BCP Reference · Annotated Sources
Sources of the Prayers and Thanksgivings
Tracing the occasional prayers of the Prayer Book to their historical origin
Three layers of provenance run through the section. The first is Cranmer’s own, drawn variously from the Sarum collects, the Latin Mass, the Eastern Liturgies, and Lutheran sources he had to hand. The second is the great Restoration revision of 1662, which added the General Thanksgiving, the prayer For All Sorts and Conditions of Men, and the prayers for use in time of national affliction — Plague, Civil War, the loss of public peace. The third is the American settlement of 1789 with its successive enlargements in 1892 and 1928, which preserved the Cranmerian and Restoration material almost unchanged but added a body of distinctly American prayers — for the President, for Congress, for Schools and Colleges, for Travelers, for Missions, for Children, for Families — that the older books had not contained.
The selection here is not exhaustive: the full table runs to some forty entries. The cards below cover the most historically significant prayers and give a representative sample of each layer of the book’s composition. Where a prayer is shared with another part of the Office — the Prayer of St. Chrysostom, the Grace — cross-references are given to the earlier pages in this series.
I.The Prayers for the Civil State
The 1789 American revision opened with a striking necessity: the office of King had vanished, and a Republic had been substituted for a Crown. The Prayers for the Civil State are accordingly the most American part of the book — Cranmerian in cadence but new in their occasion.
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For the President of the United States, and all in Civil Authority
“O Lord, our heavenly Father, the high and mighty Ruler of the universe, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth; Most heartily we beseech thee, with thy favour to behold and bless thy servant The President of the United States, and all others in authority…”
The American adaptation, made at the General Convention of 1789, of the 1662 prayer For the King’s Majesty. The opening invocation — the high and mighty Ruler of the universe — is preserved verbatim from the English; the body is altered only at the necessary points to substitute the President for the King. It is among the most exact American carry-overs of a Restoration prayer, and shows how delicately the framers of 1789 preferred to alter Cranmer’s and the Caroline divines’ work where alteration was unavoidable.
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For the Congress of the United States, to be used during their Session
“Most gracious God, we humbly beseech thee, as for the people of these United States in general, so especially for their Senate and Representatives in Congress assembled; that thou wouldest be pleased to direct and prosper all their consultations, to the advancement of thy glory, the good of thy Church, the safety, honour, and welfare of thy people…”
An entirely new composition for the 1789 American Book, traditionally attributed to Bishop William White of Pennsylvania, the principal architect of that revision. The structure is Cranmerian — a single periodic sentence rising through three clauses to a final purposive clause — but the occasion is wholly new: a deliberative legislature meeting in session, asked of God for the gift of right counsel. The prayer is appointed to be said only while Congress is sitting, and so passes in and out of liturgical use with the rhythms of the political year.
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For Our Country
“Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favour and glad to do thy will… Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues.”
Composed by the Rev. George Lyman Locke, Rector of St. John’s, Newport, in or about 1882; printed in his own parish use; adopted by the General Convention into the 1892 Book and carried unchanged into 1928. It is among the latest prayers in the book and among the most often used. The petition fashion into one united people the multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues bears the distinct stamp of the late nineteenth century — the great age of immigration to the American Republic — and reaches back, in its diction, to Pentecost and the gathered nations of Acts 2.
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For Courts of Justice
“Almighty God, who sittest in the throne judging right; We humbly beseech thee to bless the courts of justice and the magistrates in all this land… through him who shall come to be our Judge, thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ.”
Added in the 1928 revision, replacing an older and shorter form. The closing — through him who shall come to be our Judge — sets the work of the magistrate in eschatological perspective: the bench is a temporal anticipation of the Last Assize.
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For the Armed Forces of the United States
“O Lord God of Hosts, stretch forth, we pray thee, thine almighty arm to strengthen and protect the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of our country…”
Drawn together in 1928 from the older 1789 prayers For the Army and For the Navy, with the addition of airmen — a particular of the Great War, when air-service first became a settled fact of military life. The address O Lord God of Hosts reaches back through the Sanctus into the Old Testament theology of the Adonai Tsebaoth, the Lord of the armies of heaven; the prayer accordingly sets the soldier’s calling within the ordered sovereignty of God, not as a glorification of war but as a hallowing of those whom war has called.
