The snuffy cobler now you mildly kiss,
And Cowgate damsels chuckle at the bliss.
By frequent salivations render’d fair,
They press your knees that envied bliss to share;
And, liquorish fish, wives piously begin
To think it sweeter than their morning gin.

In three satirical couplets the author of an anonymous pamphlet printed in 1812 suggests a possible reason for the popularity of the Haldane Tabernacle Connexion among the female population of Edinburgh at the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so he touches upon an important feature of the wave of evangelical Independency which swept across Scotland from the late 1790s: the appearance of new forms of worship that consciously sought to follow New Testament models. Reinforcing the verse this fiercely polemical work, which almost certainly comes from an establishment source, takes the innovators to task for discarding reasoned biblical interpretation, flouting decency, and ignoring health dangers in their desire to resurrect long extinct practices from ancient Christianity.

The Brethren movement had its origins in the early nineteenth century in Ireland and the south of England, first appearing in Scotland in 1838. The morning meeting gave quintessential expression to the piety of the members and was central to its practice. In the 1870s a former Presbyterian who was looking for the ideal pattern of the Church witnessed his first meeting in the village of K-. Converted in the revivals of the 1860s, he was eventually to join the movement.

For nearly 900 years the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great has functioned as an expression of wider religious moods, movements, and aspirations. Founded in 1123 by Rahere, a courtier of Henry I, at a time when the Augustinian Canons gained a brief ascendancy over older forms of religious life, it represents the last flowering of English Romanesque architecture. The Priory was dissolved by Henry VIII, became a house of Dominicans under Mary, and saw the flames that consumed the Smithfield martyrs. Since Elizabeth’s reign it has been a parish church serving a small and poor but populous area within the City of London but outside the walls. Its history is fairly well documented. Richard Rich lived in the former Lady Chapel. Walter Mildmay worshipped, and was buried, there. John Wesley preached there. Hogarth was baptized there. Parts of the church had been turned over to secular use. There was a blacksmith’s forge in the north transept beyond the bricked-up arch of the crossing and the smoke from the forge often filled the building. A school occupied the north triforium gallery. The Lady Chapel was further divided, and early in the eighteenth century Samuel Palmer, a printer, had his letter foundry there. The young Benjamin Franklin worked there for a year in 172 s and recorded the experience in his autobiography. The church, surrounded by houses, taverns, schools, chapels, stables, and warehouses, was a shadow of its medieval glory; but between 1828 and 1897 it changed internally and externally almost beyond recognition. The process of change continued over the next forty years and indeed continues still. These changes in architecture and furnishings were closely linked to a changed attitude to medieval buildings, to issues of churchmanship, and to liturgical developments.

One of the strongest weapons in the armoury of the Roman Catholic Church has always been its impressive sense of historical continuity. Apologists, such as Bishop Bossuet (1627-1704), liked to tease their Protestant adversaries with the question of where in the world their Church had been before Luther and Calvin. The question shows how important the time between ancient Christianity and the Reformation had become in Catholic apologetics since the sixteenth century. Where the Protestants had to admit that a gap of more than a thousand years separated the early Christian communities from the churches of the Reformation, Catholics could proudly point to the fact that in their Church an unbroken line of succession linked the present hierarchy to Christ and the apostles. This continuity seemed the best proof that other churches were human constructs, whereas the Catholic Church continued the mission of Christ and his disciples. In this argument the Middle Ages were essential, but not a time to dwell upon. It was not until the nineteenth century that in the Catholic Church the Middle Ages began to mean far more than proof of the Church’s unbroken continuity.

The Liturgy has been to me a great theological teacher; a perpetual testimony that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the one God blessed for ever, is the author of all life, freedom, unity to men; that our prayers are nothing but responses to His voice speaking to us and in us. Why do I hear nothing of this from those who profess to reform it? Why do they appear only to treat it as an old praying machine, which in the course of centuries gets out of order like other machines, and which should be altered according to the improved mechanical notions of our time?

The fifth labour of Hercules required that he clean out, in one day, the thirty years of accumulated mess that the thousands of cattle owned by King Augeus had created. The Augean Stable of St Paul’s Cathedral had taken much longer to accumulate its liturgical mess, and would take much longer to clean out!

If the heirs of the Tractarians were in Victorian Anglicanism most conspicuously dissatisfied with the Prayer Book, they were not alone: the Broad Church also had discontents, which focused largely upon the recitation of the Athanasian Creed:

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.

During the Liturgical Revival of the Victorian period, the worship of the Church of Scotland changed more radically than at any time since the seventeenth century. Those who favoured reform felt that the largely unstructured and didactic character of Presbyterian services no longer appealed to many sections of society. The upper classes, for example, were turning in increasing numbers to the worship of the Episcopal Church. In addition some reformers wished the liturgy of the Kirk to reflect more clearly the doctrinal basis of the Reformed tradition. The innovations which were pioneered in this period included a change in the posture of the congregation for prayer and for singing, the introduction of prayers read by the minister instead of being delivered extempore; the use of set forms such as the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Doxology; the singing of hymns as well as psalms; the use of organs to accompany praise; the observance of the main festivals of the Christian year, and the greater frequency of holy communion.

