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ContentsEDITORIAL page 3

CHURCH, STATE & PRAYER BOOK 7John Milner

DOM GREGORY DIX AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 20David Fuller

VERNON STALEY AND ENGLISH CEREMONIAL 41Evan McWilliams

ENCOUNTERING GOD 50David Gillett

ORDINARIATE LITURGICAL TEXTS: A FURTHER REPORT 54D. C. Heath

REVIEW 58Mark Hart

LETTERS 61

BRANCHES AND BRANCH CONTACTS 64

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A new website has recently appeared called Thinking Liturgy, an offshoot of Thinking Anglicans. The latter, which is based in this country, is strongly liberal in bent but performs a useful service

in posting Anglican news even if you don’t sympathise with its position. The liturgical offshoot aims to perform a similar news-and-reviews function, and given the more specialised subject matter could, when into its stride, become a useful forum for the discussion of liturgy by people of very varying views.

It was on this site that I recently came across the new collects being ‘trialled’ by the Anglican Church in Canada. Canadian liturgical provision resembles that of the Church of England, in that there is a conservative revision of 1962 based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and a Book of Alternative Services (1985) containing modern language services (and an alternative Communion rite in traditional language). Though the Canadian Book of Common Prayer (1962) remains the Church’s official service book, the alternatives have, as in England, largely displaced it in use. The 1985 book is now nearly thirty years old of course, and the Canadian Church has recently determined on a course of further revision. The new collects are a first instalment of this, being collects for the period from Trinity to Advent 2014.

As the preamble puts it, ‘each Sunday or feast Day has two choices of collects: in some cases these are both based on the gospel for the day; in some cases, one of the choices reflects one or more of the other readings of the day’. The group issuing the collects ‘has been at work on collects for the three-year cycle of Sundays and Feast days’, so it seems that the intention is eventually to produce collects following not, as in the past, a yearly cycle but a three-yearly one corresponding with the three-year Common Lectionary. It is not clear whether these alternatives will be authorised to replace the existing BAS collects or as alternatives to them—presumably the latter, unless the intention is to eliminate traditional collects in any version.

These new collects represent a departure then in being not, as in Common Worship, a yearly cycle interacting with a three-year lectionary, but rather a three-year cycle corresponding with a three-year lectionary in which the collects are always thematically attached to the readings. Both systems of course contrast with the 1662 Prayer Book which has a single cycle of Collects, Epistles and Gospels. The case for a three-year

Editorial

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cycle draws its strength from the modern circumstance that the readings at the Eucharist may be the only readings heard by the congregation—a three-year cycle (including Old Testament texts) at least ensures that a wider range of biblical material is encountered. The 1662 book assumes of course that the congregation will have heard extensive readings from the Scriptures at other services.

The system of always thematically relating the collect to the readings seems to me over-ingenious and likely to produce a rather strained effect over a three-year period. And in fact there are strained effects even in the fairly small amount of material so far released. But the Liturgy Task Force seems to have quailed at the prospect of composing new collects to cover so long a period, and instead, as they stress, have drawn either from ‘existing, already in-use resources’ or from Prayers for an Inclusive Church, ‘a compendium of collects written by Steven Shakespeare, an English chaplain, philosopher and lecturer’ (so much for liturgical localism!). This too, then, is something of a departure—to draw in this way on very heterogeneous bodies of work for what is presumably intended still to be a liturgy with a consistent style.

They make a rather mixed bunch. For the most part they follow the classic shape of the collect—that is, an invocation involving a description of one of the divine attributes (‘O God, the protector of all that trust in thee...), followed by a petition (‘increase and multiply upon us thy mercy’) and an aspiration (‘that...we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal’), concluding with a ‘pleading’ (‘grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord’). Many are inoffensive without being very satisfying, and occasionally the would-be poetic intrudes (‘Holy one, whose fingers sculpted son and moon’) or the search for a striking phrase produces a jarring effect (‘...through Jesus Christ, your dream made flesh’). Some court ambiguity:

God of eternal wisdom,You alone impart the gift of discernment:Grant us understanding hearts, so that we may choose wiselyBetween the treasures of your promised reignAnd this world’s counterfeits;Through Jesus Christ, the pearl of true value. Amen

Before we reach line five we are almost bound to think that we are being invited to choose (rather impertinently) from among the ‘treasures of your promised reign’ rather than between them and ‘this world’s counterfeits’—and why ‘choose wisely’? Surely it’s a ‘no-brainer’?

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Editorial

The most distinctive prayers are those drawn from Steven Shakespeare’s collection, mentioned above. These are a freelance effort, which Shakespeare wishes to see used by prayer groups and even as part of the authorised liturgy (though he recognises that their unauthorised use presents problems). He has a particular taste for striking invocations intended, he says, to ‘jar us out of preconceived and limiting images we might have’1Characteristic openings include ‘Lord of the teasing riddle’, ‘God of truth uncovered’, ‘Destitute king’. One prayer runs:

Scandalous God,You sow the weeds among the crop,Raise bread with impure yeast,Offer treasure without priceAnd cast a net that catches good and bad:Throw down our idols of purity and possession,So that you might reveal in usYour wide-branching love;Through Jesus Christ, the stumbling block. Amen.

My own feeling is that this tries to do too much. It draws of course on the day’s gospel reading (the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares) and then adds in the net with the mixed catch and other images with an effect, to me, more confusing than enriching. There is just too much going on, and the various images don’t develop naturally out of each other but produce instead an effect of willed and effortful connection—the ‘wide-branching love’ of line eight, for example, presumably refers both to the Parable of the Mustard Seed and to the branches of the true vine, but has a less than inevitable relation to the wheat crop of line two, while Christ as ‘stumbling block’ seems to have only an external relation to the preceding imagery. (There is a connection, but we’re not made to feel it.)

However that may be, I can imagine some individuals and groups wanting to use these prayers. The question they pose is, ironically, whether they are ‘inclusive’ enough. Shakespeare himself concedes that their appeal may be specialised: ‘I am highly conscious that...what I have to offer will simply not “click” with many people’2 This puts in question, surely, their suitability for use with a general congregation?

It is certainly interesting to see what other Anglican churches are up to liturgically. One’s general reflection must be that in Canada, as here, there seems to be a continuing appetite for increasing liturgical provision by way of proliferating alternatives, and a consequent loss

1 Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church (2009), p.xiv.2 Ibid.p.xviii.

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of shared landmarks, even where authorisation applies the fig-leaf of commonality. No doubt this is partly a genuine preference for novelty, partly dissatisfaction with existing texts. One wouldn’t wish to discourage attempts to create a distinctively modern liturgical register, but I haven’t yet found any examples which carry the conviction of the old texts.

John Scrivener

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J O H N M I L N E R

Church, State and Prayer Book: Common Prayer and Public Policy1

When Edward II defeated the powerful but turbulent nobleman, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, at the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1321, he sealed his victory by arranging a trial at which

Thomas could neither speak nor be represented. Inevitably, the trial led to Thomas’s execution. That, however, was not that. Given Edward’s unpopularity and the regard in which the Earl had been held, Thomas’s memory lived on. Soon, he was associated with miracles and was regarded as a martyr. From that perception came the ‘Office of St. Thomas of Lancaster’. The Collect is instructive:

O God, who, for the peace and tranquillity of the inhabitants of England, willed that the blessed Thomas, thy martyr and Earl, should fall by the sword of the persecutor, grant that all who devoutly reverence his memory on earth, may merit to obtain worthy reward along with him in heaven.

So, prayer, the Church and liturgy are intertwined with politics and propaganda in a way that could clearly be threatening to the crowned, anointed king. That the Anthem for this Office compared Thomas of Lancaster directly with that other martyred Thomas, Becket, must have made things even more uncomfortable for the king and his Council.2

Pre-Reformation liturgy did, it should be noted, include references to the sovereign so the Church gave official support to the monarch of the time. In the Sarum rite, a specific reference to the king comes at the opening of the Canon of the Mass, immediately following prior references to the Pope and the local Bishop only. In the same rite, the sovereign warrants a special Solemn Collect on Good Friday, with a prayer for ‘our most Christian king N, that our Lord and God may make

1 I have used (ed.) Brian Cummings, The Book of Common Prayer The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, Oxford, 2011 as the main point of reference to all three Prayer Books, apart from a personal copy of the 1662 Prayer Book for the references to the 5 November provision regarding William III. This outstanding and scholarly edition by Professor Cummings has proved invaluable. In the notes, I have cited the occasions where I have drawn on the information in his own Notes. Throughout the paper, I have modernised the spelling.2 I am grateful to Dr Ryan Perry of the University of Kent at Canterbury for supplying me with the references following a paper he gave at a Conference in Canterbury in April 2013 to mark the 600th anniversary of the death of Henry IV.

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subject to him all barbarous nations for his perpetual peace’.3 Liturgical ceremony could also offer powerful endorsement to a king in medieval times.

And under an awning were men of venerable old age in the garb and of the number of the apostles, having the names of the twelve apostles written in front of them, together with twelve kings of the English succession, martyrs and confessors, girt about the loins with golden belts, with sceptres in their hands (and) crowns upon their heads….who, at the king’s approach, in perfect time and in sweetly sounding chant,….sang the psalm, ‘For you have saved us from those who afflicted us and put to confusion those who hated us’.4

This was the scene at Cheapside as Henry V returned to London in triumph after his victory at Agincourt in 1415. But just as it was God who had willed the execution of Thomas of Lancaster, so it was not for the people to ascribe to their own glory the triumph at Agincourt- ‘rather let it be ascribed to God alone, from Whom is every victory’.5 So, even before the Reformation and the advent of the Prayer Book, we see examples of the Church’s role—and influence—in politics and propaganda, and the underlying theme of a providential God, but a God who could be angry.

By the time of the first English Prayer Book in 1549, England was in a febrile state in which it was, broadly, to remain until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The uncertainty of the times is well illustrated by a change which occurred between 1535 and 1538 in editions of a privately printed primer of English prayers (possibly an early compilation of Cranmer’s), and the earliest of such publications to mention the monarch.

That thou vouchsafe to preserve our most gracious sovereign lord and king, Henry the Eighth, his most gracious queen Anne (Boleyn), all their posterity, aiders, helpers and true subjects.

By 1538, this had been changed. There was now a reference to the king and his ‘son, Prince Edward’.6 Anne had been dropped when her head had fallen on Tower Green. This Prince Edward who came to the throne in 1547 as a sickly boy gives his name to the first two English Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. The very nature of the two books—the

3 (trans.) A. Harford Pearson, The Sarum Missal done into English, 2nd ed., London, 1884, pp.309, 151.4 (ed. and trans.) Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell, Gesta Henrici Quinti, Oxford, 1975, pp.106-109.5 Ibid, pp.98-99.6 Frank Streatfield, The State Prayers and Other Variations from the Book of Common Prayer, London and Oxford, 1950, p.10.

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Church, State and Prayer Book: Common Prayer and Public Policy

first essentially Catholic, the second Protestant—illustrates the turmoil within society at a time when church attendance was compulsory and religious nonconformity was seen as treasonable. The removal of papal authority did not, contemporaries feared, mean the end of papal threat: this was no age of ecumenism. So, in the Litany of 1549, we find a familiar suffrage amplified in a way that reflected the fears of the time and the role of the Church in underpinning a royal authority newly independent from final papal oversight.

From all sedition and privy conspiracy, from the tyranny of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, from all false doctrine and heresy, from hardness of heart and contempt of thy word and commandment. Good Lord deliver us.

The reference to the Pope was, of course, dropped by Mary I in 1554 and, in a typical mark of her wisdom, not reintroduced in Elizabeth I’s Prayer Book of 1559. That it was there at all illustrates the tensions in society and the political role of the Church at such sensitive times.

It is fascinating to see how, as time progressed, the Prayer Book came more and more to lay emphasis on the king, drawing Church and state more closely together and enlisting, as it were, God’s aid in the support of the monarchy. In 1549, the suffrage ‘O Lord, save the King’ was introduced into Morning and Evening Prayer where it has remained ever since. There were, however, no State Prayers after the morning and evening offices. The main development was in the provision of two alternative prayers for the King, either one of which was to be used (in a very odd and unseemly liturgical deviation) after the Collect for the day. Why there were two prayers is unclear. In his recent edition of Anglican Prayer Books, Professor Brian Cummings drily comments that, ‘superfluity is a safe place where a monarch is concerned’.7 There are references to the king in the Litany and in the Prayer for the Church, although both are very brief. In the Communion service, there is the now familiar ‘specially we beseech thee to save and defend thy servant Edward our king’. The petition in the Litany is simply, ‘That it may please thee to keep Edward the Sixth thy servant, our king and governor’. There are, however, other petitions relating to the king, that he ‘may...make his heart in thy faith and fear’ and that God will be ‘his defender and keeper’.

What is more telling, however, is the way in which the Litany is infused with concerns about the state: Church and state are intertwined. Litanies and processions had been a staple of medieval life and they were often used at times of national emergency or in support of a particular enterprise. There is evidence from across the country of such liturgical

7 (ed.) Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, p.698.

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support in the autumn of 1412 for the campaign of the Duke of Clarence to restore Aquitaine to English rule. 8 It is the petitions themselves in the 1549 Litany which suggest the growing influence of the state on the Church, what Brian Cummings calls, ‘prayers of national and political incorporation’. So now in the first English Litany we have petitions for the ‘Lords of the Council and all the nobility’ and for magistrates that they may have ‘grace to execute justice and maintain truth’. National and local virtue are part of what, through its liturgical intercessory role, the Church wants to achieve. So, too, is national supremacy: God is asked to give the king, ‘the victory over all his enemies’.

For the rest of the century, those enemies were, of course, many. Two Protectors in Edward VI’s reign, the turbulence of Mary’s and during the long period in which Elizabeth I occupied the throne there was the constant threat of religious tension and foreign invasion, culminating in the Spanish Armada. Until her execution, Mary, Queen of Scots cast a shadow over the land while rebellion and plague added to the problems. The Church had a vital role in offering coherence and emphasising the place of the monarch under God. This important influence may be discerned by considering aspects of the 1559 Prayer Book, introduced the year after Elizabeth’s accession. It was similar to the short-lived 1552 Prayer Book and, therefore, had a greater Protestant than Catholic sympathy. The 1552 Book had been introduced on All Saints’ Day 1552 and was declared illegal by Mary I from 20 December 1553. Interestingly, in the interval until then from Edward VI’s death on 6 July 1553, there are existing copies which have Edward’s name struck through and Mary’s inserted. It is also likely that the 1552 Book was used in the limited area controlled for a short period by the followers of Lady Jane Grey with her name inserted as monarch.9

With the exception of the Litany which continued to be printed in Mary’s reign, including references to Philip of Spain and Mary in the petition for the monarch, the Book of Common Prayer disappeared. The 1559 Book demonstrated a greater emphasis on the monarchy and that strengthening is well shown in the Litany. Had the 1549 wording been followed, the petition for the Queen would have read simply: ‘That it may please thee to keep thy servant Elizabeth our Queen and Governor’.

Instead we find this: ‘That it may please thee to keep and strengthen in the true worshipping of thee in righteousness and holiness of life, thy servant Elizabeth our most gracious Queen and Governor.’

Now, for the first time, the Prayer for the Queen’s Majesty is found, as familiar from the 1662 State Prayers, although not here after Morning

8 John Milner, ‘The English Enterprise in France, 1412-1413’, p.80 in (ed.) Dorothy J. Clayton, Richard G. Davies and Peter McNiven, Trade, Devotion and Governance, Stroud, 1994. 9 Streatfield, p.12.