II.The Prayers in Time of National Trouble
A cluster of older prayers for use in time of war, sedition, calamity, and pestilence. Cranmer composed several in 1549; the rest were added at the Restoration of 1662, when the memory of the Great Plague and the Civil War was still fresh.
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In Time of War and Tumults
“O Almighty God, the Supreme Governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist, to whom it belongeth justly to punish sinners, and to be merciful to those who truly repent; Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies…”
Composed by Cranmer for the 1549 Book and preserved unchanged through every later revision. Its structure is the classic Cranmerian collect-form: address to God under a divine attribute, a relative clause expanding it into the ground of the prayer, the petition proper, the result-clause, and the doxological close. It is the same structural rhythm one finds in the Collects of the Sundays.
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For the Restoration of Public Peace at Home
“O Eternal God, our heavenly Father, who alone makest men to be of one mind in a house, and stillest the outrage of a violent and unruly people; We bless thy holy Name, that it hath pleased thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately raised up amongst us…”
One of the most distinctly seventeenth-century prayers in the book, added at the Restoration of 1662. The petition that it hath pleased thee to appease the seditious tumults which have been lately raised up amongst us refers, with seventeenth-century circumlocution, to the recent settlement of the Civil War and the Interregnum. The opening — who alone makest men to be of one mind in a house — is from Psalm 68:6 in the Coverdale Psalter, and gives the prayer a quiet domestic register against the great public theme.
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In Time of Great Sickness and Mortality
“O Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron; and also, in the time of King David, didst slay with the plague of pestilence threescore and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest; Have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality…”
Added at the Restoration in 1662 and put into urgent use within three years, in the Plague of London of 1665. The opening typology — Numbers 16, 2 Samuel 24 — sets the present pestilence within the great biblical pattern of plague-and-mercy: God who has slain seventy thousand may yet command the destroying Angel to cease. The prayer is among the few in the Book that name the disaster they address by its proper name.
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In Time of Calamity
“O God, merciful and compassionate, who art ever ready to hear the prayers of those who put their trust in thee; Graciously hearken to us who call upon thee, and grant us thy help in this our need; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
A short and general prayer added in 1928 to provide a form for use in calamity of any kind — fire, flood, earthquake, accident — without the historical specificity of the Plague-prayer that precedes it in the book. Its brevity is its mark: it asks God for help in this our need, leaving the particular need to be supplied by the present occasion.
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For Malefactors, after Condemnation
“O most merciful God, who, according to the multitude of thy mercies, dost so put away the sins of those who truly repent, that thou rememberest them no more; Open thine eye of mercy upon these thy servants, who most earnestly desire pardon and forgiveness…”
Adapted at the Restoration from the older Visitation of the Sick, for use with prisoners after sentence of death — that is, for those condemned and awaiting execution. It is among the gravest prayers in the book, and the most particular: it is for a single person, in a single place, on the eve of his death by hanging. The prayer that this sick member be preserved in the unity of the Church reaches back into the medieval theology of penitential reconciliation: even the malefactor under the gallows is a member of the Body, and is to be commended into God’s favour as such.
III.The Prayers concerning the Weather and the Harvest
A small group of prayers for use in the agricultural year, addressing the two great needs of pre-industrial English life — rain in dry seasons, and clear weather in wet ones — together with later additions for fruitful seasons and the harvest of the sea.
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For Rain
“O God, heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ hast promised to all those who seek thy kingdom, and the righteousness thereof, all things necessary to their bodily sustenance; Send us, we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth, to our comfort, and to thy honour…”
Composed by Cranmer for the 1549 Book; preserved unchanged through every revision. The opening clause — citing the promise of Matthew 6:33, that those who seek first the Kingdom shall have all needful things added unto them — sets the prayer for rain firmly within the Sermon on the Mount, where the daily care of the body is taken into the divine economy of the Father’s providing. The petition for moderate rain and showers is prudent: not downpours, but the fitting measure.
This is one of the two prayers — the other being the Prayer for the Sick — preserved in the standing New Every Morning Evening Prayer rotation.
