Liturgical worship, understood in the largest sense the phrase can
bear, means divine service rendered in accordance with an established
form. Of late years there has been an attempt made among purists to
confine the word "liturgy" to the office entitled in the Prayer
Book, _The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper or
Holy Communion_.
This restricted and specialized interpretation of a familiar word
may serve the purposes of technical scholarship, for undoubtedly
there is much to be said in favor of the narrowed signification as
we shall see; but unless English literature can be rewritten, plain
people who draw their vocabulary from standard authors will go on
calling service-books "liturgies" regardless of the fact that they
contain many things other than that one office which is entitled
to be named by eminence _the_ Liturgy. "This Convention," write the
fathers of the American Episcopal Church in the Ratification printed
on the fourth page of the Prayer Book, "having in their present
session set forth a Book of Common Prayer and other rites and
ceremonies of the Church, do hereby establish the said book; and
they declare it to be the _Liturgy_ of this Church."
For the origin of liturgy thus broadly defined we have to go a long
way back; beyond the Prayer Book, beyond the Mass-book, beyond the
ancient Sacramentaries, yes, beyond the synagogue worship, beyond
the temple worship, beyond the tabernacle worship; in fact I am
disposed to think that, logically, we should be unable to stop
short until we had reached the very heart of man itself, that
dimly discerned groundwork we call human nature, and had discovered
there those two instincts, the one of worship and the other of
gregariousness, from whence all forms of common prayer have sprung.
Where three or two assemble for the purposes of supplication, some
form must necessarily be accepted if they are to pray in unison.
When the disciples came to Jesus begging him that he would teach
them how to pray, he gave them, not twelve several forms, though
doubtless James's special needs differed from John's and Simon's
from Jude's--he gave them, not twelve, but one. "When ye pray,"
was his answer, "say Our Father." That was the beginning of
Christian Common Prayer. Because we are men we worship, because
we are fellow-men our worship must have form.
But waiving this last analysis of all which carries us across the
whole field of history at a leap, it becomes necessary to seek
for liturgical beginnings by a more plodding process.
If we take that manual of worship with which as English-speaking
Christians we are ourselves the most familiar, the Book of Common
Prayer, and allow it to fall naturally apart, as a bunch of
flowers would do if the string were cut, we discover that in
point of fact we have, as in the case of the Bible, many books
in one. We have scarcely turned the title-page, for instance,
before we come upon a ritual of daily worship, an order for
Morning Prayer and an order for Evening Prayer, consisting in
the main of Psalms, Scripture Lessons, Antiphonal Versicles,
and Collects. Appended to this we find a Litany or General
Supplication and a collection of special prayers.
Mark an interval here, and note that we have completed the first
volume of our liturgical library. Next, we have a sacramental
ritual, entitled, _The Order for the Administration of the Lord's
Supper or Holy Communion_, ingeniously interwoven by a system of
appropriate prayers and New Testament readings with the Sundays
and holydays of the year. This gives us our second volume.
Then follow numerous offices which we shall find it convenient
to classify under two heads, namely: those which may be said by
a bishop or by a presbyter, and those that may be said by a
bishop only. Under the former head come the baptismal offices,
the Order for the Burial of the Dead, and the like; under the
latter, the services of Ordination and Confirmation and the Form
of Consecration of a Church or Chapel.
In the Church of England as it existed before the Reformation,
these four volumes, as I have called them, were distinct and
recognized realities. Each had its title and each its separate
use. The name of the book of daily services was _The Breviary_.
The name of the book used in the celebration of the Holy Communion
was _The Missal_. The name of the book of Special Offices was
_The Ritual_. The name of the book of such offices as could be
used by a bishop only was _The Pontifical_. It was one of the
greatest of the achievements of the English reformers that they
succeeded in condensing, after a practical fashion, these four
books, or, to speak more accurately, the first three of them,
Breviary, Missal, and Ritual, into one. The Pontifical, or
Ordinal, they continued as a separate book, although it soon for
the sake of convenience became customary in England, as it has
always been customary here, for Prayer Book and Ordinal to be
stitched together by the binders into a single volume. Popularly
speaking the Prayer Book is the entire volume one purchases under
that name from the bookseller, but accurately speaking the Book
of Common Prayer ends where _The Form and Manner of Making,
Ordaining, and Consecrating Bishops, Priests, and Deacons_
begins. "Finis" should be written after the Psalter, as indeed
from the Prayer Book's Table of Contents plainly appears.
