This magisterial book examines the changing nature of Christian worship from the earliest years of the New Testament to the liquid modern world. Discounting any notion of an idealized vision of past which each generation seeks to recreate, this groundbreaking study shows that the nature of worship has always involved compromise with public life and has borrowed from the drama of the theatre. It traces how worship evolved and changed through the great east-west divide, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century reaction to it. George Guiver"s expertise is as a forensic detective, discovering in the basic practices and customs of ordinary people going about their prayer in church and alone, a vast body of liturgical DNA. He provides us with tools with which to discover the past and question common assumptions and presuppositions about worship today.