Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. To read, or hear, these words is to be taken back to a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world of risk and daily peril, a place of death and sickness and warfare—a world in which Michel de Montaigne, for instance, lost five of his six children in infancy. The Book of Common Prayer contains a section with special prayers “For Rain,” “For fair Weather,” for protection against “Dearth and Famine,” for salvation from “War and Tumults,” and from “Plague or Sickness.” This plea is present in the penultimate collect of Evensong, too:

O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed: Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that both our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

A grand sonority (with the characteristic Cranmerian triad of “all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works”) gives way to a heartfelt request: please defend us from enemies, so that we may “pass our time in rest and quietness.” It’s interesting to compare the original Latin of this old prayer, which appeared in the Sarum Missal: “Tempora sint tua protectione tranquilla” can be roughly translated as “May our time under thy protection be tranquil.” In a fourteenth-century English primer, it was translated into English, and the prayer was now that “our times be peaceable.” But Cranmer has made the plea smaller and closer at hand. In the Book of Common Prayer, the language seems not to refer to the epoch (our time) but to something more local (my days); and tranquillity and peace have become the comfier “rest and quietness.”

The Book of Common Prayer was born of a time of “War and Tumults.” In Europe, a powerful anti-Catholic movement had found its boldest leader in Martin Luther, who excoriated the Church in his Ninety-five Theses (1517-18). Luther attacked the Church’s practice of apparently offering salvation (or, at least, partial remission from sins) through the sale of indulgences. Luther came to believe that absolution and salvation were not in the power of the Church but were freely bestowed as gifts by God. The sinner is justified—redeemed from sin, made righteous—by faith alone in God, not by doing good works or by buying ecclesiastical favors. Along with this emphasis on faith went a necessary stress on the sinful helplessness of man, and on our spiritual fate as predestined by God (since we cannot earn our own redemption). Luther and his fellow-reformer John Calvin appealed to the Church fathers as theological sponsors. Both Paul and Augustine, after all, were preoccupied by the narrative of our original sin, and Augustine had argued that God’s grace was bestowed, not earned. The Catholic Church struggled internally after the Reformation with the problem of “double predestination”—the idea that God has already decided who will be in the elect and who will be damned.

Pope Leo X could not see the Catholicism in Luther’s Protestantism: he excommunicated the insurgent in 1521, sealing a schism that Luther had probably not desired. In the next twenty years, Lutheranism became a German church; Calvin established a kind of Protestant theocracy in the city-state of Geneva; Protestantism spread to France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Scandinavia; and the Catholic Church in England severed its ties with Rome. Thomas Cranmer was at the middle of this revolution. Henry VIII had used him in 1527 on diplomatic business, as one of the theologians tasked with arguing the rectitude of the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Henry, who made him Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, was probably less of a reformer than Cranmer: he wanted the Pope out of his business, but saw himself as “Defender of the Faith,” a faith still essentially that of English Catholicism. (The British monarch is to this day the “Defender of the Faith.”)

Only when Henry was succeeded by Edward VI, in 1547, could the reform that Cranmer wanted truly proceed. Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1552, three years after its publication, in order to intensify the Protestantism of its theology. Ecclesiastical committees had worked on the revision, and this version became the established collective liturgy of the Church of England for the next four hundred and sixty years. Between 1645 and 1660, during the Civil War and Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth, it was suspended, and was then reissued in 1662, after the restoration of the monarch. The 1662 edition is identical, in all important respects, to its 1552 predecessor, except for the addition of the Psalter, a complete version of the Psalms, by the English Biblical translator Miles Coverdale.

Protestantism at once diminished and intensified the role of the Church in ordinary English lives. The Church lost some of its role as mediator, intercessor, and dispenser of magic and solace. If the Church cannot help you toward salvation, then the saints cannot do anything for you, either, and praying to and for the dead is useless. A whole unwritten liturgy of feast days and processions to shrines and pleas to saints, along with a host of superstitious reflexes—a kind of continuous spectral accompaniment to earthly life—disappeared when Protestantism changed the emphasis from salvation by works to salvation by faith. The Church in England had now become a goading schoolmaster, intent on your doing as well as possible (though without any knowledge of the likely results) in those fatally important forthcoming exams. Like the goading schoolmaster, Protestantism intensified the severity of its demands. It strove to bring worshipper and Church into greater intimacy: the Protestant emphasis on the authority of Scripture, and the ability of laymen to interpret it (as opposed to the authority of ecclesiastical tradition), meant that the Bible had to be available in modern languages—Luther translated the Old and New Testaments into German in 1534 and 1522, respectively, and the first authorized Bible in English appeared in 1539.

As the Protestant reformers worried, both the priesthood and the laity were often ignorant of doctrine and Scripture; Latin was the obvious obstacle to greater participation and spiritual literacy. Likewise, the Protestants thought that the celebration of the Mass had become a theatrical spectacle, controlled by the magus-like priest, who officiated at the altar, raising up the bread for the adoration of the people and signalling that the Eucharist had become the “real presence” of the body and blood of the crucified Christ. Cranmer made sure, in an appendix to the 1552 edition, that the Anglican Prayer Book denied “any real and essential presence . . . of Christ’s natural flesh and blood” in the bread and wine of the Communion service. It was to be understood as a reënactment of a last supper and not a miraculous performance. The presiding minister says to the Anglican communicant as he offers the sacraments:

The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving.

No vicar today intones that part of the Prayer Book Communion liturgy where he or she is supposed to remind the congregation that, if we are not cleansed of sin when we come to take the bread and wine, “Come not to that holy Table; lest, after the taking of that holy Sacrament, the devil enter into you, as he entered into Judas, and fill you full of all iniquities, and bring you to destruction both of body and soul. . . . We eat and drink our own damnation.” Contemporary stomachs are not strong enough for such theological carrion. But the larger Protestant concern was that the congregant should be a communicant, not merely a dazzled consumer. In 1550, the Council of the Church of England ordered the removal of altars from all churches; Communion was henceforth to be administered from tables.