Dynamic Redemption

The purpose of this book as drafted by the late Rev. Dr. Bayard Hale Jones was to draw the attention of the laity, in particular, to their heritage in the Book of Common Prayer; to increase their knowledge of and appreciation for the plan for Christian life and nurture it contains; and so to deepen their love for the Prayer Book and their loyalty to it. Dr. Jones was always of the opinion that people who know the background and rationale of the Prayer Book, as well as its content, find themselves better worshippers and, therefore, better Christians.

The chapters were first prepared by Dr. Jones as a series of lectures for delivery at St. Philip’s Cathedral, Atlanta, Georgia, in Advent 1949; and they were given at the request of Dean, later Bishop, John Walthour as part of the observance of the four hundredth anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer in the Diocese of Atlanta. In time they acquired a regional dignity under the title, “Dr. Jones’ Advent Lectures.”

Two of Dr. Jones’ former students in the School of Theology at Sewanee, the Rev. Austin Ford and the Rev. Dewey Gable, observed the deep impression Dr. Jones made upon his audience. Prior to Dr. Jones’ death in April 1957, the Rev. Mr. Ford urged him to publish these lectures, and after his death a copy of the lectures on which he had done some revisory work was found in his files. Thus, it seems, Dr. Jones might have been considering Mr. Ford’s request, but laid the task aside to concentrate on work in progress for the Liturgical Commission, for which he was editor of publications.

It is well that the Doctor did not do a thorough job of revision, for there is in the material as it stands a freshness characteristic of his lectures which might have been erased by his stern, critical attitude toward the written word, of which he was a master. The present editors have eliminated or changed only such things in the material as might have been clear to an audience but not to a reader.

The title Dynamic Redemption was the heading supplied by Dr. Jones for the chapter he considered key to his theme. We, therefore, use it to describe the whole work.

It is the belief of the editors that the laity can profit from the careful reading of this little book and that the clergy can be refreshed by a study of these reflections of a great liturgical scholar and teacher on the Book of Common Prayer which he knew with all his mind and loved with all his heart.

It is our pleasure to acknowledge the patience and incalculable help gladly given us by Mrs. Emily S. Jones. We are likewise grateful to the Rev. Dr. E. R. Hardy for the work which he has done on the manuscript as explained in his Prefatory Note. And, lastly, the editors must acknowledge that they themselves have received a “Benjamin portion” of value and joy in making Dr. Jones’ work available to others.

George M. Alexander
Austin Ford

In the final preparation of Dynamic Redemption for publication it seemed desirable to check the biblical and other references, making some slight corrections to which the author would doubtless have attended if he had the opportunity. A few sentences in brackets have been added to complete what seemed like unintentional omissions; and a few footnotes added to call attention to points on which scholarly opinion has changed since these lectures were first drafted—in particular as to the origin of Christmas and the early history of the Nicene Creed—as also to the changes in official Roman Catholic practice under the influence of the Liturgical Movement, which we cannot but welcome. It is possible that if he were writing today, Dr. Jones would express himself somewhat more appreciatively of the ideas of the Atonement developed by Anselm and Calvin; but it would have been a pity to make any alteration in the vigor and incisiveness with which he expressed his ideas. To this is owing much of the charm of this book, as of his other scholarly works. It may be of interest to note that some of the suggested possible revisions which appear here are developed at greater length in the Prayer Book Studies issued by the Liturgical Commission, in whose work Dr. Jones played so large a part for many years. The suggested changes in Gospels for certain Sundays appear in Study II, “The Liturgical Lectionary,” and the provision for Minor Holy Days in Study XII, “The Propers for the Minor Holy Days”; the suggestion for a shortening of the Prayer of Consecration was partially incorporated in the Commission’s draft revision of the Communion Service. The several editors are now glad to send “Dr. Jones’ Advent Lectures” into the world with the hope that a wider circle of readers may welcome them with the same interest which they roused in those who enjoyed the privilege of hearing them delivered.

E. R. Hardy

A few more than four hundred years ago, in 1549, the Mother Church of England saw the publication of a book, born out of controversy, which subsequently influenced a large segment of the English-speaking world and marked a new and profound development in the progress of Christianity. The book was the first edition of the Book of Common Prayer, that of King Edward VI, and the development was one which can best be described as a “Protestant Catholicism.”

Four hundred years is a long time. Four hundred years ago, not a single English-speaking settler had set foot on the soil of the United States. Four hundred years ago, Shakespeare had not yet been born. The Prayer Book is older than the entire history of our country. It is older than the great bulk of the achievements of English literature. And yet it is little more than one-fifth as old as the Christian religion. And for nearly four times as long as the English-speaking peoples have had a Prayer Book in their own language, the universal Christian Church has had fixed rituals for the various offices of worship.

There is a story about a cultured Congregationalist who attended one of our services; and when someone asked him how he liked it, he said, “Very much—only, I do think you people spend too much time reading the minutes of the previous meeting.”

Now it seems to be a singularity of Episcopalians to be sure enough of ourselves actually to enjoy jokes at our expense. We are even fair-minded enough to take to ourselves any penetrating truth there may be in the joke. We know, even better than the man who made the jest, that there are some disadvantages in fixed forms of service: notably, that if the people are not spiritually alive and awake, and intent upon putting themselves into their worship, those forms can be dry and dead, and just as dull as the routine of reading the minutes of the previous meeting in the proceedings of a sleepy society.

But the reason for bringing in this pleasantry is that behind its immediate application there lies a profound and important historical truth. The service in any Episcopal Church, in any Anglican Church, on any given day is not a mere repetition of the last one held, put on in the customary way because we are too lazy to think up something different to do and say. It is rather the net survival of nineteen centuries of “previous meetings,” gathering up the very best of all that great Christian souls throughout the ages have ever found to do and say in the worship of Almighty God.

From generation to generation, devout men have given the highest powers of their minds to making Christian worship most expressive of the glory of God, and best fitted to the needs of men. A happy phrase from the mouth of one man was remembered and repeated by his successors, and oftentimes copied in other churches. By this process the forms of worship grew and multiplied like living things, which in a very real sense they were. Interbreeding with each other and competing with each other, they constantly evolved to higher types, with a “natural selection” vigilant at every step to ensure “the survival of the fittest.” Sometimes, like the “archaic mammals” which preceded the present dispensation of living creatures upon the earth, they grew until they assumed formidable proportions—only to be superseded by smaller, swifter, more intelligent forms. Anything merely pompous and grandiose which crept into the historic liturgies did not stay there. The things which endured in this kind of an organic evolution were the simplest, the most universal, and the most affecting thoughts and expressions. Our Prayer Book contains something from each age of its development and the best of every age.

In this respect, the Book of Common Prayer resembles the architecture of some of the English cathedrals which grew gradually to their present state through many centuries. During all that time, whenever an addition was made to the fabric, or even a repair, it was not made, as we would be at pains to do, in the style in which the church was originally built, but in that which was in fashion at the time: so that nearly every large and ancient English church presents a sort of synoptic review of the unfolding of Gothic architecture since the beginning.

