Other Occasional Offices
I. Marriage
The institution of Marriage is older than anything that can be called civilization, and is a chief corner-stone of such civilization as our race has yet achieved.
The marriage ceremony is in essence the public ratification of a mutual contract between a man and a woman for a lifelong union. No recognized civil contract of marriage is any less than this definition, since even a marriage before a Justice of the Peace must express the intention of the parties to engage in an enduring relation; and the subsequent production of evidence that it was their intention that the tie should not be permanent has often been held to invalidate the contract from the beginning. Nor is any ecclesiastical marriage any more, since even Roman theologians assert that the clergy do not marry people — the people marry each other, and are themselves the ministers of the Sacrament conferred upon each other; and the marriage of two baptized persons, before whomsoever solemnized, is sacramental.1 The Church indeed imposes conditions, exacts vows, and bestows a solemn blessing — but all with the purpose of safeguarding what any marriage ought to be, and of realizing, if possible, the ideal of that monogamy which imperfect man in a rudimentary social order is trying to attain.
The Church found Marriage as an already existing institution, with established customs and ceremonies connected with the publication of the contract. Among the Jews, there was originally no religious solemnity, the presence of a Rabbi at a wedding not being required until the Middle Ages. After a declaration before witnesses, the bridegroom simply brought the bride to his tent: a ceremony which had a ritual reminiscence in the “Veiling” which long survived, in the form of extending a canopy over the couple at the blessing of their marriage.2
The old Romans first held a solemn public betrothal, consisting of mutual consents to the future marriage expressed in fixed formulas, and the delivery of the marriage contract, and the giving of a ring and other presents from the bridegroom to the bride, as symbolic tokens of dowry. Then on the wedding day, the bride wore a distinctive veil, and both parties were crowned with flowers. The contract was signed, their hands were joined; and the marriage was sealed by the Confarreatio — the partaking of a sacrificial loaf accompanied by fruits. They then made the circuit of the altar while the priest recited a prayer. Then followed the sacrifice of an animal, and the wedding-feast.
At the first the Church took no account of these rites, Jewish or pagan, contenting itself with blessing a marriage already contracted by such forms as were customary. St. Ignatius at the beginning of the second century wrote: “It is fitting for those who purpose matrimony to accomplish their union with the sanction of the Bishop, that their marriage may be in the Lord, and not merely in the flesh. Let all things be done to the honor of God.”3 And a century later, Tertullian spoke of the happiness of a marriage that is “arranged by the Church, confirmed by the oblation, sealed by the benediction, proclaimed by the angels, and ratified by the Father.”4 Nothing more is here implied than the nuptial Eucharist and benediction, which long remained the only ceremonies in which the Church concerned itself.
In the course of time, however, the Church found that a proper safeguarding of the marriage of its members required it to lay down prior conditions for a union, and eventually to take over the ratification of the contract itself, as an ecclesiastical rite. A statute of Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century forbade marriages without inquiry by the clergy into possible impediments of consanguinity, etc.;5 the publication of the Banns was developed for this purpose, until it was required universally by the 51st Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and until in some places a final warning of this nature was prefixed to the marriage service itself, as still in our present rite.
The first recorded instance of priestly participation in the espousals was at the marriage of the daughter of Charles the Bald (840–97). Lay espousals began to be forbidden in the thirteenth century, but they were not everywhere interdicted until the Council of Trent. In the latter days of the “secular” contracting of marriages, they were held in the church porch, immediately before the Nuptial Mass; and when the Church took over the rite, it was performed at the church door. Later, a certain twisting of the rubric brought the espousals to their present place at the chancel door.6
Meantime, certain developments of society in Northern Europe had wrought some changes in the old Roman rites which had been handed down as folk customs. The Betrothal — an optional feature in Roman use — became an essential in Teutonic regions during the period of parental authority, and acquired the feature of the formal “giving away” of the bride by her father. As parental control in turn was relaxed, there was a new emphasis on the mutual action of the parties as free agents in giving themselves to each other; the vows and the dowry-tokens of the Betrothal were reduplicated in the ensuing Espousal; the original engagement-ring, incidentally, becoming the wedding ring.
