...tomorrow, "the NEW LECTIONARY" comes into general use. The lessons which have been this day read in your hearing will never again be read to you in this Church as on this day. Henceforward, morning and evening, week by week, year after year. we shall be invited to acquaint ourselves with a different Cycle of Teaching, as well as with an entirely novel distribution of the Sacred Text... We shall never again recognise at the accustomed seasons those cadences with which from childhood we have been familiar, and which are not unfrequently mixed up with some of our most precious memories of the past...
But I experience the deeper concern, and am the more constrained to speak, because I am profoundly convinced that the new lectionary is open to so many and such great objections that we should be better without it than with it. ...
Let us not be told that people may, if they please, read their Bibles at home; and that if they will henceforth attend all the three services every Sunday in the year, they will, on the contrary, hear more of the Scripture than ever they heard in times past. The answer is obvious. People will do nothing of the sort. The bulk of the Church-going population will continue to go to Church once on Sunday as hertofore: while those who go twice or oftener (not one in a hundred of them being scholars) will often be more perplexed than edified by the method of the new lectionary. ...
No, let the truth be told. It is the Clergy, - not the people, - who find "the Service" too long. It is the rich, - not the poor, - who have abridged the Lessons. As the friend of the poor, I speak. I plead on behalf of CHRIST's little ones, who should not, if I could help it, have been defrauded of their birthright; deprived, without their consent, of their daily bread.
It is the Clergy who weary, - the wealthier sort who complain, - of the length of our services. I say not that all complain, all weary; but the few are loud, and importunate, and influential; and this it is which has brought upon us our present harm and loss. Let me hope that most of my Brethren in the Ministry do not know what weariness means when they are ministering before the LORD: count reading the Lessons the flower and crown of their Daily Service; and entirely forget that they have read the same two chapters once already, when they recognise an entirely fresh set of faces at the later of the two Sunday Evening Services...
Three principles seem to have guided the Authors of the New Lectionary. The first, (i) That the Lessons ought to be greatly abridged:- the second, (ii) That every incident, or topic of Scripture, ought as much as possible to be divorced from its context:- the third, (iii) That an "indefinite amount of license" ought to be left to "the discretion" (or the indiscretion) of the Minister. Why the first of these principles is to be deplored, I have explained already. The last offends me, partly because at Evening Prayer men will henceforth never know what first or what second lesson they are going to have read to them: but chiefly because of the principle of irregularity (called "elasticity") which it will introduce into the method of our public services...
I venture in conclusion to predict that the intricacy of this new Lectionary (which sometimes "makes it more business to find out what is to be read, than to read it when it is found out,") will result in a general practice of bringing to Church, and of giving to children, what are called "Church Services", but are in reality mutilated Bibles. Already I am solicited to furnish the reading-desk of this Church with such a Bible printed at the University Press, - which you may be sure I will never do. It will be an evil day for this Church and Nation, my friends, - "the beginning of sorrows" it will be, - when the Bible is generally banished from our Churches and a volume of elegant extracts usurps its place on a shelf in every cottage.
Do any enquire why then I adopt this new Lectionary, - seeing that I disapprove of it so heartily, and for seven years am not compelled to employ it? I answer. Because I hold that a worse thing by far than unskillfully constructed Tables of Lessons, is a divided Church...
I have kept you too long, but it was impossible to say less; and I have carefully abstained from entering into a detailed examination of "the new Lectionary." Having, once for all, freely discharged my mind concerning this unhappy performance, I shall not again return to the subject; but loyally employ it... I propose to use it exactly as it stands; taking no liberties with it whatever, nor practising any part of the strange license which it sanctions. Wherever you see in the Table that alternative Evening Lessons are provided, you will hear both those lessons...
- from a sermon by John W Burgon, 31 December 1871
(Cambridge University Library 6.34.45.5)