Some of these cathedrals, like York, were built upon sites of pre-Christian devotion: buried under their foundations lie pagan altars. Their ground plan and oldest portions are of Roman structure, simple, massive, unadorned. Then came, in wave after wave, the soaring Gothic creations of the medieval spirit, developed by native English genius under the inspiration of the Gallic influences which dominated the north of Europe. There was ornamentation, now, in plenty: some of it sheerly beautiful, recalling, and even refining upon, the classical Greek motifs which had seemed to be lost; some of it barbaric inventions reflecting the mythological fancies of the Dark Ages—grisly frescoes of the Last Judgment, Easter Sepulchres for a dead Christ, holy-water stoups, hanging pyxes for the Reserved Sacrament.

Then came the reaction of the Reformation, when the Puritan extremists “broke down all the carved work with axes and hammers,” covered all glorious color with the “simplicity” and “uniformity” of whitewash, abolished the splendor of stained-glass windows crowded thick with the figures of the Saints Triumphant, and let the bald pitiless light of “common sense” in upon the desolated church. Instead of the pictures and statues which had portrayed the mysteries of the faith and the shining examples of Christian character, now from the walls of the chancel, tables of the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments confronted the congregation with a sober moral didacticism, while a towering “three-decker” pulpit exalted the office of the preacher above the altar of God. Yet even when thus stripped to a shell, the fundamental structure of the great edifice remained. The soaring arches still carried the mind upward to heaven. The ancient orders of the pile, the pier-arcade triforium, and clerestory still mystically proclaimed faith in God the Holy Trinity. And though the high altar might have been reduced to a lowly wooden table, yet what Ruskin called “the Lamp of Sacrifice” still burned invisibly; every line of the church pointed to that altar; to it every stone in the building cried aloud!

Last of all came our modern age, in which the fierce animosities of Reformation times have sunk to nothing more than a kind of grumbling prejudice. Men’s eyes were opened again to the organic meaning and function of the Church. And then they were eager to restore and recover some of the rich decoration which they now saw had been unwisely and needlessly done away.

Just as the religious ideas of each successive age embodied themselves, through architectural forms, in the fabric of the church, some of them surviving all changes to be an integral part of the present day, so, similarly, they received expression in forms of worship. There are some elements of our present Prayer Book which excite little remark because they have become so familiar, but which on examination preserve some very archaic features that are most interesting and instructive in the light of their ancient origins. Let us consider some of these survivals of a remote antiquity in modern worship.

Inheritances from Pagan Sources

There are a number of things in the Prayer Book that are older than Christianity. One of them is the pictorial phrase, “Light of Light,” in the Nicene Creed. The idea thus pregnantly expressed is that just as the faraway sun sends his radiant beams as the sole source of physical light and life in this world, so the transcendent Father does the same to bring spiritual light and life through the Incarnate Word. This very important truth was probably derived by reaction from the underlying idea which the intruding system of Gnosticism applied in such perverted ways, assimilating and sublimating it in unimpeachable form. Ultimately Gnosticism derived this thought, and especially its expression, back through Zoroastrian influences from a primitive sun-worship. Yet Christianity, on any reckoning, is none the worse for accepting and refining the well-nigh universal aspirations of the earliest members of our race.

And there is more sun-worship in the pageantry of the Christian Year—though perhaps not quite where some people have thought it was. Easter, for example, is not a solar myth. It owes nothing to the admitted fact that some of the mystery religions which, like Christianity, developed from Semitic soil offered myths of a saviour-god who died for his people and rose again with the revival of all nature in the spring of the year. The Resurrection of Christ, on the other hand, is a historic fact, inextricably rooted and tied to three other dimensions of other historic facts, until it can no more be upset than a cube can be. The Crucifixion, and its consequences, took place in direct connection with the Jewish Feast of the Passover. This, in turn, was held in commemoration of a historical spring migration, the Exodus of the Hebrew people from national servitude in Egypt. And Moses represented the observance of the Passover as a revival of a still older agricultural festival, the offering of the spring lamb and the barley cake as the first fruits of the year. Then, and not until then, can a connection be made between the keeping of Easter with the rhythms of the solar year. But excavation down through three cultural levels must be accomplished before that identification can be made. By the time that has been done the association will have been grounded into the history of the world as firmly as the discovery of America, and the point demonstrated that mythopoetic considerations had nothing to do with the Christian observance. We are able to use quite freely the analogies of the vernal resurrection of nature, precisely because such poetizings had no part whatever in establishing the Christian festival.

It is the same with the celebration of the Nativity of our Lord. Our Christmas is, indeed, a purely fictitious date and was assigned its place for entirely mystical reasons. But those reasons had nothing to do with the (approximate) coincidence of the date of December 25 with the winter solstice, or with the Natalis (Solis) Invicti which pagan Rome celebrated at about that period of the year. It may probably be true that the Christian date became popular because it effectively supplanted the heathen rites; but the reasons for putting it there had a completely different source.¹

Likewise, the Feast of St. John Baptist was placed six months before Christmas because of an intimation in the Gospel of St. Luke; and only afterward assimilated to itself reminiscences of the midsummer fire festival in Northern Europe.

Indeed the only genuine and direct influence of the solar year upon the Christian calendar is seen in the Ember Days of the four seasons. These were originally three in number, and taken directly from the Roman observances of winter sowing, summer reaping, and autumn vintage. Leo the Great added the fourth period in Lent to bring the number of seasonal fasts of the Christians up to the four annually observed by the Jews.

Not only were these Ember Seasons purely agricultural in their origin, but they really remain so to this day in the Roman Missal, where each of the twelve days in the year has its own proper Epistle and Gospel, sown liberally with implications about the care of the soil, and none whatever that can even be twisted into saying anything about the work of the Ministry. Nevertheless, the Roman Church quite early adopted them as the canonical times for Ordinations; probably because they were established fasting seasons at convenient quarterly intervals. In our Church, the Ember Days are observed mainly as times of supplication for the Ministry of the Church.

Thus our Prayer Book contains these recurring observances, whose undoubted origin was the celebration of the seasons of the solar year, but whose meaning has been converted to an entirely different purpose. But we also have two deliberately agricultural occasions for appropriate prayers for seedtime and harvest, namely the Rogation Days and Thanksgiving Day. These both originated within the Church and owe nothing to pagan influences.

It will probably come as a surprise to most people to learn that the Prayer Book contains one whole service—and a service for the administration of a Sacrament at that—whose source is entirely pagan.

Certainly Holy Matrimony is in the strictest sense a Sacrament—a consecration of natural physical means to sacred spiritual purposes. No human action could be more holy than this, which joins together two persons for a lifetime of mutual love, faith, and help. None could be more spiritual than this, whose inestimable privilege it is to bring immortal souls, the children of God, to birth in this world. St. Paul declared it to be “a great Mystery”—the only relationship which was adequate to illustrate the vital sacramental union of Christ and his Church.

The early Christians recognized this from the first. Ignatius of Antioch, early in the second century, thought that Christians should not even become engaged without the consent of the Bishop (who in his time was the local Pastor) so that their marriage might be in the Lord. Tertullian, a hundred years later, speaks of the happiness of a marriage “made by the Church, confirmed by the oblation, sealed by the blessing, reported by the angels, and ratified by the Father.”