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and Evening Prayer but at the end of the Litany. As the Litany was to be used on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, as well as at other times when ‘commanded by the Ordinary’, this prayer would be used both with great frequency and regularity. Prayers for the monarch were not an innovation with the Reformation—there is a record of a Mass for the King in a sixth-century sacramentary of St. Gregory.10 From 1559, of course, the prayers were in English and the knitting together of Church and state in a regular cycle of specific intercession strengthened the links between Church and state, with the aim, it seems, of reinforcing those between people and monarch. The Church was an integral part of people’s lives, and the Church was embracing the monarch in its cycle of prayer, using words and phrases that themselves enhanced the monarch herself.

We are familiar with special services which are issued from time to time as appropriate to the national situation—that to mark the end of the Second World War is a good example and, more recently, the extensive provision made to support the celebration of the present Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Such arrangements are not new. They were prolific in Elizabeth I’s reign and illustrate very clearly how the Church was used to support the state and to direct opinion and thought. 11 The vivid, often extravagant, language and powerful imagery, frequently drawing on Biblical analogies, emphasised the gravity both of the problems faced and, where appropriate, the victories gained. In particular, they served to emphasise to the people the necessity of standing together, under God, through the Church and with the Queen. This was devotion as propaganda. When it came to victories, the opportunity was not lost to make clear that the hand of God had been at work in England’s favour.

This is all well summed up in the Collect of thanksgiving published after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, from which this is a relatively short extract.

...Thou O Lord God, who knowest all things, knowing that our enemies came not of justice to punish us for our sins committed against thy divine majesty (whom they by their excessive wickedness have offended, and continually do offend, as much or more than we), but that they came with most cruel intent and purpose to destroy us...and utterly to root out the memory of our nation from off the earth for ever; and withal, wholly to suppress thy holy word and blessed gospel... which they (being drowned in idolatries and superstitions) do hate most deadly...Wherefore it hath pleased thee...to remember thy mercies towards us, turning our enemies from

10 Cummings, p.726.11 The references which follow are taken from (ed.) William K. Clay, Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, The Parker Society, Cambridge, 1847.

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us;...and to execute justice upon our cruel enemies turning the destruction which they intended towards us upon their own heads.

But, the prayer concludes, this display of God’s mercy involves a commitment from the people, so it is important ‘that we never [forget]……this thy merciful protection and deliverance of us from the malice, force, fraud and cruelty of our enemies’. Only by this remembrance of God’s merciful protection from the enemy may people ‘enjoy the continuance of thy fatherly goodness towards our Church, our QUEEN, our realm and people of England’. While all this sounds to the modern ear excessive, it makes clear in the most unequivocal way the real terror of the times and of the danger posed by the Armada. Further afield, the continuing threat of Turkish encroachment into Western Europe created great alarm. In an extraordinary prayer of 1565, following the Turkish invasion of Malta, the feverish anxiety of the period is well captured.

The prayer makes ‘humble suit to the throne of thy grace’ beseeching divine aid for the people to protect them from ‘our sworn and most deadly enemies the Turks, Infidels and Miscreants’. All would be well for England from ‘the world, the Turk, and all other thine enemies’ if the Gospel were betrayed—but that, of course, is not possible, so ‘therefore hate they us, because we love thee’. Although Malta was not taken, the danger returned with the invasion of Hungary in 1566 by Suleiman the Magnificent. The same prayer was brought into use again. While some of its language is to the modern reader deeply offensive, it reflects the desperate gravity and uncertainty of the international situation and the perception of the times. ‘The Turk,’ the prayer continues, ‘goeth about to set up, to extol and to magnify that wicked monster and damned soul Mahumet, above thy dearly beloved Son Jesus Christ’. If this was not sufficient to persuade God to intervene, He is cajoled further. ‘Suffer not thine enemies to prevail against those that now call upon thy name...lest the Heathen and Infidels say; Where is now their God?’. This prayer, authorised by Archbishop Matthew Parker, was meant for widespread use. The rubric is particularly instructive:

After the Psalm [and the Psalm is a compilation of all the most striking verses from the vengeance Psalms, ‘smite all our enemies upon the cheek bone and break the teeth of the ungodly’, for example], the prayer following shall be said by the Minister alone, with a high voice. At saying whereof, the people shall devoutly give ear, and shall both with mind and speech to themselves assent to the same prayer.

This was a prayer which the people were enjoined actively to pray. It was said on their behalf, but they were to engage with it—and it was to be used ‘in common prayer, every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday,

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through the whole realm’. So the Church responded with vigour and dramatic language to foreign dangers which threatened the realm.

Finally from the Elizabethan era, an example of how the Church was involved at times of serious rebellion: a prayer of thanksgiving for the suppression of the 1569 Northern Rebellion demonstrates an important way in which the Church could not only support but endorse the state. As with the attitude to the Turks, so in relation to internal rebellion, we see a frightened society—anxious about threat, terrified of disorder which would disturb what it saw as the natural state, fearful of discord and havoc. Public executions from Newcastle to Wetherby followed the suppression of the Northern Rebellion—tangible signs of state power and the consequences of rebellion. In this Thanksgiving Prayer, the executions were attributed to God Himself—it is God who ‘most dreadfully hast scourged some of the seditious persons with terrible executions’. These punishments were ‘justly inflicted for their disobedience to thee, and to thy servant their sovereign [my italics], to the example of us all...who...hast by thy assistance given the victory to thy servant our Queen, her true nobility and faithful subjects’. So the Church affirms the ordered society, ordained by God and, when threatened by sinful and rebellious men, supported by God.

By the time the 1662 Prayer Book was compiled, this picture of order and stability had been shaken to the core by two of the most striking events in English history: the Gunpowder Plot and the Civil War, known after 1660 as the Great Rebellion. Doubtless for most readers the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is one of the exciting stories remembered from childhood told also as an explanation for the thrill of bonfire night and fireworks. For contemporaries it was one of the most terrible and terrifying events they experienced, not made much less shocking by the fact it was foiled. When, in 1647, Parliament banned all Festivals (including Christmas), an exception was granted for the celebrations on 5 November.12 That the ‘penny for the Guy’ is still part of folk culture after four centuries is a reminder of the impact which the event had. The enhancement of the monarch as God’s servant has perhaps been evident in the preceding exploration of Elizabethan liturgy. A greater transformation still was to occur in the early Seventeenth Century as James I and then Charles I advocated the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, exalting the monarch as God’s anointed, accountable to Him alone and thus, of course, making the events of the English Civil War, culminating in the execution on 30 January 1649 of God’s own anointed, a most terrible and blasphemous crime. When the dark period of the Protectorate ended and Charles II came back to England, this was not simply a return but a Restoration.

12 Cummings, p.755.

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There was, however, a complication. The Gunpowder Plot had been organised by Roman Catholics eager to see the restoration of the Roman Catholic faith in England, and, following the accession of James I in 1603, in Scotland as well. The Catholic threat to a changing society where Protestantism had been accepted and Parliament was beginning to find its feet was seen as a matter of profound concern. The Catholic threat was, however, an external one—outside the main structure of society—until James, Duke of York, Charles II’s brother and heir presumptive adopted Catholicism. James II’s Coronation is the only one at which the Communion was not celebrated. A Catholic monarch would threaten, it was feared, the burgeoning influence of the landed and wealthy middle classes by a reassertion of Divine Right and submission to papal authority. So, in 1688 William of Orange and Charles II’s sister Mary began their joint reign. The Seventeenth Century wheel turned full circle: William landed in England on 5 November 1688.

Into this complex mix, men who had been deprived of their livings under the Protectorate, had seen the Prayer Book proscribed and had witnessed the execution of the monarch now had to revise the Prayer Book. It is a remarkable tribute to the compilers that the 1662 Book has endured and is seen as timeless when it was, inevitably, very much of its time. The only hints at the politics of the time do not refer to these internal preoccupations but to external threats. So, in the third Collect for Good Friday there is the petition, ‘have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Heretics, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart and contempt of thy word’—extremely mild compared with some of the examples from Elizabeth’s reign. The Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea contain some of the sentiments seen in the earlier prayers: ‘The Lord hath…dashed in pieces those that rose up against us’. Overall, it is, however, much more balanced. The Collect for use after a victory includes the judicious words, ‘we beseech thee, give us grace to improve this great mercy to thy glory, the advancement of thy Gospel, the honour of our Sovereign and, as much as in us lieth, to the good of all mankind’.

In 1662, there was, however, much more. The State Prayers as we still have them were introduced after Morning and Evening Prayer and were thus used twice every day. The Collect for the King remained in the Communion service although now moved before the Collect of the day. In the separate Irish Prayer Book a prayer was included for use with the State Prayers for the Lord Lieutenant General and General Governor. Given the difficulties associated with maintaining law and order in Ireland, and the frequent threats to royal authority, it is unsurprising that the prayer referred to ‘the sword which our dread Sovereign Lord the

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King hath committed into his hand’.13 Of much greater significance than these changes to the state prayers were the three special state services annexed to the new Prayer Book by Royal Authority (as happened at the start of each reign up to and including Victoria’s). Strictly, they were not part of the Prayer Book—although not by design but simply because they were not ready when the Prayer Book went to press.14 They are of a completely different style and quality from the rest of the Book.

The first of the three services was the Thanksgiving, ordered for 5 November, ‘for the happy deliverance of the king, and the Three Estates of the Realm, from the most Traiterous and Bloody intended Massacre by Gun-powder’. (After 1688, the title was amended and these words added, ‘and also for the happy arrival of his Majesty King William on this day, for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation’.) The second service was for 30 January, ‘being the day of the Martyrdom of King Charles the First’. That this was seen as the most important is shown by the instruction that, if the day happens to fall on a Sunday, the Form of Service was to be used on the following day. The third service was the ‘form of prayer with thanksgiving to be used yearly on 29 May being the day of His Majesty’s (Charles II’s) birth and happy return to his kingdom’. In the Kalendar, all three were red letter days and the Litany was ordered to be used on each of them.

The Kalendar starkly described 5 November as the ‘Papists’ Conspiracy’, quite different from the normal entries which are about commemorations of holy people or events in the life of the Church. This was Church and state working together in response to a threat to destroy not just Parliament itself but the Three Estates who happened to be gathered in Parliament. The implications were almost too monstrous to contemplate. The service is permeated by the absolutist theories of monarchy which were so important to James I and Charles I. One of the Collects speaks of how God has, through the ages, shown his mercy ‘in the protection of righteous and religious Kings and States’. It was God’s actions which led to ‘the wonderful and mighty deliverance of our late gracious Sovereign King James, the Queen, the Prince, and all the Royal Branches, with the Nobility, Clergy and Commons of this Realm, then assembled in Parliament, by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages’.

While the Epistle appointed at the Communion service was, rather predictably, the passage from Romans 13 beginning, ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers’, the Gospel is a remarkable demonstration

13 Archibald J. Stephens, The Book of Common Prayer...according to the use of the United Church of England and Ireland, Ecclesiastical History Society, London, 1849, I. (88)-(89).14 (ed.) George Harford and Morley Stevenson, The Prayer Book Dictionary, London, nd, p.761.

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of how the Gunpowder Plot was perceived, and gives an insight into contemporary views of kingship. The passage is Matthew 27, verses 1-10, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas and begins, of course, with, ‘When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death’. This is clearly redolent with symbolism about the nature of the anointed king, a point succinctly captured in the special Collect for Evening Prayer in the Martyrdom service which speaks of ‘that barbarous murder this day committed upon the sacred person of thine Anointed, our late Sovereign’ . The Gospel for the Martyrdom service, Matthew 21, verses 33-41, is designed to draw out the significance of God’s Anointed: ‘But last of all [the householder] sent unto them his son, saying, “They will reverence my son”. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, “This is the heir, come let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance”’.

This underlying philosophy is found throughout the services for the Martyrdom of King Charles. Here, of course, the liturgists faced a theological dilemma. The merciful God who had ensured that the Gunpowder Plot was thwarted had not prevented the execution of an anointed King. The answer to this lay in God’s righteous vengeance on the sins of the nation. So, the alternative to the first Collect for Morning Prayer prescribed in the Martyrdom service puts it like this:

O most mighty God, terrible in thy judgements, and wonderful in thy doings towards the children of men, who in thy heavy displeasure didst suffer the life of our late gracious Sovereign to be this day taken away by wicked hands; We, thy unworthy servants, humbly confess that they were the crying sins of this Nation which brought this heavy judgement upon us.

The prayer continues with an urgent petition, ‘But, O gracious God, when thou makest inquisition for blood, lay not the guilt of this innocent blood….to the charge of the people of this land’.

The prayer to be used after the Prayer for the Church Militant develops this theme further. Although it was ‘for our many and great provocations that thou didst suffer thine Anointed to fall into the hands of violent and bloodthirsty men, and barbarously to be murdered by them’, yet the nation was not left ‘for ever as sheep without a shepherd’. God is then thanked for His intervention in restoring Charles II. Proper order under God has returned to the realm. This point is strongly developed in the central part of this prayer:

...by thy gracious providence [thou] didst miraculously preserve the undoubted heir of his Crown, our most gracious Sovereign King Charles the Second, from his bloody enemies, hiding him under the

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shadow of thy wings, until their tyranny was overpast, and bringing him back in thy good appointed time to sit in peace upon the throne of his Father, and to exercise that authority over us, which of thy special grace thou hast committed unto him.

This prayer must have dispelled any lingering doubts congregations may have had about the nature of kingship and the horror of Charles I’s execution.

The services for 29 May—the birthday and restoration of Charles II—were, by contrast, joyful. There was a clear sense reflected in the liturgy that, following the upheavals of the earlier part of the century which had rocked Church and state to their foundations, happier times were assured. As the first Collect for Morning Prayer put it, ‘by thy miraculous providence [thou] hast delivered us out of our late miserable confusions, by restoring to us our dread Sovereign Lord, thy servant, King CHARLES’. The phrase ‘His Majesty’s….. Happy Return to his Kingdoms’ is, as has been seen, in the heading for the services of the day. In the second Collect for Morning Prayer, God was thanked for his ‘divine providence and goodness’ because he ‘didst this day first bring into the world, and didst this day also bring back and restore to us, and to his own just and undoubted rights our most gracious Sovereign Lord thy servant King CHARLES’. The latter part of this prayer is infused with hope and promise. ‘Let justice, truth and holiness; let peace and love and all Christian virtues flourish in his time’ and, perhaps with a last backward glance, ‘let his people serve him with honour and obedience’. From 1688, some notes of happiness could even be introduced into the Gunpowder Plot service, the title of which was now amended to add, ‘and also for the happy Arrival of his Majesty King WILLIAM on this day’. William’s landing at Torbay had led to ‘the deliverance of our Church and Nation from Popish tyranny and arbitrary power’ and God’s providence demonstrated by this event had put ‘a new song in our mouths’.

These provisions continued until they were revoked by royal order on 17 January 1859, following addresses to Queen Victoria from both Houses of Parliament, although from about 1850 they had fallen into almost universal neglect.15 The decision formally to revoke these services showed how far thinking had advanced since the crude attacks on the Turks and their faith in the mid-Sixteenth Century. With the progress of Catholic Emancipation in the Nineteenth Century came, in 1850, the establishment by Pius IX of a hierarchy of bishops in England and Wales. This led to widespread demonstrations against Roman Catholics and a renewed display of intolerance towards them. In 1851 a proposed new

15 Streatfield, The State Prayers,p.762 . The author has a copy of a Prayer Book published in 1856 which includes the lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer for all Holy Days and those for these three State Services are printed in that edition.

