Dean William McKeachie, in the Second part of his article based on his address to the Prayer Book Society’s most recent conference, pays tribute to the remarkable personality and erudition of the late Fr. William Ralston and the faith he upheld.
I first met Fr. Ralston that summer of 1960, following a concert of Haydn and Schönberg at the Edinburgh Festival. At the time, he was the Episcopal Church Fellow of St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury. Fr. Ralston in turn introduced me to Dr. C. FitzSimons Allison, Sewanee’s church historian, then on leave at Oxford. These four became my enduring guides into the classic Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Way of Christian faith and life.
In long views of Christian and specifically Reformation history, the “brokenness” of the Body of Christ has often exhibited itself in contentious doctrinal debate about such matters as (among others) biblical authority, soteriology, ecclesiology, and the doctrine of the Atonement — matters which neither “critical” Modernity nor post-Modernity has yet resolved. On the contrary, doctrinal entropy has only worsened in our time. Yet for classical Anglicans especially, there are tokens and trajectories of potential resolution which, to this day, remain traceable to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods (1559 - 1625) especially, and they are still available to be claimed or reclaimed. Nor is there any more salutary repository of them than the classic editions of the Book of Common Prayer, to the upholding of which Fr. Ralston devoted so much of his time and energy.
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