The Book of Common Prayer
Posts in Comfortable Words credited to ‘The Book of Common Prayer’
A short prayer from the opening of the communion service in the old Sarum missal.
This short prayer came near the start of the Sarum missal, the predominant Mediaeval communion service in England, just after a hymn to the Holy Ghost. It survived the cutting table of the Reformation and opened the communion service of the 1549 Prayer Book too, in an English translation of surpassing elegance and restraint.
Four short passages from the New Testament appointed to be read aloud in the English Book of Common Prayer of 1549.
In the Prayer Book of 1549, four Scriptural passages were appointed to be read out aloud as reassurance for those presenting themselves at the rail to receive Holy Communion. These are the Comfortable Words.
A short prayer from the Book of Common Prayer, for use at morning and evening.
Although much of the Book of Common Prayer was simply a translation of the mediaeval Latin service books, this prayer, from the start of Morning and Evening Prayer, was newly added in 1552. Commentators are quick to observe that it was no less than St Basil the Great (330-379) who declared that all prayer should begin with some acknowledgement of our shortcomings.
A short declaration of faith, from the early years of the Western churches.
The Apostles’ Creed dates back to the middle of the fifth century. It was a development of the Old Roman Creed, which was dubbed ‘the Apostles’ Creed’ by Ambrose of Milan, and probably emerged in Gaul. It was not unknown in the East, but it became widely used in the West through the efforts of Emperor Charlemagne in the eighth century.
A prayer for the King, from the sixteenth-century Book of Common Prayer.
This prayer came at the close of Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, the service book of the Church of England following the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Notice the phrase ‘high and mighty’, which has negative connotations in everyday speech but not here.