Every traveller is ready to testify how different the modes of worship are in the countries which he has visited. They vary, he says, with every degree of latitude. Within the same district he notices a persistency in certain practices and in the acknowledgment of the traditions which have given rise to them. Nevertheless the effects of Time may, he remarks, be traced almost as visibly as those of Locality. If through an invasion, or by any other fortunate accident, the habits of a more cultivated people are brought to bear upon an inferior one, the old customs acquire a more reasonable character; by-and-by, if the cultivation spread, and a particular class do not acquire the power of narrowing it to a certain point, a scepticism respecting old traditions becomes general. On the other hand, if a people be left to itself, without any of these influences, their minds become daily grosser, and the old superstitions lose all traces of the meaning and worth which they might have once possessed.
These remarks, which must be familiar to every modern reader, are undoubtedly derived from a true observation. Nor is their application at all limited to Pagan or Mahometan countries. I believe that where Christianity is found, the influence of locality and of periods is far more noticeable than elsewhere. There is a more strongly marked nationality in the different countries of modern Europe than in all the rest of the world at any moment of its existence; and that one century differs more from another in them than in the East, is a truism which it is almost foolish to utter. It is equally certain (as liberal writers so continually assure us) that the effect of this nationality and these changes in society upon religious opinion is most striking, and that there is no parallel to it in China or Hindostan.
But if it be so, is it not remarkable that certain forms of worship, actually of worship, have subsisted through all the revolutions to which Christendom has been subjected; have defied the restraints of national customs and languages; have stood their ground against all the varieties of opinion in reference to subjects human and Divine?
Is it not a strange thing, to take an example, that we in England in this nineteenth century should be using forms of prayer which were written by Greeks in the third and fourth centuries? nay, that the whole conception of our liturgy from beginning to end; the assignment of particular services to particular seasons of the year; the use of Psalms; the ascriptions; the acts of confession, thanksgiving, adoration, should have been taught us by nations from which, by taste, by feelings, by political institutions, by the progress of civilisation, by religious antipathies, we are divided? Think only of our northern character, our cloudy skies, our Teutonic independence, our vehement nationality, and then recollect that we are using, perhaps every day, certainly every week in the year, at the times which we believe to be most solemn, words which we owe to Hebrews and Greeks and Latins; and that in these words the simple folk of England, in spite of their narrow notions and local customs, are able to find solace and delight.
Now if the meaning of Baptism be that we are brought into God’s family, and that we become therefore capable, with one mind and one mouth, of glorifying His name; if the creed be teaching us, as children of that family, severally and unitedly to acknowledge that name, and how it is related to us; we must feel that acts of worship should be, of all acts, those which most belong to our position, and in which our fellowship is most entirely realised. And this feeling is surely one which must be wrought out in us the more we read the Bible and enter into the sense of it. That all division comes through idolatry; that all union comes through the adoration of the one living and true God; these are the two texts of the Bible, which, from the record of the dispersion at Babel, where men would build a tower whose top should reach to heaven, for the worship of natural things, down to the day of Pentecost, when the little band of Apostles in the temple were heard by the multitudes, each in their own tongue, magnifying God, it is illustrating and inculcating. If anything is to break down the barriers of space and time, it must be the worship of Him who is, and who was, and who is to come, whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, and whose dwelling is with the humble and contrite heart; if anything is to bring those at one whom these accidents of our mortality are separating, this must be the means. That men have turned worship to precisely the opposite use; that they have made it the slave of their circumstances, the badge of their divisions, the instrument of their hatred, I have confessed. The question is whether there be any witness in the world against this tendency; whether God has given us any sign that these separations are the effects of our choice, not of His will. I say that these forms of worship, preserved through so many generations, adapted to every locality, are such a sign; I say, that using these, I have a right to believe that the blessings of the day of Pentecost have been given once, and never withdrawn; that in the deepest and most practical sense there is a community which the distinction of tongues and the succession of ages cannot break.
Objections. The Quaker
Against this conclusion the Quaker protests vehemently. Forms of worship are not only no signs of the existence of a spiritual commonwealth; they are positively incompatible with it. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth. Prayer is given by the Spirit. By these prepared forms we make it the utterance of the will and the reason of man.
