A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer Part 9

4. Services for use by laymen.

I wish to alarm none, but I wish we were all astir, for there is no time to wait.[48]

I should like to suggest, if it seems desirable, as it does to me, to make any further variation from the original arrangement of Morning Prayer, that on such days as Easter-day, Whitsunday, and Ascension-day we should begin in a little different fashion than we do now.

Is it always needful to begin on such great days of rejoicing for Christians with the same sentences and the _same_ Exhortation and Confession, and have to wait, so to speak, to give vent to our feelings till we reach the special psalms for the day? Might we not on such days accept the glorious facts, and begin with some special and appropriate psalm or anthem? . . . Thus we should at once get the great doctrine of the day, and be let to rejoice in it at the very outset, and then go on to the Lord's Prayer and the rest as we have it now. Confession of sin and absolution are not left out in the services of the day, as, of course, they occur in the Holy Communion; but leaving them out in the ordinary services, and beginning in the way suggested, would at one and the same time mark the day more clearly, and give opportunity for Christian gladness to show itself . . . Only one other alteration would, I think, be needed, namely, that a good selection of psalms be made, and used, as in the American Church, at the discretion of the minister. I think all must feel that for one reason or another all the psalms are not adapted for the ordinary worship of a mixed congregation; and this plan would ease the minds of many clergy and laity. Also copying the American Church, it would be well to omit the Litany on Christmas-day, Easter-day, and Whitsunday.[49]

In the light of this summary of Anglican desiderata, compiled by wholly friendly hands, it is plain that whatever we may do in this country in the line of liturgical revision, always supposing it to be gravely and carefully done, instead of harming, ought marvellously to help the real interests of the Church of England.

Certain principles of polity adopted in our own Church a century ago, and notably among them those affecting the legislative rights of the laity in matters ecclesiastical, are beginning to find tardy recognition in the England of the present. Possibly a hundred years hence, or sooner, a like change of mind may bring English Churchmen to the approval of liturgical methods which, even if not wholly consonant to the temper of the Act of Uniformity, have nevertheless been found useful and effective in the work of bringing the truth and the power of G.o.d to bear upon the common life of a great nation.

The Church of England is to-day moving on toward changes and chances of which she sees enough already to alarm and not yet enough to rea.s.sure her. The dimness of uncertainty covers what may yet turn out to be the Mount of her Transfiguration, and she fears as she enters into the cloud. How shall we best and most wisely show our sympathy? By pa.s.sing resolutions of condolence? By childish commiseration, the utterance of feigned lips, upon the approaching sorrows of disestablishment? Not thus at all, but rather by a courageous and well-considered pioneering work, which shall have it for its purpose to feel the ground and blaze the path which presently she and we may find ourselves treading in company. Tied as she is, for her an undertaking of this sort is impossible. We can show her no greater kindness than by entering upon it of our own motion and alone.

(_b_) American.

Criticism at home has been abundant; much of it intelligent and helpful, and by no means so much of it as might have been expected captious. Of what may be called official reviews there have been three, one from the Diocese of Central New York, one from the Diocese of Wisconsin, and one from the Diocese of Easton. The subject has also been dealt with in carefully prepared essays published from time to time in _The Church Review_ and _The Church Eclectic_, while in the case of the weekly journals the treatment of the topic has been so frequent and so full that a mere catalogue of the editorial articles and contributed communications in Which, during the two years last past, liturgical revision has been discussed would overtax the limits of the present paper.

The only practicable means of dealing with this ma.s.s of criticism is to adopt the inductive method, and to seek to draw out from the utterances of these many voices the four or five distinct concepts that severally lie behind them.

_In limine_ however, let this be said, that the broadest generalization of all is one to which the very discordance of the critics bears the best possible witness. Of a scheme of re vision against which is pressed, in Virginia,[50] the charge of Mariolatry; in Ohio,[51]

the charge of Lat.i.tudinarianism; and in Wisconsin[52] the charge of Puritanic pravity, this much may at least be said, that it possesses the note of fairness. From henceforth suggestions of partisan bias are clearly out of order.

