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THE
HIGH CHURCH TRADITION
by
G. W. O. ADDLESHAW, M.A., B.D.
Chapter 2
THE LITURGY
IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
I
The Church of England in the seventeenth century in the
opinion of one of the most devoted of its sons, Herbert
Thorndike, was fighting for the maintenance of two things which
it believed necessary to the life of the Church, the episcopate,
and the liturgy. [Works, Lib. of A. C. Theol., II, pp. 4, 7.] We
are here concerned with the struggle for the latter, fought on
two fronts against what Richard Montague called the Scylla and
Charybdis of ancient piety, Roman Catholicism, and Puritanism. [Cosin:
Correspondence, Surtees Society, Vol. 52, I, p. 21; cf.
Cosin: Works, Lib. of A. C. Theol., V, p. 5.] The Roman
Catholics attacked the Church of England for substituting a
vernacular liturgy in place of the historic Latin rite; the
Puritans were opposed to the whole idea of liturgy. Worship to
them was a matter of metrical psalms chosen by the minister,
extemporary prayer, and above all sermons.
The Puritan dislike of liturgy went to the length under the
Protectorate of forbidding the use of the Lord’s Prayer. The
lovers of liturgical worship, however, were not always silenced.
According to Mrs. Alice Thornton, in one Yorkshire parish the
congregation persisted in saying the Lord’s Prayer aloud, in
spite of the rebukes of the intruding minister; and when he
threatened them with eternal damnation for using such a popish
invention, an old lady from the pews replied: ‘They were no
more damned than himself, old hacklebacke.’ [Autobiography,
Surtees Society, Vol. 55, p. 210.]
But the Cromwellian persecution did not last for ever. At the
Restoration Mrs. Alice Thornton records her joy of being able
once more to make her communion after, as she puts it, thirsting
so long for the ‘waters of life’. [Ibid., p. 205.]
But not all the laity were as well instructed as Mrs. Thornton.
The breakdown of Anglican parochial life under the Protectorate
meant that the majority were ignorant of the meaning of the
Prayer Book and badly in need of instruction in the principles of
liturgical worship. Mrs. Thornton’s husband, for instance,
had been brought up a Presbyterian and had a rooted objection to
all ‘read prayers’. At the Restoration the Church
services were explained to him by no less a personage than the
future Dean Comber, under whose influence he became a devout and
regular communicant. [Ibid., pp. 218-19.] Probably Comber’s
experience in dealing with Mr. Thornton led him later to write
his famous popular exposition of the Prayer Book, the Companion
to the Temple. But this is not an isolated production. All
through the seventeenth century the Church had to defend the use
of a vernacular liturgy and expound the principles of liturgical
worship. The need produced in the High Church party a veritable
school of liturgists who, at any rate as far as their liturgical
studies are concerned, have since their own day lapsed into an
oblivion which is quite undeserved. Not only are they invaluable
for the light they throw on the meaning of the Prayer Book, but
in an age given over to individualism they gave due place to the
liturgy in the life of the Church and grasped its implications.
The school persisted right through the seventeenth century, and
traces of its influence lingered on till the Oxford Movement.
Sometimes adherents of the school were found outside High Church
circles; one of the last of the school, Basil Woodd, was a
leading evangelical.
It is impossible to understand the work of the liturgists
without some attempt to appreciate the main features in the
theology of the school to which they belonged. The sixteenth-century
Anglican reformers, in contrast to their opposite numbers on the
continent, were mercifully deficient in ideas and had little
taste for speculative theology. Their methods were opportunist
and hand to mouth, and they had no logical theory for what they
were trying to do. The English Church consequently escaped the
fate that befell so many Protestant bodies on the Continent of
being saddled with some dominant theological idea which was to
prove a mental and spiritual incubus to later generations. But
some justification had to be found for the changes made at the
Reformation, and the English reformers found such a justification
not in the need of emphasizing some particular truth, but in an
appeal to antiquity, to the Fathers.
The appeal was not productive of any immediate consequences.
The Elizabethan theologians were undistinguished and second rate;
as Hallam politely puts it, ‘their writings are neither
numerous nor refined’. [Literature of Europe, II, ch.
2.] But at the end of Elizabeth’s reign theology began to
live again in the persons of Hooker and Andrewes. Their
importance in the history of Anglicanism is immense. They brought
into the Church a breadth of culture and an ease with humanism
and Renaissance learning, both hitherto conspicuously lacking.
Their intellectual achievements and prose style did for the
Church of England what thirteenth-century philosophy did for
medieval Christianity; they completed its structure and gave it
form and shape. [T. S. Eliot: ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’, Selected
Essays, 1832 (sic), p. 319.] They are the founders of
Anglican High Churchmanship and probably its greatest glory. But
down to the beginning of the eighteenth century the High Church
school was producing creative theology in the works of Field,
Jeremy Taylor, Sanderson, Thorndike, Barrow, Beveridge, Hickes,
Bull, and Johnson of Cranbrook. Coleridge much admired the
seventeenth-century divines, though he had little sympathy either
for their theology or political thought. He declares ‘that
they formed a galaxy of learning and talent, and that among them
the Church of England finds her stars of the first magnitude’.
[Notes on English Divines, I, p. 325.] He told Derwent
that Field’s great work Of the Church, thoroughly
understood and appropriated, would place him in the highest ranks
of Anglican divines. [Ibid., p. 35.] Jeremy Taylor is
‘a great and lovely mind’. The school mainly follows
the lines laid down by Hooker and Andrewes; although at the end
of the century its writers were largely under the influence of
Thorndike. One purpose runs through their works, a purpose of
restoration, not of producing something new; nor do they
emasculate Christian truth by trying to reconcile it with the
spirit of the age. The controversies of the sixteenth century in
England as well as abroad had wellnigh destroyed the old
theological scheme. The High Church divines of the seventeenth
century set out to restore the grandeur of Christian truth, and
teach it anew to their countrymen who had largely forgotten it in
the turmoil of the Reformation.
It is a theology characterized by a veneration for the
Fathers, by a wholeness finding its centre in the Incarnation and
a massive learning. Instead of attempting to create a scientific
system of theology on the plan of Suarez of Calvin, they take
seriously the claim of the English reformers to be returning to
antiquity. They turned to the Fathers and there in Dean Church’s
words found something ‘to enrich, to enlarge, to invigorate,
to give beauty, proportion, and force to their theology’. [Bishop
Andrewes, ‘Pascal and Other Sermons’, p. 92.] The
patristic basis makes their theology something sui generis,
something quite different from Tridentinism of continental
Protestantism. It is by no means provincial. Many High Churchmen
betray the influence of what the Abbe Brémond called devout
humanism. [Janelle: Robert Southwell, the Writer, p. 285.]
The school read most of the contemporary works produced on the
continent. Bishop Morley’s library, now in Winchester
cathedral, contains most of the literature produced in the
controversy between Port-Royal and the Jesuits. Jeremy Taylor
plundered the case books of Roman moral theologians to illustrate
the moral problems which he tries to resolve in Ductor
Dubitantium. Bishop Ken’s friends were much shocked to
find amongst the books which he left at his death most of the
best French writers on prayer. But the seventeenth-century High
Churchmen read continental works because they were interested in
the same problem which confronted the divines of the Counter-Reformation,
the rebuilding of the Christian thought and life after the havoc
caused by both the Renaissance and the Reformation. They attack
the problem in quite a different way. Counter-Reformation
theology drew its strength from the Thomist revival begun in
Spain in the sixteenth century; it thinks in the terminology of
the Middle Ages and is a continuation of medieval theology. The
Anglicans are thinking and working the whole time in terms of
patristic thought, more especially that of the Greek Fathers. One
finds in them something of the catholicity, the wide-mindedness,
the freshness, the suppleness, and sanity of Christian antiquity.
