Chapter I: Origins (1)

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.

II.

VICISSITUDES.

Certain of the necromancers of the far East are said to have the power of causing a tree to spring up, spread its branches, blossom, and bear fruit before the eyes of the lookers-on within the space of a few moments.

Modern liturgies have sometimes been brought into being by a process as extemporaneous as this, but not such was the genesis of the Book of Common Prayer.

There are at least eight forms under which the Prayer Book has been from time to time authoritatively set forth--five English, one Scottish, one Irish, and one American; so that, if we would be accurate, we are bound to specify, when we speak of "The Prayer Book," which of several Prayer Books we have in mind.

The truth is, there exists in connection with everything that grows, whether it be plant, animal, or building, a certain mystery like that which attaches to what, in the case of a man, we call personal identity. Which is the true, the actual Napoleon? Is it the Napoleon of the Directory, or the Napoleon of the Consulate, or the Napoleon of the Empire? At each epoch we discern a different phase of the man's character, and yet we are compelled to acknowledge, in the face of all the variations, that we have to do with one and the same man.

But just as a ship acquires, as we may say, her personal identity when she is launched and named, even though there may be a great deal yet to be done in the way of finishing and furnishing before she can be pronounced seaworthy, so it is with a book that is destined to undergo repeated revision and reconstruction, it does acquire, on the day when it is first published, and first given a distinctive title, a certain character the losing of which would be the loss of personal identity. There is many an old cathedral that might properly enough be called a re-edited book in stone. Norman architecture, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular, all are there, and yet one dominant thought pervades the building. Notwithstanding the many times it has been retouched, the fabric still expresses to the eye the original creative purpose of the designer; there is no possibility of our mistaking Salisbury for York or Peterborough for London.

The first Book of Common Prayer was built up of blocks that for the most part had been previously used in other buildings, but the resulting structure exhibited, from the very moment it received a name, such distinct and unmistakable characteristics as have guaranteed it personal identity through more than three hundred years. Hence, while it is in one sense true that there are no fewer than eight Books of Common Prayer, it is in another sense equally true that the Book of Common Prayer is one.

An identity of purpose, of scope, and of spirit shows itself in all its various forms under which the book exists, so that whether we are speaking of the First Prayer Book of King Edward the Sixth, or of the book adopted by the Church of Ireland after its disestablishment, or of the American Book of Common Prayer, what we have in mind is, in a very real and deep sense, one and the same thing.

Let us proceed now to a rapid survey of the facts connected with the first issue of the Common Prayer.

For a period long anterior to the Reformation there had been in use among the English brief books of devotion known as "primers," written in the language of the people. The fact that the public services of the Church were invariably conducted in the Latin tongue made a resort to such expedients as this necessary, unless religion was to be reserved as the private property of ecclesiastics.

By a curious process of evolution the primer, from having been in mediaeval times a book wholly religious and devotional, has come to be in our day a book wholly secular and educational. We associate it with Noah Webster and the Harper Brothers. The New England Primer of the Puritans, with its odd jumble of piety and the three R's, marks a point of transition from the ancient to the modern type.

But this by the way. The primer we are now concerned with is the devotional primer of the times just previous to the Reformation. This, as a rule, contained prayers, the Belief, the Ave Maria, a litany of some sort, the Ten Commandments, and whatever else there might be that in the mind of the compiler came under the head of "things which a Christian ought to know." There were three of these primers set forth during the reign of Henry the Eighth, one in 1535, one in 1539, and one in 1545. During the space that intervened between the publication of the second and that of the third of these primers, appeared "The Litany and Suffrages," a formulary compiled, as is generally believed, by Cranmer, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, and in substance identical with the Litany we use to-day. This Litany of 1544 has been properly described as "the precursor and first instalment of the English Book of Common Prayer." It was the nucleus or centre of crystallization about which the other constituent portions of our manual of worship were destined to be grouped. A quaint exhortation was prefixed to this Litany, in which it was said to have been set forth "because the not understanding the prayers and suffrages formerly used caused that the people came but slackly to the processions." Besides the primers and the Litany, there were printed in Henry's reign various editions of a book of Epistles and Gospels in English. There was also published a Psalter in Latin and English.