The Anglo-Catholic censures of _The Book Annexed_ are substantially summed up in the a.s.sertion that due regard is not had, in the changes proposed, to the structural principles of liturgical science. In the exceedingly well written, if somewhat one-sided doc.u.ment, already referred to as the Wisconsin Report, this is, throughout, the burden of the complaint. The accomplished author of the Report, than whom no one of the critics at home or abroad has shown a keener or a better cultivated liturgical instinct, is afraid that a free use of all the liberties permitted by the new rubrics of the daily offices would so revolutionize Morning and Evening Prayer as practically to obliterate the line of their descent from the old monastic forms. If there were valid ground for such an expectation the alarm might be justifiable; but is there? The practical effect of the rubrics that make for abbreviation will be to give us back, on weekdays almost exactly, and with measurable precision on Sundays also, the Matins and Evensong of the First Book of Edward VI. Surely this is not the destruction of continuity with the pre-Reformation Church.

In his dislike of the provision for grafting the Beat.i.tudes upon the Evening Prayer, the author of the Wisconsin Report will have many sympathizers, the present writer among them; but in his fear that in the introduction of the Proem to the Song of the Three Children, as a possible respond to the First Lesson,[53] there lurks a covert design to dethrone the _Te Deum_, he is likely to find few to agree with him.

But after all, may not this scrupulous regard for the precedents set us in the old service-books be carried too far? It is wholesome, but there is a limit to the wholesomeness of it. We remember who it was that made war for the sake of "a scientific frontier." Some of the scientific frontiers in the region of liturgies are as illusory as his was. For example, _The Book Annexed_ may be "unscientific" in drawing as largely as it does on the language of the Apocalypse for versicles and responses. There has certainly been a departure from Anglican precedent in this regard. And yet it would scarcely seem that we could go far astray in borrowing from the liturgy of heaven, whether there be earthly precedent or not.

Cranmer and his a.s.sociates made a far bolder break with the old office-books than _The Book Annexed_ makes with the Standard Common Prayer. The statement of the Wisconsin Report, that "The Reformers of the English Church did not venture to write new Offices of Prayer," must be taken with qualifications. They did not make offices absolutely _de novo_, but they did condense and combine old offices in a manner that practically made a new thing of them.

They took the monastic services and courageously remoulded them into a form suitable for the new era in which monasteries were to exist no longer.

Happily they were so thorough in their work that comparatively little change is called for in adapting what they fitted to the needs of the sixteenth century to the more varied requirements of the nineteenth. Still, when they are quoted as conservatives, and we are referred for evidence of their dislike of change to that particular paragraph of the Preface to the English Prayer Book ent.i.tled, _Concerning the Service of the Church_[54] it is worth our while to follow up the reference and see what is actually there said. The Wisconsin Committee use very soft words in speaking of the mediaeval perversions and corruptions of Divine Service. "It was in the monasteries chiefly," they tell us, "that these services received the embellishments and wonderful variety which we find in the later centuries." But the following is the cruel manner in which, in the English Preface cited as authority, the "embellishments" and "wonderful variety" are characterized:

But these many years past, this G.o.dly and ancient order of the ancient fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected, by planting in uncertain stories and legends, with mult.i.tudes of responds, verses, vain repet.i.tions, commemorations, and synodals, that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, after three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were unread.

. . . And furthermore, notwithstanding that the ancient fathers have divided the Psalms into seven portions, whereof every one was called a Nocturn, now of late time a few of them have been daily said and the rest utterly omitted . . . So that here you have an Order for Prayer and for the Reading of the Holy Scripture much agreeable to the mind and purposes of the old fathers, and a great deal more profitable and commodious than that which of late was used.

This is conservatism in the very best sense, for the object aimed at is plainly the conservation of purity, simplicity, and truth, but surely it is not the conservatism of men with whom inaction is the only wisdom and immobility the sole beat.i.tude.

We change our sky completely in pa.s.sing from Anglo-Catholic to Broad Church criticism of _The Book Annexed_. This last has, in the main, addressed itself to the rubrical features of the proposed revision. "You promised us 'flexibility,'" the accusation runs, "but what you are really giving us is simply rigidity under a new form. Let things stay as they are, and we will undertake to find all the 'flexibility' we care to have, without help from legislation."

This criticism has at least the merit of intelligibility, for it directly antagonizes what was, without doubt, one main purpose with the revisers, namely, that of reviving respect for the rubrics by making compliance with their terms a more practicable thing.

