In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
A bibliophile is a lover of books. And I am a lover of books. So, when there’s a subject I’m particularly interested in, I tend to collect books about it. So, as you might imagine, I have a lot of books about faith, religion, so forth.
This has been true since I was a teenager. But lately I’ve begun to collect old prayerbooks, and I brought a few of them today. This one is a Book of Common Prayer. It’s got a nice little clasp here to keep it shut. It’s from 1835, so, almost 200 years ago. That’s hard to imagine.
It’s quite a bit different from the prayerbook that we used there in the pew, but there are a lot of similarities. You would recognize it. It begins with tables of feasts days and readings. And the very first prayers in it are Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, which have been the mainstays of Anglican worship since the 1500s.
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