A SERMON PREACHED IN ST. STEPHEN'S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, ON THE
ANNIVERSARY OF THE BISHOP WHITE PRAYER BOOK SOCIETY, SUNDAY,
NOVEMBER 24, 1878.
One generation passeth away; and another generation cometh.--Eccles.
i.4.
Against the background of this sombre fact of change, whatever
there is in life that is stable stands out with a sharpness that
compels notice. Just because the world is so full of variableness,
our hearts' affections fasten with the tighter grip upon anything
that seems to have the guarantees of permanence. The Book of Common
Prayer appeals to us on this score, precisely as the Bible, in its
larger measure, does: it is the book of many generations, not of
one, and there is "the hiding of its power." We have received the
Prayer Book from the generations that are gone; we purpose handing
it on when "another generation cometh"; we hold it for the use and
blessing of the generation which now is.
Our thoughts about the book, therefore, if we would have the
thinking rightly done, must take hold upon the past, the present,
and the future, a breadth of topic covered well enough perhaps by
this phrase, The Permanent and the Variable Characteristics of the
Prayer Book.
I make no apology for asking you to take up the subject in so grave
a temper. Now, for more than three hundred years, the Common Prayer
has been the manual of worship in use with the greater number of
the people of that race which, meanwhile, in the providence of God,
has been growing up to be the leading power on earth. Everywhere
the English language seems to be going forth conquering and to
conquer, and whithersoever it penetrates it carries with it the
letters and the social traditions of a people whose character has
been largely moulded by the influences of the Prayer Book. Africans,
Indians, Hindoos are to-day, even in their heathenism, feeling the
effects of waves of movement which throb from this centre. Men in
authority, the world over, are living out, with more or less of
consistency and thoroughness, those convictions about our duty
toward God, and our duty toward our neighbor, which were early
inwrought into their consciences through the instrumentality of
these venerable forms. Surely no one can afford to think or speak
otherwise than most seriously and carefully with regard to a book
which has behind it a history so worthy, so rich, so pregnant with
promise for the future.
Look first, then, at the power which the Prayer Book draws from
its affiliations with the past. It is a common remark, so common
as to be commonplace, that our liturgy owes its excellence to the
fact of its not having been the composition or compilation of any
one man. So much is evident enough upon the face of it: for a form
of worship devised off-hand by an individual, or even put together
by a committee sitting around a table, could scarcely be wholly
satisfactory to any save the maker or the makers of it. But it is
more to the purpose to observe that not only is the Prayer Book
not the result of any one man's or any one committee's labors; it
is not the work even of any one generation, or of any one age.
The men who gradually put the Prayer Book into what is substantially
its present shape, in the days of Edward VI. and of Elizabeth, were
no more the makers of the Prayer Book than were the men who, in a
later reign, set forth what we call "the authorized version" of the
Holy Scriptures, the first translators of the Bible. In both cases
the work done was a work of review and revision. A much more severe
review, a vastly more sweeping revision in the case of the Prayer
Book than in the case of the Bible, I grant; but still, mainly
a work of review and revision after all. "Continuity," that
characteristic so precious in the eye of modern science, continuity
marked the whole process.
The first Prayer Book of the Reformed Church of England was a
condensed, simplified, and purified combination of formularies
of worship already in use in the National Church. A certain
amount of new material, some of it home-made, some of it drawn
from foreign sources, was added; but the great bulk of the
new service-book had been contained in one or other of the
older manuals. The Reformers did but clip and prune, with that
exquisite taste and judgment which belong by tradition to English
gardeners, the overgrowth and rank luxuriance of a too long
neglected, "careless-ordered" garden. But whence came the earlier
formularies themselves, from which Cranmer and the rest quarried
the stone for the new building?--to change the metaphor as Paul,
you remember, does so suddenly from husbandry to architecture.[91]
Whence came Missal, and Breviary, and Book of Offices--the best
portions of which were merged in the English Common Prayer?