Their veneration for tradition made them suspicious of an
overmuch emphasis on one particular aspect of the Christian
faith; it made them dislike new conceptions of Christianity,
planned in the minds of theologians and possessing no connection
with the past. Often too this veneration made them liable to a
somewhat static notion of authority; frequently they seem to
enthrone the Fathers instead of the Church as the voice of truth.
On the other hand from the Fathers they learnt to see the
Christian faith as an integral whole, quite naturally finding its
centre in the Incarnation. Andrewes in his famous sermons before
the court deals with the great central facts of the creed in
relation to one another and as forming a whole; there is no over-stressing
of one aspect of Christian truth, with the consequent
impoverishment of the whole faith. He speaks of Christian truth
in its comprehensiveness and variety, with its power to deal with
all the sides of man’s nature. The centre of their theology
is the Incarnation; to quote Dean Church again, it ends in ‘adoration,
self-surrender, and blessing, and in the awe and joy of welcoming
the Presence of the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal Sanctity, and the
Eternal Love, the Sacrifice, and Reconciliation of the world’.
[Ibid., p. 77.]
The learning with which this theology is expounded, made its
authors well deserve the title ‘stupor mundi’. Their
learning gave them a European reputation, and in the case of
Hooker, if we may believe Walton, provoked the enthusiastic
admiration of Clement VIII. After having extracts from the first
four books of the Ecclesiastical Polity read to him in Latin he
remarked: ‘There is no learning that this man has not
searched into: nothing to hard for his understanding: this man
indeed deserves the name of an author: his books will get
reverence by age: for there is in them such seeds of eternity,
that if the rest be like this, they shall last till the last fire
shall consume all learning.’ Bishop Bull’s works were
much admired by French ecclesiastics. In 1700 a few years after
the appearance of his Judicium Ecclesiae Catholicae,
Bossuet wrote to Robert Nelson, asking him to convey to Bull the
congratulations of the General Assembly of the French Church,
‘pour la service qu’il rend à l’Église
Catholique, en défendant si bien le jugement qu’elle a porté
sur la nécessite de croire à la divinité du Fils de Dieu’.
[Robert Nelson, The Life of George Bull, prefixed to the
1846 edition of Bull’s Workes, pp. 327-32.]
It is easy to make fun of their learning with its pompous
references, its picturesque conceits and involved style. They
wear it often rather self-consciously. On the other hand it
enabled them to speak as professionals on their subject. The
superficial writer on religious matters could not gain a hearing
in the seventeenth century unless his superficialities had been
purged away by a knowledge of the Fathers. Unless he had read his
Chrysostom, for whom the age had an immense admiration, his
opinions would have been ruled out of court. It restored too the
dignity of theology, and in the first half of the century
theology once more became the Queen of Sciences. Nor did it make
them pedants; in contrast with their Roman confrères, who
wrote in an atmosphere of the cloister or university, and whose
thought reveals a monotonous sameness, they were for the most
part parish priests moving in the world, used to dealing with
ordinary people and the difficulties of ordinary people. Their
theology not only betrays an extraordinary individuality, but it
is also couched in a language and presented in a way which the
ordinary layman of their day could understand. They made their
theology something of concern and interest to the whole Church.
The theology of the Tridentine divines is embalmed in scientific
treatises; the High Churchmen were content to expound theirs in
sermons delivered to ordinary congregations. It was not learning
for learning’s sake; it was learning acquired with devotion
and self-sacrifice so that they might be enabled to lead their
countrymen from the spiritual desert in which they had been left
at the Reformation to the pastures of eternal truth. [H. Maynard
Smith: Development of Anglican Theology after the Reformation
in Report of the Cheltenham Church Congress, 1928, pp. 124-35.]
II
The theological background of the seventeenth-century High
Church divines naturally colours their liturgical writings. In
these also they are ponderously learned. Their standard of
reference is always the first four or five centuries, which they
looked on as a liturgical golden age. Their desire to bring their
countrymen to the eternal truth is reflected in their desire that
the liturgy should be something in which all can share, that it
should be grounded on dogma. The importance they attached to the
Incarnation tended to make them find the centre of the liturgy in
the Cross; it led them to see that the liturgy must itself
witness to the truth that the totality of man’s nature, both
as an individual and a social being, is capable of being redeemed
and offered to God. The Fathers taught them to think of the
Church as an organism, and to see that dogma, prayer, and life
are one whole.
The following list contains the most eminent High Church
writers on liturgy in the seventeenth century. It shows the
extent and importance of the school, and that it was a prominent
element in the Church life of the period. The list does not claim
to be exhaustive.
- Richard Hooker (1553-1600): Ecclesiastical Polity.
V. 1597.
- Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626): Notes on the Book of
Common Prayer. (These were first published in 1854 in
the volume of his Minor Works in the Library of Anglo-Catholic
Theology.)
- John Cosin (1594-1672): Notes on the Book of Common
Prayer. (These were first published in 1710 in Dr.
Nicholl’s Commentary on the Prayer Book.)
- Herbert Thorndike (1598-1672): The Service of God at
Religious Assemblies. 1642.
- Jeremy Taylor (1613-67): An Apology for authorized and
set forms of Liturgy. 1649.
- Anthony Sparrow (1612-85): A Rationale upon the Book
of Common Prayer. 1657.
- Hamon L’Estrange (1605-60): The Alliance of the
Divine Offices. 1658.
- John Durel (1625-83): The Liturgy of the Church of
England. 1662.
- Thomas Comber (1645-89): A Companion to the Temple and
the Closet. (Published in four parts between 1672 and
1676.)
- William Beveridge (1637-1708): The excellency and
usefulness of the Common Prayer. A sermon preached at
the opening of Saint Peter’s, Cornhill, November 27,
1681.
- The Worthy Communicant. (Sermon CXXX in the Libr.
of A. C. Theology edition of his works.)
- The Great Necessity and Advantage of Public Prayer and
Frequent Communion. (Published after his death by his
executors in 1710.)
- William Nicholls (1664-1712): Comment on the Book of
Common Prayer and the Administration of the Sacraments.
1710.
- Charles Wheatly (1686-1742): A Rational Illustration
upon the Book of Common Prayer. (First published in
1710, but Wheatly in his own lifetime brought out many
new enlarged editions.)
The foundation of the school’s liturgical thought was
laid by Hooker, who established the principle underlying the
whole work of the school; the principle that the prayer of
individual Christians and the corporate prayer of the Church in
the liturgy are two distinct things. [Ecclesiastical Polity,
V, 24.] On this distinction Hooker’s successors built. The
work of Andrewes and Cosin was in the form of notes which are
invaluable as a source of information on the spirit in which the
first half of the seventeenth century interpreted the Prayer Book.
