Commontide
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 2nd Sunday of Easter
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Easter
But chiefly are we bound to praise you for the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who was offered for us, and has taken away the sin of the world; who by his death has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again has won for us everlasting life.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Priest, Theologian, and Renewer of Society
Anglican Commemoration
Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) was an English priest, theologian, and teacher. Raised in a Unitarian minister's divided household, he was baptised into the Church of England at twenty-five. In 1853 King's College London stripped him of both his chairs over his book on the meaning of eternal punishment; within a year he had opened the Working Men's College, which still stands. He is commemorated on 1 April as a Teacher of the Faith.
Frederick Denison Maurice was born in 1805 near Lowestoft, Suffolk, into a Unitarian family. His childhood was marked by religious turmoil — his mother and sisters converted to various forms of evangelical Christianity, and the household was divided by competing convictions. Maurice himself was received into the Church of England in 1831 and ordained in 1834.
His major theological work, The Kingdom of Christ (1838, revised 1842), argued that the Church's visible structures — creeds, sacraments, episcopacy — are signs of a universal spiritual society that God has already established in Christ. This vision was neither Catholic nor Protestant in the conventional sense: Maurice believed that every party in the Church held part of the truth, and that the Church's calling was to manifest the unity that already existed in Christ rather than to create it.
In 1848, inspired by the Chartist movement and the failure of revolutionary politics, Maurice joined with Charles Kingsley and J.M. Ludlow to found the Christian Socialist movement. Their argument was that competition was unchristian, that cooperation was the economic principle implied by the gospel, and that the Church had a duty to engage with the social conditions of the working class.
Maurice's dismissal from King's College London in 1853 — for publishing Theological Essays, in which he questioned whether 'eternal' in 'eternal punishment' meant 'everlasting' — made him a cause célèbre. He founded the Working Men's College in 1854 and was eventually appointed to a chair at Cambridge, where he taught until his death in 1872.
Maurice's legacy in Anglican theology and Christian social thought was established immediately and has grown continuously. The Working Men's College he founded remains active and influential. His theological vision — emphasizing the universality of Christ's redemption, the present reality of God's kingdom, and the Church's responsibility to engage with social structures — became foundational for Anglican social ethics. Christian Socialism, which he helped launch, became a major current in Anglican thought. His willingness to question the doctrine of eternal punishment — which led to his dismissal — was later vindicated by theological development. The tradition presents Maurice as a prophetic figure who paid a price for intellectual and social honesty, and whose vindication came gradually through the acceptance of his ideas and the success of his institutions.