A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer Part 4

Nowhere in this country, for instance, has the Church had a better opportunity to show what it could do for American people than in the city of Lowell, where cotton spinning had its first large development. It was a virgin soil: the Episcopal Church, as rarely happens, was earliest on the ground: and not only so, but it enjoyed for some years the friendly protection of the proprietors of the new settlement, almost a religious monopoly--was, in fact, an ecclesiastical preserve. Moreover, this beginning antedated the Irish occupation by many years, at least so far as skilled labor was concerned, for during a considerable period the operatives in the mills were of native New England stock, the best possible material to be made over into churchmen and churchwomen. And yet notwithstanding all this, and notwithstanding the patient and unintermitted toil through more than fifty years of perhaps the most laborious parish priest on the American clergy list, the Episcopal Church has to-day but a comparatively slender hold upon the affections and loyalty of the people of this largest of the manufacturing cities of New England.

A similar failure to "reach the ma.s.ses" betrays itself in Worcester and Fall River, the two cities of like character that come next in order of population, for in the former of these last named places only about two per cent, of the inhabitants have affiliations of any sort with the Episcopal Church.

It was considerations of this sort, backed perhaps by memories of the ringing appeal sounded three years before at Boston by the Bishop of Connecticut, that moved the Convention to interpret as something better than a bit of sentimentalism the invitation to look the times in the face, and give the new century its infant baptism.

But besides all this there pressed upon the mind of bishops and deputies a c.u.mulative argument of a wholly different sort. The demand for revision seemed to be closing in upon the Church on converging lines. It was plain that, before long, hands of change must necessarily be laid upon certain semi-detached portions of the Prayer Book. There was the New Lectionary, for example, that would presently be knocking for hospitable reception within the covers, and the old Easter Tables, as they now stand, could not, it was observed, last very much longer. A new book, in the publisher's sense of that term, would soon have to be made. The sanct.i.ty of stereotype plates must be disturbed. Moreover, here was an admirable opportunity to settle the wrangle, now of nine years' standing, over the best way of bringing to pa.s.s shortened services for week-day use. Add to this the fact that the intrinsic weakness of the driblet method of revision[9] had been made so abundantly plain that even its former friends wisely refrained from all attempt to urge it, and our summing up of probable motives becomes approximately complete.

II. As to the measure of authority conferred on, and scope allowed to the Committee of Twenty-one, it is possible to speak with more definiteness.

A precisian might of course, were he so disposed, take up the ground that the report of the Committee when made ought to be monosyllabic, "Yes" or "No." The wording of the resolution admits of such a construction beyond a doubt; the Joint Committee was requested to consider and report whether, etc., etc. But no one who listened to the debate on the resolution could have been left in uncertainty as to the real _animus_ of the measure. The thing intended to be authorized was an experimental review, with implied reference to a limited revision at some time future, in case the fruits of the review should commend themselves to the mind of the Church.

A distinction must be drawn between revision and review. Revision implies review as an antecedent step, but review is by no means necessarily followed by revision. The English book was reviewed and revised in 1662; it was reviewed but not revised in 1689. Review is tentative and advisory; revision is authoritative and final. In the present instance not an atom of power to effect binding change has been conveyed. No authority has been given to anybody to touch a line or a letter of the Prayer Book save in the way of suggestion and recommendation. Responsible action has been held wholly in reserve.

Moreover, even the pathway of review was most scrupulously hedged.

Applying to the resolution the legal maxim, _expressio unius est exclusio alterius_, one sees at a glance that doctrinal change is a matter left wholly on one side. The two points to which the Committee is instructed to bend all its studies are "liturgical enrichment" and "increased flexibility of use." Whatsoever is more than these is irrelevant. Accurate distinguishment between such "enrichments" as have and such as have not a doctrinal bearing is, no doubt, a delicate point, and must be set down among the difficulties to be encountered. As such it will be considered further on. For the present the fact to be noted is that the authorized reviewers are both in honor and in duty bound to keep themselves absolutely clear of controversial bias. The movement is not a movement to alter in any slightest respect the dogmatic teaching of the Church, not a movement to unsettle foundations, not a movement toward disowning or repudiating our past, but simply and only an endeavor to make the Common Prayer, if possible (and we are far from being sure, as yet, that it is possible), a better thing of its kind, more comprehensive, more elastic, more readily responsive to the demands of all occasions and the needs of "all sorts and conditions of men." Some who are deeply persuaded that only by doctrinal revision in one direction or another can the Prayer Book be made thoroughly to commend itself to the heart and mind of the American people will esteem the measure of change above indicated not worth the effort indispensable to the attainment of it. Be it so; other some there are who do think the attempt well advised and who are willing to waive their own pet notions as to possible doctrinal improvements of the book for the sake of securing a _consensus_ upon certain great practical improvements which come within the range of things attainable.

