Part 1 (1/2)
A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer.
by William Reed Huntington.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
The opening paper of this collection was originally read as a lecture before a liturgical cla.s.s, and is now published for the first time. The others have appeared in print from time to time during the movement for revision. If they have any permanent value, it is because of their showing, so far as the writer's part in the matter is concerned, what things were attempted and what things failed of accomplishment. Should they serve as contributory to some future narrative of the revision, the object of their publication will have been accomplished. So much has been said as to the poverty of our gains on the side of ”enrichment,” as compared with what has been secured in the line of ”flexibility,”
that it has seemed proper to append to the volume a Comparative Table detailing the additions of liturgical matter made to the Common Prayer at the successive revisions.
W. R. H. New York, Christmas, 1892.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.
I. ORIGINS.
Liturgical wors.h.i.+p, understood in the largest sense the phrase can bear, means divine service rendered in accordance with an established form. Of late years there has been an attempt made among purists to confine the word ”liturgy” to the office ent.i.tled in the Prayer Book, _The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion_.
This restricted and specialized interpretation of a familiar word may serve the purposes of technical scholars.h.i.+p, for undoubtedly there is much to be said in favor of the narrowed signification as we shall see; but unless English literature can be rewritten, plain people who draw their vocabulary from standard authors will go on calling service-books ”liturgies” regardless of the fact that they contain many things other than that one office which is ent.i.tled to be named by eminence _the_ Liturgy. ”This Convention,” write the fathers of the American Episcopal Church in the Ratification printed on the fourth page of the Prayer Book, ”having in their present session set forth a Book of Common Prayer and other rites and ceremonies of the Church, do hereby establish the said book; and they declare it to be the _Liturgy_ of this Church.”
For the origin of liturgy thus broadly defined we have to go a long way back; beyond the Prayer Book, beyond the Ma.s.s-book, beyond the ancient Sacramentaries, yes, beyond the synagogue wors.h.i.+p, beyond the temple wors.h.i.+p, beyond the tabernacle wors.h.i.+p; in fact I am disposed to think that, logically, we should be unable to stop short until we had reached the very heart of man itself, that dimly discerned groundwork we call human nature, and had discovered there those two instincts, the one of wors.h.i.+p and the other of gregariousness, from whence all forms of common prayer have sprung.
Where three or two a.s.semble for the purposes of supplication, some form must necessarily be accepted if they are to pray in unison.
When the disciples came to Jesus begging him that he would teach them how to pray, he gave them, not twelve several forms, though doubtless James's special needs differed from John's and Simon's from Jude's--he gave them, not twelve, but one. ”When ye pray,”
was his answer, ”say Our Father.” That was the beginning of Christian Common Prayer. Because we are men we wors.h.i.+p, because we are fellow-men our wors.h.i.+p must have form.
But waiving this last a.n.a.lysis of all which carries us across the whole field of history at a leap, it becomes necessary to seek for liturgical beginnings by a more plodding process.
If we take that manual of wors.h.i.+p with which as English-speaking Christians we are ourselves the most familiar, the Book of Common Prayer, and allow it to fall naturally apart, as a bunch of flowers would do if the string were cut, we discover that in point of fact we have, as in the case of the Bible, many books in one. We have scarcely turned the t.i.tle-page, for instance, before we come upon a ritual of daily wors.h.i.+p, an order for Morning Prayer and an order for Evening Prayer, consisting in the main of Psalms, Scripture Lessons, Antiphonal Versicles, and Collects. Appended to this we find a Litany or General Supplication and a collection of special prayers.
Mark an interval here, and note that we have completed the first volume of our liturgical library. Next, we have a sacramental ritual, ent.i.tled, _The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion_, ingeniously interwoven by a system of appropriate prayers and New Testament readings with the Sundays and holydays of the year. This gives us our second volume.
Then follow numerous offices which we shall find it convenient to cla.s.sify under two heads, namely: those which may be said by a bishop or by a presbyter, and those that may be said by a bishop only. Under the former head come the baptismal offices, the Order for the Burial of the Dead, and the like; under the latter, the services of Ordination and Confirmation and the Form of Consecration of a Church or Chapel.
In the Church of England as it existed before the Reformation, these four volumes, as I have called them, were distinct and recognized realities. Each had its t.i.tle and each its separate use. The name of the book of daily services was _The Breviary_.
