Part 3 (1/2)

And yet, curiously enough, _The Proposed Book_ was in some points more ”churchly,” using the word in a sense expressive of liturgical accuracy, than the book finally adopted. In the Morning Prayer it has the _Venite_ in full and not abridged. The _Benedictus_ it also gives entire. A single form of Absolution is supplied. The versicles following upon the Creed are more numerous than ours. In the Evening Prayer the great Gospel Hymns, _the Magnificat_ and the _Nunc dimittis_, stand in the places to which we with tardy justice have only just restored them.

Again, if we consider those features of _The Proposed Book_ that were retained and made part of the Liturgy in 1789, we shall have further reason to refrain from wholesale condemnation of this tentative work. For example, we owe the two opening sentences of Morning Prayer, ”The Lord is in his holy temple” and ”From the rising of the sun,” to _The Proposed Book_, and also the special form for Thanksgiving Day. And yet, on the whole, the Convention of 1789 acted most wisely in determining that it would make the Prayer Book of the Church of England, rather than _The Proposed Book_, the real basis of revision. It did so, and as a result we have what has served us so well during the first century of our national life--the _Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the Church according to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America_. The points wherein the American Prayer Book differs from the Prayer Book of the Church of England are too numerous to be catalogued in full. ”They will appear,” says the Preface (a composition borrowed, by the way, almost wholly from _The Proposed Book_), ”and, it is to be hoped, the reasons of them also, upon a comparison of this with the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.”

The most important differences are the following: The permissive use of ”Selections of Psalms in place of the Psalms appointed for the day of the month.” This was doubtless suggested by the wholesale transformation of the Psalter in _The Proposed Book_ into a series of selections.

The permitted shortening of the Litany is an American feature.

A number of the special prayers, as, for example, the prayer for a sick person, that for persons going to sea, the thanksgivings for a recovery and for a safe return, all these are peculiar to the American use. Extensive alterations were made in the Marriage Service and certain greatly needed ones in the Burial Office.

The two most noteworthy differences, however, are the omission from our Prayer Book of the so-called Athanasian Creed, and the insertion in it of that part of the Consecration Prayer in the Communion Office known as the Invocation. The engrafting of this latter feature we owe to the influence of Bishop Seabury, who by this addition not only a.s.similated the language of our liturgy more closely to that of the ancient formularies of the Oriental Church, but also insured our being kept reminded of the truly spiritual character of Holy Communion. ”It is the spirit that quickeneth,”

this Invocation seems to say; ”the flesh profiteth nothing.” Quite in line with this was the alteration made at the same time in the language of the Catechism. ”The Body and Blood of Christ,” says the English Book, ”which are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper.”

”The Body and Blood of Christ,” says the American Book, ”which are spiritually taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper.”

Many verbal changes are to be found scattered here and there through the book, some of them for the better, some, perhaps, for the worse. The prevailing purpose seems to have been to expunge all obsolete words and phrases while dealing tenderly with obsolescent ones. In this course, however, the revisers were by no means always and everywhere consistent.

”Prevent,” in the sense of ”antic.i.p.ate,” is altered in some places but left unchanged in others. In the _Visitation of Prisoners_, an office borrowed from the Irish Prayer Book, the thoroughly obsolete expression, ”As you tender,” in the sense of ”as you value,” the salvation of your soul, is retained.

From the Psalter has disappeared in the American Book ”Thou tellest my Sittings,” although why this particular archaism should have been selected for banishment and a hundred others spared, it is not easy to understand.

Perhaps some sudden impatience seized the reviser, like that which moved Bishop Wren, while annotating his Prayer Book, to write on the margin of the calendar for August, ”Out with 'dog days' from among the saints.”

Considering what a bond of unity the Lord's Prayer appears to be becoming among all English-speaking wors.h.i.+ppers, it is, perhaps, to be regretted that our revisers changed the wording of it in two or three places. The excision of ”Lighten our darkness” must probably be attributed to the prosaic matter-of-fact temper which had possession of everybody and everything during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The Ordinal, the Articles, the Consecration of Churches, and the Inst.i.tution of Ministers made no part of the Prayer Book as it was set forth in 1789; nor do they, even now, strictly speaking, make a part of it, although in the matter of binding force and legal authority they are on the same footing.

The Ordinal and Articles are substantially identical with the English Ordinal and Articles, save in the matter of a reference to the Athanasian Creed and several references to the connection of Church and State. The Consecration of Churches and the Inst.i.tution of Ministers are offices distinctively American. If I add that the American Book drops out of the Visitation of the Sick a form of private absolution, and greatly modifies the service for Ash-Wednesday, we shall have made our survey of differences tolerably, though by no means exhaustively complete.

And now what is the lesson taught us by the history of the Prayer Book? Homiletical as the question sounds, it is worth asking.

We have reviewed rapidly, but not carelessly, the vicissitudes of the book's wonderful career, and we ought to be in a position to draw some sort of instructive inference from it all. Well, one thing taught us is this, the singular power of survival that lives in gracious words. They wondered at the ”gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth,” and because they wondered at them they treasured them up.

Kind words, says the child's hymn, can never die; neither can kindly words, and kindly in the deepest sense are many, many of the words of the Common Prayer; they touch that which is most catholic in us, that which strongly links us to our kind. There is that in some of the Collects which as it has lasted since the days when Roman emperors were sitting on their thrones, so will it last while man continues what he is, a praying creature.

Another thing taught us by the Prayer Book's history is the duty of being forever on our guard in the religious life against ”the falsehood of extremes.”

The emanc.i.p.ated thinkers who account all standards of belief to be no better than dungeon walls, scoff at this feature of the Anglican character with much bitterness. ”Your Church is a Church of compromises,” they say, ”and your boasted _Via media_ only a coward's path, the poor refuge of the man who dares not walk in the open.” But when we see this Prayer Book condemned for being what it is by b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, and then again condemned for being what it is by the Long Parliament, the thought occurs to us that possibly there is enshrined in this much-persecuted volume a truth larger than the Romanist is willing to tolerate, or the Puritan generous enough to apprehend.

A third important lesson is that we are not to confound revision with ruin, or to suppose that because a book is marvellously good it cannot conceivably be bettered. Each accomplished revision of the Book of Common Prayer has been a distinct step in advance. If G.o.d in his wise providence suffered an excellent growth of devotion to spring up out of the soil of England in the days of Edward the Sixth, and, after many years, determined that like a vine out of Egypt it should be brought across the sea and given root on these sh.o.r.es, we need not fear that we are about to lose utterly our pleasant plant if we notice that the twigs and leaves are adapting themselves to the climate and the atmosphere of the new dwelling-place. The life within the vine remains what it always was. The growth means health. The power of adaptation is the guarantee of a perpetual youth.

REVISION OF THE AMERICAN COMMON PRAYER.

II. REVISION OF THE AMERICAN COMMON PRAYER.[1]

The revision of long established formularies of public wors.h.i.+p is, as it ought to be, a matter compa.s.sed 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 wors.h.i.+p (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 inst.i.tutions, 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]