Certain it is that any attempt of a body of reviewers like this to disturb, even by "shadowed hint," the existing doctrinal settlement under which we are living together, would be resented by the whole Church.

There are divines among us who in the interest of a more sharply defined orthodoxy are conscientiously bent upon securing the reintroduction among our formularies of the so-called Athanasian Creed.

There are others who consider that a more damaging blow at the catholicity of our dogmatic position as a Church could scarcely be dealt.

Again, there are theologians who account the Prayer Book to be so thoroughly saturated in all its parts with the sacramental idea, that they would account it not only a piece of far-seeing statesmans.h.i.+p, but also a perfectly safe procedure to allow those who chose to do so to thank G.o.d after a child's baptism for the simple fact that he had thereby been "grafted into the body of Christ's Church."

But over against these stand a much larger number who think nothing of the sort, and who would put up with the liturgical shortcomings of the Prayer Book, go without "enrichments" for a thousand years, rather than see the single word "regenerate"

dropped out of the post-baptismal office.

Sensible men not a few are to be found who hold that the incoming tide of host-wors.h.i.+p with which, as they conceive, our reformed Church is threatened can never be stayed unless some carefully contrived definition inserted in the Prayer Book shall make impossible this subtile and refined species of idolatry. But men no whit less sensible laugh them in the face, pointing to the "black rubric" and its history as evidence that between the admitted doctrine of the real presence and the disallowed tenet of transubstantiation no impervious barrier of words can possibly be run.

These ill.u.s.trations of probable divergence in opinion, in case the field of doctrine were once entered, might be multiplied. The retranslation of the Nicene Creed and the more accurate punctuation of its sentences; the rendering of the word Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment into its English equivalent of Rest; the abolition of the curious misnomer under which we go on calling x.x.xVIII Articles x.x.xIX; the removal from the Catechism, or else the conversion into mother English of that sad _crux infantum_, the answer to the question, "What desirest thou of G.o.d in this prayer?" are a few examples of less importance than those previously cited; and yet, in the case of the least of them, it is most unlikely that the advocates of change would have the show of hands in their favor, so sensitive is the mind of the Church to anything that looks in the least degree like tampering with the standards of weight and measure, the shekels of the sanctuary.

On the other hand, there are certain manifest and palpable instances of inaccuracy and, more rarely, infelicity of diction which the reviewers might very properly take occasion to amend even though such alterations could not be cla.s.sified by a strict constructionist under either of the two heads "enrichment" and "flexibility." In the masterly Report of the Rev. Dr. T. W. Coit to the Joint Committee appointed by the Convention of 1841 to prepare a Standard Prayer Book,[10] a doc.u.ment of cla.s.sical rank, there is more than one intimation of the hope that future reviewers would be given a larger liberty in this direction than he had himself enjoyed. He chafed, and naturally enough, under the necessity of reprinting in a "standard" book, evident and acknowledged solecisms and blunders.

"We wanted," he says, "to correct one ungrammatical clause in the Consecration Prayer of the Communion Service. It is in the last sentence but one, at its close. It should be, not that he may dwell in them and they in him; but, that he may dwell in us and we in him.

The prayer is made up out of two or three others; and anyone who will examine the parts put together will easily see how the thing was overlooked. A much greater error was overlooked elsewhere, showing that our American compilers were not sufficiently aware of the necessity which requires that the Prayer Book should always be consistent with itself. I allude to something in the office for the Private Baptism of Children. Suppose a clergyman to avail himself of the license given in the Rubric after the certification. He will then be made to talk thus: 'As the Holy Gospel doth witness to our comfort, on this wise--Dost thou in the name of this child,'" etc.[11]

Other cases of evident inaccuracy, besides those referred to by this eminent critic, might be cited, even from the latest Standard Prayer Book, that of 1871. It is hard, for instance, to imagine even the veriest martinet in such matters objecting to the redress of a great wrong done on page 36 of the volume mentioned, where the prayer "to be used at the meetings of Convention" is entered under the general heading, "For malefactors after condemnation." Our ecclesiastical legislators have doubtless, like the rest of us, "erred and strayed" more than once, but to deal out to them such harsh measure as this is cruel.

