The Ancestry of the Prayer Book

I. Liturgical Life and Growth

The Book of Common Prayer is the product of a long evolution. Its roots reach back into both Jewish and pagan worship. It carries marks of every age of Christian history. It gathers up much of the best of the past, and adapts it to the present needs of Christian worship.

But it has achieved its present form through no mere eclectic method. It is not a manufactured article, but an organic growth. For any adequate understanding of the Book, it is therefore necessary first to see it in relation to the whole process of liturgical development. Only then can we rightly appraise its distinctive characteristics, and the principles that have made it what it is.

II. The Forming of Orders of Worship

Early Christian worship must have been quite spontaneous in origin and method. There were at first no formal order, no settled prayers, nor any fixed place of meeting. The Christians gathered in private houses; they met in the synagogues with other Jews; they used the Temple as a place for prayer and preaching. But it is clear from the accounts in Acts that it was not long before their distinctive needs began to separate them more and more from their Jewish brethren. The beginning of that distinction is indicated in Acts 2:46, where it is stated that they “continued daily with one accord in the temple,” and also “breaking bread from house to house.”

The process of creating any kind of formal order must have been very gradual. The New Testament picture of the Christians gathered for worship, as we find it for example in Corinthians, shows us a most informal and at times almost disorderly group. All took part as they were moved. Some prayed; some preached; some spoke with tongues. They sang hymns;1 they transacted what business had to be done. It was a family gathering: and like a family, the chief sign and symbol of their unity was the Breaking of Bread, and the friendly meal or Agapé2 which accompanied it. Neither the Temple nor the Synagogue could be used for such worship. There were also wonted ceremonies for the initiation of new adherents into their fellowship, and for the commissioning of new leaders in their community; and a little later there is some trace of a systematic care of the sick.3 Marriage also, in the light of the words of the Lord, was accepted as a divine institution; and the Burial and Resurrection of Christ had given an added significance to the burial of the dead: but both, in Jewish practice, were necessary actions rather than religious rites; the New Testament gives us no information that they were treated otherwise by Christians in apostolic times; and it was much later when the Church adopted and adapted Roman customs of marriage, and evolved its own rites for the burial and commemoration of the dead.

Two factors moulded the early forms of Christian worship. On the one hand was the ordinary synagogue worship in which all had been trained, and which contributed the idea of an ordered liturgical service, and the use of the Jewish Scriptures, hymns, and prayers, as a model for their own. On the other, were the ideas and actions necessitated by their new religious experience.

The forms of the synagogue service of the first century are not certainly attested; but the rabbinical writings of the first to the third centuries probably represent them with sufficient accuracy for our purposes. From the great storehouse of the Mishnah, modern scholars have inferred some such outline as this:4 (1) the Shema‘, an extended profession of faith in the words of Deut. 6:4–9, 11; 11:13–21; and Num. 15:37–41; (2) the so-called Eighteen Benedictions, a chain of prayers comprising a very comprehensive General Intercession, both in scope and detail offering striking coincidences with the Christian “Prayers of the Faithful,” whose parent it unquestionably was; (3) readings from the Law, and the Prophets; (4) a benediction; and (5) a sermon.

But when we compare this scheme with the early Christian “Common Prayers,” whether used separately,5 or as a Pro-Anaphora introductory to the offering of the Eucharist,6 we see that though the Christian service covers substantially the same ground as the Jewish, it is not a copy in either content or order. For centuries the Pro-Anaphora did not include a profession of faith; on the other hand it did include the use of psalmody,7 which was no part of the Synagogue ritual, though it was a feature of the daily services in the Temple. And the order of parts was quite independent. The fact is that all these elements are really inevitable in any general service in any religion: and it seems that the Church evolved its own devotions out of this accustomed material, but freely and creatively under the inspiration of its own religious impetus.

The distinctively Christian elements in this common worship were the Lord's Prayer, and the Lord's Supper, called in the Acts the “Breaking of Bread.”89 The probable nature of the latter observance in primitive use, and the manner in which a meal of fellowship was converted to a sacrificial action, will be discussed in Chapter VIII.

Congregational worship, however, necessarily settles down to some sort of agreed order of procedure. This tendency was perhaps accelerated by the fact that from the first the Christian observances were rites as well as services; they were actions, in which something was done as well as said. During the first two centuries, as Dr. Fortescue remarked, the dominant characteristic of the Liturgy (we may add, of other rites as well) was “somewhat free improvisation on fixed themes in a definite order.”10

But striking devotional phrases have the quality of lingering in the mind, and of being used again, both by the author and by his hearers. From the first, there was a tendency to settle upon a form of words, as well as upon an order of thought. St. Clement of Rome at the end of the first century concludes his first letter to the Corinthians with a long prayer perfectly exemplifying the solemn style of the historic liturgies,11 and some of his very expressions survived in later use.