And yet the actual contracting of the marriage was not a religious rite. Neither the Jewish Synagogue nor the Christian Church controlled the formal exchange of vows until much later. This situation after all was a reflection of the obvious fact that marriage was a “natural sacrament,” “instituted of God,” and abundantly blessed by him in the increase of the race, for a million years before the Jewish-Christian revelation brought it to a still higher level of spiritual consciousness and adopted it as a Christian Sacrament.

Therefore, in the nature of the case, a marriage is entirely the self-initiated action of the contracting parties. The Church can safeguard it, witness it, and bless it; but the Church does not actually perform it. The clergy do not marry people: the couple marry each other. They, as partakers of the universal priesthood of all Christian people, are the celebrants of the Sacrament which they administer to each other. The officiating Priest is the Church’s official witness, and he bears the Church’s blessing: but that blessing no more marries them than the blessing at the end of the Communion Service would. As a Roman priest once said to me, “I solemnize many marriages; but I am forbidden by the laws of my Church ever to celebrate that Sacrament myself!”

In other words, the teaching of Western sacramental theology—which must be taken as logically and historically correct, although the Eastern Orthodox sometimes regard it as a cause of offense—is that Christian marriage is simply the marriage of Christians. The Ministers of the Sacrament are the contracting parties. Hence the sacredness and ecclesiastical validity of a marriage are in no wise dependent upon the official who supervises the execution of the contract. And the marriage of two baptized persons before a Justice of the Peace is exactly as sacramental as one performed before the Archbishop of Canterbury [although for Christians deliberately to avoid seeking the Church’s blessing on their union may indicate that they have not in fact intended to enter into the relation of Christian marriage].

Thus it is not difficult to see why the Church during her first thousand years felt no necessity to take over the ceremonies of the contract. She did not do so until a growing alliance with the State put more and more of the supervision of the personal life of the people in her hands—for example, made her the custodian and executor of all wills. And when at long last she assumed control of the nuptial rites, she was content to take over the existing folk customs with very little change. These customs varied in detail from one country to another; they still exist with considerable diversity in Roman Catholic lands. American churchmen may note with pleased surprise that the official wedding service used by Romans in the United States resembles the one in our Prayer Book far more closely than it does the minimum requirements of the Rituale Romanum. The reason is simple: both the form of the American Prayer Book and that adopted by the Council of Baltimore are directly descended from the service used in the English language by the Church of England before the Reformation.

It is distinctly interesting to see how some usages reflecting very primitive social conditions have been adopted and adapted to Christian use, and sublimated to express more spiritual purposes, or to harmonize with conditions of a more developed civilization. Even when not incorporated into the Church’s ceremonies, they have lingered on as customs of the people in connection with a wedding. People of fashion in ancient Rome regarded late May and early June as particularly auspicious times for a marriage. There is still a popular predilection for “June weddings”; though under modern conditions it has been observed that the month of September is slightly ahead of June—no doubt in large part as a result of summer-vacation romances.

As the marriage contract is of the very essence of the relation, and in our view even of the Sacrament of Matrimony, it is of interest to see how it has developed with changing circumstances. In the most primitive situation of all, a young fellow in a patriarchal family was forbidden by strictest taboo to have anything to do with the women of his own tribe. If he wanted a home of his own, he was forced to resort to what is known as exogamy—to marry a woman from another family group. At first, the bride’s consent was not necessary, and “marriage by capture” the rule. Among the nomadic Hebrews, the essential ceremony of a marriage was the groom’s publicly carrying his bride to his tent, a nuptial feature which lingers on in the popular custom of carrying the bride over the threshold of her new home, and is also symbolized in some countries by the holding of canopies over the heads of the bridal pair. The joining of hands in all church rites exemplifies the reception of the bride into her husband’s clan.

Another type of marriage dating from the primordial patriarchal family was “marriage by purchase,” which was based on the notion that women were valuable property. Indeed, among all uncivilized peoples, the women really do all the work; the men consider that they make their entire economic contribution by hunting and fishing—which, as all men know, are recreations. Consequently, if a father was to be deprived of the profitable services of his daughter, he insisted on being indemnified.

By the time of the classical period in Rome, this had already been modified in such a way that the payments by the groom for his bride were given back to her by her father in one way or another. From this source derives the trousseau provided by the parents, the dowry paid by the groom and settled upon the wife and her children, and the custom of wedding presents generally—note that they are always the property of the bride. Incidentally, the ring presented by the groom at the ceremony of solemn betrothal was originally a token symbol of the dowry. Thus the engagement ring was the first and, once, the only ring. The wedding ring, so called, was a later development, a doublet, when it had come about that two rites, a betrothal and an espousal, were necessary to make a wedding.

While all betrothal services feature the consent of the parents, the primitive idea of women as property lingered longest among the barbaric Teutons. The “giving away of the bride” by her father, which Cranmer incorporated in the First Prayer Book out of the rite of the Archdiocese of York, was of Teutonic origin and unknown to South Europe. We have readily sublimated this detail: the dropping of the promise of the bride “to obey” her husband has transformed the gesture of conveying of the bride from her father’s control to that of her husband, to transferring her from the protection of her childhood home to that of her husband’s loving care.

When we turn to the actual espousals, we observe that modern popular customs have retained some details which the Church has not deigned to notice. A fear that an envious evil spirit might intervene to spoil the good luck of the happy pair appears in the festal array of the bridesmaids, which seems to have been designed to confuse him and make it difficult for him to identify the bride. The convention that the best man should spend the night before the wedding at the house of the groom is of similar origin. The chiming of the “happy wedding-bells” is not mere exuberance, but a charm to ban malignant demons. The driving out of the newly wedded pair symbolizes their journey to their new home; and the rice and old shoes with which they are pelted contain reminiscences of former pagan fertility cults.

The church ceremonies of the Espousals embody some rather notable survivals of classical rites. It appears that the Roman patricians had certain religious ceremonies distinctive of their class, which seem to have died out about the time that Christianity appeared. Yet since weddings are notoriously “fashionable” functions, in which the participants are determined to put on as impressive a display as they know how to do, it is not surprising that elements of these old Roman rites lingered in people’s memories and were incorporated in the customary observances of the Christians.

In this old Roman use, the bride wore a distinctive veil, and both parties were crowned with flowers. The Church very properly exchanged the gay, festive flame-colored Roman bridal veil for the white of innocency, and arrayed her in the white robes of her Baptism. The metal crowns of all Eastern, and some Western, rites, the bridal bouquet, and the lavish wedding flowers are descended from the floral crowns.

After the final vows, and the ancient joining of hands, the climax of the pre-Christian religious service was the confarreatio, which was the sacramental partaking from the altar of a sacred barley cake, especially prepared by the vestal virgins. Then followed the wedding feast. All that the Church needed to do was to substitute the Christian Eucharist for the pagan sacrament. That it was such a substitution is shown by the custom which still prevails of administering the Holy Communion only to the newly married pair, and by the inclusion in the Nuptial Mass of special benedictions of the marriage. But the memory of the mystic farreum also still survives in the form of the Wedding Cake.