A strange uncertainty would seem from the Rubric to exist with reference to the limits of the Litany. On page 554 of the Standard Prayer Book, the words, "Here endeth the Litany," occur immediately after the prayer, "We humbly beseech thee, O Father," while on page 31 the same statement is placed immediately after the minor benediction.

These are not faults for which it could ever be worth while to revise a Prayer Book, but they are blemishes of which the revisers of a Prayer Book ought to take note.

It is a graver matter to speak of infelicities of diction in a book so justly famous as the Prayer Book for its pure and wholesome English. Wordsworth's curse on

One who would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave

seems, in the judgment of many, fairly earned by the critic, whoever he may be, who ventures to suggest that in any slightest instance the language of the formularies might have been more happily phrased. But there are spots on the sun. In the prayer already referred to, that for use "at the meetings of Convention," the pet.i.tion, "We beseech thee to be _present_ with the council of thy Church here a.s.sembled in thy name and _presence_" does seem open to the charge of tautology if nothing worse.

It would be well if wherever the word occurs in the Prayer Book in connection with Deity the anthropomorphic plural "ears" could be replaced by the symbolic singular "ear."

Considering also the great evil of having in a formulary of wors.h.i.+p too many things that have to be laboriously explained, it might be well if in the Litany the adjective "sudden," which ever since Hooker's day has given perpetual occasion for cavil, were to yield to "untimely," or some like word more suggestive than "sudden" of the thought clumsily expressed in the "Chapel Liturgy" by the awkward phrase, "death unprepared for."[12]

It must be again remarked that these are not points for the sake of which word-fanciers would be justified in disturbing an existing order of things; they are simply instances of lesser improvements that might very properly accompany larger ones, should larger ones ever be seriously undertaken.

With so many pegs upon which controversies might be hung staring us in the face, can we think of it as at all likely that any considerable number of Churchmen a.s.sembled in committee (to say nothing of Convention) will be able to agree upon a common line of action with reference to an amendment of the formularies?

That is the very point at issue, and how it is to be decided only the event can show. Certainly in the roll of the victories of charity, a favorable result, were it achieved, would stand exceeding high.

This reflection naturally leads up to the inquiry whether there is any special reason to consider the present a happy moment to attempt within the limits already defined a revision of the Prayer Book.

III. The argument for timeliness has been, in part, already stated.

A revision will be timely, if the times imperatively demand it; and the main reasons for thinking that they do are before the reader. Something, however, is still left to be said in evidence that the movement now begun is opportune--not rudely thrust upon the Church. "To everything," saith the preacher, "there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven," and among the categories that follow this statement we find reckoned what answers to liturgical enrichment, for "there is," he observes, "a time to build up."

Fifty years ago a persuasive argument against attempting to amend the Prayer Book, either in text or rubrics, might have been based upon the lack of hands competent to undertake so delicate a task.

Raw material, well adapted to edification, was lying about in blocks, but skilled workmen were scarce. This can hardly be said to-day. Simultaneously with the beginning of the Oxford movement, there naturally sprang up a fresh interest in liturgical studies, an interest which has gone on deepening and widening until in volume and momentum the stream has now probably reached its outer limit.

The convincing citation, "There were giants in those days," with which a late bishop of one of the New England dioceses used to enforce his major premise that wisdom died with Cranmer and his colleagues, no longer satisfies. Probably no period of corresponding length in the whole range of English Church history has shown itself so rich in the fruits of liturgical study as the fifty years that have elapsed since the introduction into the English Parliament of the first Reform Bill.[13] This particular historical landmark is mentioned on account of the close connection of cause and effect between it and the remarkable movement set on foot by Newman, Pusey, Keble, and Froude. To be sure, one of the earliest utterances in the Tracts ran in these words: "Attempts are making to get the Liturgy altered. My dear brethren, I beseech you consider with me whether you ought not resist the alteration of even one jot or t.i.ttle of it."[14]

And yet, notwithstanding this disclaimer, one of the main impulses that lay behind the whole movement represented by the Tracts was an earnest desire to quicken the life of the Church of England in the region of wors.h.i.+p. In the _Table of the Tracts, showing their arrangement according to Subjects_, the "Liturgical" section comes first.

