- Eamon Duffy, 'Praying for the Dead' in Faith of Our Fathers It sounds a convincing and perhaps attractive critique of the reformed. Thankfully, however, it is an inaccurate description of the Anglican experience "in the Reigns of several Princes of blessed memory since the Reformation".The departed were not banished from the liturgy. They were named in prayer:The very fact that this is the conclusion to the prayer foronly emphasises that the Church had not shrunk to the living alone: the Church militant was not prayed for without prayerful remembrance of the departed. And that phrase -- gently but beautifully embodies an understanding of the Church embracing the faithful departed.While this petition was added to the prayer for the Church militant in 1662, it was not unknown to Anglican experience prior to this. The 1559 Elizabethan Injunctions had set out a form of bidding prayers, which concluded:This was also the continued physical experience of the parish church in the reformed. The graves in the church yard, the memorials to the departed which often surrounded parishioners in their pews, ensured that any notion of the Church shrinking to the living alone was unthinkable. The Canons of 1604 , after setting out the responsibilities of church wardens regarding care of the fabric of the parish church, declared that with "like care" they should maintain the church yard. What Wordsworth would later describe in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets as "the encircling ground" of the church yard embodied the Prayer Book'sAnd at the graveside? Hooker's opening sentence in defence of the BCP's burial rite described it as "a dutie which the Church doth owe to the faithfull departed" (V.75.1). He goes on to state that the funeral rite gives to the living hope "by reason of theire fellowship and communion with Sainctes" (V.75.3): a hope, in other words, dependent upon the Church not having shrunk to the living alone. For Sparrow, in his A Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer , there was no doubt that the burial office at the graveside of the deceased prayed "for his and our consummation in Glory, and joyful Absolution at the last day".'His and our'. It echoes, of course, Roger Scruton has referred to the invocationas "the clearest and most moving of all Anglican invocations". I think those words might also be particularly applied to. It is a clear expression of our unity and communion with those who have gone before us. It is moving because gently, with due reserve, it gathers up our experience of loss and grief into hope and thanksgiving.Duffy's bleak picture, we might suggest that it was the Prayer Book's clear and moving expression of our communion with the faithful departed which contributed to the words of a later hymn becoming a staple of Anglican piety:(The painting is Constable's 'Stoke Poges Church', 1834.)