Edward Reynolds
Bishop of Norwich and author of the BCP General Thanksgiving.
Edward Reynolds was an Anglican churchman who lived through the English Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration of the monarchy. He served as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford during the Commonwealth and was made Bishop of Norwich in 1661 after the Restoration. He composed the General Thanksgiving for the 1662 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, where it remains as one of the most admired pieces of English liturgical prose. Unlike most of the BCP, which Thomas Cranmer translated from medieval Latin sources, the General Thanksgiving is an original 17th-century English composition. Its phrase "not only with our lips, but in our lives" became one of the most quoted lines in the entire Prayer Book and a defining expression of the Anglican understanding of Christian gratitude.