Nothing can be truer than the last assertion. We do make prayer the utterance of the will and reason of man. We consider it their highest and most perfect utterance; that in which, and in which alone, they fully realise themselves. What the human Will is we can understand from no terms and definitions of logic. They can only express one half of its meaning, for they can only describe it by its intrinsic properties; whereas its essential characteristic is, that it is ever going out of itself. They can only describe it at rest; whereas it only is while it acts. But in prayer we can know truly and safely what the will is; prayer expounds to us its inmost nature; prayer substantiates it, and proves that to be the greatest reality which seems in language to be the greatest contradiction. The will gives itself up that it may be itself. It dies that it may enjoy life. In acknowledging another will as the only will, it attains its own freedom; even as in trying to have a being of its own, it becomes a slave. ‘Father, not my will, but thine.’ Where do we behold the human will in such perfection, in such distinctness of life and power, as in these awful words? And it is the same with that organ which beholds as with that which determines, with that which is the seat of wisdom as with that which is the source of action. This only knows itself when it forgets itself; this only sees while the sense of sight is lost in the object of it. Accordingly the Reason also finds its deepest meaning and expression in worship.
But do we therefore deny that the Spirit of God is the author of prayer, or, in Barclay’s words, that all prayer is spurious which does not proceed from Him? No; but in affirming the one proposition we affirm the other. We believe that the Spirit of God is the awakener, the only awakener, of the spirit in man; that the will and reason not called forth by Him must remain for ever the torpid helpless victims of nature and sense. We believe that unless the Spirit of God give these powers their direction, they will only minister to that which they are meant to rule, only rivet the bondage which it is their privilege to break. We believe that whoever in past ages, either in heathen or Jewish lands, used them aright, was taught and enabled so to use them, and in proportion as he used them aright, confessed the inspiration. We believe that it is our privilege to exercise them as they could not be exercised by heathens, or even by Jews, because it is our privilege to know that there is a living Person actuating and governing them; and to know what manner of person He is, of whom He is the Spirit, from whom He proceeds, with whom He dwells. We believe that this knowledge is far more deep and awful than that which anyone possessed who merely felt that he was the subject of an inspiration; but that being deep and awful, it is incompatible with excitement, with any distortions of manner or of voice, with the notion that we are merely the unconscious animal utterers of certain sounds which are imparted to us, instead of the living, conscious, voluntary, rational agents of One who, when He promised the Spirit to His disciples, said: “Henceforth I call you not servants, but I have called you friends, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth; but whatsoever I have heard and learned of the Father, I have made known unto you.” We believe that we must attribute every act of our minds, every exercise of our affections, every energy of our will, to this Spirit; if the purpose to which we direct them be wrong, still the gift and power are His, that purpose only ours; if it be right, we shall own that of it also He is the author. We believe again that every operation in nature, the growth of every tree, the budding of every flower, should be referred to the influence of Him who first moved upon the face of the waters; but we do not call this a spiritual influence, because, though wrought by a spiritual Being, it is wrought upon unspiritual subjects, upon things, and not upon persons.
Such are some of the inferences which follow directly from the idea of Baptism as a new birth, and of the Creed as the proper act of the new-born creature. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit, and seeks its spiritual home and Father, refers all its acts and movements to His inspiration, and thereby attains its own proper distinctness and freedom. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and seeks the earth from which it came, acknowledging no influence and attraction but that. The contradiction of humanity is this—when the human spirit glorifies itself, and, as the necessary consequence and punishment of that sin, abdicates its own proper rights and throne, and sinks into the slave of the flesh, impregnating it with its own sin. The glory of humanity is this—when the human spirit renounces itself, and as its reward attains a knowledge of Him from whom it came, a victory over the flesh, and the power of communicating to it its own life.
The objection, then, which the Quaker makes to forms of prayer, that they proceed from man’s reason and will, and not from the Divine Spirit, is one which involves a denial of the very nature and possibility of prayer. And this denial has been of the most practical kind. He acknowledges prayer to be a necessary act, at once the sign of moral health and the instrument in producing it. Yet he dares not pray unless he have a sensible impulse urging him to the exercise. I will not dwell upon the Quaker use of the word “sensible,” though it seems to me very significant, indicating that those who most abhor all appeals to the senses in worship, who think that the sights and sounds with which God has filled the universe cannot be redeemed by the redeemed spirit to his service, do yet grossly confound impressions on the spirit with impressions on the sense. But the important point is that the idea of our life as a conflict, an idea continually present, one would suppose, to Fox’s mind, is thus set at naught. If the Quakers understood that the true will and real self was ever at war with the mere sensible impulse, they would surely have believed that the reluctance of the natural man towards an act which we know to be good, and feel to be necessary, is one of the best proofs that it is prompted and encouraged by the Divine Spirit. But the truth is, that the idea of a constant living personal presence has practically deserted those who seemed at one time to make this belief the whole of their religion; that the notion of an influence, an inspiration, visiting certain persons at certain seasons, which is common to Christianity with Paganism, is nearly all that they have preserved. Is it wonderful, then, that they should be unable to understand how the Spirit should have taught men in distant generations to express their deepest wants in the same words, or how through these words they should enjoy secret and awful communion with each other, and with the Most High? But, if so, what better proof do I want that these forms are one of the clear and indispensable signs of a spiritual and universal fellowship?