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For Fair Weather
“O Almighty Lord God, who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again; We humbly beseech thee… that thou wilt send us such weather, as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season…”
The pair-prayer to the foregoing, also composed by Cranmer in 1549. It is a remarkable example of his typological reading of providence: the present rain is set against the great Flood of Genesis 7, with the Noahic covenant of Genesis 9 invoked as the ground of the petition. The prayer thus moves from particular meteorological need into the Bible’s deepest typology of judgement and mercy, and asks fair weather as a Noah might have asked it.
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For Plenty (in time of Dearth and Famine)
“O God, heavenly Father, whose gift it is, that the rain doth fall, the earth is fruitful, beasts increase, and fishes do multiply; Behold, we beseech thee, the afflictions of thy people; and grant that the scarcity and dearth, which we do now most justly suffer for our iniquity, may, through thy goodness, be mercifully turned into cheapness and plenty…”
Added in the Elizabethan revision of 1559. The opening relative clause — whose gift it is, that the rain doth fall, the earth is fruitful, beasts increase, and fishes do multiply — is one of the loveliest sentences in the Prayer Book, gathering the four great economies of pre-industrial sustenance (rain, soil, herd, and sea) into a single Trinitarian doxology. Cheapness is used here in its older sense — good price, that is, ready availability — and not the modern sense of meanness or low value.
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For Fruitful Seasons (Rogation Days)
“Almighty God, Lord of heaven and earth; We humbly pray that thy gracious providence may give and preserve to our use the harvests of the land and of the seas, and may prosper all who labour to gather them…”
The 1928 revision, set particularly for use on the Days of Rogation — the three days before Ascension on which the Litany has been said in procession through the parish bounds, asking God’s blessing on the planted fields. The phrase those who labour to gather them introduces the human worker into the petition: not only the harvest, but the labourer, is to be remembered.
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For the Harvest of the Sea
“O Eternal God, who hast set the bounds of the deep, and dost still the wave thereof when it ariseth; We commend to thy gracious protection all who go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters…”
An American addition of 1928 with a strong Coverdale Psalter inheritance: those who go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters is from Psalm 107:23, in Coverdale’s rendering, set into the prayer almost without alteration. The phrase set the bounds of the deep reaches into Job 38 and Proverbs 8 — the great Wisdom-poems of the Old Testament — where the Lord’s ordering of the waters is spoken of as the first work of creation.
IV.The Prayers for the Sick and the Afflicted
A long sequence of prayers for use in personal trouble — sickness, injury, the approach of death, and the various afflictions of soul and body. Most are drawn from the 1549 Office of the Visitation of the Sick, with American additions in 1789 and 1928.
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For a Sick Person
“O Father of mercies, and God of all comfort, our only help in time of need; We humbly beseech thee to behold, visit, and relieve thy sick servant N. for whom our prayers are desired… In thy good time, restore him to health, and enable him to lead the residue of his life in thy fear, and to thy glory.”
Drawn from the 1549 Office of the Visitation of the Sick and gathered into the Prayers and Thanksgivings as a stand-alone form for general use. The opening invocation — O Father of mercies, and God of all comfort — is from 2 Corinthians 1:3, where the Apostle gathers the consolation of the sufferer into the consolation of Christ himself. The two-fold petition for health in this life and for life everlasting at the last is characteristic of the Cranmerian sick-bed prayer: it never asks bodily recovery without naming the further hope into which all bodily recovery is provisional.
This is the second of the two prayers preserved in the standing New Every Morning Evening Prayer rotation, as part of the fellowship’s healing-prayer tradition.
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For a Sick Child
“Almighty God and merciful Father, to whom alone belong the issues of life and death; Look down from heaven, we humbly beseech thee, with the eyes of mercy upon this child now lying upon the bed of sickness; visit him, O Lord, with thy salvation; deliver him in thy good appointed time from his bodily pain, and save his soul for thy mercies’ sake…”
Added in the 1928 revision. It is among the most distinctly nineteenth-century prayers in the book — written in an age in which infant mortality was still routine and the death of a child a domestic catastrophe expected at least once in every household. The petition holds the two possibilities open with notable equanimity: that the child may be prolonged on earth as an instrument of thy glory, or else received into those heavenly habitations, where, in the older language, the souls of those who sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity.
