Hobart’s Companion for the Altar is among the most widely circulated works of American Anglican devotion. First issued in 1804 by the New-York printer Peter A. Mesier, when its author was twenty-nine years old and an Assistant Minister of Trinity Church, it was reprinted nearly every year until the Civil War and remained on the shelves of pious Episcopalian households well into the twentieth century. The book is short, complete in itself, and works on the simple plan of providing for the communicant a fortnight’s worth of structured devotion: meditations and prayers for the week before the reception of the Holy Communion, devotions for the day itself, and a discipline of thanksgiving for the week after.
It is not a controversial book. It says little about the metaphysics of the Eucharist beyond the language of the Book of Common Prayer, and it is not interested in the disputes that had divided English Anglicans in the seventeenth century or that would divide American Anglicans in the nineteenth. Its concern is practical. Hobart was a parish priest before he was a controversialist, and the Companion is the work of a man who has watched his parishioners come and go from the altar rail and has formed a clear idea of what they need.
What they need, in his view, is a sustained framing of attention. The Eucharist, for Hobart, is the centre of the Christian’s spiritual life; everything else converges on it and flows from it. The Companion therefore is not designed to be read once and put down. It is designed to be returned to, week after week, until its meditations have become the natural shape of the reader’s interior preparation. In this it owes a great deal to the older English manuals of devotion — one hears in it the cadences of Thomas Comber and William Beveridge — but the directness of its address, and its quiet refusal to be ornamental, are characteristically Hobart’s own.
The volume includes, in addition to the meditations and prayers proper, Hobart’s reprinting of the 1789 American Communion Office with his interleaved devotional ejaculations at every major moment of the liturgy; a substantial set of forms for daily devotion drawn largely from Bishop Jeremy Taylor and Bishop Lancelot Andrewes; thematic directions to the Collects of the Book of Common Prayer and to the Psalms; the Whole Book of Psalms digested by occasion; and a closing note on the testimony of the primitive Fathers to apostolic episcopacy.
Our edition follows the text of the 1804 first edition (Mesier), digitised from the copy held in the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary. The sample PDF linked above is the complete draft volume — 256 pages, all chapters typeset; final editorial proof against the page-images is the only step remaining before commercial printing.