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Cranmer’s prayers use ordinary phrases and familiar Biblical similes. It availed Cranmer nothing to invent a liturgy that threw out that history and erected a verbal screen or altar between the priest and his congregation. The marriage service, for instance, was a medieval liturgy that long predated the final form it found in the Book of Common Prayer. Lewis called this quality “pithiness” I would add “coziness” or “comfortability.” The Prayer Book was a handbook of worship for a people, not for a priesthood, and its job was to replace and improve the ancient collective rites of worship that bound people together in the English Catholic Church. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body.ĭespite the quality of language that strikes us nowadays as majestic and grandly alienated, the words of the Prayer Book are notable for their simplicity and directness. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer but spare us, Lord most holy. People who have never read the Book of Common Prayer know the phrase “moveable feast,” or “vile body,” or the solemn warning of the marriage service: “If either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it.” The same is true of the vows the couple speak to each other: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance and thereto I plight thee my troth.” The words of the burial service have become proverbial: He also wrote dozens of new prayers and collects, in a language at once grand and simple, heightened and practical, archaic and timeless.Ĭranmer had been a Cambridge scholar (he had held a lectureship in Biblical studies) and a diplomat, before being plucked by Henry VIII to be archbishop, and he almost certainly did not imagine that he was writing one of the great, abiding works of English literature, what the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch calls “one of a handful of texts to have decided the future of a world language.” But the acute poetry, balanced sonorities, heavy order, and direct intimacy of Cranmer’s prose have achieved permanence, and many of his phrases and sentences are as famous as lines from Shakespeare or the King James Bible. He borrowed elements of the liturgy of the Reformed church in Cologne, and adapted a prayer of St. To this end, he translated and simplified a good deal of the Sarum Missal: from the monastic services of Matins, Vespers, and Compline he fashioned Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (commonly known now as Evensong), which are familiar to millions of members of the worldwide Anglican Church. Cranmer wanted a prayer book in English, one that could be understood by ordinary people, even by those who could not read. The Missal was a handbook for priests and monks, though, not for the laity, and its language was Latin, not English. It contained a calendar of festivals, along with prayers and readings for those festivals and it held orders of service for Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and the Mass. In particular, he turned to a book known as the Sarum Missal, which priests at Salisbury Cathedral had long used to conduct services. Cranmer did not cut his text from whole cloth: in the ecumenical spirit that characterizes the Book of Common Prayer, he went to the Latin liturgy that the English Catholic Church had used for centuries. The words-many of them, at least-were written by Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury between 15. The Book of Common Prayer was the first compendium of worship in English. The visitor has stumbled upon a service, Evensong, whose roots stretch back at least to the tenth century, and whose liturgy has been in almost continuous use since 1549, the date of the first Book of Common Prayer, which was revised in 1552, and lightly amended in 1662, three hundred and fifty years ago. Thomas Cranmer’s phrases echo through English literature and popular culture.