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For a Person at the Point of Departure
“O Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons; We humbly commend the soul of this thy servant, our dear brother, into thy hands, as into the hands of a faithful Creator, and most merciful Saviour…”
One of the great commendatory prayers, drawn from the 1549 Visitation of the Sick. The phrase this miserable and naughty world in the body of the prayer uses naughty in its older and stronger sense — worthless, given over to evil — and not the trivial modern sense it has since acquired. The image of the soul delivered from its earthly prison is from Hebrews 12:23 read in light of the Pauline figures of the body as a tabernacle to be put off; the prayer accordingly belongs to the patristic and medieval theology of the Christian death, in which the soul is lifted out of the body into the hands of its Creator.
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For Persons under Affliction
“O merciful God, and heavenly Father, who hast taught us in thy holy Word that thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men; Look with pity, we beseech thee, upon the sorrows of thy servant for whom our prayers are offered… lift up thy countenance upon him, and give him peace.”
Added in 1928 to provide a form for use with those whose affliction is not bodily sickness but some other trouble — bereavement, mental anguish, loss of work or fortune, family rupture. The opening citation — thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men — is from Lamentations 3:33, set within Jeremiah’s great meditation on suffering and divine mercy. The closing benediction — lift up thy countenance upon him, and give him peace — is the Aaronic blessing of Numbers 6, here gathered into intercession.
V.The Prayers for the Church’s Work
A group of prayers for the corporate offices and missions of the Church — for those preparing for ordination, for missions abroad, for the unity of God’s people, for Christian schools and colleges, for families, and for children. Some are 1662; most are American 1789 or 1928.
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For Those who are to be admitted into Holy Orders
“Almighty God, the giver of all good gifts, who of thy divine providence hast appointed divers Orders in thy Church; Give thy grace, we humbly beseech thee, to all those who are to be called to any office and administration in the same; and so replenish them with the truth of thy doctrine, and endue them with innocency of life…”
Added at the Restoration in 1662, drawn from the older ordinal collects, and appointed for use during the four Ember Weeks of the year — the four three-day fasts that have served, since at least the seventh century in the Latin West, as the canonical times of ordination. The petition for truth of thy doctrine and innocency of life is the Caroline divines’ standard pairing of orthodoxy with personal sanctity, the two together making up the Christian minister.
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For Missions
“O God, who hast made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the whole earth, and didst send thy blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off, and to those who are nigh; Grant that all men everywhere may seek after thee and find thee…”
Added to the American Book in 1892 and slightly adjusted in 1928. The opening citation — made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the whole earth — is from St. Paul’s Areopagus address in Acts 17:26, in the King James rendering. The petition gathers three great New Testament images of mission: the Pentecostal pouring of the Spirit upon all flesh (Joel 2 / Acts 2), the gathering of the nations into one fold (John 10), and the eschatological hastening of the Kingdom (Matthew 6:10).
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For the Unity of God’s People
“O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Saviour, the Prince of Peace; Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions… that we may be all of one heart, and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace…”
Added in 1928, but composed earlier — circulating in seventeenth-century private use among Anglican readers. The body is built almost entirely from Ephesians 4:4–6 (one Body, and one Spirit, and one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all), with the closing phrase with one mind and one mouth glorify thee from Romans 15:6. It is among the most ecumenical of the prayers of the book, and is appointed in many places for use during the Octave of Christian Unity.
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For Schools, Colleges, and Universities
“O Lord God of our salvation, to whom no work is impossible; bestow, we beseech thee, the abundance of thy grace upon all schools, colleges, and universities, especially upon the seminaries of sound learning and religious education in this Church…”
An 1789 American addition, traditionally ascribed to Bishop William White. It belongs to the period in which the new Republic was establishing its universities and divinity schools — General Seminary in 1817, Virginia Theological Seminary in 1823, the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge in 1867 — and the prayer accordingly asks for these as seminaries of sound learning and religious education: a phrase that became the conventional Anglican description of the church-related college.
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For Families
“Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who settest the solitary in families; We commend to thy continual care the homes in which thy people dwell… turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents.”
