The Devotional Use
of the Book Common Prayer
by David Robarts
I must preface this paper by raising the question of ‘use’: that which shaped the Anglican Communion, giving it coherence, pattern, and continuity. The Book of Common Prayer has been generally superseded by a diverse family of not so common Prayer Books undergoing further revision. Whilst there has ever been diversity in the use of the Book of Common Prayer itself, attention to that issue lies outside the scope of this paper as do perspectives on the use, devotional or otherwise, of its recent companions or replacements.
I would, though, presume to sound a note of warning relevant to my subject. Such bodies as liturgical commissions have something of an in-built investment in change. Their continuing labours, not to be despised, nonetheless run the risk, unless great care is taken, of emptying out devotion through changing use. I suggest that the quality of worship with its concentration upon the Divine Mystery may be severely diminished by an over-attentiveness to text and presentation. This is particularly so at a time when language tends to be univocal, lacking in poetic quality and transcendent resonance.
Lack of continuity in use and its effect upon devotion calls for a good deal more attention than has been given in recent times. The people of God at worship are in the process of being fashioned, we pray, for eternity. They are not a continuing liturgical workshop in pursuit of a liturgy ever needing to be improved. And so to my paper.
What do we mean, first of all, by the term devotional? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary presents some alternative possibilities for the religious usage of the word ‘devotion’: 1) the fact or quality of being devoted to religious observance; 2) a form of worship for private use; 3) the act of devoting, solemn dedication, consecration. In that third sense members of the Prayer Book Society are ‘devoted’ or ‘dedicated’, we might say, to the use of the Book of Common Prayer; in the first sense to the practical use of its services in a regular and faithful way. However, it is the second sense which I imagine springs most readily to mind: the use of the Prayer Book for private devotional purposes.
In this paper these three perspectives are born in mind for they are complementary. Common prayer and the practice of liturgical worship and each Christian individual’s personal or private devotion rest on different aspects of Christian faith and truth, yet both are necessary for a mature and balanced worshipping life. Too often, though, this complementarity is not realized; to the impoverishment of both. Indeed it can lead to a complete dichotomy in which some reduce the practice of religion entirely to ‘going to church’; others, however, will regard it as a purely private and interior matter.
In ‘Liturgy and Personal Devotion’, the opening chapter of a collection of essays entitled The Study of Liturgy, C. P. M. Jones draws initial attention to the central fact amongst the principles of worship that in our common worship we confess our belief in and allegiance to ‘One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.’ The God we worship is the creator and source of the whole universe.
In this universe the human race has been created in a special way in God’s image, with mind and will, and so is capable of voicing praise and thanksgiving. And we can do this not solely on our own account but always as the representatives and mouthpieces of our fellow creatures belonging to what we may call the dumb order of creation. This is magnificently articulated in the Song of the Three Children or Benedicite which we use sometimes as a Mattins canticle, generally on Ferial days and during Penitential seasons. Here we call on the whole range of creation to ‘bless the Lord, praise and magnify Him forever’; sun, moon and stars, showers and dew, lightnings and clouds, frost and snow, mountains and all green things, birds beasts and fish, are all spoken for along with all mankind, Israel and God’s special servants. As Jones properly has it, we are the priests of creation.[1]
In similar but even more festive vein that other Mattins canticle the Te Deum sings, ‘All the earth doth worship Thee the father everlasting.’ But in this case there is a further dimension: ‘To thee all angels cry aloud. The heavens and all the powers therein’. In our worship we are raised to join with the higher creation. And at the very heart of our Holy Communion service we are called up into the heavenly order of angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven in that which is the very purpose and fulfilment of all created things. ‘Holy, holy, holy’, is our cry unto all eternity. And in our Eucharistic intercessions there is a sweep and embrace of God’s own limitless concern as we pray ‘for the whole state of Christ’s church’. God the Creator is never a God of factory line mass production. He fashions unique beings in His own image and likeness. Each one of us is an expression of His loving devotion created to respond, in like manner of loving devotion to Him. Personal and interpersonal communion with God is the divine intent for mankind. God the Supreme Mystery is both man’s origin and his goal. In the words of Evelyn Underhill:
Worship is the response of the creature to the Eternal. There is a sense in which we may think of the whole life of the universe, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, as an act of worship, glorifying its Origin, Sustainer and End.[2]
And furthermore in terms salutary to our late twentieth century distortions wrought by subjective and immanentist considerations:
Worship is an acknowledgment of Transcendence; that is to say of a Reality independent of the worshipper, which is always more or less deeply coloured by mystery and which is there first. [3]
To such an acknowledgment of Transcendence, the Book of Common Prayer bears unfailing, if unfashionable, witness in the face of our contemporary desire to fashion a God congenial to our preoccupations and made in our image and likeness. The process of endlessly updating, and the pursuit of a so-called ‘relevance’, beloved by contemporary liturgical innovators, makes of worship a busy experimentation, a horizontal human endeavour, in which the loss of awe and wonder before the Transcendent Mystery of God has become a casualty of truly catastrophic proportions. A preoccupation with the so-called meaningful and relevant through the darkened and darkening glass of our subjectivism hastens an all too evident process of disintegration in which meaning itself is lost and Christianity is increasingly irrelevant.