The Pure Protestant
The pure Protestants who have rejected the use of Liturgies sympathize but little in the Quaker’s objections to them. They have no disposition to deny the voluntary nature of prayer or of any religious act. Because it has this character, they say forms are an intolerable bondage. “Each man should be able to express his own wants in his own way. In his chamber each man does or should lay bare his own feelings and wishes before God. This is the proper rule and standard of prayer according to our Lord’s words, ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet.’ But since the minister, who is or should be chosen by the congregation, has a knowledge of the different circumstances of its members, and is looked up to by them as a person fit to preach the Gospel of Christ to them, it is very right that he should offer up prayers for himself and them, suggested by the feelings of the moment, probably a preparation for the sermon he is about to deliver, and therefore full of earnestness and unction. Forms of prayers are manifestly unsuitable for both these purposes; they cannot be adapted to changes of circumstances; they cannot be connected with the feelings either of the pastor or of the people; they are the impositions of another age, affronting to the understanding and painful to the conscience of those who use them.”
Prayer to God is assumed in this statement to be, according to the primary notion of it, individual. A particular man wants to obtain certain blessings; he therefore asks them of Him who he believes can bestow them. To many persons this proposition seems self-evident; whoever doubts it is an enemy of common sense. Nevertheless it is, I believe, at war with the experience of every religious man. He learns soon that passionate eagerness to get some good thing for himself—be it fine weather for the sake of his crops, or the salvation of his soul—is not a help to prayer, but the greatest possible hindrance to it. Explain the fact as you will, but a fact it is, confessed by persons of different sentiments in different forms of language, continually presenting itself afresh to those who visit dying beds. The selfish object which we seek floats before our minds—if it be an earthly object, palpably; if an invisible unknown object, in hazy images, having more in them of terror than of beauty—but the object, He to whom our prayer is addressed, is afar off; of Him there is scarcely the least discernment. He is regarded as a Being who can inflict evil and may choose to confer a blessing; or if, through the teachings of our childhood, we have some better knowledge, the consciousness of self-seeking perverts it, and we rise up feeling that the sacrifice is not accepted; “we are very wroth, and our countenance falls.” And how is it that this kind of prayer, so natural to every man, is changed for any other? “When thou enterest into thy closet,” these are the words of our Lord to which the pure Protestant appeals, say, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” O wonderful teaching! not how the selfishness of the closet may be carried into the temple, but how the breadth and universality of spirit which belong to the temple may be attained in the closet.
When thou art most alone thou must still, if thou wouldest pray, be in the midst of a family: thou must call upon a Father; thou must not dare to say my, but our. Dost thou desire to be very holy? Yet this must not be thy petition; thou must say, “Hallowed be thy name.” Dost thou wish for some assurance of a heaven for thyself? Yet this must be thy language: “Thy kingdom come.” Dost thou wish to get some favourite project accomplished? It must be sought in this manner: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Dost thou want a supply of thy necessities, bodily or spiritual? Then thou must desire the same for all thy brethren, as well as for thyself: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Dost thou want forgiveness for thy individual sins? The prayer is still. “Forgive us our trespasses,” and the gift is only received when it is circulated, “as we forgive them that trespass against us.” Do you feel that your fellow-creatures are your tempters? Yet you must acknowledge their temptations and yours to be the same; you must ask that they may not be led into the very temptations which they cause, else you will be their tempter as well as your own. And this because the evil from which you must pray to be delivered is a common evil, an evil which is the same in root and principle, though it may take innumerable forms; that very evil of selfishness, of individuality, which we are disposed to make our very prayers means of seeking, and which will encompass us and possess us, if we do not learn to join in the ascription: ‘Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.’”
I do not mean that many objectors to forms may not have preserved these truths, and with heart and soul entered into them; but I must maintain, that just so far as they have done so, the reason of their complaint ceases. If the individual prayer is not the highest and most essential prayer, but rather is no prayer at all, then the prayer of the congregation is not an aggregate of such individual prayers, but the prayer of a body, each member of which professes to have renounced his own selfish position, that he may come as one of a family to seek the Father of it.
