A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer Part 3

And yet, curiously enough, _The Proposed Book_ was in some points more "churchly," using the word in a sense expressive of liturgical accuracy, than the book finally adopted. In the Morning Prayer it has the _Venite_ in full and not abridged. The _Benedictus_ it also gives entire. A single form of Absolution is supplied. The versicles following upon the Creed are more numerous than ours. In the Evening Prayer the great Gospel Hymns, _the Magnificat_ and the _Nunc dimittis_, stand in the places to which we with tardy justice have only just restored them.

Again, if we consider those features of _The Proposed Book_ that were retained and made part of the Liturgy in 1789, we shall have further reason to refrain from wholesale condemnation of this tentative work. For example, we owe the two opening sentences of Morning Prayer, "The Lord is in his holy temple" and "From the rising of the sun," to _The Proposed Book_, and also the special form for Thanksgiving Day. And yet, on the whole, the Convention of 1789 acted most wisely in determining that it would make the Prayer Book of the Church of England, rather than _The Proposed Book_, the real basis of revision. It did so, and as a result we have what has served us so well during the first century of our national life--the _Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the Church according to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America_. The points wherein the American Prayer Book differs from the Prayer Book of the Church of England are too numerous to be catalogued in full. "They will appear," says the Preface (a composition borrowed, by the way, almost wholly from _The Proposed Book_), "and, it is to be hoped, the reasons of them also, upon a comparison of this with the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England."

The most important differences are the following: The permissive use of "Selections of Psalms in place of the Psalms appointed for the day of the month." This was doubtless suggested by the wholesale transformation of the Psalter in _The Proposed Book_ into a series of selections.

The permitted shortening of the Litany is an American feature.

A number of the special prayers, as, for example, the prayer for a sick person, that for persons going to sea, the thanksgivings for a recovery and for a safe return, all these are peculiar to the American use. Extensive alterations were made in the Marriage Service and certain greatly needed ones in the Burial Office.

The two most noteworthy differences, however, are the omission from our Prayer Book of the so-called Athanasian Creed, and the insertion in it of that part of the Consecration Prayer in the Communion Office known as the Invocation. The engrafting of this latter feature we owe to the influence of Bishop Seabury, who by this addition not only a.s.similated the language of our liturgy more closely to that of the ancient formularies of the Oriental Church, but also insured our being kept reminded of the truly spiritual character of Holy Communion. "It is the spirit that quickeneth,"

this Invocation seems to say; "the flesh profiteth nothing." Quite in line with this was the alteration made at the same time in the language of the Catechism. "The Body and Blood of Christ," says the English Book, "which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper."

"The Body and Blood of Christ," says the American Book, "which are spiritually taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper."

Many verbal changes are to be found scattered here and there through the book, some of them for the better, some, perhaps, for the worse. The prevailing purpose seems to have been to expunge all obsolete words and phrases while dealing tenderly with obsolescent ones. In this course, however, the revisers were by no means always and everywhere consistent.

"Prevent," in the sense of "antic.i.p.ate," is altered in some places but left unchanged in others. In the _Visitation of Prisoners_, an office borrowed from the Irish Prayer Book, the thoroughly obsolete expression, "As you tender," in the sense of "as you value," the salvation of your soul, is retained.

From the Psalter has disappeared in the American Book "Thou tellest my Sittings," although why this particular archaism should have been selected for banishment and a hundred others spared, it is not easy to understand.

Perhaps some sudden impatience seized the reviser, like that which moved Bishop Wren, while annotating his Prayer Book, to write on the margin of the calendar for August, "Out with 'dog days' from among the saints."

Considering what a bond of unity the Lord's Prayer appears to be becoming among all English-speaking worshippers, it is, perhaps, to be regretted that our revisers changed the wording of it in two or three places. The excision of "Lighten our darkness" must probably be attributed to the prosaic matter-of-fact temper which had possession of everybody and everything during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The Ordinal, the Articles, the Consecration of Churches, and the Inst.i.tution of Ministers made no part of the Prayer Book as it was set forth in 1789; nor do they, even now, strictly speaking, make a part of it, although in the matter of binding force and legal authority they are on the same footing.

The Ordinal and Articles are substantially identical with the English Ordinal and Articles, save in the matter of a reference to the Athanasian Creed and several references to the connection of Church and State. The Consecration of Churches and the Inst.i.tution of Ministers are offices distinctively American. If I add that the American Book drops out of the Visitation of the Sick a form of private absolution, and greatly modifies the service for Ash-Wednesday, we shall have made our survey of differences tolerably, though by no means exhaustively complete.