But their contribution to Anglican liturgical thought was in
their lives as much as in their writings. In Andrewes’
private chapel at Ely, in Brancepeth church, in the chapel of
Peterhouse, in Durham cathedral, all three made fit for divine
worship by Cosin, Englishmen of their generation learnt something
of the splendour of the liturgy. They caught the spirit of
liturgical prayer from Cosin’s own rapt devotion at the
public services of the Church, a devotion which led to the
accusation that he was a Jesuit in disguise. [Cosin: Correspondence,
I, p. 41.] In Cosin’s life and all that he wrote is to be
found a deep feeling for the beauty of the liturgy, a
sensitiveness to its tones, an appreciation of its movements,
which is a rarity outside the Benedictine order; ‘God’s
high and holy service’ is a phrase that comes very easily to
his lips.
Thorndike’s work, The Service of God, is partly a
treatise on early liturgies – in fact he was the first
Anglican to explore systematically this branch of sacred learning
– and partly a study in the theory of liturgy. He is
concerned to attach a meaning to the words uniformity and
edification which are so much beloved by Anglicans, and
emphasizes the importance of giving due place in liturgical
thought to the eucharistic sacrifice. He sees the Eucharist as
the climax of the liturgy, and until it becomes the chief Sunday
service the ideals of the Reformers will never be realized. The
dissatisfaction felt for the present structure of the Eucharist
appears prominently in Thorndike’s later works. His
knowledge of primitive liturgies led him to be impressed by the
long prefaces commemorating the creation and redemption of the
world, the epiklesis, and the position of the intercession after
the consecration, which he found in the Eighth Book of the
Apostolic Constitutions. ‘How can Christians’, he asks,
‘think their prayers so effectual with God, as when they are
presented at the commemoration of the sacrifice of Christ
crucified; the representation whereof to God in heaven makes His
intercession there so acceptable?’ [Works, V, p. 182.]
With Overall and Cosin he preferred the position occupied by the
Prayer of Oblation in the 1549 Prayer Book. Thorndike exercised a
great influence amongst High Churchmen at the end of the
seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century; the
liturgy of the Non-jurors and the eighteenth-century Scottish
Communion Office are the practical outcome of his views. It is
noticeable that the differences between the Prayer Book of 1637
and the Scottish Communion Office are on the lines desired by
Thorndike.
The works of Jeremy Taylor and Durel are pamphlets on the
benefits of a vernacular liturgy. Sparrow’s Rationale
views the Anglican rite in detail against the background of the
early liturgies and is a first attempt to provide an explanation
of the structure and order of its services. Beveridge continues
the work of Sparrow in explaining the structure and order of the
rite; his church, Saint Peter’s, Cornhill, became the centre
in London towards the end of the century where the ideals of the
school found expression. Comber’s Companion to the Temple
is a pompous baroque work which enjoyed an enormous vogue in his
own day; the future Queen Anne once told him that she found it a
great help in preparing for her Easter communion. For many years
Comber lived in Mrs. Thornton’s house at East Newton, in the
parish of Stonegrave near Helmsley. He was Rector of Stonegrave
and is buried in the sanctuary of the church. East Newton house
is still standing; by the gate is a small two-roomed pavilion in
which, tradition says, Comber had a study and wrote the Companion
to the Temple. By the kindness of the Rev. W. T. Laverick,
the present Rector of Stonegrave, I have had access to a MS.
diary of Comber’s, belonging to Stonegrave Church. Under
1672 is an entry to the effect that he read parts of the Companion
to the Temple, as it was being written, to his mother on her
death-bed ‘to her abundant comfort’. It was intended to
provide meditations on the liturgy which the faithful could use
in their private devotions in preparation for the public services
of the Church. Comber thus anticipates the type of book on the
liturgy which is constantly being produced under the influence of
the Liturgical Movement. He also gives a minute and detailed
explanation of the structure of each service. Some editions are
preceded by a short preface on the nature of liturgical worship;
both for its English and grasp of the inner meaning of liturgy
perhaps the most impressive production of the school. Comber was
master of a grandiloquent seventeenth-century prose style.
Wheatly makes no pretensions of being original; his Rational
Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer reduces the work of
his predecessors to order and coherence. In this he was
remarkably successful; he remained for over a century the
standard authority on the Prayer Book, and was looked on as a
kind of Anglican Durandus of Mende. With the appearance of
Wheatly’s book the school of classical liturgists came to an
end. The interests of the Non-jurors were on different lines.
There concern was with the antiquities more than the underlying
principles of liturgy; Brett’s A Collection of the
Principal Liturgies, published in 1721, was a really
important contribution to the history of Christian worship, and
long remained a standard work. In one point the Non-jurors made
an important contribution to Anglican liturgical thought; they
emphasized and developed the principle that in matters of doubt
the Prayer Book is best interpreted by the liturgy of 1549.
There was a revival of interest in liturgiology in the early
years of the nineteenth century. In 1810 the Evangelical hymn-writer,
Basil Woodd, published a sermon, The Excellence of the Liturgy,
of some importance as it reinterpreted the principles of the
classical liturgists for the Evangelical party. Scattered through
Coleridge’s later works are remarks which show that he
understood the idea of liturgy. The Tractarians, owing to the
influence of Bishop Lloyd’s lectures on the Prayer Book and
Palmer’s Origines Liturgicae, were mainly interested
in the origin and history of liturgies, and the correspondence of
the Prayer Book with the worship of the Middle Ages and
antiquity; they paid little attention to the science and
underlying principles of liturgy itself. A misfortune; an
acquaintance with the teaching of our classical liturgists would
have prevented many of the mistakes of the ritualists.
Two only of the Tractarians can claim to have continued the
work of the older school: Keble and Dr. John Jebb, the nephew of
the famous bishop of Limerick. Keble’s Tract XIII
ostensibly explains the Sunday table of first lessons in the 1662
book; really it is a discussion of the principle of what he calls
‘spontaneous evolution’, a principle which is
fundamental to Anglican and indeed all liturgical thought. Jebb’s
two great works are his Choral Service, published in 1843,
and his sermon, The Ritual Law and Custom of the Church
Universal, preached at an English Church Union festival at
Ludlow in 1866. They are invaluable, not only for the light they
throw on liturgical principles and practices before the fashion
for medievalism set in, but also as an exposition of the
principles of our classical liturgists.
Deserving of special mention amongst High Church liturgists,
though he wrote no formal work on the liturgy, is the famous
Jacobite Dean of Durham, Denis Granville, who died in exile in
1703. History has been unkind to him; he is chiefly remembered
for the debts which he managed to accumulate in spite of having,
as he put it, the best deanery, the best archdeaconry, and the
best living in England. But there is another side to his
character which comes out in his letters and papers. They are
written in an entertaining and vivacious style, and reveal what
the liturgy could mean to a seventeenth-century High Churchman.
Granville loved the liturgy and had a passionate desire that his
countrymen might come to love it too. To him the heart of
Christianity lay in worship.
III
If asked what they meant by the liturgy the High Church
writers would probably have replied in Hooker’s phrase that
it was ‘the public prayer of the people of God’. [Ecclesiastical
Polity, V, 25. Cf. Thorndike: Works, I, p. 211.] They
would have gone on to say that this public prayer was not the sum
total of the individual prayers of Christians, joining together
in worship, but the prayer of an organism, an entity, the Church,
the Body of Christ. When a parish priest says his office he is
not worshipping God in his own name, but as Cosin puts it, he is
offering up on behalf of all Christians the daily prayers of
the Church, one of his priestly duties. [Correspondence,
I, p. 110.] The end for which this prayer is ordained is the
glory of God. [Beveridge: Works, Lib. of A. C. Theol.,
VIII, p. 514.]
