The following passages are taken from the Reverend Dyson Hague’s The Protestantism of the Prayer Book, which was published by the Church Association in the late nineteenth century in a revised and enlarged edition for English readers with a preface by the first Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Reverend J. C. Ryle. Dyson Hague was an Evangelical minister in the Church of England in Canada. He was also Professor of Liturgics and Ecclesiology at Wycliffe College in Toronto. Hague wrote at a time when the Church of England and her overseas branches were racked by controversy over the doctrine and liturgical usages of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
With the publication of the Tracts for the Times in the 1830s the Tractarians had undertaken the self-appointed task of changing the identity of the Church of England. They imposed a new meaning upon the 1662 Prayer Book, reinterpreting it in what they described as “a Catholic sense”. They engaged in a “microscopic search” for “words and phrases, devotional and rubrical,” that might serve “to establish an interpretation of the Prayer Book, unknown to its authors, and to three centuries of Christian life and thought.” No part of the Prayer Book was neglected in this search but the Baptismal Offices received particular attention. The Tractarians would claim that the Prayer Book taught the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as taught by the Roman Catholic Church....
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