Sir Christopher Wren: His Family and His Times: With Original Letters and a Discourse on Architecture Hitherto Unpublished. 1585-1723.Phillimore, Lucy
History
Sir Christopher Wren: His Family and His Times: With Original Letters and a Discourse on Architecture Hitherto Unpublished. 1585-1723.
Phillimore, Lucy
Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714 -- Biography; Wren family; Wren, Christopher, Sir, 1632-1723
Much was done at Ely House. In the May of 1661 the Convocation of
Canterbury met in S. Paul's, its marred, plundered condition not inaptly
showing the adversities through which the Church of England had passed.
The Convocation had much work before it, the most pressing being to
prepare a service for the baptism of those of riper years and for May
29. In order to this a committee of both Houses of Convocation was
formed, which met at Ely House, and of which Bishop Wren appears to have
been the ruling spirit. Many were still half afraid of their true
position and afraid of the Puritan party; eighteen years of confusion
and persecution had slackened all discipline, and many things seemed
natural to the new generation which neither Bishop Andrewes nor
Archbishop Laud would have tolerated for a day. It is implied in Dr.
Barwick's Life that many of those who should have upheld the Church
discipline were willing, from a mistaken notion of conciliation and
peace, to let it go. Bishop Wren set his face resolutely against this
doctrine.
[_REVISION OF THE PRAYER BOOK._]
In November the Convocation met again. Dr. John Barwick had been
appointed to the deanery of S. Paul's, and in spite of very failing
health, had resumed the weekly Communions, daily prayers, and musical
services of the cathedral, and had succeeded in making the choir, where
the Puritans had stabled their horses, once more fit for Divine service.
At this session of Convocation the Prayer Book was finally revised,
after the Bishops had heard at the Savoy Conference all that the
Puritans could urge against it. Bishop Wren had been actively engaged in
this work, and suggested a considerable number of alterations and
additions, many of which were adopted. A large number of grammatical
errors had crept in to the old book: for example, 'which' instead of
'who' was in almost all the collects and the Apostles' creed. It still,
by some oversight, survives in the Lord's Prayer.[82] 'The altering
whereof,' says Bishop Wren, 'if it may seem strange at first to
unskilful ears, yet will it not be a nine days' wonder, but for ever
after a right expression in all our addresses unto God.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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