Chapter II: Revision of the American Common Prayer.1 (1)

The revision of long established formularies of public worship is, as it ought to be, a matter compassed about with obstacles many and great. A wise doubtfulness prompts conservative minds to throw every mover for change upon the defensive, when liturgical interests are at stake. So many men are born into the world with a native disposition to tamper with and tinker all settled things, and so many more become persuaded, as time goes on, of a personal "mission" to pull down and remake whatever has been once built up, esteeming life a failure unless they have contrived to build each his own monument upon a clearing, that lovers of the old ways are sometimes compelled in sheer self-defence to put on the appearance of being more obstinately set against change than they really are. It ought not to be absolutely impossible to alter a national hand-book of worship (which is what any manual calling itself a Common Prayer must aspire to become), but it is well that it should be all but impossible to do so. Logically it might seem as if the possession of a power to make involved a continuance of power to remake; and so it does, to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent. Living organisms cannot be remodelled with the same freedom as dead matter. A solemnity hangs about the moment of birth that attaches to no other crisis in a man's life until death comes. Similarly there are certain features which the founders of institutions, the first makers of organic law, imprint lastingly upon their work. We may destroy the living thing so brought to birth; to kill is always possible; but only by very gradual and plastic methods can we hope in any measure to reconstruct the actual embodiment of life once achieved. The men of 1789 had us in their power, even as the men of 1549 had had both them and us. In every creative epoch many things are settled by which unborn generations will be bound.[2]

It may be urged that this is an argument against adopting liturgies in the first instance as vehicles of worship; and such undoubtedly it is in so far forth as immobility ought in such matters to be reckoned a disadvantage. But we are bound to take into account the gain which comes with immobility as well as the drawbacks. We must consider how large a proportion of the reverence which the great institutes of human life exact from us is due to the fixity of the things themselves. Mont Blanc loses nothing of its hold upon our admiration because we always find it in the same place.

Men like to feel that there is something in the world stronger than the individual will, stronger simply because it expresses the settled common-sense of many as to what is fitting and right in contrast with the whim of one. Lawyers, as a class, are almost as conservative as ecclesiastics, and for the very reason that they also are charged with the custody of established forms which it is important that men should reverence. Laws affecting the tenure of property, the binding force of contracts, the stability of the marriage relation, not only cannot be lightly altered, the very phraseology in which they are couched must be carefully handled, for fear lest with the passing away of the form something of the substance go also.

Moreover, the affections of men fasten themselves very tenaciously to such a trellis as a liturgy affords. The love for "the old words and the old tunes" against which all innovators in hymnody, however deserving, have to do battle, asserts itself under the form of love for the old prayers with ten-fold vehemence. An immense fund of latent heat smoulders beneath the maxim, "Let the ancient customs prevail"; and few of the victories achieved by the papacy are so startling as those that have resulted in the displacement of the liturgical uses of local Churches, that of Paris, for example, by the Roman rite.

But true principles, as we are often reminded, become falsehoods when shoved across the line of proper measure. The very cycles of the astronomers have an end, and the clock-work of the most ancient heavens, or at least our reading of it, calls, from time to time, for readjustment. So long as man continues fallible his best intended workmanship will occasionally demand such alteration for the better as, within the limits already pointed out, may be possible.

Many signs of the times suggest that the hour for a fresh review of the Anglican formularies of worship is nigh at hand. Some of these tokens are written on a sky broad enough to cover the whole English-speaking race, others of them are visible chiefly within our own national horizon. With respect to the English book, Cardwell [3] writing in 1840 and Freeman[4] in 1855, considered revision, however desirable in the abstract, to be a thing utterly out of reach, not within the circle, as the parliamentary phrase now runs, of "practical politics."

But it may be fairly questioned whether these high authorities, were they living to-day, would not concur in the judgment of a more recent writer when he says--in language which, _mutatis mutandis_, applies to our own case: "The most weighty plea in favor of timely inquiry into the subject is that the process of revision is actually going on piecemeal, and with no very intelligent survey of the bearings as a preliminary to any one instalment. The New Lectionary of 1871, the Shortened Services Act, the debates in the Convocation of Canterbury on rubrical amendments, none of them marked by any sufficient care or knowledge, and all fraught with at least the possibility of serious consequence, are examples of formal and recognized inroads on the Act of Uniformity; while such practical though unauthorized additions to the scanty group of Anglican formularies as the Three Hours' Devotion, Harvest Thanksgivings, Public Institution of Incumbents, Ordination of Readers and Deaconesses, and Children's Services prove incontestably that the narrow limits of the Common Prayer Book are no longer adequate for the spiritual needs of the Church of England . . .

