Page:The Book of Common Prayer.djvu/11

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
viii
Preface.

following, also Morning and Evening in headings, and I Lesson in both Services, are, in the original, executed in red ink. But inasmuch as this treatment was found to involve no principle, being rather a matter of penmanship or ornament, it seemed preferable to avoid it as being exceptional and possibly misleading in the printed volume. The titles of twenty-four of the Feast Days and of the three State Services which are, in the Kalendar, also written with red ink, have been set in a distinctive type.

The reader will notice many curious points throughout the work; but, however strange some of them may appear, he may rely on their being in every case a truthful reproduction of the MS. In some instances, matters of doctrine or ritual may seem to be affected, but on such questions it is, fortunately, not within the province of printer or press-corrector to express any opinion. But they venture to state, as the result of their labours, their belief that the Annexed Book was intended to be a record of the language only of the Book of Common Prayer (and not to be a standard of orthography—which the manuscript of the chief reviser, the learned Bishop Cosin, and of his secretary Sancroft shows to have been still in an unsettled condition—nor of punctuation, nor of typographical detail), and that the MS. was used in this limited sense by the authorised examiners of the Sealed Books.

Her Majesty's Printing Office,
September 1892.