AKMA’s Random Thoughts

That Settles That

I’ve been looking for this text for ages. It’s from The King's Declaration Prefixed to the Articles of Religion (“the 39 Articles,” a summary of the official position of the English church on matters controverted by Roman Catholic and Protestants), promulgated in November, 1628:

That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, we will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.

I think I’ve even quoted that “shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense” part in an article somewhere, but I don’t know which (if any).

So listen, everyone — stop putting your own sense to be the sense of things, and take everything in the literal and grammatical sense! That’ll resolve our differences (as it did so well in 1628).

DRMA; Just Dropped In by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition; Lipstick Vogue by Elvis Costello; Gone Flying by Phil Manzanera; The Day That Lassie Went To The Moon by Camper Van Beethoven.

Posted by AKMA at October 26, 2004 12:54 PM | TrackBack