Setting aside now, for the present, that portion of the formularies
which corresponds to the Ritual and Pontifical of the mediaeval
Church, I proceed to speak rapidly of the antecedents of Breviary
and Missal. Whence came they? And how are we to account for
their being sundered so distinctly as they are?
They came, so some of the most thoughtful of liturgical students
are agreed, from a source no less remote than the Temple of
Solomon, and they are severed, to speak figuratively, by a valley
not unlike that which in our thoughts divides the Mount of
Beatitudes from the Hill of Calvary.
In that memorable building to which reference was just made,
influential over the destinies of our race as no other house of
man's making ever was, there went on from day to day these two
things, psalmody and sacrifice. Peace-offering, burnt-offering,
sin-offering, the morning oblation, and the evening oblation--these
with other ceremonies of a like character went to make what we
know as the sacrificial ritual of the temple.
But this was not all. It would appear that there were other
services in the temple over and above those that could strictly
be called sacrificial. The Hebrew Psalter, the hymn-book of that
early day, contains much that was evidently intended by the
writers for temple use, and even more that could be easily
adapted to such use. And although there is no direct evidence
that in Solomon's time forms of prayer other than those associated
with sacrificial rites were in use, yet when we find mention in
the New Testament of people going up to the temple of those later
days "at the hour of prayer," it seems reasonable to infer that
the custom was an ancient one, and that from the beginning of the
temple's history forms of worship not strictly speaking sacrificial
had been a stated feature of the ritual. But whether in the temple
or not, certainly in the synagogues, which after the return from
the captivity sprang up all over the Jewish world, services
composed of prayers, of psalms, and of readings from the law and
the prophets were of continual occurrence. Therefore we may safely
say that with these two forms of divine service, the sacrificial
and the simply devotional and didactic, the apostles, the founders
of the Christian Church, had been familiar from their childhood.
They were at home in both synagogue and temple. They knew by sight
the ritual of the altar, and by ear the ritual of the choir. They
were accustomed to the spectacle of the priest offering the victim;
they were used to hearing the singers chant the psalms.
We see thus why it is that the public worship of the Church should
have come down to us in two great lines, why there should be a
tradition of eucharistic worship and, parallel to this, a tradition
of daily prayer; for as the one usage links itself, in a sense,
to the sacrificial system of God's ancient people and has in it a
suggestion of the temple worship, so the other seems to show a
continuity with what went on in those less pretentious sanctuaries
which had place in all the cities and villages of Judea, and indeed
wherever, throughout the Roman world, Jewish colonists were to be
found. The earliest Christian disciples having been themselves
Hebrews, nothing could have been more natural than their moulding
the worship of the new Church in general accordance with the
models that had stood before their eyes from childhood in the
old. The Psalms were sung in the synagogues according to a settled
principle. We cannot wonder, then, that the Psalter should have
continued to be what in fact it had always been, the hymn-book of
the Church. Moreover, they had in the synagogue besides their
psalmody a system of Bible readings, confined, of course, to the
Old Testament Scriptures. This is noted in the observation that
fell from Simon Peter, at the first Council of the Church, "Moses
of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in
the synagogue every Sabbath day." Scripture lessons, therefore,
would be no novelty.
We gather also from the New Testament, not to speak of other
authorities, that in the apostolic days people were familiar with
what were known as "hours of prayer." There were particular times
in the day, that is to say, which were held to be especially
appropriate for worship. "Peter and John went up together into
the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour." Again,
at Joppa, we find the former of these two apostles going up upon
the house-top to pray at "the sixth hour." Long before this David
had mentioned morning and evening and noon as fitting hours of
prayer, and one psalmist, in his enthusiasm, had even gone so far
as to declare seven times a day to be not too often for giving
God thanks. There was also the precedent of Daniel opening his
windows toward Jerusalem three times a day. As the love for order
and system grew year by year stronger in the Christian Church,
the laws that govern ritual would be likely to become more
stringent, and so very probably it came to pass. For aught we
know to the contrary, the observance of fixed hours of prayer
was a matter of voluntary action with the Christians of the first
age. There was, as we say, no "shall" about it. But when the
founders of the monastic orders came upon the scene a fixed rule
took the place of simple custom, and what had been optional
became mandatory. By the time we reach the mediaeval period
evolution has had its perfect work, and we find in existence
a scheme of daily service curiously and painfully elaborate.
