A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer Part 14

_Answer_. Amen.

_Minister_. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness'

sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

_Answer_. Amen.

_Minister_.

Hear also what the voice from heaven saith. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.

_Answer_.

Even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.

_Minister_.

Let us pray.

Almighty and Eternal G.o.d, to whom is never any prayer made without hope of mercy; Bow thine ear, we beseech thee, to our supplications, and in the country of peace and rest cause us to be made partners with thy holy servants; through Jesus Christ our Lord. _Amen_.[90]

_Then shall be said the Collect for the Day and, unless the Holy Communion is immediately to follow, such other prayer or prayers, taken out of this Book, as the Minister shall think proper_.

APPENDIX:

_SERMONS BEFORE AND AFTER_.

APPENDIX.

PERMANENT AND VARIABLE CHARACTERISTICS OP THE PRAYER BOOK.

A SERMON PREACHED IN ST. STEPHEN'S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BISHOP WHITE PRAYER BOOK SOCIETY, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1878.

One generation pa.s.seth away; and another generation cometh.--Eccles.

i.4.

Against the background of this sombre fact of change, whatever there is in life that is stable stands out with a sharpness that compels notice. Just because the world is so full of variableness, our hearts' affections fasten with the tighter grip upon anything that seems to have the guarantees of permanence. The Book of Common Prayer appeals to us on this score, precisely as the Bible, in its larger measure, does: it is the book of many generations, not of one, and there is "the hiding of its power." We have received the Prayer Book from the generations that are gone; we purpose handing it on when "another generation cometh"; we hold it for the use and blessing of the generation which now is.

Our thoughts about the book, therefore, if we would have the thinking rightly done, must take hold upon the past, the present, and the future, a breadth of topic covered well enough perhaps by this phrase, The Permanent and the Variable Characteristics of the Prayer Book.

I make no apology for asking you to take up the subject in so grave a temper. Now, for more than three hundred years, the Common Prayer has been the manual of wors.h.i.+p in use with the greater number of the people of that race which, meanwhile, in the providence of G.o.d, has been growing up to be the leading power on earth. Everywhere the English language seems to be going forth conquering and to conquer, and whithersoever it penetrates it carries with it the letters and the social traditions of a people whose character has been largely moulded by the influences of the Prayer Book. Africans, Indians, Hindoos are to-day, even in their heathenism, feeling the effects of waves of movement which throb from this centre. Men in authority, the world over, are living out, with more or less of consistency and thoroughness, those convictions about our duty toward G.o.d, and our duty toward our neighbor, which were early inwrought into their consciences through the instrumentality of these venerable forms. Surely no one can afford to think or speak otherwise than most seriously and carefully with regard to a book which has behind it a history so worthy, so rich, so pregnant with promise for the future.

Look first, then, at the power which the Prayer Book draws from its affiliations with the past. It is a common remark, so common as to be commonplace, that our liturgy owes its excellence to the fact of its not having been the composition or compilation of any one man. So much is evident enough upon the face of it: for a form of wors.h.i.+p devised off-hand by an individual, or even put together by a committee sitting around a table, could scarcely be wholly satisfactory to any save the maker or the makers of it. But it is more to the purpose to observe that not only is the Prayer Book not the result of any one man's or any one committee's labors; it is not the work even of any one generation, or of any one age.

The men who gradually put the Prayer Book into what is substantially its present shape, in the days of Edward VI. and of Elizabeth, were no more the makers of the Prayer Book than were the men who, in a later reign, set forth what we call "the authorized version" of the Holy Scriptures, the first translators of the Bible. In both cases the work done was a work of review and revision. A much more severe review, a vastly more sweeping revision in the case of the Prayer Book than in the case of the Bible, I grant; but still, mainly a work of review and revision after all. "Continuity," that characteristic so precious in the eye of modern science, continuity marked the whole process.