But the Church, being an organism, is subject to the laws of
growth and decay like any other organism. A man who does not pray
is spiritually dead. Spiritual decay overtakes the Church which
has no prayer of its own. This prayer is the liturgy, the prayer
of the Church. Comber describes it as ‘the life and soul of
religion, the anima mundi, that universal soul which
quickens, unites, and moves the whole Christian world’. [Companion
to the Temple, ed. 1701, Preface.]
The liturgy is something quite different to private prayer; it
has principles and an ethos of its own. Andrewes says we must
learn to distinguish ‘the Liturgy and the public service of
God in the Church’ from our private devotions. [Sermons,
Lib. of A. C. Theol., V, p. 357.] Jeremy Taylor points out that
Churches as distinct from individuals have ‘special
necessities in a distinct capacity’ [Works, ed. 1849,
V, p. 299]; the liturgy of the Church voices these necessities.
Comber warns his readers not to expect to find in the liturgy
frequent petitions suited to individual and local needs; these
should be made privately in the closet; they are out of place in
the liturgy, which voices the needs of the whole Church. [Preface,
op. cit.] Beveridge says that it is wrong to look on the liturgy
as the private possession of any group of churchmen of a single
parish; to him the Prayer Book services are ‘the prayers of
the whole Church we live in, which are common to the minister and
people, to ourselves and all the members of the same Church’.
[Works, Lib. of A. C. Theol., VI, p. 373.] To L’Estrange
the liturgy is the prayer of the Church, not regarded as a
collection of individuals, but as an organism, the mystical body
of Christ: ‘the worship publicly performed and in parochial
assemblies is not to be reputed the worship peculiar of those
congregations, but common to the whole national Church, whereof
they are limbs, in which service the spirit of that mystical
body, being in her subordinate members (as the soul is in the
natural, tota in qualibet parte) is exercised’. [The
Alliance of Divine Offices, Lib. of A. C. Theol., p. 30.]
Coleridge recognizes the distinction between the liturgy and
private prayer. The liturgy is ‘common prayer’,
something which all can use; it is meant for a Christian
community. [op. cit., I, p. 187; II, pp. 28, 29.]
The seventeenth-century liturgists loved to build churches and
replan the interior of old ones, with special reference to the
celebration of the liturgy as the act of the whole body of the
faithful. The reading-pew for the officiant at the offices was
usually at the east end of the nave, opposite the pulpit. At
Leighton Bromswold George Herbert had the reading-pew and pulpit
of equal height so that prayer and preaching might enjoy an equal
honour and estimation. A similar idea inspired Cosin’s
arrangement of the reading-pew and pulpit in the chapel at
Auckland Castle. It brought the officiant amongst the people and
made the office an act of the whole congregation. To lay emphasis
on the Eucharist, as the offering of the whole Church and not of
the priest alone, chancels were so arranged that the communicants
might kneel near the altar; sometimes as at Lyddington in Rutland
the altar was in the middle of the sanctuary with the altar rails
on all four sides. Presumably here the priest celebrated behind
the altar facing west. A Eucharist celebrated under these
conditions must have had the corporateness of the early Church.
It represents an attempt to put into practice the claim of our
divines that they were returning to the ideals of antiquity.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries High Churchmen
usually interpreted the Elizabethan Injunction ordering the altar
to be brought down amongst the people for the Eucharist, as a
means purely of enabling them to take a greater share in the
service. They held that neither the Injunction nor Canon LXXXII
applied if there was nothing to hinder the people from taking
their part in the service with the altar in its usual place at
the east end. [Wheatly: On the Common Prayer, ch. VI.]
They justify the practice of celebrating the Eucharist at the
‘north end’ on the ground that it helps the people to
take a greater share in the service; Cosin on his trial before
the House of Lords is most careful to explain that he only took
the eastward position for the consecration prayer when the
communicants were so placed that he did not have his back towards
them. [The Acts of the Court of High Commission at Durham,
Surtees Society, Vol. 34, p. 218.] Beveridge speaks of everything
being done at the altar so as to be visible to the communicants.
[Works, VI, p. 389.]
Certain seventeenth-century usages witness to the conception
of the liturgy as the Prayer of the Church. The Commandments, the
Epistle, and the Gospel were read at the chancel or sanctuary
gates. [Andrewes: Minor Works, Lib. of A. C. Theol., p.
152.] The priest came down amongst the people for the General
confession in the Eucharist. [Ibid., p. 156.] At Evensong
it was not uncommon for priest and people to repeat together the
third Collect, and probably the same happened at Mattins. [Cosin:
Works, V, Lib. of A. C. Theol., pp. 65-6.] These usages
tended to emphasize the liturgy as an act of the whole body.
The school are never tired of reiterating how the Prayer Book
as a liturgy is far superior to that of Rome because it is one in
which all the faithful can take their part. They point
particularly to certain features in the Prayer Book which make
this possible: the responses to be returned by the people and not
by the choir only [L’Estrange, op. cit., p. 110]: the
shortness of the prayers: the fact that they usually only contain
one thought, which helps the people to make them their own [Durel:
The Liturgy of the Church of England asserted, 1662, p. 24.
Beveridge: Works, VI, p. 381]: that it is in a language
which all can understand. Bishop Bull roundly declares that in
the Church of Rome there is no common prayer, ‘the
priests say and do all; the people being left to gaze about, or
to whisper one to another, or to look upon their private manuals
of devotion, according as to their private inclination leads them’.
[Works, ed. 1846, II, p. 300; cf. Beveridge Works,
VI, pp. 376-7.] Archbishop Benson in the Lincoln Judgment
sums up the ideas of the school on this point: ‘The tenor of
the Book of Common Prayer is openness. The work of its framers
was to recover the worship of the Christian congregation, and
specially to replace the Eucharist in its character as the
Communion of the whole body of Christ. By the use of the mother-tongue,
by the audibleness of every prayer, by the priest’s prayers
being made identical with the prayers of the Congregation, by the
part of the Clerks being taken by the people, by the removal of
the invisible and inaudible ceremonial, the English Church, as
one of her special works in the history of the Catholic Church,
restored the ancient share and right of the people in Divine
Service.’ [E. S. Roscoe: The Bishop of Lincoln’s
Case, 1891, p. 144.] Coleridge points out that the Prayer
Book enjoys a similar advantage over nonconformist services.
‘Many a proselyte has the Church gained from the Meeting-house
through the disgust occasioned by the long-winded, preaching
prayers of the dissenting ministers, and the utter exclusion of
the congregation from all active share in the public
devotion.’ [op. cit., II, p. 33.]
IV
When there is an understanding of the liturgy as the prayer of
the Church, there is usually to be found an emphasis on three
special points in the Eucharist: the Gospel, the Offertory, and
the singing of psalms. [cf. A. G. Hebert: Liturgy and Society,
pp. 76, 134, 214-24.] The seventeenth-century liturgists paid
particular attention to these things. It was usual to place on
the altar specially bound copies of the Bible and Prayer Book
with the intention of showing honour to the Gospels. [J. Wickham
Legg: Church Ornaments and their Civil Antecedents, p. 17.]
