CHAPTER I.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ENGLISH LITURGICAL REFORM-THE INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN ECCLESIASTICS—CARDINAL QUIGNON'S BREVIARY AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE PRAYER BOOK.

THE

HE English Prayer Book is, in the main, a revision of the pre-Reformation service books. These service books exhibit singular skill in their general construction and marvellous richness, variety, and beauty in details. But they were marred in many places by their assertion or suggestion of mediæval corruptions in doctrine; and, further, they were ill-suited, by reason of the complexity of their elaboration, for services intended to be understood and taken part in by the general body of the laypeople.* The English revision was undertaken in a spirit in which revolt against mediæval abuses, both doctrinal and practical, was conjoined with a strong ecclesiastical conservatism. Change for the sake of change was foreign to the sentiments of the leaders of the English Reformation. The practice of the early Church and "the mind and purpose of the old

* An account of the liturgical forms of the medieval Church of England, which is at once simple in style and scholarly in its methods, will be found in DR. SWETE's recent volume, Church Services and Service Books before the Reformation.

Fathers" seemed to them to indicate principles which, if given effect to, would supply the people of England with a form of worship at once simple, intelligible, and free from the superstitious accretions of later times. So far from aiming at novelty, the reformed Prayer Book was, wholly in theory, and to a large extent in fact, a return to antiquity. The very first sentence of the Preface of the Prayer Book of 1549 appeals to the result of the inquiry to which one would be led, "if a man would search out by the ancient Fathers" the original design of the "common prayers in the Church." And the keynote thus early struck rules all the succeeding paragraphs. The "godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers" as regards the reading of Holy Scripture was found to be "these many years passed," "altered, broken, and neglected." Further, "notwithstanding the ancient Fathers had divided the Psalms into seven portions," all of which were to be recited, "now of late time a few of them have been said daily (and oft repeated) and the rest utterly omitted." Again, while in the primitive Church "St. Paul would have such language spoken to the people in the Church as they might understand and have profit by hearing the same, the service in this Church of England these many years hath been read in Latin to the people, which they understood not."

The First Prayer Book of Edward VI. as well as the second owes much to foreign influence. In truth we have less historical evidence for the influence of

*

Concerning the Service of the Church," which formed, with some small differences, "The Preface" of the Prayer Book of 1549.

external agency on the second book than we have for such influence on the first.

Before Cranmer and his colleagues had attempted any revision of the service books, ecclesiastics in high station abroad had been sensible of the need of a simplification and purification of the Roman Breviary. Pope Clement VII. had directly enjoined this task on one of the most eminent of his Cardinals, the Franciscan, Francisco de Quiñones (known generally in this country as Cardinal Quignon), a Spaniard of noble family, and one of the trusted councillors of Charles V. Clement did not live to see the completion of this work. It was published at Rome in 1535 (March 1st) with a dedication to Pope Paul III., and with a concession from that Pope prefixed, in which he permits the secular clergy to substitute its recitation for that of the "old office." The book came probably at once into widespread use, for we find that by July, 1536, no less than six reprints were issued, of which one was published at Venice, two at Paris, and one at Antwerp.*

The influence of this work on the English Prayer Book was very considerable. England was not yet isolated from the great currents of thought which affected the ecclesiastical world of Europe, and a movement of this kind initiated at Rome would at once be felt in this country. The recent discovery among the MSS. in the British Museum of Cranmer's draft for a reformed Latin Breviary much on the lines of Quignon shows us some of the steps towards

* See the Preface to Legg's edition, Cambridge, 1888.

C

the much more important change of 1549.* When the English Reformers were engaged on the work of liturgical revision it must have encouraged them to recall how several of the faults which they were attempting to amend had been acknowledged by a great ecclesiastic of the Roman curia, and even by the Pope himself. Without naming Quignon's revision, the preface of the first English Prayer Book (which with some few alterations we still retain under the heading "Concerning the Service of the Church ") made free use of his preface; and, in fact, some of its paragraphs consist of a slightly modified translation of the very words of Quignon.

Thus Quignon complains that, as regards the reading of Holy Scripture in the Church's service, little by little there had grown a wide divergence from the ordinances of the ancient Fathers, inasmuch as that, while originally it was designed that certain books of the Bible should be read through at certain seasons of the Church's year, now they were scarcely more than begun; and he cites as examples the mode in which Genesis was dealt with at Septuagesima and Isaiah at Advent. We now do no more, he says, than merely take a taste (degustamus) of the several books. And in place of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament other things have been substituted, unworthy to be compared with them for serious importance (gravitas) and for usefulness-things that afford exercise for the tongue rather than the mind. This is the indictment

* See GASQUET and BISHOP'S Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer.

of the Breviary made, not by a Protestant Reformer, but by a Roman Cardinal. Quignon aimed at a more continuous reading of Holy Scripture, and in larger portions than were to be found in the short lessons of the old Breviary; and to this end he would, in addition to lengthening the lessons, omit Antiphons, Responds, Capitula, many Hymns, and other things that impeded the reading of Holy Scripture. This same course was adopted by the English Reformers, with the modification that not merely many, but all Hymns were swept away.

The total omission of Hymns in the English "common prayer" was probably due to a recognition of the extreme difficulty of giving a dignified metrical and rhymed version of those of the Breviary Hymns that might otherwise seem suitable to be retained. The rendering of the Veni Creator Spiritus in the Ordinal of 1549 (rehandled in 1662)* is the only specimen we possess; and though it is not without a certain antique gravity, it does not cause us to regret that no other attempts of this kind were imposed upon us as constituent parts of the worship of the Church of England. While the prose translations and original compositions in prose of the period which has given us the first Prayer Book are (speaking generally) models of grace and dignity, English verse had not yet assumed a form which would give it a permanent hold on our esteem and affections. Verse in this country was still in a somewhat inchoate condition; and we have certainly to be

* The reference is to the second of the two versions in our present Ordinal. The first is probably to be attributed to Cosin.