The present writer acknowledges but a very limited sympathy with the doctrinal motives and aims of either the earlier or the later Tractarians. But let us, above all things, be fair. With whatever prepossessions one looks back upon it, the ground traversed by the Church of England during the past fifty years cannot be otherwise regarded than as a field sown with mingled tares and wheat.

Individuals will differ in judgment as to the proportion in which these two products of a common soil have coexisted, but even those who have most stoutly opposed themselves to the Oxford movement, as a whole, are fain to credit it with, at least, this one good result, the rescue of the usages of wors.h.i.+p from slovenliness and torpor, and the establishment of a better standard of what is seemly, reverent, and beautiful in the public service of Almighty G.o.d. Not that there have not been, even in this respect, grave errors in the direction of excess; the statement ventured is simply this, that, up to a certain point, all Churchmen agree in admitting a genuine and wholesome improvement in the popular estimate of what public wors.h.i.+p, as such, ought to be. An immense amount of devout study has been given, during the period mentioned, by many able men to liturgical subjects, and it would be strange indeed if fifty years of searching criticism had not resulted in the detection of some few points in which formularies originally compiled to meet the needs of the sixteenth century might be better adapted to the requirements of the twentieth. Or, to put the same point in another way, has not all this searching into the mines of buried treasure, all this getting together of quarried stone (with possibly a certain surplusage of stubble) been so much labor lost, if there is never to come the recognition of a ripe moment for the Church to avail itself of the results achieved? Are the studious toils of a Palmer, a Maskell, a Neale, a Scudamore, and a Bright to go for nothing except in so far as they have been contributory to our fund of ecclesiological lore? If so, the contempt often expressed for ritual and liturgical studies by students busy with other lines of research would seem to be not wholly undeserved.

A good opportunity is now before the Church to give answer as to whether this form of investigation is or is not anything better than a species of sacred antiquarianism. Liturgiology as an aspirant for recognition among the useful sciences may be said at the present moment to be waiting for the verdict. To be sure, it can be a.s.serted for liturgiology that to those who love it it is a study that proves itself, like poetry, "its own exceeding great reward." It is not worth while to dispute this point. Liturgiology pursued for its own sake may not be the loftiest of studies, but this, at least, can be said for it, that it is a not less respectable object of pursuit than many another specialty the devotees of which look down upon the liturgiologist with self-complacent scorn as a mere chiffonier. The forms which Christian wors.h.i.+p has taken on in successive generations and among peoples of various blood are certainly as well worthy of a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification as are the flora and fauna of Patagonia or New Zealand. But while the Patagonian naturalist secures recognition and is decorated, every jaunty man of letters feels at liberty to scoff at the liturgiologist as a laborious trifler.

Moreover, remembering that in favorite studies, as in crops, there rules a principle of rotation, fas.h.i.+on affecting even staid divines with its subtle influence, we may look to see presently a decline of interest in this particular department of inquiry. Especially may serious men be expected to turn their attention in other directions, should it be found that a _Non possumus_ awaits every effort to make the fruits of their labor available for the nourishment of the Church's daily life. So then, instead of deferring action until liturgical knowledge shall have become more widely spread, and available liturgical material more abundant, we shall, if we are wise, perceive that only by moving promptly will it be possible in this case to take the tide at the full.

Never again will opportunity be more ripe.

Another evidence of timeliness is supplied by the present pacific condition of the Church. Previous movements toward liturgical revision have been of a more or less partisan and acrimonious temper. Now for the first time we seem to be taking up this subject without the expression of a fear from any quarter that if changes are made this or that party will get the advantage of some other.

The peculiar conditions that ensure this unwonted truce of G.o.d are not likely to last forever, nor is it perhaps wholly desirable that they should do so; what is desirable, and very desirable, is that we should avail ourselves of the lull to accomplish certain changes for the better, which in ordinary times the prevalent heat of friction makes impossible. The Joint Committee of Twenty-one is confidently believed to contain within itself every shade of color known to belong to the Anglican spectrum; if white light should be found to emerge, three years hence, as a result of the Committee's labors, it will be said, and truly, that never before in our history could such a blending of the rays possibly have taken place.

Still another consideration properly included under the general head of timeliness is said to have been urged with much force in the House of Bishops when the "enrichment" resolution was under discussion.

Up to the present time the Episcopal Church of this country has stood easily at the head in the matter of providing for the people a dignified and beautiful order of divine service. In fact, there has been, until lately, no one to compete. But all this is changing.