The Wedding Feast of the Romans remains. It is usually called “the Wedding Breakfast” (no matter at what hour it is held) because the Nuptial Eucharist was necessarily celebrated in the morning. This Eucharist, as we have seen, is far older than a religious observance of the marriage contract. It was expected, and practically insisted upon, until in medieval times the Church set up certain holy seasons which must not be disturbed by the merrymaking of a marriage. During these times, the conclusion of the contract was permitted, but the Eucharist and other festivities forbidden. [The First Prayer Book assumes the custom of the Nuptial Eucharist, and the Second Prayer Book of 1552 formally requires it.] Then, at the Restoration, some grim and rather uncharitable objections of the Puritans caused the removal of the requirement that the parties must receive the Communion on the day of their wedding, from the Prayer Book of 1662.² But a remembrance of the old custom which required a Nuptial Eucharist survived [until recently] in the English law, which made it illegal to perform a marriage after three o’clock in the afternoon.

Inheritances from Jewish Sources

The pre-Christian elements in the Book of Common Prayer include matter of still greater importance than these picturesque survivals from ancient pagan practice which we have been considering. We find, as we might expect, that our forms of worship owe a still greater debt to the Mother Church of the Old Testament.

It is probably to the Jews that we owe the fact that we have a Prayer Book. The services of the Synagogue were conducted by means of fixed orders of worship. And the first Apostles, who had been reared in that worship, undoubtedly laid the foundations of ordered pattern upon which all their successors built.

The Church, in our day, is afflicted with some people who are so proud of being up-to-date, that they have been known to wonder aloud whether in our advanced and privileged age it is worth while to read the Old Testament at all in a Christian Church. It may be salutary to recall that during the first quarter-century or so of the Church’s life the only Scriptures in existence were the books of the Old Testament, for not a word of the New Testament had yet been written down. At that time the Prophecy, as they later called it, was the only Lesson read at the Holy Communion. And the oldest stage of all known liturgies is provided with a Prophetic Lesson, as well as the later Epistle and Gospel. As time went by, it developed that people were too lazy to attend to three lessons in one service. The oldest one, the Prophecy, dropped out for the most part, though Rome still retains it on some ancient days such as Ember Wednesdays and Good Friday; and the Missal presents a good many examples, and even our Prayer Book has a few, where the Prophecy has remained and it is the Epistle that is omitted. This accounts for the fact that once in a while there is rather unhandily announced some selection from the Old Testament in the place, and under the title, of “the Epistle.” But if the Prophetic Lesson has been largely eliminated from the Communion Service, it is made up for in large part by devoting the First Lesson at Morning and Evening Prayer always to the Old Testament, as background for the developed teaching of the New Testament in the Second Lesson.

Moreover, the Psalter, the hymnal of the Jewish Church and the grandest collection of religious poetry ever made, plays a large part in the Prayer Book—a much larger part, indeed, than the mere reading of one or more Psalms at Morning and Evening Prayer. The Versicles and Responses, which form a structural framework of most of the Prayer Book offices, are chiefly taken from the Psalter. Phrases from the Psalms often give wings to a Collect. Indeed, the whole of the liturgical style of the Prayer Book is largely modeled upon the Psalter’s inspired poetry. In fact, it may be said that the Psalms overflow the Prayer Book; they are the prime source of the hymnal as well—all modern hymnody being a glorious development of the metrical Psalter.

The Nicene Creed

One cardinal feature of the Prayer Book which took its rise directly from the Jewish worship is the ecumenical Creed. The Jewish Creed was very brief: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. 6:4). These ten words seem to us only too obvious. We simply cannot imagine anyone who believes in a God at all, worshipping more than one God. That is because this is one of the great truths which, once stated, make it forever after impossible for anyone to believe anything else. Nevertheless, the history of the Old Testament shows clearly that this truth was most slowly and difficultly acquired. And the proclamation of the unity of the Divine Creator and Ruler of the Universe was in fact a most memorable achievement of the religious spirit of the Hebrew people. It has been acknowledged as not only the foundation of all subsequent religious thought, but also the indispensable presupposition which alone has made possible the impressive achievements of all modern science, since so long as men were confused with the idea of “gods many and lords many” directing the operation of the visible world, their minds were not open to the conception of the uniformity of nature and the universality of physical laws.

This grand and simple conception of the unity of God was the starting point of Christian theology. When the Disciples saw the Master whom they had known in the days of his flesh crucified, risen, and ascended, and came to acknowledge him as their Lord and God, there was no question of what God. He was the one God; the same God; there could be no other. When again they were filled with the power and presence of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, once more they accepted the revelation of God in another Person: but it was still the same God. And so it is inevitable that we find the words of the ancient Jewish Creed incorporated at the beginning of the universal Christian Creed: I believe in one God. [To Christians the One God is known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and so the structure of the Creeds is the threefold Name into which we are baptized, its second section amplified by what is sometimes called the kerygma or proclamation of the Gospel, the brief statement of the mighty works of God in Christ. But at the heart of our faith stands the ancient belief of Israel in One God.]

The Prayer Book preserves some significant traces of the most primitive days of the Early Church, entirely clear to the eye of the historian, though usually ignored or otherwise interpreted by users in this age.

In these days when it is perfectly legal to go to church—or indeed never to do so—it is difficult for us to realize that there was a time when it was all a man’s life was worth to be a Christian. But the Early Church was made to realize only too well the meaning of the warning of our Lord which so puzzled the Disciples in the days of his training: “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34)—in modern terms, “Any man that dares to follow me walks with a rope around his neck; he stands in the shadow of the gallows tree!”

The Persecutions

It may be that the reason why we burn candles upon the Holy Table in an open church in a free land, is that for three centuries during which the Church had no place for worship save in rooms closed, locked, and more carefully tiled than any lodge, or in the everlasting darkness of the Catacombs; and the tapers which we display “for glory and for beauty,” and as a speaking symbol of the Light of the World, were once needed for illumination.

The Prayer for Rulers

It is no wonder that the days of persecution impressed upon the Church’s liturgy some peculiarities which remain to the present day. One of these is the place which the Prayer for Rulers occupies in all the Church’s forms of formal Intercession. The petitions for Civil Rulers always come as the first item in the seven examples of these in the Prayer Book: in the series of such intercessions in Morning and Evening Prayer, in the little summary form which occurs in the shape of alternate Versicles before the Collect of the Day at Evening Prayer, in the Great Litany, in the Bidding Prayer, in the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church, in the Intercession at Evening Prayer for Families, and in the additional social service prayer entitled “A General Intercession” in the Additional Family Prayers.

Most American Churchmen think that this must be regarded as an “Erastian” feature, an inheritance from the feudal ideas of the Middle Ages, or from the fact that our Mother Church of England is an Established Church. This is not the case. This feature goes back to the very earliest days—so early, that it is recorded in the New Testament. In I Timothy we find: “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (I Tim. 2:1–2).

It was a fact that the crucifixion of our Lord under Pontius Pilate taught the founders of the Christian Church something which the Jews would never learn: that the power of the State was irresistible; moreover, that it was providential—“the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1); “sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (I Pet. 2:14). Yet it was God’s will that the Early Church follow in the bloodstained footsteps of the Passion of her Lord. The ruler who ideally should have been the guardian of the rights of all men refused to recognize that this upstart religion had any rights. He who should have been the Church’s protector was its greatest and most constant danger.

