Part Three · Sources and Rationale of the Offices

Chapter VII

THE LITANY, AND
OTHER SUPPLICATIONS

§ 1

The Origin of the Litany Form

All public prayer is a coöperative act between the appointed minister who voices aloud the Church's supplication on behalf of all, and the attendant congregation who make those supplications their own. There is a real problem of “leading in prayer,” so as to secure and maintain the participation of the people, that with heart and mind they may follow in the path wherein the minister directs their steps. The two methods most effective for this end have been, first, to offer some kind of “Bidding,” proposing the particular “intention” or subject of the petition; and second, to encourage some sort of response from the hearers.

The simplest form consists of a prayer or chain of prayers, each voicing a single petition, each preceded by a “Bidding” which serves as its announced title, each followed by the assent, “So be it,” by the people. This method is native to the Egyptian, Roman, and “Gallican” rites. It is admirably illustrated by the Orationes Solemnes of the Roman Good Friday Intercessions. It has left its vestige in the habitual “Let us pray” before Collects.

A more elaborate form arose in Syria, probably in the first part of the fourth century.1 Instead of the simple parallelism of Biddings and Collects, it offers an essentially periodic structure, the Deacon proclaiming the entire series of suffrages of a General Intercession, the whole being summed up at its conclusion by a compendious Collect by the Bishop.

Perhaps in the beginning this Syrian order was like the “Gallican” form known as the Bidding Prayer, such as that on p. 47 of the present Prayer Book, where the proclamations addressed to the people are not interrupted by any response. But such responses naturally arise from the fervor of enthusiastic worshippers, and are spontaneously interjected into the course of a long supplication. The Byzantine rite to this day has such ejaculations, “To thee, O Lord!” “Grant it, Lord!” as well as those more familiar to us, “Lord, have mercy!” and the primordial “Amen,” in a manner identical with those heard in a modern revival-service.

It seems that the early development of responsorial psalmody at Antioch furnished a pattern whereby this voluntary participation might be adopted and regularized, reduced to a definite ritual order and rhythm, by directing the response, Lord, have mercy, after each suffrage announced by the Deacon, like the recurring answer, “For his mercy endureth for ever” in Psalm 136. This transformed a mere Bidding Prayer to a Litany.

§ 2

Western Litanies

From Syria, the device of liturgical litanies spread to other rites where it was not native—the Ethiopic, Gallican, Ambrosian, Mozarabic, Celtic, and Roman.

In France the litany-form must have been in common use for some time before Mamertus in 468 instituted the Rogation Days for its solemn performance.

At Rome, a litany was employed at the exordium of the eucharistic liturgy in the century preceding Gregory the Great. In 529 the Council of Vaison attested the litany-response of Kyrie Eleison as being already in use in Italy. And Gregory (590–604), speaking of the Kyries, said that they were employed in the ferial services (in missis quotidianis) to the exclusion of some other form which, he implied, included them, which would otherwise be found at this point.2 This other matter can hardly have been anything but a Litany. We know that at this time the festal use was to sing a litany in solemn procession to the church where the papal mass was held on the days of the “Stations”;3 and a litany prefatory to the Eucharist has continued to be used on the Vigils of Easter and Whitsunday, at ordinations,4 and at the dedication of churches.

The early Roman litany was probably very much of the form of that still sung at Milan5 on the first Sunday in Lent, and the closely parallel form entitled Deprecatio S. Martini pro populo in the Stowe Missal.6 This primitive Gallico-Roman form represents a slightly confused arrangement but a literal translation of an unmistakably Antiochene original. The Celtic version is as follows:

This Litany does not have the structure of that known later in the West, consisting as it does of nothing but Intercessions. Both the Celtic and Ambrosian forms are uncertain as to order, both displacing—differently—the petition for Rulers from its original Syrian location, as we shall see later in §6. The Ambrosian version lacks the last section of the Celtic petitions; but embodies the following primitive Syrian suffrages:

It also concludes with Kyrie eleison; Kyrie eleison; Kyrie eleison.