Thus far I have only picked up the first of four elements in Jones’ essay: God the Creator. It is necessary for the sake of balance at least to mention the other three: Jesus Christ our Redeemer, the Holy Spirit, and our Final Hope. In other words, Christ and his saving work; the one Holy Spirit distributing his gifts and coordinating and harmonizing the exercise; and our purposeful and joyful end in God: all these are essential elements which underlie and sustain devotion in both common and private prayer; they are foundations upon which the devoted Christian, and the devout Anglican in particular, must build his or her life.
From this all too brief consideration of such theological considerations, I must turn now to an historical perspective. The sixteenth and seventeenth century English prayer books emerge not only from within times of religious and political crisis and upheaval but the Later Middle Ages in which the growth of individual religion was such a feature. This was stimulated further, and markedly so, by the Reformation with its increased emphasis on the responsibility of each soul before God. Ordinary people were encouraged to spend more and more time in reading, study, and devotion. The English Bible was to play an enormously important part both in fulfilling this need and in providing impetus and substance to the English Prayer Books.
It is thus surprising for us to discover that as late as 1536 the possession of such a book could result in the possibility of being burnt to death. There were, of course, obvious dangers from various viewpoints of the uninstructed and ignorant having direct access to the scriptures at that time. Even Cranmer was not very keen on people reading the Bible to themselves. The Bible, he said, belonged to the Church and its treasures should be imparted to mankind in the context of worship.
From a devotional viewpoint the psalms in particular had always had a pre-eminent place as the recitation of large portions of the Psalter had formed the core of the monastic day. ‘The vivid imagery, the changing moods, the humanity as well as the spiritual depths of the Psalms all combined to strengthen their appeal’ says C. J. Stranks in his Anglican Devotion.[4] The psalms were indispensable both for devotion and propaganda. Translations of them annotated so as to claim their support for reformed doctrine soon began to appear and were treasured sources of inspiration to men and women struggling into a new era.
Psalms were set to the well-known tunes of popular ballads and became ‘the song book of the Reformation’. A Roman Catholic writer complained,
There is nothing that hath drawn multitudes to be of their Sects so much as the singing of their psalms, in such variable and delightful tunes. These the souldier singeth in warre, the artizans at their worke, wenches spinning and sewing, apprentises in their shoppes, and wayfaring men in their travaile, little knowing, (God wotte) what a serpent lieth hidden under these sweet flowers. [5]
Yet in a more profound sense the psalms have always been the songbook of the Church and in the felicitous translation of Coverdale occupy a substantial place in the Book of Common Prayer. It was the intention of the compilers of that Book that the whole Psalter be publicly recited in the course of Morning and Evening Prayer every month.
Henry VIII, no doubt prompted by his adviser Thomas Cromwell, was in favour of allowing the sale and distribution of the English Bible. Cromwell, says A. G. Dickens,
had a positive desire to establish a religion based upon the Bible, a religion eschewing on the one hand a blind trust in ecclesiastical tradition, and, on the other, the brawling of self-appointed expositors. [6]
As soon as it became clear in 1537 that the Bible in England was to be generally used, attempts were made to see that the clergy became finally acquainted with it, not only by regular and prolonged reading, but also by learning long passages of it by heart. This finds an echo in the exhortation still delivered by the Bishop to those about to be ordained when he bids them to be studious in ‘reading and learning’ the scriptures.
