to look out upon life as an objective reality, needing for its welfare certain gifts or blessings from the Most High, which blessings they proceed to invoke, never dreaming that their personal feelings fit or unfit them for making these requests. With us, on the other hand, how often is the public prayer a simple struggling heavenward of the minister's own soul, leaving in the background, if not all untouched, this wide range of positive human wants. This feature was strikingly impressed upon the writer in passing from a city in Switzerland, where he had sat for some weeks under the ministrations of good Pastor B., to Paris, where he attended service at the American Church. Pastor B. carried the objective in prayer to a marked extreme. Besides asking for all things requisite for the bodies as well as the souls of his congregation, and remembering all the governments represented among them, the missionary intelligence of the week was duly spread before the Lord, current events received appropriate notice, — certain members of the congregation got their entire information as to the whereabouts and welfare of General Gordon from week to week from these prayers, and if anything was forgotten by the minister, or left to the unbesought mercies of the Lord, it escaped the notice of the Americans. The Parisian preacher was a true representative of the higher order of American Congregational ministers, intellectual, spiritual, refined. His prayer lifted the souls of the worshipers to the portals of heaven. There were in it devout adoration, holy meditations, fervent aspirations, a positive if not pronounced confession of sins and prayer for forgiveness; but all moved upon the plane of the suppliant's own experiences. A lofty plane that was; no one could truly follow him without feeling the divine touch; but there was little or no attempt to present the objective wants even of the congregation, much less of the great world. If there was a petition for the presidents of the two great republics, even that seemed somehow to grow out of the preacher's own necessity of expression. Now reason seems to call for a happy medium between these two extremes of subjective and objective petition in public prayer. We rightly shrink from objective details, such as the calling of proper names before a congregation; we are averse to seeming to instruct the Almighty as to passing events; but there is a certain range of topics, apart from any individual experience, which one who ministers for the public ought, as a rule, to traverse at the leading Sunday service. We have not, and are not likely soon to have, a litany, with its multitudinous specifications; nor are we in a fair way to introduce the numerous special collects for which printed liturgies provide. For the present, at least, most of our petitions will continue to be offered up by the minister in his pastoral prayer. Yet, without infringing this custom, there may be helpful modifications. In the first place we might separate from the pastoral prayer all the elements which, in harmony with our general order, may be disposed elsewhere. One such element, of the first importance, is that of the confession of sin and prayer for forgiveness. To churches of evangelical beliefs, to whom sin is still a reality and forgiveness a necessity, there is absolute need of emphasizing this feature of our devotions. But, as it is now, instead of having a becoming prominence, it is often thrust into the background, and sometimes is forgotten altogether, amid the adorations and thanksgivings and aspirations and general supplications which this prayer must embody. Why not, then, put ourselves in harmony with all the earlier (non-Lutheran) reformers by giving to the Confession and Prayer for the Forgiveness of Sin a distinct and prominent place near the opening of the service? As we have seen, it was John Calvin whose keen logic showed him the fitness of this arrangement. From him the continental churches adopted it, and from them the English Church derived it. It is safe to say that no single change which we could make in our order of prayer would be more helpful to true devotion than this, or would tend more strongly toward the true conservatism which we all desire to cherish. Again, we could disjoin from the pastoral prayer all petitions for blessings upon the truth preached, by assigning these invariably to the prayer at the close of the sermon. We could also simplify this exercise by adding a brief liturgical prayer after the Scripture reading, in which prayer all the congregation should join. Being thus reduced to its true proportions as a prayer of general intercession, the "long prayer could be more readily followed and appreciated by the congregation. This might be much facilitated if successive stages, as of adoration, aspiration, thanksgiving, petitions for individual blessings, petitions for the community and state, and intercessions for the church, could be rounded into such periods - closing, possibly, with some set formulæ as would be recognized by all the worshipers. The changes thus suggested are apparently small, but let us see how they might be made to affect the devotional character of a whole service. Following is an order of morning worship similar to what obtains in many of our churches, with the sole exception of the detachment of the penitential and Scriptural prayers from the pastoral prayer : ORDER OF MORNING SERVICE. INTRODUCTORY. - Organ Voluntary. Doxology. Lord's Prayer. Anthem. PENITENTIAL. - Confession of Sin and Prayer for Forgiveness.1 Responsive Reading. Gloria. SCRIPTURAL. - Hymn. Scripture. Summary of the Commandments (Matt. xxii. 37-40), with the Kyrie Eleison,2 said or sung in response. INTERCESSORY. — Prayer of General Intercession. Organ Response. Hymn. Offering. HOMILETICAL. Benediction. Sermon. Prayer for Blessing upon the Truth. Hymn. The one supreme end of the service, we have said, is the worship of God. It will be observed that, following this aim, each one of these successive parts, conveniently designated introductory, penitential, scriptural, intercessory, and homiletical, has in it a prayer, as well as a song of praise. All unite in the Lord's 1 A form in use in a Congregational church in Massachusetts is the