Prayer Book Through the Ages. William Sydnor
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Название: Prayer Book Through the Ages

Автор: William Sydnor

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Зарубежная эзотерическая и религиозная литература

Серия:

isbn: 9780819224743

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СКАЧАТЬ only vestments permitted are a rochet for bishops and a surplice for priests and deacons. Even a hood or a scarf is forbidden.

      Music is virtually abolished in Holy Communion except the Gloria in excelsis which is permitted to be sung as an alternative to saying it. Introit Psalms, Kyrie, Creed and Sanctus are all said. Two months before the Book came out, the organ at St. Paul’s, London, ceased to be used.

      A rubric directs that the table stand in the body of the church or in the chancel (the place for best audibility), and that it be covered with a fair linen cloth. The priest is to stand at the north side.

      The wardens collect the alms rather than the people coming up with them.

      The Zwinglian reformers pressed hard for the utmost simplicity of dress, furnishing, and movement. Certainly their influence can be seen throughout the Book, but evidence of other doctrines is also there. Percy Dearmer gives this often unappreciated 1552 Book significant credentials: “Proud as we are of the First Model [1549 Book], there is no less cause for pride in the Second, when we remember that its purpose is to provide a liturgy that is Apostolic rather than Patristic.”12 This second Book of Edward VI, which became official on November 1, 1552, was unpopular everywhere. It was halfheartedly launched on its brief career—no authorization was even given for its use in Ireland. Conservative priests made the best of it for the moment by retaining old ceremonial. There was little or no violence. Opposition to the use of upsetting practices had spent itself during the two years or more prior to the appearance of the Book.

      Young King Edward died July 5, 1553, and Mary, the ardently Roman Catholic daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, came to the throne. With the news of Edward’s death, the Latin Mass was immediately and widely restored. The 1552 Book was only officially in use for eight months.

       CHAPTER III

       THE BOOK OF 1559

      Elizabeth became queen November 17, 1558, and a new day dawned in the religious life of England. The Protestant exiles returned from the continent full of extreme reaction to the unbending Romanism of Mary’s reign. What form of worship would now become the official one?

      Elizabeth assured the Spanish ambassador that her purpose was to restore religion to the form it had had under her father, Henry VIII. But this was nearly impossible. There was no longer an appreciable base of support for such a stance. Some of the former proponents were dead, some had been converted. Moreover, the returned exiles made further steps toward Protestantism inevitable.

      The religious direction in which England would move depended on the queen and the religious leaders whom she appointed and whom she supported. What was she like? What were her private religious and philosophical views? John Booty gives us this description:

      She was a Protestant-humanist who read Socrates and Cicero, Saint Cyprian and Philip Melanchthon, and who was well acquainted with the works of Desiderius Erasmus. Ascham said in 1570 that the Queen “readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church cloth read Latin in a whole week.” Indeed, she was accustomed to reading some part of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament daily. Her religion was not that of the zealous—she could not approve of John Knox and his ways. It was that of the Christian humanist, involving devotion and moderation, and delighting in beauty, the beauty of a perfect literary style, the beauty of orderly religious ceremony. It was a religion linked to national sentiment, with the conviction that God was doing a mighty thing, through his Deborah, for England and, through England, for the world.1

      So the queen sided with “the small but sensible moderate party.” Very shortly this resulted in the authorization of the 1592 Book relieved of its more extreme features. But in the meantime firm action had to be taken to avoid religious chaos. To end disorders resulting from violent sermons on both sides, a royal proclamation was issued on December 27, 1558, forbidding all preaching. The Epistle, Gospel, and Ten Commandments were to be read in English as was being done in the queen’s chapel “until consultation may be had by Parliament.” But there were ceremonial tensions, even in the queen’s chapel. On Christmas day (Elizabeth had been on the throne five weeks) when Bishop Oglethorpe was saying Mass in the Royal Chapel, she sent a message to him during the singing of the Gloria, ordering him not to elevate the host, because she did not like the ceremony. The bishop refused, and the queen left after the Gospel.

      It was going to be a delicate matter to revise and adopt an acceptable Prayer Book, and it seems that the queen followed the cautious warning of Armagil Waad that the matter would require “great cunning and circumspection.”

      And no doubt the queen did intend to proceed cautiously. Her plan was to follow the Edwardian pattern by permitting Communion in both kinds, then after leisurely consultation to have a new Act of Uniformity passed, perhaps in the autumn, with a Prayer Book attached. Perhaps that would have been the ideal way to proceed; however, conditions dictated otherwise. On the one hand, the exiles were impatient and pressing. Elizabeth realized that, if she did not accept the 1552 Book, she might be faced with a demand for the Genevan Form of Prayers. On the other, because peace had been signed with France, there was now no need to attach much weight to the wishes of papal Catholics. So the 1552 Book was adopted with a few revisions, changes in the direction of the 1549 Book. The queen and her government showed that they were independent of the more zealous Protestants by rejecting any revisions that would make the Book more Protestant and by adopting revisions that could only be interpreted as conservative. This religious settlement was to Elizabeth what was possible and best for the nation, and she would not countenance any major adjustment of it. If there could be no revival of 1549, there would certainly be no movement in Calvin’s direction.

      The Act of Uniformity was passed in April, 1559. Convocation was not even consulted, and it passed by only three votes; in the House of Lords, nine bishops voted against it. Percy Dearmer concludes that “the consent of the Church can thus only be claimed by virtue of its subsequent acquiescence.”2 It became the official Book on the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1559, and the penalties for failure to use it were severe: a fine of one year’s stipend and six months imprisonment for the first offense, forfeit of all “spiritual promotions” and one year imprisonment for the second, life imprisonment for the third.

      These are the significant changes in the 1559 Book as compared with the 1552 Book:

      

Morning and Evening Prayer were read in the choir “with a loud voice” rather than, as 1552 put it, “in such place . . . as the people may best hear.” The other rubric at the beginning of Morning Prayer, known as “the Ornaments Rubric,” states that “the minister at the time of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministration, shall use such ornaments in the church as were in use by authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth.” This has cast long shadows of influence across the Church for centuries. The second year of Edward VI was 1548. So, on the question of vestments and ornaments, the Elizabethan Book disallows the puritanical bareness of ornament which characterized the 1552 Book. In every other respect, Morning and Evening Prayer are identical with the previous Book. They both end with “the Third Collect.”

      

The Litany was the only service in English used during Mary’s reign. Of course, when it was used that offensive petition in the 1552 Book which prayed for deliverance “from the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities” was dropped. Now this edited version of the Litany appears in the Elizabethan Book. A similar reference to the Pope’s “usurped power and СКАЧАТЬ