it rejoices in the inexhaustible material without, and submits itself with joyous and grateful humility to the study of the world of glowing wonder in which the soul of man is placed. The sense of Unity, finding its home and centre in faith, testifies to the infinite spiritual significance of every atom; thus it stands forth with absolute assurance as the guarantee against isolation, which is death. And the thought of omnipresent Force becomes to poetry a source of never-failing inspiration, hope, and joy; for poetry knows that that Force is God. "I have gone the whole round of Creation; I saw and I spoke ! I report, as a man may, of God's work — All 's love, yet all 's law. I but open my eyes · BOSTON. Vida D. Scudder. PRAYER IN PUBLIC WORSHIP. "Quand il a nommé son temple maison d'oraison, Dieu a montré que la prière est le principal de son service."-JOHN CALVIN. IT is a significant fact that among the descendants of the New England Puritans, and among the Calvinistic Protestants of France, there is to-day a similar, though entirely disconnected, outreaching after a more worshipful form of public service. In a report made to the General Association of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts in June, 1886, attention was called to the fact that nearly half the churches of the State had in some modified their old order in the direction of more worshipful forms. The report, not made by a novice but by an honored clergyman who has been in the ministry nearly forty years, earnestly recommended that attention be given to enriching the services of way the Lord's day, and making them more truly devotional. 66 "To a larger extent than ever yet," it says, our sanctuaries are to become houses of prayer.” "Refusing that straightness of prescribed form which always has proved itself a form of death, [our order] is going to afford all the variety of modes and forms of worship which can be made vital, and which the needs of differing classes of men shall require. There are uses, for example, for which a perfectly extemporaneous worship will ever be best. These uses will continue to be met. For other uses a certain proportion of forms, prepared but not imposed, are helpful to the best results." "Ministers and churches are to see to it that no empty forms or idle words abuse their worship; while in spirit and in truth, and also in holy beauty, all souls and all tongues unite in the service of the Lord's day in the Lord's house."1 The same subject of forms of worship was also under discussion in May, 1886, by the Conférences générales of the Reformed Church of France; while later in the year two articles in the "Revue Chrétienne " of Paris advocated an advance in the direction of the above report. Significant truly, and of what? Not of what some zealous churchmen would have the world believe, that Puritanism is a defunct power, of which traces will soon be found only in history; but of the fact that Puritanism-and to a less degree the reforming spirit of French Calvinism is to-day a living power; that it is more mindful than it once was of the broader wants of man's religious nature; and that at last it feels itself free, as it once did not, to appropriate and profit by the liturgical wealth of the ages. Free, for the reason that it has now fulfilled one part of its mission. There is now no more danger of the world's returning to its thraldom to the Pope of Rome than there is of its worshiping the Sphinx at the foot of the Pyramids; but there was such danger in the seventeenth century, and it was not wholly past until reformed Christianity had taken on its grand new life in this mission century. And so long as this menace threatened, there was need that some vigorous, determined, and intelligent body of Christians, like our ancestors, should deny themselves all the extrinsic beauties and accompaniments of worship which might entice men back into that deadly bondage. That it was a selfdenial to many of the most intelligent of the founders of our 1 The last National Council of Congregational Churches (Chicago, 1886), also, appointed a standing committee on the "Improvement of Public Worship." New England commonwealth, must be evident when we reflect that they were men who were not only eminent in piety, but also distinguished for their learning, university men, familiar with the lore of the ages, and not oblivious to the valuable elements in the historic liturgies. Not ignorantly, and not, we must believe, without a pang, but with a conscientious purpose, they gave up the good with the bad. And now, not blindly but with discrimination, taught by the ages, but not hampered by them, we, their descendants, are to resume so much of that discarded wealth as shall meet the wants of living men. That, we give due notice to our liturgy-bound friends, is the true significance of this new outreaching among Puritans and Calvinists. The rationale of the movement may be better understood after tracing briefly the history of the church liturgies. In the ancient church, by the beginning of the third century, we discern two distinct orders of service, adapted respectively to the worship of catechumens, or persons not yet received into full fellowship, and to the worship of the faithful who had access to the divine mysteries; in which latter service the Lord's Supper was administered. This rite, it is well known, was at first observed in connection with the early Agapæ, or love-feasts, of the church. When these were discontinued, indeed before they had been wholly abandoned, the Lord's Supper was transferred to the morning service of worship. Until now this service had been open to all, believers and unbelievers; and for some time after the transfer, as in the time of Justin (middle of the second century), there appears to have been no exclusion. The latter half of the second century, however, witnessed a marked advance from the earlier