The first Prayer Book of the Reformed Church of England was a condensed, simplified, and purified combination of formularies of wors.h.i.+p already in use in the National Church. A certain amount of new material, some of it home-made, some of it drawn from foreign sources, was added; but the great bulk of the new service-book had been contained in one or other of the older manuals. The Reformers did but clip and prune, with that exquisite taste and judgment which belong by tradition to English gardeners, the overgrowth and rank luxuriance of a too long neglected, "careless-ordered" garden. But whence came the earlier formularies themselves, from which Cranmer and the rest quarried the stone for the new building?--to change the metaphor as Paul, you remember, does so suddenly from husbandry to architecture.[91]

Whence came Missal, and Breviary, and Book of Offices--the best portions of which were merged in the English Common Prayer?

From the far past; the Missal from those primitive liturgies or communion services, some of which we trace back with certainty to the later portion of the ante-Niceneage, and by not unreasonable conjecture to the edge of apostolic days; the Breviary or daily prayers from the times when Christians first took up community life; the Offices from periods of uncertain date all along the track of previous Church history. But what advantage, asks someone full of the modern spirit, what advantage has the Common Prayer in that it can trace a genealogy running up through ages of such uncertain reputation? Have we not been accustomed to regard those times as hopelessly corrupt, impenetrably dark, universally superst.i.tious? Ought we not to be mortified, rather than gratified, to learn that from the pit of so mouldy a past our book of prayer was digged? Would not a brand-new liturgy, modernized expressly to meet the needs of nineteenth century culture, with all the old English idioms displaced, every rough corner smoothed and every crooked place made straight--would not that be something far worthier our respect, better ent.i.tled to our allegiance, than this book full of far-away echoes, and faint bell-notes from a half-forgotten past?

Yes, if modern man were only modern man and nothing more, such reasoning would be extremely cogent. But what if modern man be really, not the mere creature of the century in which he lives, but the gathered sum and product of all that has preceded him in history? What if you and I, from the very fact that we are living now, have in the dim groundwork of our nature something that would not have been there had we lived one, three, twelve hundred years ago? What if there be such a thing as c.u.mulative acquirement for the race of men, so that a new generation starts with an available capital of a.s.sociations and ideas of which the generation last preceding it owned but a part? Take such words as "feudalism," "the Crusades," "the Renaissance," "the printing press," consider how much they mean to us, and then remember that to a man of the third century they would have been empty sounds conveying absolutely no meaning. What all this goes to show is that human nature is a map which is continually unrolling. To say that the entirety of it lies between the two meridians that bound the particular tract in which our own little life happens to be cast is stupid. The whole great past belongs to us--river and island, ocean, forest, continent, all are ours. You and the man in armor, you and the Venetian merchant, you and the cowled monk have something, be it ever so little, something in common. That which was in the foreground of their life is now in the background or in the middle distance of yours. It has become a part of you.[92]

So, then, if we would have a liturgy that shall speak to our whole nature, and not to a mere fraction of it, it must be a liturgy full of voices sounding out of the past. There must be reminders and suggestions in it of all the great epochs of the Church's story.

Yes, echoes even from those very ages which we call dark (perhaps as much because we are in the dark about them as on account of any special blackness attaching to the times themselves), some echoes even from them may have a rightful place in the wors.h.i.+p which is to call out responsively all that is in the heart of the most modern of modern men.

As there were heroes before Agamemnon, so were there holy and humble men of heart before Cranmer and Luther, yes, and before Jerome and Augustine. If any cry that ever went up from any one of them out of the depths of that nature which they share with us and we with them, if any breath of supplication, any moan of penitence, any shout of victory that issued from their lips has made out to survive the noise and tumult of intervening times, it has earned by its very persistency of tone a _prima facie_ t.i.tle to be put into the Prayer Book of to-day.[93] And this is why a prayer book may survive the wreck of many systems of theology. A prayer book holds the utterance of our needs; a theological system is the embodiment of our thoughts.

Now our thoughts about things divine are painfully fallible and liable to change with change of times; but a want which is genuinely and entirely human is a permanent fact; the great needs of the soul never grow obsolete, and though the language in which the lips shall clothe the heart's desire may alter, as tastes alter, yet the substance of the prayer abides, and in some happy instances the form also abides.