The mediaeval theologians were very fond of classifying things
by sevens. In the symbolism of Holy Scripture seven appears as
the number of perfection, it being the aggregate of three, the
number of Deity, and four, the number of the earth. Accordingly
we find in the theology of those times seven sacraments, seven
deadly sins, seven contrary virtues, seven works of mercy, and
also seven hours of prayer. These seven hours were known as
Matins, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Complene. The
theory of the hours of prayer was that at each one of them a
special office of devotion was to be said. Beginning before
sunrise with matins there was to be daily a round of services at
stated intervals culminating at bedtime in that which, as its
name indicated, filled out the series, Complene. To what extent
this ideal scheme of devotion was ever carried out in practice it
is difficult positively to say.
Probably in the monastic and conventual life of the severer orders
there was an approximation to a punctual observance of the hours
as they successively arrived. Possibly the modern mind fails to
do full justice to the conception of worship on which this system
was based. Those principles of devotion of which the rosary is the
visible symbol do not easily commend themselves to us. They have
about them a suggestion of mechanism. They remind us of the
Buddhist praying wheel, and seem to put the Church in the attitude
of expecting to be heard for her "much speaking."
Doubtless many a pure, courageous spirit fought the good fight
of faith successfully in spite of all this weight of outward
observances; but in the judgment of the wiser heads among English
churchmen, the time had come, by the middle of the sixteenth
century, when this complicated armor must either be greatly
lightened or else run the risk of being cast aside altogether.
Let Cranmer tell his own story. This is what he says in the
Preface to the First Book of Edward VI. as to the ritual grievances
of the times. The passage is worth listening to if only for the
quaintness of its strong and wholesome English:
"There was never anything by the wit of man so well devised or so
surely established which, in continuance of time, hath not been
corrupted, as, among other things, it may plainly appear by the
common prayer, in the Church, commonly called divine service. The
first original and ground whereof, if a man would search out by
the ancient fathers, he shall find that the same was not ordained
but of a good purpose, and for a great advancement of godliness, for
they so ordered the matter that all the whole Bible, or the greatest
part thereof, should be read over once in the year . . . But these
many years past this godly and decent order of the ancient fathers
hath been so altered, broken, and neglected by planting in
uncertain stories, legends, responds, verses, vain repetitions,
commemorations, and synodals that commonly, when any book of the
Bible was begun, before three or four chapters were read out all
the rest were unread. And in this sort the Book of Esaie was begun
in Advent, and the Book of Genesis in Septuagesima, but they were
only begun and never read through . . . And moreover, whereas St.
Paul would have such language spoken to the people in the Church
as they might understand and have profit by hearing the same, the
service in this Church of England (these many years) hath been
read in Latin to the people, which they understood not, so that
they have heard with their ears only, and their hearts, spirit,
and mind have not been edified thereby . . . Moreover, the number
and hardness of the rules called the Pie, and the manifold
changings of the service was the cause that to turn the Book
only was so hard and intricate a matter that many times there was
more business to find out what should be read than it was to read
it when it was found out. These inconveniences therefore considered,
here is set forth such an order whereby the same shall be
redressed."
As an illustration of what Cranmer meant by his curious phrase,
"planting in uncertain stories," take the following Lessons quoted
by Dr. Neale in his _Essays on Liturgiology_:
"Besides the commemoration of saints," writes this distinguished
antiquarian, "there are in certain local calenders notices of
national events connected with the well-being of the Church. Thus,
in the _Parisian Breviary_, we have on the eighteenth of August a
commemoration of the victory of Philip the Fair in Flanders, A.D.
1304." Here is the fourth of the appointed lessons: "Philip the
Fair, King of the French, in the year 1304, about the feast of St.
Mary Magdalene, having set forth with his brothers Charles and
Louis and a large army into Flanders, pitched his tent near Mons,
where was a camp of the rebel Flemings. But when, on the eighteenth
of August, which was the Tuesday after the Assumption of St. Mary,
the French had from morning till evening stood on the defence, and
were resting themselves at nightfall, the enemy, by a sudden
attack, rushed on the camp with such fury that the body-guard had
scarce time to defend him.
"_Response_. Come from Lebanon, my spouse; come, and thou shalt be
crowned, The odor of thy sweet ointments is above all perfumes.
_Versicle_. The righteous judge shall give a crown of righteousness."
