The Forming and Fixing of the English Prayer Book
I. The Reformation
The Ecclesiastical Revolution which we call the Reformation was only the expression in the field of religion of the general social movement which began modern times. The breakdown of feudalism, the rise of nationalities, the revival of learning, the invention of printing, the discoveries of new continents and of new ways to the old, all had their share in the making of a new world. It was to be a world in which individualism was the dominant note, and freedom — spiritual, political, and social — the dominant ideal. It was a world in which the change in the ideals controlling men's conduct is comparable only to that through which we are living today. The times cried for reform and readjustment; but sadly enough the official Church, entrenched in age-old power, was unready. Men like More and Erasmus were voices crying in the wilderness. The reformation for which they had worked and prayed became in fact a revolution.
In this trying time England was fortunate. The break with Rome was primarily political; and political motives continued largely to control the extent and the manner of such doctrinal and liturgical changes as were authorized. Though this attitude has often been challenged from the standpoint of both extremes alike, whose eager proponents were unable to see anything but a mere time-serving in its middle position of moderation, the fact remains that this despised method of “practical politics” enabled the Church of England to accomplish a rational reformation, without such radical sweeping away of the past as occurred on the Continent or in Scotland. The Church kept its Catholic order, the substance of its Catholic liturgies, the continuity of its Church life in parish and diocese, while embracing a deep conviction that the new age must discard outworn superstition, and seek simplicity and genuineness in its worship, and scriptural authority for its teaching. The alterations were made with conservative deliberation. It was a generation after the break with the papal authority before the liturgical reform was measurably complete in the Elizabethan Prayer Book, and a century more before all the contrary tendencies received a definitive stabilization in the English standard Book of 1662.
II. The General Movement for Ritual Reform
The demand for a reformation in the field of worship, as well as in those of doctrine and discipline, was active everywhere in the sixteenth century, within as well as without the Roman Communion. The Missals and Breviaries had assumed formidable proportions, immensely elaborate in detail, and proportionately difficult of use; moreover they varied from diocese to diocese, over two hundred different Missals having been printed before the Reformation. There was obvious need of greater simplicity, uniformity, and the fixing of comprehensive standards to eliminate quantities of complicated and unnecessary detail, and to clarify the essential meaning of the various offices, which had been obscured by their innumerable subsidiary and often superstitious accompaniments.
One such attempt was made with papal authorization in the revised Breviary of the Spanish Cardinal Quiñones, General of the Franciscans. His first draft of 1535 appeared in six editions, and his second in 1537 enjoyed a hundred more in the next thirty years. Both forms were a drastic simplification of the Hours, ostensibly for the private use of the clergy, but actually embodying a stringent criticism of the medieval offices. Quiñones' chief objective was the restoration of the continuous recitation of the Psalter, and the reading of Holy Scripture, uninterrupted by the incidence of festivals of the Saints, and the suppression of the cluttering of anthems, responds, hymns, etc., which broke up and obscured that prime purpose of the offices. Cranmer's Preface to the First English Prayer Book, dealing as it does almost exclusively with the Choir Offices, is little else but a free translation of Quiñones' preface to his work; indeed the Cardinal enunciated all of Cranmer's guiding principles, and even enumerated the examples of detailed abuses which are such a striking feature of Cranmer's Preface.1
Rome considered that Quiñones' revision was too sweeping, and too close to Reformation standards. Moreover, it was threatening to supplant the public offices, and actually for a time made its way into choir in Spain — a use for which it was never contemplated or authorized. It was therefore suppressed at the promulgation of the Breviary of the Council of Trent in 1568. Its underlying principles, however, as to the use of the Psalter and Scripture were finally incorporated in the Breviary of Pius X in 1913.
