everyone can be re-made.

The Deacon goes on to chant about our risen Lord as the Day-spring, the Day-star, from on high:

May the Day Star find it burning when he dawneth into day. The Day Star that riseth and knoweth not his going down…

The Great Vigil continues with the reading of all the prophecies from the Old Testament that point to the one reason why the Father created everything: the Resurrection of His Son, in the Holy Spirit. All creation can now return in unity to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, baptized as the new creation, under the new Man, the new head of the new human race.

After the prophecies, we bless the Font, and baptize into this new life those who are ready. We sing the Litany of the Saints, in whose communion and fellowship we subsist, because the Church, as an organic whole through time and space, dynamically and literally includes them. Then, we celebrate the first Mass of Easter. We offer our crucified and risen and ascended Lord to the Father, as the perfect offering we can at last now make to Him, and we receive Him under the forms of bread and wine, and know ourselves to be risen in Him, living now, proleptically, in eternal life, ascended to the throne of grace, in the glory of the new creation. We, His Bride now being made resplendent, can cooperate with His graces, to make everything in our lives resurrectional.

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,

Christ, the true, the only Light,

Sun of Righteousness, arise!

Triumph o’er the shades of night:

Day-spring from on high, be near;

Day-star, in my heart appear.

(Charles Wesley, 1740, Hymn 153)

C. S. Lewis picked up on this theme of a radical new dawn, brought about by Christ, the Day-star, dawning in our hearts, with the very title of a book in his Narnia Chronicles: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Every great liturgy begins, as with the Jews, at sunset the evening before. Sabbath begins the evening before. That way, in God’s Kingdom, we are always moving from the darkness to the pale light of dawn, to the full-blaze of noon day. We are always moving toward the Light of Christ. Unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. (Malachi 4: 2) St. Peter wrote, in his second epistle, We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts. (1:19)

St. Luke the Evangelist begins his Gospel with the story of two people who are among the least likely to further the Kingdom: Zechariah, an aged priest in the Temple in Jerusalem, and his wife Elisabeth, old and barren and Mary’s cousin.

Despite her great age, Elisabeth is going to be the mother of the Lord’s Forerunner. Zechariah is told that his name is to be John, and when this boy is born, Zechariah agrees to the name, and, filled with the Holy Ghost, prophesies: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people…and thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; to give knowledge of salvation unto his people for the remission of their sins, Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us; To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1: 68-78)

Zechariah’s song, the Benedictus, is the climax of Morning Prayer, taken from the monastic office of Lauds. In reciting it, or chanting it, we use the words Israel, David and Abraham. Ever since the 16th century in England, Morning and Evening Prayer were given to the parish clergy and their laity to recite daily. So, there has been a great multitude of Christians in Great Britain and America who say, every day, the words Israel, David and Abraham at Morning Prayer, and Israel and Abraham at Evening Prayer, sometimes singing these names to some of the most beautiful music ever composed in the history of the world, the chants of 19th and 20th century English cathedral organists and choir masters. The children of Israel are nowhere more celebrated and appreciated than in Great Britain and her former colonies.

The timing of the season of Advent teaches about turning to Christ, the Day-spring, the way plants turn to the light. Heliotropism shows the imprint of God upon all His creation. As we approach December 25, the days get darker. The world is plunged into greater darkness. And during Advent, we are awe-struck by the remembrance of millennia of aching and longing for God, of the long deep groaning in anguish of the entire creation, yearning for the Saviour; we are awe-struck during Advent by the travail and desolation of long centuries of preparation, the long preparation of Israel for her Bridegroom.

Then comes the first faint light of a clear, sweet dawn: Mary, and her fiat with God. She becomes the Bridal Chamber of the Word, the Womb of God. In her, the marriage of heaven and earth, of time and eternity, begins. In her, the Day-star dawns, to appear before all men. The Morning Star, Christ, can now rise in our hearts.

Just after the point of greatest darkness, December 25, GOD IS WITH US! God is with us! Understand, all ye nations, and submit yourselves, all ye people, for GOD IS WITH US! And the light lengthens and every day gets longer, till we come to the full blazing of the Sun of Righteousness.

The Lord God of Israel visits and redeems His people – a favorite Lucan theme – not just at any old time, but in the fullness of time, when the Father has got the stage all set, with the full flowering of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy and Roman law. We can think of Jewish religion as the product, Greek philosophy as the packaging, and Roman law as the marketing. In hindsight, we can see that the Time, the kairos, our heavenly Father chose for the Incarnation, and the place, and the people and cultures involved, and the long preparation of His own people, point to an infinite wisdom and love.

My Patrimony

I was conceived and born an Episcopalian, first living in Warwick, Rhode Island, baptized at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church. My mother, Annagrace, would later tell me that she consecrated me from the womb to serve the Lord and His Church, and named me after the Apostle Paul, her favorite saint.

