The Theology and Ecclesiology of the Prayer Book Crisis, 1906–1928. By Dan D. Cruickshank

Abstract

Geoffrey Cuming (whose name recurs below) once told me that the only time that he ever heard his clergyman father swear was when he heard the news of the defeat in the House of Commons of the 1928 ‘Deposited’ Book of Common Prayer. On the other hand, pioneer Anglican missionaries in remote upper Burma held a special gathering to give thanks for that same defeat. One saw the Church of England as grievously damaged; the others saw it as miraculously saved. The defeat had actually happened twice, in December 1927 and in June 1928. And the liturgical texts and programme of the Church of England have been planned, drafted, authorized, and used in worship ever since, in a context shaped by that controversial defeat. The liturgical story was told with much textual detail in Ronald Jasper’s Walter Howard Frere: His Correspondence on Liturgical Revision and Construction (Alcuin/SPCK, 1954). Cruickshank, though...