And now what is the lesson taught us by the history of the Prayer Book? Homiletical as the question sounds, it is worth asking.

We have reviewed rapidly, but not carelessly, the vicissitudes of the book's wonderful career, and we ought to be in a position to draw some sort of instructive inference from it all. Well, one thing taught us is this, the singular power of survival that lives in gracious words. They wondered at the "gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth," and because they wondered at them they treasured them up.

Kind words, says the child's hymn, can never die; neither can kindly words, and kindly in the deepest sense are many, many of the words of the Common Prayer; they touch that which is most catholic in us, that which strongly links us to our kind. There is that in some of the Collects which as it has lasted since the days when Roman emperors were sitting on their thrones, so will it last while man continues what he is, a praying creature.

Another thing taught us by the Prayer Book's history is the duty of being forever on our guard in the religious life against "the falsehood of extremes."

The emanc.i.p.ated thinkers who account all standards of belief to be no better than dungeon walls, scoff at this feature of the Anglican character with much bitterness. "Your Church is a Church of compromises," they say, "and your boasted _Via media_ only a coward's path, the poor refuge of the man who dares not walk in the open." But when we see this Prayer Book condemned for being what it is by b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, and then again condemned for being what it is by the Long Parliament, the thought occurs to us that possibly there is enshrined in this much-persecuted volume a truth larger than the Romanist is willing to tolerate, or the Puritan generous enough to apprehend.

A third important lesson is that we are not to confound revision with ruin, or to suppose that because a book is marvellously good it cannot conceivably be bettered. Each accomplished revision of the Book of Common Prayer has been a distinct step in advance. If G.o.d in his wise providence suffered an excellent growth of devotion to spring up out of the soil of England in the days of Edward the Sixth, and, after many years, determined that like a vine out of Egypt it should be brought across the sea and given root on these sh.o.r.es, we need not fear that we are about to lose utterly our pleasant plant if we notice that the twigs and leaves are adapting themselves to the climate and the atmosphere of the new dwelling-place. The life within the vine remains what it always was. The growth means health. The power of adaptation is the guarantee of a perpetual youth.

REVISION OF THE AMERICAN COMMON PRAYER.

II. REVISION OF THE AMERICAN COMMON PRAYER.[1]

The revision of long established formularies of public worship is, as it ought to be, a matter compa.s.sed about with obstacles many and great. A wise doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission"

to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of the old ways are sometimes compelled in sheer self-defence to put on the appearance of being more obstinately set against change than they really are. It ought not to be absolutely impossible to alter a national hand-book of worship (which is what any manual calling itself a Common Prayer must aspire to become), but it is well that it should be all but impossible to do so. Logically it might seem as if the possession of a power to make involved a continuance of power to remake; and so it does, to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent.

Living organisms cannot be remodelled with the same freedom as dead matter. A solemnity hangs about the moment of birth that attaches to no other crisis in a man's life until death comes. Similarly there are certain features which the founders of inst.i.tutions, the first makers of organic law, imprint lastingly upon their work. We may destroy the living thing so brought to birth; to kill is always possible; but only by very gradual and plastic methods can we hope in any measure to reconstruct the actual embodiment of life once achieved. The men of 1789 had us in their power, even as the men of 1549 had had both them and us. In every creative epoch many things are settled by which unborn generations will be bound.[2]

It may be urged that this is an argument against adopting liturgies in the first instance as vehicles of worship; and such undoubtedly it is in so far forth as immobility ought in such matters to be reckoned a disadvantage. But we are bound to take into account the gain which comes with immobility as well as the drawbacks. We must consider how large a proportion of the reverence which the great inst.i.tutes of human life exact from us is due to the fixity of the things themselves. Mont Blanc loses nothing of its hold upon our admiration because we always find it in the same place.

Men like to feel that there is something in the world stronger than the individual will, stronger simply because it expresses the settled common-sense of many as to what is fitting and right in contrast with the whim of one. Lawyers, as a cla.s.s, are almost as conservative as ecclesiastics, and for the very reason that they also are charged with the custody of established forms which it is important that men should reverence. Laws affecting the tenure of property, the binding force of contracts, the stability of the marriage relation, not only cannot be lightly altered, the very phraseology in which they are couched must be carefully handled, for fear lest with the pa.s.sing away of the form something of the substance go also.

