400 YEARS OF PRAYER
By CANON E. C. RATCLIFF* UNE 9th, 1549, is not likely to be a significant date for more than a few. Yet it is indisputably entitled to be ranked as one of the more important dates of English history. For that
particular date, the Whit-Sunday of 1549, was appointed, by Edward vrs first "Act for the Uniformity of Service," as the day by which the new English Book of Common Prayer should have been brought into use in all churches "within this realm of England, Wales, Calice [Calais], and the Marches of the same, or other of the King's Dominions." Apart from the periods of its proscription in the reign of Mary and under the Long Parliament, an aggregate of only some twenty years, the Book of Common Prayer, revised and re-revised, has been continuously in use in this country from June, 1549, until the present day. particular date, the Whit-Sunday of 1549, was appointed, by Edward vrs first "Act for the Uniformity of Service," as the day by which the new English Book of Common Prayer should have been brought into use in all churches "within this realm of England, Wales, Calice [Calais], and the Marches of the same, or other of the King's Dominions." Apart from the periods of its proscription in the reign of Mary and under the Long Parliament, an aggregate of only some twenty years, the Book of Common Prayer, revised and re-revised, has been continuously in use in this country from June, 1549, until the present day.
By English standards that is not so very long a history. Never- theless, its length would probably astonish the men of 1549. The first Prayer Book was forced upon them by an oppressive Government with the ostensible intention of substituting a single vernacular service-book for the many service-books of the several variants of the Roman rite which were current in mediaeval England. It was admittedly thought by some that church services might be simplified in one way or another, and that English might largely, if not com- pletely, take the place of Latin as the language of the liturgy ; but the new Prayer Book went far outside these bounds. It was, as everybody knew, a first instalment of the application of Reformation ideas to the public worship of the English Church. Only the power of the Government could maintain the book, and protests against it were made. The majority of the people, however, were prepared to make the best of it ; but because that was a conservative and catholic best, the reforming party were compelled to hasten towards the achievement of their reforming plans. In 1552 they published an unequivocally Protestant revision of the Prayer Book of 1549, though one not extreme enough for the ultra-extremists. Further revisions followed in 5559, in 1603 and in 1661, all of them retreating, to some small extent, from the revision of 1552. The Prayer Book enacted by the last Act of Uniformity, and still possessing the sanction of law, in general pattern and substance is therefore the Prayer Book, not of 1549, but of 1552.
From 1552 onward, however, the Prayer Book has failed in the function assigned to it by the Acts of Uniformity. Again and again the Book has been treated by the authorities of both State and Church less as a book of religious worship than as an instrument of ecclesias- tical policy ; with the inevitable result that it has been a symbol, not of unity or uniformity, but of division. Papist and Puritan, each convinced that he had been improperly deprived of his religious rights by arbitrary Governments, joined in loathing and rejection of the Prayer Book. It was not remarkable, then, that in 1645, when the Puritans had gained the upper hand in Parliament, they should abolish it. It was not more remarkable that in 1660, when the Puritans had lost their power, the Restoration Parliament should * Canon Ratcliff is Ely Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. restore it, and reinforce it by the fourth and last of the °Acts of Uniformity.
The maintenance of the Prayer Book by legal penalty, however, proved in the long run to have had a certain advantage. Reasonable and reflective men, remote from or unshaken by the bitter religious and political conflicts of their day, had an opportunity, through their experience of the Prayer Book in use, of discovering for them- selves its merits as a book of liturgy and devotion. It ensured the conduct of public worship with the gravity with which -Englishmen of the seventeenth century approached all matters of religion. If it seemed to lack the fervour of the "prophetical" utterance of some ministers, it was a protection against the hesitancy or unattractive con- ventionalisms of others ; and when at last the use of the Prayer Book was forbidden, many had come so to value its services that they were prepared to face the risk of penalty by hearing or reading them at secret meetings. It was then, and in such a way, that the Prayer Book began to acquire the reputation and honour which it possesses today, and which have almost effaced its unhappy earlier history from popular memory. In 5949 the Prayer Book may be classed as one of those national institutions venerated by the natural English- man because they exhibit the dignity and decency which he admires supremely. So widely is the Book now appreciated that it is used as a mine of prayers by those whose Puritan• ancestors refused it, and who themselves remain outside the Established Church.
The great power of the Prayer Book lies in the irresistible beauty 'of its language. The Church of England was peculiarly fortunate in the moment chosen for the compilation of its vernacular service- book. English prose had not yet developed the verbos.: style of the Elizabethans which Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch described as "clotted." Sir Thomas More and Lupset are the representative stylists of the period in which the English of the Prayer Book was made. But a book of liturgy which was to replace the Roman rite, and which in large part was to be a rendering of the solemn Latin of that rite, required something more than a compiler with a polished, though simple, prose style. It required, also, in its compiler, a familiarity with the English tradition of religious prose translation, combined with such a sensitivity to liturgical Latin that he could reproduce the effect of the Latin in his English. Thomas Cranmer, the chief of the compilers, possessed these qualifications in a unique degree. In particular, he shows himself to have been outstandingly -skilful in adapting the Latin rhythm and clausular to his English prayers ; and he is not less effective in his use of the native English clausular. Had he worked twenty-five years later, in the reign of Elizabeth, when the prelates of the Establishment had no longer a sense of liturgy or a feeling for liturgical style, the Prayer Book would have had no more effect upon the minds and hearts of English people, and no more place in the history of their language, than the turgid occasional services and special Forms of Prayer composed in abun- dance by Elizabethan ecclesiastics, and now of little interest.
Some of the finer passages of the Prayer Book are peculiar to the Book of x549; but the law of public worship makes it impossible for the Church authorities to mark the celebration of the fourth centenary of the first Prayer Book by sanctioning the use of any service or prayer not contained in the Book of 1661. Yet, although the special merits of the Book of 1549, which it owes to its distinctive features, may not be put to a practical test in the Church of its origin, the first Book has left its imprint upon the worship of sister Churches. The Communion Service in the Prayer Book of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, for instance, is more closely related to the service of the first Book than to that of the second. The same influence may be discerned in the Prayer Books of the Scottish and South African Churches ; and more recently, the compilers of Prayer Books for the use of non-Anglican Protestant Churches have turned to the Book of 1549 sometimes for prayers and phrases, sometimes for a general pattern.
The Prayer Book as a whole, therefore, and not only that version' of it current, with revision, since 1552, has passed into the common inheritance of English-speaking Christianity. The Book is no longer a symbol of division ; and the observance of the fourth centenary of its first appearance carries within itself a welcome reminder that the fires of an ancient conflict are dying down.
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