_The Beatitudes of the Gospel_.
This is the one feature of _The Book Annexed_ against which the
fire of hostile criticism has been the most persistently directed.
Whether the strictures passed upon the Office have been in all
cases as intelligent as they have been severe, may be open to
question, but there can be no doubt whatever that, in its present
form, Resolution V. would, if put to the vote, be rejected.
Passing by the more violent utterances of those whose language
almost suggests that they find something objectionable in the
very BEATITUDES themselves,[72] it will suffice to consider
and weigh what has been said in various quarters, first, about
the unprecedented character of the Office, and secondly, concerning
the infelicity of the appointed response, "Lord, have mercy upon
us, and be it unto thy servants according to thy word."
So far as concerns precedent, it ought to be enough to say that
the words are our Lord's words, and that they were thrown by him
into a form which readily lends itself to antiphonal use. The very
same characteristics of parallelism and antithesis, that make the
Psalms so amenable to the purposes of worship, are conspicuous in
the BEATITUDES. If the Church of England, for three hundred years,
has been willing to give place in her devotions to the Curses of
the Old Testament,[73] we of America need not to be afraid,
precedent or no precedent, to make room among our formularies for
the Blessings of the New.
Those who allow themselves to characterize the liturgical use of
these memorable sayings of the Son of Man as "fancy ritual" and
"sentimentalism" may well pause to ask themselves what manner of
spirit they are of. The BEATITUDES are the charter of the kingdom
of heaven. If they are "sentimental," the kingdom is "sentimental";
but if, on the other hand, they constitute the organic law of the
People of God, they have at least as fair a right as the Ten
Commandments to be published from the altar, and answered by the
great congregation.
But is the complaint of "no precedent" a valid one, even supposing
considerations of intrinsic fitness to have been ruled out?
The Liturgy of St. Chrysostom provides that the Beatitudes shall
be sung on Sundays in room of the third antiphon.[74]
The learned Bishop of Haiti, in a paper warmly commending the
liturgical use of the BEATITUDES,[75] calls attention to the
further fact that the Eight Sayings have a place in some of the
service-books of the Eastern Church in the Office for the Sixth and
Ninth Hours, and notes the suggestive and touching circumstances
that, as there used, they have for a response the words of the
penitent thief upon the cross. We might all of us well pray to be
"remembered" in that kingdom to which these Blessings give the law.
In _The Primer set forth by the King's Majesty and his Clergy_ in
1545, a sort of stepping-stone to the later "Book of Common Prayer,"
we find the BEATITUDES very ingeniously worked into the Office of
The Hours, as anthems; beginning with Prime and ending with
Evensong. Appropriate Collects are interwoven, some of them so
beautiful as to be well worth preserving.[76]
But the most interesting precedent of all remains still to be
studied. In the first year of the reign of William and Mary, a
Royal Commission was appointed to revise the Book of Common Prayer.
The most eminent Anglican divines of the day, including Tillotson,
Stillingfleet, Patrick, and Beveridge, were among the members. To
all outward appearance the movement came to naught; for the proposed
revision was not even put into print, until in 1854, the House of
Commons, in response to a motion of Mr. Heywood, ordered it to be
published as a Blue-book. And yet in some way our American revisers
of 1789 must have found access to the original volume as it lay
hidden in the archbishop's library at Lambeth; for not only does
their work show probable evidence of such consultation, but in their
Preface they distinctly refer to the effort of King William's
Commission as a "great and good work,"[77] a thing they would
scarcely have done had they possessed no real knowledge of the
facts. Macaulay's sneering reference to the work of the Commission
is well known, but, strangely enough, the justice which a Whig
reviewer withholds, a high Anglican divine concedes, for no less
exacting a critic than Dr. Neale, while manifesting, as was to be
expected, a general dislike of the Commissioners of 1689, and of
their work, does yet find something to praise in what they
recommended.[78]
Among the real improvements suggested by the Commission was the
liturgical use of the BEATITUDES, and this in two places, once in
"The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper," as an
alternate to the Ten Commandments; and again in the Commination
Office as a proper balance to the Anathemas of the Law.
But the Commission, like the late Joint Committee on the Book of
Common Prayer, was unfortunate in its choice of a response; and no
wonder, for the task of finding the proper one is difficult.[79]
A Beatitude differs from a Commandment in that while the latter
enjoins the former only declares. The one therefore simply calls
for assent, or, at most, assent coupled with petition, while the
other peremptorily demands a cry for mercy. The immemorial form of
the cry for mercy in the devotions of Christendom is the "Kyrie
eleison," _Lord, have mercy upon us_; the immemorial form of assent
the word _Amen_. Can we do better, therefore, in adapting the
BEATITUDES to liturgical use than to treat them precisely as the
Curses are treated in the Commination Office of the Church of
England, namely, by inserting after each one of them a plain
_Amen_.
This recommendation has the great merit of simplicity. Two or three
strikingly ingenious schemes for supplying each of the Eight Sayings
with a proper response of its own have been suggested;[80] but the
objection to them is that, beautiful though they are, their
complexity would embarrass and distress the kneeling worshipper.
In these matters, practical drawbacks have to be taken into account
as well as abstract excellencies, and no matter how felicitous the
antiphonal responses, they would be worse than useless were a
puzzled congregation to refuse to join in them.
There will be found appended to this Paper a plan for recasting
the Office of the BEATITUDES in such a way as to make it coincide
structurally, as far as it goes, with the introductory portion
of the Holy Communion.[81] Were the Office to be thus set forth,
it would be possible on week-days, and with singular appropriateness
on Saints' Days, to substitute the BEATITUDES for the Commandments,
without encumbering the Communion Office with an alternate. Should
this suggestion find acceptance, the two Collects in the present
Office of BEATITUDES, which are far too good to be lost, one of
them being the modified form of a Leonine original, and the other
one of the very best of Canon Bright's own compositions, might be
transferred to a place among the "Occasional Prayers."