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verse to the National Anthem was in circulation which invoked divine protection against papalism:

Let now thine arm be seen,Guarding our gracious QueenFrom papal power.16

It was, therefore, a judicious move to remove services which had such vitriolic comments about Roman Catholicism. In 1662 there had been no Accession Service, this being introduced first by Queen Anne. With the removal of the 1662 State Services, the Accession provision was enlarged and remains current. That, too, has now fallen into widespread disuse. When Prayer Book reform became an urgent issue at the start of the Twentieth Century, one of the most important thinkers on the subject was Mirfield’s W.H. Frere. In his discussion on the Kalendar, Frere touches on the introduction of the name of ‘King Charles, Martyr’. Frere points out that Charles was added in 1661 ‘at a time of great revulsion of feeling’ and questions whether it is appropriate in any revision of the Kalendar, to use his delicate phrase, for ‘that name [to] still stand’. He argues that, if it does, the name of William Laud should be included, on the grounds that he ‘can be said with more certainty to have died on behalf of the Church’.17 Charles, King and Martyr, was dropped from the Calendar proposed in 1928 but is found in the Calendars of both the Alternative Service Book (1980) and Common Worship—as, in the latter, is William Laud on 10 January. Frere also suggested that, ‘leave should… be given to omit at any time the Collects for the King (from the Communion service)’, and they were omitted in the 1928 revision.18

State prayers were thus at the margins of the debate about liturgical reform. The Church of England remains at the heart of the nation’s public life, certainly so far as great occasions are concerned. The Church now finds itself so much at the other extreme of the times considered in this paper that the question arises of how a better balance might be struck in terms of prayers for the nation, its sovereign and leaders. The 1928 Prayer Book recognised the thinness of prescribed intercessory material when it included the Occasional Prayers, amplifying the 1662 provision for rain, plenty, plague and the like with prayers more resonant with contemporary needs. Compilations such as Eric Milner-White’s After the Third Collect and Frank Colquhon’s Parish Prayers were significant developments, as are the range of more recent materials to support intercessory prayers in the Eucharist included in Times and Seasons. This paper has attempted to demonstrate that, following the Reformation,

16 Ian Bradley, God Save the Queen, London, 2012, p.147.17 W.H. Frere, Some Principles of Liturgical Reform, London, 1911, p.64.18 Ibid, p.195.

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Church and state were inextricably linked through the liturgy. They shared common aims, and, in particular, common fears.

Today, the State Prayers are largely neglected in most parish Churches, the Litany has suffered a similar fate, while the Prayer for the Church Militant is again little used. Perhaps the Prayer Book Society could begin to work with others in the Church to see how we could try to assure a framework for prayer for the nation as it is today as our sixteenth and seventeenth century predecessors did so successfully in their own times. If the Church is to continue as an agent for coherence within the nation—and that is very different from suggesting it should be an accessory to the establishment—some consideration of a defined, structured approach, reflecting the needs of our society, would be helpful. It is interesting to reflect that while we have virtually abandoned the Accession Service, the principle of having a liturgical focus in national life has been adopted by others. In the American Episcopal Church, for example, there is a service for Independence Day.19 The ardour of those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers considered in this paper cannot be denied, even though we find many of their sentiments distasteful. It would surely be a good thing, however, if the Church could recapture their ardour with powerful and telling prayers for the nation and our national life in our own times.

(John Milner has been a lay reader for forty years and was Principal Director of the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance before retirement in 2009. The above article is a revised version of a paper for the Annual Festival of the Manchester Branch of the Prayer Book Society given at St. Anne’s Church, Tottington, 8 June 2013.)

19 The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, p.74.

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Dom Gregory Dix andthe Protestant Reformation

DA V I D F U L L E R

Preamble

Dom Gregory Dix (1901-52) admitted that he had added Chapter XVI (‘The Reformation and the Anglican Liturgy’) to his magisterial work The Shape of the Liturgy only after prolonged

hesitation and in deference to the advice of others.1 Dix did not wish to give the impression that Cranmer’s work was to be seen as some sort of climax and conclusion of Christian liturgical development. He saw the revisions as nothing more than a singular incident, and of no central interest to the subject as a whole. This essay will study his reaction to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), the principal architect of liturgical revision in the Church of England in the sixteenth century. Cranmer, a Church politician of the Reformation period, had at his disposal much of the same historical evidence that was available to Dix, heir to the Patristic revival of the Tractarian era, and yet he arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions about the theology of Eucharistic worship. Dix was certain that a liturgical study of the development of worship from Apostolic and Patristic times was far more important than the replacement of the later derived rites of Sarum, Hereford, Bangor and elsewhere. Dix added a second reason for his reticence about including this chapter. He wrote:

Ever since the sixteenth century we Anglicans have been so divided over Eucharistic doctrine, and are today so conscious of our divisions, that there is scarcely any statement that could be made about either the Eucharist or our own rite which would not seem to some of one’s fellow Churchmen to call for immediate contradiction on conscientious grounds.2

In one of its passages of purple prose, with which The Shape of the Liturgy is well stocked, Dix added:

It is quite understandable. These things go deep behind us. Two Archbishops of Canterbury have lost their lives and a third his see in these quarrels. One king has been beheaded and another

1 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, (1945), pp.613ff. Despite his hesitation in adding this extra chapter to his book, it comprised over 120 pages (some 60,000 words)!2 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.613.

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Dom Gregory Dix and the Protestant Reformation

dethroned; many lesser men have suffered all manner of penalties from martyrdom downwards on one side and another. These things have left their traces, tangling and confusing our own approach to the matter in all sorts of irrelevant ways...to spring the word ‘transubstantiation’ on a company without preparation in certain circles (or the names ‘Tyburn’ or ‘Barnes’ in others) is to invite a reaction which springs much more from emotion than from reason.3

Dix admitted that these feelings gathered most strongly around the person of Cranmer and the liturgical changes that he introduced and even if Cranmer did not precipitate these divisions, they are the direct result of his works. It is difficult for historians to be sure that they have the facts, without any of the prejudice with which those facts may have become associated. He asserted that the background to sixteenth-century liturgical controversies was not the meanings and understandings applied to isolated New Testament texts, nor yet the debates that surrounded the (almost unknown) practices of the primitive Church. He saw the principal cause as the static and unchanging nature of the mediaeval, Eucharistic liturgy, vis-à-vis the post-mediaeval world that had developed around it. He wrote:

it is an incident in the general post-mediaeval liturgical crisis provoked in the West by what the mediaeval liturgical practice itself had come to be, or perhaps it is truer to say, had come to mean to those who worshipped by it.4

In a piece of florid prose of his own, Professor Eamon Duffy, very much in the Dixian mode wrote:

Within the liturgy, birth, copulation, and death, journeying and homecoming, guilt and forgiveness, the blessing of homely things and the call to pass beyond them were all located, tested, and sanctioned. In the liturgy and in the sacramental celebrations which were its central moments, medieval people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives.5

The Church’s liturgical praxis and its attendant ceremonies offered spectacle, religious instruction and a communal context in which lives were ordered. Ecclesiastical law, vigilantly enforced by bishop, archdeacon and parish priest ensured that the laity maintained regular and sober Church attendance at Matins, Mass and Evensong each Sunday and on Feast days. Auricular confession and reception of the Blessed Sacrament at Easter was the norm. Duffy made it clear that catechetical

3 Ibid, p.614.4 Ibid, p.615.5 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, (Yale 2005), p.11.

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teaching through visual media was an essential part of the Christian life. In this context he mentioned the iconography associated with, for example, seven-sacrament baptismal fonts, many of which are still extant in East Anglian Churches.6

Eucharistic theories of the Protestant ReformationMartin Luther (1483-1546) based his conception of the Eucharist

on his understanding of Holy Scripture, particularly the gospels. While often seen as polemical in his opinions on the sacraments, his Eucharistic doctrine encompassed the fundamental principles of the Protestant Reformation, namely: the sole sufficiency of grace; the primacy of the Word of God and justification solely by faith. Professor Jeffrey Bingham believed that Luther had a strong conviction about the unity between the physical and the spiritual; the corporeal and the presence of God in Christ.7 Luther’s clear acceptance of the ecclesial interpretation of the Eucharist as exemplified by Paul and Augustine is demonstrated in this intimate relationship between sacramental signs and faith in the Word of God. In his first, extended statement of his views on the Eucharist, entitled A treatise concerning the Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ and concerning the Brotherhoods (1519) Luther wrote:

Like the sacrament of Holy Baptism, the holy sacrament of the altar, or of the holy and true body of Christ, has three parts which it is necessary for us to know. The first is the sacrament, or sign, the second is the significance of this sacrament, the third is the faith required by both of these; the three parts which must be found in every sacrament. The sacrament must be external and visible, and have some material form; the significance must be internal and spiritual, within the spirit of man; faith must make both of them together operative and useful.8

When the Mass ceased to be a testament responded to in faith, it became a work. This is the heart of Luther’s attack on the sacrifice of the Mass that he first makes in his treatise on the New Testament and the Mass and amplifies in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. For Luther the Mass is not a good work that we offer to God, it is a gift that we receive from God.

In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church Luther also attacked the Church’s policy of only administering the sacrament in one kind, and its practice of offering the Mass for the souls of the departed on the presumption that

6 Ibid, pp.65f. Duffy also made reference to church iconography in painting, carving, glass and the contents of religious commonplace collections. Ibid, pp.7; 156; 257.7 D Jeffrey Bingham, ‘Eucharist and Incarnation: The Second Century and Luther’, in Roch A Kereszty, Rediscovering the Eucharist: Ecumenical Conversations, (Mahwah, NJ 2003), p.134.8 Timothy F Lull and William Ritchie Russell (eds), Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, (Minneapolis,MN 2012), unpaginated.

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this would lessen the time that those souls spent in Purgatory (especially when those Masses were privately financed).

Uldrych Zwingli (1484-1531), like Luther, was opposed to the way that Masses could be purchased, thereby providing wealth for an already well-endowed Church and diverting money from the needs of the poor. More important for him was the fact that, in his opinion, the Church’s teaching on the Blessed Sacrament imperilled the salvation of men’s souls, encouraging them to trust in something other than God. Methodist theologian, the Rt Revd Professor W P Stephens asserted that Zwingli drew heavily on the Epistle to the Hebrews for his Eucharistic thinking.9 Zwingli believed that:

Christ, having sacrificed himself once, is to eternity a certain and valid sacrifice for the sins of all faithful, wherefrom it follows that the Mass is not a sacrifice, but is a remembrance of the sacrifice and assurance of salvation which Christ has given us.10

Using the author of Hebrews’ theology of priesthood and the sacrifice of Christ he argued that the sacrament was, ‘a memorial of the suffering of Christ and not a sacrifice’.11 He held that Christ’s intention was clear in his saying, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’; Christ did not say, ‘Offer this up to me’. Where Luther referred to the sacrament as a testament, Zwingli preferred the word, memorial. He suggested that remembering or memorialising is something that worshippers do, not something that God does.

German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) drew one significant contrast between Luther and Zwingli. He showed that the former desired to retain everything that was not at variance with the express teaching of Scripture while the latter determined to abolish everything which could not be supported by Scripture.12

John Calvin (1509-64) was a second-generation reformer. Theologian Nathan Mitchell suggested that the Eucharistic theology and reforms of Calvin were complex.13 Like Luther, Calvin believed that the Eucharist was a real participation in Christ’s Body and Blood. However, Calvin arrived at this conclusion from a different direction. His principal contention was the unconditional sovereignty of God; any sacramental theory that would limit God’s absolute dominion must therefore be idolatrous. For this reason Calvin’s outlines of Church and sacrament did not begin with a theology of Christ’s Incarnation (with, for example, Christ as sacrament of God, or the Church as sacrament of Christ, or sacraments as

9 W P Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to his Thought, (Oxford 1994), p.95.10 Quoted loc.cit.11 Quoted by Alister E McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, (New York, NY 2012), p.17612 Quoted by Herbert M Lubbock (1833-1909), sometime Dean of Lichfield, Studies in the Book of Common Prayer, (Kindle edition, 2010).13 Nathan D Mitchell, ‘Reforms, Protestant and Catholic’, in The Oxford History of Christian Worship(2005), p.320.

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actions of God-in-Christ acting through the efficacious ministry of the Church) but with an emphasis on God’s sovereign, unconditional power of election and predestination. Calvin believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and held that reception of the Communion brought real benefits to the believer. However, he could not allow the sacraments to diminish God’s freedom or to make the Holy Spirit captive or confine Christ locally within the consecrated species. In Calvin’s view, Christ sat in heaven at God’s right hand; he had no conception of him having any ubiquitous nature.14

Professor Lee Wandel believed that Calvin, unlike Luther, Zwingli and those who participated in the Fourth Lateran Council, did not try to define the physics of the Last Supper; he held it to be a secret, a mystery, the work of the Holy Spirit.15 Christ’s flesh is the food for the soul of the faithful, his blood the drink, presented through complex symbols of bread and wine, through which Christ becomes one with the recipient. Calvin believed that those whom he called unworthy could not receive Christ in the Supper.16

Thomas CranmerLuther had already set the scene for the introduction of liturgical

change across much of Continental Europe from as early as 1517, thirty years before the death of Henry VIII. Although England had no individual, determined Reformer, directly comparable with Luther and Calvin, changes to the Church had been suggested in the writings of various Humanists, such as Erasmus (1469-1536) (Praise of Folly) and the devout Catholic, Thomas More (Utopia). The principal transformations observed in England were far more political than either liturgical or doctrinal. The development of the choir offices of Morning and Evening Prayer were, for example, very much a result of the dissolution of the monasteries and the secularisation of the Church. In this process the possessions of the monastic establishments, be they large or small, became the property of the crown. Thus the liturgy had to be adapted to a completely new set of political circumstances. Despite these changes Dix was happy to accept that these choir or Cathedral offices, as they came to be called, were still monastic in that they were amalgams of elements of the Hours.

When Archbishop of Canterbury William Wareham (1450-1532) died, Henry VIII appointed Thomas Cranmer to replace him. It is likely that Cranmer’s placement was highly influenced by the Boleyns, but,

14 It is perhaps a pity that Calvin, and other Reformation theologians, all of whom subscribed to a doctrine of sola scriptura, did not heed God’s words given to Jeremiah (Jer 23: 23-4).15 Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy, (Cambridge 2006), pp.162f.16 Calvin used an analogy of a germinating seed. He wrote, ‘Besides, to say that Christ may be received without faith is as inappropriate as to say that a seed may germinate in fire’ (Institutes, Book IV, Ch 17, Sect 33). It is now well known that some seeds, particularly those of conifers, especially the giant sequoia, do require fire to germinate.

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despite the fact that he had married Osiander’s niece, Margaret, in 1532, and was living in Austria at the time, Henry was very keen not to offend Anne’s father.

Perhaps under the influence of his second wife, Henry began to see the need for changes in the Church, to sweep away what were seen as Papist excesses. In the year after his marriage to Anne Boleyn (1534) unprecedented restrictions were placed on all preachers. Old licences were withdrawn and new ones were issued, but only to those that the bishops knew to be reliable. Cranmer urged that these preachers:

should in no wise touch or intermeddle themselves to preach...any such thing that...might bring in doubt...the Catholic...doctrine of Christ’s Church, or speak on such matters as touch the Prince, his laws or succession.