In 1910, the Royal Commission on the Church of England and the Other Religious Bodies in Wales and Monmouth revealed that the Church of England was the largest religious body in Wales, and attracted over a quarter of all worshippers. This indicated a significant improvement in the Church’s fortunes in the previous half century, and a different picture from that which had emerged from the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, which had suggested that the established Church had the support of only twenty per cent of Welsh worshippers. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light upon the Church’s improving fortunes between 1851 and 1910 by exploring the liturgical patterns which were evolving in a particular Welsh county, Montgomeryshire, in the late nineteenth century. Montgomeryshire is part of the large rural heart of mid-Wales, bordered by Radnor to the south, Cardigan and Merioneth to the west, Denbigh to the north, and Shropshire to the east. The paper considers the annual, monthly, and weekly liturgical cycles which were developing in the county, and how the co-existence of the Welsh and English languages was expressed in different styles of church music and worship.

During a Christmas convention at Gahini mission station in Rwanda in 1933, a large number of people publicly confessed their sins, resolved to turn from their present beliefs and embraced the Christian Faith. From then on, missionaries of the Ruanda Mission wrote enthusiastically to their supporters in Britain of people flocking into churches in South-West Uganda and Rwanda, of ‘changed lives’, of emotional confessions followed by ‘tremendous joy’, and of the spontaneous forming of fellowship groups and mission teams. Ugandans working at Gahini saw an opportunity for ‘waking’ the sleeping Anglican Church in Buganda and elsewhere which had, they believed, lost its fervour. Following in the tradition of the evangelists of the 1880s and 1890s they travelled vast distances to share their message of repentance and forgiveness with others. This was the beginning of the East African Revival, long prayed for by Ruanda missionaries and the Ugandans who worked alongside them. Max Warren, General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, writing in 1954 when the Revival was still pulsating through East Africa, perceived the revival phenomenon as ‘a reaffirmation of theology, a resuscitation of worship and a reviving of conscience … for the church’. All three were in evidence from the early years of the East African Revival, but perhaps the most dramatic change was the form taken by the ‘resuscitation of worship’.

Writing in 196s, Horton Davies, in his magisterial examination of worship and theology in England, gave a glowing account of advances made in Free Churches over previous decades towards ‘a worship that is deeply reverent, sacramentally rich, ecumenically comprehensive, and theologically faithful’. This study examines the pressure for reformation in worship which emerged, particularly in the 1930s, within English Congregationalism. Pressure came from an exploration of the Reformed and Puritan roots of the denomination and from the influence of wider forms of corporate devotion. By 1943, Nathaniel Micklem (1888-1976), Principal from 1932 of Mansfield College, Oxford, and the most formative theologian espousing new versions of Reformed thought, could write Congregationalism and the Church Catholic, affirming that ‘by the faithful preaching of the Word, the believing celebration of the sacraments and the exercise of Gospel discipline, the Church is kept in the doctrine and fellowship of the apostles and stands in true succession’. The inter-war years, a period of marked Anglo-Catholic dominance, saw Anglican and Free Church leaders who had been shaped by evangelical theology re-examining their practices in the light of higher forms of worship. In Congregationalism, which with almost 300,000 members in England was the largest of the older Dissenting denominations, this process had distinctive features deriving from its own history.

The Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8 was not merely ‘the echo of dead themes’, as was alleged by A. J. P. Taylor. Disputes between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, which lay at the root of the crisis, were still at a height in the 1920s and 1930s. Anglo-Catholic confidence was shown in their vast Congresses, commencing in 1920 (and lasting until the 1960s), and in the celebrations and publications which marked the centenary of the Oxford Movement in 1933. Such confidence naturally caused Evangelicals and Broad Churchmen to look to their defences. Moreover, while in England anti-Romanism was less marked than before 1914, in Scotland it reached a high (if belated) peak in the 1920s in reaction to Irish Catholic immigration.

The Revised Prayer Book, though twice rejected by Parliament, was published in 1928 with the notice: ‘The publication of this Book does not directly or indirectly imply that it can be regarded as authorized for use in the churches.’ The bishops set out in July 1929 three principles by which they would guide parishes wishing to use the 1928 Book:

At the end of the third session of the Second Vatican Council in 1963, the bishops were able to make a beginning to their legislative work by promulgating two documents which they fondly hoped would be uncontroversial: the unremarkable Decree on Mass Media, and the much more consequential Constitution on the Liturgy. Among the principles for the revision of the Roman Catholic Church’s sacraments contained in the second of these documents, instructions are given for the revision of the rites of initiation, including the following: