Chapter II: Revision of the American Common Prayer.1 (2)

"A remarkable contrast between our Church's and this false view of religion," he says, "is afforded in the respective modes of treating a death-bed in the Visitation of the Sick, and a popular modern work, the Dairyman's Daughter. The latter runs thus: My dear friend, do you not FEEL _that you are supported_? The Lord deals very gently with me, she replied. Are not his promises _very precious to you?_ They are all yea and amen in Christ Jesus.. . Do you experience any _doubts or temptations_ on the subject of your eternal safety? No, sir; the Lord deals very gently with me and gives me peace. What are your _views_ of the dark valley of death now that you are passing through it? _It is not dark_. Now, if it be said that such questions and answers are not only in their place innocent but natural and beautiful, I answer that this is not the point, but this, viz., they are evidently intended, whatever their merits, as a pattern of what _death-bed examinations should be_. Such is the Visitation of the Sick in the nineteenth century. Now let us listen to the nervous and stern tone of the sixteenth. In the Prayer Book the minister is instructed to say to the person visited: Forasmuch as after this life there is an account to be given to the _Righteous Judge_ . . . I require you to examine yourself and your estate both toward God and man. Therefore I shall rehearse to you the _Articles of our Faith_, that you may know whether you do believe as a Christian man should or no . . . 'Then shall the minister examine whether he repent him truly of his sins, and be in _charity_ with all the world: exhorting him to forgive from the bottom of his heart all persons who have offended him, and if he hath offended any other to _ask their forgiveness_, and where he hath done injury or wrong to any man that he _make amends_ to the utmost of his power.' . . . Such is the contrast between the dreamy talk of modern Protestantism, and 'holy fear's stern glow' in the Church Catholic."[18]

In this striking, though perhaps somewhat unnecessarily harsh way, Newman brings out a point which is unquestionably true, namely, that the language of the Prayer Book is of the sort which it is just now the fashion to call realistic, that is, a language conversant with great facts rather than with phases of feeling and moods of mind; which after all is only another way of saying that it is a Book of Common Prayer and not a manual for the furtherance of spiritual introspection.

These, then, are the characteristics of the Prayer Book style: it is simple, straightforward, unmetaphorical, realistic. Seriously it looks almost like a studied insult alike to the scholarship and to the religion of our day, to say that these are excellencies attainable no longer. That revisers venturing upon additions to the Prayer Book would be bound to set the face as a flint against any slightest approach to sentimentality is true. But why assume that the men do not exist who are capable of such a measure of self-control? Grant that there are whole volumes of devotional matter, original and compiled, which one may ransack without finding a single form that is not either prolix, wishy-washy, or superstitious--it does not follow that if the Prayer Book is to be enriched, the enrichments must necessarily come from such sources. Moreover it is to be remembered that there is another vice of style to be shunned in liturgical composition quite as carefully as sentimentality, namely, jejuneness. We cannot escape being sentimental simply by being dull. Feeling must not be denied its place in prayer for fear that it may not prove itself a duly chastened feeling. There ought to be a heart of fire underneath the calm surface of every formulary of worship. Flame and smoke are out of place; but a liturgy should glow throughout. Coldness, pure and simple, has no place in devotion.

Over and above the intrinsic difficulties in the way of revision growing out of the delicate nature of the work itself, obstacles of a different sort are certain to be encountered. In so large a body of men as the Joint Committee of the two Houses, entire and cordial agreement is almost too much to be expected; and then even supposing a unanimous report submitted, what is likely to follow? Why this--if the changes proposed are few, the cry will be raised, It surely is not worth while to alter the Prayer Book for the sake of so insignificant a gain; whereas if the changes proposed are considerable, the counter cry will be sounded, This is revolution.

Then there is the anxious question, How will it look to the English? What will be the effect on the _Concordat_ if we touch the Prayer Book? To be sure, the Concordat does not seem to weigh very heavily on the shoulders of the other party, as indeed there is no reason why it should. Convocation does not much disturb itself as to the view General Convention is likely to take of its sayings and doings, and even disestablishment might proceed without our being called into consultation. And yet the Concordat difficulty will have to be reckoned with; and the dire spectre of a possible disowning of us by our mother the Church of England will have to be laid, before any alterations in the Book of Common Prayer will be accounted by some among us perfectly safe.

But it is scarcely worth while to go on gratuitously suggesting opposition arguments. They will be sure to present themselves unsolicited in due time. For the present it is enough to add that if the movement for liturgical revision has not in it enough toughness of fibre to enable it to survive vigorous attack, it does not deserve success.

V. Under the head of liturgical enrichment ought to be classed whatever alteration would really serve to enhance the beauty, majesty, or fitness, of accepted formularies of worship. Excision may, under conceivable circumstances, be enrichment. James Wyatt undoubtedly imagined that he was improving the English cathedrals when he whitewashed their interiors, added composition pinnacles to the west towers of Durham, and rearranged the ancient monuments of Salisbury; but an important part of the enrichment accomplished by our nineteenth century restorers has lain simply in the undoing of what Wyatt did.

