Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
And that brings me back to my starting point.
The business of us laymen is simply to endure and
make the best of it. Any tendency to a passionate
preference for one type of service must be regarded
simply as a temptation. Partisan “Churchmanships”
are my bête noire. And if we avoid them, may we not
possibly perform a very useful function? The
shepherds go off, “every one to his own way” and
vanish over diverse points of the horizon. If the
sheep huddle patiently together and go on bleating,
might they finally recall the shepherds? (Haven’t
English victories sometimes been won by the rank
and file in spite of the generals?)
As to the words of the service—liturgy in the
narrower sense—the question is rather different.
If you have a vernacular liturgy you must have a
changing liturgy; otherwise it will finally be
vernacular only in name. The ideal of “timeless
English” is sheer nonsense. No living language can
be timeless. You might as well ask for a motionless
river.
I think it would have been best, if it were possible,
that necessary change should have occurred gradually
and (to most people) imperceptibly; here a
little and there a little; one obsolete word replaced
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in a century—like the gradual change of spelling
in successive editions of Shakespeare. As things are
we must reconcile ourselves, if we can also reconcile
government, to a new Book.
If we were—I thank my stars I’m not—in a
position to give its authors advice, would you have
any advice to give them? Mine could hardly go
beyond unhelpful cautions: “Take care. It is so
easy to break eggs without making omelettes.”
Already our liturgy is one of the very few remaining
elements of unity in our hideously divided
Church. The good to be done by revision needs to
be very great and very certain before we throw that
away. Can you imagine any new Book which will
not be a source of new schism?
Most of those who press for revision seem to wish
that it should serve two purposes: that of modernising
the language in the interests of intelligibility,
and that of doctrinal improvement. Ought the two
operations—each painful and each dangerous—to
be carried out at the same time? Will the patient
survive?
What are the agreed doctrines which are to be
embodied in the new Book and how long will
agreement on them continue? I ask with trepidation
because I read a man the other day who seemed to
wish that everything in the old Book which was
inconsistent with orthodox Freudianism should be
deleted.
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For whom are we to cater in revising the
language? A country parson I know asked his sexton
what he understood by indifferently in the phrase
“truly and indifferently administer justice”. The
man replied, “It means making no difference
between one chap and another.” “And what would
it mean if it said impartially?” asked the parson.
“Don’t know. Never heard of it,” said the sexton.
Here, you see, we have a change intended to make
things easier. But it does so neither for the educated,
who understand indifferently already, nor for the
wholly uneducated, who don’t understand impartially.
It helps only some middle area of the congregation
which may not even be a majority. Let us
hope the revisers will prepare for their work by a
prolonged empirical study of popular speech as it
actually is, not as we (a priori) assume it to be. How
many scholars know (what I discovered by accident)
that when uneducated people say impersonal they
sometimes mean incorporeal?
What of expressions which are archaic but not
unintelligible? (“Be ye lift up”). I find that people
re-act to archaism most diversely. It antagonises
some: makes what is said unreal. To others, not
necessarily more learned, it is highly numinous and
a real aid to devotion. We can’t please both.
I know there must be change. But is this the right
moment? Two signs of the right moment occur to
me. One would be a unity among us which enabled
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the Church—not some momentarily triumphant
party—to speak through the new work with a
united voice. The other would be the manifest
presence, somewhere in the Church, of the specifically
literary talent needed for composing a good
prayer. Prose needs to be not only very good but
very good in a very special way, if it is to stand up
to reiterated reading aloud. Cranmer may have his
defects as a theologian; as a stylist, he can play all
the moderns, and many of his predecessors, off the
field. I don’t see either sign at the moment.
Yet we all want to be tinkering. Even I would
gladly see “Let your light so shine before men”
removed from the offertory. It sounds, in that
context, so like an exhortation to do our alms that
they may be seen by men.