All this looked rather to the edification of individual Christians in their private devotional life than to the public worship of the Church, but we are not to suppose that meanwhile the larger interests of the whole body were forgotten. So early as in the year 1542, Convocation, which according to the Anglican theory stands toward the Church in the same attitude that Parliament holds to the State, appointed a Committee of Eight to review and correct the existing service-books. We know very little as to the proceedings of this committee, but that something was done, and a real impulse given to liturgical revision, is evidenced by the fact that at a meeting of Convocation held soon after King Henry's death a resolution prevailed "That the books of the Bishops and others who by the command of the Convocation have labored in examining, reforming, and publishing the divine service, may be produced and laid before the examination of this house."

The next important step in the process we are studying was the publication by authority in the early spring of 1548, of an Order of the Communion, as it was called, a formulary prepared by Cranmer to enable the priest, after having consecrated the elements in the usual manner, to distribute them to the people with the sentences of delivery spoken in English. The priest, that is to say, was to proceed with the service of the Mass as usual in the Latin tongue, but after he had himself received the bread and the wine, he was to proceed to a service of Communion for the people in a speech they could understand.

Almost everything in this tentative document, as we may call it, was subsequently incorporated in the Office of the Holy Communion as we are using it to-day.

We have, then, as an abiding result of the liturgical experiments made in anticipation of the actual setting forth of an authoritative Prayer Book, the Litany and this Order of the Communion.

The time was now ripe for something better and more complete; a new king was upon the throne, and one whose counsellors were better disposed toward change than ever Henry had been. The great movement we know under the name of the Reformation touched the life of the Christian Church in every one of its three great departments--doctrine, discipline, and worship. In Henry's mind, however, the question appears to have been almost exclusively one of discipline or polity. His quarrel was not with the accepted theological errors of his day, for as Defender of the Faith he covered some of the worst of them with his shield. Neither was he ill-disposed toward the methods and usages of public worship so far as we can judge. His quarrel first, last, and always was with a certain rival claimant of power, whose pretended authority he was determined to drive out of the realm, to wit, the Pope. But while it was thus with Henry, it was far otherwise with many of the more thoughtful and devout among his theologians, and when the restraint that had been laid on them was removed by the king's death, they welcomed the opportunity to apply to doctrine and worship the same reforming touch that had already remoulded polity.

An enlarged Committee of Convocation sat at Windsor in the summer of 1548, and as a result there was finally set forth, and ordered to be put into use on Whitsunday, 1549, what has become known in history as the "First Prayer Book of Edward VI."

To dwell on those features of the First Book that have remained unaltered to the present day would be superfluous; I shall therefore, in speaking of it, confine myself to the distinctive and characteristic points in which it differs from the Prayer Books that have succeeded it.

It is worthy of note that in the title page of the First Book there is a clear distinction drawn between the Church Universal, or what we call in the _Te Deum_ "the holy Church throughout all the world," and that particular Church to which King Edward's subjects, in virtue of their being Englishmen, belonged. The book is said to be "the Book of the Common Prayer and administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of _The Church_, after the use of the Church of England." "_The Church_" is recognized as being a larger and, perhaps, older thing than the _Church of England_, while at the same time it is intimated that only through such use of these same prayers and sacraments as the English Church ordains and authorizes can English folk come into communion with the great family of believers spread over the whole earth.

The Preface is a singularly racy piece of English, in which with the utmost plainness of speech the compilers give their reasons for having dealt with the old services as they have done. This reappears in the English Prayer Book of the present day under the title "Concerning the Service of The Church," and so described is placed after the Preface written in 1662 by the Revisers of the Restoration.

The Order for Daily Morning Prayer, as we name it, is called in Edward's First Book "An Order for Matins daily through the year." Similarly, what we call the Order for Daily Evening Prayer was styled "An Order for Evensong." These beautiful names, "Matins" and "Evensong," which it is a great pity to have lost, for surely there is nothing superstitious about them, disappeared from the book as subsequently revised, and save in the Lectionary of the Church of England have no present recognition. One of them, however, Evensong, seems to be coming very generally into colloquial use. The Order for Matins began with the Lord's Prayer. Then, after the familiar versicles still in use, including two that have no place in our American book, "O God, make speed to save me. O Lord, make haste to help me," there followed in full the 95th Psalm, a portion of which is known to us as the _Venite_. From this point the service proceeded, as in the English Prayer Book of to-day, through the Collect for Grace, where it came to an end. The structure of Evensong was similar, beginning with the Lord's Prayer and ending, as our shortened Evening Prayer now does, with the Collect for Aid against Perils. Then followed the Athanasian Creed, and immediately afterward came the Introits, Collects, Epistles, and Gospels.