The rites of the Sarum Manuale at the time of the Reformation were in general according to this North-European development of those of the ancient Roman Empire. Naturally, apart from the Eucharist, they were chiefly in the vernacular.7
The service in 1549 followed closely the order of the Sarum Use. The chief differences were the lengthening of the initial Exhortation with German material;8 the Teutonic “giving away” of the bride from the York rite; the conversion of two prayers for blessing the ring into a prayer over the newly betrothed;9 the addition of the Declaration, “Those whom God hath joined together,”10 and the Proclamation of the Marriage,11 from Lutheran sources; and the transfer of the benedictory prayers formerly interpolated into the Nuptial Mass to the second part of the marriage service.
This left the rite consisting of two parts: the Marriage proper, composed of consolidated Betrothal and Espousal, held “in the body of the church”; and the Blessing of the Marriage, comprising a psalm said in procession to the altar, and subsequent prayers at the altar-rail. The Eucharist as such contained nothing proper to the marriage;12 and it is not remarkable that the revision of 1662 removed the requirement of it.
The American Prayer Book of 1789 dropped the second part of the service altogether. Cranmer's transmutation of the blessing of the ring into a blessing of the parties had indeed left the second section without sufficient raison d'être, since it rounded out the first part of the service as complete in all essentials, with the marriage contracted, blessed, and proclaimed. The American rite also shortened again the first exhortation, eliminating the statement of the purposes of marriage, from a dislike of the Tudor frankness in which they were put.13
The latest revisions, American, English, and Scottish, all add a Blessing of the Ring, and omit the “obey” clause from the bride's betrothal question and marriage vow, making the formulæ for both parties identical in tenor. The American book further dropped “with all my worldly goods I thee endow”;14 and added for optional use judiciously amended versions of the two outstanding prayers for children, and for mutual happiness, from the second section of the English services. All revisions append a proper Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the Nuptial Eucharist for use where desired.
The American service still provides for publishing the Banns, if required by the civil law. Nowadays, however, the marriage license, which was originally an episcopal dispensation from the necessity of calling the Banns, has become the State's authorization and registration. It protects the officiating clergyman in questions of fact. The Church's underlying requirement of due publicity has not yet been satisfactorily met by recent canonical experiments with the exaction of prior notice of a projected marriage in lieu of the obsolete system of the Banns.15
In our present order of the service, the first two exhortations were formerly known as the Cautelæ or “Cautions.” They express in the most solemn possible language the safeguards with which the Church surrounds the rite, and the necessity for its worthy reception.
The following questions represent the ancient Betrothal; they are still in the future tense. Though in a sense they cover the same ground as the following vows of espousal, they are retained as a logical sequel of the “Cautions,” in the light of which the parties must immediately affirm that they voluntarily and sincerely desire to proceed to the marriage.
The “giving away” of the bride is in form the one archaism surviving in our rite from the days when women were property; but its significance has been wholly converted to the transfer of obedience to that of loving care.
The incorporation of the characteristic prayers from the second part of the English service has now furnished our order with all desirable completeness. At one stage of the last revision it was proposed that our rite be conformed to the two divisions of the English; but it was rejected as involving something of an anticlimax.
There is some difficulty however when it is attempted to copy the English ceremonial with our consolidated service. Somehow or other it has very generally come to be the custom to hold the first part of the service through the betrothal vows in the old place at the chancel door, and to go to the altar for the espousals and prayers. This does not correspond with the British division, which in the latest English and Scottish books has been made clear by subtitles as between “The Marriage” and “The Benediction.” Some of our clergy indeed conform to this natural and organic division of the service, by making the procession to the altar-rail come after the giving of the ring and before the prayers, avoiding the interruption of what is now a continuous action. Our rubrics however do not provide for either custom.
II. The Thanksgiving after Childbirth
The Jewish idea of a period of separation and a ceremony of reconciliation after childbirth16 was brought before the Church by the incident of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. This idea is found in the Canons of Hippolytus;17 and an accustomed service of thanksgiving, rejecting Jewish ceremonial concepts, is noted in the time of Gregory the Great.18
The Purification of Women in 1549 followed closely the Sarum order, and has remained unaltered in its essentials, though the title was changed to its present form of “Thanksgiving, … commonly called the Churching” in 1552.