"It is evident, then, that contented acquiescence with the old state of things already belongs to the past, and that a return to it is impossible. We must perforce advance, for good or ill, in the path of revision, and cannot even materially slacken the pace nor defer the crisis. One choice, however, is left in our power, and that is the most important of all, namely, the direction which revision shall take--that of conservative and recuperative addition, or that of further evisceration, ceremonial or devotional." [5]

A measure looking in the direction towards which this reviewer points was actually passed by the General Convention of our own Church at its late session in October, 1880.

The wording of the Resolution referred to was as follows:

"_Resolved_: That a Joint Committee, to consist of seven bishops, seven presbyters, and seven laymen be appointed to consider and report to the next General Convention whether, in view of the fact that this Church is soon to enter upon the second century of its organized existence in this country, the changed conditions of the national life do not demand certain alterations in the Book of Common Prayer in the direction of liturgical enrichment and increased flexibility of use."[6]

In the present article the writer proposes to inquire, in connection with this measure:

(1) What motives may fairly be supposed to have actuated the Convention in allowing so important an initiatory step to be taken?

(2) What measure of authority was conferred on and what scope given to the Joint Committee then constituted?

(3) What reasons exist for considering the present a happy moment to attempt liturgical revision, within certain limits, should such a thing be determined upon?

(4) What serious difficulties and obstacles are likely to be encountered in Committee, in Convention, and in the Church at large?

(5) What particular improvements and adjustments of our existing system would be, in point of fact, best worth the effort necessary to secure them?

I. The interpretation of motives, difficult enough in the case of individuals, becomes mere guess-work when the action under analysis is that of a large body of men. Which one of many considerations urged upon the Convention carried with it the supreme weight of persuasion in this particular instance it is impossible to say. Two or three arguments, however, from their frequent reappearance in the debate may fairly be judged to have exercised a controlling influence. One of these was hinted at in the language of the resolution itself, namely, the call for revision that has grown out of "the changed conditions of the national life." Shrewd and far-seeing as were William White and his coadjutors in their forecast of nineteenth century needs made from the standpoint of the Peace of Versailles, they would have been more than human had they succeeded in anticipating all the civil and ecclesiastical consequences destined to flow from that memorable event. Certainly it ought not to be held strange that this "new America" of ours, with its enormously multiplied territory, its conglomerate of races, its novel forms of association, its multiplicity of industries not dreamed of a generation ago, should have demands to make in respect to a better adaptation of ancient formularies to present wants, such as thoughtful people count both reasonable and cogent. That a Prayer Book revised primarily for the use of a half-proscribed Church planted here and there along a sparsely inhabited sea-coast, should serve as amply as it does the purposes of a population now swollen from four millions to fifty, and covering the whole breadth of the continent, is marvel enough; to assert for the book entire adequacy to meet these altered circumstances is a mistake. "New time, new favors, and new joys," so a familiar hymn affirms, "do a new song require." We have conceded the principle so far as psalmody is concerned, why not apply it to the service of prayer as well as to that of praise, and in addition to our new hymns secure also such new intercessions and new thanksgivings as the needs of to-day suggest? The reference in the resolution to the approaching completion of the century has since been playfully characterized as a bit of "sentimentalism."[7] The criticism would be entirely just if the mere recurrence of the centennial anniversary were the point chiefly emphasized. But when a century closes as this one of ours has done with a great social revolution whereby "all estates of men" have been more or less affected, the proposal to signalize entrance upon a fresh stretch of national life by making devotional preparation for it is something better than a pretty conceit; there is a serious reasonableness in it.[8]

Every revision of the Common Prayer of the Church of England, and there have been four of them since Edward's First Book was put in print, has taken place at some important era of transition in the national life: and conversely it may be said that every civil crisis, with a single exception, has left its mark upon the formularies.

To one who argues that because we in this country are evidently entering upon a new phase of the national life we ought similarly to re-enforce and readjust our service-book, it is no sufficient reply to urge the severance effected here between Church and State. The fact that ours is a non-established Church does not make her wholly unresponsive to the shocks of change that touch the civil fabric. In so far as a political renewal alters the social grading of society, bringing in education, for instance, where before it was not, or suddenly developing new forms of industrial activity, the Church, whether established or not, is in duty bound to take cognizance of the fresh field of duty thus suddenly thrust upon her, and to prepare herself accordingly.

In the Preface added to the English Prayer Book at the Restoration, and commonly attributed to Sanderson, "that staid and well weighed man," as Hammond called him, there occurs a sentence which, both on account of its embodying in a few words the whole philosophy of liturgical revision and because of a certain practical bearing presently to be pointed out, it is worth while, in spite of its familiarity, to quote:

"The particular forms of Divine worship, and the rites and ceremonies appointed to be used therein, being things in their own nature indifferent and alterable and so acknowledged, it is but reasonable, that upon weighty and important considerations, according to the various exigency of times and occasions, such changes and alterations should be made therein, as to those that are in place of authority should from time to time seem either necessary or expedient."