The high altar in Winchester cathedral still retains a Bible and
Prayer Book given by Charles II. To mark its significance the
Gospel was read or sung by one of the ministers at the chancel or
sanctuary gates. Until the revision of 1662 the Prayer Book
contained a rubric ordering ‘that in such places where they
do sing, there shall the lessons be sung in a plain tune, after
the manner of distinct reading: and likewise the Epistle and
Gospel’. Cosin approved of the rubric on the ground that
singing enhanced the dignity of the service and helped the
devotion of the congregation; but he makes no reference directly
to the practice of singing the Epistle and Gospel. [op. cit., p.
58. A similar expression of approval will be found in the Rationale
on Cathedral Worship or Choir Service, 1721, pp. 34, 35, 38,
by Dr. Thomas Bisse, a latitudinarian churchman of the eighteenth
century.] Before the Gospel often came the solemn singing of
‘Glory be to Thee, O God’, and at the end ‘Thanks
be the Thee, O Lord’, though Wheatly declares that there is
no authority for this practice in the Prayer Book. [op. cit., ch.
VI, 6, 3.] Sparrow approves of kissing the book, both on account
of its contents and that others might see that it was preferred
before all others. [Rationale, ed. 1722, p. 159.] In 1641
High Churchmen were accused of having Gospel processions on
festivals, complete with crucifix, incense, and lights. There is
little foundation for this charge; but it is interesting as
showing the importance they were popularly held to attach to the
Gospel.
Although no directions about the Offertory were given in the
Prayer Books of 1552 and of 1559, the High Churchmen made a point
of emphasizing it. In the Coronation rite, which owes its present
form to the seventeenth century, the king personally offers the
elements. Andrewes and other Jacobean bishops started the use of
credence or side-tables, as they were then called, to enhance its
dignity. [Laud: Works, Lib. of A. C. Theology, IV, p. 210.]
In 1627 one John Wood gave a credence table with a locker over it
to the church of Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire. [J. Barr: Anglican
Church Architecture, 1842, p. 67. The locker is still in
existence, but the table disappeared about 1870. For this
information I am indebted to the Rector, the Rev. E. V. Rumbold.]
The usual practice before 1662, and probably for some while
afterwards, was that the bread or wafers were placed on the altar
in a canister, and the wine in a flagon before the service began;
immediately before the consecration the bread was solemnly placed
on the paten, and the wine with a little water in the chalice. [Andrewes,
op. cit., pp. 156-7; cf. Wickham Legg: English Orders for
Consecrating Churches, Bradshaw Society, 1911, p. 177.] It is
probable that there is a reference to this practice in the rubric
before the consecration prayer in the 1662 Prayer Book on
ordering the elements so that they may be conveniently
consecrated. Bishop Bull used to receive the elements from the
clerk or churchwarden or take them himself from the side and
offer them on the altar before the service began. [Life,
op. cit., p. 53.]
It is true that many have denied that there is anything more
in the Prayer Book than a monetary offering; and it is almost
certain that the revisers of 1662 did not intend the word ‘oblations’
in the Prayer for the Church to refer to the elements. [J. Dowden:
Further Studies in the Prayer Book, pp. 176-222.] But as
Dr. Brightman pointed out, the offering of money is in part a
commutation for the primitive offering by the faithful of bread
and wine, and the elements are bought out of this money. The
elements therefore are legitimately included in the offering of
‘these our alms and oblations’. [The English Rite,
I, p. ccxviii.] According to Wickham Legg it is for this reason
that the Prayer Book directs that the elements should not be
placed on the altar until the monetary offerings which represent
them have been collected and first offered. [ ‘Ancient
Liturgical Customs’, in Essays on Ceremonial, p. 47.]
In any case the essence of the offertory consists not in the
recital of such prayers as the Suscipe, sancte Pater, and
the Offerimus tibi, Domine, of the Latin rite, but in the
actual placing of the elements on the altar. [Brightman, ibid.;
cf. Wickham Legg: Ecclesiological Essays, p. 93.] Divines,
however, such as Wheatly and Johnson of Cranbrook were accustomed
to refer the word ‘oblations’ to the elements. [Wheatly,
op. cit., ch. VI, 10, 3. Johnson: ‘The Unbloody Sacrifice’,
Works, Lib. of A. C. Theol., I, pp. 35-42.] In certain
churches and college chapels there was something that looks very
like an offertory procession; the people brought their alms to
the wardens standing at the chancel gates; the clergy presented
theirs kneeling before the altar, a practice still continued in
Durham Cathedral. [Granville: Remains, II, p. 180, Surtees
Society, Vol. 47; Jebb, op. cit., p. 497.] When the Church at
Abbey Dore was consecrated on Palm Sunday, 1634, the communicants
came up one by one and kneeling on a cushion before the altar
made their offerings to the bishop’s chaplain, who placed
them on the altar. The order of service calls this action ‘the
holy oblation or offering’. [Wickham Legg: English Orders
for Consecrating Churches, p. 175.]
Psalms have ever been regarded as peculiarly the voice of
Christ in His Church; and the omission from the 1552 and
subsequent Prayer Books of all psalmody in the Eucharist was a
piece of vandalism which it is hard to forgive. But their
omission from the Prayer Book did not mean that psalms ceased to
be sung at the Eucharist. In actual fact it resulted in the
realization of what is desired by many sections in the Liturgical
Movement, the restoration of whole psalms to the Eucharist
instead of the truncated psalmody of the Roman rite. It became
customary to sing a psalm, either in the Prayer Book or metrical
version, as an Introit, and at the Offertory and Communion.
Sometimes the Introit was an organ voluntary or the sanctus,
more usually a psalm. [Jebb, op. cit, pp. 461-2.] Cranmer
provided a table of introit psalms in the 1549 Prayer Book, and
Wheatly wished the table had never been omitted since he disliked
the unliturgical and individualistic practice of choosing psalms
at random. He says of Cranmer’s table ‘that each psalm
contains something of the evangelical history used upon each
Sunday and Holy Day’ or is ‘in some way or other proper
to the day’. [op. cit., ch. V, 8]; according to Samuel
Downes, the editor of Sparrow’s Rationale, the psalms
bear no relation to the days for which they were appointed. [Lives
of the Compilers of the Liturgy, 1722, p. clvii.] This is
rather unfair; in a few cases Cranmer’s choices are
unsuitable; but as a rule the psalm fits the day admirably. Psalm
98, appointed for the first Mass at Christmas, forms a
magnificent opening to the Midnight Mass; and nothing could
express better the mind of Our Saviour in His Passion than Psalm
61 appointed for Palm Sunday. On the Sundays after Trinity Psalm
119 is sung, a section a Sunday, an arrangement which has much to
commend it on grounds of convenience. The importance attached to
introit psalms is shown by the Non-jurors embodying Cranmer’s
scheme in their liturgy of 1718, and by Bishop Deacon drawing up
a table for his liturgy in some ways superior to Cranmer’s.
We know from Smart’s attack on Cosin that it was usual in
Durham cathedral to sing a psalm before and after the sermon at
the Eucharist. [The Acts of the Court of High Commission at
Durham, pp. 224-5.] In the eighteenth-century form for the
consecration of churches Psalm 24 is provided for the Offertory.
Andrewes [op. cit., p. 157], Thorndike [Works, I, p. 383],
and L’Estrange all mention the practice of singing psalms
during the Communion and claim that it is modelled on the
primitive practice of singing Psalm 34 at this point in the
service. L’Estrange thought the time of communion could not
be better employed than in psalms ‘suitable to the subject
of those blessed mysteries’. [op. cit., p. 324.] In Jebb’s
time the practice had survived in Durham cathedral in the playing
of what he calls ‘a soft symphony’ during the Communion.
