Power and Principle: The Anglican Prayer Book Controversy, 1927-1930

Abstract

By December, 1927, Church of England Prayer Book Revision was twenty-one years old. It had developed a mystique of its own. The hand of God was at once seen in its overthrow, and appeal to divine Providence does not seem far from some modern interpretations of the events of 1927-30. Anthony Howard thinks the episode reveals the Church of England “as the suffering servant of a secular state,” a curious view when the suffering Church's policy was so emphatically “‘not quite straight.’” The Liturgical Commission finds “the hand of Providence” in the failure of the bishops to carry their Book, or indeed to terminate the emergency created by this failure. Stephen Neill has another theory: that the compromises accepted in 1929-30 were, though illogical and irresolute, typical of the spirit of the nation—which had been engaged with consistency and tenacity in fierce controversy over the issue for several years before. The final proof of these appeals to national or divine wisdom is the assertion that the Book was a very poor Book anyway, though used very widely in the Church of England today.