Prayer Book Through the Ages. William Sydnor

enforce some of the doctrines of the Continental Reformers upon the English church. The Church was not invited to sanction these articles, but the Council had the effrontery to state on the title page that they had been agreed upon by the bishops in Convocation. In 1562, the Forty-two Articles were reduced to thirty-nine. Article 42, which had asserted the existence of hell in terms very moderate for the times, disappeared forever.

      The reinstituting of Prayer Book order met with little opposition. While there were places where devout congregations continued to flock to the Latin Mass, almost as soon as Elizabeth became queen there were many places where the people “entirely renounced the Mass” and by early January were bringing back the Prayer Book. On Easter, several weeks before the actual Act of Uniformity had passed, the service in the Royal Chapel was Mass “sung in English according to the use of King Edward,” and after it the celebrant took off his vestments and gave Communion in both kinds to the queen and many peers, vested only in a surplice. By Whitsunday (May 14), a number of parish churches and the monks at Westminster made haste to follow suit. St. Paul’s was the only church in London which retained the Latin services up until the last minute.

      The actual transition was very quietly accomplished. The resistance of the bishops and principal clergy was both strenuous and solid, but this does not seem to have been the case among the rank and file; most suffered in silence, though certainly many of them deprecated change. In the changeover from the Roman Catholic days of Mary to Elizabeth’s Protestant regime, not more than some 200 clergy were deprived of their livings during the years 1558-1564, a state of things which is in marked contrast with the wholesale policy of deprivation by which the Marian ecclesiastical policy was carried through.

      During the forty-five years Elizabeth was on the throne, the Prayer Book was under attack by the Puritans on the left and the Roman Catholics on the right. The Prayer Book was only a part of that religious struggle out of which was forged the genius of what has come to be called “Anglicanism.” And it is that part—the fortunes of the Prayer Book in Elizabethan England—which we now seek to appreciate.

      The most persistent and uncompromising attacks on the Prayer Book came from the Puritans. With the Act of Uniformity, the Prayer Book party in Parliament won the day. But the exiles who had come streaming back to England after the death of Queen Mary had hoped to have the 1552 Book as revised and used in Frankfurt. What they got was 1552 revised in the other direction. Their annoyance must have been great when the revision swept away several of the Puritan portions of Edward’s second Book and brought back some of the discarded ceremonies and vestments of earlier times. They were disillusioned by the queen’s conservatism, but this did not keep them from trying by various means to further reform in Convocation, in Parliament, and, if need be, independently. Their two main principles were that nothing is admissible that is not actually found in Scripture; and that nothing tainted with Romanism is admissible, even if it is mentioned in Scripture. Strict observance of these principles ruled out the use of the surplice, wafer bread, the sign of the cross in Baptism, kneeling for Communion, the ring in marriage, the veil in Churching, bowing at the name of Jesus, and the use of organs and “effeminate and over-refined” music. In Baptism, it was in their minds an usurpation of the father’s responsibility that the minister should address the infant and the godparents answer in its name. Other reprehensible practices included emergency Baptism by women, Confirmation, the preaching of sermons at funerals, and, unexpectedly, the reading of the Bible in church. In the first decade there was little criticism of the Prayer Book text beyond what was involved in these practices.