Cranmer's Long Game: The Genius of the Daily Office

Thomas Cranmer is remembered for his prose, but his most lasting achievement may be a habit, not a sentence: the Daily Office, morning and evening, prayed by ordinary Christians in ordinary weeks.

A habit, not a doctrine

Cranmer compressed the monastic hours into two services any layperson could pray, and set the whole Psalter and most of the Bible to be read in course over a year. It was, in effect, a quiet bet that Christians formed by daily Scripture would not need to be told what to believe; they would come to believe it by praying it.

Five hundred years later, the bet still pays off for anyone willing to keep it.