My mother loved St. Paul, and believed everything he said. Her father, Alfred Carlson, was the Senior Warden at St. Mary’s. His large extended family had recently come from Sweden, and the Lutheran pastor in Småland, in Hinneryd, told the Carlsons that when they got to Providence, Rhode Island, they should all become Episcopalians, and so they did, a clan of perhaps 40 souls.

After St. Ansgar’s was built in Providence, we would occasionally go there. Sometimes, afterwards, we would all gather at my Grandfather’s house for a marvelous Sunday dinner that would last well over two hours, with lots of beer, and digest afterwards, for hours -- the men sitting in the den with cigars, and the women in the kitchen, and later the living room, attending to the vital matter of how the families, husbands, wives and neighbors, and the children, were keeping together in common cause for learning and improvement, along with equally important girl talk.

One of the family’s close friends was Ben Jackson, a young Episcopalian in the State Department, working in the American Embassy in Athens, Greece, just after World War II. The ties of Anglicans with the Greek Orthodox, both in England and the United States, were profound: Greeks were coming here by the tens of thousands, and Ben was good at keeping the contacts bright. Everyone appreciated his faith, integrity and zeal. He was mourned deeply and talked about for years after he died in his late 40s of cancer.

My mother used to say that when the men were together, talking about politics and religion, and all that concerned them about their communities, she knew there was cosmic order. This is how God wants things to be. Men need to take responsibility for their families, community and country, and when they do, the women are to listen, and question, and perhaps offer suggestions, and help them to clarify their views, and strengthen their resolve. Men need to get their heads together.

Some of the conversation would be in Swedish, and these were boisterous, old Viking-style Swedes, who were committed churchmen, zealous, conservative, anti-Roosevelt Republicans. They spoke Swedish with relish and vigour, as hjältarna språk. We children (a multitude at these gatherings) paid no attention to all that…we ran around my Grandpa’s giant house and three acres of beautiful grounds, eager to play. Alfred’s wife, Nina, an Associate of the Sisters of the Holy Nativity, had a background in England and Scotland. She was sometimes bowled over by the boisterous Swedish family into which she had married. Their six children all went to St. Mary’s. My mother, Annagrace, sang in the choir with her mother.

My father, Clayton, married my mother at St. Mary’s. At the time, his family was living in Warwick. His large extended family in central Maine is from England, with one branch, the Kennedys, from Northern Ireland. They became devout independent Baptists, perhaps from the influence of Roger Williams, the founder of the Baptist colony of Rhode Island.

But my father found himself strongly attracted at St. Mary’s, to the Liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. He knew that if he adopted that, he would be affirming and enriching everything he had always been, from old Bible-believing Baptist roots in South Somerville, Maine, halfway between Augusta and Rockland. He would sometimes visit his Rector, Father William Kite, to ask what more he could do to serve the Church, perhaps by coaching basketball. This was right after WWII, in which he had served in the Merchant Marine and Coast Guard.

I was born on his 21st birthday. He took that as a sign that he should ask to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church. My sister, Darryl Jeanne, was born 18 months later. At that time, Dad had a good job at the Providence Gas Works, and we lived in the top apartment of a house my Grandfather owned a couple blocks west of Narragansett Bay, in Longmeadow, Warwick, with Grandpa’s other daughters and sons-in-law on the lower floors.

There was never one time when I did not know God, directly and personally. I know how He intimates and speaks and moves. So I guess that makes me a once-born Christian. I have always loved and cherished the Holy Scriptures, and to this day read them and understand them as a child, believing every word of them. I would later learn from the very great mid-twentieth century Bishop of Göteborg, Sweden, Bo Giertz, that we do not interpret the Scriptures…the Scriptures interpret us.

I loved being in church from as early as I can remember, and our first Rector at St. Mary’s, Father William Kite, predicted that I would someday be a priest. I have always known, in a direct and immediate way, that the Eucharist is heaven brought down to earth, and earth lifted up to heaven, in the Holy Spirit, and have always rejoiced deeply in the music that reveals this. My mother taught us music, and she believed that children in the womb hear it, and know, in the biblical sense of to know, what it is, a zipper that opens the soul to God.

In 1952, United States Steel built an enormous new plant in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River, just opposite Trenton, New Jersey, about 35 miles northeast of Philadelphia. They were hiring skilled labor from the Northeast and from all over the world: Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Mexico, and other places.

My Dad, in Rhode Island, saw an ad in the newspaper and replied to it, and was hired in the coke manufacturing division, as an entry-level engineer. All new employees had to buy a 1,300-square-foot plywood house from the company, with three bedrooms on a concrete slab, a washing machine, hot and cold water, central heat, a carport and a quarter-acre yard, for a very modest price.

For a skilled immigrant, this was the amazing beginning of the American dream, unheard of in the old country. My parents felt as though they were immigrants, coming from a country called New England into a new country called Pennsylvania, where even the accent presented challenges. Their third child, my brother Philip, was born.