In what sense, then, can extempore utterances be said to be most declaratory of our wants? Of what wants? Do the members of the congregation feel that they have sinned, and do they wish to confess their sins? Is this a local feeling, a feeling belonging to one set of circumstances, or to one period of time? Or is it a human feeling, belonging to men as men? “But each man has his own particular sin; his own burden, of which he himself is conscious.” Undoubtedly; and is not his sin and burden just this, that he has chosen a scheme of his own, that he has followed certain tastes and inclinations of his own, and so that he has forgotten his Father in heaven and his brethren on earth? Does not each particular sin spring from this root? And is it not this which interprets that sense of the individual character of sin, and the personal responsibility for it, upon which so much stress is—so rightly—laid? The load lies on the separate conscience of each man. It is the very nature and law of the conscience that it singles out each man, severs him from his fellow, makes him feel that the participation of the whole universe in his guilt does not make it less to him. But then the conscience reproves us for this very thing; for having chosen to be divided when we were meant to be one. And since it has reproved men for this sin ever since Adam’s fall, and since it has taught every Christian man that this was emphatically and most awfully his sin ever since Christ died that we might be all one, as He is with the Father; there seems no reason why the language of one generation, in confessing this sin, should not be the language of all. No reason why it should not be; the greatest blessing, if by any means it could be; since by this means the sense of sonship and brotherhood would be realised and revived in the very act of acknowledging disobedience and selfishness.
Or does some member of the congregation desire to give thanks for a blessing which has been vouch-safed to him particularly—must this be a local temporary feeling, because it is called forth by a local temporary occasion? Does it not cease to be a true feeling if it is? If from the particular blessing the heart do not gain enlargement, be not drawn out into a contemplation of other blessings; if it be not led to dwell most upon those which are common and permanent, as being the greatest, though perhaps only observed when they are taken away or when some startling novelty brings them into notice, the purpose of God in bestowing that good thing is surely not accomplished; the man has not really profited by it. But if he have, his feelings become human feelings; they do not want a specific, self-chosen mode of expression; he can find them in the Psalms of David; he can utter them in the language of Christian men who lived in other climes and periods. He can give thanks for creation, preservation, redemption; for gifts enabling him to enjoy this life and another, which are bestowed upon his race as well as himself; he can ask that they as well he may have, above all other good things, a thankful spirit; his own special mercies will then be understood and appreciated.
Or does a particular member of the congregation long for some means, not of declaring his own sins, or his own thankfulness, but of praising the name of God, of glorifying Him for His great glory? Is this a specific, local, temporary, individual emotion? Can it have a specific, local, temporary, individual expression? Is it too humiliating, too limiting to the largeness of a modern intellect, that it should use the words of other days, and say, “We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!” or, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end”?
Or, lastly, does the same particular member of the congregation feel his need of mercies spiritual and temporal, and desire to ask for them? We have seen by the Lord’s prayer how he ought to ask them, if he be alone in his chamber; how necessary it is that he should not look for them as meant for him, otherwise than as the child of a Father, as one of many brethren. Are they temporal, the blessings of food and raiment? Does he dare to seek for these with a desire to appropriate them exclusively? Then his prayer becomes a sin. Are they spiritual? Then the blessing itself is that of more intimate communion with his Father, a larger communion with the family. Is it necessary that he should limit these by the particular notions and phrases of his own time? Is it a great hardship and bondage to be obliged to use a more general, and therefore, one would fancy, a more becoming language?
If it be said, “Every prayer must be composed in some age, why do you suppose that those which have come down from another time must possess those qualities which you attribute to prayer more than those which are composed in our own?” I answer, I do not say that they must be better, or why they must be better, I have merely been contending with those who say, because they come down to us from another time, they cannot be fit for our use. I do believe, however, that the prayers written in the first ages of Christianity are in general more free, more reverent, more universal, than those which have been poured forth since. I do not think the opinion is a singular one; and I would rather its soundness were tried by the feelings and sympathies of religious men in different periods and circumstances, but especially of men in times of great suffering, than by any theories or arguments of mine. Still I do not find it harder to explain to myself why this should be so, than why there should be a fresher, truer feeling respecting nature and the outward transactions of men in Homer, than in the poetry of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. If there were that feeling respecting God, as the source of all things and the end of all things, which I attributed in the last section to the age of the Fathers, it cannot be strange, I think, that their devotional outpourings should have been simpler, purer, more human, than those of men who were occupied, and, as I conceive, were by the order of Providence meant to be occupied, in subtle questions respecting the operations of their own minds, or with inquiries into the law and course of nature. Whether the succession and order of devotional acts may not have much to do with the history and circumstances of man, as well as with the nature and plans of God; and whether, therefore, other ages may not have thrown a light upon this subject, which the first did not possess, I will not say. To those who deny all order in devotion, who think it little less than a sin that offices of confession should be laid down as preparatory to offices of thanksgiving, these again to offices of prayer, and these to the higher communion, it can seem no great derogation from the honour of the primitive times, if we should admit that the apprehension of this spiritual sequence may only in part have belonged to them. And if such persons still require a further reason why we think that the particular acts of praise and prayer were more congenial to older times than to modern, the considerations which have been occupying us under this head involve the reply. There has been a constant tendency for several centuries towards greater individuality of thought and feeling. There is a true ground for this tendency, though it may have led to the most false results. But it is in itself, when unsustained by another tendency, unfavourable to the worship of God, as well as to fellowship among men. A vehement reaction against this tendency has begun in all parts of Europe. One of the fruits of it will certainly be an aversion from all those utterances which modern Protestants have dignified with the name of devotion; if another consequence of it be not a return to the old forms and a delight in them, we must expect a reign of atheism.