By November of 1547 real attempts were being made to transform England into a Protestant country by overthrowing the Catholic religion. Under the leadership of Protector Somerset (1506-1552) Cranmer abolished the three traditional abuses which featured in his discussions with Lutherans in 1538: the denial of the chalice to the laity, clerical celibacy and private Masses.17 Little action was ultimately taken on the subject of private Masses because Cranmer argued that, since no one benefitted from the Sacrament of the Altar except the communicants, little was to be gained from continuing the practice where priests alone received. Cranmer’s understanding on the Eucharist seems very ambiguous at this time. Crockett made it clear that Cranmer did not accept the ubiquity of Christ; the body of Christ was present in heaven and could not, therefore, be present in the Eucharistic elements.18

It is known that in 1550 Cranmer believed in the doctrine which he expressed in his books on the Sacrament, a policy that fell short of any extreme sacramentarian position.19 His policy complemented that of Zwingli but it may even have fallen short of the modified Zwinglianism of Johann Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1573), Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, and John Hooper (1495-1555), sometime Bishop of Gloucester, and their followers. However, it coincided with the principles of Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), went farther than those of Martin Bucer (1491-1551), and far beyond Lutheranism.20 In contrast, Nicholas

17 In January 1548 the use of candles at Candlemass, the Imposition of Ashes on Ash Wednesday and the Distribution of Palms on Palm Sunday were all abolished. In February Cranmer ordered all remaining religious images to be removed. 18 William R Crockett, Eucharist: Symbol of Transformation, (New York, NY 1989), p.167.19 Principal among Cranmer’s writings was: A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, (1550).20 Jasper Ridley, Thomas Cranmer, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p.279. Cranmer’s vacillation was equally apparent in his reactions to chantries. He opposed the second Chantries Bill, which would have continued Henry’s acts of seizure for financial gain, but five years later he argued that the sale of chantries should be postponed so that these assets could be available to Edward VI when he came of age.

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Ridley (c1500-55) confirmed that the men who drafted the 1549 Rite did not believe in the Real Presence; but they used other words which indicated exactly the opposite.

Dix versus CranmerWhile accepting that there had been some differences of opinion

between the realism of Ambrose and the symbolism of Augustine, Dix put the seeds of Reformation firmly in the ninth century with the theology of the Real Presence and the landmark contribution of Paschasius Radbertus (785-865) in his de Corpore et Sanguine Domini.21 Dix asked why, with the welter of controversy surrounding the Eucharist, was there no division in the Church in earlier centuries. He speculated that it was purely the introduction of the concept of justification through faith alone (sola fides) that precipitated the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Dix added that the introduction of substantially altered liturgies (for example, as translated into the vernacular language) stirred up partisanship within the laity, which had more effect than mere theological disputation. He drew the important conclusion that the conflict only questioned the doctrines associated with the Real Presence; there had been no earlier discussion or debate about the sacrificial elements in celebrations of the Mass. Also, the separation of the Western and Eastern Churches had engendered significantly different attitudes to the visibility of the Eucharistic actions at the altar. In the East all was hidden from the congregation by the construction of a veil across the sanctuary, which, over time, became the reinforced screen of the iconostasis. In the West, as reception of the elements declined, the focus of the congregation was on the Elevation of the Host, an action that accreted to itself a panoply of torches, censings and the ringing of bells. By contrast, in the East, despite a parallel decline in reception, there was no demand to see the sacramental elements.

In part of Chapter XVI of The Shape of the Liturgy Dix examined the changes that had occurred in the periods leading up to the sixteenth century. He explained the difficulties of separating these, one from the other, but listed five for his readers’ consideration.22 First, he observed that the Eucharist had ceased to be a corporate action. In his view, the praxis had been a combined activity, where the ancient Church spoke of ‘doing’ the Eucharist. Earlier in his book he wrote:

We all find it easy and natural to use such phrases as, of the clergy, ‘saying Mass’, and of the laity, ‘hearing Mass’; or in other circles, ‘Will you say the Eight?’ or ‘attending the early Service’. The ancients on

21 Gregory Dix, ‘Consecration’, in Kenneth Mackenzie (ed) The Liturgy, (1938), p.101. Dix referred to Radbertus as Radbert. 22 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, pp.615-622.

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the contrary habitually spoke of ‘doing the Eucharist’, ‘performing the mysteries’, ‘making the synaxis’ and ‘doing the oblation’. And there is the further contrast, that while our language implies a certain difference between the functions of the clergy and the laity, as between active and passive (‘taking the service’ and ‘attending the service’; ‘saying’ and ‘hearing’ Mass), the ancients used all their active language about ‘doing’ the liturgy quite indifferently of laity and clergy alike. The irreplaceable function of the celebrant, his ‘special liturgy’, was to ‘make’ the prayer; just as the irreplaceable function of the deacon or the people was to do something else which the celebrant did not do. There was difference of function but no distinction in kind between the activities of the various orders in the worship of the whole Church.23

Dix argued that, for example, in the post-Apostolic Church the Fraction was performed by the Deacon and Concelebrants; this activity has been transferred to the priest alone; in a sense it may be supposed that the individual priest offers the Eucharist. Secondly, Dix referred to the Intention of the Mass. In each individual offering, the priest could attach a separate efficacy, a value of its own. Dix explained that, while these values may have had an association with the sacrifice of Calvary, each offering was the celebrant’s own offering. Masses thereby accrued a worth, whereby ten Masses said for a particular intention were worth more than five. Dix argued that these changes away from the post-Apostolic understanding of the sacrament were arrived at by slow and gradual stages, but would prove of considerable importance in Reformation thinking. Thirdly, Dix turned his attention to the changes to the language of the Mass. He suggested, that, although the laity had little or no understanding of the Latin text, and were reduced to being passive viewers and listeners, yet the music, ritual and ceremonial stimulated religious emotions. Dix reminded his readers that worship conducted in languages that the worshippers did not comprehend was not a new phenomenon. In first century Palestine, synagogue and Temple worship was conducted in liturgical Hebrew, not the vernacular Aramaic of the populace. Similarly, the New Testament was not written in the language that Jesus spoke and the Jews of the Diaspora were happy to read the Septuagint, but, at key moments significant phrases, such as Christ’s last words from the cross, were included in a language that was essentially incomprehensible, Aramaic. By the fourth century, when Greek generally ceased to be used as a common language in the West, Latin became the lingua franca. Dix reflected that all public notices, ‘from Northumberland

23 Ibid, p.12.

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to Casablanca, from Lisbon to the Danube’, were posted in Latin.24 It was quite natural for Christian rites to retain Latin as their (universal?) language. In later centuries, with the growth of new nation states and the associated cross-fertilisation of cultures, the Church stood for stability and civilisation. It could only do this from behind the defensive wall of a common language. The maintenance of the status quo in the face of the development of printing presses and improvements in standards of literacy was, Dix asserted, indefensible and by the sixteenth century the Church was showing signs of staleness and decay. Dix’s fourth contention was based on another human sense, that of seeing. In the Ordo Romanus Primus, the Roman Rite dating back to the mid-eighth century, the congregation was subjected to a plenitude of dramatic action, from Gospel and Offertory processions, the fermentum carried in or out by acolytes and the involvement of Deacons in the Fraction. The administration of the Communion was a corporate event for most of those present. The excitement of this form of worship had been replaced over time with the Low Mass, in which the ceremonial had been reduced to its simplest elements and in which one lone priest muttered his way through the liturgy in silence or in a low, almost unheard, voice. The only activity that attracted the attention of the laity was the only one that they could observe, the Elevation. Seeing what they had been taught was the Body of their Saviour, they worshiped and adored. Dix believed that the change of emphasis of the Consecration for the purpose of adoration was also fundamental to the cause of the Reformation. Fifthly, and finally, Dix thought that the eschatological concept of the primitive rites had disappeared from view. The Eucharistic worship, often observed by the laity through a rood screen, emphasised the links between the action and the Passion. The words of Paul that the Church should, ‘proclaim the Lord’s death’, became detached in the minds of clergy and laity from what followed, ‘till he come’. Dix wrote:

It was just here that the practical confining of the redeeming action of Christ (into which the Eucharist enters) to Calvary led to serious and unnecessary difficulties. Being wholly within history and time, the passion is wholly in the past—the only moment of redemption which is so wholly confined to the past. The Church at the Eucharist can only be conceived to enter into a wholly past action in one of two ways, either purely mentally by remembering and imagining it; or else, if the entering into it is to have any objective reality outside the mind, by way of some sort of repetition or iteration of the redeeming act of Christ. Thus the way was not so much laid open as forced upon the Church to that general late mediaeval notion of some fresh sacrifice of Christ, and his immolation again at every Eucharist. There

24 Ibid. p.617

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was no other way by which the reality of the Eucharistic action could be preserved on the mediaeval understanding of it; yet the unbroken tradition of liturgy and theology alike insisted on this reality. And since the Eucharistic action was now viewed as the act of the priest alone—though the liturgy itself continued to state a different view (‘We Thy servants together with Thy holy people offer unto Thee ...’), there was no escaping the idea that the priest sacrifices Christ afresh at every Mass. However hard they tried to conciliate this view of the matter with the doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews of the one oblation for sins, perfect and complete (so far as history and time are concerned) on Calvary, the mediaeval theologians, and the party of the old religion at the English Reformation, never quite got away from the necessity of defending the reality of the Eucharistic sacrifice as in some sense an iteration of the sacrifice of Christ at the hands of the priest, even though they insisted that it was not a new sacrifice.25

In his proposals for a return to the liturgy of the post-Apostolic church Dix, in more or less every respect, paved the way for the principles underlying most liturgical revisions after Vatican II; the sense of the corporate nature of worship, the roles of laity and clergy, the eschatological understanding of the Eucharist, etc. Thus the Protestant Reformation can be curiously seen as blocking liturgical reform and its concomitant return to ancient principles precisely because of Luther’s individualism in his theology, and the political imperatives behind the English Reformation.

The judges at Cranmer’s trial (which began on 13th November, 1553) charged him with having had three different Eucharistic doctrines at various times: Papist, Lutheran and Zwinglian. In his lengthy analysis of Cranmer’s theology, Dix explored a number of features: his doctrine concerning eating the Flesh and drinking the Blood of Christ; concerning the true use of the Last Supper; concerning Consecration; concerning the Ministry; and his esteem for the Eucharist. He concluded that, while Cranmer made use of a number of Lutheran features, and, ‘clothed his negations with the comparative warmth of the Calvinist’s idea of Eucharist devotion’, he (Dix) was quite unable to distinguish the substance of Cranmer’s doctrine from that of Zwingli. Dix quoted from a letter by John Hooper to Johann Bullinger (dated 27th December, 1549) in which he wrote:

The Archbishop of Canterbury entertains right views as to the nature of Christ’s presence in the supper...He has some articles of religion to which all preachers and lecturers in divinity are required to

25 Ibid, p.623.

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subscribe or else a license for teaching is not granted them; and in these his sentiments respecting the Eucharist are pure and religious and similar to yours in Switzerland.26

Dix asserted that in his second Prayer Book (1552) Cranmer forsook the traditional four-fold shape of the liturgy and made radical changes that drastically altered the doctrinal implications. Rearranged in this way the new rite more fully expressed Zwinglian doctrine, vindicating Cranmer’s claim that this had been his real meaning all along.27 Dix added the rider that none of Cranmer’s rites, of 1549 and 1552, or subsequently that of 1559, included a rubric for a second consecration, should either element prove insufficient for its administration. Once again this enforced his Zwinglian view of consecration.28 Dix saw in Cranmer an extremism (perhaps only paralleled by Ridley, Hooper and Bucer) without which the small and short-sighted Zwinglian party in England would have suffered annihilation. In subsequent centuries, certainly by the eighteenth, the Church of England had become a branch of the state. The state had, in Dix’s words, ‘ordered its liturgy and removed it altogether from the Church’s control by freezing it rigidly down to the last comma in the form of a secular statute’.29 Thomas Herring (1693-1757), sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, referred to, ‘the incomparable liturgy with which the wisdom of our legislature has endowed us’.30 Dix remarked that Cranmer’s liturgy, left to be self-interpreting (that is, outside the control of the Church), had its natural consequence in the neo-Zwinglian movement in Anglicanism.31 Louis Bouyer claimed that Dix had established irrefutably that the interpretation long given by catholicising Anglicans of the difference between Cranmer’s Eucharist of 1549 and the one he produced in 1552 was untenable. He wrote:

Far from being still Catholic or, at the most, ‘Lutheranized’, the first Eucharist is only Catholic in appearance and simply disguises under a veil of ambiguities the same doctrine which is so frankly stated in the second, a doctrine which is not only ‘reformed’ but properly Zwinglian.32

Timms refutes DixIn the year after Dix published The Shape of the Liturgy, the Alcuin Club

produced a paper entitled ‘Dixit Cranmer’, written by the Revd G B Timms.33

26 Ibid, p.656, fn 1.27 Ibid, p.659.28 Ibid, p.676.29 Ibid, p.695.30 Quoted by Dix, ibid, p.695.31 Loc.cit.32 Louis Bouyer, Eucharist, p.408.33 G B Timms, Dixit Cranmer: A Reply to Dom Gregory, (London: Mowbray & Co, 1946).

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Timms argued that Chapter XVI of Dix’s work would be of most interest to readers, because it dealt with relatively contemporary Anglican issues. However, he suggested that, in dealing with the liturgy of the Church of England, Dix had shown signs that he had not fully appreciated the implications of the principles worked out in his preceding chapters. The crux of Timms’s argument was that Dix’s decision that Cranmer, and the Eucharistic rites that he devised, were Zwinglian was based more on his reading of Cranmer’s work Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament than the content of the actual rites themselves. Referring to the Defence, and Cranmer’s doctrine concerning eating the Flesh and drinking the Blood, Dix had written that, ‘we must understand that he means by this, “thinking with faith that Christ died for my sins on Calvary”, and nothing else’.34 On the basis of this, Timms accepted that Cranmer’s Eucharistic doctrine was pure Zwinglianism. However, Timms took his arguments further and referred to Cranmer’s Prayer Book and his later work Answer unto a Crafty and Sophisticall Cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner (1551), to which Dix makes only one reference, and that, more or less, in passing.35 Timms began his analysis by examining the Exhortations that Cranmer had carefully composed for inclusion in both Edwardine Prayer Books. In these he revealed his Eucharistic beliefs: first, that the Eucharist is a solemn and thankful remembrance of Christ’s passion; and secondly, that it is a holy mystery whereby the faithful are spiritually fed with the Body and Blood of Christ, if, that is, they approach the altar with the right intention. Timms suggested that Dix had been selective in his quotations from the Exhortations. The second 1549 Exhortation contains the words:

Wherefore our duetie is, to come to these holy misteries, with moste heartie thankes to bee geven to almightie GOD, for his infinite mercie and benefites geven and bestowed upon us his unworthye servauntes, for whom he hath not onely geven his body to death, and shed his bloude, but also doothe vouchesave in a Sacrament and Mistery, to geve us his sayed bodye and bloud to feede upon spiritually.

These words were not quoted by Dix but confirmed Cranmer’s viewpoint. Three further passages from the Exhortations amplified Cranmer’s position:

he hath left in those holy Misteries, as a pledge of his love, and a continuall remembraunce of the same his owne blessed body, and precious bloud, for us to fede upon spiritually, to our endles comfort

34 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.649.35 Ibid, p.647. Dix argued that this latter work was no more than a tortuous form of reply to a reply to the Defence, in which he defended his earlier thinking, sentence by sentence.

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and consolacion (First Exhortation, 1549); my duetie is to exhort you to consider the dignitie of the holy mistery, and the greate perel of the unworthy receiving thereof, and so to searche and examine your own consciences, as you should come holy and cleane to a moste Godly and heavenly feaste: so that in no wise you come but in the mariage garment, required of god in holy scripture; and so come and be received, as worthy partakers of suche a heavenly table. The way and meanes thereto is: First to examine your lives and conversacion by the rule of goddes commaundements, and whereinsoever ye shall perceive your selves to have offended, either by wil, word, or dede, there beewaile your owne sinful lives, confess your selfes to almightie god with ful purpose of amendment of life. And yf ye shal perceive your offences to be such, as be not only against god, but also againste your neighbours: then ye shal reconcile your selves unto them, ready to make restitucion and satisfaccion, accordyng to the uttermost of your powers, for all injuries and wronges done by you to any other: and likewise beeyng ready to forgeve other that have offended you; as you would have forgevenesse of your offences at gods hande: for otherwyse the receiving of the holy Communion doth nothyng els, but encrease your damnacion (Second Exhortation, 1552); and the benefite is great, if with a truly penitent heart and lively fayth, we receive that holy Sacrament (for then we spirituallye eate the fleshe of Christ, and drynke hys bloud, then we dwel in Christ and Christ in us, we be one with Christ, and Christ with us (Third Exhortation, 1552).