[op. cit., p. 511.]
Attempts were constantly made to remedy the omission from the
Eucharist of an ordered table of psalms or hymns. In 1623 George
Wither published his Hymns and Songs of the Church with a
Communion hymn which reads like an Anglican counterpart to the
Corpus Christi sequence Lauda, Sion, salvatorem. As late
as 1794 there is Basil Woodd’s Collection of Psalms and
Scripture Paraphrases with a few hymns arranged according to the
order of the Church of England; in 1827 Heber’s
posthumous work Hymns, written and adopted to the Weekly
Church Service of the Year, appeared; both these works
attempted to provide a hymn or psalm to match the Prayer Book
Propers; Holy, Holy, Holy was the hymn in Heber’s
book for Trinity Sunday. But most clergy appear to have chosen
psalms at random with occasional reference to the 1549 scheme of
Introits. In view of the deference paid by our liturgies to the
practices of the primitive church it is interesting to notice
that there is no trace till the Oxford Movement of any psalm or
hymn being sung as a Gradual, the most ancient place in the
Eucharist for a psalm. Cosin declared that the Church of England
had omitted Graduals as ‘neither needful nor of ancient use’,
coming from so great a liturgist a strange remark.
V
The seventeenth-century liturgists found the centre of the
liturgy in the Eucharist. Thorndike calls it ‘the crown of
public service, and the most solemn and chief work of Christian
assemblies’. It is held to form the distinctive feature of
Christian worship, differentiating it from the worship of purely
natural religions. Our Lord instituted it as the constant
perpetual sacrifice of His Church. In it is to be found the whole
content of the Christian religion and far greater lessons than
even the best of sermons can provide. Not only is it the centre,
the crown of the liturgy; on it the liturgy depends for its true
functioning; where the Eucharist is despised, neglected, or
misunderstood, the liturgy disintegrates into an individual and
impersonal thing. [Thorndike: Works, I, pp. 274-5, 833.
Johnson: Canons, Lib. of A. C. Theol., I, p. xxxix.]
This grasp of the function of the Eucharist in the liturgy
made Dean Granville spend so much of his life conducting a
campaign in favour of weekly communions in cathedrals; it
explains why both he and his father-in-law, Cosin, supposed that
the rubrics of the Prayer Book intended a daily celebration. It
appears, too, in the attitude of the school towards the altar.
Laud on his trial voiced that attitude when he magnificently
proclaimed that the holy table was ‘the greatest place of
God’s residence upon earth’. [Works, Lib. of A.
C. Theol., , IV, p. 285.] To Jeremy Taylor the altar is the place
where the Christian sacrifices are presented, and where ‘the
beloved Body and Blood of the Son of God’ are really present
in the sacrament. [Works, V, p. 330.]
The school paid great reverence to the altar, bowing to it
when they came into church and when they went up to make their
communion. In the bare churches of the period the altar held the
central place; and at the Eucharist the eye would have been
naturally carried towards it. It was covered with what the age
called a carpet, a covering usually of blue or crimson velvet
falling in folds at the corners and embroidered on the front with
the sacred monogram. On the altar were two candlesticks, in the
centre an alms bason embossed with a scene from the gospels, with
the usual magnificently bound Bible and Prayer Book on each side.
Arranged in front were the flagons, the sacred vessels, and a
cushion for the altar book. In the churches which could afford it
gold plate was alone considered worthy for the celebration of the
Eucharist.
Our age has little use for an alms bason in the middle of the
altar; there must be either a cross or a crucifix. But the alms
bason has good pre-Reformation precedent. In medieval wills there
are bequests of silver basons to churches, to stand on the high
altar and to be used in collecting the offerings of the people. [J.
T. Micklethwaite: The Ornaments of the Rubric, pp. 34, 41.]
In the seventeenth century it was not unusual for a church to
possess two basons, one for the alms and one for ‘the other
devotions of the people’. A cross or crucifix was rare as an
ornament on the altar; the recorded instances are confined to
coronations and royal chapels. According to Wickham Legg, the
crucifixes which roused the wrath of the Puritans were in stained-glass
windows. [English Orders for Consecrating Churches, p. lxi.]
Bishop Butler had a cross over the altar in his chapel at Bristol.
The best explanation for the absence of a cross or crucifix was
given in the last century by the famous Bishop Philpotts of
Exeter, one of the last of the old High Churchmen. He maintained
that a cross or crucifix is peculiarly unsuitable as an ornament
at the Eucharist. The Eucharistic sacrifice is a pleading here on
earth of Calvary as an actual, living, triumphant reality; the
cross speaks of Calvary as an event, dead and past, and
encourages people to think of the Eucharist as ‘nothing more
than a bare remembrance of what is past and gone’. [Vide
A. J. Stephens: The Book of Common Prayer, pp. 1117-18.]
At least the alms bason has a definite and integral part to play
in the unfolding of the Eucharistic action.
The age loved to lavish gifts on the altar; in particular
magnificent sets of altar plate. The set which Cosin after the
Restoration gave to Durham cathedral includes two candlesticks
and ‘a fair, large, scolloped paten, silver and gilt’,
now known as a ciborium, with a cover ‘of fair embossed work’
surmounted by an orb and cross. According to the ceremonial of
the period, the ciborium was used for the bread till immediately
before the Prayer of Consecration, when it was transferred to the
paten; the ciborium bears this inscription: PANIS QUEM FRANGIMUS
COMMUNIO CORPORIS CHRISTI EST. [Cosin: Correspondence, II,
pp. xxv, 168, 172. All the plate except the ciborium was recast
in 1767; the candlesticks are now on the altar of the Gregory
chapel.] Lord Crewe commemorated the fiftieth year of his
consecration by a gift of silver altar plate to South Church,
Bishop Auckland. Judging from the flagon which has survived, the
most magnificent and romantic of all these sets must have been
that ordered by James I for the embassy chapel at Madrid when
Charles I went to court the Spanish Infanta. James was
particularly anxious that the worship of the Church of England
should not appear mean in the eyes of the Spaniards. The flagon
of silver gilt is embossed on its body with the Virgin and Child
on one side and on the other the Virgin with the dead Christ.
Round the top of the base are panels representing the Nativity,
the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Virgin
crowned with the Child, and Saint Nicholas with children. [The
flagon is now in the possession of Saint Columba’s College,
Dublin; for the description I am indebted to the Warden.]
Gifts were not confined to altar plate. In 1638 Jeremy Taylor
furnished his church at Uppingham with new ornaments which
included, besides altar plate, a diaper corporal and fair linen
cloth, a cushion of crimson velvet with crimson silk tassels and
a carpet of green silk damask for the altar. It is not known
whether it was all at his own expense; the Bishop of Peterborough
dedicated the ornaments. [For this information I am indebted to
the Rev. C. J. Stranks; cf. his article on Jeremy Taylor in the C.Q.R.,
October 1940.] In 1668 Fuller, the Bishop of Lincoln, wrote to
Sancroft, then Dean of Saint Paul’s, asking him to procure
in London a carpet for his cathedral altar with panes of cloth of
gold and blue damask. The Bishop seems a little afraid that the
blue may not tone with the gold, so he adds a proviso that it is
not to be too gaudy. He also asks him to order a pair of ‘great
and plain double-guilt’ candlesticks, instead of the
existing brass ones which he can stomach no longer, lamenting at
the same time his inability to afford a more expensive metal. [Granville:
Remains, I, p. 218, footnote. Surtees Society, Vol. 37.]