The Philosopher
When the modern philosopher makes any objection to forms of worship, it is chiefly because they substantiate and perpetuate two mischievous superstitions. One is that a Being, who by His idea and law is unchangeable and perfect, can be swayed or led into better acts and purposes than His own by our petitions; the other is that it can please Him to receive the praises or commendations of His creatures. These complaints are usually put forth with most breadth and precision by disciples of the Utilitarian school. But it is evident that they are practically adopted, though with some varieties of expression, and in connexion with a different anthropological theory, by a large section of Rationalists.
Now in one phrase or another both these parties acknowledge, by every word which they speak, and every act which they do, either as philosophers or as ordinary men, that evil exists, and that it ought to be and may be by some means diminished. The Utilitarian traces it all to bad systems of government; the Rationalist refers it directly to man’s ignorance of himself and his own powers. Each looks forward to his own Avatar, and to a millennial period of the species which shall follow. Each then does acknowledge an Ideal, with which men should be in agreement, with which they are not in agreement, into agreement with which they may by some process be brought. Wherein, then, do we and they differ? Not in the acknowledgment of actual inconsistency and contradiction: this has nothing to do with either of us; we simply own what we cannot deny. But in this, that our Ideal is a living Being; that we believe Him to have given all things their right type and order; that we believe them when in their relation to Him to be still very good; that we believe their disturbance and incoherency to be the result of a voluntary renunciation of allegiance to Him, by the only creature which could commit such an act; that we believe all disturbance and incoherency to be contrary to His will; that we believe the restoration to begin in the submission of those who have brought about the confusion. The submission consists in the confession that His will is the good will; one of the main acts and exercises of it is that of entering into His will, and beseeching that it may be put forth for the removal of those curses whereof the evil will has been the cause. This is the rationale—in cold and miserable words—of those ancient litanies which express to this day the thoughts and longings of the most earnest people in different corners of the earth. They are not founded on the notion that any thing is mutable in God. They are cries for the vindication and preservation of His immutable order. They are confessions that every act of His providence, from the first hour of the world, has had for its end the making this immutable order manifest, and the bringing the universe into conformity with it. But they are not founded upon the lying fancy that the world is right; that persons are fulfilling their proper relations to each other: that things are not discomposed and made evil by the sin of those who are meant to direct them. Man, they assume, is God’s minister, acting for Him, able to perform His intentions towards His involuntary creatures; able, because he has a will, to set them at naught. His proper condition, in whatever place he were, would be that of dependence, of doing the will of another. His proper way of fulfilling that condition here, is by crying out for the rectification of that which is independent, which has lost its centre, which is struggling to stand by itself, and which therefore cannot stand at all; for the rectification of this, and therefore of whatever else has through this cause suffered decay and ruin.
But if it be said, “This supposes that a restoration has taken place already. These prayers are unmeaning, unless those who offer them believe themselves, on some pretext or other, to be in a better condition than those about whom they pray—” I answer, “Unquestionably; it is the very point which I have been pressing, that prayer does suppose a restoration; that the idea of prayer and the idea of a Church can never be separated, each implying the other; and that a Church which is not built upon the confession of a restored humanity is a contradiction in terms.” But, observe, a restored humanity; and therefore those who offer their prayers do not put forth any claim of superiority to their race, nay, not to the worst member of their race. The very essence of their prayers is this—a cry that those sins which they feel in themselves, under which they are groaning, which they have committed, may not be, as they have been, their masters, and the masters of the universe. They who pray do not feel this less than other men, but more; they do not reject evils from themselves to cast them upon their neighbours, more than other men do; on the contrary, they identify their neighbours’ sins with their own; they feel that they have them, and are responsible for them. Only as members of a redeemed race and family can they vindicate the privilege, which has been asserted for them, of being new creatures, of casting off the slough of their selfish natures, of disclaiming that misery which by their rebellion they have made their own, of entering into that blessedness which their Master by His obedience has obtained for all who will have their portion in Him. So that the Philosopher says well and truly, that this superstition of prayer, if it be one, has been maintained by forms, and without forms would be likely to die out. Not as if the sense and necessity of prayer could ever die out in man, but because the only condition under which it can be a true and reasonable service, that of its being presented by men, as members of a body or family, which continues the same from generation to generation, and which converts the notion of a human race from a dream into a reality, is in these forms embodied, and wheresoever they are neglected is nearly lost.