Contemporaneously with this utterance there came into the Prayer Book, as a direct consequence of the enormous enlargement of the naval and commercial marine that had taken place under the Commonwealth, the "Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea." Here was a wise and right-minded recognition of a new want that had sprung up with a new time, a want which jealousy of the Puritans who had built up the naval supremacy did not prevent the Caroline bishops from meeting. But the change that passed on England during five years of Cromwell was as nothing compared with the transformation of America under ninety-five years of the federal constitution. Take a single illustration. The year 1789, the date of the Ratification of the American Prayer Book, saw sea-island cotton first planted in the United States, and it was about that time that upland cotton also began to be cultivated for home and foreign use. As the effect of this scarcely noticed experiment there straightway sprang up an industry, North and South, which has been to our country almost what her shipping interest is to Great Britain. Bishop White and his associates were not to blame for failure to provide bread that all this unanticipated multitude of toilers should eat. And yet a failure there has been. No one who has not labored at the task of trying to commend the Church of the Prayer Book to the working class, as it is represented in our large manufacturing towns, can know how lamentable that failure is. We gather in the rich and the poor, but the great middle class that makes the staple and the strength of American society stands aloof.

Nowhere in this country, for instance, has the Church had a better opportunity to show what it could do for American people than in the city of Lowell, where cotton spinning had its first large development. It was a virgin soil: the Episcopal Church, as rarely happens, was earliest on the ground: and not only so, but it enjoyed for some years the friendly protection of the proprietors of the new settlement, almost a religious monopoly--was, in fact, an ecclesiastical preserve. Moreover, this beginning antedated the Irish occupation by many years, at least so far as skilled labor was concerned, for during a considerable period the operatives in the mills were of native New England stock, the best possible material to be made over into churchmen and churchwomen. And yet notwithstanding all this, and notwithstanding the patient and unintermitted toil through more than fifty years of perhaps the most laborious parish priest on the American clergy list, the Episcopal Church has to-day but a comparatively slender hold upon the affections and loyalty of the people of this largest of the manufacturing cities of New England.

A similar failure to "reach the masses" betrays itself in Worcester and Fall River, the two cities of like character that come next in order of population, for in the former of these last named places only about two per cent, of the inhabitants have affiliations of any sort with the Episcopal Church.

It was considerations of this sort, backed perhaps by memories of the ringing appeal sounded three years before at Boston by the Bishop of Connecticut, that moved the Convention to interpret as something better than a bit of sentimentalism the invitation to look the times in the face, and give the new century its infant baptism.

But besides all this there pressed upon the mind of bishops and deputies a cumulative argument of a wholly different sort. The demand for revision seemed to be closing in upon the Church on converging lines. It was plain that, before long, hands of change must necessarily be laid upon certain semi-detached portions of the Prayer Book. There was the New Lectionary, for example, that would presently be knocking for hospitable reception within the covers, and the old Easter Tables, as they now stand, could not, it was observed, last very much longer. A new book, in the publisher's sense of that term, would soon have to be made. The sanctity of stereotype plates must be disturbed. Moreover, here was an admirable opportunity to settle the wrangle, now of nine years' standing, over the best way of bringing to pass shortened services for week-day use. Add to this the fact that the intrinsic weakness of the driblet method of revision[9] had been made so abundantly plain that even its former friends wisely refrained from all attempt to urge it, and our summing up of probable motives becomes approximately complete.

II. As to the measure of authority conferred on, and scope allowed to the Committee of Twenty-one, it is possible to speak with more definiteness.

A precisian might of course, were he so disposed, take up the ground that the report of the Committee when made ought to be monosyllabic, "Yes" or "No." The wording of the resolution admits of such a construction beyond a doubt; the Joint Committee was requested to consider and report whether, etc., etc. But no one who listened to the debate on the resolution could have been left in uncertainty as to the real _animus_ of the measure. The thing intended to be authorized was an experimental review, with implied reference to a limited revision at some time future, in case the fruits of the review should commend themselves to the mind of the Church.

A distinction must be drawn between revision and review. Revision implies review as an antecedent step, but review is by no means necessarily followed by revision. The English book was reviewed and revised in 1662; it was reviewed but not revised in 1689. Review is tentative and advisory; revision is authoritative and final. In the present instance not an atom of power to effect binding change has been conveyed. No authority has been given to anybody to touch a line or a letter of the Prayer Book save in the way of suggestion and recommendation. Responsible action has been held wholly in reserve.

