A Short History of the Book of Common PrayerHuntington, William Reed
Religion
A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer
Huntington, William Reed
Episcopal Church. Book of common prayer
There are others who consider that a more damaging blow at the
catholicity of our dogmatic position as a Church could scarcely
be dealt.
Again, there are theologians who account the Prayer Book to be
so thoroughly saturated in all its parts with the sacramental
idea, that they would account it not only a piece of far-seeing
statesmanship, but also a perfectly safe procedure to allow those
who chose to do so to thank God after a child's baptism for the
simple fact that he had thereby been "grafted into the body of
Christ's Church."
But over against these stand a much larger number who think
nothing of the sort, and who would put up with the liturgical
shortcomings of the Prayer Book, go without "enrichments" for
a thousand years, rather than see the single word "regenerate"
dropped out of the post-baptismal office.
Sensible men not a few are to be found who hold that the incoming
tide of host-worship with which, as they conceive, our reformed
Church is threatened can never be stayed unless some carefully
contrived definition inserted in the Prayer Book shall make
impossible this subtile and refined species of idolatry. But
men no whit less sensible laugh them in the face, pointing to
the "black rubric" and its history as evidence that between the
admitted doctrine of the real presence and the disallowed tenet
of transubstantiation no impervious barrier of words can possibly
be run.
These illustrations of probable divergence in opinion, in case
the field of doctrine were once entered, might be multiplied. The
retranslation of the Nicene Creed and the more accurate punctuation
of its sentences; the rendering of the word Sabbath in the Fourth
Commandment into its English equivalent of Rest; the abolition of
the curious misnomer under which we go on calling XXXVIII Articles
XXXIX; the removal from the Catechism, or else the conversion into
mother English of that sad _crux infantum_, the answer to the
question, "What desirest thou of God in this prayer?" are a few
examples of less importance than those previously cited; and yet,
in the case of the least of them, it is most unlikely that the
advocates of change would have the show of hands in their favor,
so sensitive is the mind of the Church to anything that looks in
the least degree like tampering with the standards of weight and
measure, the shekels of the sanctuary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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