Again, substitution may be enrichment, as in the case where a wooden spire built upon a stone tower is taken down to be replaced by honest work. It would be an enrichment if in St. George's Chapel, the central shrine of British royalty, the sham insignia now overhanging the stalls of the knights of the garter were to give room to genuine armor. Not merely then by addition, but possibly, in some instances, by both subtraction and substitution, we may find the "Prayer-book as it is" open to improvement.

Before, however, entering upon any criticism of the formularies in detail, it is important to draw a distinction between two very different things, namely, the structure of a liturgical office and the contents of it. By structure should be understood the skeleton or frame that makes the groundwork of any given office, by contents the actual liturgical material employed in filling out the office to its proper contour.

The offices of the Roman Breviary, for example, continue, for the most part, identical in structure from day to day, the year through; but they vary in contents. For an illustration nearer home take our own _Order for Daily Morning Prayer_. The structure of it is as follows: 1. Sentences, 2. Exhortation, 3. Confession, 4. Absolution, 5. Lord's Prayer, 6. Versicles, 7. Invitatory Psalm, 8. The Psalms for the day, 9. Lection, 10. Anthem or Canticle, 11. Lection, 12. Anthem or Canticle, 13. Creed, 14. Versicles, 15. Collect for the day, 16. Stated Collects and Prayers, 17. Benediction.

Now it is evident that without departing by a hair's breadth from the lines of this framework, an indefinite number of services might by a process of substitution be put together, each one of which would in outward appearance differ widely from every other one. The identical skeleton, that is to say, might be so variously clothed upon that no two of its embodiments would be alike. But is it desirable to run very much after variety of such a sort in a book of prayer designed for common use? Most assuredly, No. To jeopard the supreme _desideratum_ in a people's manual of worship, simplicity: to make it any harder than it now is for the average "stranger in the Church" to find the places, would be on the part of revisionists an unpardonable blunder.

There are, however, a few points at which the Morning Prayer might advantageously be enriched, and no risk run. It would surely add nothing to the difficulty of finding the places if for one-half of the present opening sentences there were to be substituted sentences appropriate to special days and seasons of the ecclesiastical year. We should in this way be enabled to give the key-note of the morning's worship at the very outset. Having once departed, as in the case of our first two sentences, from the English precedent of putting only penitential verses of Scripture to this use, there is no reason why we should not carry out still more fully in our selection the principle of appropriateness. The sentences displaced need not be lost, for they might still stand, as now, at the opening of the Evening Prayer.

Passing on to the declarations of absolution there is an opportunity to simplify the arrangement by omitting the alternate form borrowed from the Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper, where only it properly belongs. This, however, is a change likely to be resisted on doctrinal grounds, and need not be urged.

Coming to the _Venite_, we find another opportunity to accentuate the Christian Year. It may be said that the rubric, as it is already written, allows for the substitution of special anthems on the greater festivals and fasts. This is true; but by giving the anthem for Easter a place of honor, while relegating anthems for the other great days to an unnoticed spot between the Selections and the Psalter, the American compilers did practically discriminate in favor of Easter and against the rest. The real needs of the case would be more wisely met if the permission to omit _Venite_ now attached to "the nineteenth day of the month" were to be extended to Ash-Wednesday and Good Friday, and special New Testament anthems analagous to the Easter one were to be inserted along with the respective Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, for Christmas-day and Whitsunday.

By this change we should put each of the three great festivals of the year into possession of an invitatory anthem of its own; and we should obviate on the fasting days, by the simple expedient of omission, the futile efforts of choir-master and organist to transform _Venite_ from a cry of joy into a moan of grief.

This brings us to the Psalter. Here we have an opportunity to correct the palpable blunder by which it has come about that the greatest of the penitential psalms, the fifty-first, has no place assigned it among the proper psalms either for Ash-Wednesday or for Good Friday.[19] It would also be well to make optional, if not obligatory, the use of "proper psalms" on days other than those already provided with them; _e_. _g_., Advent Sunday, the Epiphany, Easter Even, Trinity Sunday, and All Saints' Day.[20] There would be a still larger gain in the direction of "flexibility of use," as well as a great economy of valuable space, if instead of reprinting some thirty of the Psalms of David under the name of Selections, we were to provide for allowing "select" psalms to be announced by number in the same manner that "proper" psalms are now announced. Instead of only the ten selections we now have, there might then be made available twenty or thirty groups of psalms at absolutely no sacrifice of room. It has been objected to this proposal that the same difficulty which now attaches to the finding of the "proper psalms" on great days would embarrass congregations whenever "select psalms" were given out; but this is fairly met by the counter consideration that if our people were to be educated by the use of select psalms into a more facile handling of the Psalter it would be just so much gained for days when the "proper psalms" must of necessity be found and read. The services, that is to say, would run all the more smoothly on the great days, after congregations had become habituated, on ordinary days, to picking out the psalms by number.

