DOST THOU LOVE THY WIFE?
[CHURCH OF ENGLAND.]
The new weeks preparation for a worthy receiving of the Lord’s Supper, as recommended and appointed by the Church of England; consisting of meditations and prayers for the morning and evening of every day of the week: with forms of examination and confession of sins and a companion at the altar … also meditations to enable us to live well after receiving the Holy Sacrament …
London, printed from the edition of the late Edwd. Wickstead, for T. Wilson and R. Spence, York, [c. 1780-1800?].
[bound with:]
[—.] The new week’s preparation for a worthy receiving of the Lord’s Supper, as appointed and practised by the Church of England; part the second: consisting of meditations, prayers, and hymns … with a form of daily self examination … London, printed from the edition of the late Edw. Wickstead for A. Millar, W. Law and R. Cater, and for Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, York, 1793.
2 parts in 1 vol., 12mo, pp. [2], vi, 148, with engraved title and frontispiece; [2], 144, with engraved frontispiece; some light marks, a little marginal damp staining to second work; overall good in contemporary red morocco, attractive roll-tooled gilt panel to covers with cornerpieces, spine gilt in compartments, gilt board edges and turn-ins, edges gilt, marbled endpapers; some wear to spine, joints and corners; ‘K. Palmer’ tooled in gilt to upper cover.
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The new weeks preparation for a worthy receiving of the Lord’s Supper, as recommended and appointed by the Church of England; consisting of meditations and prayers for the morning and evening of every day of the week: with forms of examination and confession of sins and a companion at the altar … also meditations to enable us to live well after receiving the Holy Sacrament …
An attractive copy of two later editions of these collections of prayers, hymns, meditations, and self-examinations, with a focus on Holy Communion.
The prefaces are particularly scathing of a similar earlier work published by Samuel Keble, describing its language as ‘fitter for a sensual lover than a worshipper of the all pure, and all-knowing God’, and as partly ‘taken out of a Popish book’. The ‘examinations’ include one for a husband, asking ‘Dost thou love thy wife, and shew it in a kind, tender, and gentle behaviour towards her? Art thou faithful to her bed?’, while the prayers include one for ‘taking physic’ (‘Oh! give thy blessing to these means now used for my recovery’). The second part includes a meditation on ‘presumptuous thoughts’ (‘the enemy had almost filled me with presumptuous thoughts of my own merits’).
The opening frontispiece shows a lady kneeling in prayer before an open book, light from the window shining upon her, with the trappings of wealth strewn upon the floor and book-lined shelves behind (including a copy of the Bible). The frontispiece to the second part depicts the Last Supper.
ESTC T300994; the second part apparently not in ESTC.
