Suffrages in Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)

Suffrages in Morning Prayer (1928 BCP) are the two brief versicle-and-response petitions said after the Lord's Prayer and before the collects in Morning Prayer in the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer. They ask God to show mercy and grant salvation, then to cleanse the worshippers' hearts and preserve the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Their brevity is deliberate. Scripture has been read, answered in canticles, and confessed in the Creed; the office now turns to prayer. Minister and people pray together in language drawn almost word for word from the Psalms, and the final response prepares directly for the Collect for Peace and the Collect for Grace.

Prayer Book text

The complete Morning Prayer suffrages are:

Minister. O Lord, show thy mercy upon us.
Answer. And grant us thy salvation.
Minister. O God, make clean our hearts within us.
Answer. And take not thy Holy Spirit from us.

The 1928 rubric establishes the posture and the transition into this prayer:

And after that, these Prayers following, the People devoutly kneeling; the Minister first pronouncing,

The Lord be with you.
Answer. And with thy spirit.
Minister. Let us pray.

Here, if it hath not already been said, shall follow the Lord's Prayer.

The suffrages are therefore neither another canticle nor a private devotion. They belong to “these Prayers,” are said while the people kneel, and divide the words between minister and congregation. The salutation and “Let us pray” make clear that the whole assembly is acting.

Mercy and salvation

The first versicle and response reproduce Psalm 85:7 with only the 1928 book's spelling of “show” in place of the Authorized Version's “shew”:

Shew us thy mercy, O LORD, and grant us thy salvation.

In the psalm this petition follows a plea that God will turn from displeasure, revive his people, and make them rejoice in him. Morning Prayer places the same appeal after the Creed and the Lord's Prayer. The congregation has confessed the saving acts of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but confession does not become presumption: believers still ask that God's covenant mercy be shown and his salvation given.

“Mercy” and “salvation” are thus parallel but not empty synonyms. Mercy names God's gracious disposition toward sinners; salvation names the deliverance his mercy grants. The response also gives the people a real share in the petition: the minister asks for mercy “upon us,” and the congregation answers by asking salvation for that same worshipping body.

A clean heart and the Holy Spirit

The second pair draws together two consecutive verses of Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.

The Prayer Book changes the psalm's singular “me” to the corporate “our” and “us.” What is David's penitential prayer becomes the daily petition of the Church. It also follows the confession and absolution earlier in the office: absolved worshippers do not cease to depend upon grace, but ask for inward cleansing and the continued gift of the Spirit.

The same movement from cleansing to a renewed heart and the indwelling Spirit appears in Ezekiel's promise:

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

This promise prevents a merely moralistic reading of “make clean our hearts.” God is the acting subject: he cleanses, gives the new heart, puts his Spirit within his people, and thereby enables obedience. The suffrage is a prayer for sanctifying grace, not a declaration that the worshippers can purify themselves.

Grace, obedience, and Anglican doctrine

Article X gives the doctrinal grammar for this dependence:

we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

The suffrage asks for exactly this divine priority and cooperation. God must make the heart clean; God must not withdraw his Spirit. The Collect for Grace, which follows shortly afterward, then asks that the day's actions be ordered by God's governance and made righteous in his sight. Cleansing, the Spirit's presence, and obedient action form one sequence.

John Henry Hobart, Assistant Bishop of New York, explicitly used this Prayer Book petition to explain Anglican teaching on sanctification:

The Scriptures teach, that, owing to the weakness, and corruption of human nature, man must be “enlightened, quickened, and sanctified by the Divine Spirit”—must be “transformed” by “the renewing of the Holy Ghost”—must be “created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works.” The necessity of the Divine influences, and of the renovation of the heart from sin to holiness, the Church strenuously maintains . . . . In various Collects and supplications of the Liturgy, she beseeches God that “he would make clean our hearts within us”—that “his Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.”

Hobart's interpretation joins evangelical dependence and sacramental-churchly prayer. The Spirit's renovation is necessary because human nature is weak and corrupt; the Church therefore teaches that necessity by making the congregation ask for it aloud in the liturgy.