simplicity of worship, and by the days of Tertullian (died A. D. 220) a distinction was made between the earlier part of the service, to which all might still come, and the latter part, from which all who were not baptized were excluded. The earlier part of the service was very simple, consisting of the confession of sins, the chanting of psalms and hymns of praise to Christ, reading of the Scriptures, preaching, and prayer for those who were to retire, as well as, in some churches, for authorities and for the poor and the sick. The succeeding service was more formal, and by the close of the third century had developed into an elaborate ritual. The essential parts may be resolved into: (1) The offertory, or presentation of gifts; (2) The salutation, or kiss of peace; (3) A confession of faith, which early assumed the form of the Apostles' Creed; (4) The eucharistic or thanksgiving prayer, generally embodying the seraphic hymn, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts," etc.; (5) The Consecration of the elements, using the Scripture words of institution, and a prayer for the descent of the Holy Spirit to sanctify the bread and the wine; (6) A prayer of general intercession for the living and the dead, embodying the Lord's Prayer; and (7) The Communion proper. These elements were uniformly present, and, although elaborated in somewhat different order and form, there was sufficient agreement among the churches to prove their common origin. In the third century there was, no doubt, considerable latitude still given to those who officiated, the liturgy being still unwritten; but in the fourth century written forms gave to the service substantially the order still preserved to us in such ancient liturgies as those of St. James and St. Mark. The distinction at that time obtaining between the mass of the catechumens and the mass of the faithful continued until the sixth century, when, with the overthrow of paganism and the introduction of infant baptism, it disappeared from the Western Church. Thus the entire service became, in course of time, distinctively sacramental, and the elements of Scripture reading and preaching, once so prominently recognized, fell into comparative disuse. So the service stood at the time of the Reformation. Men spoke no longer of going to worship God, or to receive instruction in the word of God, but of going to mass; the whole Christian service crystallizing around a priestly act in which the Son of God was again offered up for the sins of believers. When the reformers exposed the theological errors of this practice, and attacked its attending corruptions, they of course changed radically their own forms of worship. These changes, however, were far from uniform. On the one hand, churches which had the support of the state, like the Lutheran and the Anglican churches, contented themselves with doing away the absolute evils of the old system, scrupulously preserving all that was good and permitting what was indifferent. Luther, it is well known, prepared a "German Mass," embodying much of the devotional part of the old service, and allowed pictures and crosses in the churches; though he magnified the reading of the Scriptures and the preaching of the word. But while he gave his approval to this formal "Order of Service in the Congregation," and never dreamed of dispensing with a liturgy, he expressly said that this order should not be binding if a better appeared. In the same spirit, and largely influenced by Luther, all the churches of Northern Europe prepared reformed liturgies. The Book of Common Prayer was in large part a compilation from the Roman Breviary, Missal, and other books of ritual. The order for the Morning and Evening Services was a compression, with some significant omissions and additions, of the offices used at the seven canonical hours. The order for the Communion Service, together with the collects, epistles, and gospels, were translations and adaptations of the Latin Missal. On the other hand, such isolated reformers as Zwingli and Farel, going to an extreme in their repudiation of the Roman doctrine of the sacrament, were consistent with themselves in throwing away the entire historic ritual. Following these men, but with considerable more of conservatism both in doctrine and in matters of worship, were Calvin, Knox, and in general the reformed churches which had no strong state support. Somewhat conservative, we say, these were. John Calvin was before all things a scholar and a theologian, and was in no sense an image-breaking enthusiast. The severely simple ritual which his predecessor, Farel, had instituted at Geneva was remodeled by him and given more of character and dignity. Believing, as his words at the head of this article indicate, that prayer is the chief element in the worship of God, Calvin prepared forms of prayer and an order of service for the morning of the Lord's day, and also forms for the administering of baptism and for the celebrating of the Lord's Supper. And it is to be noted that in his order for the morning service, instead of devising something new, he went back to the church of the second and third centuries, and adopted substantially its ante-communion order of worship, as follows: ORDER OF SERVICE IN THE CHURCH AT GENEVA. Sentence. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. AMEN. Exhortation to Confession, as follows: Brethren, let each one present himself before the Lord, and with all simplicity confess his sins, and follow me with his mind, while I with these words: Confession of Sins and Prayer for Forgiveness. [Following the prescribed form given below.2] go before 1 Guided by Knox, the Church of Scotland was the only state church to forego the use of a prescribed liturgy. 2 I have attended worship in a Walloon church in Leyden, where this confession is still in use in its original form. Following is a translation: |