The Protestant groups on the Continent made a much more radical breach with tradition. Their tendency was to supplant rather than to revise the ancient services. In Luther's orders, his Litany was a really magnificent composition, collecting much of the greatest value in the rich “Gallican” tradition of Northern Europe; his offices for Baptism, Marriage, and Burial were also intelligently conservative, though much simplified; but for the Eucharist, while he kept the unessential framework of the rite, he abolished the essential Canon, substituting the reading of the scriptural narrative for the vital Prayer of Consecration; and the daily offices as such, with very little regulation or even suggestion, were remitted to the discretion of the minister. The Calvinistic orders were similar in character, but even slighter in prescribed content. In both, the celebration of the Sacraments tended to be overshadowed by the preaching of the Word. In the sketchy outlines of the general services devised for the latter purpose, some few features were salvaged from the Breviary, but the required order of use of Psalter and Scripture was abandoned: and the services for the most part replaced the old Hours with a plan based on the so-called “Prone” or vernacular devotions formerly customary at High Mass. Both Calvinistic and Lutheran services added many hortatory and penitential elements.
The Calvinistic orders affected the English revision through the liturgies of refugee congregations in England, and the influence of visiting divines from the Continent. Cranmer also during his stay in Germany had acquired some first-hand acquaintance with the regional Lutheran schemes; and besides Luther's writings, he took some suggestions from the Consultation of Archbishop Hermann von Wied of Cologne. Hermann espoused the cause of the Reformation, and his book was a draft scheme for the revision of the Liturgy, composed in conference with eminent men of like mind, and published in 1542. For services within the Roman Communion, it was of course an impossibility, and Hermann was removed from his see in 1547; but as a Protestant document it was learned, able, and moderate, and such portions as Cranmer adopted were a real contribution to the English rite.
III. Preliminary Moves
In England itself reforms of various kinds were slowly accomplished. Coverdale's translation of the Bible was authorized in 1535. Special Injunctions were issued as to the teaching of the people. The “Bishops' Book” of 1537, and its amended successor, the “King's Book” of 1543, furnished doctrinal instruction. The reading of a chapter of the Bible in English2 was required at Matins and Evensong in 1543. Sentiment was growing against many accompaniments of the services which were deemed superstitious.
In 1544 the Litany, the first complete office in English, the work of Cranmer, was set forth under royal authority. Other changes were in the making when the death of Henry VIII and the accession of Edward VI in January 1547 gave an opportunity for a more rapid and comprehensive dealing with the whole matter. The boy King was definitely Protestant. The Reform party was in control. Royal Injunctions were put forth, requiring among other things the reading of the Epistle and Gospel in English at High Mass, with curtailment of the Hour Services.
In 1548 a Royal Proclamation set forth the Order of Communion. This Order directed that after the Priest's Communion in the Latin service, “without the varying of any other rite or ceremony in the Mass (until other order be provided),” the Communion be administered to the people in both kinds, with appropriate devotions in English.3 This was a quite illogical but typically English way of moving forward.
IV. The First English Prayer Book
A complete Prayer Book in English was issued in 1549. Imposed by act of Parliament, it has been much debated whether it was authorized by the synods of the Church. While the records are defective and the evidence somewhat conflicting, it seems undeniable that the Church approved it in some form.4
Much of the services had appeared in English in tentative use during the period of change;5 recourse was had to the English versions of the Primers;6 and a group of bishops and other scholars conferred and assisted in the draft: but the plan and most of the execution were unquestionably Cranmer's. His was the guiding and deciding hand, his the consistent mold of doctrine, his the masterly distinction of style which no subsequent pen has been able to equal, and which ranks his Prayer Book with the greatest liturgies of all time.
Except for the Ordinal, which was published separately the following year, the First Prayer Book gathered into one volume all that Cranmer and his assistants felt was essential in the various medieval offices, and the less complete revisions already undertaken. Thus the new ritual had the cardinal merit, perhaps the primary purpose, of availability, in simplicity of use by the clergy, and intelligibility to the people. For the first time in a thousand years in the West, all the services were in a language understood by the laity, for whose benefit they were originally composed; and they were so designed as to enlist once more the people's participation in their performance, as had been the case in the primitive days of the Church — thus giving liturgical expression to the Reformation movement to revive the New-Testament teaching of the priesthood of all believers.