From the far past; the Missal from those primitive liturgies or
communion services, some of which we trace back with certainty
to the later portion of the ante-Niceneage, and by not unreasonable
conjecture to the edge of apostolic days; the Breviary or daily
prayers from the times when Christians first took up community
life; the Offices from periods of uncertain date all along the
track of previous Church history. But what advantage, asks someone
full of the modern spirit, what advantage has the Common Prayer
in that it can trace a genealogy running up through ages of such
uncertain reputation? Have we not been accustomed to regard those
times as hopelessly corrupt, impenetrably dark, universally
superstitious? Ought we not to be mortified, rather than gratified,
to learn that from the pit of so mouldy a past our book of prayer
was digged? Would not a brand-new liturgy, modernized expressly
to meet the needs of nineteenth century culture, with all the old
English idioms displaced, every rough corner smoothed and every
crooked place made straight--would not that be something far
worthier our respect, better entitled to our allegiance, than
this book full of far-away echoes, and faint bell-notes from a
half-forgotten past?
Yes, if modern man were only modern man and nothing more, such
reasoning would be extremely cogent. But what if modern man be
really, not the mere creature of the century in which he lives,
but the gathered sum and product of all that has preceded him in
history? What if you and I, from the very fact that we are living
now, have in the dim groundwork of our nature something that would
not have been there had we lived one, three, twelve hundred years
ago? What if there be such a thing as cumulative acquirement for
the race of men, so that a new generation starts with an available
capital of associations and ideas of which the generation last
preceding it owned but a part? Take such words as "feudalism," "the
Crusades," "the Renaissance," "the printing press," consider how
much they mean to us, and then remember that to a man of the third
century they would have been empty sounds conveying absolutely no
meaning. What all this goes to show is that human nature is a map
which is continually unrolling. To say that the entirety of it lies
between the two meridians that bound the particular tract in which
our own little life happens to be cast is stupid. The whole great
past belongs to us--river and island, ocean, forest, continent, all
are ours. You and the man in armor, you and the Venetian merchant,
you and the cowled monk have something, be it ever so little,
something in common. That which was in the foreground of their life
is now in the background or in the middle distance of yours. It has
become a part of you.[92]
So, then, if we would have a liturgy that shall speak to our whole
nature, and not to a mere fraction of it, it must be a liturgy full
of voices sounding out of the past. There must be reminders and
suggestions in it of all the great epochs of the Church's story.
Yes, echoes even from those very ages which we call dark (perhaps
as much because we are in the dark about them as on account of any
special blackness attaching to the times themselves), some echoes
even from them may have a rightful place in the worship which is to
call out responsively all that is in the heart of the most modern
of modern men.
As there were heroes before Agamemnon, so were there holy and humble
men of heart before Cranmer and Luther, yes, and before Jerome and
Augustine. If any cry that ever went up from any one of them out of
the depths of that nature which they share with us and we with them,
if any breath of supplication, any moan of penitence, any shout of
victory that issued from their lips has made out to survive the
noise and tumult of intervening times, it has earned by its very
persistency of tone a _prima facie_ title to be put into the Prayer
Book of to-day.[93] And this is why a prayer book may survive the
wreck of many systems of theology. A prayer book holds the utterance
of our needs; a theological system is the embodiment of our thoughts.
Now our thoughts about things divine are painfully fallible and
liable to change with change of times; but a want which is genuinely
and entirely human is a permanent fact; the great needs of the soul
never grow obsolete, and though the language in which the lips shall
clothe the heart's desire may alter, as tastes alter, yet the
substance of the prayer abides, and in some happy instances the
form also abides.
To an eye that looks wisely and lovingly on such sights, there is
the same keen sense of enjoyment in finding here and there in the
Prayer Book suggestions of forgotten customs, reminders of famous
persons and events, that there is in detecting in the masonry of
an old castle or minster tell-tale stones which betray the different
ages, the "sundry times and divers manners" which the fabric
represents. Who, for instance, that has traced the history of
that apostolic ordinance, "the kiss of peace," down through the
liturgical changes and revolutions of eighteen hundred years, can
fail to be interested in finding in a single clause of one of the
exhortations of our communion service that which corresponds to
the literal kiss of primitive times, as well as to the petrified
symbol of the original reality, the silver, ivory, or wooden
"osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday,"
a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again,
the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an
impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brushing these
away as so much trash! They are not trash, they are way marks that
tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love
the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings,
such as "_De Profundis_" and "_Miserere_," still possess such
associations for ourselves. There was a time when very many more
of them meant to men now dead and gone as much as "Rock of Ages,"
or "Sun of my Soul," or "Lead, kindly Light," can mean to you or
me.[95]
Then, too, the monuments of specially revered heroes of the faith
that dot the paths of the Common Prayer, how precious they are! We
like to think of Ambrose as speaking to us in the lofty sentences
of the _Te Deum_. It is pleasant to associate Chrysostom with the
prayer that bears his name, and to know that he who swayed the
city's multitude still prized the Master's promise to the "two or
three gathered together" in his name. So also, in our American Book,
Jeremy Taylor, the modern Chrysostom, meets us in the Office for
the Visitation of the Sick, in that solemn prayer addressed to Him
"whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered."
