laudable Practice

The very finest words in the Church of Ireland's modest Prayer Book revision of 1878 are to be found in the closing paragraph of the Preface : And now, if some shall complain that these changes are not enough, and that we should have taken this opportunity of making this Book as perfect in all respects as they think it might be made, or if others shall say that these changes have been unnecessary or excessive, and that what was already excellent has been impaired by doing that which, in their opinion, might well have been left undone, let them, on the one side and the other, consider that men's judgements of perfection are very various, and that what is imperfect, with peace, is often better than what is otherwise more excellent, without it. I first encountered these words as a precocious teenager, sitting in the parish church before Sunday Morning Prayer, and browsing through the Prayer Book, bought as a Confirmation present and carried with me each Sunday, as was then normal ...

It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it. Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, was the author of the Preface to the revision of 1662.  These opening words of the Preface almost certainly have their roots in an earlier statement by Sanderson, in his 1647 Oxford lectures On Conscience and Human Law :  but in this, as in many other debates, the mean between the two extremes seems to be the truer opinion , and safer to follow . In the 1662 Preface, Sanderson also applied this moderation and prudence to the description of the bitterly divisive events of the 1640s and 1650s, the civil wars and the Interregnum: the Preface refers to "the late unhappy confusions".  It would, of course, have been easy to give expression to a triumphalist Royalism and Laudianism.  Such a spirit...

Responding to a Telegraph columnist exploring the significance and meaning of the BCP during these turbulent times, one commentator on Twitter urged 'don't forget the Preface ... V handy guide to life'.  It is a prescient comment. The prefaces of the various iterations of the BCP embody a wisdom not just for ecclesial but also wider communal life.  In an age shaped by the passions of heightened political partisanship and of religious and secular fundamentalisms, an age lacking a sense of the moral commitments which can sustain diversity and the common good, and in which social media encourages loud disagreement rather than prudent, modest discernment, we might turn to the prefaces of the BCP for a wisdom to guide us. Three particular passages from the prefaces are suggestive of a wisdom expressed in prudence, moderation and caution which nurtures and protects the concord necessary for the good life, in both ecclesial and communal terms.   From the 1662 Preface , a c...