Timms opined that these Exhortations (none of which was quoted by Dix) contain extravagant language for one whom Dix claimed:

by a somewhat forced use of the phrase, ‘to eat the Body and drink the Blood of Christ’... meant, ‘to remember the passion with confidence in the merits of Christ’.36

He closely examined Cranmer’s precepts that: the true Body and Blood of Christ are not really, naturally, corporally or carnally under the forms of bread and wine; evil men do not eat the very Body and Blood of Christ; and Christ is not offered in the Eucharist by the priest as a sacrifice propitiatory for sin. He considered the first of these as saying, in effect, ‘that transubstantiation is false’, and, ‘there is no presence of Christ in the sacrament at all, apart from its use in administration’, therefore, ‘to worship Christ in the sacrament is idolatry’.37 Cranmer’s Eucharistic

36 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.656. Dix went on to suggest that Cranmer had used this flowery phraseology in order to preserve a great deal of conventional Catholic language. However, this language is not understood today in anything like its original sense.37 G B Timms, Dixit Cranmer: A Reply to Dom Gregory, p.19.

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doctrine refused to accept that anything further was required to perfect the work of Christ in man’s redemption. The changes he made in the 1552 Rite only amplified this position; changes that Dix believed were significant in his Zwinglianism. Timms added the comment:

These alterations, as is well known, follow closely the recommendations of Martin Bucer’s Censura or criticism of the rite of 1549, written at the invitation of Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, and finished on January 5, 1551. But it is significant that they also answer the ‘sophisticall cavillations’ of Gardiner, who claimed to find in the 1549 rite the doctrine of (a) transubstantiation, and (b) a propitiatory offering of Christ in the Mass.38

In conclusion, Timms accepted that the real point of controversy between Dix and Cranmer (as discussed in Chapter XVI of The Shape of the Liturgy) was: is the spiritual gift which is received in Holy Communion essentially different from that which is received in spiritual communion? Cranmer thought that it was not, while Dix understood that it was. Timms stated that Cranmer had the better arguments and believed that, given a place for debate, Dix would have fared no better than Gardiner. Timms’s ultimate point was to observe that, while Dix understood that the Son of God did say, ‘Take, eat, this is my Body’, he steered well clear of a serious discussion on transubstantiation. Throughout The Shape of the Liturgy, Dix had relegated it to footnotes, as necessary. Timms ended his thesis with a piece of prose, which, if not exactly purple, was a deep shade of mauve:

But if we try to find the significance of the Eucharist in ‘what is given in the feeding’ we get hopelessly bogged, as the Cranmer versus Gardiner disputation clearly shows: both Protestant and Catholic raise a great amount of dust, and appear to reach diametrically opposed conclusions, but on analysis, so I believe, we find that they are both saying the same thing, though saying it differently and quarrelling violently in the process. It is a great merit in Dom Gregory’s book that for the greater part of it he refuses to be drawn into the bog—until he comes to Cranmer. Then he arrives so near home that those emotions which he has for the most part kept admirably under control surge up within him, and in spite of himself he is drawn into the vain and endless argument: Dom Gregory is the catholic knight-errant, Cranmer the protestant dragon, the Church of England the maiden victim, and her liturgy her chains.

Dix had argued that Cranmer’s Eucharistic thought was indistinguishable in substance from that of Zwingli and it can be argued that Cranmer

38 Ibid, p.28.

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framed an Anglican Eucharistic rite that few in the Church of England have ever held. Timms suggested that Cranmer’s use of key terms and phrases separated him from Zwingli and linked him with Bucer, Calvin and other ‘dynamic receptionists’. This disagreement is unlikely to end since ambiguities undeniably appear in Cranmer’s Holy Communion rites, even though he believed that their wording was simple enough for a child to understand.

Dix’s response to TimmsIn 1948 Dix responded to Timms’s criticism in a paper entitled, Dixit

Cranmer et Non Timuit, which may be translated as, ‘Cranmer said, and feared not’.39 Dix observed that both he and Timms, despite starting from different ecclesiastical standpoints and purposes, reached identical conclusions on some essential questions. With typical tongue-in-cheek effrontery, Dix commented that the circulation of Timms’s pamphlet among members of the Alcuin Club (for whom it was written) could not help but overcome their prejudices and prepare them to recognise the truth about the Prayer Book. Timms had commented that Cranmer had, in the heat of argument, taken a more extreme standpoint than he, in fact, actually held. Dix alleged that Cranmer had uttered his statements in passion and cold-blood.40 They were issued in his capacity of Archbishop of Canterbury after months of careful preparation and he explained them ably and lucidly in a series of statements of his Eucharistic doctrine, which eventually cost him his life.41 To Timms’s suggestion that Cranmer, ‘as a theologian was competent but unimpressive’, Dix reminded his readers of the occasion when, on the day after he had been convicted of heresy, Cranmer attended the doctoral awarding congregation at Oxford, in which his suppleness in argument shone out, and in which he single-handedly demolished the Eucharistic arguments of England’s leading, professional theologians.42

Dix examined many of the passages from A Defence, cited by Timms, and added several of his own from other sixteenth-century writers. The crux of the matter lay between Cranmer’s Zwinglianism and his Receptionism. Dix concluded:

There is not much doubt about the meaning of such statements as these. It would appear, therefore, that Cranmer was not the

39 Gregory Dix, ‘Dixit Cranmer et Non Timuit’, The Church Quarterly Review, Vol CXLV, March 1948, and Vol CXLVI, June 1948. Dix’s papers were subsequently published by Dacre Press (undated). This title shows a clever play on the words Dix and Timms. It is possible to read it as ‘Cranmer has spoken, but not Timms’, or, by implication, ‘Dix knows Cranmer, but Timms does not!’40 A curious juxtaposition of terms; passion is normally associated with hot-blood.41 G B Timms, Dixit Cranmer, p.12. Gregory Dix, Dixit Cranmer et Non Timuit, (London: Dacre Press), p7.42 G B Timms, Dixit Cranmer, p.34. Gregory Dix, Dixit Cranmer et Non Timuit, pp.7f. Reported by: John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1583, 1462.

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only contemporary author who could set side by side in the same work about the Eucharist what Mr Timms calls ‘passages which have a strong Zwinglian flavour’ and others which might at first sight appear to be patient of a ‘Receptionist’ interpretation. But that it would be tedious, it would be easy to show that this is true not only of Cranmer, Hooper, Bullinger and Zwingli, but also of Oecolampadius, Vadianus, Pellican, Megander, Gualter, à Lasco and others, about whose doctrinal allegiance no one pretends there is any ambiguity. It cannot in all these cases be set down to the effects of inadvertence, controversial hastiness or self-misrepresentation, or even theological incompetence, unless we are to postulate these things almost on an epidemic scale among theologians who played a notable part in European controversy for a whole generation.43

Dix argued that it was impossible to understand Cranmer and the Anglican formularies in their original sense unless they are compared in detail with contemporary writers and set against the passionate, Eucharistic controversies among Protestants of those days. He drew the conclusion that Cranmer was a Zwinglian, not of the left wing, like Caspar Megander (1484-1545), or of the right, like Calvin, but of the centre, like Bullinger (who succeeded Zwingli in Zurich in 1531). Dix wrote:

Timms had misunderstood what Cranmer meant by the word ‘spiritually’. He pointed out quite rightly that Cranmer took ‘real’ as the equivalent of ‘physical’ or ‘material’. But he omitted to note that Cranmer occasionally equated ‘spiritual’ with ‘figurative’. He meant by ‘spiritual’ that which is ‘abstract’ or ‘only to be grasped by the mind’.44

In the second part of his thesis Dix examined Cranmer’s alliances; alliances that placed him in the Zwinglian faction of Protestantism, as opposed to (say) Lutheranism and Receptionism. Dix concentrated particularly on Cranmer’s supposed friendship with Bucer who had been a resident at Lambeth Palace for half of 1549. Timms had quoted from a letter from Hooper to Bullinger that, ‘Bucer is with the Archbishop of Canterbury like another Scipio and an inseparable companion’.45 Dix believed that Timms was right to make this reference but suggested that he should have looked much more closely at the remainder of Hooper’s correspondence. In the next eighteen months, up to Bucer’s death, his only communication with Cranmer concerned the Vestment Controversy. It has been accepted in some quarters that Bucer’s work entitled Censura,

43 Gregory Dix, Dixit Cranmer et Non Timuit, 15.44 Ibid, p.30.45 G B Timms, Dixit Cranmer, p.33.

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to which Timms had referred, had greatly influenced Cranmer’s mind in his revision of the first Prayer Book, making its successor Receptionist in character and form. Dix tore these arguments to shreds through a careful examination of eight of its chapters (chaps ii to ix); a study that occupies five pages of his paper. Bucer’s life-long witness against Zwinglianism was failing and, in the ensuing storm, he was advised by his friend from Strasbourg, Vallérand Poullain (1509-57), ‘not to raise any controversy in the matter of the Eucharist’. Bucer remained silent but wrote Confessio de Eucharistia in his dying months; this was only published post-mortem. In one final act, aimed at getting a Receptionist interpretation into the Prayer Book revision, Bucer side-lined Cranmer and wrote directly to the King and the Council. Dix commented, ‘The phrases which he had so strenuously defended in the interests of Receptionism were all deleted from the Anglican liturgy in 1552, and have never since been reinserted’.46

The Black Rubric, which John Knox insisted that Cranmer should include in the 1552 Prayer Book revision, contained all that needed to be said. It included the words:

Leste yet the same kneelyng myght be thought or taken otherwyse, we dooe declare that it is not ment thereby, that any adoracion is doone, or oughte to bee doone, eyther unto the Sacramentall bread or wyne there bodily receyved, or unto anye reall and essencial presence there beeyng of Christ’s naturall fleshe and bloude. For as concernynge the Sacramentall bread and wyne, they remayne styll in theyr verye naturall substaunces, and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatrye to be abhorred of all faythfull Christians. And as concernynge the naturall body and blood of our saviour Christ, they are in heaven and not here. For it is agaynst the trueth of Christes true natural bodye, to be in more places then in one, at one tyme.47

Dix admitted that the Black Rubric was not of Cranmer’s devising, but that he (Cranmer) had accepted its inclusion when pressed by King and Council. Dix argued that, in what he called, ‘its lawyer-drawn theology’, the 1552 Rite retained one loophole from being declared entirely Zwinglian and that was closed by the wording of Article XXIX of the XLII Articles of 1553. This said:

Forasmuch as the truth of man’s nature requireth that the body of one and the self-same man cannot be at one time in divers places but must needs be in some one certain place: therefore the body of Christ cannot be present at one time in many and divers places.

46 Gregory Dix, Dixit Cranmer et Non Timuit, p.44.47 The ‘Black Rubric’, or the Declaration on Kneeling was inserted into the 1552 Book at the last minute, and, as a result, its wording varies among different printings. The version shown above is not atypical.

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And because (as Holy Scripture doth teach) Christ was taken up into heaven and shall there continue unto the end of the world: faithful man ought not to believe or openly to confess the real and bodily presence (as they term it) of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.48

Dix commented that only Cranmer could have penned such stately English––the perfect summary of the ‘Zwinglian belief in the Real Absence’.49 Not only did the Eucharist now exclude any sacramental presence of Christ in the bread and wine, it denied any such presence in those to whom the sacrament was administered. The Son of God was now segregated in ‘one certain place’, detached from all contact with the communicants, whether by the sacrament or its celebration. In typically florid style, Dix added that, ‘The full Zwinglian denial had at length been officially proclaimed as the only teaching of the English Church’.

Richardson enters the debateIn 1949 the American Episcopalian Patristics scholar Cyril Richardson

wrote a work subtitled, Dixit Cranmer et Contradixit, in which he analysed the earlier commentaries of Timms and Dix.50 He performed this important work, not as might be expected, by comparing and contrasting the writings of the two protagonists, but by returning to Cranmerian source material. In fact, both Dix and Timms were only mentioned in this work (which ran to nearly 20,000 words) a handful of times. Richardson began by accepting that Cranmer’s thoughts were not always consistent and, it could be argued, the Exhortations in the 1549 Rite contained some ambiguities. He contended that Cranmer, ‘esteemed the Lord’s Supper more highly than did Zwingli’.51 But, it was also clear that the major part of Cranmer’s explanation of the Last Supper was heavily dependent on themes derived from the Swiss reformer. Richardson somewhat muddied the waters by quoting from the Rev’d Alexander Barclay, who suggested that Zwingli was not a Zwinglian, but admitted that his writings had singular clarity, which left no reason for failing to grasp exactly what he meant.52 Richardson reasoned that Dix had not fully grasped Zwingli’s thoughts. He wrote:

In seeking to disentangle it, Dom Gregory seems to have gone to exaggerated limits, presenting a view that Zwingli himself was at pains to rebut. Indeed, Dom Gregory’s understanding of Zwingli is perhaps at times as unjust as the construction that Cranmer, in the

48 Quoted by Gregory Dix, Dixit Cranmer et Non Timuit, p.47.49 Loc. cit50 Cyril C Richardson, Zwingli and Cranmer on the Eucharist: Cranmer Dixit et Contradixit, (Evanston IL 1949).51 Ibid, p.2.52 Alexander Barclay, The Protestant Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper: A Study of the Eucharistic Teaching of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, (1927). See also: Elmer S Freeman, The Lord’s Supper in Protestantism, (New York, NY 1945), p.62.

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Answer, puts upon many of Gardiner’s words. Where Cranmer can only understand a crass and ‘Capernaical’ doctrine in the orthodox view of the substance of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, Dom Gregory can only see a ‘purely mental and psychological’ attitude in Zwingli’s conception of faith.53

Did Dix misunderstand Zwingli’s Eucharistic theology? Dix had written:

His [Zwingli’s] doctrine of the sacraments … leaves them no force or efficacy of their own whatsoever. They are bare signs or ceremonies by which a man assures other people rather than himself of his saving faith in Christ’s redemption. In the eucharist there is but plain bread and wine, a reminder of the salvation achieved long ago at Calvary [Dix’s emphasis].54

Zwingli had argued that the bread and wine possess no inherent spiritual meaning, but the religious significance of the elements is determined by those elements being placed within the community of the Christian faith. It would seem that Dix did not exaggerate Zwingli’s Eucharistic theology. Of Timms, Richardson wrote:

Mr Timms is far from bringing the needed clarity into this vexed issue of Cranmer’s opinions. He is not rigorous enough in treatment of the leading ideas; and, in consequence, Dom Gregory’s rebuttal is at times most telling, though I believe it is misguided on one central issue. By showing that Cranmer did not believe the Lord’s Supper to be a ‘mere mental remembrance’, Mr Timms shows something that, pace Dom Gregory, is really obvious. But he proceeds from this to defend something that is really impossible, viz that Cranmer was a ‘dynamic receptionist’. Mr Timms might have been better advised to state Zwingli’s opinions and then compare them with Cranmer’s.55

After reading hundreds of pages of Cranmer’s and Zwingli’s words, Richardson accepted that there was a difference of temper between them. Cranmer held the Eucharist in higher esteem than did Zwingli, but Richardson was conscious of other differences between the two authors. He saw in Cranmer’s writings a major contradiction of thought and found a particular emphasis on God’s operation within the sacrament.56

William Tighe suggested that Richardson awarded the victory to Dix.57 However, he thought that all Anglican scholars, save for those on the

53 Cyril C Richardson, Zwingli and Cranmer on the Eucharist, p.3.54 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.632.55 Cyril C Richardson, Zwingli and Cranmer on the Eucharist,p. 4.56 Ibid, p.33. It is impossible within the confines of this essay to analyse these in full—Richardson’s work should be consulted for more information. 57 William J Tighe, ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’, Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, November 2008.

