Daggers at the Font
by Richard Simon
March 2025
An outtake from Thomia: The Entangled Histories of Lanka & Her Greatest Public School, out today.
At the height of the Victorian religious revival, doctrinal and liturgical differences in the Church of England—High Church vs. Low, Anglo-Catholics vs. Calvinists, Evangelicals vs. Tractarians—were prosecuted with a fervour that seems slightly absurd to us today. Accusations of heresy and corruption were hurled back and forth between pulpit and pulpit, often over the most trivial issues; synods and church meetings became angry shouting-matches. Nor were these clerical quarrels confined to Britain: they broke out wherever the Church of England had gained a foothold in the still-expanding Empire. The missionary societies, too, took sides, greatly to the bemusement of their native converts.
When the first Bishop of Colombo, James Chapman, arrived in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1845, his Oxford or Tractarian sympathies were greeted with frank hostility by one of the most prominent clergymen already in situ on the island, Rev. Barcroft Boake – the highly-paid headmaster of the colony’s principal boy’s school for the native elite, the government-run Colombo Academy (now known as Royal College). Boake was a stern Calvinist as well as a notorious controversialist, and when Chapman proceeded to set up his own rival establishment, St Thomas’s College, along Tractarian lines, doctrinal and commercial rivalry quickly degenerated into a vicious personal feud.
The following is an outtake from Thomia: The Entangled Histories of Lanka & Her Greatest Public School, by Richard Simon, which is being launched today at the Barefoot Garden Café in Colombo.
From time to time, their mutual rancour would break into public conflict. One such eruption, which occurred at a baptism conducted by Boake in late 1851, was even reported in the English press. Neglecting to make a proper sign of the Cross over the candidates’ foreheads, as stipulated in the rubric, Boake had, on this occasion, ‘merely waved his hand in the air over the children’ during the ceremony. Chapman, who was present as godfather to one of the infants, protested that the gesture was insufficient and demanded that Boake make the prescribed sign. Such matters of ritual were vital elements of worship to Oxford-influenced churchmen, but deeply objectionable—Popish mummery, as they saw it—to their Evangelical counterparts. Boake refused to sign the infants with the cross, obliging the bishop to remedy the deficiency himself. There the matter should have ended; but Boake then wrote to Chapman to inquire aggressively whether the baptisms he had performed in his fifteen years as a ‘presbyter’ were invalid, since he had not made the sign of the Cross over any of them. The bishop, in reply, merely referred Boake to the relevant passage in the prayer-book, but this tactic, mild as it was, only fuelled Boake’s anger. In what a Colombo Observer correspondent described as ‘a characteristic letter’, he promised to obey the bishop ‘on this very trivial and unimportant point,’ and declared provokingly that
(I yield to no man) whether Bishop or Presbyter, in veneration for our Church, and in attachment to her formularies, when understood in the sense in which they were compiled by our early reformers, and not in the novel sense which was subsequently attempted to be put upon them by Laud and Montague, and which a modern school of theologians are so pertinacious in endeavouring to force upon the acceptance of men as conscientious and as capable of interpreting the words of the Church as themselves.’
In addition to being a direct attack upon the bishop’s Tractarian views, this was also an oblique rejection of his spiritual authority. Chapman’s reply is worth quoting in full:
Colombo, October 22, 1851. Rev. and Dear Sir—I am glad of your determination to yield to no person, whether Bishop or Presbyter, in veneration for our Church, and in attachment to her formularies. As long as you show that attachment in mildness of temper and meekness of bearing—in frankness of obedience yourself, and fulness of charity towards others, you will ensure the respect and esteem of all. But it appears to have escaped your observation, that if those formularies are used or understood in any other ‘sense than that in which they were compiled by our early reformers,’ as explained and witnessed by their own most clear and explicit words, the charge of ‘novelty’ is really applicable to those only who put the new interpretation upon them.
We should not forgot that there are errors of defect as well as excess; and both are evil, because both are wrong. If we either stop short or go beyond our pledges, we err. In the Church, therefore, as in the school and in the world, obedience is the real test of our daily life, and when this proceeds from a ‘glad and willing mind, it bears the visible impress of the holy spirit of God upon it.’
I accept thankfully your promise of a correct observance in your ministrations of all that is required for the future; and gladly close this correspondence with the expressive words, which it has again and again recalled to my mind.
Oh, by Thine own sad brethren borne,
So meekly up that hill of scorn,
Teach Thou Thy priests their daily cross
To bear as Thine.
I remain, Rev. and dear Sir, yours, very faithfully,
(Signed) J. Colombo
As Boake’s superior or ‘ordinary’, Chapman was well within his rights to offer such an admonition; but courteous as it was, the bishop must surely have known what effect his words would have on the thin-skinned doctor. Perhaps it could not be helped; Boake would probably have taken offence no matter what Chapman’s reply.
The roots of Royal-Thomian rivalry, then, are deeper—and much darker—than most Thomians or Royalists suppose. Today’s friendly academic and sporting competition between august equals was once a do-or-die struggle for survival between two youthful institutions whose destinies had not yet come clear—a struggle further embittered by personal animus between their champions, themselves divided by a dispute over doctrine and practice that threatened to split the Church they both loved asunder.
