'To inform the mind, and to excite devotion': lessons from the Apocrypha at Matins and Evensong

Continuing with extracts from John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), having considered the lessons from the Canonical Scriptures, Shepherd turns to the matter of lessons from the books of the Apocrypha. He first indicates a practical reason for such lessons, mindful of the fact that not all of the Canonical Scriptures were considered appropriate for public reading in the congregation:

To supply what is wanting to complete the year, we read a part of Scripture which we acknowledge not to be canonical, out of the Apocrypha, or Apocryphal Books.

Such acknowledgement of practicalities, however, does not prevent Shepherd from recognising that public reading of the Apocrypha was a patristic practice:

By the ancients, these were sometimes styled ecclesiastical books, having been compiled, and published for the edification of the pious, and being commonly read in the church ... as works of religious and moral instruction, Jerome, and his antagonist Ruffinus, with Athanasius, Austin, and others testify.

What is more, lessons taken from the Apocrypha were more suited for public reading in the congregation than some portions of Canonical Scripture:

many of the Apocryphal chapters are better calculated to inform the mind, and to excite devotion, in a popular congregation, than some of the canonical chapters, which, because they are less important to Christians, or less intelligible to persons of ordinary capacities, are omitted in the calendar.

Shepherd here is clearly working from Bishop Hoadly's defence of the practice in The Reasonabless of Conformity to the Church of England (1707), referenced in a footnote:

And I gave you my Reasons for this, viz. that there was no Obligation to read every Canonical Chapter, in the publick Worship of God; that some of the Canonical Chapters may be improper, unintelligible, of very little Concern to Christian People, wholly out of their reach, of little Advantage, either to the informing their Minds in any important Matter, or to the raising their Devotions; and that many of the Apocryphal Lessons are more for the Edification of the People, than any of those Chapters which are omitted. 

This is a sensible, modest, theologically coherent defence of the reading of lessons from the Apocrypha. It is rooted in - as Shepherd goes on to note - "the words of the Church of England" in Article VI, recognising "the distinction that is to be made between Apocryphal and Canonical Scripture", while also affirming the wisdom and moral teaching to be found in the Apocrypha, a wisdom and moral teaching which is rightly read for our edification in the congregation.