Having discussed the two discontinuities that a present Episcopal worshipper would experience encountering the 1789 Communion Office, it’s time to point out the continuity–and it’s a pretty obvious one. As a commenter here noted when I posted the texts, it’s amazing how close the common content is between these two prayer books separated by almost 200 years.

The text of Rite I is substantially the same as the contents of the 1789 rite. Yes, there are some minor differences in phrasing or wording, but for the most part I could rely on my memory of Rite I to supply the texts I needed to say.

There’s not a whole lot left to say on this point.

Except, maybe, that an investigation like this reveals how different the Rite II material is from Rite I and the prayers we had been using for some 500 years. I’m all in favor of liturgical scholarship and liturgical advance, but I do feel like we lost something of our Anglican heritage in relegating our primary means of continuity to Rite I and not having even one prayer in Rite II partaking of a modernized and updated form of the classical Anglican rite.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—if we want a focus on baptismal ecclesiology you can’t get more of it than the language of us abiding in Christ and him in us which has been stripped from our current rites along with the notion of self-oblation.

Now we’ll turn to the past for a bit and look at the sources of the 1789 Communion Office. The title of the presentation these posts are based on was “The 1789 Communion Office: A Surprising Liturgy Now and Then.” We’ve covered the “Now” part; now we’ll turn to why an early American congregation would have found this so surprising.