With great restraint, as became those who knew that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, the Early Church phrased its petitions accordingly. The prayer for the Emperor was made an integral part of the opening supplication for the Peace of the Church. Later liturgies, under kings who had become nursing-fathers of the Church, used fulsome language about “our most religious, Christ-loving Kings,” “our divinely-preserved, orthodox Kings”—but it must not be forgotten that the Early Church had prayed for Nero! The oldest Syrian liturgy presents what is, doubtless, the original form of this prayer, whose burden is “that they may be peaceably disposed toward us” and goes on to echo the words of I Timothy. And Justin Martyr, addressing the pagan Emperor in an attempt to explain why the Christians could not join in the “patriotic” emperor-worship of his day, reflects the same idea: “Wherefore we worship God alone; but we pray for you also, that with the royal power ye may be found to have a prudent mind.” The original, and eternal, objective of the State Prayers achieves perfect form in the Collect for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity: “that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness.”

It may well be that Erastian ideas may have had something to do with preserving the State Prayers in this peculiarly significant place, though they had nothing to do with putting them there in the first place, since after persecutions ceased, the Church was everywhere established by the State. But it has not been in vain that this position has survived. We Americans have made such a point of the absolute separation of Church and State in the name of freedom of religion, that we have forgotten what inspired this kind of petition in the Primitive Church: that this freedom, together with all others, is in deadly peril of being wiped out absolutely in a slave state. Few people know—it might be said, few people have been willing to know—that during the autocracy of Stalin in Russia, no less than fifteen thousand bishops and priests were put to death for their religion, and more humble Christians have laid down their lives for their faith than during the entire three centuries of the Great Persecutions. It is not enough that we should pray for mere “Christian” rulers and magistrates, that they may truly and impartially administer justice . . . to the maintenance of God’s true religion, and virtue”; we need to pray for the Peace of the Church everywhere. All our earnest and most agonized resolves to achieve peace, unity, security, and happiness for all mankind must comprehend the vital fact that no man anywhere upon earth can be altogether free, until “the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15).

The Prayer for Prisoners

There is another curious survival of the days of persecution in the form of the petition for “all prisoners and captives.” This must impress everyone as a charitable thought. When attention is focused on it, it seems paradoxical too. One realizes, with a certain flattered amusement, that there is a gratifyingly small proportion of Episcopalians in jail. One might be inclined to back away from it entirely when the necessary thought crosses the mind that this situation may be due less to the moral cogency of our religion and its universal practice by all its adherents, than it is to the fact that our constituency so largely lies among those in comfortable economic brackets.

Quite evidently, this cannot be what is meant. What, then? Another look at the ancient Syrian liturgies will make it perfectly plain that the supplications were offered for those “in bonds, and prisons, and mines, and exiles for the Name of the Lord.” The petition arose in the days when any meeting of the Christian congregation might find some beloved member—it might be their Bishop himself—who was absent, arrested under the fatal accusation of being a Christian. It is true that the persecutions were neither continuous nor universal; the first world-wide and completely systematic attempt to wipe this “pernicious brood” off the earth did not take place till the year 250. In some parts of the world there were long periods of relative security. Nevertheless, Christianity was everywhere an outlawed religion; and anywhere at any time the malice of a personal enemy, or even (as has been recorded) the snitching of a defaulting debtor, might precipitate an arrest, with the dreadful alternatives of recantation or martyrdom.

The insecurities of life and travel in Europe during the Dark Ages probably kept this supplication alive. Those were insecurities which we thought had been left completely behind in the days of barbarism, except for tiny pockets in the underworld. Yet our times have seen barbarism break out again, on a greater scale and with more satanic power than anything ever known in all the history of the race, so that the atrocities of Attila and Genghis Khan fade into insignificance. In very recent days, there have been many for whom the words of the Litany ring out with heart-shaking force.

Yet it is very remarkable that one unbroken petition in the Litany refers to the earliest, as well as the latest, developments in the long history of the Church—“That it may please thee to preserve all those who travel by land, by water, or by air, all women in childbirth, all sick persons, and young children; and to show thy pity upon all prisoners and captives”—and carries our minds back in one breathless swoop through a vista of nearly two thousand years, from the days of air transport to the days of persecution!

Thus not even the horrors of a whole world in agony were too much for the Prayer Book to express. The problem of human suffering, in a world made by a good God, is the hardest intellectual problem which man has had to face. It is a problem which the philosophers have found insoluble. The Church does not pretend to offer any intellectual solution for it; but in the power of Christ’s Redemption, it does offer a practical solution. It brings the assurance that no man can possibly be called upon to endure more than the Son of God in the substance of our flesh first endured for him. While suffering cannot be adequately explained, it can be nailed to the Cross of Christ and offered up in sacrifice to Almighty God.

And therein is the finality of the Christian religion. Any religion is good enough, as long as things are going our way. There is only one religion that is good enough when we are faced with overwhelming suffering, loss, and death. There is only one religion which dares to call upon God—not in avoidance, but in acceptance—“in all time of our tribulation” as well as “in all time of our prosperity, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment.”

The Catechism

Still another inheritance from the age of persecution is represented in the feature of the Church Catechism in preparation for membership. At the very first, new converts were baptized upon the spot on the mere expression of their faith and desire. No instruction was bestowed, no “screening” imposed, in the case of the “three thousand” adherents on the Day of Pentecost. The chance-met Ethiopian, with whom Philip the Deacon “thumbed a ride,” was instantly taken at his word.

But when the difficult days arrived, when Christianity was a forbidden religion, the Church learned that it did not pay to admit impulsive Christians. Too many of them, threatened with torture, recanted—or worse, betrayed their brethren. As a guard against the admission to the Church of the casual convert who might later fall away, a system of gradual and systematic instruction was set up. This normally lasted for three years: in those days it took as long for a pagan inquirer to become a Christian as it does in these for a layman to make his way into the ministry of the Church!

In order even to become enrolled for instruction, the Church required Sponsors, to insure that this was a reliable person to be intrusted with the knowledge of the Christian Mysteries. This is the origin of our present requirement that each person to be baptized shall have three Godparents. We have converted it into something of a legal fiction, in the designation of “securities” to take the baptismal vows on behalf of an unconscious infant, and to see to it that he is brought up to fulfill those promises. But where we think of Godparents to guarantee the faith of the Church to the individual, the primitive Church sought responsible persons to guarantee the faithfulness of the candidate to the Church.

During the long period of probation and indoctrination, some substantial parts of the plan of instruction were reserved, and not communicated to the candidates until the final six-week period before their initiation into the Christian brotherhood. It was this final time of intensive instruction which determined the length and, to some extent, the content of the season of Lent. If the idea of this season had been merely to commemorate the passion of our Lord, the Church might have rested content with the three days of the time of Irenaeus; or with Holy Week, as they did a little later; or with the two weeks beginning with Passion Sunday, which was the whole of the season at one time, as the Roman Church still marks by the veiling of crosses and images for that period alone; or with the three weeks commencing at what is now Mid-Lent Sunday, as is shown by the folk-custom of the festivities of Mi-Careme, a survival of the time when it was actually Carnival—Farewell to Meat—before the short fasting-season. But the period of six weeks seems to be a naturally correct space for a session of concentrated instruction. It is the shortest time during which the indispensable subject matter can be covered. Experience has also shown that it is about the longest time that unanimous attendance can be exacted of a mixed group. The Church did, indeed, experiment with longer Lents, even to the extreme length of nine weeks, stretching clear back to Septuagesima; but they did not work, and had to be abandoned again. The really determining factor was the special preparation for the Easter Baptisms. The “Forty Days” was an afterthought, a rationalization. The idea of a fast of forty days in commemoration of our Lord’s fast before the Temptation was only a kind of symbolic numerology.