At the end of the seventh century some such form as these was supplanted at Rome by a rudimentary version of the present Litany of the Saints.7 But this also was of Syrian provenance. Sergius I, to whose pontificate (687–701) it is attributed, was a Greek-speaking pope from the region of Antioch. He is known to have advocated two cults at Rome, that of the Cross, and that of Christ as the Lamb of God.8 Now both of these originated at Jerusalem, and left their mark on the local rite of that center, the “Liturgy of St. James,” which was subsequently adopted at Antioch. The Sergian Litany accordingly offered the innovations of a special deprecation, “By thy Cross, Deliver us, O Lord,”—the only “obsecration” in this form, and the germ of those we now have—and the inclusion of the Agnus Dei, as in the Liturgy.

A collation of the earliest sources, as quoted by Alcuin and the Stowe Missal, yields the following common matter, which is offered as representing the primordial form of the Litany of the Saints:

This germinal form shows the Western litany-form quite complete in character and structure, but consisting of only the barest possible outline. Subsequently that outline was filled in with rich detail, for the most part drawn from the Syrian sources that gave it birth, both directly, and through the “Gallican” litanies that were current in the West before it appeared. As an essentially popular and extra-liturgical devotion, its growth was unregulated by any central authority, but everywhere developed local texts, displaying an immense variation in detail, yet preserving a rather remarkable fidelity to the structural principles displayed in the earliest forms, and a retention of some most primitive phrases. Conservative Rome, beginning with the austere simplicity of the Sergian scheme, lagged far behind Northern Europe in the fertility of this development, so that the present Roman Litany seems bald and meager beside other medieval exemplars.

The Syrian origins of the Sergian Litany clear up many problems of the constitution of the surviving Western type. They show that the invocations of the Saints were not a mere medieval corruption, but an accustomed feature of the conclusion of Syrian litanies. One MS of “St. James”9 enumerates the Blessed Virgin, the Archangels, St. John Baptist, Apostles, Prophets, and Martyrs, St. Stephen, and All Saints—obviously the framework that gave rise to the present Roman categories.

Likewise the outstanding theological peculiarity of the Western litany is that its body, between the present initial invocation of the Holy Trinity and the final Kyries, is distinctively a Prayer to Christ. This also is true of the Syrian sources, which typically conclude with some form of the bidding, “Let us commend ourselves and one another and all our life to Christ our God.”10

Even the Deprecations, sometimes considered a Western peculiarity, echo the Syrian “For the forgiveness of our sins and remission of our transgressions, and for our deliverance from all affliction, wrath, danger, necessity, and uprising of enemies,”11 with a later mention of “bitter death.”12

The concluding triple Kyries are likewise Syrian.13 And of course, like all Syrian litanies, the Western form invariably leads toward and concludes in some sort of summary Collect.

§ 3

Cranmer's English Litany

The Litany had been found in English in the Primers since about the year 1400. Cranmer put forth an official version in 1544: so that the Litany was the first constituent of the English Prayer Book to appear—as it was also the only one to remain in continuous use through the Marian reaction, which interdicted the rest of the Prayer Book.

The relative bareness of the official Roman form was amply filled up by the fact that Cranmer's Litany was an unusual assimilation of rich material from many sources. These were chiefly the Sarum processional litany, the special form for the dying, the particular supplications inserted in time of war, and some details from the uses of York and Westminster; Luther's Latin Litany of 1529, itself a most admirable composition gathering up many valuable features current in northern Europe; the Roman, whether through Luther or Quiñones;14 and the Byzantine liturgical litanies.15

Besides details, the Greek forms had an important influence upon the style of the Litany. The Latin form proposed each suffrage singly, and extremely briefly—eight of them consisted of only three words, two of two, and one of one! Logically, this taking of one thought at a time, like the beads of a rosary, has its merits; but the rhetorical effect is very fragmentary, and resembles a skiff tossed on a choppy sea. Cranmer, with his sensitive ear echoing with the fuller music of the ampler Greek rhetoric, expanded the jejune terms of the Latin, and combined sometimes as many as five cognate petitions into a single suffrage, with a magnificent vocal result, like the onward roll of ocean-surges.

§ 4

Revisions of the Litany

The great number of Invocations of the Saints in later medieval times, which had been reduced to three summary groups in 1544, were eliminated altogether in 1549. In 1559 the uncharitable Deprecation against “the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities” was removed; and the Litany concluded with “The Grace.” In 1662 the original Lutheran phrase, for “Bishops, pastors, and ministers of the Church,” was made definite as “Bishops, Priests, and Deacons,” as against recent Presbyterian usurpations; and to the Deprecation beginning “From all sedition” was added “rebellion” and “schism,” in feeling remembrance of all that the Church and realm had lately suffered from both.