Another very early example, now dated about the second quarter of the second century, was the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,12 in Syria. This prototype of the “Church Orders” was a tractate of instruction, chiefly along ethical lines, for initiates into the Faith — a sort of primitive “Confirmation Manual” — but incidentally it gave definite forms for Baptism and the Communion, as we shall see.

About the year 148, we have a careful and objective description of the same two rites in the First Apology of St. Justin Martyr, a reasoned explanation of Christian faith and practice addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius.13 This description is sufficiently accurate and comprehensive as to apply quite recognizably to any historic form of the rites down to the present day; the essential order and detail are all there. Justin implies a Trinitarian form for administering Baptism, and a liturgical narrative of the Institution of the Eucharist: but he does not quote any of the other words of the latter rite, intimating that the Thanksgiving was made “at length,”14 and “according to the ability” of the celebrant.15 Evidently in his time the service was not a settled form of words, though it was an established procedure; though extempore, it was not aimlessly spontaneous.

In the Early Church, therefore, we have the formative stages of a process which has endured throughout Christian history. For one lifetime after another, men brought the best powers of their minds to the worship of God, “to render thanks for the great benefits they had received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, … and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.” By the principles of survival in an organic evolution, the simplest, most universal, and most affecting thoughts and expressions became established in wonted use, and lived on after the death of those who first gave them utterance, until they became fixed Liturgies — which, long before they were inscribed upon rolls of parchment, were written in the hearts of the faithful.

III. The Fixation of Regional Rites

One important influence in the fixing of ritual texts appeared in those interesting circular letters covering questions of discipline and worship known as the “Church Orders.” The precursor of these was the Didaché. Subsequent examples eliminated the didactic element of the Didaché, and enlarged the scope of the treatise to cover the whole internal regimen of the Church, including Holy Orders. The “Church Orders” were thus a sort of “consuetudinary” of their times, recording the formative stages of customary regulations and ritual in days before Canons were enacted, or the Liturgy fixed.

The first systematic and measurably complete of these treatments was the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus, leader of the Greek-speaking party in Rome, and eventually their schismatic bishop; pupil of Irenæus, and, as Dr. Cheetham aptly says, “the most remarkable man of letters produced by the Church of Rome in the first three centuries.”16 He was martyred probably shortly after his exile in 235. His liturgical writings may be dated about the year 217.17 Coming toward the end of the period when Greek was used as the language of the Roman Church, his voluminous writings fell into neglect, and have been largely lost. But the Apostolic Tradition was circulated throughout the Church, and, as we shall see, exercised a formative influence on the rites of many centers. The end of its pilgrimage was in Abyssinia, which it reached about the tenth century in a translation from a secondary Arabic version, where it was incorporated in the Ethiopic Synodos or Book of Canon Law, and where its Liturgy eventually ousted the parent Alexandrian order as the normal liturgy of the Church. Thus it was the strange and romantic destiny of this earliest standard liturgical text to have survived in constant use in the heart of Africa to the present day!

The Apostolic Tradition exists in five versions, Latin, Bohairic, Sahidic, Arabic, and Ethiopic, besides some important fragments of the original Greek embedded in the Apostolic Constitutions; and by the revolutionary researches of Dom Connolly18 and Dr. Schwartz19 it has been identified as the lost work of Hippolytus.20

The Apostolic Tradition contains not only detailed rubrical and quasi-canonical directions, but specimen texts, for Baptism, Ordinations, and the Eucharist; as well as some valuable information for the development of the Church's Common Prayers. Hippolytus intimated that the forms of prayer are still free — using Justin's exact phrase, that they should be “according to the ability” of the celebrant21 — and he gives his liturgical forms as examples of the manner in which he himself was accustomed to conduct the rites; perhaps by implication of the way he considered they ought to be conducted.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of these texts for the study of Christian rituals. They are properly basic, for they furnished the crystallizing center around which all the national rites “froze” into their definitive forms. The whole of liturgical history has had to be rewritten in the light of them; and such a reconstruction is offered in the present work.

In the matter of the baptismal rites, the witness of Hippolytus for this period is corroborated by that of Cyprian and Tertullian; but for the Eucharist and for Ordination, the Apostolic Tradition is indispensable, standing alone in the third century, which is the most obscure period of liturgical history. In this formative epoch, when the Christian services were in general settled as orders, but not yet fixed as texts, definite allusions in the Fathers are exceedingly scant.

About the middle of the fourth century, however, the fullest and most elaborate of all the “Church Orders,” the Apostolic Constitutions, furnishes us with a complete text of the Eucharist as celebrated in the region of Antioch, very amply confirmed in manifold detail by the writings of St. Chrysostom and St. Cyril of Jerusalem; as well as orders of Baptism and prayers of Ordination slightly elaborated from the actual text of Hippolytus; some notes on penitential discipline, and the Christian Year; directions and forms for Common Prayer; the blessing of the Oil for the Sick, and an account of the Burial and Commemoration of the Dead.