All these things help to make the Prayer Book the large-hearted,
wide-minded book we all of us feel it to be, so like a friend
whom we revere because he is kindly in his tone, generous in his
judgments, quick to understand us at every point.
So much for the past of the Prayer Book. We have touched it in no
image-breaking mood, but with reverence. "One generation passeth
away, another generation cometh," and it has been the peculiar
felicity of this book to stand
A link among the days, to knit
The generations each to each.
We pass on to consider the present usefulness of the Prayer Book
and the possibility of extending that usefulness in the future.
And now I shall speak wholly as an American to Americans, not
because the destinies of the Prayer Book in the New World are
the more important, though such may in the end turn out to be
the fact, but simply because we are at home here and know our own
wants and wishes, our own liabilities and opportunities, far better
than we can possibly know those of other people. As a Church we
have always tied ourselves too slavishly to English precedent. Our
vine is greatly in danger of continuing merely a potted ivy, an
indoor exotic. The past of the Common Prayer we cannot disconnect
from England, but its present and its future belong in part at
least to us, and it is in this light that we are bound as American
Churchmen to study them. Let us agree, then, that the usefulness
of the book here and now lies largely in the moulding and formative
influence which it is quietly exerting, not only on the religion
of those who use it, but also largely on the religion of the far
greater number who publicly use it not. It has interested me, as
it would interest almost anyone, to learn how many prayer books
our booksellers supply to Christian people who are not Churchmen.
Evidently the book is in use as a private manual with thousands,
who own no open allegiance to the Protestant Episcopal Church. They
keep it on the devotional shelf midway between Thomas a Kempis and
the Pilgrim's Progress, finding it a sort of interpreter of the
one to the other, and possessed of a certain flavor differencing
it from both. This is a happy augury for the future. Much latent
heat is generating which shall yet warm up the dullness of the land.
The seed-grain of the Common Prayer will not lie unproductive in
those forgotten furrows. The fitness of such a system of worship
as this to counteract some of the flagrant evils of our popular
religion can scarcely fail to commend it to the minds of those who
thus unobserved and, "as it were in secret," read and ponder.
Much of our American piety, fervid as it is, shows confessedly
a feverish, intermittent character which needs just such a tonic
as the Prayer Book provides in what Keble happily called its "sober
standard of feeling in matters of practical religion."
Then, too, there is the constantly increasing interest which it
is such a pleasure to observe among Christians of all names in
the order of the ritual year, in Christmas and Easter, Lent and
Good-Friday--who can tell how much of this may not be due to the
leavening influence of the Prayer Book, over and above what is
effected by the public services of the Church? "I wonder," said
a famous revivalist to a friend, a clergyman of our Church, "I
wonder if you Episcopalians know what a good thing you have in
that year of yours. Why don't you use it more?"
And true enough, why do we not? That we might learn to do so was a
wish very near to the heart of that holy and true man who, if
anyone, deserves the title of the saint among our priests, the
late Dr. Muhlenberg, the man who twenty-five years ago headed the
not wholly abortive movement known as the "Memorial."[96] One
fruit of that movement is perhaps to be seen in the earnest desire
now prevalent throughout the Church to see the scope of the Prayer
Book's influence enlarged. In General Conventions and Church
Congresses nowadays no topic excites greater interest than the
question how better to adapt the services of the Church to
the present needs and special conditions of all classes of the
population. To be sure, the apparent impotence of the governing
body to find or furnish any lawful way of relief is a little
discouraging, but it is something to see an almost universal
assent given in terms, to the proposition that relief ought to
be had. What we have to fear is that during the long delay
which puts off the only proper and regular method of giving more
elasticity to the services, there may spring up a generation of
Churchmen from whose minds the idea of obligation to law in matters
of ritual observance will have faded out altogether.
