'That with them we ...'
It sounds a convincing and perhaps attractive critique of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana. Thankfully, however, it is an inaccurate description of the Anglican experience "in the Reigns of several Princes of blessed memory since the Reformation".
The departed were not banished from the liturgy. They were named in prayer:
And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom.
The very fact that this is the conclusion to the prayer for Christ's Church militant here in earth only emphasises that the Church had not shrunk to the living alone: the Church militant was not prayed for without prayerful remembrance of the departed. And that phrase - that with them we - gently but beautifully embodies an understanding of the Church embracing the faithful departed.
While this petition was added to the prayer for the Church militant in 1662, it was not unknown to Anglican experience prior to this. The 1559 Elizabethan Injunctions had set out a form of bidding prayers, which concluded:
Finally, let us praise God for all those that are departed out of this life in the faith of Christ, and pray unto God that we have grace for to direct our lives after their good example, that after this life we with them may be made partakers of the glorious resurrection in the life everlasting.
This was also the continued physical experience of the parish church in the reformed ecclesia Anglicana. The graves in the church yard, the memorials to the departed which often surrounded parishioners in their pews, ensured that any notion of the Church shrinking to the living alone was unthinkable. The Canons of 1604, after setting out the responsibilities of church wardens regarding care of the fabric of the parish church, declared that with "like care" they should maintain the church yard. What Wordsworth would later describe in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets as "the encircling ground" of the church yard embodied the Prayer Book's with them we.
And at the graveside? Hooker's opening sentence in defence of the BCP's burial rite described it as "a dutie which the Church doth owe to the faithfull departed" (LEP V.75.1). He goes on to state that the funeral rite gives to the living hope "by reason of theire fellowship and communion with Sainctes" (V.75.3): a hope, in other words, dependent upon the Church not having shrunk to the living alone. For Sparrow, in his A Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer, there was no doubt that the burial office at the graveside of the deceased prayed "for his and our consummation in Glory, and joyful Absolution at the last day".
'His and our'. It echoes, of course, that with them we. Roger Scruton has referred to the invocation Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's Church militant here in earth as "the clearest and most moving of all Anglican invocations". I think those words might also be particularly applied to that with them we. It is a clear expression of our unity and communion with those who have gone before us. It is moving because gently, with due reserve, it gathers up our experience of loss and grief into hope and thanksgiving.
Contra Duffy's bleak picture, we might suggest that it was the Prayer Book's clear and moving expression of our communion with the faithful departed which contributed to the words of a later hymn becoming a staple of Anglican piety:
Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won.
(The painting is Constable's 'Stoke Poges Church', 1834.)
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