The language of Cranmer's magnificent four hundred year old liturgy is being butchered and replaced with pale and platitudinous up-dated versions. This is being done, the Church leaders tell us, to aid the understanding of the Common Man!

In 1980 a Gallop Poll survey showed that 52% of churchgoers were unhappy with the new services and of these, 93% said they preferred the old ones in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. 77% said they preferred the traditional Lord's Prayer to the new one with its "Lord do not bring us to the test"! The Common Man had spoken; but he had spoken too late. Already the "Alternative Service Book" had been approved by General Synod (its members elected by only 3% of church members) and was at the printers.

The traditional form of the Lord's Prayer has been deliberately left out of this new book of services and as our great tradition is being done to death, the old Cranmer is put to gather dust on vestrey shelves. Already it is hard to find a parish church that uses the Prayer Book. This is a major calamity. Collects, canticles, prayers and petitions, rounded and smoothed by centuries of use are hacked about by those who seemingly have never understood what Owen Chadwick put so well: "Liturgies are not made - they grow in the devotion of centuries.

Listen to the Collect for Purity at the beginning of the service of Holy Communion - read it aloud to yourself. It is a very ancient one. It appears in one of the service books of Alquin of York who for some time attended the court of Charlemagne. It is just one of the many unflawed gems of English in Cranmer's now doomed prayer book.

Collect for Purity:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sadly, nothing in the modern prayer book reaches the heights and beauty of this.