The first American book in 1789 emended a few phrases; substituted a suffrage for Christian Rulers and Magistrates for those for King and Royal Family; and gave permission to abbreviate the Litany by omitting the old war-time supplications: but in unfortunate ignorance of the historical structure of the service, made the cut come before the Kyries, which robbed the shortened Litany of its proper conclusion and Lord's Prayer. The revision of 1892 contributed the single new suffrage, “That it may please thee to send forth labourers into thy harvest,” from Hermann's Litany and the Primer of 1535.

The 1928 book brought the Invocations of the Holy Trinity nearer their Latin originals, dividing them between minister and people instead of repeating them entire, and eliminating the appended “miserable sinners.” It added “from earthquake, fire, and flood” to the Deprecation beginning “From lightning and tempest”; and the words “or by air” to the suffrage for those who travel by land or by water. A new Petition for the President was set before that for Rulers generally. The missing Amen was supplied after the prayer “O God, merciful Father”;16 and the misunderstood and misapplied structure of the following Psalm-verse with repeated Antiphon was clarified by rubrics directing the manner of its recitation.

The text of the Litany now comes to an end with the prayer “We humbly beseech thee,” as had been the usage in the Ordinal since 1662—omitting the Prayer of St. Chrysostom appended in 1549, the Grace of 1559, and the General Thanksgiving of 1789.

The break for shortening the service by omitting the war-time supplications has now been put after the Lord's Prayer. This is excellent for the use of the Litany as a separate service, and the English revision of 1928 does the same. The English book however takes a further step toward clearing up the historic structure by terminating the Litany with the Kyries when the Holy Communion is to follow. The triple Kyrie Eleison in fact marks the conclusion of the litany-form as such: whatever comes next is of the nature and purpose of the Litany-Collect. The Lord's Prayer may indeed be used in that capacity, and in fact no more universal a supplication could be devised. But though it had this place in the independent use of the Litany, it does not belong to the liturgical connection of this office, where the proper summary prayer toward which it is directed is none other than the Collect of the day.

Fully to restore the ancient and organic articulation of the Litany used as prefatory to the Eucharist would therefore involve going one step beyond the recent English book, and providing for the omission of the introductory parts of the Communion before the Collect when the Litany precedes. This was advocated by Dr. Frere twenty-five years ago;17 nor is it mere theory, since exactly this arrangement was in use at the Ordering of Deacons from 1550 to 1662, and since to this day the Latin order preserves substantially18 the primitive structure of the use of liturgical litanies, by directing, on the occasions noted above when the Litany is used as a part of the mass, that the final Kyries of the Litany shall be solemnly sung by the choir, coinciding with the Kyries of the mass; during which the celebrant goes to the altar, and simultaneously completes the Litany and commences the Eucharist with the Collect of the day.

§ 5

Structure and Character of the Litany

The structural divisions of the Litany have now been made clear in our book by paragraphing and capitals. The Invocations of the Holy Trinity are a theological paraphrase of the Western form of Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison, with which the Litany formerly began and ended. “Remember not” comprises the old penitential Antiphons; though its latter portion is much more ancient, being embodied, as we have seen, in Alcuin's version of the Sergian archetype. The Deprecations are supplications for deliverance from dangers and afflictions; and include two groups of Obsecrations, i.e., adjurations to Christ to spare his people by invocation of the mighty acts of his Redemption. The long section of Intercessions forms the main body of the office, and represents the essential contents of the Greek sources. It concludes with invocation of Christ as Son of God and Lamb of God, and the final solemn Kyries. At this point the original liturgical Litany proceeded at once to the Collect of the day; the independent form interpolated the Lord's Prayer and other prayers and suffrages before the concluding Collects. In the Anglican books, this interpolation contains the solemn supplications in time of war.19 These last may well be omitted when the Litany is used before the Communion, and in normal times; but they voice a moving heartfelt cry of the faith of Christ's Church out of great tribulation, and are of deep significance at penitential seasons and occasions.