following: (Call to Confession, by Minister.) "The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good." "Enter not into judgment with thy servant, For in thy sight shall no man living be justified." "But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." LET US THEREFORE MAKE CONFESSION BEFORE GOD. (Confession and Prayer.) Almighty and most merciful Father: We have sinned and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But do thou O Lord have mercy upon us. Spare thou those O God who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promise declared unto mankind in Jesus Christ our Lord. And grant O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life; To the glory of thy holy name. AMEN. (Declaration of Remission, by Minister.) "And the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word. I am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins. . . . Return unto me for I have redeemed thee." 2 After each of the two commandments is sung ... "Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law." After "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets' "Glory be to thee, O Christ, in whose strength we renew our vows to keep these laws." Prayer. The confession may be offered by the minister alone, or, better, by the whole congregation. The responses, "Lord have mercy," ctc., sung by the choir and congregation after the two commandments, should be chanted as reverent prayers, thus giving to the Scriptural part a distinctively devotional element. The intercession ought, of course, to be devotional; while the sermon, if true to its mission, will lead on to a prayer, in which shall culminate the worshipful spirit of the hour. All will agree that if we are to make lasting progress in this direction it must be, not by revolutionary strides, but by making, from time to time, such moderate changes as shall be consonant with the genius of our order, and as shall commend themselves to the reason of our congregations. To this end, when changes are made, the reasons therefor must be clearly and convincingly set forth. When such reasons can be given, no people are more ready than those of our New England churches to make advances, even in matters of liturgy; but let them once feel that innovations are proposed from mere love of novelty, or in imitation of a system which sets up as the only correct form of divine worship, or because a minister has got some kind of an ecclesiastical bee under his broadcloth, and there is Puritan enough in them yet to resist every change. For the two modifications here proposed we justly claim: (1) That the use of a General Confession of Sin in the earlier part of our service which is but a return to the usage given by Calvin to the English and Reformed churches-is needed, both for its devotional value and for its conserving influence upon the doctrine of sin which underlies our evangelical system. (2) We believe that the fitness of using the two commandments immediately after the Scripture reading, to sum up the divine teachings, will be conceded by all. For the use of a prayer that these laws may be observed, we repeat the argument of this whole article, namely, that every part of a divine service should have interfused with it a prayerful element. For the use of this particular liturgical form of prayer, we urge both its inherent beauty and the fact that in its characteristic portion- it is one of those common inheritances of the church which, like the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed, has been hallowed by ages of pious use, and is thereby entitled to our recognition, as it is open to our appropriation. Geo. A. Jackson. SWAMPSCOTT, MASS. EMERSON IN NEW-ENGLAND THOUGHT.1 THE reading public has patiently waited for Mr. Cabot to fulfill the trust committed to him by the family of the Concord essayist, to give a patient, trustworthy, and adequate account of his life and career. Ample time has been taken, over five years, during which short or partial memoirs of Emerson have been abundant, for the execution of his task. The result justifies the confidence of the family, and will be keenly appreciated by thousands on both sides of the Atlantic, who have been waiting to verify Emerson's ethics by a better knowledge of the man. It is often the case that one who has constantly given his thought to the world as a writer leaves only gleanings for his biographer; but in this instance, while there is little variety in a career whose strong lines are already well known, a career in which internal portraiture takes the place of contact with external life, a career in which the centre of interest is in the hero as a man of thought who speaks chiefly through his daily journal,— the painting of the inward man, so that he is essentially his own biographer, is like giving a closer knowledge of one whom we knew already, and in whose thought our own lives have expanded into beauty and power. There is nothing to surprise the faithful student of Emerson in these pages; the impression is the constant confirming of convictions already formed; the complete man is here unfolded in the letters and journals which Mr. Cabot has edited with consummate discretion and good taste. There is not a line too much, nor hardly a line too little, in the entire work; the biographer is not thrust forward at the expense of his hero, nor are there any remarks which do not grow directly out of the plainest necessity. The biography is as judiciously written as if the eternal gods had held the pen and administered justice on every page; but with all this repression, there is nothing wanting to a full elucidation of Emerson's career or to a sufficient explanation of his secret. It is a biography of our most distinguished literary American, of which even Plutarch might have been proud to be the author. It everywhere tells what one wishes to know about Emerson, and it tells no more. It deals with him honestly, and, on the whole, with the conviction that the utmost skill of the historian of a notable man's life is the simplicity of the truth. It is a much needed piece of work, extremely well done. 1 A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. volumes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. By James Eliot Cabot. In two |