Historical development

William Palmer traced the versicles after the Lord's Prayer to the older Western daily offices:

The versicles which follow the Lord's Prayer are described by Amalarius, who wrote in A.D. 820; and they are found in the Anglo-Saxon offices: they varied, however, in different churches of the West, even where the same prayers in general were used; but all our versicles and responses are found in the ancient ritual of the English churches, both before and after the Norman conquest; and they occurred in the same place which they occupy at present.

The English 1662 Morning Prayer has six pairs rather than the two retained in the American morning office:

Priest. O Lord, shew thy mercy upon us.
Answer. And grant us thy salvation.
Priest. O Lord, save the King.
Answer. And mercifully hear us when we call upon thee.
Priest. Endue thy Ministers with righteousness.
Answer. And make thy chosen people joyful.
Priest. O Lord, save thy people.
Answer. And bless thine inheritance.
Priest. Give peace in our time, O Lord.
Answer. Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God.
Priest. O God, make clean our hearts within us.
Answer. And take not thy Holy Spirit from us.

The American book retained the first and last pairs for Morning Prayer. This shortened form is not an innovation of 1928: it already appears in the first American Prayer Book of 1789 and remains in the 1892 book. The 1928 Evening Prayer still prints six suffrages, adapted to American civil order, while Morning Prayer preserves the compact two-pair form.

Clifford W. Atkinson summarizes both the form and its relation to what follows:

Following the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, the Suffrages are said. These are a brief series of responsorial prayers that, taken by themselves, reflect the concerns of the prayers to follow. In the earlier American Prayer Books, there were two Suffrages in the morning Office, and six in the evening. These were derived from the English Office, which uses the same six, morning and evening. The Suffrages were, generally speaking, adapted from the Psalms.

That summary fits the 1928 sequence precisely. The appeal for salvation anticipates the Collect for Peace, where eternal life is located in the knowledge of God and defence is sought through Christ. The appeal for a clean heart and the Holy Spirit anticipates the Collect for Grace, where the congregation asks to be kept from sin and governed in righteous action.

Common prayer and congregational response

Because the text alternates between “Minister” and “Answer,” it should not be treated as clerical monologue followed by passive listening. Hobart described audible response as a defining feature of Anglican social worship:

Sincerity demands this audible joining in the responses of the liturgy. “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh.” And to be silent, when the Church has provided for us, in the responses of the liturgy, confessions, invocations, supplications and praises, calculated to warm the coldest bosom, and to awaken the most sluggish tongue, while it proves our disregard of her injunctions, and destroys the beautiful characteristic of our service, as social in its spirit and its acts, authorises the conclusion, that the affections of the heart are not interested, where so many calls are disregarded to the worship of the tongue.

In parish worship, the minister should therefore leave room for the people's full response rather than running the pairs together. In private recitation, one person says both parts, but the printed dialogue still teaches that Anglican prayer is ecclesial: even alone, the worshipper uses the Church's common words.

For catechesis, the four lines can be learned as a compact pattern of Christian prayer:

• God acts first in mercy;
• salvation is his gift;
• inward purity must be created by God;
• holy living depends upon the abiding work of the Holy Spirit.

The suffrages thus form a hinge in Morning Prayer. They gather the penitence, Scripture, and Creed already said into direct petition, and they announce the themes of peace, grace, and obedient service developed in the collects that follow.

See also

• Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)
• Daily Office (1928 BCP)
• Lord's Prayer in Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)
• Collect for Peace in Morning Prayer (1928 BCP)
• Collect for Grace (1928 BCP)
• Suffrages in Evening Prayer (1928 BCP)
• Articles of Religion (1928 BCP)

External links

• The 1928 Book of Common Prayer: Morning Prayer
• Church of England: The Order for Morning Prayer
• William Palmer, Origines Liturgicæ, section XV
• John Henry Hobart, The Moral Efficacy and the Positive Benefits of the Ordinances of the Gospel