The unions were pretty rough-and-ready. Those who didn’t vote the right way at a meeting could have their car overturned or set on fire. One day, my Mother and I (age five) were standing in front of our house a little after 5 p.m., when the men were coming home from the plant. Suddenly, a car veered off our street, aiming at us, nearly hitting us, missing us by inches, speeding at some 40 mph into the house next door, crashing into a plywood wall about where the bathroom would be, and plowing halfway into the house. The man in that house had voted the wrong way at a union meeting, and the goal now was to kill him at home, after work, when he would be showering. As it turned out, the man was not in his shower, and no one was hurt.

But my father went to talk with his priest, Father William Warren. It had to be 1953. We were going to the Church of the Incarnation, in the next town, Morrisville. My dad asked Father Warren whether this was all there was to life…dog eat dog, or passive acceptance of violence and degradation and raw exercise of power. He wanted, again, to know what more he could do for the Church. Perhaps he could be a layreader or teach something.

I was not far away from the room in which this momentous meeting took place, but as a five-year-old, I learned about it from subsequent conversations and from an article written six years later by Margaret Parton in the Ladies Home Journal:

Clayton Hewett, with the aid of his old friend Bill Warren, was reaching a momentous decision. Bill, he said, pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand, "I can’t go on working full time at the steel plant, and only giving part time to the church. I’ve got to give my life to God — to the church!"

In the kitchen of the red-brick parsonage, on that gray March evening…Nancy Warren and Grace Hewett chattered as they washed the Sunday-supper dishes. Upstairs, children laughed and romped. But the two men in the living room heard none of these domestic sounds, for they were deep in a discussion which was to change many lives. Help me, Bill, Clayton pleaded. Couldn’t I at least be a lay worker for the church? (Father Warren) looked thoughtfully at his friend and parishioner, the wiry young steelworker Clayton Hewett — passionate, argumentative, and deeply devoted to his church. Then he smiled. I’ve been praying for you to reach this decision, Clay, he said slowly. But even now I don’t think you’re aiming high enough. Have you ever thought of entering the ministry?

Clayton Hewett stared at his friend in amazement. How could he enter the ministry? He was married, and had three small children. He had only a high-school diploma. He was twenty-six years old, and had no money to speak of.

His pastor had already thought of these obstacles—and more. Clayton Hewett was often belligerent, had rough edges badly in need of smoothing, needed to acquire more compassion for others, more humor. But two things convinced me that I was right, he says now. One was the strong feeling that here was a man that God wanted. The other was the character of his wife.

In the kitchen, Grace Hewett put away the last dish and took off the apron borrowed from Nancy Warren. Then she walked into the living room—a slender young woman of twenty-six with soft blond hair and shining blue-gray eyes. Seeing that the men were deep in talk, she sat down quietly and said nothing. Bill Warren turned to her.

Clayton is thinking of entering the ministry, he said. For a full moment Grace was very still, but now her face lit up with radiance.

I’m very surprised and very happy, she said finally. To her, there seemed to be no obstacles of real importance.

Shortly afterward the Hewetts tucked their sleeping children in the back of the car, and drove home to their neat little mortgaged house in Fairless Hills, five miles from Morrisville. Clayton was sunk in thought and Grace did not intrude, for she always respected his silences. I knew he had been unhappy for a long time, and that he wanted to make a change in our lives. But he did not discuss it with me, so that I didn’t know in what direction he would go. Driving home that night, I silently thanked God that he had found to me what seemed the right direction. ²

The Day-spring from on high was visiting us in a powerfully new and stunning and direct way, to change our lives completely and forever.

At Princeton University, my father had to be tutored and take courses and learn how to do research and write papers, to prepare for the seminary Father Warren could get him into: Father Warren’s own alma mater, Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) in Alexandria. It was decided that he would do his first (Junior) year alone, so that he could concentrate completely on his courses.

Father Warren arranged for us to have a small house in Morrisville right on the Delaware Canal that parallels the Delaware River, and by this time (1955) my mother was pregnant with my sister Joan. Dad got my mother a dog, which became my first dog, Lady, a saucy miniature collie, named after Mother’s first dog. Right away, I lost a chronic fear of dogs, and became endeared to them and to all animals.

The house, by the Canal, was in low country, and we had flooding in the cellar, with a coal furnace that would go out, and we had to learn to cope. We ate and lived simply, and as children had a child’s awareness of something awesome going on above our heads. Anything we had to forego was part of this awesome higher thing, all connected with God.

One Sunday morning, just outside the Church of the Incarnation, standing by a bed of budding daffodils, I could hear the organ playing what I now know to be the hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the grandeur of God’s Presence, everlasting strength and tenderness all wrapped up in cosmic victory.

The hardest thing for us, and more so for my Mother, was that my father was now living 150 miles away. So letters and visits -- Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and all the usual collegiate holidays -- became very important.