From about the same time, we have the Sacramentary or Book of Prayers of St. Serapion, contemporary of St. Athanasius, and Bishop of the rural diocese of Thmuis in the Nile Delta. Serapion's work is not a “Church Order,” as it contains no canonical matter, and a minimum of rubric. It consists of the text of the officiant's prayers for much the same rites and services as those of the Apostolic Constitutions. Certain peculiarities of arrangement just disqualify it from the status of an official “Sacramentary”; it looks more like the notes of an interested visitor.22

As we shall see later, it was during this fourth century that the texts of the great families of eucharistic liturgies took the definite forms which they still maintain. There were a few types, and not as many liturgies as there were individual congregations: because any rural town looks toward some larger center which it calls “The City”; and though no autocratic organization existed at this period, and though also throughout history there has been surprisingly little attempt on the part of the great sees to impose conformity in the matter of rite, yet the suburban churches showed themselves eager to copy the usage of outstanding and influential centers. Hence the growth of the historic liturgies has always been on a regional basis, in provincial types.

The tendency to differentiation was, however, counterbalanced to a considerable extent by the free exchange of ideas, expressions, and ceremonial between the various provinces by the agency of individual churchmen as they traveled back and forth, so that a particularly poignant phrase or edifying custom originating in one part of the world might be readily incorporated into the still elastic order of a number of other rites. This influence indeed has never altogether ceased, and probably never will, though subsequent conditions have much restricted its operation. But it was particularly active throughout the first four centuries, while the communion of the Church remained unbroken, and while Greek was alike the universal language of the intelligent classes throughout the Empire, and the common medium of the Church's worship everywhere.

But though in the formative period every center showed itself ready to welcome desirable new features, and to utilize luminous new phrases of devotion, yet both were incorporated into the already established framework of the local order, which from the first obstinately preserved its own genius by resisting modification of its essential structure and arrangement.

It was in the fourth century also that the Church first came forth into the light of day, as first a permitted and then an established religion. It ceased to be a secret and persecuted association, hiding under the cover of night, or in the everlasting darkness of the Catacombs. For the first time it built churches, and developed public ceremonials, which became increasingly elaborate, incorporating many survivals from the ancient pagan world.23

Yet already in the fourth century this tendency to enrichment of the worship of God, which has remained one of the formative forces in liturgical growth, encountered the opposite principle of simplification, which was necessarily evoked by the inordinate lengthening of the services which unrestricted enrichment entails. We shall see later how this was effected in the case of the eucharistic liturgy; how the two chief surviving rites Eastern and Western, the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom and the Roman Mass, prevailed over their rivals because they were the briefest forms in use; and how in our time these contrary tendencies for enrichment and simplification have been harmonized and made to work together by the application of a third principle of flexibility, in the form of free choice between prescribed alternative forms, which was unknown in the early ages of the Church.

IV. Medieval Service-Books

By the beginning of the fifth century, the fixation of the texts of the great liturgies was virtually complete. The many subsequent elaborations were in unessential details, and did not affect the fundamental characteristics of the rites.

From our earliest knowledge of them, after this fixation of the text, the service-books of all branches of the Church were on an entirely different basis from anything with which we are now familiar. There was no such thing as a complete Prayer Book, comprising all the public offices of the Church, since the great elaboration of the services then in use made that a physical impossibility. Indeed, that remains true in the Greek and Latin communions to this day. But before the invention of printing, the sheer bulk and cost of manuscript volumes prevented even the supplying to each of the numerous participants in each service of a complete text of that service: and like the actors in a play, they were provided with “part-books,” containing their own portions in full, and the “cues” for the place of those parts in the whole. In other words, there were no comprehensive books for a given service, but instead there were books for a given officer in one or even all services.

Thus the “Sacramentary” contained the bishop's prayers, not only for the Communion, but for the other Sacraments and rites. The deacon, subdeacon, master of ceremonies, and choir, had their supplementary books for the various offices.

In the West, the landmarks are the three oldest Sacramentaries. The “Leonine” Sacramentary,24 discovered in 1735, is a fragmentary and badly arranged collection covering three-quarters of the year, containing the proper prayers for the Eucharist, ordinations, requiem and nuptial masses, but lacking the Canon of the mass, and the baptismal services. It is purely Roman, and in its present form dates from the early part of the seventh century.

The “Gelasian” Sacramentary25 represents the original use of Italy outside of Rome; and is the form in which the Roman type of services first invaded Gallican territory. It is a comprehensive collection, covering all the offices of the Church. It is arranged on a different basis from the pure Roman books, for it divides the moveable from the immoveable feasts in the use of the Liturgy, and segregates the “occasional offices” from both, instead of fitting all together with some considerable awkwardness into the dates of the secular calendar. It belongs to the end of the seventh century.