Another step in the line of simplification, and one which it is in order to mention here, would be the removal from the Morning Prayer of _Gloria in Excelsis_, seeing that it is never, or almost never, sung at the end of the psalms unless at Evening Prayer. As to the expediency of restoring what has been lost of _Benedictus_ after the second lesson, the present writer offers no opinion. There are some who warmly advocate the replacement, and there is, unquestionably, much to be said in favor of it. It is unlikely that any doctrinal motive dictated the abbreviation.

Pausing a moment at the Creeds for the insertion of a better title than "_Or this_" before the confession of Nicaea, we pass to the versicles that follow.

Here again it would be enrichment to restore the words of the English book, although the task of finding an equally melodious equivalent for _O Lord, save the Queen_ might not be easy.

Happily the other versicles are such as no civil revolution can make obsolete. It will never be amiss to pray,

_Endue thy ministers with righteousness_.

Answer. _And make thy chosen people joyful_.

These are all the alterations for which the present Morning Prayer considered as a form of Divine Service for Sundays would seem to call. It will be observed that they are far from being of a radical character, that they affect the structure of the office not at all, and touch the contents of it but slightly.

The case is altered when we come to the Order for Evening Prayer. Here there is a demand, not indeed for any structural change, but for very decided enrichment by substitution. The wording of the office is altogether too exact an echo of what has been said only a few hours before in Morning Prayer. It betokens a poverty of resources that does not really exist, when we allow ourselves thus to exhort, confess, absolve, intercede, and give thanks in the very same phrases at three in the afternoon that were on our lips at eleven in the morning.

Doubtless liturgical worship owes a good measure of its charm to the subtle power of repetition; but the principle is one that must be handled and applied with the most delicate tact, or virtue goes out of it. We must distinguish between similarity and sameness. The ordered recurrence of accents is what makes the rhythm of verse; but for all that, there is a difference between poetry and sing-song, just as there is a difference between melody and monotony. Moreover, the taste of mankind undergoes change as to the sorts of repetition which it is disposed to tolerate. No modern poet of standing would venture, for instance, to employ identical epithets to the extent that Homer does, making Aurora "rosy-fingered" every time she appears upon the scene, and Juno as invariably "ox-eyed." People were pleased with it then, they would not be pleased with it now. It is possible in liturgies so to employ the principle of repetition that no wearying sense of sameness will be conveyed, and again it is possible so to mismanage it as to transform worship into something little better than a "slow mechanic exercise." Mere iteration, as such, is barren of spiritual power; witness the endless sayings over of _Kyrie Eleison_ in the Oriental service-books, a species of vain repetition which a liturgical writer of high intelligence rightly characterizes as "unmeaning, if not profane."[21] Now the common popular criticism upon the Evening Prayer of the Church is that it repeats too slavishly the wording of the Morning Prayer. If this is an unjust criticism we ought not to let ourselves be troubled by it. On the other hand, if it is a just criticism it will be much wiser of us to heed than to stifle the voice that tells us the truth. It might seem to be straining a point were one to venture to explain the present very noticeable disinclination of Churchmen to attend a second service on Sunday, by connecting it with the particular infelicity in question; but that the excuse, We have said all this once to-day; why say it again? may possibly have something, even if not much, to do with the staying at home is certainly a fair conjecture.

Without altering at all the structure of the Evening Prayer, it would be perfectly possible so to refill or reclothe that formulary as to give it the one thing needful which now it lacks--freshness. In such a process the _Magnificat_ and the _Nunc dimittis_ would play an important part; as would also certain "ancient collects" of which we have heard much of late. Failing this, the next best thing (and the thing, it may be added, much more likely to be done, considering what a tough resistant is old usage) would be the provision of an alternate and optional form of Evening Prayer, to be used either in lieu of, or as supplementary to the existing office. In the framing of such a _Later Evensong_ a larger freedom would be possible than in the refilling of a form the main lines of which were already fixed. Still, the first plan would be better, if only it could be brought within the range of things possible.

Next to Evening Prayer in the order of the Table of Contents comes the Litany. Here there is no call for enrichment,[22] though increased flexibility of use might be secured for this venerable form of intercessory prayer by prefixing to it the following rubric abridged from a similar one proposed in The Convocation Prayer Book:

"_A General Supplication, to be sung or said on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and on the Rogation Days, after the third collect at Morning or Evening Prayer, or before the Administration of the Holy Communion; or as a separate Service_.