There is a conservatism so conservative that it will stand by and
see a building tumble down rather than lay a sacrilegious hand on
a single stone, will see dam and mill and village all swept away
sooner than lift the flash-boards that keep the superabundant water
from coming safely down. It is among the things possible, that for
lack of readjustment and timely adaptation of the laws regulating
worship, just such a fate may befall our whole liturgical fabric.
The plausible theory of "the rubric of common sense," about which
we have heard so much, a theory good within limitations, is
threatening, by the wholesale application it receives, presently
to annul all other rubrics whatsoever. When, by this process,
uniformity and even similarity shall have been utterly abolished,
when it shall have become impossible for one to know beforehand of
a Sunday whether he is going to mass, or to meeting, or to church,
the inquiry will be in order, What has conservatism of this sort
really conserved?
"The personal liberty of the officiating clergyman," I fear
will be the only answer; certainly not, "The liberty of the
worshipping congregation." The straight and only honest way out
of our embarrassment will, some day or other, be found, I dare not
believe very soon, in a careful, loving, fair-minded revision of
the formularies; a revision undertaken, not for the purpose of
giving victory to one theological party rather than to another, or
of changing in any degree the doctrinal teaching of the Church,
but solely and wholly with a view to enriching, amplifying, and
making more available the liturgical treasures of the book.
"One generation passeth away, another generation cometh." As we
have seen in these words an argument in favor of not breaking with
the past, so let them also speak to us of our plain duty to the
present. True, the great needs are, as I have said, common alike
to all the generations, to those that pass and those that come; but
the lesser needs are variable, and unless we are prepared to take
the ground that because "lesser" they maybe disregarded altogether,
we are bound, with the changed times, to provide for the new wants
new satisfactions. Take, simply by way of illustration, the need we
stand in of an appropriate form of third service for use on Sundays
in city churches, when Morning and Evening Prayer have been already
said according to the prescribed order.
Why have we no such service?
Simply because no such need existed in our American cities when the
Prayer Book, as we have it now, was taking shape, at the close of
the last century. Just as no form for the administration of Adult
Baptism was put into Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book, simply because
the usage of Infant Baptism was universal in that day, and there
were no unbaptized adults; but such service was inserted at the
Restoration to meet the need that had sprung up under the Puritan
regime; so was it unnecessary in Bishop White's day to provide for
a form of service which has only become practicable and desirable
since modern discovery has enabled us to make the public streets
almost as safe at night as in the daytime, and church-going as easy
by gaslight as by sunlight.
Now it is perfectly possible, of course, under the present order of
things, and with no change in rubric or canon law, for any clergyman
to provide an additional service, to provide it in the form of a
mosaic made up of bits of the liturgy wrenched out of their proper
places, and so irregularly put together that no stranger among the
worshippers can possibly, with the book in hand, thread his way
among its intricacies.
But when we consider how many exquisite gems of devotional speech
there are still left outside the covers of the Prayer Book; when we
consider how delightful it would be to have back again the
_Magnificat _, and the _Nunc Dimittis _, and some of the sweet
versicles of the Evensong of the Church of England; when we consider
the lamentable mistake already made in our existing formularies of
introducing into Morning and Evening Prayer identically the same
opening sentences, the same General Exhortation, the same General
Confession, the same Declaration of Absolution, the same Prayer for
the President, and the same General Thanksgiving--is it not evident
that an additional, or, if you please, an alternative service,
composed of material not elsewhere employed, would be for the
worshippers a very great gain? The repetition which wearies is
only the repetition which we feel need not have been. We never
tire of the Collect for Peace any more than we tire of the sunset.
It is in its place, and we always welcome it. In a perfect liturgy
no form of words, except the Creed, the Doxology, and the Lord's
Prayer, would at any time reappear, but as in arabesque work every
square inch of space differs from every other square, so each clause
and sentence of the manual of worship would have a distinctive
beauty of its own, to be looked for precisely there and nowhere
else.
This is but one illustration of what may be called a possible
enrichment of our Book of Common Prayer. Impoverishment under
the name of revision may very justly be deprecated, but who shall
find any just fault with an enrichment that is really such?
