ABSTRACT
The Puritan appraisal of the Book of Common Prayer is ground well trodden by historians of the English church in the century following the Reformation. The Prayer Book had two major things wrong with it in the eyes of some English Protestants. First, what one might think of as its rubrics or stage directions: the prescribed ceremonies, rituals and attire, such as making the sign of the cross in baptism or the wearing of the surplice. Second, and to continue the theatrical metaphor, objections were raised with the play' itself that is, with the actual text of the liturgy. The Directory was a revolutionary solution to the Prayer Book. The Directory had a short life span, at least in England and Wales. The Book of Common Order was subject to some of the similar debates over set forms in the Kirk as in the English church. Furthermore, there was a tension between what contemporaries called conceived' prayer and extempore prayer.
