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
Beginning, then, with the inherent difficulties, and taking them
in the inverse order of arduousness, we see at once how hard it
must be to secure unity and self-consistency in the revision of a
book so complicated as the Common Prayer. It is like remodelling
an old house. We think it a very easy matter, something that can
be done in one's head, but the mistake is discovered when the new
door designed to give symmetry to this room is found to have spoiled
the looks of that, when the enlargement of the library turns out
to have overtaxed the heating energy of the fireplace, and the
ingenious staircase, instead of ending where it was expected to
end, brings up against an intractable brick wall. Just such perils
as these will beset anybody who ventures to disturb the adjustments
of the "Prayer Book as it is" and to introduce desirable additions.
But domestic architecture is not given up on account of the patient
carefulness the practice of it demands, neither need Liturgical
Revision be despaired of because it requires of the men who
undertake it a like wisdom in looking before and after.
The really formidable barrier to revision, so far as what have been
called the "inherent difficulties" are concerned, is reached when
we touch style. How to handle without harming the sentences in which
English religion phrased itself when English language was fresher
and more fluent than it can ever be again is a serious question.
The hands that seek to "enrich" may well be cautioned to take heed
lest they despoil. It is to be remembered, however, in the way of
reassurance that the alterations most likely to find favor with the
reviewers are such as will enrich by restoring lost excellencies,
rather than by introducing forms fashioned on a modern anvil.
The most sensitive critic could not, on the score of taste, find
fault with the replacement in the Evening Prayer of the _Magnificat_
and the _Nunc dimittis_, nor of bringing back a few of the Versicles
that in the English book follow the Lord's Prayer, nor yet of our
being allowed to say, "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, Lord,"
rather than "O Lord, our Heavenly Father, by whose Almighty power
we have been preserved this day." Objections to these alterations
may be readily imagined, but it would be necessary to base them on
other grounds than those of literary fastidiousness. In the case of
enrichments like these no one could raise the cry that the faultless
English of the Prayer Book had been marred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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