Added in 1928. The opening citation — who settest the solitary in families — is from Psalm 68:6 in the Coverdale Psalter, where the gathering of the lonely into the household is given as one of the great works of God. The body of the prayer is woven from 2 Peter 1:5–7 (faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness) and Malachi 4:6 (turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents) — the very last verses of the Old Testament, here brought into the household’s daily prayer.
VI.The Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions, and the Final Prayers
The end of the Prayers section is taken up with three universal prayers — for all the people of God, for travellers, and the Prayer of St. Chrysostom — that conclude the section as the Litany itself was concluded.
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A Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Men
“O God, the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, we humbly beseech thee for all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldest be pleased to make thy ways known unto them, thy saving health unto all nations… Finally, we commend to thy fatherly goodness all those who are any ways afflicted, or distressed, in mind, body, or estate…”
One of the two great Restoration additions of 1662 — the other being the General Thanksgiving — and the most ample of all the Prayer Book’s general intercessions. Authorship is uncertain: ascribed by some to Bishop Peter Gunning of Ely, who was on the 1662 revision committee, and by others to Bishop Edward Reynolds; the matter is unsettled in the older liturgical scholarship and likely cannot be settled now.
The structure is admirable: a single periodic sentence opens it (for the world), a second governs the middle (for the Church), a third the close (for the afflicted), and a brief commendatory clause seals it. The bracketed insertion [especially those for whom our prayers are desired] is a 1662 provision: the prayer is to be amplified, in the moment of saying, with the names or descriptions of the present afflicted. It is among the most elastic prayers in the book — large enough to take in any congregation’s present need.
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For Travellers
“O Almighty God, who art a strong tower of defence unto thy servants against the face of their enemies… that all the world may know that thou art our Saviour and mighty Deliverer; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
An 1789 American addition, traditionally ascribed to Bishop William Smith of Maryland, who served on the 1789 revision committee with William White. It is in the older mode of the seventeenth-century traveller’s prayer, in which the chief petition is for protection from great and apparent dangers — robbery, shipwreck, the highwayman, the storm at sea — that were the actual conditions of eighteenth-century journeying. The wording is in fact identical to the 1604 Hampton Court thanksgiving For Peace and Deliverance from our Enemies, repurposed for the traveller.
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A Prayer of St. Chrysostom
“Almighty God, who hast given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplications unto thee… granting us in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting.”
The same prayer that closes Morning and Evening Prayer, and the Litany, here repeated as the proper conclusion of the Prayers section — a place that must close with a blessing-and-dismissing prayer of universal scope. For its source see Sources of Morning Prayer.
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A Prayer which may be said after any of the former
“O God, whose nature and property is ever to have mercy and to forgive, receive our humble petitions; and though we be tied and bound with the chain of our sins, yet let the pitifulness of thy great mercy loose us; for the honour of Jesus Christ, our Mediator and Advocate. Amen.”
Provided in 1928 as a common conclusion that may be added to any of the foregoing prayers when said in private use. The form is in fact older than its place in the 1928 book: it is the 1549 Cranmerian collect for the twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, here lifted out of the Sunday cycle and made available as an all-purpose petition. The phrase tied and bound with the chain of our sins is among the strongest single images of bondage in the Prayer Book.
VII.The Thanksgivings — General and Occasional
The Thanksgivings are the structural counterpart to the Prayers: where the Prayers ask, the Thanksgivings give thanks for what has been received. The General Thanksgiving is a great Restoration composition; the occasional Thanksgivings — for rain, fair weather, plenty, peace — were added in 1604 as the corresponding answers to Cranmer’s petitionary prayers.
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A General Thanksgiving
“Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we, thine unworthy servants, do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us, and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory… that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives.”
Among the masterpieces of seventeenth-century English devotion. Composed by Bishop Edward Reynolds of Norwich for the 1662 Book; entered the Daily Office in 1662 as the corresponding thanksgiving to the General Confession.
Its structure is a triple thanksgiving — for creation and preservation; for redemption; for the means of grace and hope of glory — followed by a single petition that the saying of thanks may pass from lips into life. The phrase not only with our lips, but in our lives is the central pivot of the prayer, and one of the most quoted single sentences in all of Anglican devotion: that gratitude is finally not a kind of speech, but a kind of life.