In the matter of doctrine, the services were perhaps not so much reformed as clarified. The reading of the Scriptures in English was given a primary place in worship, affording a greatly broadened basis for the Church's teaching. The Sacraments and other rites were divested of such ceremonies — whether medieval or ancient; Cranmer did not have the data to discriminate — as tended to distract the mind from the essential meaning of the rites. The ritual language was minutely and, on the whole, most intelligently censored to preserve true Catholic doctrine, and to remove medieval accretions and misconceptions of the primitive and universal faith.7
Finally, the First Prayer Book led the movement for uniformity of rite, against the chaos of medieval local customs, setting the precedent afterward followed by the Council of Trent. “Now from henceforth,” says the Preface to the Book, “all the whole realm shall have but one use.”
The creators of the new book were aware of the significance of their work. Yet they could hardly have realized all that it would mean for the future in England, and in wide lands of which they had heard but fantastic rumors, and in nations yet unborn; “for in its purification of doctrine, in its simplification of the services, above all in its use of the English tongue, it was and is the fons et origo of all subsequent versions of the Book.”8
V. The Second Prayer Book, and the Elizabethan Settlement
Changes of such magnitude could hardly be accepted without disturbance. Looking back upon those turbulent times, it is now clear that Cranmer correctly interpreted the mind and the needs of that day, in that the great inarticulate majority of the English Church accepted his work without protest, and tacitly adopted its basic principles as a finality of English worship for all future generations. In only one quarter of the country was there any organized conservative opposition: in Devon a protest was fomented which bears the stamp of reactionary clerical leadership, since it hotly espoused some abandoned details which were least defensible, least valuable and intelligible to the lay mind. And this movement actually broke out into armed insurrection, and was firmly put down by force. Cranmer expected and had nerved himself to deal with opposition from that side: indeed, he was all too ready to act at the first hint of such antagonism, and remorselessly silenced and removed conservatives of great ability and excellent spirit, who might have given him reluctant but valuable support. But he was totally unprepared for the unwillingness of the members of his own party of reform to stop short of any extremes, to abide by any settlement, or to submit to any control.
Such a situation, however, seems to be inherent in the progress of all revolutions. Not only the renunciation of former rulers, but also the breach with established custom, for a time completely upsets the prevailing equilibrium between the eternally opposed principles of authority and liberty, and between the conservative and the progressive spirit. It is extremely easy to condemn the blind obstinacy of the partisans of the old order, the heady excesses of the enthusiasts of the new, the follies of both in their treatment of each other. It has not proved easy at all for historians to assay the various periods of conflict without a sympathetic bias and animus of their own, to discern permanent needs of the human spirit under the extravagant expressions of particular controversies, and to draw from them the lessons which we need today for our still unsolved problems of conciliation and comprehension.
The restiveness of the English leaders of reform was further incited by Genevan influences, notably by Bucer and Peter Martyr, Continental divines who had sought refuge in England, and had been honored by chairs of divinity at Cambridge and Oxford. Both pressed for a further revision in the direction of Calvinistic standards.
The Second Prayer Book accordingly was passed by Act of Parliament in 1552, and imposed by another Act of Uniformity. Convocation seems to have had little to do with authorizing it, beyond considering some minor points in desultory debate. Cranmer claimed in his Preface that the First Book had been all that any reasonable person could desire, and that the objections to it had arisen from the contentiousness of unreasonable men. This seems to represent his settled conviction; certainly to an extent that has not been at all realized, he avoided making real modifications of doctrine in the Second Book.
The greatest controversy centered around the Communion: and Cranmer's manner of handling that problem is typical of his objectives in the whole book. As we shall see later,9 the very extensive alterations which he made in the order of that service to render it more conformable to Protestant views of the Sacrament are not less striking than the minute pains which he took to ensure that no element of value was actually removed from the rite.
Some further externals and accessories were dropped, notably the eucharistic vestments, and the exorcism, anointing, and chrysom in Baptism. For the rest, all prayers for the dead were abolished; and new penitential beginnings of the daily offices and the Communion seem designed further to supplant the use of private confession.
