The History of the BY THE REV. J. H. MAUDE, M.A. FELLOW, DEAN, AND LECTURER OF HERTFORD College, oxford THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER CHAPTER I THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER The Book of Common Prayer.—To English churchmen of the present day it appears a most natural arrangement that all the public services of the Church should be included in a single book. The addition of a Bible supplies them with everything that forms part of the authorised worship, and the only unauthorised supplement in general use, a hymn book, is often bound up with the other two within the compass of a tiny volume. It was, however, only the invention of printing that rendered such compression possible, and this is the only branch of the Church that has effected it. In the Churches of the West during the Middle Ages, a great number of separate books were in use; but before the first English Prayer Book was put out in 1549, a process of combination had reduced the most necessary books to five, viz. the Missal (properly Missale Plenarium), which contained all that was necessary for the Mass; the Breviary, which contained the daily offices now compressed into the English Matins and Evensong; the Manual, a collection of occasional offices for the use of a parish priest; the Pontifical, which contained those services in which a bishop had to officiate; and the Processional, containing the Litanies, |