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 God 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
reassure 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 passing 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 mass 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 Latitudinarianism; 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 assertion 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
document, 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 Beatitudes 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 associates 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
entitled, _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 godly and ancient order of the
ancient fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected,
by planting in uncertain stories and legends, with multitudes
of responds, verses, vain repetitions, 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 beatitude.
We change our sky completely in passing 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 illustration, 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 assured, 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.