Comfortable Words
The King James Bible of 1611, a model of straightforward English made for reading aloud.
The King James Bible of 1611, a model of straightforward English made for reading aloud.
A meditation on the Psalms, and on the evidence for the existence of God that is plain for every eye to see.
In The Spectator for Saturday August 16th, 1712, Joseph Addison argued for the great moral benefits of Christian belief while utterly rejecting any attempt to enforce it on the unwilling. A week later, he published a follow-up on the various ways to strengthen faith. Among them he recommended regular divine worship, an upright life, and retreats to the countryside to contemplate the works of God’s hands. He ended with these verses.
Joseph Addison gives thanks to God for caring for him body and soul, from the cradle to the grave.
In The Spectator for Saturday August 9th, 1712, Joseph Addison reflected on the virtue of gratitude towards God, who “does not only confer upon us those bounties, which proceed more immediately from his hand, but even those benefits which are conveyed to us by others.” Gratitude was one area, he said, where the poets of the Old Testament far surpassed the poets of classical Greece and Rome, because they had a deity more worthy of it; and he closed with his own attempt.
A paraphrase in rhyming verse of Psalm 100, a song of praise from all Creation.
In the King James Bible, Psalm 100 begins ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands’. The hymn All People that on Earth do Dwell, written by Scottish minister William Kethe in 1561, is a well-known metrical paraphrase of Psalm 100; Isaac Watts made his own in 1719.
This short prayer appeared in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, as a preparation for holy communion.
Much of the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 was an elegant translation of the old Sarum Use of the mediaeval English church. This prayer, appointed for the Communion Service between the Comfortable Words and the distribution of the bread and wine, was one of the new ones. It blends passages from Mark 7:28 and John 6:56 with a traditional Roman collect and the Greek Liturgy of Saint Basil. Its name comes from the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637.