Father Warren was always a big help, a pastor and friend-in-Christ to all his people. My brother Philip, about three at the time, during Choral Morning Prayer, decided that he should leave the Nave and go into the Chancel, to sit with Father Warren, who put Philip on his lap until it was time for the sermon.

After a severe rain that flooded our cellar, the walls upstairs became very damp, and Father Warren got us a house on high ground, right next door to the church — a house they had purchased for a janitor.

In late spring of 1956, it was time to join my father in Alexandria. The Curtin brothers rented a Hertz truck and loaded it up and put me in the cab (my Mother must have driven the rest of the family in the car). We got to Alexandria in the wee hours of the morning. Our new rental house, two miles from the Seminary, was a pleasant, early ’50s, three-bedroom house with a white picket fence and woods in the back.

I can remember some of my Dad’s professors, and their children: Dr. Holt Graham and his son David (we got ferocious poison ivy climbing on the seminary’s brick walls); and Dr. Walter Russell Bowie, Professor of Old Testament, who wrote the words to Hymn 522 in our 1940 Hymnal and autographed for me a copy of his children’s book on the Old Testament; and Dr. Charles Price, whose daughter was soon to die tragically; and Dr. A. T. Mollegan; and a fellow student one year ahead of my father, Bishop John Rodgers, who occasionally baby-sat us.

From many later discussions with my father, and listening to him talk with others, I remember that the main thing he had to work out at VTS was the sense of the corporate, the communal, the conciliar, in both the Old Testament and the New, in the sense of the Church as the Body of Christ, and not just the individual and his relationship with Christ.

The corporate and the personal have to come into balance, along with the objective and subjective, the head and the heart. But Father Warren had warned my father, in 1955, as he started at VTS, Clayton, don’t let them destroy your faith. The deadly malaise that was to consume the Church was already unleashed, a new and more subtle and deadly form of gnosticism growing out of the Nazism and Communism that had become virulent and deadly before and after August 1914, the date Solzhenitsyn uses to mark the end of the Christian West.

In 1958, my father was ordained Deacon and Priest in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, to serve at a neglected working class parish 10 miles southwest of Philadelphia, the Church of the Atonement, Morton, built for 100 parishioners, now with over 350.

When we moved to Morton in May 1958, I was curious about the name of the street we lived on. Atonement’s rectory address was 935 Amosland Road. Why was it called that? Pure coincidence – or perhaps a sign.

Later, I would learn more about the prophet Amos, and over the years it became clear that my father had a kind of devotion to Amos the prophet. Amos prophesied around the year 750 B.C. in Judah, which was experiencing a time of prosperity, affluence, security and expansion, just as we were in the Episcopal Church in the post WWII years. Amos would speak harsh words into complacent environments, as would my father. They both had a passion for justice: Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. (Amos 5:24), and in 7:7, the prophecy about the plumb line against a wall, which would show Judah, and us, as unimaginative and cowardly in the face of grave threats to our theological and moral integrity.

The old church, obviously too small, had numerous structural deficiencies, so my father worked out a plan for financing and building a new church and undercroft that could take care of 350 plus parishioners. By the spring of 1959, the old church was torn down, and the architect, Roland Taylor Addis, who designed numerous churches in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, designed one for us.

If I were not in Holy Orders, one of the things I would be is an architect. When Mr. Addis and my father consulted with one another about the philosophy of design, and construction details, especially for the sanctuary, they would often meet in the rectory, at the dining room table, and I would sneak into the kitchen and listen to what they were saying.

I can remember overhearing my father say that he wanted no veneer. All interior paneling had to be solid red oak, and the Altar was to be made of solid Philippine mahogany panels; all silver was to be sterling, not plate, and all vestments and hangings were to be real silk, with real gold thread, so that we could follow the specifications of the Book of Exodus in the construction of the Tabernacle. The steeple, a French Gothic flèche, was sheathed in solid copper. All pews and furniture were hand crafted in solid oak by New Holland woodworkers in Lancaster County. I was bursting with a quiet, never-articulated pride at the results, after having spent every day after school on the building site. To this day, I love the sights, sounds and smells of construction sites.

The new church was truly lovely, wondrously smelling of red oak, and when Bishop Oliver J. Hart came on Palm Sunday, 1960, to lay the Cornerstone (which my sister Darryl and I had filled with historical artifacts), I knew I was part of something very special.

In those days, we had a tremendous respect for the bishop and for the Episcopal Church. Bishop Hart was the last real Bishop of Pennsylvania — the last who knew and believed enough about the Church and the Scriptures and the Lord to be a bishop. He retired in 1963. We children knew that he was not literally God, but we had an inchoate sense from St. Ignatius of Antioch that where the bishop is, there is God. The bishop represents God the Father. He is also the great High Priest of the Diocese.

Bishop Hart, who had served as a Chaplain in WWII and wore his fruit salad on his Chimere, knew this, and lived up to it. When my father said, the day before his visit, that we should cut the grass a second time, we did so without question, knowing that everything should be in perfect readiness for his visit.