We must remember that the men who gave us what we now have were, in
their day and generation, the innovators, advocates of what the
more timid spirits accounted dangerous change. We cannot, I think,
sufficiently admire the courageous foresight of those Reformers
who, at a time when public worship was mainly associated in men's
minds with what went on among a number of ecclesiastics gathered
together at one end of a church, dared to plant themselves firmly
on the principle of "common" prayer, and to say, Henceforth the
worship of the National Church shall be the worship not of priests
alone, but of priests and people too. What a bold act it was! The
printing-press, remember, although it had given the impulse to the
Reformation, was far from being at that time the omnipresent thing
it is now; books were scarce; popular education, as we understand
it, was unknown; there were no means of supplying service-books to
the poorer classes (no Prayer Book Societies, like this of yours),
nor could the books have been used had they been furnished. And yet
in the face of these seemingly insuperable obstacles, the leaders
of religious thought in the England of that day had the sagacity
to plan a system of worship which should involve participation by
the people in all the acts of divine service, including the
administration of the sacraments.
Here was genuine statesmanship applied to the administration of
religion. Those men discerned wisely the signs of their own times.
They saw what the right principle was, they foresaw what the art
of printing was destined in time to accomplish, and they did a
piece of work which has bravely stood the wear and tear of full
three hundred years.
No Churchman questions the wisdom of their innovations now. Is it
hopeless to expect a like quickness of discernment in the leaders
of to-day? Surely they have eyes to see that a new world has been
born, and that a thousand unexampled demands are pressing us on
every side. If the Prayer Book is not enriched with a view to
meeting those demands, it is not for lack of materials. A Saturday
reviewer has tried to fasten on the Church of England the stigma
of being the Church which for the space of two centuries has not
been able to evolve a fresh prayer.
If the reproach were just it would be stinging indeed; but it is
most cruelly unjust. In the devotional literature of the Anglicanism
of the last fifty years, to go no further back, there may be found
prayers fully equal in compass of thought and depth of feeling to
any of those that are already in public use. Not to single out
too many instances, it may suffice to mention the prayers appended
to the book of Ancient Collects edited a few years since by a
distinguished Oxford scholar. The clergy are acquainted with them,
and know how beautiful they are. Why should not the whole Church
enjoy the happiness of using them?[97] Why is there not the same
propriety in our garnering the devotional harvest of the three
hundred years last past that there was in the Reformers garnering
the harvest of five times three hundred years?
"One generation passeth away, another generation cometh." I have
spoken of the present and the past, what now of the future? We
know that all things come to an end. What destiny awaits the book
to which our evening thoughts have been given? That is a path not
open to our tread. The cloudy curtain screens the threshold of it.
Still we may listen and imagine that we hear sounds. What if such
a voice as this were to come to us from the distance of a hundred
years hence--a voice tinged with sadness, and carrying just the
least suggestion of reproach? "Our fathers," the voice says,
"in the last quarter of the last century, forfeited a golden
opportunity. It was a time of reconstruction in the State, social
life was taking on the form it was destined long to retain, a great
war had come to an end and its results were being registered, all
things were fluent. Moreover, there happened, just then, to be an
almost unparalleled lull in the strife of religious parties; men
were more disposed than usual to agree; the interest in liturgical
research was at its greatest, and scholars knew and cared more
than they have ever done since about the history and the structure
of forms of prayer. Nevertheless, timid councils prevailed; nothing
was done with a view to better adapting the system to the needs of
society, and the hope that the Church might cease to wear the
dimensions of a sect, and might become the chosen home of a great
people, died unrealized. We struggle on, a half-hearted company,
and try to live upon the high traditions, the sweet memories of our
past."
God forbid, my friends, that the dismal prophecy come true! We will
not believe it. But what, you ask, is the pathway to any such
betterment as I have ventured roughly to sketch to-night? I will
not attempt to map it, but I feel very confident which way it
does not run. I am sure it does not run through the region of
disaffection, complaint, threatening, restlessness, petulance,
or secession. Mere fretfulness never carries its points. No, the
true way to better things is always to begin by holding on manfully
to that which we already are convinced is good. The best restorers
of old fabrics are those who work with affectionate loyalty as
nearly as possible on the lines of the first builders, averse to
any change which is made merely for change's sake, not so anxious
to modernize as to restore, and yet always awake to the fact that
what they have been set to do is to make the building once more what
it was first meant to be, a practicable shelter.