Ours are no longer the only congregations in which common prayer is to be found. It is true that thus far the attempts at imitation have been rather grotesque than formidable, but such, until recently, have also been, in the judgment of foreign critics, all of our American endeavors after art. We are to consider what apt learners our quick-witted countrymen have shown themselves to be, in so much that even Christmas Day, once the _bete noire_ of Puritan legislators, has come to be accounted almost a national festival, and we shall be convinced that our primacy in the field of liturgies is not an absolutely a.s.sured position. This argument is open to the criticism that it seems to lower and cheapen the whole subject by representing Anglican religion in a mendicant att.i.tude bidding for the favor of the great American public, and vexed that others, fellow-suppliants, have stolen a good formula of appeal. Nevertheless there is a certain amount of reasonableness in this way of putting the thing. Certainly with those who reckon the liturgical mode of wors.h.i.+p among the notes of the Church, the argument is one that ought to have marked influence; while with those who, not so persuaded, nevertheless view with pleased interest the general spread of a liturgical taste among the people of this country, seeing in it a token of better things to come, a harbinger of larger agreements than we have yet attained to, and of an approaching "consolation of Israel" once not thought possible--even with such the argument ought not to be wholly powerless.[15]

The fact that the Convocations of Canterbury and York have taken in hand and carried through a revision of the rubrics of the Prayer Book will seem to those who hold that our Church ought to advance _pari pa.s.su_ with the Church of England, and no faster, another evidence of the timeliness of the American movement. Under the t.i.tle of _The Convocation Prayer Book_ there has lately appeared in England an edition of the Prayer Book so printed as to show how the book would read were the recommendations of York and Canterbury to go into effect. It is true that the consent of Parliament must be secured before the altered rubrics can have the force of law; but whatever may come of the rubrics recommended, the existence of the book containing them is evidence enough of a wide-spread conviction among the English clergy that change is needed.

Indeed never has this point been more powerfully put in the fewest possible words than by the brilliant, and no less logical than brilliant Bishop of Peterborough in a recent speech in the Upper House of Convocation.[16] "If the Church of England wants absolute peace, she should have definite rubrics."

It is true he goes on to say that in his judgment the dangers of carrying the question of rubrical revision into Parliament are greater than the evil of letting it alone, but it is to be remembered that we in this country are hampered with no Parliamentary entanglements and are free to do of our own motion, and in a quiet, orderly way, that which the Church of England can only do at the risk of something very like revolution.

But this matter of the rubrics and their susceptibility of improvement will come up later on. It seemed proper to refer to it, if no more, under the head of timeliness. If nothing else in the way of change be opportune at the present moment, it is an easy task to show that the rubrics, as they stand, cry aloud for a revision.

IV. The obstacles to be encountered by any Committee undertaking so to carry forward a review of the Prayer Book that revision may eventually result, are of two sorts; there are the inherent difficulties of the work itself, such, for instance, as that of matching the literary style of the sixteenth century writers, and there is the wholesome dread of a change for the worse which is sure to a.s.sert itself in many quarters the moment definite propositions shall have reached a point at which the "yeas and nays" are likely to be called.

Beginning, then, with the inherent difficulties, and taking them in the inverse order of arduousness, we see at once how hard it must be to secure unity and self-consistency in the revision of a book so complicated as the Common Prayer. It is like remodelling an old house. We think it a very easy matter, something that can be done in one's head, but the mistake is discovered when the new door designed to give symmetry to this room is found to have spoiled the looks of that, when the enlargement of the library turns out to have overtaxed the heating energy of the fireplace, and the ingenious staircase, instead of ending where it was expected to end, brings up against an intractable brick wall. Just such perils as these will beset anybody who ventures to disturb the adjustments of the "Prayer Book as it is" and to introduce desirable additions.

But domestic architecture is not given up on account of the patient carefulness the practice of it demands, neither need Liturgical Revision be despaired of because it requires of the men who undertake it a like wisdom in looking before and after.

The really formidable barrier to revision, so far as what have been called the "inherent difficulties" are concerned, is reached when we touch style. How to handle without harming the sentences in which English religion phrased itself when English language was fresher and more fluent than it can ever be again is a serious question.

The hands that seek to "enrich" may well be cautioned to take heed lest they despoil. It is to be remembered, however, in the way of rea.s.surance that the alterations most likely to find favor with the reviewers are such as will enrich by restoring lost excellencies, rather than by introducing forms fas.h.i.+oned on a modern anvil.