Part 14 (1/2)

_Answer_. Amen.

_Minister_. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness'

sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

_Answer_. Amen.

_Minister_.

Hear also what the voice from heaven saith. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.

_Answer_.

Even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.

_Minister_.

Let us pray.

Almighty and Eternal G.o.d, to whom is never any prayer made without hope of mercy; Bow thine ear, we beseech thee, to our supplications, and in the country of peace and rest cause us to be made partners with thy holy servants; through Jesus Christ our Lord. _Amen_.[90]

_Then shall be said the Collect for the Day and, unless the Holy Communion is immediately to follow, such other prayer or prayers, taken out of this Book, as the Minister shall think proper_.

APPENDIX:

_SERMONS BEFORE AND AFTER_.

APPENDIX.

PERMANENT AND VARIABLE CHARACTERISTICS OP THE PRAYER BOOK.

A SERMON PREACHED IN ST. STEPHEN'S CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BISHOP WHITE PRAYER BOOK SOCIETY, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1878.

One generation pa.s.seth away; and another generation cometh.--Eccles.

i.4.

Against the background of this sombre fact of change, whatever there is in life that is stable stands out with a sharpness that compels notice. Just because the world is so full of variableness, our hearts' affections fasten with the tighter grip upon anything that seems to have the guarantees of permanence. The Book of Common Prayer appeals to us on this score, precisely as the Bible, in its larger measure, does: it is the book of many generations, not of one, and there is ”the hiding of its power.” We have received the Prayer Book from the generations that are gone; we purpose handing it on when ”another generation cometh”; we hold it for the use and blessing of the generation which now is.

Our thoughts about the book, therefore, if we would have the thinking rightly done, must take hold upon the past, the present, and the future, a breadth of topic covered well enough perhaps by this phrase, The Permanent and the Variable Characteristics of the Prayer Book.

I make no apology for asking you to take up the subject in so grave a temper. Now, for more than three hundred years, the Common Prayer has been the manual of wors.h.i.+p in use with the greater number of the people of that race which, meanwhile, in the providence of G.o.d, has been growing up to be the leading power on earth. Everywhere the English language seems to be going forth conquering and to conquer, and whithersoever it penetrates it carries with it the letters and the social traditions of a people whose character has been largely moulded by the influences of the Prayer Book. Africans, Indians, Hindoos are to-day, even in their heathenism, feeling the effects of waves of movement which throb from this centre. Men in authority, the world over, are living out, with more or less of consistency and thoroughness, those convictions about our duty toward G.o.d, and our duty toward our neighbor, which were early inwrought into their consciences through the instrumentality of these venerable forms. Surely no one can afford to think or speak otherwise than most seriously and carefully with regard to a book which has behind it a history so worthy, so rich, so pregnant with promise for the future.

Look first, then, at the power which the Prayer Book draws from its affiliations with the past. It is a common remark, so common as to be commonplace, that our liturgy owes its excellence to the fact of its not having been the composition or compilation of any one man. So much is evident enough upon the face of it: for a form of wors.h.i.+p devised off-hand by an individual, or even put together by a committee sitting around a table, could scarcely be wholly satisfactory to any save the maker or the makers of it. But it is more to the purpose to observe that not only is the Prayer Book not the result of any one man's or any one committee's labors; it is not the work even of any one generation, or of any one age.

The men who gradually put the Prayer Book into what is substantially its present shape, in the days of Edward VI. and of Elizabeth, were no more the makers of the Prayer Book than were the men who, in a later reign, set forth what we call ”the authorized version” of the Holy Scriptures, the first translators of the Bible. In both cases the work done was a work of review and revision. A much more severe review, a vastly more sweeping revision in the case of the Prayer Book than in the case of the Bible, I grant; but still, mainly a work of review and revision after all. ”Continuity,” that characteristic so precious in the eye of modern science, continuity marked the whole process.

The first Prayer Book of the Reformed Church of England was a condensed, simplified, and purified combination of formularies of wors.h.i.+p already in use in the National Church. A certain amount of new material, some of it home-made, some of it drawn from foreign sources, was added; but the great bulk of the new service-book had been contained in one or other of the older manuals. The Reformers did but clip and prune, with that exquisite taste and judgment which belong by tradition to English gardeners, the overgrowth and rank luxuriance of a too long neglected, ”careless-ordered” garden. But whence came the earlier formularies themselves, from which Cranmer and the rest quarried the stone for the new building?--to change the metaphor as Paul, you remember, does so suddenly from husbandry to architecture.[91]

Whence came Missal, and Breviary, and Book of Offices--the best portions of which were merged in the English Common Prayer?

From the far past; the Missal from those primitive liturgies or communion services, some of which we trace back with certainty to the later portion of the ante-Niceneage, and by not unreasonable conjecture to the edge of apostolic days; the Breviary or daily prayers from the times when Christians first took up community life; the Offices from periods of uncertain date all along the track of previous Church history. But what advantage, asks someone full of the modern spirit, what advantage has the Common Prayer in that it can trace a genealogy running up through ages of such uncertain reputation? Have we not been accustomed to regard those times as hopelessly corrupt, impenetrably dark, universally superst.i.tious? Ought we not to be mortified, rather than gratified, to learn that from the pit of so mouldy a past our book of prayer was digged? Would not a brand-new liturgy, modernized expressly to meet the needs of nineteenth century culture, with all the old English idioms displaced, every rough corner smoothed and every crooked place made straight--would not that be something far worthier our respect, better ent.i.tled to our allegiance, than this book full of far-away echoes, and faint bell-notes from a half-forgotten past?