The extraordinary power and appeal of the Litany as a form of words is not approached by any other service. It is a pure flight of the spirit, unaccompanied by any ceremonial or dramatic action. The tenor of its supplication is unique to the Christian religion. Ancient faiths cried for mercy to gods whom they feared: they had no solution of the problem of suffering but avoidance, by the propitiation of dread divinities who inflicted or withheld it by their own caprice. Their despairing petitions contained none of the trust in the prevailing goodness of God's providence which inspires the Litany. On the other hand, popular modern cults attempt to evade and ignore suffering; but they must needs shrink to silence in the presence of irremediable disaster. Christianity alone accepts the fact of suffering as enshrined in the heart of God himself, lifts it up in sacrifice to him, and nails it to the Cross of Christ. The Christian religion alone has power not only to scale the heights, but to descend into the depths; alone among religions, it dares to pray: “In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our prosperity; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment, Good Lord, deliver us!”

§ 6

Primitive Notes

Some of the incomparable force of the Litany is due to its reflection of the great distress of nations in the Dark Ages which gave birth to the modern world; more, perhaps, to the direct unaltered tradition that has brought us the very words of the cry of the persecuted Primitive Church.

One of these mint-marks of primitive expression is the interpolation of suffrages for Rulers between that for the Universal Church and those for the Clergy and People. This is not a later “Erastianism,” nor a mere following of the scriptural pattern of 1 Tim. 2:1, 2. Later liturgies indeed commemorated “our most religious and Christ-loving,”20 “divinely-preserved, orthodox”21 Kings; but the earliest age prayed for Rulers of the pagan State, not as grateful supporters and nursing-fathers of the Church, but as potentially its chiefest enemies and the most deadly dangers to its very existence. The petition for Kings was therefore a vital part of the supplication for the peace of the Church. “That they may be peaceably disposed toward us” is the keynote of this suffrage in the earliest available form in the Apostolic Constitutions,22 and appears in effect in the Alexandrian rite,23 in Justin Martyr,24 in the letter of St. Clement of Rome,25 and is implicit in 1 Tim. 2:2 and elsewhere in the New Testament.

Another primitive note is the petition for Prisoners and Captives. The Apostolic Constitutions makes it clear that this was originally a prayer for those in bonds “for the Name of the Lord.”26 The Middle Ages kept it alive because of the perils of travel and commerce from pirates, highwaymen, and slavers; and to this day it is sometimes thrown into poignant relief by the activities of bands devoted to criminal violence. It is a strange and dramatic fact that the same suffrage in our Litany includes the earliest as well as the latest thing in the history of the Christian Church, and carries our minds back through the entire perspective from the days of air-transport to the days of the Persecutions!

Our tender and touching petition for “fatherless children, and widows,” is historically a vestige of a primitive list of All Estates within the Church, wherein Widows and Orphans were included together with Bishops, Presbyters, Deacons, Subdeacons, Readers, Singers and Virgins,27 as persons enjoying an organic official standing in the Christian community, and as entitled to its support.

§ 7

Homologues of the Litany

Such primordial features help to give the Litany the incisive, vivid, concrete character which distinguish it from the six other forms of Intercessory Prayer in the Prayer Book.

The Prayer for the Church in the Communion Office, originally identical with the matter of the Litany, is an old coin that has passed through many hands, and been abraded by the attrition of the ages, till it has been worn smooth and dim, while the Litany still shines sharp from the die.

The Bidding Prayer is another doublet, which at times may profitably be substituted for the Litany, as covering the same cycle of thought, but without any penitential color, and indeed with some positive “eucharistic” notes. It has the incidental advantage that it may be heard sitting instead of kneeling, and the disadvantage that it enlists no coöperation until the final Lord's Prayer. As it stands, it is a little copious and rhetorical; but it is offered as a model and a framework for free individual lines of supplication, with an unlimited opportunity for pastoral intercession, and creative liturgical experiment.

The sequence of prayers after the Third Collect of Morning and Evening Prayer is also moulded upon the structure of the Litany, with successive petitions for Rulers, Clergy and congregations, and All Conditions, especially the afflicted. These prayers indeed were arranged, and in part composed, to cover the ground of the Litany when that office is not said, and are omitted when it is to follow.

