Unity, Uniformity and Diversity: the Anglican Liturgy in England and the United States, 1900-1940

Abstract

‘Uniformity’, declared Sir John Nicholl, one of the greatest of Anglican ecclesiastical lawyers, ‘is one of the leading and distinguishing principles of the Church of England - nothing is left to the discretion and fancy of the individual.’ At the Reformation the English Church was distinguished not by the decisions of councils, confessional statements, or the writings of particular leaders, but by one uniform liturgy. This liturgy, ‘containing nothing contrary to the Word of God, or to sound Doctrine’ and consonant with the practice of the early Church, was intended to ‘preserve Peace and Unity in the Church’ and to edify the people. It was also opposed to the ‘great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm’ and, abolishing the liturgical uses of Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York, and Lincoln, it established that ‘now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use’. This principle of liturgical uniformity was enshrined in the several Acts of Uniformity from that of the second year of King Edward VI to that of the fourteenth year of Charles II, amended, but not abolished, in the reign of Queen Victoria. It was a principle conveyed to the churches in the colonies so that, even if they revised or abandoned the Book of Common Prayer in use in England, as the Americans did in 1789, what was substituted was called ‘The Book of Common Prayer and declared to be ‘the Liturgy of this Church’ to be ‘received as such by all members of the same’. The principle of uniformity was modified during the Anglican Communion’s missionary expansion. The Lambeth Conference of 1920 considered that liturgical uniformity throughout the Churches of the Anglican Communion was not a necessity, but the 1930 Conference held that the Book of Common Prayer, as authorized in the several Churches of the Communion, was the place where faith and order were set forth, and so implied a degree of uniformity maintained by the use of a single book.