Moreover, the affections of men fasten themselves very tenaciously to such a trellis as a liturgy affords. The love for "the old words and the old tunes" against which all innovators in hymnody, however deserving, have to do battle, a.s.serts itself under the form of love for the old prayers with ten-fold vehemence. An immense fund of latent heat smoulders beneath the maxim, "Let the ancient customs prevail"; and few of the victories achieved by the papacy are so startling as those that have resulted in the displacement of the liturgical uses of local Churches, that of Paris, for example, by the Roman rite.

But true principles, as we are often reminded, become falsehoods when shoved across the line of proper measure. The very cycles of the astronomers have an end, and the clock-work of the most ancient heavens, or at least our reading of it, calls, from time to time, for readjustment. So long as man continues fallible his best intended workmanship will occasionally demand such alteration for the better as, within the limits already pointed out, may be possible.

Many signs of the times suggest that the hour for a fresh review of the Anglican formularies of worship is nigh at hand. Some of these tokens are written on a sky broad enough to cover the whole English-speaking race, others of them are visible chiefly within our own national horizon. With respect to the English book, Cardwell [3] writing in 1840 and Freeman[4] in 1855, considered revision, however desirable in the abstract, to be a thing utterly out of reach, not within the circle, as the parliamentary phrase now runs, of "practical politics."

But it may be fairly questioned whether these high authorities, were they living to-day, would not concur in the judgment of a more recent writer when he says--in language which, _mutatis mutandis_, applies to our own case: "The most weighty plea in favor of timely inquiry into the subject is that the process of revision is actually going on piecemeal, and with no very intelligent survey of the bearings as a preliminary to any one instalment. The New Lectionary of 1871, the Shortened Services Act, the debates in the Convocation of Canterbury on rubrical amendments, none of them marked by any sufficient care or knowledge, and all fraught with at least the possibility of serious consequence, are examples of formal and recognized inroads on the Act of Uniformity; while such practical though unauthorized additions to the scanty group of Anglican formularies as the Three Hours' Devotion, Harvest Thanksgivings, Public Inst.i.tution of Inc.u.mbents, Ordination of Readers and Deaconesses, and Children's Services prove incontestably that the narrow limits of the Common Prayer Book are no longer adequate for the spiritual needs of the Church of England . . .

"It is evident, then, that contented acquiescence with the old state of things already belongs to the past, and that a return to it is impossible. We must perforce advance, for good or ill, in the path of revision, and cannot even materially slacken the pace nor defer the crisis. One choice, however, is left in our power, and that is the most important of all, namely, the direction which revision shall take--that of conservative and recuperative addition, or that of further evisceration, ceremonial or devotional." [5]

A measure looking in the direction towards which this reviewer points was actually pa.s.sed by the General Convention of our own Church at its late session in October, 1880.

The wording of the Resolution referred to was as follows:

"_Resolved_: That a Joint Committee, to consist of seven bishops, seven presbyters, and seven laymen be appointed to consider and report to the next General Convention whether, in view of the fact that this Church is soon to enter upon the second century of its organized existence in this country, the changed conditions of the national life do not demand certain alterations in the Book of Common Prayer in the direction of liturgical enrichment and increased flexibility of use."[6]

In the present article the writer proposes to inquire, in connection with this measure:

(1) What motives may fairly be supposed to have actuated the Convention in allowing so important an initiatory step to be taken?

(2) What measure of authority was conferred on and what scope given to the Joint Committee then const.i.tuted?

(3) What reasons exist for considering the present a happy moment to attempt liturgical revision, within certain limits, should such a thing be determined upon?

(4) What serious difficulties and obstacles are likely to be encountered in Committee, in Convention, and in the Church at large?

(5) What particular improvements and adjustments of our existing system would be, in point of fact, best worth the effort necessary to secure them?

I. The interpretation of motives, difficult enough in the case of individuals, becomes mere guess-work when the action under a.n.a.lysis is that of a large body of men. Which one of many considerations urged upon the Convention carried with it the supreme weight of persuasion in this particular instance it is impossible to say.

