“Deus, a quo sancta desideria, recta consilia, et justa sunt opera, da
servis tuis illam quam mundus dare non potest pacem, ut et corda nostra
mandatis tuis, et, hostium sublata formidine, tempora, sint tuâ
protectione tranquilla.”
“God, from whom are all holy desires, right counsels, and just works,
give to Thy servants that peace which the world cannot, that both our
hearts, in Thy commandments, and our times, the fear of enemies being
taken away, may be calm under Thy guard.”
The adulteration of this great Catholic prayer in our English
church-service (as needless as it was senseless, since the pure form of
it contains nothing but absolutely Christian prayer, and is as fit for
the most stammering Protestant lips as for Dante’s), destroyed all the
definite meaning of it, [60] and left merely the vague expression of
desire for peace, on quite unregarded terms. For of the millions of
people who utter the prayer at least weekly, there is not one in a
thousand who is ever taught, or can for themselves find out, either
what a holy desire means, or a right counsel means, or a just work
means,—or what the world is, or what the peace is which it cannot give.
And half an hour after they have insulted God by praying to Him in this
deadest of all dead languages, not understanded of the people, they
leave the church, themselves pacified in their perennial determination
to put no check on their natural covetousness; to act on their own
opinions, be they right or wrong; to do whatever they can make money
by, be it just or unjust; and to thrust themselves, with the utmost of
their soul and strength, to the highest, by them attainable, pinnacle
of the most bedrummed and betrumpeted booth in the Fair of the World.
The prayer, in its pure text, is essentially, indeed, a monastic one;
but it is written for the great Monastery of the Servants of God, whom
the world hates. It cannot be uttered with honesty but by these; nor
can it ever be answered but with the peace bequeathed to these, ‘not as
the world giveth.’
Of which peace, the nature is not to be without war, but undisturbed in
the midst of war; and not without enemies, but without fear of them. It
is a peace without pain, because desiring only what is holy; without
anxiety, because it thinks only what is right; without disappointment,
because a just work is always successful; without sorrow, because
‘great peace have they which love Thy Law, and nothing shall offend
them;’ and without terror, because the God of all battles is its Guard.
So far as any living souls in the England of this day can use,
understandingly, the words of this collect, they are already,
consciously or not, companions of all good labourers in the vineyard of
God. For those who use it reverently, yet have never set themselves to
find out what the commandments of God are, nor how loveable they are,
nor how far, instead of those commandments, the laws of the world are
the only code they care for, nor how far they still think their own
thoughts and speak their own words, it is assuredly time to search out
these things. And I believe that, after having searched them out, no
sincerely good and religious person would find, whatever his own
particular form of belief might be, anything which he could reasonably
refuse, or which he ought in anywise to fear to profess before all men,
in the following statement of creed and resolution, which must be
written with their own hand, and signed, with the solemnity of a vow,
by every person received into the St. George’s Company.
I. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth, and of all things and creatures visible and invisible.