"_NOTE.--The Litany may be omitted altogether on Christmas Day, Easter Day, and Whitsunday_"

In connection with the Morning and Evening Service there is another important question that imperatively demands discussion, namely, a week-day worship. The movement for "shortened services," so-called, has shared the usual fate of all efforts at bettering the life of the Church, in being at the outset of its course widely and seriously misunderstood. The impression has gone abroad, and to-day holds possession of many otherwise well-informed people, that a large and growing party in the Episcopal Church has openly declared itself wearied out with overmuch prayer and praise. Were such indeed the fact, the scandal would be grave; but the real truth about the matter is that the promoters of shortened services, instead of seeking to diminish, are really eager to see multiplied the amount of worship rendered in our churches. "Shortened services" is a phrase of English, not American origin, and has won its way here by dint of euphony rather than of fitness. Readjusted services, though a more clumsy, would be a less misdirecting term. In the matter of Sunday worship, the liberty now generally conceded of using separately the Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Holy Communion is all that need be asked. Whether these services, or at least two of them, do not in themselves admit of a certain measure of improvement is a point that has already been considered, but there certainly is no need of shortening them, whatever else it may be thought well to do. When what a Boston worthy once termed "a holy alacrity" is observed, on the part of both minister and singers, even the aggregated services of Morning Prayer, Litany, and "Ante-Communion," together with a sermon five-and-twenty minutes long, can easily be brought within the compass of an hour and a half--a measure of time not unreasonably large to be given to the principal occasion of worship on the Lord's Day. As for the Evening Prayer--there certainty ought to be no call for the shortening of that on Sundays; for it would be scarcely decent or proper to devote to such a service anything less than the half hour the existing office demands.

What the advocates of shortened services really desire to see furthered is an increase in the frequency of opportunities for worship during the week, their conviction being that if the Church were to authorize brief services for morning and evening use, such as would not occupy much more time than family prayers ordinarily do, the attendance might be secured of many who, at present, put aside the whole question of going to church on week-days as impracticable. Supposing it could be proved that such a provision would work to the discouragement of family prayer, it would plainly be wrong to advocate it; no priesthood is more sacred than that which comes with fatherhood. But we must face the fact that in our modern American life family prayer, like sundry other wholesome habits, has fallen largely into disuse. If the Church can, in any measure, supplement the deficiencies of the household, and help to supply to individuals a blessing they would gladly enjoy at their own homes, if they might, it is her plain duty to do so. Moreover, many a minister who single-handed cannot now prudently undertake a daily service, as that is commonly understood, would acknowledge himself equal to the less extended requirement.

Not a few careful and friendly observers of the practical working of Anglican religion have been reluctantly led to consider the daily service, as an institution, only meagrely successful. Looking at the matter historically we find no reason to wonder at such a conclusion.

Our existing usage (or more correctly, perhaps, _non-user_) dates from the Reformation period. The English Church and nation of that day had grown up familiar with the spectacle of a very large body of clerics, secular and regular, whose daily occupation may be said to have been the pursuit of religion.[23] The religion pursued consisted chiefly in the saying of prayers, and very thoroughly, so far at least as the consumption of time was concerned, were the prayers said. What more natural than that, under such circumstances, and with such associations, the compilers of a common Prayer Book for the people should have failed to see any good reason for discriminating between the amount of service proper to the Lord's Day and the amount that might be reasonably expected on other days? Theoretically they were right, all time belongs to God and he is as appropriately worshipped on Tuesdays and Thursdays as on Sundays. And yet as a result of their making no such discrimination, we have the daily service on our hands--a comparative, even if not an utter failure. We may lament the fact, but a fact it is, that In spite of all its improved appliances for securing leisure, the world is busier than ever it was; and there will always be those who will insist that the command to labor on six days is as imperative as the injunction to rest upon the seventh. As a consequence of all this accelerated business, and of the diminution in the number of persons officially set apart for prayer, the unabridged service of the Church fails to command a week-day attendance. We have no "clerks" nowadays to fill the choir. The only clerks known to modern times are busy at their desks.

It may be urged in reply to this that the practical working of the daily service ought to be kept a secondary consideration, and that its main purpose is symbolical, or representative; the priest kneeling in his place, day by day, as a witness that the people, though unable personally to be present, do, in heart and mind, approve of a daily morning and evening sacrifice of prayer. This conception of the daily service as a vicarious thing has a certain mystical beauty about it, but if it is to be adopted as the Church's own let us, at least, clear ourselves of inconsistency by striking out the word "common" from before the word "prayer" in characterizing our book.

What is really needed for daily use in our parishes is a short form of worship specially framed for the purpose. If they could be employed without offence to the Protestant ear (and they are good English Reformation words) _Week-Day Matins_ and _Week-Day Evensong_ would not be ill chosen names for such services. The framework of these Lesser Orders for Morning and Evening Prayer, as they might also be called, were the other titles found obnoxious, ought to be modelled upon the lines of the existing daily offices, though with a careful avoidance of identity in contents. There should be, for instance, as unvarying elements, the reading of the lessons for the day, the use of the collect for the day, and the saying or singing of the psalms for the day. Another constant would be the Lord's Prayer; but aside from these the _Lesser Order_ need have nothing in common with the Order as we have it now. There might be, for example, after the manner of the old service-books, an invitatory opening with versicles and responses, or if the present mode of opening by sentences were preferred, specially chosen sentences, different from those with which the Sunday worship has made us familiar, could be employed. Moreover, the anthems or canticles and the prayers, with the exception of the two just mentioned, ought also to be distinctive, and, in the technical sense of the word, _proper_ to the week-day use.

