7 JUNE 1946, Page 7

A GREAT WHIT-SUNDAY

By CANON NORMAN CLARKE T used to be the custom to print in the introductory pages of the I Book of Common Prayer a table giving the dates of the movable feasts for a period of fifty years. The advantages of it were doubtful, but with its passing there disappeared one of the distractions which for many a child whiled away the time of a tedious sermon meant for its elders if not its betters. A glance through some old Prayer Rocks reveals the fact that only infrequently has Whit-Sunday fallen on June 9. But it does so fall this year, and it did in 1549. Times have changed since then, and with them the services of the Church of England ; but none of these changes compares with those on that one day, Whit-Sunday, 1549. In January of that year the first of the four Acts of Uniformity in English history was passed, and it decreed that the First Prayer Book of Edward VI should be used in all Parish Churches from the following Whit-Sunday.

it is easiest to picture the changes in terms of a particular instance. For one hundred years one or other (perhaps all three) of the monks of Plympton Priory who were attached KS the parish church of Sutton (now St. Andrew's, Plymouth) had gone from their Prysten House, less than a dozen yards away, into the church to recite their offices or to offer the sacrifice of the Mass. In 1539, when the monastery at Plympton was dissolved, the Prysten House had passed into secular ownership—it is now happily restored to the parish church—but there had been no break in the services. From dawn to bed-time, from Mattins to Compline, they had said their prayers and recited their psalms ; they had one of the largest parish churches in England, but it is doubtful if any congregation joined them. Those who went to church went to hear the Mass. That Whit-Sunday all was changed. There was no Mass, but an English Communion service ; no seven services throughout the day, but Mattins and Evensong. One does not know how many people were in church to worship in the new way, but for the first time they heard the whole service in a language which they could understand. True, five years before an English Litany had been introduced, and for the previous twelve months an English Order of Communion had been-interspersed in the Latin Mass. Now there was a service in which they could intelligently join ; whether or not they did, and whether or not they appreciated the change, is among the unsolved problems of history.

If it was to Mattins they went, or Evensong,-they would hear it start with the Lord's Prayer, said by the priest alone. Then came the Venite and the Psalms, almost as now ; there were two lessons and the canticles, though the Jubilate, the Cantate and the Deus Misereatur were introduced only in 1552. After the Benedictus, or the Nunc Dimittis at Evensong, came the Lesser Litany, then the Creed (said kneeling) and the Lord's Prayer and the service familiar to us today as- far as the third collect. There iit ended ; there was no

Penitential introduction and none of the prayers after the third collect, and there was no sermon. None is provided for now. If it was to Communion they went, what would strike them most would be the change of emphasis ; it was no longer so much a sacrifice offered by the priest as a communion of the 'people. All was in English, but, apart from that the service would be as strange to us today as it was to them on that Whit-Sunday nearly 40o years ago. The Gloria in Excelsis, following a psalm and the Lesser Litany, came at the beginning ; the old Canon, broken into three parts in X552, was retained, but the Invitation, the Confession and Absolu- tion, the Comfortable Words and the Prayer of Humble Access, all to be found in the 1548 Order of Communion, were said between the Prayer of Consecration and the actual Communion. It was here, perhaps, that the change was most clearly seen ; the people were to "draw near and take." There followed sentences from the Bible, a form of dismissal, the Prayer of Thanksgiving and the Blessing.

What happened in Plymouth happened throughout the country ; there was one service for all and the old variations from diocese to diocese had gone. " Now from henceforth all the whole realm shall have but one Use," declared the Act of Uniformity. The new forms of service were not the haphazard stringing together of "prayers and Scripture. They bear the marks of liturgical skill and research ; and the principles which guided the Reformers in 1549 and '662 are still to be found in the regrettably little-read Prefaces to the Book of Common Prayer. The first of these dates from i662 but the other two from 1549. The avowed aim of the Reformers was to preserve as much as possible of the old. A new spirit was abroad, and they would have none of the revolutionary movement which inflicted its loss on other branches of the Christian Church. To this fact we owe many of the most beautiful parts of our services. But the new learning and the rediscovery of the Bible meant that new or, it would be truer to say, revived ancient standards of judge- ment had to be applied. Scripture became the test of truth, and along with the desire to preserve went the determination to purify ; and this involved both doctrine and ceremonial. " Many things, whereof some are untrue, some uncertain, some vain and superstitious," were omitted. A mass of ceremonies, " so great, and many of them so dark, that they did more confound and darken, than declare and set forth Christ's benefits to us," was left out and only those retained which were " apt to stir the dull mind of man to the remembrance of his duty to God."

The return to the Bible, recently made available to the common people in their own language, was both the inspiration of the Reformation and the keynote of the changes in public worship which it involved. That men should know the Bible, and apply it to their own lives, and through it know the God whom it reveals, was the purpose of Cranmer and those associated with him. With this in view the services were simplified, and the reading of Holy Scripture was made more complete and more continuous than before. " For this cause be cut off Anthems, Responds, Invitations and such like things as did break the continual course of the reading of the Scriptures." Both readers and hearers were to understand all that was done, and the congregation was to be edified ; so the whole service was to be in English. It is. hard to believe that the dignity of the language and the beauty of the cadences which have endeared it to generations of Englishmen, whether members of the Church of England or not, were appreciated by all who came to worship on that Whit-Sunday in 1549 ; but there is an impressive as well as an expressive purpose behind forms of public worship, and the phrasing, strange at first, and doubtless in some places scarcely understood, became itself instruction in the things of God.

It has been said that the new book was intended to be only tran- sitional, but there is no evidence of this. Cranmer's mind was alert and open to receive new knowledge as it came, but it was not so much his will as the attitude of his opponents, who read into the new book the old doctrines which, for truth's sake, had been dis. carded, which gave the book so short a life. Three years later it was replaced by a more thorough-going revision, which bears un- mistakable signs of the pressure of foreign reformers who had fled to England for refuge and been treated with high honour at Oxford

and Cambridge. It is of this 1552 revision that no less an authority than the late Profeisor Swete wrote, " It heads a new liturgical family. . . . There is no reason why English Churchmen should regret the fact. . . . It was fitting that the Church of England should possess a Use which, while in accordance with ancient pre- cedent in things essential, should proclaim her independence of foreign dictation in the order of her worship." There were other changes in 1559 and slighter ones in 1604. Stability was reached in 1662, when the services were enriched by prayers which indicate that there was a revival of the liturgical sense and our present book took shape.

What the future holds in store none can say. In retrospect we see that the rejection of the proposed revision of 1927 was not an unmixed evil. It has left us with a variety of Uses which rivals, if it does not surpass, that of pre-Reformation days, and that is bad. But the past twenty years have out-moded what 1927 produced. The time has not yet come for further attempts at revision, but, when it does, the principles which guided those who, through more than a hundred years, produced our present Book of Common Prayer are

those to which the Church of England stands committed. To be in a state of tension is the inevitable lot of a Church which seeks

to combine the old with the new, but the tension of today is different from the controversy of forty or even twenty years ago. Another twenty years may find us better fitted to produce a revision of our Book of Common Prayer based on Holy Scripture as interpreted by sound learning, which is the ground on which the Church of England takes her stand.