On Puritanism and the Prayer Book

'The comprehensiveness of the Prayer Book therefore is distinguished not only by its large generosity in matters indifferent, but also by its clear limitations where matters of importance are called into question. The Church does not wish to overdrive the flock, but a clear distinction is maintained between the weak members who lag, and the wilful ones who stray.

It is too much to expect that a generous temper such as this will not be abused: of this abuse the Prayer Book history shows at least one long and continuous instance. The Puritan party from the days of Elizabeth to the present time has never honestly accepted the Prayer Book: its members have been too much of Churchmen to leave the Church, but too little of Churchmen to value its principles: they have thus remained in a false position, attempting to subvert the system to which they nominally conformed. It has been pointed out how openly the attempt was made in Elizabethan times; and, though it has in God's good Providence failed all along to win any substantial recognition, it has been able at times to establish an evasive and false tradition of Prayer Book interpretation which has practically popularised and sought even to justify a system of disloyalty to the Prayer Book. The party has had its conflicts with the more loyal and whole-hearted churchmanship, and the issues have hitherto not been finally decisive.

The failure of the Elizabethan attempt to puritanize the Church inaugurated the period of loyalty of the early Stuart times: the success of this recovery was too rapid and too injudicious, and so the revenge came speedily; for a while sectarianism and puritanism had their way, until a short experience of their results under the Commonwealth produced a fresh reaction. The failure of the Puritans at the Savoy inaugurated another period of loyalty under the later Stuarts, but, when Church life was systematically crushed in the 18th century by Whig politicians and Latitudinarian bishops, the reign of the false tradition and the evasive, disloyal or merely torpid attitude to the rules of Church worship again set in; and those who tried to be loyal to the Church system, whether early followers of Wesley, Clapham Evangelicals or Oxford Tractarians, were all alike in turn charged with innovation, disloyalty, and even with Popery.

The contest still survives: the Puritan party still works for a system, which is not the system of the Catholic Church or of the English Prayer Book, and defends its disregard of plain rubrics (e.g., as to fasting or daily services), and its want of sympathy with the system (e.g., as to the frequency and discipline of Communion) by appealing to the evasive tradition, which in the dark days of the history it has been able to form, and would like to fasten permanently upon the Church.  Thus there is no feature more marked in the history of the Prayer Book than this contest between the Church system of worship expressed in the Prayer Book and the false interpretation which has grown up through a continuous tradition of evasion and rebellion.'

-Bishop Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, 1901.