To an eye that looks wisely and lovingly on such sights, there is the same keen sense of enjoyment in finding here and there in the Prayer Book suggestions of forgotten customs, reminders of famous persons and events, that there is in detecting in the masonry of an old castle or minster tell-tale stones which betray the different ages, the "sundry times and divers manners" which the fabric represents. Who, for instance, that has traced the history of that apostolic ordinance, "the kiss of peace," down through the liturgical changes and revolutions of eighteen hundred years, can fail to be interested in finding in a single clause of one of the exhortations of our communion service that which corresponds to the literal kiss of primitive times, as well as to the petrified symbol of the original reality, the silver, ivory, or wooden "osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday,"

a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again, the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brus.h.i.+ng these away as so much tras.h.!.+ They are not trash, they are way marks that tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings, such as "_De Profundis_" and "_Miserere_," still possess such a.s.sociations for ourselves. There was a time when very many more of them meant to men now dead and gone as much as "Rock of Ages,"

or "Sun of my Soul," or "Lead, kindly Light," can mean to you or me.[95]

Then, too, the monuments of specially revered heroes of the faith that dot the paths of the Common Prayer, how precious they are! We like to think of Ambrose as speaking to us in the lofty sentences of the _Te Deum_. It is pleasant to a.s.sociate Chrysostom with the prayer that bears his name, and to know that he who swayed the city's mult.i.tude still prized the Master's promise to the "two or three gathered together" in his name. So also, in our American Book, Jeremy Taylor, the modern Chrysostom, meets us in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, in that solemn prayer addressed to Him "whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered."

All these things help to make the Prayer Book the large-hearted, wide-minded book we all of us feel it to be, so like a friend whom we revere because he is kindly in his tone, generous in his judgments, quick to understand us at every point.

So much for the past of the Prayer Book. We have touched it in no image-breaking mood, but with reverence. "One generation pa.s.seth away, another generation cometh," and it has been the peculiar felicity of this book to stand

A link among the days, to knit The generations each to each.

We pa.s.s on to consider the present usefulness of the Prayer Book and the possibility of extending that usefulness in the future.

And now I shall speak wholly as an American to Americans, not because the destinies of the Prayer Book in the New World are the more important, though such may in the end turn out to be the fact, but simply because we are at home here and know our own wants and wishes, our own liabilities and opportunities, far better than we can possibly know those of other people. As a Church we have always tied ourselves too slavishly to English precedent. Our vine is greatly in danger of continuing merely a potted ivy, an indoor exotic. The past of the Common Prayer we cannot disconnect from England, but its present and its future belong in part at least to us, and it is in this light that we are bound as American Churchmen to study them. Let us agree, then, that the usefulness of the book here and now lies largely in the moulding and formative influence which it is quietly exerting, not only on the religion of those who use it, but also largely on the religion of the far greater number who publicly use it not. It has interested me, as it would interest almost anyone, to learn how many prayer books our booksellers supply to Christian people who are not Churchmen.

Evidently the book is in use as a private manual with thousands, who own no open allegiance to the Protestant Episcopal Church. They keep it on the devotional shelf midway between Thomas a Kempis and the Pilgrim's Progress, finding it a sort of interpreter of the one to the other, and possessed of a certain flavor differencing it from both. This is a happy augury for the future. Much latent heat is generating which shall yet warm up the dullness of the land.

The seed-grain of the Common Prayer will not lie unproductive in those forgotten furrows. The fitness of such a system of wors.h.i.+p as this to counteract some of the flagrant evils of our popular religion can scarcely fail to commend it to the minds of those who thus un.o.bserved and, "as it were in secret," read and ponder.

Much of our American piety, fervid as it is, shows confessedly a feverish, intermittent character which needs just such a tonic as the Prayer Book provides in what Keble happily called its "sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion."

