Psalm, sung by the whole congregation. Prayer by the Minister. [The form not prescribed, save that he "begs God to grant the gift of the Holy Spirit, in order that his Word may be faithfully expounded, to the glory of his name and the edification of the Church; and be received with becoming submission and obedience of mind."] Sermon. Prayer, at some length, following a prescribed form.1 Benediction, in the words: The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. AMEN. [To this was sometimes added:] Depart in peace; remember the poor; and the God of peace be with you. AMEN. O Lord God, eternal and almighty Father, we acknowledge and sincerely confess before thy Holy Majesty that we are miserable sinners, conceived and born in guilt and sin, prone to iniquity, and incapable of any good work; and that in our depravity we make no end of transgressing thy commandments. We thus call down destruction upon ourselves from thy just judgment. Nevertheless, O Lord, we anxiously lament that we have offended thee, and we condemn ourselves and our faults with true repentance, asking thee to succor our wretchedness by thy grace. Deign then, O most gracious and most merciful God and Father, to bestow thy mercy upon us, in the name of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Effacing our faults, and washing away all our pollutions, daily increase to us the gifts of thy Holy Spirit, that we from our inmost hearts acknowledging our iniquity, may be more and more displeasing to ourselves, and so stimulated to true repentance; and that He, mortifying us with all our sins, may produce in us the fruits of righteousness and holiness pleasing to thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN. 1 The form is too long for insertion, but may be summarized as follows: Acknowledgment of unworthiness to appear before Almighty God, but claim to come in the name of Jesus Christ, trusting that he will be present interceding for us. Petition for forgiveness, fitting the suppliants for further prayer. Prayer for magistrates, that they may be instruments for furthering God's kingdom. For pastors; and that the churches may be rescued from hirelings. For all men, that the lost and wandering may be reclaimed, and that the enlightened may have spiritual enrichment. Commendation of those in affliction, asking that they may be turned thereby to repentance, and that they may be consoled. In particular praying for those brethren who are dispersed and suffering under the tyranny of Antichrist. That recognizing the utterness of our guilt, we may ourselves turn with full purpose of heart to Jesus Christ, that he " may extinguish our old Adam and renovate and invigorate us for a better life." Closing with a paraphrase at considerable length of the LORD'S PRAYER. It is not generally thought that Calvin had any perceptible influence upon or sympathy with the Prayers of the Anglican Church, however much he may have contributed to its Articles of Religion. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that one striking feature of this Genevan order of worship was afterwards introduced into the English morning and evening services through the influence of two of Calvin's intimate associates. In the first reformed Prayer Book of 1549 these services began with the Lord's Prayer, without the opening sentences, the general confession, and the declaration of the remission of sins. A revision of the book being demanded, Archbishop Cranmer invited over from the Continent to his assistance Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr. The former, who was deferred to with great honor by Cranmer, had been intimate with Calvin at Strasburg, in fact had invited him to that place when he was banished from Geneva. He was familiar, too, with Calvin's form of public worship which he first prepared at that time (1538-40) for the Strasburg church. Moreover, at the very time when the revision was making, Valerandus Pollanus, Calvin's successor in the Strasburg church, was in London, and published a Latin translation of the Strasburg (French) order of service. Accordingly when the Second Prayer Book of King Edward VI. appeared, marking "the furthest point in the Puritan direction which was ever reached by the liturgy of the Church of England," -the Daily Prayer service began, like Calvin's order, with introductory Scripture sentences and the Confession and Declaration of the Remission of Sins. Though the absolution clause did not appear in the Genevan form, Calvin having been, as he afterwards said, "over-easy in yielding" to opposition to it, — it did belong to the Strasburg order, the Confession in Pollanus's translation being followed by these words: "Hic Pastor ex Scriptura sacra sententiam aliquam remissionis peccatorum populo recitat, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." Thus that striking characteristic of the beginning of public worship by acknowledg ing, and praying for the forgiveness of, sins a feature of which no trace appears in all the historic liturgies for a thousand years, or from the time of St. Basil onward was restored to the Anglican and Reformed Protestant world by Calvin's ritual. The pertinence of tracing this point so carefully will appear beyond. 1 Even Archbishop Laurence, who obtained his promotion for trying to prove (in his Bampton Lectures) that the XXXIX. Articles were not Calvinistic (!!), admitted, though with very scant courtesy, that these opening services were derived, through Pollanus, from the Strasburg liturgy. We have dwelt at such length on the Calvinistic type of the reformed worship for the reason that the New England churches have inherited from it the spirit and general character, if not the precise order of their worship. When in the seventeenth century there recurred in England a state of things which had obtained on the Continent in the sixteenth century, making our Puritan ancestors fear a speedy return to Rome, what so natural for them as to resort to the simpler methods of worship of their continental brethren? That they soon went beyond their models in a non-liturgical and non-sacerdotal direction is to us no matter of wonder, for reasons already explained; but it is to be remarked that these men were in exact accord with their continental friends as to the elements which should enter into the public worship of God. Prayer, praise, devout attention to God's word, no one of these was to be overlooked. It would be a grand mistake to say that the Puritans of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, or of the English Commonwealth, through devotion to preaching forgot to worship. It was not so much the preaching, as the praying and