Moreover, even the pathway of review was most scrupulously hedged. Applying to the resolution the legal maxim, _expressio unius est exclusio alterius_, one sees at a glance that doctrinal change is a matter left wholly on one side. The two points to which the Committee is instructed to bend all its studies are "liturgical enrichment" and "increased flexibility of use." Whatsoever is more than these is irrelevant. Accurate distinguishment between such "enrichments" as have and such as have not a doctrinal bearing is, no doubt, a delicate point, and must be set down among the difficulties to be encountered. As such it will be considered further on. For the present the fact to be noted is that the authorized reviewers are both in honor and in duty bound to keep themselves absolutely clear of controversial bias. The movement is not a movement to alter in any slightest respect the dogmatic teaching of the Church, not a movement to unsettle foundations, not a movement toward disowning or repudiating our past, but simply and only an endeavor to make the Common Prayer, if possible (and we are far from being sure, as yet, that it is possible), a better thing of its kind, more comprehensive, more elastic, more readily responsive to the demands of all occasions and the needs of "all sorts and conditions of men." Some who are deeply persuaded that only by doctrinal revision in one direction or another can the Prayer Book be made thoroughly to commend itself to the heart and mind of the American people will esteem the measure of change above indicated not worth the effort indispensable to the attainment of it. Be it so; other some there are who do think the attempt well advised and who are willing to waive their own pet notions as to possible doctrinal improvements of the book for the sake of securing a _consensus_ upon certain great practical improvements which come within the range of things attainable.

Certain it is that any attempt of a body of reviewers like this to disturb, even by "shadowed hint," the existing doctrinal settlement under which we are living together, would be resented by the whole Church.

There are divines among us who in the interest of a more sharply defined orthodoxy are conscientiously bent upon securing the reintroduction among our formularies of the so-called Athanasian Creed.

There are others who consider that a more damaging blow at the catholicity of our dogmatic position as a Church could scarcely be dealt.

Again, there are theologians who account the Prayer Book to be so thoroughly saturated in all its parts with the sacramental idea, that they would account it not only a piece of far-seeing statesmanship, but also a perfectly safe procedure to allow those who chose to do so to thank God after a child's baptism for the simple fact that he had thereby been "grafted into the body of Christ's Church."

But over against these stand a much larger number who think nothing of the sort, and who would put up with the liturgical shortcomings of the Prayer Book, go without "enrichments" for a thousand years, rather than see the single word "regenerate" dropped out of the post-baptismal office.

Sensible men not a few are to be found who hold that the incoming tide of host-worship with which, as they conceive, our reformed Church is threatened can never be stayed unless some carefully contrived definition inserted in the Prayer Book shall make impossible this subtile and refined species of idolatry. But men no whit less sensible laugh them in the face, pointing to the "black rubric" and its history as evidence that between the admitted doctrine of the real presence and the disallowed tenet of transubstantiation no impervious barrier of words can possibly be run.

These illustrations of probable divergence in opinion, in case the field of doctrine were once entered, might be multiplied. The retranslation of the Nicene Creed and the more accurate punctuation of its sentences; the rendering of the word Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment into its English equivalent of Rest; the abolition of the curious misnomer under which we go on calling XXXVIII Articles XXXIX; the removal from the Catechism, or else the conversion into mother English of that sad _crux infantum_, the answer to the question, "What desirest thou of God in this prayer?" are a few examples of less importance than those previously cited; and yet, in the case of the least of them, it is most unlikely that the advocates of change would have the show of hands in their favor, so sensitive is the mind of the Church to anything that looks in the least degree like tampering with the standards of weight and measure, the shekels of the sanctuary.

On the other hand, there are certain manifest and palpable instances of inaccuracy and, more rarely, infelicity of diction which the reviewers might very properly take occasion to amend even though such alterations could not be classified by a strict constructionist under either of the two heads "enrichment" and "flexibility." In the masterly Report of the Rev. Dr. T. W. Coit to the Joint Committee appointed by the Convention of 1841 to prepare a Standard Prayer Book,[10] a document of classical rank, there is more than one intimation of the hope that future reviewers would be given a larger liberty in this direction than he had himself enjoyed. He chafed, and naturally enough, under the necessity of reprinting in a "standard" book, evident and acknowledged solecisms and blunders. "We wanted," he says, "to correct one ungrammatical clause in the Consecration Prayer of the Communion Service. It is in the last sentence but one, at its close. It should be, not that he may dwell in them and they in him; but, that he may dwell in us and we in him. The prayer is made up out of two or three others; and anyone who will examine the parts put together will easily see how the thing was overlooked. A much greater error was overlooked elsewhere, showing that our American compilers were not sufficiently aware of the necessity which requires that the Prayer Book should always be consistent with itself. I allude to something in the office for the Private Baptism of Children. Suppose a clergyman to avail himself of the license given in the Rubric after the certification. He will then be made to talk thus: 'As the Holy Gospel doth witness to our comfort, on this wise--Dost thou in the name of this child,'" etc.[11]

Other cases of evident inaccuracy, besides those referred to by this eminent critic, might be cited, even from the latest Standard Prayer Book, that of 1871. It is hard, for instance, to imagine even the veriest martinet in such matters objecting to the redress of a great wrong done on page 36 of the volume mentioned, where the prayer "to be used at the meetings of Convention" is entered under the general heading, "For malefactors after condemnation." Our ecclesiastical legislators have doubtless, like the rest of us, "erred and strayed" more than once, but to deal out to them such harsh measure as this is cruel.