Then, too, there is the constantly increasing interest which it is such a pleasure to observe among Christians of all names in the order of the ritual year, in Christmas and Easter, Lent and Good-Friday--who can tell how much of this may not be due to the leavening influence of the Prayer Book, over and above what is effected by the public services of the Church? "I wonder," said a famous revivalist to a friend, a clergyman of our Church, "I wonder if you Episcopalians know what a good thing you have in that year of yours. Why don't you use it more?"

And true enough, why do we not? That we might learn to do so was a wish very near to the heart of that holy and true man who, if anyone, deserves the t.i.tle of the saint among our priests, the late Dr. Muhlenberg, the man who twenty-five years ago headed the not wholly abortive movement known as the "Memorial."[96] One fruit of that movement is perhaps to be seen in the earnest desire now prevalent throughout the Church to see the scope of the Prayer Book's influence enlarged. In General Conventions and Church Congresses nowadays no topic excites greater interest than the question how better to adapt the services of the Church to the present needs and special conditions of all cla.s.ses of the population. To be sure, the apparent impotence of the governing body to find or furnish any lawful way of relief is a little discouraging, but it is something to see an almost universal a.s.sent given in terms, to the proposition that relief ought to be had. What we have to fear is that during the long delay which puts off the only proper and regular method of giving more elasticity to the services, there may spring up a generation of Churchmen from whose minds the idea of obligation to law in matters of ritual observance will have faded out altogether.

There is a conservatism so conservative that it will stand by and see a building tumble down rather than lay a sacrilegious hand on a single stone, will see dam and mill and village all swept away sooner than lift the flash-boards that keep the superabundant water from coming safely down. It is among the things possible, that for lack of readjustment and timely adaptation of the laws regulating wors.h.i.+p, just such a fate may befall our whole liturgical fabric.

The plausible theory of "the rubric of common sense," about which we have heard so much, a theory good within limitations, is threatening, by the wholesale application it receives, presently to annul all other rubrics whatsoever. When, by this process, uniformity and even similarity shall have been utterly abolished, when it shall have become impossible for one to know beforehand of a Sunday whether he is going to ma.s.s, or to meeting, or to church, the inquiry will be in order, What has conservatism of this sort really conserved?

"The personal liberty of the officiating clergyman," I fear will be the only answer; certainly not, "The liberty of the wors.h.i.+pping congregation." The straight and only honest way out of our embarra.s.sment will, some day or other, be found, I dare not believe very soon, in a careful, loving, fair-minded revision of the formularies; a revision undertaken, not for the purpose of giving victory to one theological party rather than to another, or of changing in any degree the doctrinal teaching of the Church, but solely and wholly with a view to enriching, amplifying, and making more available the liturgical treasures of the book.

"One generation pa.s.seth away, another generation cometh." As we have seen in these words an argument in favor of not breaking with the past, so let them also speak to us of our plain duty to the present. True, the great needs are, as I have said, common alike to all the generations, to those that pa.s.s and those that come; but the lesser needs are variable, and unless we are prepared to take the ground that because "lesser" they maybe disregarded altogether, we are bound, with the changed times, to provide for the new wants new satisfactions. Take, simply by way of ill.u.s.tration, the need we stand in of an appropriate form of third service for use on Sundays in city churches, when Morning and Evening Prayer have been already said according to the prescribed order.

Why have we no such service?

Simply because no such need existed in our American cities when the Prayer Book, as we have it now, was taking shape, at the close of the last century. Just as no form for the administration of Adult Baptism was put into Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book, simply because the usage of Infant Baptism was universal in that day, and there were no unbaptized adults; but such service was inserted at the Restoration to meet the need that had sprung up under the Puritan regime; so was it unnecessary in Bishop White's day to provide for a form of service which has only become practicable and desirable since modern discovery has enabled us to make the public streets almost as safe at night as in the daytime, and church-going as easy by gaslight as by sunlight.

Now it is perfectly possible, of course, under the present order of things, and with no change in rubric or canon law, for any clergyman to provide an additional service, to provide it in the form of a mosaic made up of bits of the liturgy wrenched out of their proper places, and so irregularly put together that no stranger among the wors.h.i.+ppers can possibly, with the book in hand, thread his way among its intricacies.