Strong Puritan objections19 were successfully met in England, where the service has remained habitual. Elsewhere, either these objections, or Victorian prudery, or possibly sheer carelessness, have caused the service to fall into general disuse. The American book of 1928 rescued the office from the end of the collection to a place after the marriage service; the Scottish adds it to the group of baptismal offices.
III. Visitation of the Sick
A large part of our Lord's ministry was devoted to the healing of the sick. It may be said that health of body and mind together was the primary objective of that wholeness and fulness of life which he came to bring; certainly it is the immediate expression for that normality, security, and sanity of living, which the New Testament calls sωtηrια (deliverance, safety), and which Latin devotion translated as salus (safety, health), that we have converted into the more abstract conception of Salvation itself.
He acknowledged that sickness is sometimes the result of sin;20 he habitually exacted some measure of prevailing faith, and once21 a restitution to moral wholeness, as prerequisites of healing; but in general he condemned the popular idea that sickness is a condign punishment of misdeeds of the sufferer or his forefathers.22
Often he made use of “suggestive” ceremonies,23 and even of material media;24 and while there is no record that he used oil, his followers did,25 and the therapeutic practice of anointing was common among the Jews at that time;26 and the words of St. James27 mark the employment of oil as customary in the early Church, as subsequent evidence shows it to have been thereafter.
The gift of healing was explicitly bestowed upon the Apostles.28 The early Church regarded it as a normal function of the ministry: not however in any sense as a magical act, ex opere operato, displacing the physician,29 but as a ministration to the soul, curing the spiritual obstacles to physical recovery. The Canons of Hippolytus mentioned powers of exorcism and healing as bestowed at the ordination of bishops,30 and the Apostolic Constitutions bracketed gifts of healing with the word of teaching at the ordination of presbyters.31
Our earliest liturgical document, Hippolytus' Apostolic Tradition, has a blessing of oil for the sick at the end of the eucharistic Canon, at the point where the Holy Oils are still consecrated in the Roman rite on Maundy Thursday with a formula which retains some of Hippolytus' words to this day.32 Bread, water, and oil for the healing of the sick were blessed in the Prayer Book of Serapion.33 The early Syrian Church prayed at every Eucharist for those in mental darkness (the Energumens) as regularly as for the Catechumens;34 and Serapion had a corresponding prayer for the sick in general in the normal liturgy.35
From as early times as we have any information, we find all branches of the Church applying its spiritual remedies for soul and body together to the benefit of those who could not come to church to receive them, in formal Offices for the Visitation of the Sick. This Visitation was not a personal call of the clergyman to console the sufferer, but a corporate act of the Church, a concourse of clergy, choir, and friends,36 for the purpose of administering the sacramental rite of the Anointing of the Sick.
This Anointing was regarded as distinctly a ministration of the Spirit;37 as restoring the grace of Confirmation;38 not merely as palliating the results of sin, like Absolution, but as actually curing spiritual maladies by destroying the roots and causes of sin.39 A consequent physical recovery was confidently expected.40
These beliefs regarding the Sacrament of Unction still remain in the East.41 But in the West, a pernicious change beginning about the ninth century transformed the rite from a sacrament of healing to a preparation for death, under the name of Extreme Unction — i. e., the Anointing of those in extremis.42 A new ritual was devised of anointing seven parts of the body, with formulæ professing to remit specific sins committed through the several senses. This converted the ceremony from a “confirming” consecration to a solemn Absolution in imminent expectation of death.
In the light of such depressing doctrines it is a little surprising that Unction survived at all in 1549, and not at all remarkable that it was eliminated in 1552. It is only very recently that a better understanding of the primitive doctrine and use of the rite have made it possible to restore it in the latest revisions of the Prayer Book.43
At the Reformation, the Sarum Visitation of the Sick comprised the Seven Penitential Psalms with their Antiphon “Remember not,” on the way to the house; the salutation “Peace be to this house” on entering, and upon reaching the sick chamber a sprinkling with holy water, Kyries, Lord's Prayer, suffrages, and nine collects. Then followed an Exhortation to the sick person to prepare him for the reception of Unction by first quieting his mind and conscience, containing an examination of faith, and counsel to acts of charity and restitution. This led to a sacramental confession, followed by an emphatic declaratory Absolution, and also by the much older prayer of absolution which was the formula normally employed for this purpose until the twelfth century.44 Then the rite of Unction was introduced with Psalm 71 with its Antiphon “O Saviour of the world.” Next came the sevenfold anointing of the organs of sense, each followed by a psalm; then a concluding prayer and psalm; and the office ended with communion from the reserved Sacrament.