Then, after this short interlude of snatches from Holy Scripture,
there follows the Fifth Lesson: "At the beginning of the fight the
life of the king was in great danger, but shortly after, his
troops crowding together from all quarters to his tent, where the
battle was sharpest, obtained an illustrious victory over the
enemy"--and more of this sort until all of a sudden we come upon
the Song of Solomon again. "_V_. Thou art all fair, my love; come
from Lebanon. _R_. They that have not defiled their garments,
they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy."
Is not Cranmer's contemptuous mention of these uncertain legends
and vain repetitions amply justified? And can we be too thankful
to the sturdy champions of the Reformation, who in the face of no
little opposition and by efforts scarcely appreciated to-day, cut
us loose from all responsibility for such solemn nonsense?
There are some who feel aggrieved that chapters from the Apocrypha
should have found admission to our new lectionary, and there are
even those who think that of the canonical Scriptures, passages
more edifying than certain of those appointed to be read might
have been chosen, but what would they think if they were compelled
to hear the minister at the lecturn say: "Here beginneth the first
chapter of the Adventures of Philip the Fair"?
But the reformers, happily, were not discouraged by the portentous
front of wood, hay, and stubble which the liturgical edifice of
their day presented to the eye. They felt convinced that there
were also to be found mixed in with the building material gold,
silver, and precious stones, and for these they determined to make
diligent search, resolved most of all that the foundation laid
should be Jesus Christ. This system of canonical hours, they
argued, this seven-fold office of daily prayer is all very
beautiful in theory, but it never can be made what in fact it
never in the past has been, a practicable thing. Let us be content
if we can do so much as win people to their devotions at morning
and at night. With this object in view Cranmer and his associates
subjected the services of the hours to a process of combination
and condensation. The Offices for the first three hours they
compressed into _An Order for Daily Morning Prayer_, or, as it was
called in Edward's first Book, _An Order for Matins_, and the
Offices for the last two hours, namely, Vespers and Complene,
they made over into _An Order for Daily Evening Prayer_, or, as
it was named in Edward's first Book, _An Order for Evensong_.
These two formularies, the _Order for Matins_ and the _Order for
Evensong_, make the core and substance of our present daily
offices. But the tradition of daily prayer is only one of the
two great devotional heritages of the Church. With the destruction
of the temple by the Roman soldiery, the sacrificial ritual of
the Jewish Church came to a sudden end; but it was not God's
purpose that the memory of sacrifice should fade out of men's
minds or that the thought of sacrifice should be banished from
the field of worship. Years before the day when the legionaries
of Titus marched amid flame and smoke, into the falling sanctuary
of an out-worn faith, one who was presently to die upon a cross
had taken bread, had blessed it and broken it, and giving it to
certain followers gathered about him, had said, "Take, eat; this
is my body, which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me."
Likewise also he had taken the cup after supper, saying, "This cup
is the New Testament in my blood which is shed for you."
Certainly there must be a relation of cause and effect between this
scene and the fact, which is a fact, that the most ancient
fragments of primitive Christian worship now discoverable are
forms for the due commemoration of the sacrifice of the death of
Christ.
These venerable monuments seem to exclaim as we decipher them:
"Even so, Lord, it is done as thou didst say." "Thy name, O Lord,
endureth forever and so doth thy memorial from generation to
generation." Of the references to Christian worship discoverable
in documents later than the New Testament Scriptures there are
three that stand out with peculiar prominence, namely, the lately
discovered _Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_, placed by some
authorities as early as the first half of the second century;
the famous letter of Pliny to the Emperor Trajan, a writing of
the same period; and the Apology or Defence addressed by Justin
Martyr to Antoninus Pius about the year 140 after Christ. The
noteworthy fact in connection with these passages is that of the
three, two certainly, and probably the third also, refer directly
to the Holy Communion. In the _Teaching_ we have a distinct sketch
of a eucharistic service with three of the prescribed prayers
apparently given in full. In Justin Martyr's account, the evidence
of a definitely established liturgical form is perhaps less plain,
but nothing that he says would appear to be irreconcilable with
the existence of a more or less elastic ritual order. Whether he
does or does not intend to describe extemporaneous prayer as
forming one feature of the eucharistic worship of the Christians
of his time depends upon the translation we give to a single word
in his narrative. Later on in the life of the Church, though by
just how much later is a difficult point of scholarship, we are
brought in contact with a number of formularies, all of them
framed for the uses of eucharistical worship, all of them, that
is to say, designed to perpetuate the commandment, "This do in
remembrance of me," and all of them preserving, no matter in what
part of the world they may be found, a certain structural
uniformity. These are the primitive liturgies, as they are
called, the study of which has in late years attained almost to
the dignity of a science. As to the exact measure of antiquity
that ought to be accorded to these venerable documents the
authorities differ and probably will always differ. Dr. Neale's
enthusiasm carried him so far that he was persuaded and sought
to persuade others of the existence of liturgical quotations in
the writings of St. Paul. This hypothesis is at the present time
generally rejected by sober-minded scholars. Perhaps "the personal
equation" enters equally into the conclusions of those who assign
a very late origin to the liturgies, pushing them along as far as
the sixth or seventh century. If one happens to have a rooted
dislike for prescribed forms of worship, and believes them in his
heart to be both unscriptural and unspiritual, it will be the
most natural thing in the world for him to disparage whatever
evidence makes in favor of the early origin of liturgies. Hammond
is sensible when he says in the Preface to his valuable work
entitled _Liturgies Eastern and Western_, "I have assumed an
intermediate position between the views of those on the one hand
who hold that the liturgies had assumed a recognized and fixed
form so early as to be quoted in the Epistles to the Corinthians
and Hebrews . . . and of those, on the other, who because there are
some palpable interpolations and marks of comparatively late date
in some of the texts, assert broadly that they are all untrustworthy
and valueless as evidence. This view I venture to think," he adds,
"equally uncritical and groundless with the former."