These Introits, so-called, were psalms appointed to be sung when the priest was about to begin the Holy Communion. They had been an ancient feature of divine service, but were dropped from the subsequent books as a required feature of the Church's worship.

The title of the Communion Service in Edward's First Book is as follows: "The Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion commonly called the Mass." Immediately after the Prayer for Purity--_i_. _e_., in the place where we have the Ten Commandments, comes the _Gloria in Excelsis_. The service then proceeds very much as with us, except that the Prayer for the Church Militant and the Consecration Prayer are welded into one, and the Prayer of Humble Access given a place immediately before the reception of the elements. I note, in passing, certain phrases and sentences that are peculiar to the Communion Office of the First Book, as, for instance, this from the Prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church: "And here we do give unto thee most high praise and hearty thanks for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all thy saints from the beginning of the world, and chiefly in the most glorious and blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord and God, and in the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, whose examples, O Lord, and steadfastness in thy faith and keeping thy holy commandments grant us to follow. We commend unto thy mercy, O Lord, all other thy servants which are departed hence from us with the sign of faith and do now rest in the sleep of peace. Grant unto them, we beseech thee, thy mercy and everlasting peace, and that at the day of the general resurrection we and all they which be of the mystical body of thy Son may altogether be set on his right hand."

And this from the closing portion of the Consecration: "Yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, and command these our prayers and supplications by the ministry of thy holy angels to be brought up into thy holy tabernacle before the sight of thy divine majesty."

Following close upon the Communion Service came the Litany, differing very little from what we have to-day, save in the memorable petition, "From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, good Lord deliver us."

The Baptismal Offices of the First Book contain certain unique features. The sign of the cross is ordered to be made on the child's breast as well as on his forehead. There is a form of exorcism said over the infant in which the unclean spirit is commanded to come out and to depart. There is also the giving of the "Crisome" or white vesture as a symbol of innocence. "Take this white vesture for a token of the innocency which by God's grace in this holy sacrament of Baptism is given unto thee, and for a sign whereby thou art admonished, so long as thou livest, to give thyself to innocency of living, that after this transitory life thou mayest be partaker of the life everlasting."

The Catechism in Edward VI. First Book, as in the subsequent books down to 1662, is made a part of the Confirmation Office, although it does not clearly appear that the children were expected to say it as a preliminary to the service.

The Office for the Visitation of the Sick contains provision for private confession and absolution, and also directs that the priest shall anoint the sick man with oil if he be desired to do so.

The Office for the Communion of the Sick allows the practice of what is called the reservation of the elements, but contains also, be it observed, that rubric which has held its place through all the changes the Prayer Book has undergone, where we are taught that if the sick man by any "just impediment fail to receive the sacrament of Christ's body and blood, the curate shall instruct him that if he do truly repent him of his sins and steadfastly believe that Jesus Christ hath suffered death upon the cross for him . . . he doth eat and drink the body and blood of our Saviour Christ, profitably to his soul's health although he do not receive the sacrament with his mouth."

The Burial Office contains a recognition of prayer for the dead, but except in the matter of the arrangement of the parts differs but little from the service still in use. A special Introit, Collect, Epistle, and Gospel are appointed "for the Celebration of the Holy Communion when there is a Burial of the Dead."

A Commination Office for Ash-Wednesday, substantially identical with that still in use in the Church of England, concludes the book.

The First Prayer Book of King Edward the Sixth, memorable as it was destined to become, proved, so far as actual use was concerned, but short-lived. It became operative, as we have seen, on Whitsunday, 1549, but it was soon evident that while the new services went too far in the direction of reform to please the friends of the ancient order of things, they did not go far enough to meet the wishes of the reforming party.

Before the year was out no fewer than three translations of the Liturgy into Latin had been undertaken with a view to informing the Protestant divines of the Continent as to what their English colleagues were doing. "There was already within the Church" (of England), writes Cardwell, in his comparison of Edward's two books, "a party, though probably not numerous, which espoused the peculiar sentiments of Calvin; there were others, and Cranmer, it appears, had recently been one of them, adhering strictly to the opinions of Luther; there were many, and those among the most active and the most learned, who adopted the views of Bullinger and the theologians of Zurich; there was a still larger body anxious to combine all classes of Protestants under one general confession, and all these, though with distinct objects and different degrees of impatience, looked forward to a revision of the Liturgy, to bring it more completely into accordance with their own sentiments."