So far as the clergy were concerned, Bible reading became a very important part of their ministry and of their private devotions. From 1549 onwards all clergy were required to say Mattins and Evensong daily. This meant that in the course of a year they would read virtually the whole of the Old Testament once and the New Testament (excepting the Apocalypse) three times. Liturgical and lectionary revision of more recent times has altered this but the priniciple of systematic, if more selective, biblical reading and Psalter recitation remains at the heart of daily Anglican worship and devotion. In the words of Bishop John Moorman, ‘Henry’s action in 1537 set on foot the reading of the Bible which is a practice at the root of all Anglican religious custom’.[7] In addition to, or as a consequence of, this it is clear that the Book of Common Prayer itself is saturated with biblical thought and expression.
Another important element, and one not to be overlooked in the development of Prayer Book devotion, were the Primers — the most popular handbooks of devotion throughout the Middle Ages. These were brief manuals of prayer and elementary religious instructions intended for the laity. They were superseded by the Kings Primer in 1545 and Edward VI’s in 1553, intended as a companion to the new Book of Common Prayer and which assumed that the basis of private prayer was still liturgical prayer. This gave way to Mary’s Catholic Primer and then that of Elizabeth in 1559 which was essentially that of 1545. This was the last attempt to provide a reformed Primer until 1627 when Bishop John Cosin returned to a liturgical scheme in his Private Devotions.
I trust I may be pardoned for paying scant attention to the rich and varied expressions of Puritan and Evangelical Piety of the 16th and 17th centuries as I give, inevitably, greater prominence to the Caroline Divines and their contribution to the devotional life with, and alongside, the Book of Common Prayer.
First, though, I must mention the important emergence of prayer and scripture reading for households as a growing element of devotion. Anglicans and Puritans alike were agreed on the importance of the Christian home in which discipline and responsibility were emphasised. Few books did more to help the earnest layman to fulfil his duties than The Practice of Piety Directing a Christian how to walk tbat he may please God. It was written by Lewis Bayly, Bishop of Bangor, published in 1612, and ran into 58 editions in little more than 100 years; continuing to be issued until 1842. It was a book, avers Stranks, mightily important in informing the religious views of middle class English people. Puritan in outlook it begs people to live every minute as in the sight of God who, however, far from being their loving Father is ‘the outraged Creator of the Universe, the divine, inflexible Judge’. Such books were written to direct people towards leading good and holy lives. Yet the book most widely read was one intended to show the wickedness of the Church from which many had recently become separated. I refer to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs which was, incidentally, nearly four times as long as the Bible itself.
The 17th century was a theological age in which between the growing strength of Puritanism and the receding threat of the Papacy there emerged a fine flowering of Anglican theology and spirituality. Richard Hooker had laid the theological foundation with his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in the reign of Elizabeth. Others, endorsing his threefold appeal to scripture, reason, and tradition, explored and embraced a world which took in the best of both Renaissance and Reformation.
Bishop Lancelot Andrewes is the first and perhaps most eloquent of this school and his Preces Privatae or ‘Private Devotions’ shows how greatly learning could widen and deepen private prayer. He drew, and borrowed, from the Fathers and medieval writers, from Greek liturgies, from Missal and Manual, as well as Primers. The Book of Common Prayer was a primary source but so also was Knox’s Book of Common Order. Classical pre-Christian writers also offered scope.
The same spirit was at work in the eloquent heart searching of John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and, says Stranks, ‘shines with a quiet radiance in both the poetry and prose of George Herbert. Everything belongs to God and is to be consecrated to Him’. [8]Herbert’s Country Parson is a model for all clergy: a diligent preacher and teacher, a loving pastor and a faithful priest. Herbert himself was a saintly exemplar, living by the rubrics of the Prayer Book, devoted to his Church and Parishioners. Bishop John Cosin for his part complained that many people neglected
the old and Godly canons of the Church which were made and set forth for this purpose, that men, before they set themselves to pray might know what to say and avoid as near as might be, all extemporal effusions of irksome and indigested prayers that they used to make that herein are subject to no good form of words but pray what and how and when they list.[9]
Cosin’s collection of Private Devotions in thc Practice of the Ancient Church in which he returned to the tradition of the Primers and Hours reflected his orderly, authoritative, and concise mind but appeared at an unpropitious time. It was heavily attacked by the Puritans and failed to capture the imagination of the mass of English people. The book was, nonetheless, welcomed amongst the educated of a Catholic inclination. His book went to 11 editions, the last being printed in 1838.