Again, it would serve very powerfully and appropriately to emphasize the pivot points in the ritual year if this same principle were to be applied to saints' days, and we were to have special _Holyday Matins_ and _Holy-day Evensong_, there still being required, on the greater festivals and fasts, the normal Morning and Evening Prayer proper to the Lord's Day.[24]

The argument in favor of thus specializing the services for week-days and holydays, in preference to following the only method heretofore thought possible, namely, that of shortening the Lord's Day Order, rests on two grounds. In the first place permissions to skip and omit are of themselves objectionable in a book of devotions. They have an uncomely look. Our American Common Prayer boasts too many disfigurements of this sort already.

Such a rubric as _The minister may, at his discretion, omit all that follows to, etc. _, puts one in mind of the finger-post pointing out a short cut to weary travellers. It is inopportune thus to hint at exhaustion as the probable concomitant of worship. That each form should have an integrity of its own, should as a separate whole be either said complete or left unsaid, is better liturgical philosophy than any "shortened services act" can show.

In the second place, a certain amount of variety would be secured by the proposed method which under the existing system we miss. There is, of course, such a danger as that of providing too much liturgical variety. Amateur makers of Prayer Books almost invariably fall into this slough. Hymn-books, as is well known, often destroy their own usefulness by including too many hymns; and Prayer Books may do the same by having too many prayers.[25]

To transgress in the compiling of formularies the line of average memory, to provide more material than the mind of an habitual worshipper is likely to assimilate, is to misread human nature. But here, as elsewhere, there is a just mean. Cranmer and his colleagues in the work of revision jumped at one bound from a scheme which provided a distinctive set of services for every day in the year to a scheme that assigned one stereotyped form to all days.

Now nothing could be more unwise than any attempt to restore the methods of the Breviary, with its complicated and artificial forms of devotion; but so far to imitate the Breviary as to provide within limits for a recognition of man's innate love of change would be wisdom. By having a distinctive service for week-days, and a distinctive service for holydays, Ave might add just that little increment to the Church's power of traction that in many instances would avail to change "I cannot go to church this morning" into "I cannot stay away."

It will be urged as a counter-argument to these considerations that the thing is impossible, that such a measure of enrichment is entirely in excess of anything the Church has expressed a wish to have, and that for reviewers to propose a plan so sweeping would be suicide. Doubtless this might be a sufficient answer to anybody who imagined that by a bare majority vote of two successive General Conventions new formularies of daily worship could be forced upon the Church. But suppose such formularies were to be made _optional_; suppose there were to be given to parishes the choice between these three things, viz.: (_a_) the normal Morning Prayer; (_b_) a shortened form of the normal Morning Prayer; and (_c_) such a special order as has been sketched--what then? Would the Church's liberty be impaired! On the contrary, would not the borders of that liberty have been most wisely and safely widened by the steady hand of law?

This is perhaps the right point at which to call attention to the present state of the "shortened services" controversy, for wearisome as the story has become by frequent repetition, the nexus between it and the subject in hand is too important to be left out of sight.

In the General Convention of 1877, where the topic under its American aspects was for the first time thoroughly discussed, the two Houses came to a deadlock. The deputies on the one hand, almost to a man, voted in favor of giving the desired relief by rubric, thus postponing for three years' time the fruition of their wish; while the bishops with a unanimity understood to have been equally striking insisted that a simple canon, such as could be passed at once, would suffice. And so the subject dropped.

At the late Convention of 1880 an eirenicon was discovered. The quick eye of one of the legal members of the House of Deputies detected on the fourth page of the Prayer Book, just opposite the Preface, a loophole of escape, to wit, _The Ratification of the Book of Common Prayer_. Here was the very _tertium quid_ whereby the common wish of both parties to the dispute might be effected without injury to the sensibilities of either.

The _Ratification_ certainly did not look like a canon; neither could anybody with his eyes open call it a rubric--why not amend that, and say no more about it? The suggestion prevailed, and by a vote of both Houses, the following extraordinary document is hereafter to stand (the next General Convention consenting) in the very fore-front of the Prayer Book:

THE RATIFICATION OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. _By the Bishops, the Clergy, and the Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in General Convention assembled_.

The General Convention of the Church having heretofore, to wit: on the sixteenth day of October in the year A. D. 1789, set forth a _Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church_, and thereby established the said book, and declared it to be the Liturgy of said Church, and required that it be received as such by all the members of the same and be in use from and after the first day of October in the year of our Lord 1790; the same book is hereby ratified and confirmed, and ordered to be the use of this Church from this time forth.

"But note, however, that on days other than Sundays, Christmas-day, the Epiphany, Ash-Wednesday, Good Friday, and Ascension Day, it shall suffice if the Minister begins Morning or Evening Prayer at the General Confession or the Lord's Prayer preceded by one or more of the Sentences appointed at the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer, and end after the Collect for Grace or the Collect for Aid against Perils, with 2 Cor. xiii. 14, using so much of the Lessons appointed for the day and so much of the Psalter as he shall judge to be for edification.