Comber notes in his diary in 1690 the gift to York Minster by an
unknown donor of a noble crimson velvet altar cloth with rich
embroidery and a gold fringe. ‘I hope,’ he adds, ‘God
will reward this alms done in secret, very openly, it being a
seasonable and liberal gift.’ [MS. diary.]
There is a charming contemporary account of a similar gift
made by Queen Mary II to Canterbury. She noticed that the
furnishings were dingy, so she sent for the Dean and showed him
‘some pieces of silver stuff and purple-flowered velvets’,
which she thought would do. But there was not enough material,
and though she took the trouble to send to Holland, she was
unable to get any more. However, with the help of a page ‘who
understood those things’, she matched it up with a pane of
gold stuff. It must have been a very magnificent affair when it
was finished, ‘a pane of the figured velvet, and a pane of
gold stuff, flowered with silver’. At the same time she
renewed the hangings on the Archbishop’s throne. Altogether,
they cost her well over £500. [Wickham Legg and Saint John Hope:
Inventories of Christ Church, Canterbury, p. 290.] Mrs.
Thornton left to Stonegrave Church not only money for the
purchase of altar plate, but also two carpets for the altar, one
embroidered and one plain purple, a fair linen cloth and two
corporals, or napkins as they were then called. [Autobiography,
p. 333.]
VI
From their conception of the liturgy as the prayer of the
whole Church with its centre in the Eucharist, the seventeenth-century
liturgists go on to deduce that the individual Christian if he
would be true to his vocation and attain the end of his being
must take his part in the liturgy. For it is the Church, as
Johnson of Cranbrook puts it, for which Christ died and which He
fills with His graces; and the blessings of the Christian
religion can only be enjoyed by individual Christians as they
live the life of the Church and join in its prayer. [Brett: Life
of the late Reverend John Johnson, 1748, p. 160.] Comber
accordingly bids his readers ‘to keep their heart close to
every petition as they go along’, a delightful seventeenth-century
way of telling them to pray the Mass. [op. cit., Preface.] At the
end of the period Simeon declared: ‘The finest sight short
of heaven would be a whole congregation using the prayers of the
liturgy in the true spirit of them.’ [Quoted in C. Smyth: Simeon
and Church Order, p. 291.]
They held that liturgy deepens and widens the spiritual life;
through it we enter into the devotional riches of the whole
Church; for liturgy is not the prayer of any one age or group of
Christians. In an important passage at the end of his history of
liturgies Comber speaks of liturgical worship as ‘that way
of praying, which was used by the saints in the Old Testament,
enjoined by Christ in the New, practised by all those holy
bishops and devout Christians, who lived ever since the first
settling of the Church, and now allowed and observed in all
regular Protestant Churches’. In the same passage – it
is an appeal to nonconformists to think more charitably of the
Prayer Book – he goes on to speak of the liturgy as ‘the
voice of the Church’; when we use it our prayers are not
stinted to the ‘sudden conceptions of any private person’,
but we adore God ‘in the same manner, that the Christian
Church has always done and as near as possible in the same words’.
[Companion to the Temple, ed. 1702, II, p. 83.] The mere
joining in the liturgy with its hallowed associations, the
uniting with others in the prayer of the Church, acts as a spur
on our own slackness in zeal and devotion.
All the writers of the school have a strong belief based on an
interpretation of Our Lord’s words, ‘where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’
(Matt. 18:20), that liturgical worship, because it is the prayer
of the Church, has a far greater spiritual value and is more
acceptable with God than private prayer. [Hooker, op. cit., V, 24.
Beveridge: Works, VIII, pp. 503-4.] In fact one of the
weaknesses of the school was that at times their emphasis on
liturgy made them undervalue the place of private prayer in the
life of the soul. Jeremy Taylor, Granville, and Ken are almost
the only persons touched by the school who betray any knowledge
of contemplative prayer; the majority appear content with
discursive meditation. Granville used Fr. Baker’s Holy
Wisdom; he thought, however, that he should be read with
caution and found him very ‘enthusiastical’.
Not only do they think of the liturgy as an essential part of
our prayers, but they see in it a visible sign of that inner
unity which should mark the life of the Church, and a powerful
means of creating that unity. By it we are formed in the mind of
the Church; in using it daily we are linked not only with each
other but with the Church down the ages; gradually we grow up
into the mind and outlook of the Church and lose that
individualism which cuts us asunder from our fellow Christians.
The meeting of the faithful in the liturgy makes the worship of
the Church on earth an analogue of that offered in the heavenly
sanctuary where the Church is truly one. [Thorndike: Works,
I, pp. 211-12.] George Herbert in his sermons used to liken a
Christian congregation, praying ‘with one heart and one
voice, and in one reverent posture’, to the beauty of the
Jerusalem that is at peace with itself.
With such views on the place of the liturgy in the life of the
soul it was natural that the school should lay great emphasis on
instructing the laity in its principles and meaning. George
Herbert was in the habit of explaining the structure of the
Prayer Book to the people of Bemerton; he dealt with the meaning
of the prayers, the connection between the collect, epistle, and
gospel for the day, and showed the reason for all that was done
in the service. The Church of England may well be proud of him;
for he originated what is so much advocated by the Liturgical
Movement, the liturgical sermon. In Granville’s papers there
is mention of him during Lent 1679-80 taking the young people of
Easington through the Eucharist in preparation for their Easter
Communion. [Remains, II, pp. 43-4.] His nephew is told to
use the Prayer Book with the aid of Comber’s Companion to
the Temple as a subject matter for his meditations, so that
he may be able to enter more into the meaning of the services. [Ibid.,
pp. 64-5.] His household were made to follow the services with
their Prayer Books and Bibles. [Ibid., p. 154.]
In the Granville papers there is a plan for a clerical study
circle on the liturgy. It was to be held in Granville’s
house in the college at Durham on the first Thursday of each
month. Ecclesiastical lawyers were to be invited as well as
clergy; and the study circle was to discuss matters of church
discipline, and the orders and rules of the Prayer Book. The day
was to begin with Mattins in the cathedral, followed by a dinner
given by Granville himself. The study circle was to start
business at twelve; the subject of the discussion was to be
chosen beforehand, and each member was to bring his views in
writing. These were to be read by the secretary and to be
followed by a discussion till Evensong, each member speaking in
turn. It was an excellent plan to mix clergy and lawyers
together; many of the difficulties over the law of public worship
are due to the fact that they do not understand one another’s
point of view. [Ibid., pp. 171-3.]
Throughout the century it was usual in devout households for
the family to say the whole of Mattins and Evensong together when
it was impossible to attend the daily offices in church.
Granville during his travels said the offices with his man-servant,
the latter making the responses. [Ibid., p. 32.] Mrs.
Thornton had the offices said each day in her house, and it was
through constantly saying them there that Comber gained his
insight into the Anglican rite and was inspired to write his
commentary. [Memoirs of the Life and Writing of Thomas Comber,
1799, p. 66.] L’Estrange thought that the reformers, in
compressing the traditional offices into two, intended to make it
possible for the laity in their homes to take their part in the
liturgy. [op. cit., p. 108.] In George Herbert’s parish
those whose work prevented them from attending the daily offices
used to pause for a moment when they heard the church bell and
offer their devotions to God, thus uniting in intention with the
prayer of the Church.