Likewise it is not accident that the Suffrages after the Creed at Evening Prayer constitute a brief but perfect Litany in themselves, with petitions embracing a paraphrased Kyrie Eleison, the State, the Clergy, the People, the Peace of the Church, and the sanctification of all. These Suffrages are the survivals of a much longer series, whose structure was clearly devised to fill the office of a litany-intercession.28

Family Evening Prayer also has an Intercession, copied after those in the Communion and the daily offices. And “A General Intercession” in the supplement to Family Prayer offers an interesting version, wherein the supplications for the ancient categories of the Faithful are adapted and extended with the widest charity and the most developed social conscience to the needs of all those who suffer inequality in the complexities of the modern industrial State.

§ 8

Other Forms of the Litany

A brief specialized Litany for the Dying, along the lines of the Sarum Commendatio Animæ, is found in the Visitation Office. It includes a literal rendering of the Kyries—“Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy, Lord, have mercy.” This is the form in the English Alternative Order of the Communion of 1928; and Bishop Dowden had recommended it thirty years before to restore “the large indefiniteness of the original.”29

The Litany and Suffrages for Ordinations is a new composition, and an entirely specialized form, containing only appropriate Intercessions between the abbreviated Invocations and the Kyries, followed by the Lord's Prayer, suitable Preces, and a summary Collect. The structure is excellent, the choice of ideas nearly equally so, but the expression is distinctly prosaic.

§ 9

The “Lesser Litany” and the Lord's Prayer

The Litany has also a special historical relation to the manner of the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in all the offices of the Church, through its final Kyries, known as the “Lesser Litany,” which precede the Lord's Prayer in the Litany itself, and originally served to introduce it in every other place where it was used congregationally, save in the Communion, where it had a special Prologue.

This clearcut use of 1549 was gradually modified in successive editions by a number of adventitious changes, the chief of which was the appending of the “scriptural” doxology in three places in 1662. The resulting situation in the first American Prayer Book was that the Lord's Prayer, concluding with the doxology, appeared in the Morning and Evening Prayer, the Communion Office, and Family Prayers; and introduced by the Lesser Litany, with no doxology, in the Litany and the Visitation of the Sick and of Prisoners. While the remaining instances of the Prayer possessed neither Kyries nor conclusion, these prominent examples served to suggest an entirely new rationale, which became widely accepted after 1892 added Burial and the Penitential Office to those provided with Kyries—namely, of two separate uses of the Lord's Prayer: one in a “eucharistic” sense, marked by the final doxology; and the other “petitionary” or “penitential,” distinguished by the Lesser Litany and the absence of a doxology.

This theory is strictly modern, and peculiar to the Church in America. Yet it is not inappropriate, and has sufficed to bring order out of a considerable confusion and diversity of use in the later Anglican books. It was made “official” and uniform in 1928 by adding the doxology in all places where the Prayer was not preceded by the Lesser Litany.30

It is significant that after all the changes the primitive reverence for these verba Verbi has been preserved, and the principle maintained that the Lord's Prayer should never be used abruptly and without some sort of dignified introduction in congregational worship. It is prefaced by some form of the traditional Prologue in the Communion, the Bidding Prayer, the Offices of Instruction, and the Office of Institution; by the Absolution (whose revision in 1662 made it bear an apparent reference to the following Lord's Prayer) in the formal place for its occurrence in Morning and Evening Prayer; by the special Bidding, “Seeing now,” in Baptism; by “Let us pray” in Confirmation, Marriage, and the optional place in Morning and Evening Prayer; and by the Kyries in the three Litanies, the Penitential Office, Visitation, and both Burial Offices. Only in Family Prayers is the principle ignored; though it is not quite obvious why liturgical propriety should not be observed even in a “private” service, where two or three are gathered together.

§ 10

Collects

As has been intimated, every Litany looks forward to a concluding Collect as its terminus ad quem, and the necessary final resolution of its essentially “periodic” structure. This Litany-Collect strictly fulfills the original meaning of the Gallican term, Collectio or Collecta, for this type of prayer, in that it gathers up or collects the accumulated suffrages of the Litany's Biddings to Prayer, and the resultant secret “intentions” in the hearts of all, in a sort of generalized conclusion.