"And note also that on any day when Morning and Evening Prayer shall have been duly said or are to be said, and on days other than those first aforementioned, it shall suffice, when need may require, if a sermon or lecture be preceded by at least the Lord's Prayer and one or more Collects found in this book, provided that no prayers not set forth in said book, or otherwise authorized by this Church, shall be used before or after such sermon or lecture.[26]

"And note further also that on any day the Morning Prayer, the Litany, or the Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper may be used as a separate and independent service, provided that no one of these services shall be disused habitually."

It may seem harsh to characterize this act as the mutilation of a monument; but really it does seem to be little else. The old Ratification of 1789 is an historic landmark; it is the sign-manual of the Church of White's and Seabury's day, and ought never to be disturbed or tampered with while the Prayer Book stands. The year 1889 might very properly see a supplemental Ratification written under it; and testifying to the fact of Revision; but to write into that venerable text special directions as to what may be done on days other than Ash-Wednesday, and what must not be done without 2 Cor. xiii. 14, is very much as if the City Government of Cambridge should cause to be cut upon the stone under the Washington elm which now records the fact that there the commander of the American armies first drew his sword, divers and sundry additional items of information, such as the distance to Watertown, the shortest path across the common, etc., etc.

Why the Convention after having entrusted to a Joint Committee, by a decisive vote, the task of devising means for securing for the Prayer Book "increased flexibility of use," should have thought it necessary subsequently to take up with this compromise of a compromise (for such the proposal to amend the Ratification really is) it is difficult to say. Perhaps it was with the determination to have, at any rate, something to fall back upon in case the larger and more comprehensive measure should come to naught.

The rubric is confessedly the proper place for directions as to how to use the services, and but for the very natural and defensible objection on the part of some to touching the Prayer Book at all, there never would have been any question about it.[27] This objection having been at last waived, a straight path is now open to the end desired, and it ought to be followed even at the cost of three years more of delay.

Returning to the general subject, and still following the order of the Table of Contents, we come to Prayers and Thanksgivings upon several Occasions.

Here it would be well to note more intelligibly than is done by the present rubric the proper places for the introduction of the Prayers and the Thanksgivings, providing for the use of the former before, and of the latter after the General Thanksgiving.

As to the deficiencies in this department let the late Dr. Muhlenberg speak.

"The Prayer Book," he says, "is not undervalued as to its treasures in asserting its wants. The latter cannot be denied. Witness the meagre amount of New Testament prayer and praise for the round of festivals and fasts; the absence of any forms suited to the peculiar circumstances of our own Church and country and to the times we live in; or for our benevolent and educational institutions. There are no prayers for the increase of Ministers, for Missions, or Missionaries, for the Christian teaching of the young; for sponsors on occasions of Baptism; for persons setting out on long journeys by land, quite as perilous as voyages by sea; for the sick desiring the prayers of the Church when there is no prospect of or desire for recovery; for the bereaved at funerals, and many other occasions for which there might as well be provision as for those few for which we already have the occasional prayers."[28]

After the _Prayers and Thanksgivings_ come _The Collects, Epistles, and Gospels _. Here again there is some room for enrichment. Distinctive collects for the first four days of Holy Week, for Monday and Tuesday in Easter Week, and for Monday and Tuesday in Whitsun Week, would add very materially to our liturgical wealth, while there would seem to be no reason whatever why they should not be had. It would also serve to enhance the symmetry of the Christian Year if the old feast of the Transfiguration[29] (August 6) were to be restored to its place among the recognized holy days of the Church and given its proper collect, epistle, and gospel.

There are some liturgists who desire the restoration of the introits of the First Book of Edward VI. The introit (so called from being the psalm sung when the priest goes within the altar-rails) has been in modern usage replaced by a metrical hymn. A sufficient reason for not printing the introit for each day in full, just before the collect, as was the mode in Edward's Book, is that to do so would involve a costly sacrifice of room. A compromise course would be to insert between the title of each Sunday or holyday and the collect proper to it, a simple numerical reference stating whereabouts in the Psalter the introit for the day is to be found, and adding perhaps the Latin catchwords. Any attempt to make the use of the introit obligatory in our times would meet with deserved failure; the metrical hymn has gained too firm a hold upon the affections of the Church at large ever to be willingly surrendered.

Coming, next, to the orders for the administration of the two sacraments, we find ourselves on delicate ground, where serious change of any sort is out of the question. Permission, under certain circumstances, still further to abbreviate the Office of the Communion of the Sick might, however, be sought without giving reasonable cause of alarm to any, and general consent might perhaps also be had for a provision with respect to the Exhortation, "Dearly beloved in the Lord," that in "Churches where there is frequent Communion it shall suffice to read the Exhortation above written once in a month on the Lord's Day."[30]

There are three liturgical features of the Scottish Communion Office which some have thought might be advantageously transferred to our own service. They are (_a_) the inserting after Christ's summary of the Law a response, _Lord, have mercy upon us and write these thy laws in our hearts, we beseech thee_; (_b_) the repeating by the people, after the reading of the Gospel, of a formula of thanks corresponding to the _Glory be to thee, O Lord_, that precedes it; and (_c_) the saying or singing of an Offertory sentence at the presentation of the alms. Upon these suggested enrichments the present writer offers no opinion.