Most of this structure was retained in outline in 1549. One of the Penitential Psalms (143), formerly said on the way, was now repeated on entering the chamber, in lieu of the Aspersion. The nine collects were reduced to two, and those by no means the strongest of the list, materially impairing the former confident note of expected recovery. The first part of the Exhortation, on the moral values of sickness, was much expanded, especially along the unfortunate line of submission to suffering as divine retribution; the passages on charity and restitution were reduced to rubrics leaving their treatment to the discretion of the priest. Confession was recommended, and the old forms of Absolution retained. The Anointing was to be with the sign of the cross upon forehead and breast only, with a single confident prayer for healing, remission, and grace — a material improvement on its immediate sources, though not free from medieval misconceptions in detail. Psalm 13, the first of the eight psalms connected with the Sarum Anointing, concluded the office.
But the abolition of the Anointing in 1552 destroyed at a stroke the whole objective and rationale of the rite. It was entirely appropriate that there should have been an adequate and searching penitential preparation for receiving what was accepted as an effectual Sacrament of Healing. But the removal of that terminus ad quem left all that preparation directed only toward death, or at best to subduing the soul to patience under continued illness. In the first sense, the office is psychologically and therapeutically quite as deleterious as “Extreme Unction” itself, viewed as a “Sacrament of the Dying”; in the second, it “definitely countenanced the view that sickness is, as a rule, a divine punishment for sin, and that therefore it is a sick person's principal duty to glorify God by remaining ill and suffering patiently, rather than by recovering quickly through the ministrations of His Church.”45
The development of modern psychology and psychotherapy, and the revival of some understanding of the real manner and import of the ministrations of the early Church, have caused our Visitation Office to be increasingly disused. The more dangerously ill the patient, the less chance that a wise clergyman would subject him to such a strain — or that the physician or family would permit him to do so. For those painfully but not dangerously sick, there is little of comfort or consolation in the service. There are probably few clergy now living who have ever employed the office formally and as a whole. Even as a storehouse of helpful and hopeful devotions it leaves much to be desired.
Most of the changes made in the service since 1552 have been directed toward making it more available for the consolation of the sick. Psalms 143 and 13 were dropped in 1552. Four supplemental prayers were added at the end of the office in 1662, and three more in 1789. The first American book also substituted Psalm 130 for Psalm 71, and eliminated all mention of a private confession.
Our revision of 1928 struck out the old gloomy Exhortation, referring to its subject in a rubric. Private confession is again mentioned, and the short Absolution as in Evening Prayer appended after the service. The framework of the old office remains; but an attempt has been made to import an element of comfort and edification by incorporating five psalms, each preceded by an Antiphon and followed by a Collect. The appendix to the service has been enlarged by a Litany for the Dying, prayers for the Commendation of the Soul, and very brief forms for Anointing or Imposition of Hands.
The English and Scottish revisions have likewise been in the direction of providing a ministry of comfort, abolishing morbid elements, and listing about sixty consoling psalms and lections.
All these revisions antedate the adoption of the report on the Ministry of Healing at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, which established the fact that the whole trend of modern psychology is to recognize the fundamental place of spiritual wholeness in bodily healing, and to approve what we have seen to be the faith and practice of the primitive Church. The way is therefore open for future revisions to reconstruct the now obsolete Office of Visitation along primitive lines, and to restore it as a living and usable rite.
IV. Communion of the Sick
The Anglican Church stands almost alone in encouraging the private celebration of the Eucharist for the purpose of the Communion of the Sick. The ancient Church regarded the Liturgy as a corporate act of the whole body,46 and as early as Justin Martyr47 directed the Communion to be taken from the altar to the sick. Down to the Reformation, instances of private celebrations are few and doubtful.48 Even the Calvinists retained this point of view,49 and reluctantly preferred some form of Reservation to private celebrations.