As a result of the agitation thus vividly pictured by Cardwell, there came forth in 1552 the book known as the Second Prayer Book of King Edward VI., a work of the very greatest interest, for the reason that it was destined to become the basis of all future revisions. Whitsunday, 1549, was the day when the First Book began to be used. The Feast of All Saints, 1552, was the date officially appointed for the introduction of the Second Book. Presently King Edward died, and by an act of Mary passed in October, 1553, the use of his Book became illegal on and after December 20th of that year. It thus appears that the First Book was in use for two years and about four months, and the Second Book one year and about two months. A memorable three years and a half for the English-speaking peoples of all time to come, for it is not too much to say that while the language of Tyndale and of Cranmer continues to be heard on earth, the devotions then put into form will keep on moulding the religious thought and firing the spiritual imagination of this race.

The points in which the second of King Edward's two books differs from the first are of such serious moment and the general complexion of the later work has in it such an access of Protestant coloring, that high Anglican writers have been in the habit of attributing the main features of the revision to the interference of the Continental Reformers. "If it had not been for the impertinent meddling," they have been accustomed to say, "of such foreigners as Bucer, Peter Martyr, and John a-Lasco, we might have been enjoying at the present day the admirable and truly Catholic devotions set forth in the fresh morning of the Reformation, before the earth-born vapors of theological controversy and ecclesiastical partisanship had beclouded an otherwise fair sky." But it does not appear that there is any solid foundation in fact for these complaints.

The natural spread of the spirit of reform among the people of the realm, taken in connection with the changes of opinion which the swift movement of the times necessarily engendered in the minds of the leading divines, are of themselves quite sufficient to account for what took place. Certainly, if the English of that day were at all like their descendants in our time, it is in the highest degree unlikely that they would have allowed a handful of learned refugees to force upon them changes which their own sober judgment did not approve.

The truth is, very little is certainly known as to the details of what was done in the making of Edward's Second Book. Even the names of the members of the committee intrusted with the revision are matter of conjecture, and of the proceedings of that body no authentic record survives. What we do possess and are in a position to criticise is the book itself, and to a brief review of the points in which it differs from its predecessor we will now pass.

Upon taking up the Second Book after laying down the First, one is struck immediately with the changed look of Morning Prayer. This is no longer called Matins, and no longer begins as before with the Lord's Prayer. An Introduction has been prefixed to the office consisting of a collection of sentences from Holy Scripture, all of them of a penitential character, and besides these of an Exhortation, a Confession, and an Absolution. There can be little doubt that this opportunity for making public acknowledgment of sin and hearing the declaration of God's willingness to forgive, was meant to counterbalance the removal from the book of all reference, save in one instance, to private confession and absolution. The Church of England has always retained in her Visitation Office a permission to the priest to pronounce absolution privately to the sick man. This was a feature of the First Book that was not disturbed in the Second. But wherever else they found anything that seemed to look toward the continuance of the system familiarly known to us under the name of "the Confessional," they expunged it. Between the Exhortation and the Confession there is, in point of literary merit, a noticeable contrast, and it is scarcely to be believed that both formularies can have proceeded from one and the same pen. Another step in the Protestant direction was the prohibition of certain vestments that in the First Book had been allowed, as the alb and cope. The Introit Psalms were taken away. The word "table" was everywhere substituted for the word "altar." The changes in the Office of the Holy Communion were numerous and significant. The Ten Commandments, for instance, were inserted in the place where we now have them. The _Gloria in Excelsis_ was transferred from the beginning of the service to the end. The Exhortations were re-written. The supplication for the dead was taken out of the Prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church, and the words "militant here on earth" were added to the title with a view to confining the scope of the intercession to the circle of people still alive. The Confession, Absolution, Comfortable Words, and Prayer of Humble Access were placed before the Consecration instead of after it. Most important of all was the change of the words appointed to be said in delivering the elements to the communicants. In the First Book these had been, "The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life," and in the case of the cup, "The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life." For these were now substituted in the one instance the words, "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving," and in the other, "Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee, and be thankful."

From the Office for the Communion of the Sick the direction to reserve the elements was omitted, as was also the permission to anoint the sick man with oil. The Service of Baptism was no longer suffered to retain the exorcism of the evil spirit, or the white vesture, or the unction; and there were other items of less important change. Those mentioned reveal plainly enough what was the animus of the revisers. Most evidently the intention was to produce a liturgy more thoroughly reformed, more in harmony with the new tone and temper which the religious thought of the times was taking on.