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highest and lowest extremities of Anglican Churchmanship, continued to resist Dix’s characterisation of Crammer’s views, for decades after his death. In recent years they have effectively, if tacitly, received the support of the one-time liberal, Anglican, Evangelical and now post-Christian, Reformation historian Diarmaid MacCulloch.58

In a review of Richardson’s paper, E R Hardy, of Berkeley Divinity School, wrote that he had not only enquired into what each writer had said, but had given consideration to their presuppositions.59 He concluded that Richardson had made an important contribution to the study of this topic, which should help to raise it, out of the controversies with which Anglicans cannot help associating it, into its proper place in the history of Reformation thought and of Eucharistic faith and practice generally.

Commentary In a less antagonistic vein, Dix wrote of Cranmer’s Rite that:

As a piece of liturgical craftsmanship it is in the first rank—once its intention is understood. It is not a disordered attempt at a catholic rite, but the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’. If in the end the attempt does not succeed—if we are left with a sense of the total disconnection of token communion in bread and wine with that mental ‘eating and drinking of Christ’s Flesh and Blood’, ie remembering of the passion, which is for Cranmer the essential Eucharistic action—that must be set down to the impossible nature of the task, not to the manner of its performance. Cranmer was in the end baffled like all the Reformers by the impossibility of reconciling the external rite of the Eucharist and the scriptural evidence of the Last Supper with the idea that ‘we spiritually and ghostly with our faith eat Christ, being carnally absent from us in heavens in such wise as Abraham and other holy fathers did eat him many years before he was incarnated and born’ [Dix’s emphases].60

The whole debate about the nature of the Eucharist and its liturgy seems to depend on establishing answers to the following questions:

What is meant by faith to a Christian?

Is the Eucharist a sacrament?

Is the Eucharist a sacrifice? If it is a sacrifice, is it a continuation of Calvary or entirely separate?

58 William J Tighe, ‘The Shape of the Liturgy’, loc cit; and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, (Yale 1995).59 E R Hardy, review of Richardson in Church History, Vol 20, Issue 02, 1951, pp.88-9.60 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p.672.

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Are the Eucharistic elements materially changed through the words and actions of an ordained priest?

Is it necessary to include the Institution Narrative and/or an epiclesis within the Anaphora?

Does the phrase ‘Body of Christ’ imply the Eucharistic species or the corpus fidelium or both?

Is reception of the elements a sacramental or a physical action?

It is unlikely that Anglicans will ever agree on their answers to any of these questions. Unless and until the Anglican Communion establishes some sort of monarchical archiepiscopacy with a willingness to rule absolutely (which would almost certainly destroy it!), then these contentious issues will remain unresolved. It should be added that, even within the Roman Catholic Church there are fundamental differences of opinion on these and many other matters. Perhaps this wide diversity of Eucharistic opinion is one of the gems of Anglicanism.

In a history of the Benedictine Community at Pershore, Nashdom and (later) Elmore, Petà Dunstan suggested that the most famous contribution to the scholarship that emerged was undoubtedly The Shape of the Liturgy. She wrote:

Written with style and lucidity it captured not only the attention of the academic community but also many clergy and laity in the Church. Subsequent critiques of aspects of the book’s thesis cannot detract from the observation that for more than a generation this book came to dominate liturgical debate and reform.61

After Dix’s untimely death in 1952 Bishop Kenneth Kirk described him as, ‘my closest and oldest friend, and the most brilliant man in the Church of England’. There is little doubt that he was a celebrated and distinguished theologian. Cranmer was also a renowned and eminent theologian. It is a great pity that the passing of the generations did not allow these two outspoken liturgical protagonists to meet in the debating chamber, or, better still, in the working sessions of the Liturgical Commission—what fireworks there would have been!!

(David Fuller was a founder member of the Blackburn Branch of the Prayer Book Society and is currently a member of the Scottish Prayer Book Society. He is a Licensed Lay Reader in the Scottish Episcopal Church, Diocese of Argyll and The Isles. He was recently awarded a doctorate for his thesis ‘Homo Eucharisticus: Gregory Dix Reshaped’.)

61 Petà Dunstan, The Labour of Obedience, (Norwich 2009), p.133.

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In 1965 Cyril Pocknee produced what was to be the final revision of Percy Dearmer’s famed The Parson’s Handbook. In his introduction he paid homage to a generation of liturgical scholars whose efforts had

made possible ‘a recognizable Anglican Use’ in the cathedrals and larger churches of England. Vernon Staley was not included in the list.1 It is a strange omission though one that resonates even today. Staley’s name is not as widely known as that of W.H. Frere or J. Wickham Legg and this despite the fact that his work was profoundly influential in the same circles as these better-known figures. Dearmer himself gave specific thanks to the Very Rev. Vernon Staley in the preface to the fourth edition (1902) of The Parson’s Handbook2 and Staley’s magisterial The Ceremonial of the English Church is included in the Handbook’s extensive ‘list of books quoted.’3 His influence may be felt throughout the Handbook as Dearmer argues for obedience to the Prayer Book, the implication of which is a late-medieval ceremonial, performed with the requisite ornaments and in a suitable context.4

Vernon Staley (1852-1933) was born in Rochdale, Lancashire and trained for the sacred ministry at Chichester Theological College, an educational institution with a Catholic reputation.5 In 1901 he was appointed Provost of St Andrew’s Cathedral, Inverness where he served for ten years before moving to Ickford, Buckinghamshire where he was rector of St Nicholas church until his death. During his time at Ickford he fitted the church with ornaments that reflected his views on appropriate furnishings in light of the Ornaments Rubric. Many of these items he produced himself in his

1 Cyril Pocknee, The Parson’s Handbook, p ix. Those scholars listed are: Walter Howard Frere, Charles Gore, W.H. St. John Hope, J. Wickham Legg, Francis Eeles, Jocelyn Perkins, A.S. Duncan-Jones, and J.H. Arnold. Pocknee notes, ‘All these were members of the Alcuin Club...’2 Percy Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook, p.vii. 3 Ibid., p.550. The works also by Staley or edited by him given in Dearmer’s list are: On the Reverence due to the Altar: by Jeremy Taylor and The Church Kalendar and Lectionary.4 Ibid., p.6. ‘Fortunately our Church, in its wise persistent conservatism, refers us for our standard to a definite period of English Use, in the loyal adoption of which standard both confusion and vulgarity would be as impossible as lawlessness.’5 Mark D. Chapman, Ambassadors of Christ: Celebrating 150 Years of Theological Education in Cuddesdon 1854-2004. Farnham 2004, p.24. ‘Another observer [in 1854] rejected Chichester, Wells, and Cuddesdon as “nurseries of Anglican Popery”’

Vernon Staley andEnglish Ceremonial

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workshop, including a tall font cover and hanging tester over the altar.6 These vaguely Jacobean pieces reflect the same temper as many of those ornaments commissioned by High-Churchmen in the early seventeenth century and suggest a liturgical context rich in ceremonial—the original ‘English Use’—where the Book of Common Prayer was clothed in some of the English Church’s ancient splendour.

In Staley’s day the phrase ‘English Use,’ was understood simply as a restatement of the title page of the Book of Common Prayer which included the phrase, ‘According to the use of the Church of England.’ The English Use was, according to its advocates, ‘a convenient title to express what is aimed at by those who desire loyally to follow the directions given or implied by our Church in the Prayer Book in respect of Church Ornaments and Ceremonial.’7 This simple argument, repeated time and time again over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, was most fully articulated by Vernon Staley and it is to his work that we now turn in an effort better to understand the arguments and sources of authority that informed his interpretation of the Use.

The Ceremonial of the English Church, first published in 1899, is Staley’s most comprehensive treatment of the question of authority and it is the clearest compendium of historical argument in favour of the English Use.8 Other essays and compendia exist but none are so focused and lucid.9 Even J.T. Micklethwaite’s The Ornaments of the Rubric published two years previously was not so cautious in its researches and wide-reaching in its references.10 That Dearmer chose to make use of Staley’s work is no surprise.

The Ceremonial of the English Church is divided into three parts. The second and third parts are relevant to this paper though the first is worth examination on its own merits. ‘Part First: The Moral Principles of Religious Ceremonial’ sets the philosophical context in which the latter parts stand. ‘Part Second: The Regulation of English Ceremonial’ is divided into five chapters and deals with various aspects of authority in the broadest sense. ‘Part Third: Ornaments and Ceremonies of the English Church’ is divided into four chapters and is concerned with the particular application of authority to the ornaments of the church,

6 Website of St Nicholas, Ickford. http://www.ickfordchurchfriends.com/history/: accessed 16 Jan. 2014.7 E.G.P. Wyatt, English or Roman Use?, 1913, p. 1.8 For this paper, the edition analysed is the fourth (1911).9 Typical of the period is the volume titled Essays on Ceremonial (1904), edited by Staley, which includes a chapter by E.G.Cuthbert F.Atchley specifically addressing ‘English Ceremonial’. This, like so many other treatments, is popular in tone and far too bound to minor controversies of the day to be an effective piece of stand-alone scholarship.10 It should not be imagined that Micklethwaite’s work is in any respect lacking. Its purpose is to provide references that justify ornaments. It does not examine the relative merits of the references themselves and the nature of their authority.

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Vernon Staley and English Ceremonial

the ornaments of the ministers, and to the ceremonies particular to the English Church.11

It is in Part Second that the abundance of Staley’s researches makes itself known. He divides sources of authority across three chapters (after a two-chapter introduction). These are ‘Modification of the Ancient Usages Affecting the Ceremonial of the English Church,’ ‘The Ornaments Rubric,’ and ‘The Canons of the English Church.’

Chapter One of the two-chapter introduction climaxes with the claim, worth quoting in full, that, ‘There is no room to doubt, that, when the English Church reformed her service books and translated them into the mother-tongue, she had no intention of departing from the ancient ceremonial, any more than she had of departing from the ancient doctrine, of the Catholic Church.’12

Chapter Two culminates in the observation that, with the re-institution of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662, there existed the king’s warrant to the Savoy Conference which assumed a degree of conformity to earlier traditions of liturgical performance. Staley quotes Bishop Cosin, ‘It is to be noted, that the Book does not everywhere enjoin and prescribe every little order, what should be said or done, but takes it for granted that people are acquainted with such common, and things always used already... let ancient custom prevail, the thing which our Church chiefly intended in the review of this service.’13

Those things ‘taken for granted’ and ‘acquainted in common,’ the ‘ancient customs’ of the English Church are what the three following chapters address. Most significantly, Chapter Three ‘Modification of the Ancient Usages’ includes a very clear list of those things proscribed in or before 1549. It is, therefore, an admittedly limited revival of late-medieval ornaments and ceremonies that is proposed in The Ceremonial of the English Church and not a complete revivification of the English Church in its pre-Reformation state.

Staley’s analysis of the ‘ancient usages;’ is divided into three sections which follow on in chronological order from the reign of Henry VIII to Charles II. In the first section he writes, ‘The modifications in ceremonial usages made in the reign of King Henry VIII., were comparatively few and trifling... [I]t will be seen that the chief change in ceremonies made in Henry’s reign was the attempt to put down superstition in regard to pictures and images.’14 The authorities in question during this period are Injunctions of 1538 and a royal order to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer dating from early 1545 that forbade ‘the ringing of bells on Allhallow-

11 Chapter I of Part Third is merely an introductory list of the material to be addressed subsequently.12 Vernon Staley, The Ceremonial of the English Church, p.45.13 Ibid., p.55.14 Ibid., pp.59, 61.

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day at night, the veiling of images in Lent, and the creeping to the cross on Good Friday.’15

More significant alterations to the use of the English Church were made under Edward VI and here Staley lists an August 1547 order from the Privy Council which suspended the authority of the bishops in order that a visitation be made to ensure the enforcement of the earlier Injunctions dating from Edward’s father’s reign. Additionally he notes a royal proclamation dated January 1548 authorising the ‘omission of the use of candles on Candlemas day, ashes on Ash Wednesday, and palm on Palm Sunday, and a week later, the Council issued an order forbidding the enforcement of the use of holy bread, holy water, and creeping to the cross on Good Friday.’16 These changes were not all, for shortly thereafter, ‘a further order in Council was made directing that “all the images remaining in any church or chapel were to be removed and taken away”, whether the objects of superstition or not.’ Continuing the theme of Royal and Privy Council directives, Staley describes certain changes made to the Mass, as well as the 1548 Order of Communion providing for communion in both kinds.

The most significant document appealed to in this section is the Prayer Book of 1549 itself. Its rubrics made the further changes of disallowing the elevation of the Sacrament, requiring that the Sacrament of the Body be placed in the mouth rather than in the hand, and limiting reservation to the purpose of communion of the sick. These alterations, Staley observes, ‘were the chief, if not the only, modifications of the accustomed ceremonial usages made by the rubrics of the services contained in the Prayer Book of 1549.’17

It is essential that this first of Staley’s sections in Chapter Three be given full examination for the opinion that follows the historical data is telling. He writes, ‘[T]he validity of the legislation referred to is more than doubtful, and it was much questioned at the time, even though, from force of circumstances, universally submitted to... [T]his legislation, unconstitutional though it undoubtedly was, did affect considerably the state of things prevailing in the second year of Edward VI., to which year the Ornaments Rubric refers us.’18

The careful way in which Staley clarifies the exact condition of the ornaments and ceremonies in 1549 and yet provides commentary that brings that condition into question may demonstrate the extent to which he is uncomfortable with the entire situation of legality as it relates to the

15 Ibid., p.60.16 Ibid., p.64.17 Ibid., p.65.18 Ibid., p.66.

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Church’s liturgy. However, this subtle hint of discomfort is assuaged almost immediately as he says, ‘The deliberate selection of the second year as the standard affords evidence, which cannot be gainsaid, of the intention of the English Church, as expressed in the Ornaments Rubric and elsewhere, that the reformed rite should, with certain modifications alluded to in this chapter, be clothed with the accustomed ceremonies.’19 In essence, the Ornaments Rubric ‘marks the via media between the ceremonial excesses of the first year, and the defects of the third,’20 a comfortable position between superstition and complete ceremonial nakedness.

Of the ceremonial changes dating to the reign of Charles II, Staley observes in passing, ‘Broadly speaking, only such ancient ceremonies as are inappropriate to, or inconsistent with, the structure of our present Prayer Book are disallowed.’21 He gives no authorities for this statement at this point in the text and seems unconcerned with defending such an observation. The care with which he presents the authorities chiefly relating to the reigns of Elizabeth and Charles I may go some way to explaining this.

Chapter Three of Part Second could be a stand-alone work, complete as is its summary of the condition of the English Church to the reign of Charles II. Yet, in order to make the case for the continuation of the Ornaments Rubric and, by implication, the state of affairs in 1549 watertight, Staley proceeds to describe in detail the later authorities that would seem to support the liturgical and ceremonial status quo in the second year of the reign of Edward VI.

In Chapter Four Staley deals with the Ornaments Rubric directly and breaks it down into individual clauses, just in case the reader were to have difficulty interpreting its language. There is a slight pedantry here which in any other writer would seem tedious. In Staley’s hands, it becomes far more interesting as he leads from one reasoned conclusion to another with precision. The chapter must be read in full to take in its effect.