The First Prayer Book provided that if the sick communion was to be made on a day when the Sacrament was celebrated in church, the priest should reserve at the open communion as much as was necessary for the sick person, and take it to him after service, administering it with Confession, Absolution, Comfortable Words, and Postcommunion Thanksgiving. If it came on a day when there was no Communion in church, then, upon sufficient notice, and provided there was a suitable place in the sick man's house50 where he might reverently celebrate, he should consecrate the Sacrament by a form comprising Introit, Kyries, Collect, Epistle, Gospel, and Preface “unto the end of the Canon,” and so administer the communion. In event of emergency, or lack of warning, or other just impediment, the sick person was to be instructed to make a spiritual communion, exactly as the Sarum Manuale had provided in like case. It is on the whole probable that Cranmer intended these three methods to be exhaustive; although in fact continuous reservation for the sick was nowhere forbidden in the book, and might indeed be legitimately applied where there was ample “warning,” but no service in church, and no “convenient” place to celebrate in the house: and there is some evidence that such reservation survived in some places.51
The Prayer Book of 1552 dropped all mention of the “Justinian” method of communion the same day from the service in church, as well as all other rubrics specifying the manner of administration. Here it is at least possible that the directions were not intended to be exclusive, since they were hardly even sufficient. Perhaps the idea was to avoid the mention of deeply controverted subjects, and leave the practice to traditional custom and the discretion of the clergy. Certainly Elizabeth's Latin Prayer Book of 1560 retained the “Justinian” reservation of 1549; and Bishop Sparrow's Rationale, published in various editions from 1657 to 1684, and for nearly two centuries the most esteemed commentary on the Prayer Book, maintained that this procedure had continued to be legitimate.52
Continuous Reservation was permitted in the Nonjurors' book of 1718; and has long been legal in the Episcopal Church of Scotland. A proposal to authorize it in the English book of 1928 was a chief cause of the defeat of the sanction of that book by Parliament. A like proposal was rejected by General Convention for the American revision of 1928. Yet Reservation with or without episcopal license has long been known both in England and America. It is obviously a convenience, sometimes a necessity, for busy clergy; likewise it is somewhat less of a strain on a very sick communicant than a whole celebration. Perhaps there might have been less opposition to its authorization if its advocates had been willing to refrain from some uses of the Sacrament in ceremonial cultus which seem to many to be dangerous infringements of the principles of Articles XXV and XXVIII.
All recent orders for Communion of the Sick offer alternative provision of Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the depressing assignments of 1549, with their dominant note of submission to the will of God. The American books since 1892 have allowed the use of the full proper service of the day in the case of bedridden persons not critically ill; and the new book offers a shortened Confession and Absolution.
V. Burial of the Dead
A belief in human immortality is as old as religion.53 All races and faiths have provided for the reverent disposition of the outworn tenement of the soul. For the most part, funeral ceremonies have expressed or symbolized not only consolation for the bereaved, but some sort of help for the departed in the new life upon which he had entered. The rationalistic and sceptical attitude of the party of the Sadducees kept this latter to a minimum in Jewish belief; and it is a curious fact that there is no entirely undeniable allusion to prayers for the dead in either the canonical Old or New Testaments. Nevertheless this was an established custom in the time Second Maccabees was written;54 and regular commemorations of the departed were made at every synagogue service in the time of our Lord, as they have been ever since.55
The Resurrection of our Lord, acclaimed by the Apostles as the primary ground of their Christian confidence,56 and observed by the Church in weekly festival, filled up an immemorial hope with the certainty of faith, and exalted the immortality of the soul beside the being of God as an equally fundamental assurance of religion. To the Christian, death had become “the gate of everlasting life”; and the Church kept the anniversaries of the tragic ends of the Martyrs as their Natalia or “birthdays” into the life of eternal blessedness. For the first thousand years the Church wore white at funerals, in contrast to the black of pagan and Jewish mourning; and to this day the burial service of the Eastern Church redounds in the acclamation of Alleluias.