The Diocese of Pennsylvania was far from perfect, but it was well led and solidly committed to the Caroline Catholicism of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, a book I respected as a young lad, but would soon come to cherish…a book that would open up astonishing new vistas.

Our family always travelled. Dad took off a full month every summer, usually July, and we would drive first to my maternal grandparents, leaving Morton, Pennsylvania, at about 1 a.m. so that we could arrive in Warwick, Rhode Island, around breakfast time. My brother Matthew was born in 1960, so there were five of us children, my parents, and Lady, the dog, to fit with all our gear into a new emerald green 1959 Rambler Custom Cross Country station wagon.

We learned how to do it, with a roof rack on top! Even at this stage, I was being taught the Marine Corps adage: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome! My mother, with her Viking background, taught us to treat every trip, every move, as an adventure, an opportunity to meet new people and see life from new perspectives.

We would spend two days at Grandpa and Grandma Carlson’s in Warwick, then go to a cottage at Lake St. George in Liberty, Maine, near Grandpa and Grandma Hewett’s, spend a month swimming, fishing, boating, camping and visiting my grandparents and my Grandfather’s brother, Lloyd Sr., who with his son Don, ran a dairy farm two miles away. Don lived 300 yards from his brother Lloyd Jr, a self-made builder. So with them and all their wives and children, there was a lot of visiting.

Going to that farm was very special. We would spend many days there, sometimes helping with haying and blueberrying, sometimes at target practice in the fields with .22s and 30-30s. The Hewetts there, Lloyd Sr. (Law) and his wife, Jenny, at the helm, were deeply committed to the Lord and to the South Somerville Baptist Church. During lunch break in haying season, Law would sit everyone down for a Scripture reading and devotions before the blessing. (Their son Don, who inherited the farm, was regarded by multitudes as a saint when he died in 2015.) There was a lot of holiness on that farm, distilled from suffering as well as from the sure faith in Jesus’ Resurrection, that we in the Church can, in the Spirit, make everything resurrectional.

The Hewetts had run this part of Somerville, Maine, for over 150 years, and in the evenings, the stories they would spin -- about old Maine and the old understandings about self-reliance, states’ rights and traditional virtues -- can never be forgotten. Some are hilarious and some are bittersweet, crafted over the years to be told after supper, after the right promptings and questions, all in the old Maine accent.

In those days, they still had the one room schoolhouse, for grades one through eight, opposite the South Somerville Baptist Church at the beginning of Hewett Road, where it connects to Route 17. The Pastor was the bus driver for the school, and hymns were sung coming and going, and of course the Bible was prominent in both devotion and study throughout the day. What courts and legislatures said about this did not matter to them, because they were doing things God’s way.

Law and his sons Lloyd Jr., and Don were selectmen for Somerville, population 300. Don had the fire truck, a 1927 Chevrolet, in his barn, near his two draft horses, Duke and Prince. The story of Don´s first tractor, bought in 1952, a secondhand model B John Deere is told by Kelly Payson Roopchand in her book about this farm and family, Birth, Death and a Tractor.³

Law and Don were both Deacons at the Church. The selectmen and a handful of others decided the school curriculum, adjudicated conflicts, and kept the unemployment rate down to zero. There was no need for police, since every man had multiple rifles, shotguns and handguns, and all persons and property were protected and secure. There were no lawsuits, because everything was resolved based on biblical principles, man-to-man on the honor system, on a handshake, and sometimes in the general store, where there were plenty of witnesses.

After a month in this marvelous place called the State of Maine, we drove back as far as Grandpa and Grandma Carlson’s in Warwick, Rhode Island, and spent two or three days with them and the aunts and uncles on my mother’s side, and then made our way back to suburban Philadelphia, our hearts heavier as we drove south, away from the Arcadian purity of New England.

The culture there is formed in part – as all cultures are – by geography and climate. In New England, the terrain is glacial, glacial till with lots of granite, deep glacial lakes with crystal clear water, lots of pine, spruce, fir, maple and white birch, and dry air, whether warm or cold. How the predominant Calvinism, once represented by Jonathan Edwards, melted down into so much Unitarianism, is a thread we shall pick up later. Boston and its suburbs, the largest concentration of colleges and universities in the world, would descend fully into gnosticism after World War II. Cambridge and Boston would go on to become one of three black holes of gnosticism in the world, along with Berkeley, California, and Uppsala, Sweden.

As we drove up and down the East Coast, not all the interstate highways were in place, and we often drove through small towns. We would pass an Episcopal Church, and my Mother would exclaim, Just look at that church! Ours are the most beautiful. That got me thinking, and observing, and applying a critical eye. After some time, I could see what she was getting at. Yes, the Episcopal Church is usually the most elegant and beautiful building in a town. She would comment on our sign, The Episcopal Church Welcomes You, hung outdoors somewhere near the church. Just look at that sign! Ours is the best. As I began to compare it with other signs, a little lesson in graphic design, I saw what she meant. Aesthetically, it was the best.