The “Gregorian” type26 dates from the pontificate of Hadrian (784–791), who at the request of Charlemagne sent his official book as a pattern for the French churches. Its Calendar was on the same old Roman basis as the Leonianum; and it contained only the solemnities observed by the Roman court. For parochial use, it needed much supplement; and it is therefore found combined with varying appendices drawn largely from the “Gelasian” books, in the “Mixed Sacramentaries” of the next two centuries. Ultimately, it was the “Gelasian” order of text and Calendar which prevailed in the modern Missals.

Beginning in the ninth century, however, a different arrangement of service-books began to appear, giving complete texts of given offices, instead of part-books for particular officiants. The first of these were the Bishop's services, segregated into the “Pontifical.” Before the year 1000, the medieval multiplication of celebrations of the Communion, particularly as requiems, had brought about the invention of the new rite of “low mass” — utterly unknown in the early ages, and still regarded as a radical impossibility in the Eastern Churches — with the celebrant as the only minister: and for his use, all the part-books for the performance of the Liturgy were consolidated into the “Missal.” By the eleventh century, the missionary travels of members of the monastic orders made it frequently impossible for them to participate in the rendition of the Divine Service in the chapter; and the demand for a portable book containing a shortened but complete version of the Offices resulted in the “Breviary.” By the thirteenth century, the occasional offices for parochial use were brought together into the “Manual” or Hand-Book (modern, Rituale). The choir-books, directories of service, Epistle- and Gospel-books, and the like, maintained a separate existence for use as needed.

V. At the Reformation

The English service-books at the time of the Reformation were exactly of the type then prevalent in Northern Europe. They represented the result of a long process of mutual assimilation between the distinctive Roman use, and that of the rest of Europe.

As we shall see more particularly in the case of the Communion, it appears that the Western churches early developed a characteristic form of the services, marked by variability of parts in accordance with the Christian Year; and that in the fourth century Rome brought this process to a sudden end by fixing the greater part of its rites absolutely in invariable form, and by discouraging innovations thereafter; while outside the vicinity of Rome ritual elaboration went on unchecked. This was the origin of the conflict between the historic Roman and “Gallican” uses. The latter is found in a “pure” form and in fullest development in the essentially identical rites, the Gallican proper in France, and the Mozarabic in Spain.

But as the influence of Rome increased, there was a voluntary movement in “Gallican” regions to conform to Roman standards. Of their own motion France and Spain adopted the Roman order, to the complete extinction of the ancient French use, although the Mozarabic still exists as an endowed survival in a few churches. It appears that originally the “Gallican” rite prevailed in the British Isles, and in North Italy, from the existence of “mixed” books of the Celtic and Ambrosian rites and the Sacramentary of Bobbio, in all of which a “Gallican” framework is adapted around the Roman Canon of the Mass.27 This general adoption of the Roman rites was much facilitated by the liberal incorporation of impressive ceremonies and eloquent devotional forms from the “Gallican” orders into the once rigid and meagre outlines of all the Roman offices.

The original British and Irish churches drew their Christianity from Gallican missions, and unquestionably derived their liturgies from the same source. The Roman mission came to Britain with no purpose to impose their own rites upon the British and Celtic Christians with whom they would inevitably come into contact. “Take,” said Gregory to Augustine, “whatever you may find which would be pleasing to God, and good, religious, and right, and use it.”28 Yet in the competition of the two types, the same influences of the simplicity and practicality of the Roman service, and the prestige of the Apostolic See, operated in England as in other “Gallican” regions; and at Whitby (664) and Cloveshoo (747), the Celtic missionaries had to yield.

But Gallican influences were not dead. Intercourse with North Europe continued to be more frequent than that with Rome: and though the services of the various English uses at the Reformation were Roman in fundamental order and content — just as were the German rites, for example — yet they belonged to the North-European type as distinct from the Italian, in the matters of the Calendar, the liturgical Lectionary, and many surviving “Gallican” ritual details which had never been adopted at Rome.

There was, however, no national uniformity in England, but instead a system of diocesan “Uses,” of which Salisbury (better known under its old Latin name of Sarum), Hereford, and York were the chief. Of these Sarum was by far the most important. From the time of Bishop Richard Poore three centuries before the Reformation, that great cathedral foundation had led the way in liturgical matters, until it was the standard almost throughout England, Wales, and Ireland.

In addition to the official service-books to which allusion has been made, there had gradually come into existence many books of private devotion. The Psalter, the Creeds, the Lord's Prayer, schemes of Hour Services following in the main the plan of the Breviary, were used in varying ways. These books were called Primers. They were first in Latin; later, with English supplements, they were popular and widely used, had great educational value, and afterward exercised considerable influence in the formation of the English Prayer Book.29