A strange uncertainty would seem from the Rubric to exist with reference to the limits of the Litany. On page 554 of the Standard Prayer Book, the words, "Here endeth the Litany," occur immediately after the prayer, "We humbly beseech thee, O Father," while on page 31 the same statement is placed immediately after the minor benediction.

These are not faults for which it could ever be worth while to revise a Prayer Book, but they are blemishes of which the revisers of a Prayer Book ought to take note.

It is a graver matter to speak of infelicities of diction in a book so justly famous as the Prayer Book for its pure and wholesome English. Wordsworth's curse on

One who would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave

seems, in the judgment of many, fairly earned by the critic, whoever he may be, who ventures to suggest that in any slightest instance the language of the formularies might have been more happily phrased. But there are spots on the sun. In the prayer already referred to, that for use "at the meetings of Convention," the petition, "We beseech thee to be _present_ with the council of thy Church here assembled in thy name and _presence_" does seem open to the charge of tautology if nothing worse.

It would be well if wherever the word occurs in the Prayer Book in connection with Deity the anthropomorphic plural "ears" could be replaced by the symbolic singular "ear."

Considering also the great evil of having in a formulary of worship too many things that have to be laboriously explained, it might be well if in the Litany the adjective "sudden," which ever since Hooker's day has given perpetual occasion for cavil, were to yield to "untimely," or some like word more suggestive than "sudden" of the thought clumsily expressed in the "Chapel Liturgy" by the awkward phrase, "death unprepared for."[12]

It must be again remarked that these are not points for the sake of which word-fanciers would be justified in disturbing an existing order of things; they are simply instances of lesser improvements that might very properly accompany larger ones, should larger ones ever be seriously undertaken.

With so many pegs upon which controversies might be hung staring us in the face, can we think of it as at all likely that any considerable number of Churchmen assembled in committee (to say nothing of Convention) will be able to agree upon a common line of action with reference to an amendment of the formularies?

That is the very point at issue, and how it is to be decided only the event can show. Certainly in the roll of the victories of charity, a favorable result, were it achieved, would stand exceeding high.

This reflection naturally leads up to the inquiry whether there is any special reason to consider the present a happy moment to attempt within the limits already defined a revision of the Prayer Book.

III. The argument for timeliness has been, in part, already stated. A revision will be timely, if the times imperatively demand it; and the main reasons for thinking that they do are before the reader. Something, however, is still left to be said in evidence that the movement now begun is opportune--not rudely thrust upon the Church. "To everything," saith the preacher, "there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven," and among the categories that follow this statement we find reckoned what answers to liturgical enrichment, for "there is," he observes, "a time to build up."

Fifty years ago a persuasive argument against attempting to amend the Prayer Book, either in text or rubrics, might have been based upon the lack of hands competent to undertake so delicate a task. Raw material, well adapted to edification, was lying about in blocks, but skilled workmen were scarce. This can hardly be said to-day. Simultaneously with the beginning of the Oxford movement, there naturally sprang up a fresh interest in liturgical studies, an interest which has gone on deepening and widening until in volume and momentum the stream has now probably reached its outer limit. The convincing citation, "There were giants in those days," with which a late bishop of one of the New England dioceses used to enforce his major premise that wisdom died with Cranmer and his colleagues, no longer satisfies. Probably no period of corresponding length in the whole range of English Church history has shown itself so rich in the fruits of liturgical study as the fifty years that have elapsed since the introduction into the English Parliament of the first Reform Bill.[13] This particular historical landmark is mentioned on account of the close connection of cause and effect between it and the remarkable movement set on foot by Newman, Pusey, Keble, and Froude. To be sure, one of the earliest utterances in the Tracts ran in these words: "Attempts are making to get the Liturgy altered. My dear brethren, I beseech you consider with me whether you ought not resist the alteration of even one jot or tittle of it."[14]

And yet, notwithstanding this disclaimer, one of the main impulses that lay behind the whole movement represented by the Tracts was an earnest desire to quicken the life of the Church of England in the region of worship. In the _Table of the Tracts, showing their arrangement according to Subjects_, the "Liturgical" section comes first.

