The Catholick Christian Instructed In The Sacraments, Sacrifice, Ceremonies, And Observances Of The Church. By Way Of Question And Answer Challoner, Richard Addenda,Fine & Rare: Theology & Church History

~Original brown mottled calf, double gilt frames to boards. Raised bands, gilt fillets, and red gilt label to spine. Cracking to spine over rear hinge and over top front hinge (c. 6 cm); hinges holding. Minor chipping to top spine. 12mo (10.4 x 17cm). All edges speckled red; small ink-spot to fore-edges. Original endpapers just starting at gutters. Offset browning to endpapers. Bookplate to inside front board. Closed tear to centre of final contents page (3cm). Decorated initials, head-, and tail-pieces. No publisher; Blom suggests Thomas Meighan, and Mitchell identifies Meighan's publication of the volume as the cause of his 1737 arrest (one of several for 'seditious publications'), also identifying the printer as Anne Parker of St Giles Cripplegate: both Meighan and Parker were arrested in October 1737, and copies of the book confiscated (Mitchell, 'Thomas Meighan: Notes on the Future of Catholic Bookselling in England', Publishing History 10, 1981, p. 53). The preface contains an answer to C. Middleton's 1729 anti-Catholic 'A Letter from Rome'. Signature in attractive old hand to inside front board: 'John Scott, Gloucester Street, London, No 1302'. This is likely the clockmaker active in the 1780s and 90s at 40 Gloucester Street, Red Lion Square, London. Front free endpaper is closely written with birth and death dates of members of the Knight family, ranging from 1765 to 1804. This is almost certainly the Knight family, Catholics who settled at Axminster in 1763 and were instrumental in the construction of a Catholic chapel there. John Knight (d. 1801, in line with the death date for the John Knight attested here) was land agent to the Lord Petre, the Petres being a long-established Catholic family (Challoner had succeeded a member of the family, Benjamin Petre, as Vicar Apostolic of the London District) who owned Axminster lands. John Knight converted a room of his Axminster house for use as a Catholic chapel in c. 1765: Mass was to be celebrated there for nearly 70 years. After the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 John Knight's son Henry (1779-1858, birth date recorded here) was responsible for the building of a small Catholic chapel in Axminster, the first public Catholic place of worship in Axminster since the Reformation, opened in 1831. In 1862, also under the patronage of the Knight family, a Catholic church (St Mary's, Axminster), was completed and consecrated. 'The Catholick Christian Instructed', which was to reach 14 editions before the close of the 18th century, was one of Challoner's many devotional and polemical works, aimed at ordinary English Catholics and intended to 'popularize and transmit the mainstream Douai tradition which he had received' (Duffy, Challoner and his Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England, 1981, 90). This extraordinary range of 'catechetical and apologetic works, prayer books, meditations, martyrologies, and controversy' all 'written in plain, sound, instructive Augustan prose, often affective in tone, yet as sober as their century (.) ensured that Challoner's church did better than survive' (ODNB). The Knight family of Axminster, closely associated with this volume, were in many ways Challoner's archetypal audience, and their incremental efforts to restore a place of Catholic worship in the English village of Axminster are readily understood as a concrete expression of his broader project. First edition of a significant work. Blom 508. ESTC T072815. ~Robust packaging. Overseas orders trackable on request. Size: xxiv, 261, (3)pp