I have still to speak on the subject of praise, which seems to the Philosopher a thing so unworthy of men to offer or of God to receive. The ground of this conclusion is that the words praise and flattery are convertible: and that since flattery is offensive to an imperfect being, so far as he has right feelings, and is only so far tolerable as he is weak and vain, it must to a perfect Being, if He took cognizance of such folly, be altogether odious. Now I join issue with them upon all these points. Suppose praise to be offered to a fellow-man which he does not deserve, it is abominable because it is false; suppose that, being deserved, it is offered to him with the view of bribing him to bestow future favours, it is offensive, because it is mean: suppose him to deserve it, and that it is offered with no unworthy motive, it may be wrong, because it is imprudent; for men, through their imperfections, are made vain, by hearing themselves even rightly commended. But if we could suppose these circumstances absent, I confidently affirm, that there is not any occupation so elevating and delightful to a man, as that of praising and thanking his brethren. Generous men, in all ages and nations, have felt it so; when the motives of self-interest have been farthest from them, even respect for the object of their admiration, and fear of doing him hurt, have not availed to restrain them from expressing their sense of the favours which he has bestowed on them, or their delight in the beauty and harmony of his character. With ignoble aim, these outpourings of the heart have often been directed to kings and great men; because the thankful and humble heart has felt their acts as a condescension, and has perceived a kind of special propriety and suitableness in their virtues. But they have been directed also to suffering friends, and poor scholars, and persecuted saints, and especially to the dead, from whom nothing could ever be expected, and to whom they could not be dangerous. Wherefore the true and obvious analogy from human experience is,—that if God have none of the imperfection which could make Him obnoxious to the mischievousness of praise; and if there have proceeded from Him all the benefits which all His creatures have received; and if there be in Him all the goodness and truth, of which the goodness and truth in man are the reflection,—there can be no act so entirely suitable to man, so thoroughly joyful, as that of thanking and blessing Him. In which act if anyone discovers a low and cringing desire to win some good from the Being thus magnified, let him know that whoever enters upon the work in this spirit, and with this object, will be soon so struck with its utter ridiculousness and incongruity, or else so wearied with the heartless and hypocritical effort, that no pains he can use will enable him to persevere in it; or, at any rate, to persuade himself that he is doing more than repeating a set of incoherent, unintelligible sounds. In the loss of self, in the escape from self, consists the freedom and enjoyment of that act. The worshipper has found that object to which the eyes of himself and of all creatures were meant to be directed, in beholding which they attain the perfection of their being, while they lose all the feeling of selfish appropriation which is incompatible with perfection. They gaze upon Him who is the all-embracing Love, with whom no selfishness can dwell, the all-clear and distinguishing Truth, from which darkness and falsehood flee away; and they are changed into the same image, and their praises are only the responses to the joy with which He looks upon His redeemed creation and declares it very good.
Let this service seem foolish to whom it will, we know not only that it must be acceptable to God, because He is a spirit, and because He is truth, and because He seeketh them to worship who will worship Him in spirit and truth, but we know also that it meets all the deepest wants which men, in the student’s garret, in the palace and the hut, have been all, by different methods, trying to express.
The man of earnest meditation, hating the world’s turmoil, angry at its meanness, yet amidst many thoughts of pride and discontent retaining a desire for its good, learns that to seek truth is the proper end of his life,—to find it, his only felicity; and he strives, and toils, and suffers, and if perchance the vision of some principle of living power dawns upon him, he shouts εὕρηκα through the universe. His joy is true joy; yet when he thinks of the thousands of living creatures, men like himself, to whom his discovery will do no good, who must groan and die still, his labour seems all vanity, his truth a dream, and he curses himself for having dared to dwell so apart from human sympathies. The gentle and generous man, nursed amid kindly and family influences, his imagination early trained to converse with lovely objects, his heart and conscience not seared, sees a beauty living and moving through all things, and pursues it with an insatiable passion. He cannot doubt the reality of his faith, though men call it a delusion; that which has so possessed his being and exalted it, cannot be a lie. But what mean pain, and confusion, and death? Are they merely shadows to make the light shine brighter? —No! they master it, they obscure it. He becomes saddened; the glory has fled from the earth, and he sees not how it can ever return again. Thus in their solitary hours have men, according to their different tendencies and education, been haunted by the vision of a truth for which it were worth while to die, and of a loveliness which must be the sole charm of life; and the one has seemed to dwell only in cold words and propositions, and the other to be ever changing its shapes, and vanishing at last altogether.