Evidently what Broad Churchmen, or at least a section of them, would prefer is the prevalence of a general consent under which it shall be taken for granted that rubrics are not literally binding on the minister, but are to be stretched and adapted, at the discretion of the officiant, as the exigencies of times and seasons may suggest. It is urged that such a common understanding already in great measure exists; and that to enact new rubrics now, or to remodel old ones, would look like an attempt to revivify a principle of compliance which we have tacitly agreed to consider dead.

The answer to this argument is not far to seek. If the Church means to allow the Common Prayer, which hitherto has been regarded as a liturgy, to lapse into the status of a directory; if, in other words, she is content to see her manual of worship altered from a book of instructions as to how Divine Service _shall_ be performed into a book of suggestions as to how it _may_ be rendered, the change ought to be officially and definitely announced, and not left to individual inference or uncertain conjecture. We are rapidly slipping into a position scarcely consistent with either the dignity or the honor of a great Church--that of seeming to be what we are not. To give it out to the public that we are a law-respecting communion, and then to whisper it about among ourselves that our laws bind only those who choose to be bound by them, may serve as a convenient device for tiding over a present difficulty, but is, oh the whole, a course of procedure more likely to harden than to relieve tender consciences.

Take, by way of ill.u.s.tration, the case of a city clergyman who would gladly introduce into his parish the usage of daily service, but who is convinced, whether rightly or wrongly, that to secure even a fair attendance of worshippers he ought to have the liberty of so far condensing the Morning or the Evening Office as to bring it within the limits of a quarter of an hour. He seeks relief through the lawful channel of rubrical revision, and is only laughed at for his pains. In this busy nineteenth century it is nonsense, he is a.s.sured, to spend a dozen years in besieging so obdurate a fortress as the General Convention. The way to secure "shortened services" is to shorten services. This is easy logic, and applicable in more directions than one. Only see how smoothly it runs: If you want hymns that are not in the Hymnal, print them.

If you want a confessional-box, set it up. If you want a "reserved sacrament," order the carpenter to make a tabernacle and the locksmith to provide a bolt.[55] This is a far less troublesome method of securing the ends desired than the tedious and roundabout process of proposing a change at one meeting of the General Convention, having your proposal knocked about among some forty or fifty dioceses, and brought up for final action three years later.

And yet, superior as the former method may be to the latter in point of celerity and directness, the latter has certain advantages over the former that ought to be evident to men who are not frightened by having their scrupulousness called scrupulosity.

Moreover, why should this whole matter be discussed, as so commonly it is discussed, wholly from the clerical side? Have the laity no rights in the liturgy which the clergy are bound to respect? When and where did the Protestant Episcopal Church confer on its ministers a general dispensing power over the ordinances of worship which it withheld from the body of the faithful?

Heretofore it has been held that when a layman went to church he had a right to expect certain things guaranteed him by the Church's law. If all this has been changed, then formal notice ought to be served upon us by the General Convention that such is the fact.

THE MOTIVE OF THE EFFORT AFTER REVISION.

It is asked, and with no little show of plausibility, Why--in the face of such manifold hostility and such persistent opposition, why press the movement for revision any further? Is it worth while to divide public sentiment in the Church upon a question that looks to many to be scarcely more than a literary one? Why not drop the whole thing, and let it fall into the limbo, where lie already the _Proposed Book_ and the _Memorial Papers_? For this reason, and it is sufficient: There has arisen in America a movement toward Christian unity, the like of which has not been seen since the country was settled. It is the confident belief of many that the key to the situation lies with that Church which more truly than any other may be said to represent the historical Christianity of the peoples of English stock. One of the elements in this larger movement is the question of the form of worship.

The chief significance of _The Book Annexed_ lies in the claim made for it by its friends, that more adequately than the present Standard it supplies what may fairly be demanded as their manual of worship by a people circ.u.mstanced like ours. While, in one sense, more English than the present book in that it restores liturgical treasures lost at the Revolution, it is also more thoroughly American, in that it recognizes and allows for many needs which the newly enfranchised colonists of 1789 could not have been expected to foresee.