The present writer acknowledges but a very limited sympathy with the doctrinal motives and aims of either the earlier or the later Tractarians. But let us, above all things, be fair. With whatever prepossessions one looks back upon it, the ground traversed by the Church of England during the past fifty years cannot be otherwise regarded than as a field sown with mingled tares and wheat. Individuals will differ in judgment as to the proportion in which these two products of a common soil have coexisted, but even those who have most stoutly opposed themselves to the Oxford movement, as a whole, are fain to credit it with, at least, this one good result, the rescue of the usages of worship from slovenliness and torpor, and the establishment of a better standard of what is seemly, reverent, and beautiful in the public service of Almighty God. Not that there have not been, even in this respect, grave errors in the direction of excess; the statement ventured is simply this, that, up to a certain point, all Churchmen agree in admitting a genuine and wholesome improvement in the popular estimate of what public worship, as such, ought to be. An immense amount of devout study has been given, during the period mentioned, by many able men to liturgical subjects, and it would be strange indeed if fifty years of searching criticism had not resulted in the detection of some few points in which formularies originally compiled to meet the needs of the sixteenth century might be better adapted to the requirements of the twentieth. Or, to put the same point in another way, has not all this searching into the mines of buried treasure, all this getting together of quarried stone (with possibly a certain surplusage of stubble) been so much labor lost, if there is never to come the recognition of a ripe moment for the Church to avail itself of the results achieved? Are the studious toils of a Palmer, a Maskell, a Neale, a Scudamore, and a Bright to go for nothing except in so far as they have been contributory to our fund of ecclesiological lore? If so, the contempt often expressed for ritual and liturgical studies by students busy with other lines of research would seem to be not wholly undeserved.

A good opportunity is now before the Church to give answer as to whether this form of investigation is or is not anything better than a species of sacred antiquarianism. Liturgiology as an aspirant for recognition among the useful sciences may be said at the present moment to be waiting for the verdict. To be sure, it can be asserted for liturgiology that to those who love it it is a study that proves itself, like poetry, "its own exceeding great reward." It is not worth while to dispute this point. Liturgiology pursued for its own sake may not be the loftiest of studies, but this, at least, can be said for it, that it is a not less respectable object of pursuit than many another specialty the devotees of which look down upon the liturgiologist with self-complacent scorn as a mere chiffonier. The forms which Christian worship has taken on in successive generations and among peoples of various blood are certainly as well worthy of analysis and classification as are the flora and fauna of Patagonia or New Zealand. But while the Patagonian naturalist secures recognition and is decorated, every jaunty man of letters feels at liberty to scoff at the liturgiologist as a laborious trifler.

Moreover, remembering that in favorite studies, as in crops, there rules a principle of rotation, fashion affecting even staid divines with its subtle influence, we may look to see presently a decline of interest in this particular department of inquiry. Especially may serious men be expected to turn their attention in other directions, should it be found that a _Non possumus_ awaits every effort to make the fruits of their labor available for the nourishment of the Church's daily life. So then, instead of deferring action until liturgical knowledge shall have become more widely spread, and available liturgical material more abundant, we shall, if we are wise, perceive that only by moving promptly will it be possible in this case to take the tide at the full. Never again will opportunity be more ripe.

Another evidence of timeliness is supplied by the present pacific condition of the Church. Previous movements toward liturgical revision have been of a more or less partisan and acrimonious temper. Now for the first time we seem to be taking up this subject without the expression of a fear from any quarter that if changes are made this or that party will get the advantage of some other. The peculiar conditions that ensure this unwonted truce of God are not likely to last forever, nor is it perhaps wholly desirable that they should do so; what is desirable, and very desirable, is that we should avail ourselves of the lull to accomplish certain changes for the better, which in ordinary times the prevalent heat of friction makes impossible. The Joint Committee of Twenty-one is confidently believed to contain within itself every shade of color known to belong to the Anglican spectrum; if white light should be found to emerge, three years hence, as a result of the Committee's labors, it will be said, and truly, that never before in our history could such a blending of the rays possibly have taken place.

Still another consideration properly included under the general head of timeliness is said to have been urged with much force in the House of Bishops when the "enrichment" resolution was under discussion.

Up to the present time the Episcopal Church of this country has stood easily at the head in the matter of providing for the people a dignified and beautiful order of divine service. In fact, there has been, until lately, no one to compete. But all this is changing. Ours are no longer the only congregations in which common prayer is to be found. It is true that thus far the attempts at imitation have been rather grotesque than formidable, but such, until recently, have also been, in the judgment of foreign critics, all of our American endeavors after art. We are to consider what apt learners our quick-witted countrymen have shown themselves to be, in so much that even Christmas Day, once the _bete noire_ of Puritan legislators, has come to be accounted almost a national festival, and we shall be convinced that our primacy in the field of liturgies is not an absolutely assured position. This argument is open to the criticism that it seems to lower and cheapen the whole subject by representing Anglican religion in a mendicant attitude bidding for the favor of the great American public, and vexed that others, fellow-suppliants, have stolen a good formula of appeal. Nevertheless there is a certain amount of reasonableness in this way of putting the thing. Certainly with those who reckon the liturgical mode of worship among the notes of the Church, the argument is one that ought to have marked influence; while with those who, not so persuaded, nevertheless view with pleased interest the general spread of a liturgical taste among the people of this country, seeing in it a token of better things to come, a harbinger of larger agreements than we have yet attained to, and of an approaching "consolation of Israel" once not thought possible--even with such the argument ought not to be wholly powerless.[15]

