At the close of the seventeenth century we find South and others bitterly complaining of the liberties taken with the Prayer-book by some of the ‘Moderate’ clergy.  Some prayers, it appears, were omitted, and some were shortened, and in one form or another ’the divine service so curtailed,’ says South in his exaggerated way, ’as if the people were to have but the tenths from the priest, for the tenths he had received from them.’[1134] No doubt the expectation of immediate changes in the liturgy, and the knowledge that some of the bishops were leaders in that movement, had an unsettling effect, adapted to encourage irregularities.  At all events we hear little more of it, when the agitation in favour of comprehension had ceased.  There was often a lax observance of the rubrics;[1135] but there appear to be no complaints of any serious omissions, until three or four of the Arian and semi-Arian clergy ventured, not only to leave out the Athanasian Creed, but to alter the doxologies,[1136] and to pass over the second and third petitions of the Litany.[1137]

The Athanasian Creed, however, might fairly be said to stand on a somewhat different footing.  If it had been a pain and a stumbling block only to those who had adopted Whiston’s opinions about the Trinity, men to whom the ordinary prayers could not fail to give offence, it would have been clear that such persons had no standing-ground in the ministry of the Church of England.  But the case was notoriously otherwise.  Persons who have not the least inclination to adopt heterodox opinions, may most reasonably object to the use in public worship of elaborate scholastic definitions on questions of acknowledged mystery.  Those clergymen, therefore, whether in the eighteenth or in the nineteenth century, who have been accustomed to neglect the rubric which prescribes the use of this Creed on certain days, might feel reasonably justified in so doing, on the tacit understanding that, at the demand of the bishop they should either read the formula, notwithstanding their general dislike to it, or give up their office in the Church.  No doubt it was quite as often omitted in the last century as in our own;[1138] and in George III.’s time, even if a desire had existed to enforce its use, there would have been the more difficulty in doing so from its having been forbidden in the King’s Chapel.[1139]

The habit of reading continuously, as parts of one service, Morning Prayer, the Litany, and part of the office for the Communion, had hardly become fixed at the commencement of the century.  John Johnson,[1140] writing in 1709, said it was an innovation.  The old custom had been to have, on Sundays and holy days, prayers at six, and the Litany at nine, followed after a few minutes’ interval by the Communion service.  Even in Charles I.’s time they had often become joined, as a concession to the later hours that were gradually gaining ground, or, as Heylin expressed it, ‘because of the sloth of the people.’  But ’long after the Restoration’ the distinction was maintained in some places, as in the Cathedrals of Canterbury and Worcester.  And throughout the last century, ‘Second Service’ was a name in common general use for the Communion office.[1141]