The question is, Shall we turn a cold shoulder on the movement churchward of our non-Anglican brethren of the reformed faith, doing our best to chill their approaches with a hard _Non possumus_, or shall we go out to meet them with words of welcome on our lips?

Union under "the Latin obedience" is impossible. For us, in the face of the decrees of 1870, there can be "no peace with Rome." The Greeks are a good way off. Our true "solidarity," if "solidarity"

is to be achieved at all, is not with Celts, but with our own kith and kin, the children of the Reformation. Is it wise of us to say to these fellow Christians of ours, adherents of the Catholic Faith as well as we, "Nay, but the nearer you draw to us the farther we mean to draw away from you; the more closely you approximate to Anglican religion, the more closely shall we, for the sake of differencing ourselves from you, approximate to Vatican religion?"

In better harmony with the apostolic temper, in truer continuity with the early churchmanship, should we be found, were we to join voices thus:

_V_. Come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord.

_R_. And he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.

II.

_The Book Annexed_ may be said to hold to the possible standard Common Prayer of 1890 a relation not unlike that of a clay model to the statue which is to be. The material is still in condition to be moulded; the end is not yet. It was in antic.i.p.ation of this state of things that the friends of revision in 1883 were anxious to carry through the preliminary stage of acceptance as many of their propositions as possible. To revert to our parable, the modeller, in treating the face of his provisional image, must be careful to lay on clay enough, or he may find himself barred at the last moment from giving the features just that finishing touch which is to make them ready for the marble. All the skill in the world will not enable him to secure for the face precisely the expression he would have it wear, if the _materia_ be insufficient.

Looked at in this light, the suggestion made by the Joint Committee in the House of Deputies at an early stage of the session of 1883, that the entire Book Annexed, in precisely the form in which it had been submitted, should be pa.s.sed, and sent down to the dioceses for consideration, instead of being the arbitrary and unreasonable demand it was reckoned by those who lifted their eyebrows at the very mention of such a thing, was really a sensible proposition which the Convention would have done well to heed.

Few, if any, critics of _The Book Annexed as Modified_ have p.r.o.nounced it an improvement to _The Book Annexed_ as presented.

The Book came out of the Convention less admirable than it went in. As a school of Liturgies, the long debate at Philadelphia was doubtless salutary and helpful, but whether the immediate results, as shown in the emendation of the Joint Committee's work, were equally deserving of praise is another question.

Nevertheless, as was argued in the paper of which this one is the continuation, we must take things as we find them, not as we wish they were; and since there is no other method of liturgical revision known to our laws than revision by popular debate, to revision by popular debate we must reconcile ourselves as best we may.

Regrets are idle. Let us be thankful that the amicable struggle at Philadelphia had for its outcome so large rather than so small a ma.s.s of workable material, and instead of accounting _The Book Annexed_ to be what one of the signers of the Joint Committee's Report has lately called it, "a melancholy production," recognize in it the germ of something exceedingly to be desired. From the first, there has never been any disposition on the part of sober-minded friends of Revision to carry through their scheme with a rush; the delay that is likely to better things they will welcome; the only delay they deprecate is the delay that kills.

The changes enumerated in the "Notification to the Dioceses," and ill.u.s.trated to the eye in _The Book Annexed_ as Modified, may be broadly cla.s.sified under the following heads:

(_a_) Clearly desirable alterations, with respect to which there is practically unanimous consent, and for which there is immediate demand, _e_. _g_., shortened offices of week-day prayer.

(_b_) Alterations desirable in the main, but likely to be more cordially acquiesced in, could still further improvement be secured, _e_. _g_., the new versicles introduced into Evening Prayer after the Creed.

(_c_) Alterations generally accounted undesirable on any terms, e. g., the permissive rubrics with respect to the reading of certain psalms during Lent, instead of the regular responds to the First and Second Lessons of the Evening Prayer.

The question arises, Is any course of action possible that will give us without delay the changes which for some fifteen years the whole Church has been laboring to secure; that will give us, with a reasonable delay of three years longer, the confessed improvements a little more improved; while at the same time we are kept from becoming involved in the wretched confusion sure to result from putting into circulation, within a brief period, two authorized but diverse books of Common Prayer? This threefold question it is proposed to meet with a threefold affirmative.

THE STANDARD PRAYER BOOK OF 1890.