Two or three arguments, however, from their frequent reappearance in the debate may fairly be judged to have exercised a controlling influence. One of these was hinted at in the language of the resolution itself, namely, the call for revision that has grown out of "the changed conditions of the national life." Shrewd and far-seeing as were William White and his coadjutors in their forecast of nineteenth century needs made from the standpoint of the Peace of Versailles, they would have been more than human had they succeeded in antic.i.p.ating all the civil and ecclesiastical consequences destined to flow from that memorable event. Certainly it ought not to be held strange that this "new America" of ours, with its enormously multiplied territory, its conglomerate of races, its novel forms of a.s.sociation, its multiplicity of industries not dreamed of a generation ago, should have demands to make in respect to a better adaptation of ancient formularies to present wants, such as thoughtful people count both reasonable and cogent. That a Prayer Book revised primarily for the use of a half-proscribed Church planted here and there along a spa.r.s.ely inhabited sea-coast, should serve as amply as it does the purposes of a population now swollen from four millions to fifty, and covering the whole breadth of the continent, is marvel enough; to a.s.sert for the book entire adequacy to meet these altered circ.u.mstances is a mistake. "New time, new favors, and new joys," so a familiar hymn affirms, "do a new song require." We have conceded the principle so far as psalmody is concerned, why not apply it to the service of prayer as well as to that of praise, and in addition to our new hymns secure also such new intercessions and new thanksgivings as the needs of to-day suggest? The reference in the resolution to the approaching completion of the century has since been playfully characterized as a bit of "sentimentalism."[7] The criticism would be entirely just if the mere recurrence of the centennial anniversary were the point chiefly emphasized. But when a century closes as this one of ours has done with a great social revolution whereby "all estates of men" have been more or less affected, the proposal to signalize entrance upon a fresh stretch of national life by making devotional preparation for it is something better than a pretty conceit; there is a serious reasonableness in it.[8]

Every revision of the Common Prayer of the Church of England, and there have been four of them since Edward's First Book was put in print, has taken place at some important era of transition in the national life: and conversely it may be said that every civil crisis, with a single exception, has left its mark upon the formularies.

To one who argues that because we in this country are evidently entering upon a new phase of the national life we ought similarly to re-enforce and readjust our service-book, it is no sufficient reply to urge the severance effected here between Church and State.

The fact that ours is a non-established Church does not make her wholly unresponsive to the shocks of change that touch the civil fabric. In so far as a political renewal alters the social grading of society, bringing in education, for instance, where before it was not, or suddenly developing new forms of industrial activity, the Church, whether established or not, is in duty bound to take cognizance of the fresh field of duty thus suddenly thrust upon her, and to prepare herself accordingly.

In the Preface added to the English Prayer Book at the Restoration, and commonly attributed to Sanderson, "that staid and well weighed man," as Hammond called him, there occurs a sentence which, both on account of its embodying in a few words the whole philosophy of liturgical revision and because of a certain practical bearing presently to be pointed out, it is worth while, in spite of its familiarity, to quote:

"The particular forms of Divine worship, and the rites and ceremonies appointed to be used therein, being things in their own nature indifferent and alterable and so acknowledged, it is but reasonable, that upon weighty and important considerations, according to the various exigency of times and occasions, such changes and alterations should be made therein, as to those that are in place of authority should from time to time seem either necessary or expedient."

Contemporaneously with this utterance there came into the Prayer Book, as a direct consequence of the enormous enlargement of the naval and commercial marine that had taken place under the Commonwealth, the "Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea." Here was a wise and right-minded recognition of a new want that had sprung up with a new time, a want which jealousy of the Puritans who had built up the naval supremacy did not prevent the Caroline bishops from meeting. But the change that pa.s.sed on England during five years of Cromwell was as nothing compared with the transformation of America under ninety-five years of the federal const.i.tution. Take a single ill.u.s.tration. The year 1789, the date of the Ratification of the American Prayer Book, saw sea-island cotton first planted in the United States, and it was about that time that upland cotton also began to be cultivated for home and foreign use. As the effect of this scarcely noticed experiment there straightway sprang up an industry, North and South, which has been to our country almost what her shipping interest is to Great Britain. Bishop White and his a.s.sociates were not to blame for failure to provide bread that all this unantic.i.p.ated mult.i.tude of toilers should eat. And yet a failure there has been. No one who has not labored at the task of trying to commend the Church of the Prayer Book to the working cla.s.s, as it is represented in our large manufacturing towns, can know how lamentable that failure is. We gather in the rich and the poor, but the great middle cla.s.s that makes the staple and the strength of American society stands aloof.