A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

“A Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving, to be used yearly upon the 5th day of November, for the happy deliverance of King James I., and the three estates of England, from the most traitorous and bloody-intended massacre by gunpowder. And also for the happy arrival of his Majesty King William on this day, for the deliverance of our Church and nation.”

“A Form of Prayer with Fasting, to be used yearly on the 30th of January, being the day of the martyrdom of the blessed King Charles the First; to implore the mercy of God, that neither the guilt of that sacred and innocent blood, nor those other sins, by which God was provoked to deliver up both us and our king into the hands of cruel and unreasonable men, may at any time hereafter be visited upon us or our posterity.”

“A Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to Almighty God, for having put an end to the great Rebellion, by the restitution of the king and royal family, and the restoration of the government, after many years’ interruption; which unspeakable mercies were wonderfully completed upon the 29th of May, in the year 1660. And in memory thereof that day in every year is by act of parliament appointed to be for ever kept holy.”

“A Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to Almighty God, to be used in all churches and chapels within this realm, every year, upon the 20th day of June, being the day on which her Majesty began her happy reign.”

When passing events, such as a pestilence, or its removal, call for humiliation or thanksgiving, it is usual for the Crown to require the archbishop of Canterbury to prepare a form of prayer for the occasion, which is then sent through the several suffragan bishops to the clergy in their respective dioceses, with the command of the archbishop and bishop that it shall be used on certain fixed days, so long as the occasion shall demand.

This charge would fall on each separate bishop, were the Church of England separated from the State, and not distributed into provinces.

FORMULARY. (See Common Prayer, Liturgy.) A book containing the rites, ceremonies, and prescribed forms of the Church. The formulary of the Church of England is the Book of Common Prayer.

This may be a convenient place to treat of forms of prayer generally.

To the illustrious divines who conducted the reformation of our Church, in the reigns of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, any abstract objections to a prescribed form of prayer seem never to have occurred, for these were all the inventions of a later period. Ridiculous it would be, if we were going to address a human sovereign, to permit one of our number to utter in the royal presence any unpremeditated words, which might chance at the time to come into his head; and not less ridiculous,—if it be allowable to use such an expression under such circumstances,—would they have thought it to permit the priest to offer at the footstool of the King of kings, a petition in the name of the Church, of which the Church had no previous cognizance; to require the people to say “Amen” to prayers they had never considered, or to offer as joint prayers what they had never agreed to offer.

But, as has been observed, it was not upon the abstract question that they were called to decide. In their Church, the Church of England, when they were appointed to preside over it, they found prescribed forms of prayer in use. They were not rash innovators, who thought that whatever is must be wrong; but, on the contrary, they regarded the fact that a thing was already established as an argument a priori in its favour; and therefore they would only have inquired, whether prescribed forms of prayer were contrary to Scripture, if such an inquiry had been necessary. We say, if such an inquiry had been necessary, because the slightest acquaintance with Scripture must at once have convinced them that contrary to Scripture could not be that practice, for which we can plead the precedent of Moses and Miriam, and the daughters of Israel, of Aaron and his sons when they blessed the people, of Deborah and Barak; when the practice was even more directly sanctioned by the Holy Ghost at the time he inspired David and the psalmists; for what are the psalms but an inspired form of prayer for the use of the Church under the gospel, as well as under the law? The services of the synagogue, too, it is well known, were conducted according to a prescript form. To those services our blessed Lord did himself conform: and severely as he reproved the Jews for their departure, in various particulars, from the principles of their fathers, against their practice in this particular never did he utter one word of censure; nay, he confirmed the practice, when he himself gave to his disciples a form of prayer, and framed that prayer too on the model, and in some degree in the very words, of prayers then in use. Our Lord, moreover, when giving his directions to the rulers of his Church, at the same time that he conferred on them authority to bind and to loose, directed them to agree touching what they should ask for, which seems almost to convey an injunction to the rulers of every particular Church to provide their people with a form of prayer.