In the Order of Confirmation a substitution for the present preface[31] of a responsive opening, in which the bishop should charge the minister to present none but such as he has found by personal inquiry "apt and meet" for the reception of the rite would be a marked improvement.

The remaining Occasional Offices would seem to demand no change either in structure or contents, although in some, perhaps in all of them, additional rubrics would be helpful to worshippers.

Some addition to the number of Occasional Offices would be a real gain. We need, for instance, a short Office for the Burial of Infants and Young Children; a Daybreak Office for Great Festivals; an Office for Midday Prayer; an Office of Prayer in behalf of Missions and Missionaries; an Office for the Setting apart of a Layman as a Reader, or as a Missionary; a Form of Prayer at the Laying of a Corner-stone; and possibly some others. It is evident that these new formularies might give opportunity for the introduction of hitherto unused collects, anthems, and benedictions of a sort that would greatly enhance the general usefulness of the Prayer Book.

This completes the survey of the field of "liturgical enrichment." A full discussion of the allied topic, "flexibility of use," would involve the examination in detail of all the rubrics of the Prayer Book, and for this there is no room. It is enough to say that unless the rubrics, the hinges and joints of a service-book, are kept well oiled, much creaking is a necessary result. There are turning-points in our public worship where congregations almost invariably betray an awkward embarrassment, simply because there is nothing to tell them whether they are expected to stand or to sit or to kneel. It is easy to sneer at such points as trifles and to make sport of those who call attention to them; but if it is worth our while to have ritual worship at all it is also worth our while to make the directions as to how people are to behave adequate, explicit, plain. A lofty contempt for detail is not the token of good administration either in Church or State. To the list of defective rubrics add those that are confessedly obsolete and such as are palpably contradictory and we have a bill of particulars that would amply justify a rubrical revision of the Prayer Book even if nothing more were to be attempted.

There is another reason. Far more rapidly than many people imagine, we are drifting away from the position of a Church that worships by liturgy to that of a Church worshipping by directory. The multiplicity of "uses" that vexed the Anglican Reformers is in our day multiplied four-fold. To those who honestly consider a directory a better thing than a liturgy this process of relaxation is most welcome, but for others who hold that, until the binding clauses of a Book of Common Prayer have been formally rescinded, they ought to be observed, the spectacle is the reverse of edifying. They would much prefer seeing the channels of liberty opened at the touch of law, and this is one of their chief reasons for advocating revision.

Two questions remain untouched, both of them of great practical importance. Could the Prayer Book be enriched to the extent suggested in this paper without a serious and most undesirable increase in its bulk as a volume?

Even supposing this were possible, is it at all likely that the Church could be persuaded to accept the amended book?

Unless the first of these two eminently proper questions can be met, there is, or ought to be, an end to all talk about revision. The advantage to a Church of being able to keep all its authoritative formularies of worship within the compass of a single volume is inestimable. Even the present enforced severance of the Hymnal from the Prayer Book is a misfortune.[32]

Those were good days when "Bible and Prayer Book" was the Churchman's all sufficient formula so far as volumes were concerned.

Rome boasts a much larger ritual variety than ours, but she secures it by multiplying books. The Missal is in one volume, the Breviary in four, the Pontifical, the Ritual, and the Ceremonial in one each, making eight in all.[33] This is an evil, and one from which we Anglicans have had a happy escape. It was evidently with a great groan of relief that the Church of England shook herself free from the whole host of service-books, and established her one only volume. It behooves us to be watchful how we take a single step towards becoming entangled in the old meshes.[34]

But need the enrichment of the Prayer Book--such enrichment as has been described, necessarily involve an unwieldiness in the volume, or, what would be still worse, an overflow into a supplement? Certainly not; for by judicious management every change advocated in this paper, and more besides, might be accomplished without transgressing by so much as a page or a paragraph the limits of the present standard book. All the space needed could be secured by the simple expedient of omitting matter that has been found by actual experience to be superfluous. Redundancy and unnecessary repetition are to the discredit of a book that enjoys such an unrivalled reputation as the Common Prayer. They are blemishes upon the face of its literary perfectness. Who has not marvelled at the strange duplication of the Litany and the Office of the Holy Communion in the Ordinal, when the special petitions proper to those services when used in that connection might easily have been printed by themselves with a direction that they be inserted in the appointed place?

Scholars, of course, know perfectly well how this came about. The Ordinal does not belong to the Prayer Book proper, but has a separate identity of its own. When printed as a book by itself it is all very well that it should include the Litany and the Holy Communion in full, but why allow these superfluous pages to crowd out others that are really needed?[35]

It has already been explained how the room now occupied by the "Selections" might be economized, and by the same simple device the space engrossed by divers psalms here and there in the Occasional Offices, _e_. _g_., Psalm li in the Visitation of Prisoners, and Psalm cxxx in the Visitation of the Sick could be made available for other use.