The clearest piece of evidence that Lent was chiefly for the end of the instruction of the candidates for Baptism on Easter Even is found in the Epistle and Gospel for the Third Sunday in Lent. These propers were assigned in the sixth century in preparation for what was called a “Mass of Scrutiny” held the following Wednesday. In the active periods of persecution, the Scrutinies were a final and formal “looking over” of those who were proposed for membership in the Church—exactly as Mowgli was presented, with his Sponsors, to the Seeonee wolf-pack. When the Scrutinies became mere formalities, as of course they had by the sixth century, they were made the occasion for repeated ceremonies of Exorcism, in which every one, down to the acolytes, participated. These Exorcisms are pictorially represented on Lent III by the Gospel of the casting out of the evil spirit—with the lesson that the “empty house” must be filled with positive goodness, lest a worse thing befall. And the Epistle, “Be ye followers of God, as dear children,” refers to the tender admonitions of the baptismal instruction.

The Dismissals and the “Mass”

The matters of Christian instruction which were reserved and imparted only in the final Lenten period, included the Eucharistic Canon, the full form of the Creed to be professed at the Baptism, and the Lord’s Prayer. The candidates, therefore, were admitted only to the preparatory part of the Communion Service—that which corresponds in content to our Morning Prayer. They were instructed and then dismissed with a blessing. This was done before the Creed in the Eastern Churches. At Rome, where the Creed was not employed at the Mass before the eleventh century, they were dismissed before the Gospel.¹

Of course, the need for this “Discipline of the Secret,” as it was called, was over when the conversion of Constantine brought an end to the persecutions. Nevertheless, ecclesiastical inertia preserved the empty forms of it for about five hundred years thereafter. Indeed, the Greek Church still goes through the motions of the ancient “Expulsion of the Catechumens”; but it is a mere gesture: no one leaves the Church. But the Disciplina arcani has left several traces upon our Prayer Book.

The Dismissal of the Catechumens after the first part of the rite, and the Dismissal of the Faithful at the end of it, were the source of the peculiar word “Mass,” which the Church of Rome employs as its most common name for its Eucharistic Liturgy. The First Prayer Book of 1549 retained it as one of the titles of the Communion Service. The Roman rite still preserves the original setting at the end of the service: “Ite, missa est”—“Go: it is the Dismissal”—or, as Dom Gregory Dix paraphrases it: “That’s all. Good morning, everybody.” It was by the figure of speech known as a synecdoche—the use of the name of a part for the whole—that the term came to be applied to the entire service, by way of the convenient but not particularly exact phrases “the Mass of the Catechumens” and “the Mass of the Faithful.” We use exactly the same sort of synecdoche when we speak of our service as the “Holy Communion”—a term which properly applies to the part of the service wherein the Sacrament is administered to the people. Rome so employs it to the present day, using it freely, but meaning thereby only that part, never the whole.

Thus the word “Mass” contains about as little meaning of its own as any word which the human mind has ever invented. What proper meaning it ever had, it has utterly lost; and the vacuum has been filled by assigning to it the required significance of “the Eucharistic Sacrifice.”

Though the word “Mass” was dropped out in the Second Prayer Book and had no currency in our Church thereafter, it was revived in the last century, and a good many Anglicans make a point of using it, precisely because they do believe in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and like a short and simple word to say so. The Greek term “Eucharist” is just a little too fancy for everyday employment. It is not intelligible at all to the untaught, and it seems just a little precious even to the initiate, though it is conceded that it does occur in the Prayer Book and the word “Mass” does not.²

There are real objections to a free use of the word “Mass.” The Reformation detestation of “the horrible abominations of the Mass” is still alive in many people. Such persons recoil at the use of the term and consider that it indicates an absolute capitulation to Rome. To be sure, that is probably very seldom true, since most of our people who use it are only trying to assert at the most that Anglicanism is as good as Romanism, while modestly waiting for the world to assure us that it is much better!

All the same, all that to-do about the “abominations of the Mass” was not wholly empty sound and fury. The actual text of the Latin service, if one of the crudest, is also one of the most harmless liturgies ever devised. It does express the idea of a Sacrifice and of a Real Presence; but it does not contain anything remotely resembling the notion of a ritual immolation of Christ or of the theory of Transubstantiation. Those figments were rationalizations imposed from the outside upon a service which gave no warrant for them whatever. To say that the Sacrifice of the Mass was a repetition of the Sacrifice upon Calvary, or that Calvary availed for the Original Sin of the race, but that men must look to the Mass for the remission of their actual sins in this life—such things were unmistakably “abominations.”

Cranmer felt that there was nothing the matter with the Latin Mass which a judicious translation into English would not cure. So he made what Dr. Brightman in one place calls a “liberal” translation of it, and in another an “eloquent” translation. By a process of separating its real content from the old medieval associations which had overgrown and completely concealed its form—from all the hocus-pocus in other words—in the fresh dress of a new language it recovered its primordial meaning.

The Creed

We have remarked that the Christian Creed was another element of the reserved teaching of the Disciplina arcani. There was no particular reason why it should have been—the Christians were always ready to explain their faith to anyone who would give them a fair hearing—but one way to make sure that the neophytes actually learned the formula was to present it to them as a special privilege of their initiation. In much the same way, in the present century the Church in South Africa has revived the Dismissal of the Catechumens for their native converts, to make them appreciate their privileges as communicants by not admitting them to the sight of the Holy Mysteries until they have earned the right to partake of them.

The Creed was a development of the original baptismal Profession of Faith as required of Gentile converts. In the Acts and Epistles we find allusion only to Baptism in the Name of Jesus. Acceptance of Christ was all that was needed in the first Jewish adherents: they did not have to declare that they believed in God. But with the spread of the Gospel to Gentiles who might believe in dozens of gods or none at all, this point needed to be added. And as by that time the Church had acquired a rich experience of the power of God the Spirit, this also was included, to form a simple acknowledgment of belief in God the Holy Trinity. This is evident from the fact that the first formulae for Baptism in the Name of the Trinity are found in the Gospel according to St. Matthew and in the early treatise the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Didache), both of which originated at Antioch, the capital of Gentile Christianity.

From that point on, the simple formula was expanded in carefully chosen language. The so-called Apostles’ Creed, which was the Baptismal Creed of the Church of Rome, remained relatively plain, and very realistic and factual in its terms. The Creeds of the Eastern Churches were a little more elaborate, rhetorical, and theological, as befitted the Greek genius. [The Council of Nicaea based its Creed on a Baptismal Creed of the eastern type, adding a few phrases such as “God of God,” and “of one substance” to safeguard it against the misinterpretations of Arianism. The Nicene phrases and further additions were brought into the Creeds in use at Jerusalem and elsewhere, and from this type of formula comes our “creed commonly called Nicene,” which first appears at Constantinople in A.D. 381.]

