Q: I hope you can help me in my research. I am trying to find out what “generally” meant when this sentence was added to the Book of Common Prayer in 1604: “Two only, as generally necessary to salvation; that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.” Is this saying the two sacraments are usually necessary, or universally necessary?
A: Here’s how that passage appeared in 1604, when John Overall, Dean of St. Paul’s, added it to the children’s catechism in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer:
“Queſtion. How many Sacraments hath Chriſt ordained in his Church?
“Anſwere. Two onely as generally neceſſary to ſaluation, that is to ſay, Baptiſme, and the Supper of the Lord [Communion].”
(The letter “ſ,” or long “s,” an obsolete form of the lowercase “s,” appears throughout the passage, and “u” is pronounced as “v”—as in “ſaluation,” an old spelling of “salvation.”)
The adverb “generally” had three meanings in the early 1600s: (1) broadly speaking, (2) usually, and (3) universally. In fact, it had had those meanings since the 1300s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but the third sense is now considered archaic.
As for your question, we haven’t been able to find any record of an explanation by Overall or a contemporary as to which sense of “generally” was intended in the catechism.
Later Anglican writers have said “generally” is used in its “universal” sense in the catechism. Arthur W. Robinson, for example, has this explanation of the usage in The Church Catechism Explained (1895):
“ ‘Generally necessary’: i.e. universally necessary, necessary for all alike: obligatory in a way in which, for example, Holy Orders or Matrimony could not be said to be.”
The OED says the adverb “generally” was formed within English by adding the “-ly” suffix to the adjective “general.” The adjective, in turn, was ultimately derived from the Latin adjective generalis, which the OED defines as “common to the whole of a class or kind, generic, forming a group or class, of universal application.”
(In a Dec. 10, 2013 post about the phrase “in general,” we discuss the etymology of the word “general” in more detail.)
Getting back to your question, we think Overall, who delivered lectures in Latin as a professor of divinity at Cambridge, is likely to have intended “generally” in its “universal” sense, derived from the Latin adjective generalis. (The Latin adverb is generaliter.)
In fact, Overall, a High Church traditionalist, “had spoken Latin so long it was troublesome to him to speak English in a continued Oration” when he preached before Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas Fuller writes in The History of the Worthies of England (1662).
As for the three original senses of “generally” in English, all of them first appeared in Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340), a Middle English translation by Michel of Northgate of a French devotional guide, La Somme des Vices et des Vertus (1279), by Laurent du Bois. Here are the meanings, and their earliest citations:
1) broadly speaking: “Nou ich þe habbe aboue yssewed generalliche þe dingneté and þe worþ and þe guodnesse of uirtu and of charité” (“Now I have above generally shown the dignity and the worth and the goodness of virtue and of charity”).
(2) usually: “ ‘Zel al þet þou hest and yef hit þe poure,’ þet is þe uirtue þet þe holy writinge ret more generalliche” (“ ‘Sell all that you have and give it to the poor,’ that is the virtue that holy scripture teaches more generally”).
(3) universally: “Voulhede generalliche is ine eche zenne, vor no zenne ne is wyþoute uoulhede” (“Wickedness generally is in each sin, for no sin is indeed without wickedness”).
Interestingly, the Middle English title of the devotional manual mentioned above, Ayenbite of Inwyt, appears five times, altered a bit, in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).
The title literally means the “again-biting of inner wit,” but it’s usually translated as “Remorse of Conscience.” Joyce uses it in the sense of “conscience,” as in this example: “They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience.”
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