Ten years have passed since Professor David Martin edited PN Review 13, Crisis for Cranmer and King James, a compilation of essays, testimonials and petitions to Synod. PNR 13 initiated what now appears to have been the last major debate (in and outside the Church of England) about the place of Cranmer's prayerbook and the Authorised Version of the Bible in our spiritual and general culture. There were leaders in The Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph and dozens of articles in the press. Some members of Synod condemned the "Jews and atheists" who arrogated unto themselves the right to comment on the language of worship in a church of which they were not members, even though that Church was the established Church of England.

In 1976 Carcanet Press published three massive anthologies: The English Sermon, covering the period from 1550 to 1850. This project alerted me, a late-comer to the Anglican communion, to the wealth of the Anglican tradition, a wealth to which I had hardly been introduced at school or at University. This is why I responded to David Martin's approach, supported by my fellow editors Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson.

The campaign we waged had its effect no doubt within the Church, though not the effect we hoped. It now seems to me that in focusing on the Anglican Prayer Book and the Authorised Version (with glances at Hymns Ancient and Modern) we miscalculated, as if in defending the English syllabus against radical revisionists one focussed exclusively on Shakespeare and Milton. We ought to have insisted on a wider context, even if to have done so had complicated the polemic of our campaign.

Readers browsing along the shelves devoted to English Literature in most libraries may find sermons by Donne, possibly by Andrewes, Herbert, Swift, Sterne and Newman; but the work of Cranmer, Latimer, Hooker, Laud, Taylor, Barrow, South, Ken, Berkeley, Butler, Wesley, Froude, Keble or Pusey, to name a few, will be shelved elsewhere, without cross-reference. Anyone who has tried to build up a personal library of the classic Anglican authors knows what a painful task it is, involving endless exploration of second-hand and antiquarian catalogues and bookshops. Modern and reprint editions scarcely exist.

University English departments for the most part pay only cursory attention to the sermon as a genre, and the hymn is a very poor poetic cousin in seminar rooms. As for major essays and meditations - Ecclesiastical Polity for instance, Holy Living and Holy Dying, or On the Constitution of the Church and State - they may be alluded to en passant. More students of English read snippets from Euphues than paragraphs of Hooker.

Yet the Anglican writers are central to the literary tradition (quite apart from their contextual and historical pertinence), had an enabling influence on their peers and successors, and remain wonderfully readable. Their omission from the syllabus is as serious as the omission of the eighteenth century would be. But in a secular age, when artisan writers are studied as sociological phenomena and the syllabus is adjusted to reflect greater gender parity, it is unlikely - for reasons of ideology, perhaps, or timetable, or because teachers are uninformed and students reluctant - that the sermon will find a place among the newly-admissible genre.

It would seem that the reinstatement of the best of the Anglican writers on the syllabus is the only recourse for those who believe that the language of the historical liturgy, the Authorised Version of the Bible and Hymns Ancient and Modern should be made accessible to all English people. And not only at tertiary level. Little in our prose tradition is more direct, plain and serviceable than the language of Latimer's "Sermon of the Plough", more lucid than Hare's "Holy Branches", more humane than Barrow's "Of a Peaceable Temper and Carriage". Sermons, hymns, meditations, expository essays - this abundance, neglected since the War, omitted from the English syllabus since it was first established by men of secular vision earlier this century, is the context which validates the cultural arguments for the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version. They provide, in a sense, the native patristics for those "twin peaks" of our literature, elucidating their language, vitally informed by and informing them.

Most English writers before our own time had their first experience of formal language in church, hearing the lessons, singing the hymns, enduring the sermons. Those special, common arrangements of words were heard in one age by Herbert, in another by Johnson, by Cowper, by Coleridge, by Arnold, by Eliot, by Auden. The implications and emphases altered; each writer established a different relation with them. But they remained a common ground. Not to hear that chord in the cadences and thrifty allusions of Dickens, for example, or of Mrs Gaskell, is to miss a dimension of their rhetoric and irony. They are a crucial chord in most of our literature since the seventeenth century.

It is not possible, this late in the day, to play that chord with the expectation that it will be audible to most readers. And yet by advocating something more than the retention of the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version in Anglican worship, by advocating the study at secondary and tertiary level of the classics of Anglican literature, as part of any English student's necessary patrimony, certain fundamental familiarities, certain common skills of sensibility may be recreated and retained, certain resources strengthened. It is pointless to speak of "preserving" traditions which have by and large been broken; but they can be recognised and made serviceable in new ways.

What is necessary is the provision of accessible texts, of recorded readings of the great sermons and anthologies of the major hymnodists. "Why spit on your luck?" Auden asked, when fundamental liturgical reform began in England. The luck still belongs to English literature. It is time that our weary institutions of learning turned their attention to it, this light that might grace their discipline, and not only retrospectively.