Meantime the business of the world has not been intermitted; kings have been reigning and dynasties changing; and men have felt that unless there were some awful Law which those kings acknowledged, and which lasts amidst all those changes of dynasty, society was a mere dream and impossibility. Philosophers have felt that such a Law must be; politicians that they must create the impression of it. But what is this Law? There are times when you cannot put aside this question—when it is asked, and must be answered; for men rise up and say, that it is but a cobweb imagination which has been cut through by swords in former days, and which they with their brushes can now sweep away entirely. Where is its birthplace and its home, the warrant of its authority, the guardian of its permanence?
Yet supposing this question too were answered, there is a universe of distinct living beings groaning for a daily subsistence. What shall we say of these? “Try and make them philosophers,” cries one; “teach them to understand the truth of things; teach them to see the fair proportions of things.” Well! this is plausible—let us begin. “But no,” says another, who seems to be wise, “this will never avail. What will your people care about the sun and stars? They are men; they feel that other men have ruled them, and not for their benefit; they want to be rulers themselves. Give them some share in the State: then it will be time to think of making them natural philosophers.” We are convinced by the wisdom of these remarks: we see that men cannot be satisfied with merely contemplating things at a distance; they must feel that they belong to a system; they must feel that it does not move without them. And though we do not like to give up the hope of seeing our brethren better acquainted even with the wonders of the world about them, we acknowledge that the world in which they are actually to live and move must be one of human feelings and hopes. But when we ask you where and how you are making the experiment for raising the poor man to a feeling of his position, for giving him citizenship and political power, we are bound to confess that we can see nothing but a scheme to rob the poor man of that which he has already, to take from him all sense of dignity and freedom and equality, and reduce him into a condition of hopeless slavery.
Now supposing it were possible that truth and goodness are not abstractions, are not formulas, but are realities; and, as the traces of them have been seen in the acts of persons, so that they dwell absolutely in a Person; supposing it were true that this Being is the King of kings and Lord of lords, from whom all law derives its life and potency; supposing this Being has established for Himself a witness in the heart of the poorest man in this world, and has decreed that there should be desires in that heart which anything short of His own infinite perfection shall not satisfy; and has called this poor man to be a citizen of His kingdom, yea, a member incorporate thereof, and has said that he, as much as the richest man, is concerned in the order and organisation of this kingdom, and may urge on the wheels in the midst of which the spirit of the living creature is moving: would it not then be true that the cravings of the philosopher, the necessities of the statesman, the hopes of the wayfarer, have all their highest interpretation in this worship which is said to be the idlest of all ceremonies? Are not the recorded deeds and desires of the world utterly unintelligible without it? If this ceremony were abolished, if the idea of a perfect Being united to man, inspiring him with prayer, and hearing his prayers, were lost out of the universe, would not the imperfect hope of the philosopher die too? would not the belief in Law become impossible? would not each man sink further and further into solitude and brutality, finding none able to raise him, none who was not assisting to deepen his degradation?
The Romish System
But still these old Liturgies are in some sense Popish. The prayers in them have reached any modern nations which may have adopted them through Popish hands; they have received a Popish imprimatur. Nay, portions of them may be actually the composition of Bishops of Rome, or of persons who acknowledge their supremacy. What can be said to rebut this charge? Can it be pretended that there is an exact chronological line, at which what we please to call Catholicism ends and what we call Popery begins? Would we reject a prayer of Bernard’s as passing the limit? If not, may there not by possibility be one by A Kempis or even by Pascal, which we would not utterly disown?
To these questions I answer precisely as I did in the former case; I want no chronological lines. I am quite ready to use a prayer of A Kempis or of Pascal or of many a person less commonly tolerated among us. Why I conceive the older prayers are in general likely to be better than those which have been composed in any part of Europe for several centuries I have explained; but that explanation has no direct connexion with the question before us. If there be no clearer and more palpable distinction between the forms of the Catholic Church and those to which the Romish system has given birth, than that which is arrived at by special pleadings about the date of the birth or the degree of the soundness of particular men, I at least would rather leave the question unresolved.