And I would soon discover the greatness of our 1940 Hymnal, because our organist and choirmaster at Atonement, Mr. Robert Hamilton, taught a junior choir of boys and girls. Darryl and I can still remember all the hymns and anthems he taught us. When he rehearsed us, he would give us background on who wrote the words and who composed the music. Music was part of our upbringing. Whenever my mother could, she would play symphonies on her old record player, full blast if my father was not home. I can remember writing term papers with Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony being played upstairs, and undoubtedly heard by neighbors a block away.

We could begin to see that the greatness of our Hymnal is that it is truly catholic, incorporating music from every time period, from early Plainsong onwards, to modern, and also setting forth music from a vast array of cultures throughout the world.

Another indication of the greatness of our tradition is the Prayer Book. When the Pentagon put together a pocket-sized Prayer Book for the Armed Forces in the early ’50s, it was largely based on the Book of Common Prayer. And in many movies, whenever a wedding or burial was shown, the words were from the Book of Common Prayer. This was the classical, accepted way to do things. And of course, when the concept of a National Cathedral was being discussed in the late 19th century, a charter passed by Congress in 1893 established this new edifice as the Cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington D.C. on Mt. St. Alban, the highest elevation in the City. When President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in 1907, 20,000 people turned up.

The Episcopal Church was a de-facto state church until the 1960s. Some colonies had, for nearly 150 years, been completely and officially Anglican, with Church and State all one thing. It was especially significant in Virginia, the Mother Colony, which gave more leaders to the Continental Congress than any other colony.

We would soon learn the greatness of English literature, that Shakespeare and English drama is the best, that the English language is the language of the world, in a unique way, that English liturgy is the best, along with the 19th and 20th century English cathedral choir tradition, that the British Empire is the greatest that ever existed, with its very great Navy and with the very great traditions and institutions and Christian Faith it imparted to its colonies, that America’s greatness comes from Great Britain, that the Anglo-American alliance is the greatest ever forged in the history of the world, and that Great Britain, and the countries that derive from her, have done more to evangelize the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ than anyone else.

The obvious questions to ask now are: If this is true, whence comes this greatness? What is our history in this regard? If Christian Europe became the greatest continent, who is its father? If England was the greatest country, who is its father? What is our patrimony? If the hoards of hell tried to destroy it with the onslaughts of Nazism and Communism, might they not be destroying it now, by slightly different -- but more insidious -- means? How far have they advanced with this destruction? Wouldn’t this destruction be their top priority, if the man of lawlessness is to be released, and the mystery of iniquity spread abroad, and the whore of Babylon to spread her nastiness?

The late great Bishop Fulton Sheen talked about a pattern in history that sheds some light on our reflections. Every 500 years, he avers, there is an enormous shift in the center of gravity, or the paradigm used for self-understanding in a culture, as a civilization takes a giant step in reform or collapse. From Abraham, circa 2000 B.C. to Moses, circa 1500, is 500 years. From Moses to the Exile, and Return (circa 500 B.C.), and from that to the Birth of Christ, 0, is 500 years. Then, we go 500 years to the collapse of Rome, followed by, circa 1000, Europe as a new Christian civilization, to 1500, the Reformation, to our times, which may well be the final lead-up to the end times. The cataclysmic changes occurring today are far greater than all the previous ones put together.

Our community, the community that produced the British Empire, has now very nearly been savaged, attacked from without and even more from within. It is bad enough that the devil should pit the races and the classes against each other. With gnostic feminism, the devil pits the sexes against each other, the ultimate insult to human dignity. He can now destroy marriage and the family. Islam moves in to pick off what is left.

There are globalists who help set all this up, many of them Anglicans and Episcopalians, as the witting or unwitting accomplices of the hordes of hell, who want to destabilize existing structures, destroy orthodox Anglicanism and the rest of the believing Church, erase the United States and Great Britain, and control everything in a one-world system in which power, not love, is the ultimate moral absolute, and all religions have been homogenized into a pantheon of gods and goddesses, the church of the anti-christ, the whore of Babylon.

So where are we in relation to the end times? What is our history as a remnant, since WWII, and what is our calling today? How are we to be salt and light, the city set on a hill, a transparency to the Day-spring from on high, the Sacrament of the Holy Spirit, the Sacrament of the Age to Come, despite the persecution that is coming and that is already here? What makes us unique? What is the gift we bring to the rest of the Body?

What follows is our Patrimony, our roots, and what makes us tick as traditional, orthodox Anglicans.

The Anglican Patrimony

Our heritage, our patrimony -- the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic ethos -- is richer and deeper than we may realize, with its roots in ancient Israel and in the earliest days of the Church.

Knowing how rich and deep our tradition is can strengthen our community. We can, knowing more about the special call of God upon our life, share our unique treasures more completely with the rest of the Body.