Yet Collects existed as a characteristic Western and Egyptian form of prayer before the Syrian litany-form was imported. In this use they “collected” the intentions of a pause for silent prayer after their individual Biddings. Especially was this the use, and the term, throughout the “Gallican” orders. The word Collect was never really naturalized in purely Roman regions, and when for a time it was adopted, it was given another sense, in the phrase Oratio ad collectam, that is, “the Prayer over the people gathered together” to go in procession to the church of a papal Station.

As we shall see later,31 it appears that throughout the West the Eucharist was originally celebrated in the form which has survived in the “Gallican” rites, in that the whole Liturgy consisted of a definite series of Collects, each with its proper subject and purpose, but each variable with the occasion. About the middle of the fourth century, however, the Roman rite transformed its sequence of Consecration Prayers into an invariable “Canon,” consisting still of a chain of Collects, but no longer, with some small exceptions, subject to change or substitution. Outside this Canon four prayers were left as typical “Gallican” variables, before the Lections, at the Offertory, after the Communion, and at the final benediction of the people.32

Of these, the most significant was the first, which the Roman rite calls simply Oratio—The Prayer—of the mass, and which we know as the “Collect of the day.” This prayer is much older than Litanies, and corresponds to Serapion's “First Prayer of the Lord's Day,”33 and an equivalent Collect of the later Alexandrian group.34 But this Collect of the day was assimilated to be the concluding Collect of the introductory Litany of the sixth century in Rome. This is the reason why most of our present liturgical Collects are such very general prayers for God's mercy and grace. For modern use, it might be desired that more of them were more distinctive and incisive.

When, however, the prefatory Litany fell into disuse, the Collect was again in a position of particular prominence, and received considerable emphasis as carrying a sort of key-note for the particular service in relation to the Christian Year. The English Church went a step further. Inheriting the term “Collect” from the “Gallican” tradition of Northern Europe, it invented the idea that the purpose of the Collect was to “collect” the import of the liturgical scripture of the day, especially the Epistle, which it immediately precedes. Indeed, many post-Reformation Collects were deliberately written to do so.

Some fifty-seven liturgical Collects were translated from the Latin in the First Prayer Book, as against twenty-four newly composed. Of the latter, thirteen were for Saints' Days—on the whole, an extremely competent and edifying piece of work, replacing a mechanical and uninspiring ringing of changes on the theme of the merits and prayers of the Saints. As in the Litany and the Communion Office, the translations were more liberal than literal; while retaining much of the simplicity and directness of the originals, their dry bones were clothed upon with the lineaments of life.

While only one new Collect was composed in 1552, one in 1637, four in 1662, one in 1789, and one in 1886, the revision of 1928 furnished no less than fifteen—for Eucharists on the Second Sunday after Christmas, the first four days of Holy Week, an early celebration on Whitsunday, the Ember and Rogation Days, Independence Day, the feast of the dedication of a Church, a marriage, and two each for Burials and for any Saint's Day not provided with a proper service. 1928 also revised the Third Collect of Good Friday, and the Collect of St. Luke's Day.

It is coming to be realized that a Collect, presenting a single profound and universal petition within its brief compass, is as exacting an art-form as a sonnet. It is free poetry, where thoughts, instead of words, rhyme in definite strophe-patterns. It has underlying principles of prose-rhythm, which are beginning to be explored.35 To be sure, some of the original exemplars, Latin and English, have rhetorical awkwardnesses which only devotional familiarity has made tolerable to our ears. New Collects, or other short prayers, certainly should not imitate their defects.36 Indeed not a little of the new matter in all recent Anglican revisions leaves something to be desired toward the attainment of the Collect's difficult but indispensable ideal of a balance of force and facility, emotion and restraint.

§ 11

Special Intercessions

The now considerable collections of special prayers are an outgrowth of the Collects devised before the Reformation for “votive” offerings of the Eucharist for the needs of current occasions or particular individuals. Even funeral Eucharists, which survived in 1549, were eliminated in 1552, to be restored only in 1928, along with provisions for a celebration at a marriage. Otherwise, votive intercessions have existed only as “commemorations” inserted into the public offices.