It was Bishop Jeremy Taylor who, far more, laid hold on the Anglican mind with his book Holy Living which appeared in 1650. He wrote at a time of great crisis: both the country’s monarch and chief Prelate were executed, the Church suppressed and the Prayer Book proscribed. Taylor’s intent throughout is to show the ‘plain way of holiness for all who wish to walk in it.’ His aim was ‘an ordered life of devotion in which the vision of God and the grace of God lead us into the fullest service of our fellow men’.10 Taylor’s Holy Dying which followed in 1561 is a briefer companion volume which keeps to the essentials in trying to persuade the healthy that sickness and death are subjects for immediate consideration and not to be postponed.
The two most popular guides in the seventeenth century, however,were The Practice of Piety, previously mentioned, and the anonymous Whole Duty of Man, which appeared in 1657. This latter was an attemptto reach the middle and working classes. Here duty rather than devotionand behaviour rather than belief are stressed.
The return of the Prayer Book itself led to devotional and instructive commentaries such as Anthony Sparrow’s A Rationale Upon the Book of Common Prayer — printed first in 1655 — and the dull, prolix but widely used work of Thomas Comber, A Companion to thc Temple; or a Help to Devotion in thc Use of thc Common Prayer, which appeared in 1684.
Sparrow’s Rationale offered an easy to read yet learned defence of the Prayer Book’s scriptural and Catholic origins intermingled with assistance in making it more devotionally effective. ‘It became,’ says Stranks, ‘an authoritative source from which later works on the Prayer Book drew’.[11] As late as 1839 John Henry Newman thought so highly of it that he had a new edition printed. ‘The triple advantage of this type of book’, says the great Congregational scholar Horton Davies,
which was to have many successors in the eighteenth, and particularly nineteenth century, were that it fostered an informed appreciation of the Prayer Book, cultivated loyalty to the Church of England, and promoted liturgical devotion as contrasted with idiosyncratic devotions that were extraliturgical. [12]
‘It was The Whole Duty of Man,’ says Stranks, however,
which took its place with the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as an indispensable possession in every respectable household. The author intended it to be used side by side with them as a simple explanation of the duties which flow from acceptance of the other two. For more than 150 years it was received as such. Anglicanism meant in doctrine the Bible and the Prayer Book and in practice The Whole Duty of Man.[13]
The Church in the 18th century, it used to be said, was asleep. Modern research has shown this not to be true. While in an age of reason there were arguments over Deism, Latitudinarianism, Socinianism, and the like, little of this seems to have got down to ordinary people worshipping on Sundays and leading a decent life during the week. The Church then, as now, struggled to survive against unbelief and indifference. Religion centred upon the Book of Common Prayer which was used regularly in public and private devotions.
In addition to Sparrow, Comber, and the Whole Duty of Man, there appeared Robert Nelson’s A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England. Published in 1704 it had run into 25 editions by 1781. William Nicholls’ A Comment on the Book of Common Prayer, dedicated to Queen Anne and printed in 1710 was scholarly and popular with clergy and ecclesiastically minded laity. It continued to be reprinted until the 19th century.
Stranks comments and sums up:
It was round the Prayer Book that the main body of Anglican piety was made to centre… It was felt that if only people could be got to understand the nature and purpose of the Church’s services they would come to love them and find them in every way sufficient. Its prayers offered the best stimulus for the Christian’s most profound thoughts about his faith, selections from them, rearranged to suit personal needs, were the best possible manual of private devotion. Though many of those who wrote about the Prayer Book were learned in the history of liturgies it was not their main object to promote liturgical studies as such. They wished to show how closely the Prayer Book corresponded with the devotional temper and methods of the undivided Church, which was the standard to which Christian worship, in their opinion, should conform. That the Church of England was Catholic they had no doubt, and they were equally proud of the fact that it was Reformed. Superstitious errors which had grown up in the dark ages had been put away and its doctrine and life were now truly biblical, in line with genuine tradition and therefore rational and sound.
Religious practices inculcated by Sparrow, Comber, Nicholls and Nelson, reinforcing as they did the teaching of earlier High Church divines, sank deeply into the soul of England and maintained a hold there throughout the 18th century, in spite of the chilly rationalism of official religion and the strong wind of Evangelicalism which did so much to alter the appearance of the English Church. When the time came Keble, Newman and Pusey could appeal to them for proof that the Oxford Movement was no innovation.[14]
The dynamic impact of John Wesley and the Evangelical Revival gave a new impetus to personal relgion. It should also be recalled that Wesley himself was a churchman through and through; he adhered to the Church’s teaching, was a high Church sacramentalist, and taught his followers to observe all the rules that the Prayer Book laid down. The Wesleys and their followers in the parishes mightily enriched public worship and parish life with hymnody, more frequent celebrations of the Holy Communion, a quest for holiness, a zeal for souls, and a deep concern for the social implications of the gospel.