psalm-singing soldiers that the Cavaliers derided and ran away from at Marston Moor and Naseby. It was not preachers, but worshipers, who prayed with faith, and "Who roll'd their psalms to wintry skies" who laid our New England foundations. That they stood not upon the order nor upon the liturgical beauty with which they voiced their prayer and praise, was well. It was one mission of theirs to demonstrate that man could worship his Maker acceptably without any ecclesiastical machinery. This mission they have discharged. Addressing ourselves now to our task, what suggestions may be made towards the liturgical improvement of our more formal Sunday services? We begin with the assumption that the one supreme object of assembling in church is to worship God; not to be entertained, not to be instructed even, but to worship God. Everything connected with the service should contribute, directly or indirectly, to this end. What fails of this should thereby be excluded. Now of the several elements which enter into our worship, prayer, praise, and attention to God's word, the two latter are measurably well provided for. Not that there is not room in most of our churches for a more worshipful service of praise. We ought to have more grand chorals, more devout chants; but, on the whole, the general introduction of improved hymn-books into our churches has had a happy effect. Choirs no longer usurp the people's function of praising God. The operatic period of our church music is past, the sickly sentimental period is passing; and the future may be trusted to take care of itself. Again, the growing practice of the responsive reading of the psalms not only adds a new element of praise, but tends toward making our reading of the Scriptures a more worshipful element of the service. We are coming to recognize other uses of revealed truth besides giving to the preacher a subject for his discourse; and our Sunday readings are taking a wider range than they once had. What is yet to be desired among us is to see more Bibles in our pews, and more frequent references made to them, with occasional congregational readings of passages like the Beatitudes, the Prologue to John's Gospel, Paul's grand Triumphal (Rom. viii. 31-39), or his Psalm of Love (1 Cor. xiii.). These will doubtless come in due time. Nor can our sermons be fairly charged with lack of a devotional spirit. As was facetiously said of a respected clergyman of Essex County, in a late report of his church to the Conference, we generally preach on some religious topic. The homiletical themes of the venerable pastor of the West Church in Boston do not find large favor among us; nor do we longer in our pulpits treat "religious topics" from the view-point of scientific theologians. By its reverent presentation of divine truth the sermon uniformly aims to put men into a conscious and becoming relationship with God. Succeeding in this it is acceptable preaching. But how now of our prayers? To say that they are not what they should be is a truism. We do not need to be reminded of this by our friends who pray by the book; we see it ourselves. But we do not see a remedy for it in a simple resort to fixed forms of prayer. To bind ourselves rigidly to such forms would only make matters worse; and happily this is an impossibility for us without subjecting ourselves to that entire system of ecclesiastical bondage which we have forever abjured. What we want, if that is possible, is to combine the advantages of freedom and prescription. The writer was present at Union Park Church in Chicago the Sunday after the great fire. The spiritual and sympathetic pastor, true as well as tender, dignified as well as devout, untrammeled by any forms, so led the devotions of that congregation that every burdened worshiper went home feeling that a ray of light from heaven had shone upon him; that there was yet something to live for, and work for, and find joy in, even in that stricken city. I venture to say that the Right Reverend members of the House of Bishops who lately met in Chicago, could they have been present at that service, would have consented that there was one occasion when the sympathetic soul of a minister of God. who was in close contact with the hearts of his people voiced the needs of that great city as no liturgy ever written could have expressed them. On the other hand, who has not listened to vagaries in public prayer such as to make him long just for that service, perhaps for the most interminable and unintelligible litany ever penned. The liturgist rightly enough claims that the staple of human life is a recurring round of sins and sorrows and cares; that it is made up of experiences peculiar to no country nor clime nor period. Chicagos are burnt but once in a thousand years. Therefore, he says, let our public prayers voice these universal wants. To which it may be answered, that although there are universal wants, yet even these take on a local coloring. The temptation against which the worshipers in Trinity Church need to be strengthened are vastly different from those for which King Mwanga and his court will need divine grace, when once they begin to pray. Should not these differences, therefore, be recognized in the public prayers of the kingdom of Uganda and of the city of Boston? Then these crises that come to communities are not to be neglected because they are few and brief; for the spiritual histories of men at these times are often momentous, outweighing in their influence for eternity long years of ordinary living. Provision should be made for all such critical hours. But granting all this, and all other things that can be said in favor of freedom and personality in prayer, it must still be admitted that there are certain standing wants, old as humanity, which, as a rule, ought to be voiced whenever men come together to worship God. And what is the custom in our churches with regard to these universal wants? Do we not know that our prayers oftener reflect the subjective experiences of the minister than the objective needs of the individuals, the church, the community, the nation, the world, for which he is supposed to pray? In this regard I am inclined to think our (American non-liturgical) attitude somewhat unique. Foreign pastors, even when they do not use printed prayers, are careful to voice the multitudinous wants of society in its varying classes, the rich and the poor, the leisurely and the burdened, the virtuous and the vicious; to review the work of the church, and ask blessings upon all its departments of effort, spiritual, beneficent, and social; to take cognizance of the state, praying for kings and for all in authority; and, in general, |