Even these have been of slow growth. The First Prayer Book had prayers only for Rain and Fair Weather. 1552 added supplications for times of Dearth, and War and Plague. 1604 temporarily balanced the account with four corresponding Thanksgivings. 1662 contributed prayers for Ember Days and Parliament, as well as “All Conditions” for Morning Prayer without the Litany, with a parallel General Thanksgiving, and a thanksgiving for Restoring Public Peace at Home. The first American Prayer Book brought in prayers for a Sick Person and Sick Child, Persons going to Sea, those under Affliction, and Condemned Malefactors; and thanksgivings for Delivery from Childbirth, Recovery from Sickness, Safe Return from Sea. The Prayer for Convention dates from 1799. 1892 added prayers for Unity, Missions, and Rogation-tide, and a thanksgiving for a Child's Recovery from Sickness.

This entire accumulation was exactly doubled in number in the 1928 book, which added eighteen new prayers, as well as a Collect to the section of Occasional Collects (now transferred to this division of Special Prayers), the Bidding Prayer, and twenty-three more new forms in the appendix after Family Prayers.

All this evidences a spirited and determined attempt to bring the worship of the Church up to date, and adapt it to current needs—with perhaps the hope that these prayers might also serve to guide and inspire the devotions of the people, and make the Prayer Book not only an official ritual of public worship, but a really popular manual for personal use.

The new material displays a significant reflection of the problems and aspirations of the time that brought it forth. A developed political conscience and a democratic idealism speaks in the prayers for a State Legislature and for Courts of Justice, and in the really magnificent general supplication For our Country. A new social purpose is expressed in the prayers for Christian Service, for Social Justice, and for Every Man in his Work; as well as the intercessions in the appendix, for Those in Mental Darkness, for a Blessing on the Families of the Land, for all Poor, Homeless, and Neglected Folk, and “A General Intercession.” The growing sense of international fellowship appears in the prayer for the Family of Nations. Interest in education, religious or secular, is voiced in the supplications for Schools, Colleges, and Universities, for Religious Education, for Children (with another in the appendix), and for Those about to be Confirmed. Primarily religious objectives appear in Laud's forceful prayer for the Church, a new alternative prayer for Missions,37 and one for the Increase of the Ministry; as well as the general intercession of the Bidding Prayer, and the Roman Collect for Unity. War-time influences are shown by the prayers in Time of Calamity, for the Army, for the Navy, and for Memorial Days.

Most of the remaining devotions in the appendix are largely for spiritual graces, and are personal and mystical in tone. Some however are of great value for landmarks and emergencies in individual lives, such as those for One about to undergo an Operation, for the Absent, for a Birthday, and for an Anniversary of One Departed. This last is one of the finest of the prayers for those who have entered into life eternal, whose inclusion was a notable contribution of the revision of 1928; and, together with other vital petitions for Christian Stewardship (“for Faithfulness in the Use of this World's Goods”), and for Joy in God's Creation, should make an occasional telling appearance in public worship, and should by no means be suffered to slumber unused in the appendix.38

It would be desirable that the second of the votive Collects on p. 49 (“Assist us mercifully”) should have restored to it the title and use of a prayer “For Those about to Undertake a Journey”—it was in fact the Collect of the old Mass for Travelers.

For the place and manner of the use of the occasional prayers and Collects, see the Note appended at the end of this chapter.

§ 12

The Penitential Office

From medieval times the Latin Church has had a Penitential Office for occasional use, consisting of the recitation of the Seven Penitential Psalms, with appropriate prayers. The Sarum rite employed this form as a preface to the Liturgy on Ash Wednesday, beginning with a sermon, and after the Psalms presenting the Lesser Litany, Lord's Prayer, suffrages, seven collects, and a solemn Absolution of the people; then proceeded to the Blessing of Ashes and the mass.

Cranmer rejected “sacramentals” (the blessing of inanimate things, outside the actual celebration of the Sacraments), such as candles on Candlemas, ashes on Ash Wednesday, palms on Palm Sunday, holy water on Easter Eve. But though this elimination of other seasonal ceremonies reduced the Liturgy to a dead level of uniformity throughout the year, the beginning of Lent was too pivotal to be left unmarked by some special office: and for it he devised the Commination Service still in use in England.

For the sermon of the Sarum use he substituted long homily-exhortations, and appended the “Comminations,” a chain of denunciations in Old-Testament terms of the wrath of God against violators of the moral law. Then followed the penitential Psalm 51, the Lesser Litany, Lord's Prayer, suffrages, a collect, the summary prayer “O most mighty God,” and “Turn thou us” to be sung as an Anthem. Since 1552 the last-named has been recited congregationally.