The vigour and freshness of Evangelicalism led to a very different movement in the nineteenth century. This, too, like Wesley’s, was a call to holiness and deeply sacramental, it too appealed to the Bible and the early Fathers of the Church. It also looked to the Caroline divines and a reinvigorating of the principles of Prayer Book worship and devotion. This, of course, was the Tractarian Revival which we associate especially with the names of Keble, Pusey and Newman. Before saying a little about it I should mention the very wide acceptance and astonishing impact of John Keble’s book of poems The Christian Year which appeared in 1827 and ran into 140 editions by 1873, becoming what has been described as the Christian Vade mecum. It is hard for us who read that poetry today to appreciate the effect upon contemporaries, a sense even of awe which it evinced in some readers. People found in Keble’s misgivings at the familiar old world breaking up around him an echo of their own, and in his faith the support they needed. ‘Those who loved and feared for the Church’, says Stranks, ‘found themselves stirred to feel more keenly about its shortcomings, its purification and its defence . . . The Christian Year profoundly influenced the religious life of England and can lay claim to a place among the great devotional books of our church.’[15]
The effect of the Tractarians was the natural outcome of evangelical religion and its insistence upon people’s sins and their redemption by the cross and sacrifice of Christ. If some of their followers were more concerned with the ceremonial outworkings of such convictions we should nonetheless be clear about what they held in common. Prayer Book rubrics, the Book’s Feasts and Fasts, and services in general, were given a new attention and a renewed sacramental emphasis.
While there is a rich and deep-seated strain of devotion associated with the Holy Communion throughout Anglican history, to which the Prayer Book and other commentaries and manuals, to some of which I have already referred, bear abundant witness, the celebration of the Holy Communion itself and the practice of such related matters as fasting and confession varied very greatly at different times and places as did their theological appreciation. The great Dr Johnson, for example, received Holy Communion only once a year at Easter — the old medieval tradition — rather than the Prayer Book minimum of at least three times a year. There are other instances in the same century of daily Holy Communion. John Wesley, for example, speaks of the twelve days of Christmas in 1774 being observed in this way as ‘a little emblem of the Primitive Church’.16[16]
The Whole Duty of Man only suggests the possibility of private confession in the course of its penitential emphases and heart-searching preceding Holy Communion, while Nicholls in his Comment on the Book of Common Prayer, in 1710, does not hesitate to recommend it for those who cannot quiet their conscience in accordance with Book of Common Prayer teaching. Fasting was enjoined by both Puritans and King’s men alike, if in very different ways, and is commended in a thoroughgoing way in such manuals as Nelson’s Festivals and Fasts.
The Tractarians, however, brought a combination of weighty scholarship and thoroughgoing practical zeal for all these things. The Tractarian backbone, Dr Pusey, wrote both scholarly tomes and sermons on the Holy Communion while celebrating his daily Eucharist with episcopal sanction and in accord with old Prayer Book principles; rising at 4 am for his devotions and performing all with the deepest reverence. Profoundly penitent himself, people queued to have him hear their confessions, demanding the rites which the Prayer Book offered them. Pusey wore haircloth, ate most frugally, and gave away of his substance profusely. His first Tract for the Times, No 18, dealt at length with the practice of fasting, which he commended not only on grounds of obedience and Prayer Book provision, but by reference to practical wisdom and experience. There was also in Pusey a genuine social dimension, a devotion for Christ’s sake beyond personal piety. He bade men in that tract reflect upon the glaring contrasts between luxury and misery in society and spoke of luxuries in the middle class which had become comforts and comforts which had become necessities.
A wealth not only of devotional practice but also devotional literature flowed from the Tractarians into our century — much of it supplementary to the Book of Common Prayer, such as Littledale and Vaux’s book The Priest’s Prayerbook and Carter’s Treasury of Devotion for the laity. This returns us to where I began: the general abandonment in use of the Book of Common Prayer in the face of continuing experimentation and national diversification.