Yet, in what is about to be unfolded here, we are not dealing with articles of faith. Our faith in no way depends on knowing how deep and rich our heritage is. We are dealing rather with permitted speculation. Nonetheless, the light shed by thorough study of the foundations of the Christian faith in Great Britain, and of the role of the Church, and State, in the British Isles and in the United States, can lead one in a progression, from seeing this subject as permitted speculation, to what is possibly true, to what is probably true, and on to historical certainty. The written records, the legends and the oral tradition are all consistent. As new information is unearthed, whether archeological or linguistic, it keeps agreeing with what was known before, and confirms what the prophets foretold in the Scriptures. (Isa. 49: 12, 20)

Speculation and research into involvement of Jews and Israelites in the pre-Christian history of Britain is not unlike the investigations into the Shroud of Turin. For the past hundred years, the Shroud of Turin, now over the High Altar of the Cathedral in Turin, Italy, has been close to the center of the world’s attention, the subject of intensive historical and scientific study. Some scientists have been converted to our Lord by it, and are in no doubt that it is His actual burial cloth. All scientists agree that there is no explanation known to science today for how the image of a crucified man is mysteriously singed into the surface of a linen fabric, woven in 1st century Palestine. All they can say is that some kind of intense burst of light and radiation, coming from the crucified man, caused the image on both the front and back of the shroud to appear in three dimensions.

We may believe that in God’s Providence, the Shroud of Turin has come to the world’s attention at a time when man has the computer technology and other scientific capabilities to analyze this phenomenon and come to faith in Jesus’ Resurrection. When the late Bishop John A. T. Robinson of Honest to God fame saw the Shroud on display in Turin in the l970s, he was converted by it to faith in Jesus’ bodily Resurrection.

Yet our faith in no way depends on the Shroud. Our faith in the Paschal Mystery comes from the witness of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and from Holy Scripture. Jesus’ Resurrection is the ultimate truth that contains all truth, and is the reason why God created everything. Regarding relics and miracles, the Church maintains a holy reserve, so that we do not place our faith in them, or use them as props.

A good place to begin a study of Jews and Israelites in pre-Roman Britain is to learn how they might have traveled so far, and why. The Phoenicians blazed the trail; they were the dynamic travelers and traders in the millennium before Christ. They opened up trade routes, by sea and land, from the eastern Mediterranean into northern Europe, Britain and the Baltic. The Phoenicians had a dynamic effect on the vocabulary and grammar of the proto-German tribes, as the Phoenicians interacted with the proto-Germans en route.

In recent studies of the proto-German that gave rise to today’s Germanic languages, we notice that there are unique features in grammar and vocabulary. It is now known that these features came from the Phoenicians, a semitic people whose language is close to Hebrew and Aramaic. Phoenician pottery has been found in Denmark. The Viking’s long boats are patterned on Phoenician vessels. Words like sea, ship, strand, sail, boat, fish, carp, eel, sword and knight, which are old German, go back to the Phoenicians. One third of proto-German’s words are Phoenician.¹ The Phoenicians paved the way for the massive migrations of Celts from the Black Sea area to Brittany, Britain, Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

During this time frame, in about 785 B.C., the word of the Lord came to Hosea, who was to become a prophet to Israel, Ephraim, the ten tribes of the northern Kingdom. We are going to use Hosea in this book as a rose uses a trellis: Hosea will be the framework, the matrix, for our story, our way of understanding the past 40 years, and the coming 40.

Israel had broken from Judah after Solomon’s death, and chosen Jeroboam to be its King. Jeroboam did not want his people going to Jerusalem for the great feasts, so he set up shrines in Bethel and Dan in Samaria. These shrines would have a degraded priesthood and an easy acceptance of the idolatries of neighboring pagans.

Faithless Israel was being threatened by Assyria and entering a time of near anarchy. The Lord told Hosea to marry a prostitute, as an enacted parable, because Israel’s apostasy and sin added up to spiritual adultery. Israel was the adulterous wife of the Lord, who would be brought to face her sin through exile and suffering. But in his covenant love, the Lord would redeem Israel and restore her. And the Lord, when He restores something, makes it better than if it had never fallen away.

Damascus fell to the Assyrians in 732 B.C., and the Assyrians went on to conquer Samaria in 721 B.C. Some of the tribes went into captivity in Ninevah. But there was a way for other tribes, especially Ephraim, Manasseh and Dan, to escape. There was, at that time, a massive migration of Celts, who used to live around the Black Sea, pushing northwest, to end up in Brittany, southwest Britain and Ireland. Those Israelites who could joined the Celts, sometimes intermarrying, and loosing some of their identity as they went along, in a migration that could go fairly quickly, or take generations, depending on the family groups involved. It all fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah 66: 19, I will send those that escape of them…to the isles afar off.