The Christian Year is one of the most valuable possessions of the Teaching Church. The Church does not leave the contents of the faith to the Catechism (to be learned in childhood and then forgotten), or to the Creeds (to be repeated mechanically without thinking), or to the Articles of Religion (to be filed away in the archives). Nor does she leave it to the whim of the minister to dilate on his favorite passages or ride his pet hobbies, and thus to limit the proclamation of the faith to his understanding of the same. Year by year, the Church brings before us the great events upon which our religion was founded, and the lives and teachings of the Master and his followers, in the inspired words of the Apostles and Evangelists. The way in which this Church Calendar came into being and now operates for our benefit is most instructive and interesting.

The Year and Its Seasons

The Year that we follow is not quite the time that it takes the earth to make one circuit about the central sun. It is really governed by the seasons, and was originally measured from the winter solstice, the day when the sun rises the farthest south, and then every day appears a little farther north, bringing light and life to the chilled Northern Hemisphere. The earth spins like a top, with its axis inclined 23½° to the plane of its orbit. But like a top, the axis “weaves,” describing a circle of 47° on the vault of the sky. It takes about 21,000 years to complete this circle. Some 10,000 years ago, the bright star Vega, which shines like a blue-white diamond down in the northwestern sky at this season of the year, was the Pole Star; and about as long in the future, it will be pole star again. The result is that the seasons, if measured by an exact revolution of the earth about the sun, as indicated by the stars, would be about 20 minutes earlier every year. Before the star-watchers caught on to this fact, the midwinter solstice slid backward in the calendar, from January 1 to December 25, and then to December 21. If this had been allowed to go on, 10,000 years hence we would be keeping Christmas in midsummer, and Easter in the autumn—as they have to do in the Southern Hemisphere now. As Christianity originated in the Northern Hemisphere, and most of the people on earth live there, this was not to be tolerated; we cast our majority vote, and nailed down the year to the seasons instead of to the stars.

Primitive man felt the rhythms of the seasons of the solar year in his very bones, and arranged the observances of his religion accordingly. To him, the sun as the source of light and life in the world typified the Godhead. The birth, blossoming, fruiting, and death of the year were elaborated in the festivals which set forth the course of human life, and made the basis of myths which represented the imaginary deeds of some saviour-god who redeemed mortality to the life eternal.

This ancient sun-worship has touched the expression of the Christian faith, in the words “Light of Light” in the Nicene Creed, and in the fact that we still turn to the sacred East at the recitation of the Creed. This can be done with entire safety and propriety for the very reason that the Christian religion is not a made-up mythology. It is based on facts. We are not disturbed at the parallel of the Semitic mystery religions, which proclaimed a saviour who died for his people and rose again with the resurrection of all nature in the spring of the year. The Crucifixion occurred at the time of the Passover, which was an existing festival commemorating a spring migration—the flight out of Egypt. This in turn revived an older agricultural festival of the Firstfruits: and only at this level do Christians make contact with the rhythms of the solar year. And Christmas, though it directly supplanted the pagan midwinter festival of the Unconquered Sun, was possibly assigned to its date for quite different reasons.

So it is all clear again that we can feel the “mood of Nature” as a scenic background for the Christian observances: in the gathering gloom of the darkening year to celebrate the season of Advent, with the foretaste of promise in its keynote, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand!”; at Christmas to rejoice in the rising of the eternal Sun of Righteousness; at Easter to feel the Resurrection of our Lord mirrored in the thrilling coming to life again of all visible nature.

The Months and Weeks

Probably the use of the month was older than the reckoning of the year. The smallest child greets new moon and full moon as a frequently recurring wonder. It takes longer experience to keep track of the slower cycle of the seasons. And at first the month was simply the revolution of the moon, as its name would indicate. The year actually contains about 11 days over 12 lunar months. This necessitates an insertion every year to make the reckoning with the year come out right—which is awkward. The Jews stuck to it; but the Romans got tired of it, and got together the arbitrary divisions we follow, which do not say anything about the position of the moon.

The Jewish “Sabbath” seems originally to have been a monthly, not a weekly, observance. “New moons and sabbaths”—how often the old Prophets talk about those! And yet the full moon was much more important to them than new moon—they must have been speaking of that.

Astronomically, it is 29½ days from one new moon to the next. But there is a little problem about that: actual new moon is when the moon is in line with the sun, and can’t be seen at all. The moon is really about 1½ days old by the time its first thin crescent is glimpsed. Subtract 1½ from 29½, and you have 28 days—exactly four of our weeks. It is plain where the week came from: it represented, roughly, the quarters of the moon.

So the Semitic peoples adopted the little cycle of seven days of the week, and named the days from the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets. It happened that this planetary week was already known at Rome at the time that Christianity appeared. It was a good thing for the spread of Christianity that this was so. The Early Church would have been put to it to get in its weekly commemoration of the Resurrection if they had had to dodge about in, say, an eight-day or a ten-day rhythm of life in the Empire. It gave the Christian observances an opportunity to get a foothold in the procession of the Roman days, and later, to dominate them.

The Jews fasted on Monday and Thursday each week, and rested on Saturday. The Christians kept Sunday as a weekly reminder of the Resurrection and transferred the fasts to Wednesday and Friday. The Friday fast remains, as a recollection of Good Friday; but the Wednesday fast has disappeared, except in the four ember weeks.

The Two Calendar Systems

The calendar of the Christian Year, therefore, really consists of two different systems of reckoning, combining each year to a different result. One is the Roman calendar of the civil year, composed of months and days, and carrying the fixed festivals or dated days. This is a solar calendar and takes account of nothing but the revolution of the earth about the sun. The other is based on the Jewish calendar, where the lunar month is the determining factor, and has all the movable festivals. It is a system of Sundays and their weekdays.

The movable calendar depends upon Easter. The Jews worked that 11-day intercalation to the 12 lunar months in such a way that Passover was always the first full moon in the spring [by adding an extra month to seven years in every nineteen]. Our Easter is always the Sunday after—“the first Sunday after the first full moon which falls on or next after the Vernal Equinox.” The Prayer Book contains tables to figure that out in advance, instead of waiting and taking a look at the moon. These tables are all about “Golden Numbers” and such. A recent novelist said, “Golden Numbers! Beautiful words! You wouldn’t think, to hear it, that they are only logarithms in disguise!” Most of us follow the advice, “The best way to find Easter is to buy a penny almanac.”

But once Easter is found, everything else in the Christian Year is found with it. Every date in the year is then fixed for its ecclesiastical bearings. Easter moves up and down the calendar in a range of 35 days—five full weeks—and carries with it, in an unbroken block, three-quarters or more of the year, from Septuagesima Sunday to the last numbered Sunday after Trinity. The slack is taken up in the flexible ends of the Epiphany and the Trinity seasons. There may be from one to six Sundays after Epiphany, 22 to 27 after Trinity.

