A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer. William Reed Huntington

existence. Elizabeth's book was the longest lived of all that preceded the Restoration, but that only continued in use five-and-forty years. But the Prayer Book of 1661 has now held its own in England for two centuries and a quarter. When, therefore, we are asked to accept the first Edwardian Book as the only just exponent of the religious mind of England, it is open to us to reply, "Why should we, seeing that the Caroline Book has served as the vehicle of English devotion for a period seventy-five times as long?" The most voluminous of the additions made to the Prayer Book, in 1661, were the Office for the Baptism of Adults and the Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea. The wide diffusion, under the Commonwealth, of what were then called Anabaptist opinions, had brought it to pass that throughout the kingdom there were thousands of men and women who had grown up unbaptized. At the time of the Reformation such a thing as an unchristened Christendom seems not to have been thought possible. At any rate no provision was made for the contingency. But upon the spread of liberty of religious thought there followed, logically enough, the spread of liberty of religious action, and it was not strange that after a whole generation had spent its life in controversy of the warmest sort over this very point of Baptism, there were found to be in England multitudes of the unbaptized.

      Another reason assigned in the Preface of the English Prayer Book for the addition of this office was that it might be used for the baptizing of "natives in the plantations and other converts." This is the first hint of any awakening of the conscience of the English Church to a sense of duty toward those strangers and foreigners who in the "Greater Britain" of these later days fill so large a place. The composition of the office, which differs very little, perhaps scarcely enough, from that appointed for the Baptism of Infants, is attributed to Griffith, the Bishop of St. Asaph. The compiler of the Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea was Bishop Sanderson, famous among English theologians as an authority on casuistry. He must have found it rather a nice case of conscience to decide whether a Stuart divine in preparing forms of prayer for a navy that had been the creation of Oliver Cromwell ought wholly to omit an acknowledgment of the nation's obligation to that stout-hearted, if non-Episcopal Christian. Other additions of importance made at this revision were the General Thanksgiving, in all probability the work of Reynolds, a conforming Presbyterian divine, the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, the Prayer for Parliament, upon the lines of which our own Prayer for Congress was afterward modelled, and the Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Men. In the Litany the words "rebellion" and "schism" were introduced into one of the suffrages, becoming tide-marks of the havoc wrought in Church and State by what the revisers, doubtless, looked back upon as "the flood of the ungodly." The words "Bishops, Priests, and Deacons" were substituted for "Bishops, Pastors, and Ministers of the Church." New Collects were appointed for the Third Sunday in Advent and for St. Stephen's Day. Both of these are distinct gains, albeit had the opinion then prevailed that to introduce into the Prayer Book anything from the pen of a living writer is an impiety, we should have gained neither of them.