The name of the book used in the celebration of the Holy Communion was _The Missal_. The name of the book of Special Offices was _The Ritual_. The name of the book of such offices as could be used by a bishop only was _The Pontifical_. It was one of the greatest of the achievements of the English reformers that they succeeded in condensing, after a practical fas.h.i.+on, these four books, or, to speak more accurately, the first three of them, Breviary, Missal, and Ritual, into one. The Pontifical, or Ordinal, they continued as a separate book, although it soon for the sake of convenience became customary in England, as it has always been customary here, for Prayer Book and Ordinal to be st.i.tched together by the binders into a single volume. Popularly speaking the Prayer Book is the entire volume one purchases under that name from the bookseller, but accurately speaking the Book of Common Prayer ends where _The Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecrating Bishops, Priests, and Deacons_ begins. ”Finis” should be written after the Psalter, as indeed from the Prayer Book's Table of Contents plainly appears.
Setting aside now, for the present, that portion of the formularies which corresponds to the Ritual and Pontifical of the mediaeval Church, I proceed to speak rapidly of the antecedents of Breviary and Missal. Whence came they? And how are we to account for their being sundered so distinctly as they are?
They came, so some of the most thoughtful of liturgical students are agreed, from a source no less remote than the Temple of Solomon, and they are severed, to speak figuratively, by a valley not unlike that which in our thoughts divides the Mount of Beat.i.tudes from the Hill of Calvary.
In that memorable building to which reference was just made, influential over the destinies of our race as no other house of man's making ever was, there went on from day to day these two things, psalmody and sacrifice. Peace-offering, burnt-offering, sin-offering, the morning oblation, and the evening oblation--these with other ceremonies of a like character went to make what we know as the sacrificial ritual of the temple.
But this was not all. It would appear that there were other services in the temple over and above those that could strictly be called sacrificial. The Hebrew Psalter, the hymn-book of that early day, contains much that was evidently intended by the writers for temple use, and even more that could be easily adapted to such use. And although there is no direct evidence that in Solomon's time forms of prayer other than those a.s.sociated with sacrificial rites were in use, yet when we find mention in the New Testament of people going up to the temple of those later days ”at the hour of prayer,” it seems reasonable to infer that the custom was an ancient one, and that from the beginning of the temple's history forms of wors.h.i.+p not strictly speaking sacrificial had been a stated feature of the ritual. But whether in the temple or not, certainly in the synagogues, which after the return from the captivity sprang up all over the Jewish world, services composed of prayers, of psalms, and of readings from the law and the prophets were of continual occurrence. Therefore we may safely say that with these two forms of divine service, the sacrificial and the simply devotional and didactic, the apostles, the founders of the Christian Church, had been familiar from their childhood.
They were at home in both synagogue and temple. They knew by sight the ritual of the altar, and by ear the ritual of the choir. They were accustomed to the spectacle of the priest offering the victim; they were used to hearing the singers chant the psalms.
We see thus why it is that the public wors.h.i.+p of the Church should have come down to us in two great lines, why there should be a tradition of eucharistic wors.h.i.+p and, parallel to this, a tradition of daily prayer; for as the one usage links itself, in a sense, to the sacrificial system of G.o.d's ancient people and has in it a suggestion of the temple wors.h.i.+p, so the other seems to show a continuity with what went on in those less pretentious sanctuaries which had place in all the cities and villages of Judea, and indeed wherever, throughout the Roman world, Jewish colonists were to be found. The earliest Christian disciples having been themselves Hebrews, nothing could have been more natural than their moulding the wors.h.i.+p of the new Church in general accordance with the models that had stood before their eyes from childhood in the old. The Psalms were sung in the synagogues according to a settled principle. We cannot wonder, then, that the Psalter should have continued to be what in fact it had always been, the hymn-book of the Church. Moreover, they had in the synagogue besides their psalmody a system of Bible readings, confined, of course, to the Old Testament Scriptures. This is noted in the observation that fell from Simon Peter, at the first Council of the Church, ”Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogue every Sabbath day.” Scripture lessons, therefore, would be no novelty.
We gather also from the New Testament, not to speak of other authorities, that in the apostolic days people were familiar with what were known as ”hours of prayer.” There were particular times in the day, that is to say, which were held to be especially appropriate for wors.h.i.+p. ”Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.” Again, at Joppa, we find the former of these two apostles going up upon the house-top to pray at ”the sixth hour.” Long before this David had mentioned morning and evening and noon as fitting hours of prayer, and one psalmist, in his enthusiasm, had even gone so far as to declare seven times a day to be not too often for giving G.o.d thanks. There was also the precedent of Daniel opening his windows toward Jerusalem three times a day. As the love for order and system grew year by year stronger in the Christian Church, the laws that govern ritual would be likely to become more stringent, and so very probably it came to pa.s.s. For aught we know to the contrary, the observance of fixed hours of prayer was a matter of voluntary action with the Christians of the first age. There was, as we say, no ”shall” about it. But when the founders of the monastic orders came upon the scene a fixed rule took the place of simple custom, and what had been optional became mandatory. By the time we reach the mediaeval period evolution has had its perfect work, and we find in existence a scheme of daily service curiously and painfully elaborate.