About this site

Rite & Rubric presents the Daily Office — Morning and Evening Prayer — according to the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (1928), with the Psalms and Lessons appointed in the revised Lectionary of 1945, for every day of the church year. The Psalms are given in the Coverdale Psalter of the 1928 book; the lessons in the King James Version, including the books of the Apocrypha appointed for certain first lessons. Alongside the office of the day, the site offers the complete orders for Morning and Evening Prayer with every alternative printed in full, the Prayers and Thanksgivings, the Litany, and the whole Psalter, by psalm or in the thirty day course.

How the day is reckoned

Visit in the morning and the site opens Morning Prayer for the day; visit in the evening and it opens Evening Prayer. The liturgical day is computed from the civil date: the date of Easter, the seasons and Sundays of the church year, fixed holy days and their eves, Ember and Rogation days, and the Sundays before Advent are all reckoned according to the tables and rubrics of the 1928 book. Evening Prayer on the day before a red-letter feast uses the eve’s propers and the collect of the feast, except on Sundays; and when more Sundays follow Trinity than the propers provide, the last is kept as the Sunday next before Advent and the surplus is supplied as the rubric directs.

Transferred feasts

When a red-letter holy day falls upon a privileged Sunday or in Holy Week or Easter Week, the Sunday or privileged office is kept and the feast is transferred, by rubrical practice, to the first open weekday following — not a Sunday, another feast, or a privileged day — and when several feasts are displaced together they transfer in calendar order. The office of a transferred feast notes the day it is transferred from beneath its title, the monthly and yearly calendars note transfers at the foot of each month, and a transferred feast keeps no eve.

Editorial notes

Where the Lectionary appoints more than one set of Psalms and Lessons (as on most Sundays), the first set is shown and the others may be selected. The opening sentences rotate day by day among those the rubric appoints — one on ferial days, two on Sundays and holy days — and on ferial weekdays the office uses the shorter bidding to confession and the shorter form of the Absolution which the rubrics permit. A rubric supplies the Collect for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity for a Reader to pray in the place of the Absolution when no Presbyter is present. The Prayer for the President is said in its two forms at Morning Prayer on alternating days. The Apocrypha is quoted from the King James Version of 1611 in modernized spelling.

Sources

The text of the offices follows the 1928 Book of Common Prayer as digitized by the Society of Archbishop Justus (justus.anglican.org). The 1945 Tables of Psalms and Lessons were transcribed from the same society’s facsimile and verified against an independent transcription. The Psalter and the Litany follow the same society’s digitization of the 1928 book. The collects follow the 1928 propers as published at episcopalnet.org, with two collects supplied from the Society’s facsimile. The scripture text is the King James Version with Apocrypha as distributed by eBible.org (public domain).

All the texts presented here are in the public domain. This site is an independent devotional resource and is not affiliated with any ecclesiastical body.