Martin Thorton, who sees the roots of the Book of Common Prayer firmly planted in the Benedictine Rule, the basis of both being the fundamental and biblical rule of the Catholic Church: Office, Eucharist, Personal Devotion. He says this in his English Spirituality:
The Book of Common Prayer is fundamental to our understanding of all ages of English spirituality. It is the development and consummation of our Patristic and Biblical tradition. It embodies principles for which the fourteenth-century ascetics had been groping and in its final form it is the product of the Caroline age. [17]
He continues:
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries offer a certain parallel to the fifeenth and early sixteenth centuries: the true tradition remains alive, but it is an underground current, buried beneath more spectacular modes and events. Our task is to recognize and rediscover this true tradition and to work and pray that by God’s grace it may lead us into our third golden age. [18]
I would like to conclude by giving attention to one of the glories of Thornton’s second golden age, the era of the Caroline divines: Little Gidding, the creation of Nicholas Ferrar, a deacon of the Church of England. Ferrar established a community at Little Gidding, not far from Cambridge, in 1626, a community of about thirty persons centred on his family. They lived a life of prayer and work according to Prayer Book principles and a strict rule.
At the beginning of every hour from 6 am to 8 pm there was an Office lasting for about a quarter of an hour in which several groups within the community took their turn. The Office comprised a hymn and portions of psalms and gospels so that the entire Psalter was recited each day and the gospels once a month. Furthermore, two or three members kept a vigil from 9 pm to 1 am while reciting the Psalter once more.
King Charles I visited the community in 1633 and called it his ‘little Arminian nunnery’. It was chiefly engaged in the adoration of God, but its members also visited the nearby village sick and poor and taught children the psalms. The austerities of Ferrar himself were great. He kept the late watch in his manor house two or three times a week, slept only four hours on other nights and was sparing in food and drink. His piety was modelled upon the Bible and in a filial conformity to the canons of the church. I would like to read the account of this holy man’s death in 1637:
Towards evening he called the family and other friends together . . . and asked them to say the prayers for a dying man. He seemed to fall into a peaceful sleep for a time, but they remained with him in the room. Suddenly he raised himself up in bed. His voice came clear and strong and, stretching out his arms, he looked upward and around him with a light of great happiness in his eyes. “O what a blessed change is here,” he cried. “What do I see . . . I have been at a great feast. O magnify the Lord with me.” One of his nieces spoke to him. “At a feast, dear father?” “Aye,” he answered, “at a great feast, the great King’s feast.” They stood in awe waiting for him to continue. But he sank back quietly on his bed and closed his eyes . . . His lips parted and he gave a long gasp. In that moment they saw that his soul was sped. At the same instant the clock struck one — it was the hour at which for years past he had risen for his morning devotions.’ [19]
A. N. Allchin comments:
So to the very end the rhythms of bodily life, of sleeping and waking, were maintained. Only now, he rose up finally and definitively into that presence and that joy, which day by day he had risen up, who knows with how much effort, to find… Nicholas Ferrar was a man of constant and unceasing prayer. . . [He] had given a large part of [his] life, waking and sleeping, to the things which belong to eternity, standing on the threshold of that marriage feast whose fullness [he was] now being called to enter. [20]
He calls us in our day to a love of these dearly held Anglican principles and practices of our Prayer Book which point us to that vision of God to which all our worship directs us; to that divine glory of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; One ceaseless unchanging splendour of love and light, unto the ages of ages and world without end.
NOTES:
- C. P. M. Jones, ‘Liturgy and Personal Devotion’ in The Study of Spirituality, edited by Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright and Edward Yarnold SJ (London: 1986), pp. 3-7.
- Evelyn Underhill, Worship (London, 1937), p. 3
- Underhill, p. 3.
- C. J. Stranks, Anglican Devotion (London, 1961), p. 14.
- Stranks, p. 15.
- John R. H. Moorman, The Anglican Spiritual Tradition (London, 1983), pp. 14-17.
- Moorman, p. 9.
- Stranks, p. 65.
- Stranks, p. 66.
- Stranks, p. 85.
- Stranks, p. 141.
- Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, vol. ii (Princeton, NJ, 1970) p. 117.
- Stranks, p. 143.
- Stranks, p. 173.
- Stranks, p. 266.
- J. Wickham Legg, English Church Life from the Restoration to the Tractarian Movement (London, 1914), p. 30.
- Martin Thornton, English Spirituality (London, 1963), p. 257.
- Thornton, p. 289.
- A. L. Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (London, 1963), pp. 299-300.
- A. M. Allchin, The World is a Wedding (London, 1975), pp. 70-71.