Again, why continue to devote a quarter of a page of precious space to the "Prayer for imprisoned debtors," seeing that now, for a long time past, there has been no such thing in the United States as imprisonment for debt? By availing ourselves of only a portion of these possible methods of garnering space, all that is desired might be accomplished, without making the Prayer Book bulkier by a single leaf than it is to-day.

But would a Prayer Book thus enriched be accepted by the Church at large? Is there any reason to think that the inertia which inheres in all large bodies, and to a singularly marked degree in our own Communion, could be overcome? The General Convention can give an approximate answer to these questions; it cannot settle them decisively, for it is a body which mirrors only to a certain extent the real mind and temper of the constituencies represented in it. One thing is certain, that only by allowing fullest possible play to the principle of "local option" could any wholly new piece of work on the part of revisionists, however excellent it might be in itself considered, find acceptance. To allow features introduced into the body of an existing service to be accounted optional, would indeed be impossible, without gendering the very wildest confusion. Upon such points the Church would have to decide outright, for or against, and stand by her decisions. But as respects every additional and novel Office proposed, the greatest care ought to be taken to have the indefinite An rather than the definite _The_ prefixed to it. Before such new uses are made binding on all, they must have met and endured the test of thorough trial by some. This is only fair.

But there is a limit, it must be remembered, in the Church's case to the binding power of precedent and prescription. The social order changes, and of these tides that ebb and flow it is our bounden duty to take note. Had mere aversion to change, dogged unwillingness to venture an experiment always carried the day, instead of having the "Prayer Book as it is," we should still be drearily debating the rival merits of Hereford and Sarum. The great question to be settled is, Does an emergency exist serious enough to warrant an attempt on our part to make better what we know already to be good? Is the Republic expecting of us, and reasonably expecting of us, greater things than with our present equipment we are quite able to accomplish? There are eyes that think they see a great future before this Church--are they right, or is it only mirage? At any rate ours is no return trip--we are outward bound. The ship is cutting new and untried waters with her keel at every moment. There is no occasion to question the sufficiency of either compass or helm, but in certain matters of a practical sort there is a demand upon us to use judgment, we are bound to give a place in our seamanship to present common-sense as well as to respect for ancient usage, and along with it all to feel some confidence that if the ship is what we think her to be, "the winds of God" may be trusted to bring her safely into port.

THE BOOK ANNEXED: ITS CRITICS AND ITS PROSPECTS.

THE BOOK ANNEXED: ITS CRITICS AND ITS PROSPECTS.[36]

First, last, and always this is to be said with respect to the revision of the American Common Prayer, that unless we can accomplish it with hearty good feeling the attempt at improvement ought to be abandoned altogether.

The day has gone by when new formularies of worship could be imposed on an unwilling Church by edict, and although under our carefully guarded system of ecclesiastical legislation there is little danger of either haste or unfairness, we must bear it well in mind that something more than "a constitutional majority of both houses" is needful if we would see liturgical revision crowned with real success. Of course, absolute unanimity is not to be expected. Every improvement that the world has seen was greeted at its birth by a chorus of select voices sounding the familiar anthem, "The old is better"; and the generation of those, who, in the sturdy phrase of King James's revisers, "give liking unto nothing but what is framed by themselves, and hammered on their anvil," will be always with us. But substantial unanimity may exist, even when absolute unanimity is impossible, and if anything like as general a consent can be secured for revision in 1886 as was given to it in 1883, the friends of the movement will have good reason to be satisfied.

That there has been, since the publication of _The Book Annexed as Modified_, a certain measure of reaction against the spirit of change must be evident to all who watch carefully the pulse of public opinion in the Church. Whether this reaction be as serious as some imagine, whether it have good reasons to allege, and whether it be not already giving tokens of spent force, are points which in the present paper will be touched only incidentally, for the writer's purpose is rather irenic than polemical, and he is more concerned to remove misapprehensions and allay fears than to seek the fading leaf of a controversial victory.

LIMITATIONS.

No estimate of the merits and demerits of _The Book Annexed_ can be a just one that leaves out of account the limitations under which the framers of it did their work. These limitations were not unreasonable ones. It was right and proper that they should be imposed. There is no good ground for a belief that the time will ever come when a "blank cheque," to borrow Mr. Goschen's mercantile figure, will be given to any company of liturgical revisers to fill out as they may see fit. But the moulders of forms, in whatever department of plastic art their specialty lies, when challenged to show cause why their work is deficient in symmetry or completeness, have an undoubted right to plead in reply the character of the conditions under which they labored. The present instance offers no exception to the general rule. In the first place, a distinct pledge was given in the House of Deputies, in 1880, before consent to the appointment of the Joint Committee was secured, that in case such permission to launch a movement in favor of revision as was asked for were to be granted, no attempt would be made seriously to change the Liturgy proper, namely, the Office of the Holy Communion.