To sum up, the argument in behalf of an apostolic origin for the
Christian Liturgy may be compactly stated thus: The very earliest
monuments of Christian worship that we possess are rituals of
thanksgiving, having direct reference to the sacrifice of the
death of Christ. Going back from these to the New Testament we
find there the narrative of the institution of the Holy Communion
by Christ himself, and in connection with it the command, "This
do in remembrance of me." It is, I submit, a reasonable inference
that the liturgies in the main fairly represent what it was in
the mind of the apostle to recognize and establish as proper
Christian worship. I do not call it demonstration, I call it
reasonable inference. There is a striking parallelism between the
argument for liturgical worship and the argument for episcopacy.
In both cases we take the ground that continuity existed between
the life of the Church as we find it a hundred years after the
last of the apostles had gone to his rest and the life of the
Church as it is pictured in the New Testament.
That there were many changes during the interval must no doubt be
granted, but we say that if those changes were serious ones
affecting great principles of belief or order, those who maintain
that such a hidden revolution took place are bound to bring
positive evidence to the fact. This history of the Church during
the second century has been likened with more of ingenuity than
of poetical beauty to the passing of a train through a railway
tunnel.
We see the train enter, we see it emerge, but its movement while
inside the tunnel is concealed from us. Similarly we may say that
we see with comparative distinctness the Christian Church of the
Apostolic Age, and we see with comparative distinctness the Church
of the Age of Cyprian and Origen, but with respect to the interval
separating the two periods we are not indeed wholly, but, we are,
it must be confessed, very largely ignorant. And yet as in the
case of the tunnel we confidently affirm an identity between what
we saw go in and what we see coming out, so with the doctrine,
discipline, and worship of the Church, the usages of the third
century, we argue, are probably in their leading features what the
usages of the first century were. If reason to the contrary can
be given, well and good; but in the absence of countervailing
testimony we abide by our inference, holding it to be sound.
I am far from wishing to maintain that these considerations bind
liturgical worship upon the Christian Church as a matter of
obligation for all time. It might be argued, and I think with
great force, that liturgical worship having been universal
throughout the ancient world, heathen as well as Jewish, the
apostles and fathers of the Christian Church judged it unwise
to make any departure at the outset from a custom so invariable,
trusting it to the spirit of the new religion to work out freer and
less formal methods of approaching God through Christ in the times
to come. This, I confess, strikes me as a perfectly legitimate line
of reasoning and one which is strengthened rather than weakened by
what we have seen happen in Christendom since the sixteenth
century. Great bodies of Christians have for a period of some
three hundred years been worshipping Almighty God in non-liturgical
ways, and have not been left without witness that their service
was acceptable to the Divine Majesty. Moreover, the fact that
absolute rigidity in liturgical use never was insisted upon in
any age of the Church until the English passed their Act of
Uniformity, makes in the same direction. And yet even after these
allowances have been made, there remains a considerable amount
of solid satisfaction for those who do adhere to the liturgical
method, in the thought that they are in the line which is apparently
the line of continuity, and that their interpretation of the
apostolic purpose with respect to worship is the interpretation
that has been generally received in Christendom as far back as we
can go.