Book of Common Prayer

"I know of no good prayers but those in the Book of Common Prayer."

"There is no such sharp break between the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and earlier liturgical prose as there is between Tyndale and the medieval translators of scripture. It is an anonymous and corporate work in which Cranmer bore the chief part, and it is almost wholly traditional in matter though some of the excellences of its style are new... Sometimes, but very sparingly, the compilers borrowed from the recent liturgical experiments of the continental Reformers. Some prayers they translated from the Greek, and some they added of their own, but these were closely modelled on scripture. They wished their book to be praised not for original genius but for catholicity and antiquity, and it is in fact the ripe fruit of centuries of worship."

"[I]n general the style of that volume [Book of Common Prayer] is such as cannot be improved. The English Liturgy indeed gains by being compared even with those fine ancient Liturgies from which it is to a great extent taken. The essential qualities of devotional eloquence, conciseness, majestic simplicity, pathetic earnestness of supplication, sobered by a profound reverence, are common between the translations and the originals. But in the subordinate graces of diction the originals must be allowed to be far inferior to the translations. And the reason is obvious. The technical phraseology of Christianity did not become a part of the Latin language till that language had passed the age of maturity and was sinking into barbarism. But the technical phraseology of Christianity was found in the Anglosaxon and in the Norman French, long before the union of those two dialects had produced a third dialect superior to either. The Latin of the Roman Catholic services, therefore, is Latin in the last stage of decay. The English of our services is English in all the vigour and suppleness of early youth. To the great Latin writers, to Terence and Lucretius, to Cicero and Caesar, to Tacitus and Quinctilian, the noblest compositions of Ambrose and Gregory would have seemed to be, not merely bad writing, but senseless gibberish. The diction of our Book of Common Prayer, on the other hand, has directly or indirectly contributed to form the diction of almost every great English writer, and has extorted the admiration of the most accomplished infidels and of the most accomplished nonconformists, of such men as David Hume and Robert Hall."

"One of the unique features of the English 'Reformation' – i.e., of the history of the C of E – is the fact that it coincides with a climax in the history of English prose. Even the role of Luther's German in his reformation movement and in the subsequent cultural history of Germany provides no adequate analogy or comparison. The King James Bible, the BCP and what we today associate with the name of Cranmer are lasting monuments to this accidental (or providential?) conjunction. The degradation of language and liturgy seem to go hand in hand. It is no longer a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater but simply of throwing away a casket of jewels."

"What the great hymnbook of 1780 is to the Methodists and the Psalter to the Presbyterians, the Book of Common Prayer is to the English Church: "unique, unapproachable, elemental in its perfection". With the Authorised Version it is our living link with ourselves and with the early modern phase of our language in its first simple and supple splendour. Herbert Howells, one of the finest of our church composers in the older generation, puts the threat quite simply: "It is as if someone has gone around and put black marks on parish church after parish church, and one cathedral after another.""

"Everything about my education came to focus in my attempt to save the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. These texts, with hymnody, were what I most obviously shared with my father, and now the generations were being separated from each other just where they might expect continuity. To maintain something of that continuity I found myself in correspondence with the intelligence and imagination of England. The Prayer Book, the KJV and classic hymnody for me brought together poetry, music, poetry set to music, the poetics of place, the Church in a place, and articulate speech."

"[A]fter eighty years of maturation, a hybrid church, thoroughly if murkily reformed in its doctrines, unreformed in its government, a mish-mash in its liturgy, had achieved not only an intellectual self-confidence but a rhythm of worship, piety, practice, that had earthed itself into the Englishman's consciousness and had sunk deep roots in popular culture."

"There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted"

"Give peace in our time, O Lord."

"Grant that the old Adam in the Child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in him."

"Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord,"

"Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."

"Dost thou, therefore, in the name of this Child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?"

"It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it."