worthy of our love and admiration. Cranmer, to whom we are perhaps chiefly indebted for this beauty of diction in both Bible and Prayer Book (for the "Great Bible" of 1539 was largely his work), was one of a number of great scholars in an age of revived and great scholarship. But great scholars are not always masters of prose as Cranmer was. Criticism and literary art are rarely wedded to each other. Liddon, himself a master of style, has said: "For the English language the sixteenth century was the period of consummate excellence. . . . The English writers of the sixteenth century - and Archbishop Cranmer in particular - had an ear for English which has not been given even to the most gifted of their successors; and their work is unapproached in its simple and forcible vocabulary, and still more in the ordered beauty of its rhythm." 1

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Moreover both the Prayer Book and the Bible are translations from another tongue; the latter wholly, the former almost wholly. And good translation is no easy matter. Success in avoiding stiffness is rare, and smooth and melodious English is rarer still. Yet the translators of both

1 Preface to Reflections on the Psalms. Nevertheless, in a deeply interesting letter to King Henry in 1543, Cranmer confesses his inability to write verse. After telling of his "travail" to translate the ancient office hymn, Salve festa dies, into English verse, he writes, "But because mine English verses lack the grace and felicity that I would wish they had, your Majesty may cause some other to make them again, that can do the same in more pleasant English and phrase." It seems probable that the longer version of the Veni Creator Spiritus in the Ordinal is by Cranmer. If so he showed his excellent judgment in writing as he did above. See Thomas Cranmer by Canon Mason, pp. 141, 142, and Julian's Dic. of Hymnology, p. 1209.

2 Macaulay's description of translation in general was "champagne in decanter." Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Piccolomini and Wallenstein is probably the only example in English secular literature of which it has been said that the translation is superior to the original.

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Prayer Book and Bible were successful, and both books have become English classics, in fact the greatest of them all. Lord Macaulay has said of the Prayer Book, "The essential qualities of devotion and eloquence, conciseness, majestic simplicity, pathetic earnestness of supplication, sobered by a profound reverence, are common between the translations and the originals. But in the subordinate graces of diction the originals must be allowed to be far inferior to the translations." And he adds, "The diction of our Book of Common Prayer has directly or indirectly contributed to form the diction of almost every great English writer." What has been often written concerning the uncommon beauty and matchless English of our translation of the Bible is equally applicable to the Prayer Book. "It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of the national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the gifts and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words." 2 This is the judgment, not of an Anglican, but of a member of the Roman Communion.

That the Book is still capable of improvement, and, as in former revisions, requiring from time to time adaptation to the growing needs of a new age and new conditions, is unquestionable. If it were not so it would be on a level with "The Everlasting Gospel" itself, as contained in the writings of the New Testament. The fact remains, nevertheless, that it is a marvelous work as revised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the skill and wisdom of

1 Hist. of England, III, p. 475.

The Dublin Review, qu. by Neale in Essays on Liturgiology, p. 221.

many devoted men, through nearly 150 years of varied conflict, and as remarkable for what it has persistently retained of Catholic doctrine and practice, as for what it has left out of mediæval accretions and perversions. An eminent American layman has written concerning it: "The Book of Common Prayer has been the study of the most acute and vigorous minds, not only of ecclesiastics, but of lawyers, statesmen, and scholars. A body of literature has been created as to its sources, meaning, and purposes which for learning, reasoning, and style is unsurpassed. Those who know it best love it best, and the very earnestness of their discussions as to its origin and meaning attests their devotion to it. It has profoundly influenced not only the moral, but also the intellectual and political, life of England, and of the world. . . . Its history is a part of the warp and woof of the history of the English people and nation which no one can fully understand who does not know its story."

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1 J. H. Benton, LL.D., President of the Boston Library, in The Book of Common Prayer, Its Origin and Growth, pp. v. vi.

INDEX