The First American Prayer Book eliminated the Commination Service, but directed the three last prayers to be said at the end of Morning Prayer on Ash Wednesday. 1892 reconstituted the Penitential Office as at present, beginning with Psalm 51. 1928 removed such expressions as “vile earth” and “miserable sinners”; thus liberating this telling act of penitence from morbid preoccupations with a supposed vitiation of human nature or futile luxury of grief over an irrevocable past, and brought it into line with the Church's teaching in the General Confessions and elsewhere as to the essentially constructive and forward-looking value of penitence, in renouncing past errors in order to embrace and enable the righteous future.

Appended Note

Note on the Use of the Occasional Prayers

There has been a good deal of confusion in the use of the occasional prayers, which has not come to an end in our book of 1928.

The Occasional Collects (p. 49) were offered in 1549 to terminate the “Ante-Communion” service when there was no celebration. To this use they were perfectly adapted, consisting mostly of just the sort of universal summary and benedictory supplications as constituted the ancient Collect Super Populum at the end of the Liturgy.39 1552 added the permission to use them after the Collects of Morning or Evening Prayer (i.e., after the “Third Collect”), or the Communion (the Collect of the day), or the Litany (“We humbly beseech thee”): that is, as votive “Memorials.” The American books do not use them with the “Ante-Communion,” and do not mention the Litany. As a matter of fact, these prayers are well known and widely used—as choir-prayers, and sermon-prayers, and to open meetings, and sometimes as so-called Postcommunions40—but in their rubrical place as “Memorials” they are not needed, and practically never used. 1928 moved these Collects from the end of the Communion Office to a place after the Special Prayers, where they could more easily be found for particular uses; but omitted to provide them with a more constructive rubric.

The Special Prayers were appended to the Occasional Collects in 1549. 1552 inserted its four occasional prayers in the Litany, before “St. Chrysostom,” for optional use “if the time require.” 1662 constituted the present separate section, with the rubric “to be used before the two final prayers of the Litany, or of Morning and Evening Prayer.” Now in 1662 “the two final prayers … of Morning and Evening Prayer” were counted as “St. Chrysostom” and “The Grace”; so that this book simply extended the existing use of these intercessions from the Litany to the daily offices.

The first American Prayer Book kept this rubric unaltered; but it inserted “All Conditions” and the General Thanksgiving in the text of Morning and Evening Prayer. And as popular interpretation had come to regard “The Grace” not as a prayer, but as a blessing, it became customary to insert Occasional Prayers not before “St. Chrysostom,” but before the General Thanksgiving! Accordingly the presence of special prayers after the general Intercession was justified by saying that “generals should come before particulars”—an entirely fictitious and absolutely erroneous rationale, since in fact the particular prayers for Rulers, and for Clergy and People, come before the final compendious prayer specially composed to gather up all the rest of the matter of the universal intercession of the Litany.

1892 however adopted this mistaken convention into law, by directing the Occasional Prayers “to be used before the General Thanksgiving, or, when that is not said, before the final Prayer of Blessing or the Benediction”; and in like manner the Special Thanksgivings after the General Thanksgiving.

1928 corrected this for the Special Prayers, specifying that they were “to be used before the Prayer for all Conditions of Men,” etc.; but left the rubric for the Special Thanksgivings unaltered.

It will be noted that 1892 gave the further alternative “before the final Prayer of Blessing or the Benediction”—which in 1928 was made to read “before the final Prayer of Thanksgiving or of Blessing, or before the Grace.” This action of the earlier book adopted the popular interpretation of the rubric of the last prayer of the ordination-services,41 as justifying the use of so-called “Postcommunion Collects,” and sanctioned the use of the Occasional Prayers at that point in the service. Special Intercessions, however, are not proper matter for either Postcommunion or Super Populum Collects; the conclusion of the Communion Office is an entirely irrational and inorganic place for them: and the rubrics of the 1928 communion service directed specifically that they should come after the Creed. The change of rubric before the Special Prayers, altering “the Benediction” to “the Grace,” was intended to effect the same end of abolishing this illegitimate use of intercessions in lieu of “Postcommunions”; but the rubric is not lucid and definitive, and under cover of it some clergy still persist in the now outlawed customs of 1892.