This migration also corresponds with II Esdras 13: 40-45.² The Dan-ites left their name wherever they went. The Danube and Dnieper Rivers, Dan-mark, and many place names in the British Isles, like Lon-don, were named by them. Brith is Hebrew for covenant, and the word British means covenant-man. Saxon is Isaac’s son. Much of the Welsh and Gaelic languages are based on Hebrew. Scottish girls have a nonsense rhyme for jumping rope that is a Hebrew arithmetic table. The Cornish recite a rhyme that is Psalm 24 in Hebrew. One of Ireland’s other names is Hibernia, from the name Heber.³

Evidence is piling up to support the travels of the prophet Jeremiah to Ireland. After the Babylonian conquest of Judah and sack of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., King Zedekiah and his sons were taken into captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah fled to Egypt with Baruch, his scribe, and Zedekiah’s two daughters. He took one of them, Scota, to Spain, and married her off to a prince there. The other, Tamar (Tea) Tephi, he took to Ireland, and had her married to the son of the High King of Ireland.

Evidence is piling up that when Jeremiah went to Ireland, he took with him Jacob’s anointed pillar, the Stone of Scone, the Stone of Destiny. The Stone of Scone ended up on the Coronation Throne in Westminster Abbey in London. For the past 2,500 years, the monarchs of Ireland, Scotland and England have been crowned, sitting upon this stone, descendants of David’s line by Judah’s and Tamar’s son Zarah, on whose hand a scarlet thread had been tied by the mid-wife. (Genesis 38) So, in the fulfillment of prophecy (Genesis 49: 10), that David should never want a man to sit upon his throne, his descendants number Carodoc, Constantine the Great, King Arthur, and Alfred the Great. There is today a committee at Buckingham Palace to keep the Royal Family’s lineage straight. The British are the bearers of the Promise: first, of Joseph’s birthright, a multiplicity of seed in many nations, and second, of Jacob’s scepter, a royal line.

The Royal Coat of Arms of Great Britain has a crouched lion, the Lion of Judah, and the Unicorn of Israel, the ten tribes. Holland and Denmark have the crest with the Lion. Ireland’s crest has David’s harp and the scarlet thread.

All this is brought out so that we can see more clearly whence we come.

The Church in Britain is the first of all official national churches. Joseph of Arimathea, our Lady’s uncle, who had become wealthy from the tin trade in Cornwall and Somerset, took the Faith there in 37 A.D. St. Philip the Apostle consecrated him a bishop in France in 63 A.D. From Joseph of Arimathea’s mission to Glastonbury, on land donated by Arviragus, the cousin of Carodoc, Pendragon of the British armies, the Faith spread rapidly, and three missionary bishops were sent to the Continent.

Rome itself was prepared for conversion by the Roman Army’s capture of Carodoc, whose son Linus became a Bishop of Rome. Carodoc’s daughter, Gladys, also known as Claudia, was the honorary daughter of Claudius Caesar and the wife of Rufus Pudens, a Christian senator and half-brother of St. Paul. The Gospel went to Rome by way of Glastonbury, and St. Paul himself spent time in Britain, as did St. Peter, Peter´s father-in-law Aristabulus, St. Barnabas, brother of Aristobulus, and Simon the Zealot.⁴

It is entirely possible that our Lord, in His youth, spent some time with his great-uncle in Britain, and that His mother was there too. One thing that points to such visits is the consistency of the legends about it, and another, the typical Celtic reticence in promoting knowledge of it. If Jesus had been to Spain or Italy, there would be a great cathedral or shrine marking the place. But it is the spirituality of the Celts, and the Anglo-Saxons who followed them, to be remarkably reserved.

British reserve, even during the great days of the British Empire, is well known. The impulse not to be ruled, nor to rule is deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon-Celtic culture. Colonies of the British Empire are always better prepared than anyone else for self-governance. In the United States, we inherited the Celtic impulse, not to be ruled, nor to rule. It has been said that the only thing America asks for when protecting other countries from tyranny is room to bury our dead.

All this is brought out so that we may see more clearly whither we go.

What is our destiny in our part of the Church of God on earth? One clue to this is an alliance utterly unprecedented in the history of the world: the Anglo-American Alliance. Great Britain and the United States, brother nations, Ephraim and Manasseh, are, together, God’s battle ax in the world. Every so many years, we link up to save others from tyranny and disaster, as in the First and Second World Wars.

From 1945 to 1948, we did, together, what has never been done before in the history of the world on so massive a scale: we completely re-habilitated our enemies, with the Marshall Plan in Europe, and MacArthur’s governance of Japan. Our enemies became foremost trading partners in the world.

Israel came into existence in 1948, and continues today, only because of the Anglo-American Alliance. Britain’s victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1918 set the stage, and together with America, made the miraculous emergence of Israel a reality. None of this is coincidence.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Anglo-American Alliance has stood together in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Balkans, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan, to name but a few places in our time.

It is of utmost importance that we should know whence we come, and whither we go. We need to know what our destiny is.

The Anglo-American Alliance has existed in the past because of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church. Nearly all its leaders have been Anglicans and Episcopalians: Winston