A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer Part 5

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 a.s.sociates 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 bra.s.s 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 workmans.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+pwreck of many an attempt to construct liturgies _de novo_.

Ambitious framers of forms of wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, the Protector of all that trust in thee," or "Almighty and everlasting G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage 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.

"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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d and man. Therefore I shall rehea.r.s.e 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sume 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 superst.i.tious--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 wors.h.i.+p. 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 cla.s.sed whatever alteration would really serve to enhance the beauty, majesty, or fitness, of accepted formularies of wors.h.i.+p. Excision may, under conceivable circ.u.mstances, 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, subst.i.tution 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 subst.i.tution, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 subst.i.tution 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 a.s.suredly, No. To jeopard the supreme _desideratum_ in a people's manual of wors.h.i.+p, 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 subst.i.tuted 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 wors.h.i.+p 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.

Pa.s.sing 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 subst.i.tution 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 a.n.a.lagous 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 a.s.signed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 embarra.s.s 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 t.i.tle than "_Or this_" before the confession of Nicaea, we pa.s.s 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 subst.i.tution. 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 wors.h.i.+p owes a good measure of its charm to the subtle power of repet.i.tion; 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 repet.i.tion 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 repet.i.tion that no wearying sense of sameness will be conveyed, and again it is possible so to mismanage it as to transform wors.h.i.+p 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 repet.i.tion 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_.