ABSTRACT
The life of the puritan was in one sense a continuous act of worship, pursued under an unremitting and lively sense of God’s providential purposes and constantly refreshed by religious activity, personal, domestic and public. It is perhaps necessary to establish at the outset the primary fact that the Elizabethan puritans were willing to enclose their worship in a fixed and invariable order, for Bancroft reported that ‘the most of them think there ought to be no prescribed form at all.’ The worship of sixteenth-century Calvinists is liable to an equal distortion if viewed through the spectacles of the modem liturgical movement. There is evidence to suggest that some puritan burials were performed in the spirit of the Genevan book, if not according to its precise directions.