But if the main and characteristic glory of the Church be precisely this, that it is brought into the Holiest of the Holies, not into the figure of the true, but into the presence of God Himself; if this be the grand point of separation between older forms and the cold efforts of modern devotions, that with holy fear and confidence they claim this privilege; if ascriptions to the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are continually on the lips, always in the hearts, of those who wrote them, giving at once the essence and the body to their supplications; if each individual member of the Church be in these forms supposed to join with the whole of it in every act of confession, of petition, or of thanksgiving; if this union of each with all be involved in the fact that these prayers are offered up for the merits and mediation of the one Lord of the whole body; if it is on the ground of these merits and this mediation that the poorest member of the flock may join with saints and angels about the throne because the virtue and life of both are in Him; if to these same causes is owing the freedom of the older prayers from those fetters of time and locality which mankind in the person of its King has shaken off; if therefore in these qualities consists their Catholicity, we have another, a more righteous and a more safe measure, for determining the value of the system which takes to itself the Catholic name. For that this system does in its mildest form embody the doctrine that men who are members of Christ’s Church and body cannot enter into the Holiest of the Holies, cannot present themselves before God, cannot ascend up where Christ has gone before them, unless they approach through intervening mediators; that this notion is practically and constantly embodied in those forms which would be recognized by all as truly and properly Romish; that the mediators are not merely ideals of human excellence and beauty, but also the helpers and heroes of particular towns, professions, individuals; thus much will not be denied even by those who are most eager to disclaim the charge of positive idolatry. Now, more than this I do not want. I do not care to dwell upon those practical results which seem to me to have followed quite inevitably, and by a far stronger necessity than a mere logical one, though by that also, from these premises;
I do not care to establish the fact, which seems to me written with sunbeams on the history of Europe, that a continually downward progress from Divine worship to hero-worship, from hero-worship to natural, must be the consequence, when that first fatal step is taken of doubting or denying that the communion between God and His creatures is really established in the incarnate Son, that the union of men with their Lord has been completed and cemented in Him. I simply take my stand upon this ground. I say, “By these acts you Romanists have set aside so far as in you lies, the very meaning and end of the Church’s existence; have destroyed the very principle of its union and fellowship; you have reduced it into a set of incoherent fragments held together by no Divine law, and therefore needing some wretched human law to give it consistency.” I repeat it, as far as in you lay, for you have not done the work. A mightier power has been traversing your schemes and preparing the way for their ultimate confusion and discomfiture. Not without you but within you has there been a seed of life with which these seeds of corruption and death have been seeking to amalgamate, because they could not destroy it. These old, holy, reverent forms have been mocking your inventions as no vulgar Protestant scoffer was ever able to mock them, mocking them by witnessing that the blessings which those inventions offered were not too great for men to dream of, but too poor and pitiful for them not to trample under their feet when once they know out of what curse they have been delivered and to what height they have been raised.
These forms witness to us of holy men whom we are to remember, and with whose special graces we may sympathize, just because we are united like them to Him of whose fulness all have received, and grace for grace. Let them be multiplied if you will, let each age contribute its quota to the goodly company, let all the blessings which through them Christ has bestowed upon His flock or upon any the least portion of it (for blessings to a part are blessings to the whole) be thankfully commemorated. The forms bear no protest against such recollections; rather teach how it is possible rightly to entertain them. But the moment any one of these holy men is so regarded, that his translation out of this world shall not be a sign to the poorest man who stays in it of his own fellowship with an unseen Lord, but shall rather be a restraint upon his spirit, a fleshly impediment to communion, an earthly dream to obscure the vision of a heavenly reality, that moment the principle of these forms is assaulted, and any new language which may be introduced into them sanctioning such an inversion or denial of the doctrine of the communion of saints stands out in the most broad and palpable contradiction to the living words in which they have embodied it.
These forms invite us on certain days to remember our Lord’s acts, condescension, humiliation, triumph. They teach us that if we forget the days, we shall be in danger of forgetting that of which they speak, and therefore of sinking back into that dark, idolatrous, divided state, out of which by Christ’s work we have been brought. For there is not and cannot be any return to the state of Jewish outlooking and hope; denying the fulfilment, we lose also the expectation; we lose everything but a confused dream of a possible blessing. But if through any degrading sensualization of this testimony men shall come to fancy that the Church is not really redeemed, justified, and glorified in Christ, but that by the keeping of these days, or by any observances whereby they preserve their own fellowship with the Church, these yet unobtained blessings are to be purchased, then the forms which commemorate these days, as the great signs and trophies of Christ’s accomplished work, do far more by anticipation to refute such a shameful and ignominious delusion, than all the words which can be devised after it has become prevalent. These forms authorise certain days and seasons, during which the members of Christ’s body may enter into His humiliation, and chasten themselves with His stripes, that so they may keep down the evil inclinations which separate them from their brethren, may sympathize in the sorrows of mankind, may realise the blessings which are given to the whole Church. But, if any selfish and lying spirit should go forth proclaiming that by these fasts and penances for subduing the flesh that blessing is to be obtained which is given without money and price, that by them the individual man who performs them is put into a higher individual condition, and has a right to claim something for himself on that score which as an ordinary Churchman is not his, then these forms of humiliation do pour such contempt upon that godless and uncatholic pride, as no one who thinks all restraints upon self-indulgence vain and childish has ever been able to express.
I might go on through a number of other cases, but these will suffice as hints. They prove, I think, that there lies hid in these ancient forms of worship, something of that power which I attributed to Baptism and the Creed; a power before which all human systems, and therefore the Romish, the most complete of them all, must at last shrink and quail.