The fact that the Convocations of Canterbury and York have taken in hand and carried through a revision of the rubrics of the Prayer Book will seem to those who hold that our Church ought to advance _pari passu_ with the Church of England, and no faster, another evidence of the timeliness of the American movement. Under the title of _The Convocation Prayer Book_ there has lately appeared in England an edition of the Prayer Book so printed as to show how the book would read were the recommendations of York and Canterbury to go into effect. It is true that the consent of Parliament must be secured before the altered rubrics can have the force of law; but whatever may come of the rubrics recommended, the existence of the book containing them is evidence enough of a wide-spread conviction among the English clergy that change is needed.

Indeed never has this point been more powerfully put in the fewest possible words than by the brilliant, and no less logical than brilliant Bishop of Peterborough in a recent speech in the Upper House of Convocation.[16] "If the Church of England wants absolute peace, she should have definite rubrics."

It is true he goes on to say that in his judgment the dangers of carrying the question of rubrical revision into Parliament are greater than the evil of letting it alone, but it is to be remembered that we in this country are hampered with no Parliamentary entanglements and are free to do of our own motion, and in a quiet, orderly way, that which the Church of England can only do at the risk of something very like revolution.

But this matter of the rubrics and their susceptibility of improvement will come up later on. It seemed proper to refer to it, if no more, under the head of timeliness. If nothing else in the way of change be opportune at the present moment, it is an easy task to show that the rubrics, as they stand, cry aloud for a revision.

IV. The obstacles to be encountered by any Committee undertaking so to carry forward a review of the Prayer Book that revision may eventually result, are of two sorts; there are the inherent difficulties of the work itself, such, for instance, as that of matching the literary style of the sixteenth century writers, and there is the wholesome dread of a change for the worse which is sure to assert itself in many quarters the moment definite propositions shall have reached a point at which the "yeas and nays" are likely to be called.

Beginning, then, with the inherent difficulties, and taking them in the inverse order of arduousness, we see at once how hard it must be to secure unity and self-consistency in the revision of a book so complicated as the Common Prayer. It is like remodelling an old house. We think it a very easy matter, something that can be done in one's head, but the mistake is discovered when the new door designed to give symmetry to this room is found to have spoiled the looks of that, when the enlargement of the library turns out to have overtaxed the heating energy of the fireplace, and the ingenious staircase, instead of ending where it was expected to end, brings up against an intractable brick wall. Just such perils as these will beset anybody who ventures to disturb the adjustments of the "Prayer Book as it is" and to introduce desirable additions. But domestic architecture is not given up on account of the patient carefulness the practice of it demands, neither need Liturgical Revision be despaired of because it requires of the men who undertake it a like wisdom in looking before and after.

The really formidable barrier to revision, so far as what have been called the "inherent difficulties" are concerned, is reached when we touch style. How to handle without harming the sentences in which English religion phrased itself when English language was fresher and more fluent than it can ever be again is a serious question. The hands that seek to "enrich" may well be cautioned to take heed lest they despoil. It is to be remembered, however, in the way of reassurance that the alterations most likely to find favor with the reviewers are such as will enrich by restoring lost excellencies, rather than by introducing forms fashioned on a modern anvil.

The most sensitive critic could not, on the score of taste, find fault with the replacement in the Evening Prayer of the _Magnificat_ and the _Nunc dimittis_, nor of bringing back a few of the Versicles that in the English book follow the Lord's Prayer, nor yet of our being allowed to say, "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, Lord," rather than "O Lord, our Heavenly Father, by whose Almighty power we have been preserved this day." Objections to these alterations may be readily imagined, but it would be necessary to base them on other grounds than those of literary fastidiousness. In the case of enrichments like these no one could raise the cry that the faultless English of the Prayer Book had been marred.

But what shall be said of the composition of entirely new services and offices, if it should be judged expedient to give admission to any such? How can we be sure that such modern additions to the edifice would be sufficiently in keeping with the general tone of the elder architecture? It might be held to be an adequate answer to these questions to reply that if the living Church cannot now trust herself to speak out through her formularies in her natural voice as she did venture to do in the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, it must be that she has fallen into that stage of decrepitude where the natural voice is uncertain.