The new book was no happier than the old in quieting controversy. It was a hot, heady, intolerant time. The new wine was still in ferment, and declined to be confined by any bottles, new or old: many men were in a mood to quarrel with any ordinances of worship whatever which were imposed and required. Indeed, great issues were at stake, of which these liturgical and doctrinal disputes were only symptoms. Men fought with bitter recrimination over such seemingly unessential questions as kneeling at Communion or the use of the sign of the Cross. They were really fighting to establish the principles which should guide the Church and people of England as they moved on into the new age.
The frail young King died. Mary, who had successfully resisted every attempt to detach her from her divorced mother's religion, came to the throne. There was a swift overturning of the Protestant régime. There were persecutions and martyrdoms. There was the unpopular Spanish marriage. The nation breathed more easily when Mary's short reign ended and Elizabeth came to the throne.
It was fortunate for England that the new Queen was no zealot. Her ability as a moderator between warring factions appears in the fact that to this day there remains uncertainty as to her exact religious opinions. She had an open and independent mind. It is clear that she was a sincere Protestant, definitely rejecting papal claims, and disliking distinctively papal ritual.10 Her personal preference inclined her to the dignity and even splendor of the historic traditions of worship. Political considerations drove her increasingly to the new ways. She held the two in balance, determined to enforce uniformity, but realizing that both sides must find at least a measure of satisfaction.
The Elizabethan Prayer Book of 1559 adopted the Second Book of Edward VI as its practical basis, with some additional provisions for the Lectionary, and with the significant compromises with the First Book of combining the Sentences of Administration of the Communion of the two books to their present forms, and of appending the “Ornaments Rubric” authorizing the ornaments of church and minister which were allowed in the second year of Edward VI.11 Thus the Queen and her advisers opened the way for that policy of comprehensiveness which, in theory if not always in practice, has ever since been characteristic of the Church of England.
The “Elizabethan Settlement” made its way rapidly. The people were apparently ready for it; and only a small number of clergy were deprived because of unwillingness to accept it. The persecutions of the Marian reaction had definitely fixed the Protestant position of the nation; and this was confirmed by the Pope's order in 1562 prohibiting Roman Catholics from attending the services of the Church of England, followed in 1570 by his Bull of Excommunication and Deposition against Queen Elizabeth. The separation of England and Rome was now complete.
VI. The Jacobean Prayer Book
Though the sobering experiences of the days of “Bloody Mary” had disposed all parties to accept the formal Elizabethan “Settlement” as a measure of peace for the time, there remained the ineluctable conflict between liberty and authority, independency and uniformity. During the following century, this conflict was cast in the mold of a struggle for domination between Genevan and English ideas of the Church. The Calvinistic system of belief and worship had swept the field in Scotland; and Scottish Presbyterian influence fed the fires of discontent in the sister nation.
On the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 as James I of the United Kingdom, the Calvinistic party assumed that a great victory lay within their reach. They presented to the King the pretentiously styled “Millenary Petition,” so called from its supposed thousand signers, alleging grievances against the worship, ministry, support, and discipline of the Church. The King appointed a conference at Hampton Court. Like practically all Scotchmen, he was a keen amateur theologian; but he had conceived a personal dislike for the contentious spirit of the churchmen of his native land, and had resolved to espouse the Episcopal side. The Conference gave him exactly the opportunity which he desired to assert his royal prerogative to the English hierarchy, and to put his unruly countrymen firmly in their place. Under his own resolute presidency, the deliberations were not allowed to get out of hand for a moment, but were strictly confined to the announced agenda. The Presbyterians' hope had been to turn the first concessions into a vantage-ground for the general reorganization of the Church. This died at the opening of the Conference; and thereafter they argued their points perfunctorily, and accepted the resulting relaxations without gratitude.
The “Jacobean” Prayer Book of 1604 was issued by royal Letters Patent, and passively accepted by Convocation, whose Canon 80 of the same year ordered the book provided for use in the parish churches. The results of the Hampton Court Conference were represented by a slight reduction in Lessons from the Apocrypha; the withdrawal of Lay Baptism in emergency; an explanatory “or Remission of Sins” appended to the title of “The Absolution,” and a like gloss to the title of the Confirmation Service; and the addition of the matter on the Sacraments to the Catechism.12 The supplications for the Royal Family in the daily offices and the Litany, and four Special Thanksgivings, were also inserted in this book.
