An earlier form of this paper was given at the Anglican Way Conference, St. John’s Church, Savannah, 8 March 2024.
Sometime in the 1950s a visitor walked into a stereotypical English parish church in a stereotypical English town and asked, ‘What is the service like here’? The answer comes:
Oh just the usual thing you know;
the BCP all through,
Just pure and unadulterated 1662;
A minimum of wise interpolations from the Missal,
The Kyrie in Greek, the proper Collects and Epistles,
The Secret and the Canon and the Dominus Vobiscum,
(Three aves and a salve at the end would amiss come);
To the “militant” and “trudle”1“Trudle” refers to the invitation to Communion, ‘Ye who do truly and earnestly repent ye of your sins…’. The word is a corruption of “truly.” there is little need to cling,
But apart