If Hobart’s first two devotional volumes are concerned with the great occasions of the Christian year and the central act of Christian worship, his Christian’s Manual of Faith and Devotion attends to the ordinary day. Issued in 1814, when Hobart was in the early years of his episcopate, the Manual offers a complete programme of household devotion: morning and evening offices adapted from the Book of Common Prayer, prayers for occasions of joy and of trouble, devotions for the sick, and a doctrinal catechism summarising the essentials of the faith.
Less celebrated than the two Companions, the Manual is in some ways the most useful of the three. It is the book the layman would actually keep on his bedside table, the volume he would turn to when he wished to pray and did not know how to begin. Its design is deliberately modest: no elaborate set-pieces, no extended meditations, but the steady provision of forms that allow a Christian household to keep the discipline of prayer through the unspectacular days that fill the ordinary year.
With Volumes I and II, this completes the devotional triptych at the heart of Hobart’s lay ministry.