VII. The Scottish Prayer Book of 1637
In Scotland itself, a temporary use of the Second English Prayer Book beginning in 1557 was halted after the return of John Knox from exile in 1559; and Knox's form of Calvin's directory of worship under the title The Book of Common Order became the Scottish standard. King James restored the lapsed episcopate to Scotland in 1610, and began forceful endeavors to bring the country into line with England in the matter of rite. A half-hearted attempt toward compliance was made in a draft of 1619, inserting a few English forms in Knox's Order; but it was not printed. Under Charles I the matter was revived in 1629, with conferences between Bishop Maxwell and Archbishop Laud. Laud at first was not interested, wishing the Scotch to have the English book; but the Scottish bishops proceeded with the English book as a basis, modified in a Presbyterian direction. In 1635, with the work virtually complete and partly in print, Laud suddenly awakened to the liturgical opportunity, and reopened the matter vigorously, with the able assistance of Maxwell and Wedderburn.
The resulting book was authorized by Royal Warrant, Act of the Scottish Privy Council, and Royal Proclamation, in 1636, for use the following year. Undoubtedly it would now be known as the “Laudian,” rather than the “Scottish,” Prayer Book — since it perfectly expressed Laud's churchmanship, and the Scotch at that time would have none of it; attempts to use it were broken up by rioting — if it were not for the fact that the process of its making had founded a Scottish school and tradition of liturgical scholarship which to this day has not ceased to be one of the most eminent and respected in the Anglican Communion. Also, the Episcopal Church of Scotland subsequently adopted the Book of 1637, and, as we shall see, has continued to improve upon it to the present time.
Frequent reference will be made hereafter to the Book of 1637 in the history of the various offices. It may suffice here to say that in many respects this Book revived unwisely abandoned excellencies of the First Prayer Book of 1549; in many more it adorned the services with judicious enrichments, and made them more available with exact and illuminating rubrics. This Book has been the prime fount of inspiration for all subsequent Prayer Book revisions to this day. Not only did it contribute a great deal of valuable detail to the Book of 1662: it was sufficiently in advance of its age that there remained many more matters whose essential rightness was recognized only recently, and which were adopted into all the revisions of the last decade.
VIII. The Great Rebellion
Meanwhile in England affairs in Church and State were approaching a crisis. King Charles I carried to their logical extreme the Tudor tendencies to autocracy, attempting to govern the realm in the manner of a modern dictator, rather than as the constitutional monarch of a free people. Laud, his Primate, reflected the same spirit, pouring oil on the flames of discontent by compelling conformity with a high hand.
The convening of the Long Parliament at the end of 1640 saw the battle joined. The Lords tried a back-fire, by appointing a committee to consider concessions as to the “Innovations,” as the Calvinistic party called all the ritual details to which they took exception. The list is interesting because of the real indifference of the matters complained of: about two-thirds of them have been subsequently authorized in some form in later Anglican books, without appreciably altering the “proportion of the faith.”13
But it was now too late for concessions. Determined demands were made for the abolition of altars, organs, vestments, the hierarchy, and the imposition of any rites and ceremonies. Episcopacy was abolished in 1643; in 1645 the Primate was executed, and the Book of Common Prayer was outlawed under severe penalties.
For the next fifteen years the only permitted form of prayer was the “Directory of Public Worship,” an abridgment of Knox's Genevan scheme. It was an Order, not a Prayer Book, offering skeleton suggestions for the conduct of the services, with a few model forms of prayer.14 In this interim the loyal clergy got the Prayer Book formulæ by heart, and used them in substance if not in form, or devised equivalent services for themselves. The latter course was taken by Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor.15 Their rituals contributed the use of Psalms 39 and 90 to the Burial Office of 1662; and Taylor's recourse to the Liturgy of St. James was a precursor of the move to conform to some primitive features of the Eastern rites which eventually has had important effects upon the structure of most Anglican liturgies.