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For Rain (Thanksgiving)
“O God, our heavenly Father, who by thy gracious providence dost cause the former and the latter rain to descend upon the earth, that it may bring forth fruit for the use of man; We give thee humble thanks that it hath pleased thee, in our great necessity, to send us at the last a joyful rain upon thine inheritance…”
Added in 1604 at the Hampton Court Conference, as the answering thanksgiving to Cranmer’s 1549 prayer For Rain. The opening — the former and the latter rain — is the language of Deuteronomy 11:14 and James 5:7, where the two rainy seasons of the Holy Land (the autumn and the spring) are taken up as a figure of God’s seasonal providence.
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For Plenty (Thanksgiving)
“O most merciful Father, who of thy gracious goodness hast heard the devout prayers of thy Church, and turned our dearth and scarcity into cheapness and plenty…”
The thanksgiving-pair to the Elizabethan prayer For Plenty, added at Hampton Court in 1604. The verbal echo — turned our dearth and scarcity into cheapness and plenty — is exact: the prayer for plenty asks that scarcity and dearth be mercifully turned into cheapness and plenty, and the thanksgiving rejoices that this has been done.
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For Peace and Deliverance from our Enemies
“O Almighty God, who art a strong tower of defence unto thy servants against the face of their enemies; We yield thee praise and thanksgiving for our deliverance from those great and apparent dangers wherewith we were compassed…”
The 1604 thanksgiving for victory and deliverance — the original from which the 1789 American Prayer For Travellers was later drawn (the two share, indeed, identical wording). Said in 1604 with the recent memory of the Spanish Armada (1588) and on the eve of the Gunpowder Plot (1605); through the seventeenth century used after the various wars of the Stuart period; and so come down into the Prayer Book as the Church’s standing thanksgiving for any deliverance from war or invasion.
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For a Recovery from Sickness
“O God, who art the giver of life, of health, and of safety; We bless thy Name, that thou hast been pleased to deliver from his bodily sickness this thy servant, who now desireth to return thanks unto thee, in the presence of all thy people…”
Added at the Restoration as the thanksgiving-pair to the prayer For a Sick Person. The prayer is to be said in the presence of the congregation, when the recovered sick-person comes again to church to give thanks; it is, accordingly, a public liturgical act, not merely a private devotion. The petition that the recovered person devote the residue of his days to an humble, holy, and obedient walking before thee binds the recovery to the moral discipline that should follow upon it.
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The Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child
“O Almighty God, we give thee humble thanks for that thou hast vouchsafed to deliver this woman thy servant from the great pain and peril of childbirth…”
The 1928 adaptation of the older Churching of Women — the medieval rite by which a mother returned to church for the first time after childbirth and was solemnly received back into the worshipping assembly. The 1928 form is shorter than the 1549 Office and has dropped the older language of ritual purification, retaining only the substantial thanksgiving for safe delivery from the great pain and peril of childbirth — which, in the era before modern obstetrics, was the most common single occasion of female death.
The Prayers and Thanksgivings, taken as a whole, form a kind of liturgical commonplace book of the English-speaking Church — a gathered storehouse of formal addresses to God for every public and private occasion, each carrying the date of its composition and the imprint of the moment that called it forth. To pray any of them is to pray with a particular congregation in a particular moment of history: with Cranmer in 1549, asking rain and fair weather for an English harvest; with the bishops of 1662, asking deliverance from plague and the restoration of public peace; with the framers of 1789, learning to pray for a Republic where they had once prayed for a King; with the late nineteenth century, asking the gathering of a continent of immigrants into one united people; with the early twentieth, learning to ask God’s blessing on the new dimension of the airman.
That so much history has been preserved in so few pages is one of the marks of the genius of the Prayer Book. Each prayer is short — most no longer than a single periodic sentence — but each, properly read, opens a window onto the moment of its composition and the world in which it was first prayed. To go through the Prayers and Thanksgivings slowly is to make a small tour of four hundred years of Christian history, in cadences uniformly grave and uniformly compact.