The theme of this address, in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the First Book of Common Prayer, may be stated in the words of the late Miss Evelyn Underhill:

Anglican worship is a special development of the traditional Christian cultus; and not merely a variant of Continental Protestantism. … It forms, with the Bible or Lectionary, the authorized Missal and Breviary of the English branch of the Catholic Church. Its use is obligatory, and its contents declare in unmistakable terms the adherence of that Church to the great Catholic tradition of Christendom and the general conformity of its worship to the primitive ritual type.

At the close of 1644 the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly found themselves in a difficult position. The preachers had declared that, if they all did the will of the Lord in the church, He would surely bless the efforts of their army in the war against the King. But the church was still unreformed and the King undefeated. They could have peace at the risk of allowing Charles to regain control of the church. They could go on with the war at the cost of permitting religious differences among their own partisans to continue and spread. In other words, nothing could be settled so long as Charles kept the field and the fear of defeat hung over English and Scots, Parliament and Assembly, Presbyterians, Independents, and sectaries alike. The predicament was made to Cromwell's hand. The campaign of 1644, having ended in frustration, he returned to his place in the House of Commons and initiated the maneuvers which led to the reorganization of the army with Fairfax in command but in the event with Cromwell still as its driving force. The result was the victory the Assembly divines had looked for as the sign of God's favor upon their efforts to reform the church but victory on terms which made reform of the church as they conceived it more difficult than ever. For Cromwell's accomplishment in war and politics was due to his gift for drawing upon those very energies of the spirit in himself and others which had been evoked in the people by Puritan preaching but which the ministerial caste was now striving to keep within bounds. He had succeeded in organizing victory not by curbing and containing the Puritan spirit but by giving it free play among the men under his command and by granting scope to its most characteristic modes of expression and organization. Hence the preaching of the Word in the parliamentary army as reconstituted in the New Model had not a little to do with the army's military success.

Arnold Toynbee has described our western civilization in the twentieth century as a rationalistic and secular culture. In the sense that an awareness of the importance of science is the starting point of the thinking of our day the generalization seems true. We prize the realism of the objective, analytical approach of science. In a turbulent and swiftly moving age we have substituted relativism for older values once confidently assumed to have universal validity. We have seen scepticism, born of twentieth-century events, erode an old and dynamic belief in progress. We observe Protestantism, its old orthodoxy shaken, striving to make the Christian tradition meaningful and significant for a materialistic generation. We watch the protagonists of democracy striving to hold fast to essential human values and to protect basic freedoms in an age of fear and power.