The most significant authority brought forward at this point as witness to the validity of the old ornaments and ceremonies is none other than Bishop Cosin who, ‘in 1661 was the principal reviser of our present Prayer Book, and under whose hand the Ornaments Rubric, as it now stands, assumed its final form.’22 Staley makes the bold claim that Cosin interpreted the Rubric to give ‘full and frank authority to clothe our reformed rite with the ancient ceremonies.’23 The evidence provided is Cosin’s Notes on the Book of Common Prayer which, Staley argues, makes a case

19 Ibid., p.67.20 Loc. cit.21 Ibid., p.68.22 Ibid., p.77.23 Ibid., p.79.

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for the inclusion of the ornaments in use under the Latin rite alongside those of the Prayer Book of 1549.24

To prove the continuance of this state of affairs, Staley moves on in Chapter V to address the Canons of 1603/4. In seeking to reconcile the notable difference between what he has set up as the definition of the Ornaments Rubric and the clear language of these Canons of James I which enjoined the wearing of the cope in cathedrals and collegiate churches and the surplice in parish churches he writes, ‘In the face of [Puritan] opposition, it was under the circumstances deemed unadvisable to press obedience to the directions of the Ornaments Rubric...’25 The Rubric was merely ‘suffered to remain in abeyance, till a better state of things should prevail.’26

The Canons of 1640 are then surveyed and noted as possessing ‘church authority’27 despite not having received the confirmation of parliament. Of those practices enjoined by the Canons, Staley notes only the placement of the altar ‘sideway under the east window of every chancel or chapel’28 and its enclosure by rails, and the making of reverences by the laity when entering and leaving the church and when approaching the altar.

Having ended his broad defense of the authority for ornaments and ceremonies, Staley’s Part Third deals in detail with the ornaments and ceremonies themselves, providing evidence from the authorities already listed for their continuing retention and use. Additionally, various Visitation Articles are quoted including those of Andrewes, Cosin, Cranmer, Grindal, Laud, and Ridley.

The thoroughness with which Staley defends the use of the old Catholic ornaments and ceremonies is notable. He appeals to the words of the Ornaments Rubric itself and to later interpreters of it, as relating to the Prayer Book of 1662 specifically. He addresses Canons dating from the reigns both of James I and Charles I, as well as Injunctions dating all the way back to the reign of Henry VIII. His use of Visitation Articles of bishops known to be of diverse ceremonial opinions adds considerable weight to the argument that the appearance of pre-Reformation worship, only slightly modified, remains the standard.

In places, the arguments of The Ceremonial of the English Church are

24 Ibid., p.78. Cosin writes, ‘Those ornaments of the church, which by former laws, not then abrogated, were in use by virtue of the statute 25 Henry viii., and for them the provincial constitutions are to be consulted, such as have not been repealed, standing then in the second year of king Edward vi., and being still in force by virtue of this rubric and Act of Parliament.’ Staley clarifies, ‘—that is, the ornaments used in the Latin services in Henry’s reign, which services were continued throughout the whole of the second year, and for four months of the third year, of the reign of Edward vi.’25 Ibid., p.84.26 Loc.cit.27 Ibid., 89.28 Loc. cit.

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tortured. In particular the justification of the disagreement between the Ornaments Rubric and the Canons of 1603/4 comes across as weak and circumstantial. Yet, other areas—the discussion of Bishop Cosin’s interpretation of the Rubric for example—are very strong indeed. The balance of plausibility and unassailable proof made Staley’s work very valuable to a growing group of ‘English Usagers’ who required arguments both valid and viable to support their contention that late-medieval liturgical expression was not only permissible but required in the Church of England.

A second work by Staley that deserves brief comment is Studies in Ceremonial, published in 1901. It was intended to be a companion volume to The Ceremonial of the English Church and is concerned primarily with the validity of certain ornaments and ceremonies which, ‘within the last fifty years or so, seem to have been introduced without adequate authority into many English churches.’29 As such, it can come across as distinctly anti-Roman. This is due to Staley’s insistence that English ceremonial be regulated by English custom. ‘Pre-Reformation English ceremonial [is] not identical with that of the modern Roman Church,’30 he observes. As regards genuflections at the Eucharist, signing with the Cross at the Creed, bowing at the name of Jesus, and reverencing the altar there is the consistent appeal to authorities as diverse as pre-Reformation missals and primers, Elizabethan Injunctions, and the Canons of 1640. The same learned tone that pervades The Ceremonial of the English Church makes Studies in Ceremonial, though theoretically a book dealing only with then-contemporary controversy, an example of scholarship that seems fresh even today.

In placing Staley’s writing alongside that of his more populist contemporary Percy Dearmer, it is apparent that The Parson’s Handbook does not stand up favourably against Staley’s work. And yet, though The Ceremonial of the English Church ran to several editions, The Parson’s Handbook came to dominate the scene as the accepted authority on English ornaments and ceremonies. This is perhaps partly due to Dearmer’s polemical tone which makes Staley’s measured prose seem rather unexciting. The Introduction to the Handbook is full of potentially useful information, very similar to that found in The Ceremonial of the English Church, which is clouded by Dearmer’s polemic against ‘Puritans’ and ‘non-conforming churchmen.’ Such is the character of Dearmer’s writing that he, rather more extreme than Staley, very clearly states that, ‘To obey the [Ornaments Rubric] properly, we must interpret it in the spirit of a parson of the year 1548, who was conversant with the old ceremonial.’31 Though Staley does

29 Staley, Studies., p.v.30 Ibid., 2.31 Dearmer, 39.

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make reference to the condition of the Church in 1548, he never goes quite so far in suggesting that year to be entirely definitive of a lawful interpretation of the Prayer Book of 1662. His more measured approach limits his audience. Slightly self-righteous polemic is always preferred to gently-measured scholarship.

A second factor in the popularity of The Parson’s Handbook was its immediate practicality. For those less concerned with the historical justification for ornaments and ceremonies and more ready simply to implement them in the parishes, the Handbook proves its worth immediately. Staley’s historical discussion never includes any details as to performing the Prayer Book liturgy according to the ancient ceremonies. Dearmer’s chapters Ten, Eleven and Twelve outline the simple Communion Service undertaken by priest and clerk only, the Holy Communion (essentially in the form of High Mass) with deacon and subdeacon, clerk, taperers, and thurifer, and a lengthy analysis of the ceremonial itself in the form of a columned table. The ease with which these chapters could be studied and put into use marks The Parson’s Handbook as an eminently more pragmatic work than The Ceremonial of the English Church, a striking reflection on the differing personalities of their respective authors.

As the twentieth century progressed, the populist strand of English Use writing eclipsed the quieter works. Yet, a fresh look at Staley’s books may be of benefit to current scholarship in redressing the balance of perception that the English Use was, despite its undeniable aesthetic quality, a manner of liturgical performance suited only to strong personalities with an antiquarian sensibility and not something grounded in legitimate scholarship.32 In bringing Staley to light, the full scope of liturgical writing in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be recovered.

A Note Regarding the OppositionDespite the scholarly quality of much English Use writing, The

Ceremonial of the English Church in the vanguard, there were some who contested the narrative put forward by English Use supporters. The Church’s progress of thinking on ornaments and ceremonies was not so clear, they suggested. One of the most convincing arguments was put forward by W.H. Griffith Thomas, sometime Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. In The Catholic Faith: A Manual of Instruction for Members of the Church of England he latches onto the discontinuity in practice represented by the Canons of 1603/433 and makes no small issue of the fact that arguments

32 The appellation of ‘British Museum Religion’ plagued the English Use from its earliest days though, as some of its supporters noted, this could be taken as a compliment to its intensive historical researches and scholarly approach to modern liturgical questions.33 These ordered the surplice in parish churches and permitted the cope in cathedrals and collegiate churches.

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like Staley’s completely ignore the Prayer Book of 1552 of which that of 1559 is but a minor modification.

Being that the Ornaments Rubric originates in the Book of 1559, only later to be replicated in 1662, such a glossing is no minor omission. ‘There is no question whatever as to actual fact and custom from 1559,’34 Thomas writes. ‘The universal practice of the Church after 1559 was the use of the dress of ministration which had been ordered by the Prayer Book of 1552... [T]he dress of ministration ordered by the first Prayer Book of 1549 was never adopted from 1559 onwards. The Canon of 1604 is in exact agreement...’35 Therefore of the state of ornaments and ceremonies in 1662, Thomas says, ‘There is no trace whatever that the Authorities of Church and State intended to make any alteration in the existing customs which had been universal and uniform since 1559.’36 He then quotes the Visitation Articles of none other than Bishop Cosin—so assuredly on the Catholic side, according to Staley—who asks only whether the parish possesses ‘a large and decent surplice for the minister to wear at all times of his public ministration in the Church.’37

(Evan McWilliams is currently researching at the University of York for a PhD focusing on the English Use movement in the first half of the twentieth century.)

34 W.H. Griffith Thomas, The Catholic Faith (1911), p.442.35 Loc.cit.36 Ibid., 443.37 Ibid., 444.

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Encountering God

A vehicle for encountering God

It was in the late 1950s that I had my first real encounter with the Book of Common Prayer, and it was an encounter with God. That’s what Cranmer certainly intended through the work which he has

bequeathed to the Anglican Church. I was in the sixth form at the time, and an avowed atheist. It was my

headmaster who said I should go to church as I wished to enter the diplomatic service after university, and ‘C of E will look good on your CV’ he told me. How different things are today!

So, along with my younger sister, I went to my parish church the next Sunday. I had very little idea what was going on. I know now that it was a 1662 service of Holy Communion, but did not know what happened when most of the congregation got up and went through the screen at the front. As they came back looking ‘not very happy’, we decided not to risk it ourselves. But there was something about the service, something about the words, that affected me deeply. I came away thinking ‘the God who I know does not exist was there’. I returned that evening and on every subsequent Sunday, very soon becoming a convinced Christian, and not much later on I believed God to be calling me towards ordination.

Cranmer was more than Shakespeare, more than the great poets of his age. He was creating a vehicle for worship through which the people of this land could encounter God.

And in similar vein my experience with the Prayer Book continued. As a university student in the early 1960s I attended a church for 1662 Evening Prayer where there were about 600 students from all denominations. We sung all the psalms, chanted the versicles and responses (the whole service printed out on a new leaflet each Sunday) and heard a long sermon. It was the most popular church venue in the city for students. It wasn’t used as a relic of ancient liturgy but as a living expression of a contemporary worshipping church. Therefore we weren’t literalists—we said ‘Holy Spirit’ instead of ‘Holy Ghost’, and ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ rather than ‘Our Father which art in heaven’. Today I fear some who use 1662 are archaeological literalists rather than using it as an expression of contemporary worship.

I was also passionately pro-BCP because of the faith which was enshrined within its pages—the doctrines of sin and grace in the Communion service, in the marvellous invitation to Confession in

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Encountering God

Morning and Evening Prayer and in the following General Confession. These are the central truths of the New Testament, rediscovered at the Reformation and much later enshrined, for instance, in Newton’s famous hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. I valued the Prayer Book, and still do, not only because of the beauty of its language but because of the beauty of the faith it proclaims. So much of our understanding of doctrine is learnt through the liturgy in parishes. Now much greater emphasis has to be placed on sermons and midweek house groups for teaching the faith, especially as many people don’t now have a whole lifelong experience of imbibing the truths of the faith through worship twice every Sunday for decade after decade.

A cultural shift and new challengesThen in the late 1960s I found myself as a curate in a parish where we

had about fifty young people at evening worship. It was 1662 Evening Prayer and yet they no longer loved it as I had done as a student only a few years earlier. What had changed?

One indication of the change came to me when I gave a lift to a student attending the same university I had attended myself as decade earlier. He told me he had arrived there seeking for God and found his spiritual path through the witness of the University Buddhist Society. When I had arrived at the same university there had been no Buddhist Society.

When a decade earlier I had encountered God via 1662, that naturally led to Christian commitment. By now there were many options on offer and available. The revolution of the 1960s had led to ‘flower power’ and seeking after truth and beauty elsewhere, not in the ‘old religion’. Hierarchy had broken down and the Prayer Book, for all its beauties, was part of that past which was being discarded.

This massive cultural and religious shift had been gathering pace for the past forty years. It is in this context that we must read the opening words on the Prayer Book Society website

The Prayer Book Society was formed to promote and preserve the use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer—the traditional service book of the Church of England containing the Church’s historic beliefs and its official standard of doctrine.

We cannot approach the issue of the Book of Common Prayer in isolation; we must see it as part of a wider mission, both to challenge the secularist assumptions of the age and to invite people into a living encounter with God. As we do that (and it’s a massive task) I believe we will find that the glories of the Prayer Book and its unique contribution to the worship of our nation are re-appropriated by new generations,

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seldom, if ever, as the only vehicle of their worship but as part of a wide variety of styles, modes and approaches to God.

This understanding of diversity is part of our modern culture which I believe is here to stay. The Act of Uniformity, on which universal Prayer Book worship was first founded has been subject to an increasing process of erosion ever since it was enacted. One example flows from how we have become a televisual age. Cranmer would be amazed at what is happening in the heart of the Church of England today, where one increasingly popular approach to prayer is based on a rediscovery of the icons of the Eastern Church. He would have seen those in his day as akin to the idolatry of the Popish practises from which this realm had been delivered!

Important principles and prioritiesWe will all have our own priorities and principles for today which flow

from the genius of the Book of Common Prayer. Two stand out for me:

1. Words are important; phrases that are memorable form part of one’s deep spiritual bedrock. At times our modern worship services fail to provide us with that.

2. The Book of Common Prayer enshrines simplicity and lack of fussiness. Sometimes our modern liturgies can become over-complex—as can the experience of some if they are given the whole range of possible options in the Common Worship services of Baptism and Confirmation.

Another factor to remember is that the Book of Common Prayer is not complete as a compendium of worship today—new liturgies are necessary. One example stems from the rediscovery of the importance of the healing ministry, which now finds helpful provision in the Common Worship services for ‘Wholeness and Healing’—a dimension not really central to the concerns of the early Anglican divines, but a crucial way of connecting with our society today.

Another need that many find is for liturgies in the home and family. I certainly discovered this as I sought to provide daily worship at home with my wife, who for much of the last four years of her life was not able to get to church. We needed a kind of Compline service which had resonances with the experiences of daily life, and so we developed a series of ten, based on a variety of traditions. A Compline service was of course provided in 1928, but there is a place for creating new liturgies which meet the need of variety, greater flexibility and creativity which have become more and more part of our way of life.

As someone who spent sixteen years of my stipendiary ministry teaching in theological colleges I recognise the importance of familiarising

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ordinands with the content, traditions, doctrine and principles of the Prayer Book. I think it is true that the majority of ordinands come from parishes where it is not used, or only rarely, and this means there must be some weeks in any year when there is regular exposure to the Book of Common Prayer, as well as what can be taught in lectures and seminars. Such exposure can be easier at a college, and is more difficult of course during the less frequent times of worship on a non-residential course.

Above all I have tried to inculcate in ordinands and curates over the years that when the Prayer Book is used it must be done well, and with most this needs practice, particularly in getting one’s tongue around some of the more sonorous phrase in the Holy Communion Prayer of Consecration!

But it must never become a piece of seventeenth-century theatre. We must happily combine with it twenty-first century material. Evensong doesn’t only have to have hymns like ‘Dear Lord and father of mankind’ or ‘The Day thou gavest’. In 1662 they didn’t have such hymns as we know them and which we now almost completely equate with its very ethos.. They simple used chants which were devised at the time of the Reformation to accompany the Coverdale version of the Psalter, replacing the former tradition of plainsong. We must remain with those who, like the best in our tradition, have been able to use the Prayer Book with sensitivity in combination with new expressions of worship in each age.

But above all we must value it as a vehicle for encountering God—and long may there remain occasions when, in the wider variety of the Church’s liturgy, it continues to be so.