VII
The attitude of the Church to the Prayer book was
revolutionized by the understanding of the real nature of liturgy
which the school possessed. In spite of having originated in the
sixteenth century, the Prayer Book has become inseparably linked
with their theological and spiritual teaching. The sixteenth-century
reformers gave us a vernacular liturgy, and one adapted to the
technique of congregational worship. But the revolutionary nature
of their work, the controversies in which they moved, prevented
them from realizing the implications of what they had done. The
Prayer Book leaves their hands only half understood; even their
own supporters were lukewarm in their admiration; it was left for
a later age to see its full significance. The liturgists of the
seventeenth century longed to worship; they grasped the meaning
of liturgy, and to a surprising extent succeeded in making their
age liturgically minded. They interpreted the Prayer Book and
gave it form and meaning; under their hands a protestant service
book was transformed into a catholic liturgy; they discovered its
beauties; they loved it and were ready to die for it.
The intention of the compilers of the 1552 Prayer Book had
been to set the worship of the Church of England definitely in
the tradition of Continental protestantism. The seventeenth-century
liturgists took the Prayer Book and interpreted it, not as an
Anglican counterpart to the Protestant Church Orders of the
Continent, but against the traditional worship of the Catholic
Church. [E. C. Ratcliff, art. ‘Christian Worship and Liturgy’,
in K. E. Kirk: The Study of Theology, pp. 457, 461.] They
emphasize its supposed conformity to the standards of scripture
and the primitive church; and they delight in quoting Grotius’s
comment that the English liturgy was incomparably better than
that of any other reformed Church owing to its nearness to the
primitive pattern. To Durel the Prayer Book is the Worship of the
universal Church adapted to the manners and genius of the English
people [op. cit., p. 16.]
It is to the seventeenth-century liturgists that we owe the
best and most painstaking revision of the Prayer Book. They
removed anomalies and inconsistencies, and gave it polish and
form. To them we owe such familiar things as the names of the
prayers in the Eucharist, names expressive of the different parts
and movements of the rite, such as the Collect for Purity, the
name given to it my Laud [Works, III, p. 73], the Collect
of Humble Access, the Prayer of Consecration, the Prayer of
Oblation, and the Collect of Thanksgiving; these last four names
first appear in the Scottish rite of 1637. It was an age of
liturgical creativeness; it produced some of the best prayers in
the Prayer Book, the Anglican orders for the consecration of
churches, and in the 1637 Prayer Book the most satisfactory
Eucharistic rite in the English language. In this period too the
crown and glory of the Anglican liturgy, the Coronation rite,
achieved its present form.
The devotion felt by the school for the Prayer Book was
expressed by the adjective ‘incomparable’. Granville
claimed that it deserved to be taken as the universal liturgy for
all Christendom. [op. cit., p. 93.] Comber speaks of it as
possessing a true and native lustre ‘so lovely and
ravishing, that like the purest beauties, it needs no supplement
of art and dressing, but conquers by its own attractiveness’.
[Companion to the Temple, ed. 1701, Preface.] As an
instance of the way in which the Prayer Book conquered by its own
intrinsic beauty, the school loved the story of Bishop Bull and
the sectary. During the Protectorate Bull was allowed to minister
unmolested in the parish of Easton-in-Giordano, close to Bristol.
When one of the sectarys in the parish brought his child to be
baptized, Bull used the Prayer Book service as if it were an
extemporary composition of his own. After the service the sectary
commented on the prayers as an example of the superiority of
‘extemporary effusions’ to ‘premeditated forms’;
he was only sorry that such excellent prayers had been
accompanied by the sign of the cross, ‘that badge of popery’.
Whereupon Bull triumphantly showed him the Prayer Book service
and how it contained all the prayers which he had admired. The
sectary was so impressed that he and his family ever afterwards
became regular church-goers. [Life, op. cit., pp. 34-5.]
Bull all through his life emphasized the necessity of a reverent,
distinct, and leisurely reading, if the full beauty of the rite
was to be brought out, and was himself noted for the way in which
he read every part of the service with the particular devotion
belonging to it. [Works, II, pp. 18-19; Life, p. 46.]
The school loved the Prayer Book for its completeness; to Jeremy
Taylor ‘there is no ghostly advantage which the most
religious can either need or fancy, but the English liturgy in
its entire constitution will furnish us withal’. [Works,
V, p. 247.] They loved it too because it came to them with the
authority of the whole Church; Jeremy Taylor says it was done by
king and priest with the advice of the people [Ibid., p.
234]; a rosy view of the Prayer Book’s origin scarcely
likely to be echoed by modern historians.
One of the most typical, but least known, panegyrics on the
Prayer Book is to be found in a charge delivered to the clergy of
the diocese of Canterbury by Sir Leoline Jenkins in the reign of
Charles II, ‘I forbear to tell you ...’, he says,
‘how excellent the composition is, how devout and humble the
confessions, how grave and divine the absolutions, how pathetic
and comprehensive the prayers and supplications, how sweet and
exalted the hymns and thanksgivings, how charitable and
compassionate the intercessions for all sorts of men; in a word,
how excellent the matter, the method, and the decorum of the
whole liturgy is. So that neither Rome nor Moscovy, Osburgh nor
Amsterdam, have anything in their public services that can enter
into comparison with it.’ [William Wynne: The Life of Sir
Leoline Jenkins, 1724, I, p. lxxv. Sir Leoline Jenkins, 1624-85,
was a High Church, ecclesiastical and admiralty lawyer. He held
various high positions: deputy Dean of Arches, Judge of the Court
of Admiralty, Judge of the Prerogative Court, and at the end of
his life Secretary of State.]
The most revealing passage on what the liturgy could mean to a
devout churchman who had caught the spirit of the school is to be
found in the Granville papers. It is a fragment of a diary dated
at Sedgefield, 5th December 1679. To appreciate the passage to
the full it must be remembered that Granville is referring to the
lessons for Evensong for that day in the 1662 lectionary. His
humility and sincerity make the passage extraordinarily moving;
it is the utterance of a man whose spiritual life was nourished
on the Prayer Book.
‘At my first return I did mind the voice of the Church in
the psalms, the voice of God in the lessons, in particular
manner, watching for somewhat suitable to my state, labouring
under many fears and much distrust and diffidence, and it pleased
God, by the Church’s care, to put into my hands a fit form
of devotion, Psalm 27, The Lord is my light and my salvation,
etc., fit to inspire courage, and to bring to my ears the
eleventh of the Hebrews, concerning the mighty power of faith; of
all things most seasonable for my consideration, who am, I fear,
notoriously peccant in not exercising and employing my faith. I
beseech God to deliver me from all my past guilt, and strengthen
my faith so at last that I may remove all those mountains of
difficulties which have long discouraged me. Amen.’ [op. cit.,
pp. 41-2.]
The consideration which the school gave to the nature of
liturgy as the prayer of the Church, centring round the
Eucharist, led to their laying down and elaborating three
principles, to which they maintained all liturgies must conform
if they are to fulfil their function as the adoring prayer of the
Church, and which they believed to be best exemplified in the
Anglican rite. The principles are summed up in three key words,
edification, order, uniformity. A liturgy must edify, its
structure must reveal a rational order, it must be uniform in
every place where it is offered. A Church whose public worship
does not manifest these principles cannot be said to have a
liturgy; and without a liturgy it is spiritually dead. In the
following three chapters we shall examine the meaning which the
school gave to these principles.
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