The Martyrdom of Polycarp in 158 is witness for the celebration of the Eucharist both at a funeral and on anniversaries; and in the same century Tertullian gives a like testimony for North Africa.57 By the middle of the fourth century we have evidence for prayers for the dead in the normal liturgy, in Serapion and the Apostolic Constitutions. The latter document gives an account of funeral services, displaying the features of all subsequent burial offices: a funeral procession, psalms, lessons of Scripture, prayers, and the celebration of the Eucharist.58 Memorial services, composed of psalms, lessons, and prayers, were held on the third, ninth, and fortieth days, and the anniversary,59 as they still are in the Eastern Church.60
In the West, in the “deformation” period of the ninth and tenth centuries, the medieval doctrines of Purgatory, with its penal torments, again cast a pagan gloom over the burial of the Christian dead, bringing a revival of the black garments and the notes of mourning and terror of heathen days.
At the Reformation, the tone of the services left much to be desired toward voicing the consolations of the Christian hope. Yet they did express an unremitting solicitude, and filled the time from the decease to the interment with an almost unbroken round of the offices of religion. The rites for the dying might be prolonged to any required length; concluding with the magnificent Commendation of the departing soul. A further commendatory farewell followed death. During the preparation of the body, the Placebo or Vespers of the Dead was said. The body was borne to the church in a procession with psalms and prayers. Then came the Dirige (whence dirge) or Matins and Lauds of the Dead; and the Requiem Mass, followed by the Absolutions or final blessings of the body. Another procession with psalms and collects brought them to the grave, which was opened and blessed to the accompaniment of further psalms and prayers. The body was committed to the ground; and the grave filled in again during more psalmody. A final office,61 consisting of psalms, prayers, and the canticle Benedictus, concluded the rite; and the Penitential Psalms were said while returning from the grave.
The First Prayer Book selected the salient essentials of this prolific order. The Processions were reduced to one from the lychgate to the church or grave. The ceremonial opening and blessing of the grave was eliminated from the Burial, and the subsequent covering of the body confined to a symbolic gesture. The Service of the Dead might occur either before or after the Burial, and consisted of Psalms 116, 139, and 146, the Lesson from I Corinthians 15, Kyries, Lord's Prayer, suffrages, and Collect. It was followed by a proper Requiem Eucharist. Of this material, the German orders suggested the use of I Corinthians 15 in church, and the anthem “In the midst of life”62 at the grave.
The Second Prayer Book abolished the Requiem, and in the Service of the Dead and the Burial eliminated the Psalms, the Suffrages, and all the prayers but two — from which every explicit intercession for the departed soul had been removed, as had the commendation of the soul to God from the Committal. What was left of the Service of the Dead must follow the Burial, so that the whole office was said at the grave-side.
The revision of 1662 returned to the alternative procedure of 1549 in holding the Service of the Dead in the church before the Burial. Psalms 39 and 90 were incorporated from the liturgies devised by Sanderson and Jeremy Taylor for use during the period when the Prayer Book was interdicted under the Commonwealth. This revision also prefixed the “canonical” rubrics denying Christian burial to the unbaptized, excommunicates, and suicides.
The latest revisions in England, Scotland, and America offer these features: amended versions of the Sentences; additional alternative psalms, lessons, and prayers — some of which now again include specific supplications for the departed soul; a restoration of the commendation of the soul at the Committal, and of provision for the proper Eucharist; and permission to say the whole service under cover of the church.63 The English and Scottish books offer additional Sentences, and restore the Suffrages after the Lord's Prayer. The English and American give an Anthem alternative to “Man that is born of a woman.” The English returns to 1549 by allowing the Service of the Dead either before or after the Burial; and has made a move toward reconstituting the Matins of the Dead by allowing three lessons alternating with three psalms — in effect approximately the structure called a “Nocturn,” as a constituent of Matins. The American rite abolishes the “canonical” rubric, which often imposed an unendurable hardship upon those already under deep affliction — contenting itself with specifying that “it is to be noted that this Office is appropriate to be used only for the faithful departed in Christ, provided that in any other case the Minister may, at his discretion, use such part of this Office, or such devotions taken from other parts of this Book, as may be fitting.”
All revisions provide a special office for the Burial of a Child,64 dealing tenderly with those who mourn under conditions which to them are always the purest tragedy, with the comfort of faith and hope most difficult to attain. The American service is peculiar in encouraging, if it does not actually adopt, the conception of modern popular theology that the souls of children become “angels” in heaven.