But, really, what ought to be said is this--that if the same canons of style that ruled the sixteenth century writers are studied and obeyed, there is no reason in the world why a result equally satisfactory with the one then attained should not be reached now. There is nothing supernatural about the English of the Prayer Book. Cranmer and his associates were not inspired. The prose style of the nineteenth century may not be as good as that of the sixteenth, but, at its best, it is vastly superior to eighteenth century style, and of this last there are already no inconsiderable specimens in the American Book of Common Prayer. The Office for the Visitation of Prisoners, for example, is so redolent of the times of the Georges, when it was composed, that it might be appropriately enough interleaved with prints out of Hogarth. A bit of Palladian architecture in a Gothic church is not more easily recognized. Many worse things might happen to the Prayer Book than that the nineteenth century should leave its impress upon the pages.

In fact, it is just as possible, if men will only think so, to use our language with effect for any good purpose to-day as it was three hundred years ago. All that is necessary is a willingness to submit to the same restrictions, and those mostly moral, that controlled the old writers; and our work, though not identical with theirs, will have the proper similarity. True, a modern author may not be able to reproduce, without a palpable betrayal of affectation and mannerism, the precise characteristics of a bygone style. Chattertons are not numerous. It is easier to secure for the brass andirons and mahogany dining chairs of our own manufacture the look of those that belonged to our grandfathers than it is to catch the tones of voices long dead; and just as good judgment dictates the wisdom of repeating the honest and thorough workmanship of the old cabinet-makers in place of slavishly imitating their patterns, so it will be well if the compilers of devotional forms for modern use seek to say what they have to say with sixteenth century simplicity rather than in sixteenth century speech. In letters, as in conduct, the supreme charm of style is the absence of self-consciousness. "Say in plain words the thing you mean, and say it as if you meant it," is good advice to any seeker after rhetorical excellence, be he young or old. The Reformers, that is to say, the men who Englished the Prayer Book, in seeking to meet the devotional needs of the people of their own time do not seem to have been at pains to tie themselves to the diction of a previous generation. They dared to "call a spade a spade" whenever and wherever the tool came into use, and they have their reward in the permanence of their work. Sweetnesses and prettinesses they banished altogether. Indeed, in those days it seems not to have occurred to people that such things had anything to do with religion. It was not that they did not know how to talk in the sweet way--never has sentimentalism been more rife in general literature than then, but they would not talk in that way; the stern traditions of Holy Church throughout all the world forbade. Religion was a most serious thing to their minds, and they would speak of it most seriously or not at all.

Never since language began to be used have severity and tenderness been more marvellously blended than in the older portions of the English Prayer Book.

This effect is largely due to an almost entire abstention on the part of the writers from figurative language, or at least from all imagery that is not readily recognized as Scriptural. Bread and beef are what men demand for a steady diet. Sweetmeats are well enough, now and then, but only now and then.

It is the failure to observe this plain canon of style that has made shipwreck of many an attempt to construct liturgies _de novo_. Ambitious framers of forms of worship seem almost invariably to forget that there may be such a thing as a too exquisite prayer, an altogether too "eloquent address to the throne of grace." The longest and fullest supplicatory portion of the Prayer Book, the Litany, does not contain, from the first sentence to the last,[17] one single figurative expression, it is literally plain English from beginning to end; but could language be framed more intense, more satisfying, more likely to endure?

Scriptural metaphor, whether because it comes to us with the stamp of authority or on account of some subtle intrinsic excellence, it may be difficult to say, does not pall upon the taste. And yet even this is used sparingly in the Prayer Book, some of the most striking exceptions to the general rule being afforded by the collects for the first and third Sundays in Advent, the collects for the Epiphany and Easter Even, and the opening prayer in the Baptismal Office. All these are instances of strictly Scriptural metaphor, and moreover it is to be kept in mind that they are designed for occasional, not constant use. In the orders for daily Morning and Evening Prayer, the "lost sheep" of the General Confession and the "dew" of God's blessing in the Collect for Clergy and People are almost the sole, if not the sole cases of evident metaphor, and these again are Scriptural. When in Jeremy Taylor's prayer, introduced by the American revisers into the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, we come upon the comparison of human life to a "vale of misery" we feel that somehow we have struck a new current in the atmosphere; for the moment it is the rhetorician who speaks, and no longer the earnest seeker after God.

Besides this freedom from figures of speech, we notice in the style of Prayer Book English a careful avoidance of whatever looks like a metaphysical abstraction. The aim is ever to present God and divine things as realities rather than as mere concepts or notions of the mind. So far as the writer remembers, not a single prayer in the whole book begins with that formula so dear to the makers of extemporary forms of devotion, "O Thou." On the contrary, the approach to the Divine Majesty is almost always made with a reference to some attribute or characteristic that links Deity to man and man's affairs; it is "O God, the Protector of all that trust in thee," or "Almighty and everlasting God who of thy tender love toward mankind," or "Lord of all power and might who art the author and giver of all good things."

Cardinal Newman in one of his theological works written before his departure from the Church of England, has a powerful passage bearing upon this point. He is criticising the evangelicals for their one-sided way of setting forth what it must mean to "preach the Gospel." No less a person than Legh Richmond is the object of his strictures.