(The Rt Revd David Gillett was Bishop of Bolton in the Diocese of Manchester between 1999 and 2008, and is now Honorary Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Norwich. The article above was originally given as a an address to the Norwich Branch of the Prayer Book Society in 2013.)

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In my report ‘Ordinariate Liturgical Texts’ (Faith & Worship no. 72. Easter 2013) I wondered what was still to come, and speculated that any revision of the traditional-language Eucharistic rite in the

Book of Divine Worship (2003) might bring it closer to English than to American Prayer Book traditions. That now seems to be happening, even though at the time of writing a revision has yet to be officially published—all that is available are Internet comments on services that have recently taken place. But in early January I discovered by chance (courtesy of Google) a complete text of a Sung Mass celebrated at the church of St John the Evangelist, Calgary, Canada, on the Third Sunday of Advent 2013. Assuming that the text of that service has been officially authorised, it appears that the BDW rite has indeed been revised in such a way as to ‘de-Americanise’ it almost completely. For the convenience of Prayer Book Society members there follows an outline of that service, in which I have used ‘1928’ to refer to the English Proposed Book of that year, not the authorised American one.

Processional Hymn, Asperges;Introit, Invocation, Collect for Purity (1662), Summary of the Law

(American text). Ninefold Kyrie in Greek, (no Gloria in Advent), Collect of the Day, OT Lesson, Gradual, Epistle, Hymn, Alleluia. Gospel with 1928 responses, Sermon, Nicene Creed (1928);

Prayer for the Church (see below), Ye that do truly...upon your knees (1662 but omitting and take...your comfort as in the American Prayer Book of 1979), General Confession (1662), Absolution (not so called—1662 but preceded by May and with first person plural pronouns), Comfortable Words (1662);

Offertory Anthem, Hymn, Orate fratres, Offertory Prayer;Sursum corda/Preface/Sanctus (1662), Benedictus (1928), followed by a

revised text of the traditional-language translation of the Roman Canon found in the Book of Divine Worship;

Bidding (1549/1928); Lord’s Prayer with Tridentine Embolism inserted before the doxology, O Lord Jesus Christ who saidst to thine apostles..., Pax (1549), Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us—Therefore let us keep the feast during Fraction (American Prayer Book of 1979 inspired by 1549), Agnus Dei (1549), Prayer of Humble Access (1662), Behold the Lamb...,

Ordinariate Liturgical Texts: A Further Report

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Communion Anthem, Hymns:Prayer of Thanksgiving (1662 but with thou dost feed us in these holy

mysteries, a partial reversion to 1549), Post-Communion Collect, Blessing (1662), Dismissal, Last Gospel (KJV);

Angelus, Recessional Hymn.The bidding to the Prayer for the Church is from Series Two (1967). The

Prayer itself is the variant of 1928 printed on pages 283-4 of Common Worship, with the addition at the appropriate places of the names of Pope Francis, the Ordinary, the Blessed Virgin and the patron saints of the parish. There are only three actual alterations: the reversal of the second and third paragraphs, a change of true religion to peace, and the omission of only from the final sentence—it is to be hoped that this last is a misprint, as the missing word appears at that point in the Book of Divine Worship, and 1 Timothy 2.5 is quoted several times in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Words of Administration were not given, but comment elsewhere on the internet suggests that they may be those of 1549 with the addition of Amen.

The ordinary texts of the Mass (Creed, Sanctus/Benedictus, Lord’s Prayer, Agnus) are set to Merbecke’s music of 1550. The Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion Anthems are set to the plainsong of The English Gradual (= English Hymnal no. 659). The Collect of the Day (perhaps provisional) is a revised version of the 1662 collect for Advent IV taken from the American Prayer Book of 1979, and differs in this respect from the Customary which offers a choice of the 1549 and 1662 collects for Advent III. The Lessons are those of the modern Roman Rite but in a more traditional translation, as are the Offertory. and Post-Communion Prayers which have been adapted to the second person singular. The Preface for Advent originated in the American experimental liturgy of 1967.

A recent official development is the publication in March 2014 of Divine Worship - Occasional Services which consists of The Order for Funerals and The Order for the Celebration of Holy Matrimony (both summarised in Faith & Worship no. 72) together with The Order of Holy Baptism, authorised by Rome in December 2013. Unlike the Book of Divine Worship, which reproduced the Baptism service of the American Prayer Book of 1928, the new Order of Holy Baptism comprises an order for the Baptism of adults and older children with Confirmation and First Communion; and orders for Infant Baptism, separate Confirmation, and rules for conditional and emergency Baptism. These weave together BCP material from 1662, 1928 (English and American) with other traditional ceremonies—salt (optional), two anointings, giving of a white robe (optional) and candle: the texts

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accompanying the second anointing and the white robe (chrysom) closely follow the BCP of 1549.

The opening exhortation is from the 1662 adult Baptism service, but changes ‘forasmuch as all men are conceived and born...actual transgressions’ to ‘seeing that God willeth all men to be saved from the sinful nature which they inherit, as well as from the actual sins which they commit’. The second prayer ‘Almighty and immortal God, the aid of all who need...’ follows, but expanded with ‘steadfast in faith, joyful through hope and rooted in charity’ from the first prayer which is otherwise omitted. Then comes the sign of the cross and ‘We receive this child/man/wornan...life’s end’, the 1662 wording in the 1549 position.

The three Gospel readings of the American Prayer Book (including Mark 10 and John 3) are provided for infant Baptism only, as adult Baptisms take place during Mass. After a sermon which replaces the BCP exhortations, the prayer ‘Almighty and everlasting God, heavenly Father...’ follows.

The next exhortation is the brief one from the American Prayer Book of 1928. The renunciation is from the same source, differing by only one word from 1662: the profession of faith is in triple form as in 1549, but with ‘I do’ instead of the more dramatic ‘I believe’ (adult candidates recite the Apostles’ Creed instead),

After some more promises come the four short prayers of 1662 slightly modified, with a fifth added in second place. The blessing of the water is preceded by Sursum corda and Preface as in 1928, and has ‘and send the Holy Spirit upon the water of this font’ inserted before ‘Sanctify this water...’. After anointing, white robe and candle, come the 1928 post-Baptismal prayers and (at infant Baptism) a revised version of the 1928 charge to the godparents.

In Confirmation as a separate rite following the sermon at Mass there is a presentation of the candidates rather like an ordination, the Nicene Creed (text of 1928), and a renunciation and renewal of vows similar to those of adult Baptism. From ‘Our help is in the Name of the Lord’ onwards, the BCP service with the additions of 1928 is complete, with the exception that the prayer for the sevenfold gifts is translated from the modern Roman Rite even though it differs very little from the BCP version with which it has a common source: and ‘Defend, O Lord, these thy servants...’, said once only, is the first of the prayers that follow the act of Confirmation which is by chrismation.

The full text of the Prayer of Humble Access having been included in the Mass celebrated in Canada on Advent III, together apparently with the 1549 Words of Administration, the only major element of the ‘Anglican patrimony’ that remains missing from the services described above and in Faith & Worship no. 72 (apart front structural features of the Eucharist such

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as the position of the Prayer for the Church, the Act of Penitence and Gloria in excelsis) is a Eucharistic Prayer incorporating the Prayers of Consecration and Oblation on the lines of the Scottish Liturgy of 1637. With this exception, it remains extraordinary, and surely of ecumenical significance, that if for convenience one makes a comparison with the Shorter Prayer Book of 1946, almost all of that book has now been authorised by Rome, though without acknowledgement of the source. It appears that a complete missal is due next year.

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Simon Reynolds, Table Manners: Liturgical Leadership for the Mission of the Church,SCM, 2014. ISBN 978 0 334 04528 1 Pbk. £19.99

In an introductory essay to God’s Transforming Work¸ a book ‘celebrating ten years of Common Worship’, Rowan Williams asked ‘Is there a liturgical crisis in the Church of England?’ He diagnosed ‘a fairly pervasive failure to realize that people do need to be educated in liturgical behaviour’. As a direct response to this challenge, Table Manners develops the concerns and themes of the essay, and makes the work of Margaret Barker and Iain McGilchrist (to which Williams refers) foundational for its argument. The scope is narrowed by its more specific goal of educated priests. It clearly aims to fill a perceived gap in the training of ordinands.

Table Manners is not the most inspiring title. We all know that they matter, and we notice when they are missing, but as far as possible we try not to draw attention to them or prescribe them, for fear of being inhospitable or unaccommodating of different cultures. Herein lies the difficult task which Reynolds sets himself. He aims to work at the level of principle rather than prescription, attempting to avoid ‘issues of churchmanship’ (as the blurb says), yet the worked examples inevitably reveal that the elephant in the book is evangelical worship (and its wider influence), which is certainly ritualized but often lacking the liturgical sense of being a transformative event in physical space and time.

The contemporary scene is surveyed in the first chapter, where the source of today’s malaise is traced to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Here Reynolds uses Iain McGilchrist’s significant and controversial work The Master and His Emissary, which draws on neurological science to argue that over recent centuries the West has suppressed the right brain (with its preference for the intuitive, artistic and individually specific) and handed control to the left brain (with its preference for the logical, analytic and abstract). The high artistic sophistication of the worship of the Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, where worship was primarily experienced, gave way to a more verbal emphasis, where everything had to be understood. ‘One of the gradual effects of the Book of Common Prayer… was to make worship rational: meaning was more precisely mapped-out. What was intended to be liberating became, in significant ways, more specific and containing.’

Later, this sweeping verdict is softened when the pictorial language of the General Confession is favourably contrasted with the tendency for abstract concepts in modern liturgy. However, it also seems contradictory to say on the one hand that ‘the scope of our authorised liturgy is now

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Review

richer than in any previous period since the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549’, yet complain that the use of many alternative texts militates against the internalization of liturgy (which would allow words to become part of our whole bodies, and not simply pass through our left brain).

The second chapter considers the Eucharistic tradition, recognising that early practice is more varied than was thought in the mid-twentieth century, and drawing on the work of Margaret Barker which challenges the assumption that the more domestic Passover and synagogue setting was the primary influence on early Christian worship and argues for how pervasive in the New Testament is the imagery and ritual of Temple worship, and the language of sacrifice and the Day of Atonement. Worship must embody the priest at the altar in the temple, as well as the host serving supper at the table.

All this is worked out in the remaining chapters which offer many penetrating insights into the use of language and silence, gesture and voice, space and furniture. Throughout the book there is repeated criticism of the modern disproportionate emphasis on the immanent and horizontal rather than the transcendent and vertical, and on church as a gathering of the family in a homely setting rather than a glimpse of the eternal and a bridge between heaven and earth. Examples given include Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and Cranmer’s practice of the people gathering round the table in the chancel. Circles tend to be difficult to penetrate, orientated inwards, anthropocentric, pointing to nothing beyond themselves.

Full marks go to King’s College Chapel (Cambridge), Coventry Cathedral, and Notre Dame de Haut in Ronchamp, the last given as an example of the successful combination of immanence and transcendence. There is more subtlety in the argument than I can convey here, and above all, Reynolds is asking people to think about how the space and the liturgy can be used to balance different perspectives and emphases.

I would have liked some similar recognition of the difficulty of conveying transcendence without confusing it with size, distance or unfamiliarity. Surely, at the heart of the Temple tradition is the belief that God’s otherness simply cannot be represented. All our attempts at this compete with expressions of immanence, yet in truth it is God’s transcendence as creator which makes it possible for him to be closer to us than we are to ourselves.

It was never going to be possible to stay at the level of principle, and the book would be duller if it had done. Readers will need to get over the author’s preferences if they don’t suit. For me, the cathedral model was too dominant, and the justification for this by means of the often quoted phenomenon of increased attendance in recent years is a myth crying

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out for some hard left-brained analysis. Is the presidential chair really so significant? Is it practical to announce the notices five minutes before the service starts, when twenty-five per cent of the congregation have not arrived, and to deny cushioned seating in order to avoid domestication, and to expect the priest to be so early that he/she is seen only to be in an attitude of silent attentiveness as worshippers arrive, even in a multi-parish benefice?

I got over all this. The bottom line is that the book does offer an education from which anyone would benefit, and its challenge will stay with me. Above all, it encourages serious reflection on liturgical practice in an attempt to counter years of casual drift and chance formation.

Mark Hart

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From The Revd Christopher Idle, Herne Hill, London

The articles on Weddings and Funerals (more properly, Marriage and Burial) in the Lent issue, prompt me to make this confession and complaint.

As an incumbent in the 1970s and 80s (I had learned better by the 90s), I presumptuously assumed that modern couples would expect a modern wedding service. So that is what I offered, with the well-practised and perfectly true line, ‘This is the order of service we usually have here.’ I did not specifically deny anyone a more traditional rite, but very few couples were sophisticated enough to request or require it.

If I had qualms about some of the language, I thought the gains outweighed the losses. But I still missed, from the very first page, ‘which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee...’. As I recall, the newer service reduced that to the fact that Jesus once went to a wedding; no beauty, no miracle, and certainly no beholding his glory.

My wife’s objection (she was often our organist) came even earlier; ‘Why’, she asked, ‘do you begin with that verse about love without giving the context? You make it sound that if they love each other they can be sure of eternal life!’ So after that I didn’t leave out 1 John 4, but rather gave them more of it.

But prompted by what I cannot now remember (was it something I read from the Prayer Book Society?) I then began to make the options clearer. At an early stage I showed each couple the latest service alongside a slightly adapted Prayer Book text, letting them look at both without further comment from me. Sometimes they would take them home before deciding; for some who were unused to such a method, I would read aloud some of the key passages including the vows.

I then found that the majority of couples in this inner-London parish opted for the Prayer Book service! So that is what they had; I did not keep statistics but remember that it was well over half of them. There is my confession.

But turn the pages to the Burial of the Dead, and the calendar to this very month as I write. No longer the incumbent, I have got to know a regular ‘8 o’clock’ couple. Married for over 60 years, they love the Prayer Book and choose that BCP service, as I do, from other options on a Sunday.

It proves to be the wife who dies first, but not before she has calmly thought about her own funeral, chosen some possible hymns, and written down her desire to be buried according to the 1662 book.

LETTERS

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The widower explains this when seeing the Vicar about arrangements. ‘Oh no’, says that gentleman; ‘No, she can’t have meant the old Prayer Book service!’ ‘But she did’, said her husband; ‘she even wrote that down so we would be clear what to do’. ‘No, no, I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted that.’

Now I know at first-hand what it is to mourn the loss of a spouse, and the pressures felt by the grieving, newly-widowed partner, sometimes after the strain of long illness and months of specialised caring. He or she is uniquely vulnerable to pressure from the ‘professionals’ in an unfamiliar field. So against his better judgement, and certainly against his late wife’s, my friend reluctantly agreed to a supposedly more up-to-date service. At least they were allowed her choice of hymns.

But what an example of high-handed clerical arrogance! Surely an unloving, even illegal ruling, the opposite of true pastoral care!

It is too late for me to apologise to the couples whom (I now see) I sold short on their wedding day. All I can say is that with the limited material I had made available, we did our best. But I can urge my fellow-clergy, if they habitually fail to honour the perfectly reasonable wishes of either the betrothed or the deceased, to acknowledge and bewail their own manifold sins and wickedness, so that they may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life, to the glory of God’s holy name and the blessing of their parishioners.

From The Revd Roger Knight, Rochester

Further to your remarks about the association between naming and Baptism (‘Editorial’, Faith & Worship 74), the following may be of interest. When my grandmother was born in December 1900, she was not expected to live. She was therefore baptised at home and later brought to church that the Baptism might be certified by the congregation. In fact she lived to be well over 90 (as apparently her doctor had foretold if she survived infancy!) She always said that she had been half named at home. I have never heard anyone else use that expression but I guess it must once have been current usage, if only in this part of Kent. Anyway, the story is grist to your editorial mill.

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