IX. The Restoration
After Cromwell's death, the reaction of the English people from the dictatorship of the Commonwealth made inevitable the restoration of Charles II as King, and equally so the restitution of the Church of England. Both Church and State turned with relief to constitutional order as the only possible safeguard of the people's liberties.
As soon as negotiations began with the exiled Prince, the use of the Prayer Book was spontaneously and very generally revived. Five editions of the Book of 1604 are known to have been printed in 1660.16 The Presbyterians fought a losing battle, first against any official restoration of the Book, next against its imposition as required without alternative, last against detailed forms and expressions. The King was sympathetic, and issued general declarations of amnesty, and an interim declaration of toleration; and every opportunity was given for the defeated party to be heard.
The Savoy Conference brought the issue to its conclusion. This consisted of forty-two divines, evenly representing the two parties, in session for nearly four months in 1661 at the residence of the Bishop of London at the “Savoy Hospital.” Under Baxter's leadership, the Presbyterians presented a long list, known as the “Exceptions of the Ministers,” comprising every extant objection to the Book of 1604. The “Exceptions” were carefully considered but firmly dealt with by the Bishops. Many amendments in detail were conceded: and indeed credit should be given to the penetrating lucidity of the Presbyterians, a legitimate inheritance from Calvin himself, which pointed out many expressions which fell short of being just and apposite. But their really substantive objections to any required Liturgy, or to what the Bishops held to be essentials of the historic faith and worship of the Universal Church, were refuted and disallowed in no conciliatory spirit.17
Whatever views one may hold of the points at issue, whether liturgical or doctrinal, one cannot but sorrow that at that critical moment these two groups of able and Christian men could find no way of agreement. Hitherto, both parties were within the communion of the Church: and it surely seems as if that Church could and should have been kept or made broad enough to continue to contain them. But after this failure of mutual adjustment and understanding, it must be recognized that the Church of England was no longer the Church of all the English people. Something was wrong then, which we to this day have still to set right.
Meantime, proceedings for a new Prayer Book were begun in Parliament, and Convocation appointed a committee of bishops, of which Cosin, Wren, and Sanderson were the guiding spirits. The work was done in a month; which is not quite so surprising as it seems, as the committee consisted of only seven, and the three bishops named had long been students of the liturgy, and had systematic drafts of changes which they had been accumulating for years. The work was passed by both houses of both Convocations; received further modifications in Parliament; and was again adopted as amended by the Convocations. This therefore was the first Prayer Book which had the fullest and most unquestioned synodical authorization. A committee of Convocation supervised its printing; some copies of this edition were corrected by hand and certified under the Great Seal; and these Sealed Books were the first examples of an authenticated Standard Book of Common Prayer.
In the Book of 1662, there were some 600 changes; of which the most important will be noted under the history of the respective offices. It embodied six new prayers, four new Collects, new offices for Adult Baptism18 and for use At Sea.19 The Bible quotations, except for the Psalter, the Decalogue, and the Comfortable Words and some Offertory Sentences, were according to the Authorized Version of 1611. The detailed changes in text and rubric of the services were all with the object of greater clarity and practicality, ignoring on the one hand Puritan demands for changes in fundamental sense and use, and on the other not going beyond the Book of 1604 to revive more ancient features, save as they were brought to the attention of the revisers in the Scottish Book of 1637 — and even that was conservatively employed. In filling in details, and making explicit an inadequate rubric, they naturally suffered at times from too brief a perspective of historical knowledge.
All this minuteness effectively brought the Prayer Book of 1662 up to date, and made it adequate for the needs of a modern age. It has remained the standard in continuous use for over 270 years in England. It may be noted that in the matter of language, it has been the greatest of all conservative forces to stay the natural degeneration of the English tongue — even more than the Bible, because of its constant corporate use, and that in spoken form. Thus although Shakespeare, and even later authors, used many words which are now obsolete, so that at times they actually speak in a dead language, there are not over two or three words in the Prayer Book which are of doubtful meaning to the ordinary user today.