From the Sunday Next Before Advent to Epiphany, the observances revolve around a much smaller seven-day cycle around Christmas. Christmas also determines the feasts of the Annunciation and St. John Baptist (the first, nine months before; and the latter, six months before); and the Epiphany and the Purification (12 days and 40 days after, respectively). It is also curious that the occurrence of Christmas and the Annunciation on the 25th day of their respective months, and of St. John on the 24th day, set the precedent for putting five other Saints’ Days on the 24th or 25th day: St. Paul, January 25; St. Matthias, February 24; St. Mark, April 25; St. James, July 25; and St. Bartholomew, August 24 [perhaps because the Romans, who numbered days backwards from the Kalends (first) of the following month, thought of the last week, beginning “seventh day before the Kalends of January” as really belonging to the following month, so these festivals stood as sentinels at the beginning of each month—and the extra day in leap year was long added after February 22.]

The Fixed Feasts

The “dated days” of the Roman church calendar began their development before the varying groups of Sundays composing the liturgical Seasons were differentiated or thought to be of much importance.

The martyrs were the first to be so commemorated, with the celebration of their “birthdays” into the life eternal. The first of these commemorations was that of St. Polycarp in a.d. 158. The original Roman calendar was full of them—so much so that it has been called “the calendar of the cemeteries.” But many of them were pushed aside by commemorations of later worthies. The old English calendar before the Reformation, for example, had many more of them than the modern Roman. Often the Church did not know dates for the deaths of Martyrs, their fame having spread after their death. So a second class of commemorations grew up, that of the so-called “translations,” the removal of their bones from their original resting-place to some stately shrine. The earliest of these was that of St. Peter and St. Paul, on June 29 (a.d. 258), the day still observed for St. Peter.

A third class of dates was the anniversaries of the dedication of important churches. The Transfiguration (August 6) goes back to the dedication of the fourth-century basilica on Mt. Tabor, the traditional Mount of the Transfiguration. The dates we keep for St. Andrew, SS. Philip and James, Michaelmas, and All Saints are all anniversaries of dedications of local parish churches in Rome.

These remembrances of outstanding Christians throughout the ages whose lives were crowned with victorious success are in themselves of outstanding value for us. All Saints’ Day, on which we sum them all up, is one of the greatest days of the year. But there were drawbacks to the developments which these observances took throughout the centuries. They so crowded the calendar that the color of the Season was seldom seen. Nearly always, the “green” days were displaced by commemorations of red or white.¹

The real achievements of the Saints were also often overlaid with legends which were pure mythology. The cultus of the Saints became riddled with gross superstitions. So Cranmer at the Reformation reduced the list to those only who were mentioned in Holy Scripture. It is a pretty short list: five festivals of our Lord; twelve days commemorating fourteen “Apostles”; two Evangelists; and five others: the Precursor, St. John Baptist; the Protomartyr, St. Stephen; the Innocents; All Angels; and All Saints. No doubt, Cranmer thought he was getting back to the observances of the primitive Church. This is by no means the case, since most of the festivals of the Apostles were of distinctly late appearance. St. Barnabas, for instance, did not get in before about the twelfth century. The point, however, is of importance only to the historian. The Church’s cycle of devotions is distinctly enriched by these recurring remembrances of the personalities of the founders of our religion, presented in the words of Holy Scripture.

The Church of England has retained a reminder of the former wealth of these commemorations of the human figures of Christian history by including a partial list of Saints of every age in the calendar, but without providing proper services for them in the Prayer Book. This is all to the good, as far as it goes. It has been suggested that the more outstanding of these Black Letter Days, as they are called, might be provided with proper services for optional use on weekdays, by citing the Epistle and Gospel in the form of a lectionary notice (not printing it out) and by providing that the services on these “minor holy days” should not be used on Sundays or holy days of the Christian Year which already have propers of their own. This provision would be a great help to churches which have a daily celebration. Summer conferences, for example, usually do; and while their members are delighted at the opportunity of making a daily communion, they are a little dismayed at going through services which are identical in every word for seven days in a row.

The Cycle of Sundays

The fixed feasts have been treated first because they were the first to be developed as a definite system. Even so, however, Sundays are primary. As far as the complexities of modern living permit, Sundays are holidays from business and labor, and Christian people are then set free to fulfill their obligations of worship. Even the most devout cannot always attend services on holy days in the middle of the week, such as Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Ascension Day, or All Saints’ Day—occasions that are more important than most of the Sundays. Unless these days are public holidays, people have to go to their jobs.

Thus, it is a little surprising to observe that this system of Sundays is a late development in the Christian Church. The Early Church did, indeed, keep “the Lord’s Day” from the beginning. The experience of the Resurrection on the first day of the week, underscored by the empowering with the Spirit exactly seven weeks later on the Day of Pentecost, set in their minds the pattern of a weekly Easter. The feasts of Easter and Pentecost themselves were observed as such from the first. But apart from them, there were no seasons, no named Sundays; consequently no special prayers or lessons proper to any Sunday.

A preparatory season of Lent before Easter, and a festal season thereafter until Whitsunday, probably became established in the course of the third century; the Council of Nicaea alludes to both as settled features. Also, tradition ascribes to the same period the Roman observance of the original three ember seasons, which the Western Church took over from pagan agricultural festivals.

However, the Christian Year got its real start in the formative fourth century, after the Church had obtained its freedom. One important influence on its development came through the growing ambition of the Bishop of Jerusalem, who fostered local pilgrimages to the holy places on days chosen with reference to the feast of the Resurrection, and moving in the calendar with it. Thus Ætheria, a nun of Aquitaine who visited the Holy City about the year 385, speaks of Lent, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and (probably) Ascension Day.

In this century also, certain speculations which assigned to our Lord’s nativity dates chosen for mystical reasons gave rise to Christmas, Epiphany, and festivals assigned with reference to them. In the West, beginning in Gaul in the sixth century, Christmas acquired its own preparatory season of Advent, on the analogy of Lent. East and West fixed the three Pre-Lenten Sundays also in the sixth century.

Nevertheless, at the end of the eighth century, when Pope Hadrian sent his own service book to Charlemagne, on the latter’s request for a standard book to help clear up the great diversity of use in France, we find that the only Sundays which the papal court was then observing with proper prayers were Easter and Whitsunday and their Octaves, the seasons of Advent, Pre-Lent, and Lent, except for two “Ember” Sundays (our Trinity 4 and 18), no propers were provided for other Sundays falling after Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, or Pentecost.

Sundays not designated in the Sacramentaries and Lectionaries of this period were simply “Common Sundays.” If a given Sunday was not occupied by a fixed holy day, the celebrant chose such prayers as he felt appropriate, either from the rest of the Sacramentary, or possibly from the manuscript collections of prayers, of which many must have been in circulation. The sole survivor of this sort of thing, the so-called Leonine Sacramentary, presents such an unselected accumulation, with an astonishing number of parallel services on the same subjects.

Other books of the time incorporated such material by furnishing blocks of masses and lessons, to be used wherever needed. The Missale Gothicum ends with six Sunday masses. The Gelasian Sacramentary offers eight masses after Easter, and sixteen for any Sunday. The earliest Lectionaries give Gospels for ten Sundays after Epiphany, and Epistles for ten Sundays after Easter, as well as a list of no less than forty-two selections from the Pauline Epistles, with no stipulations as to their use.

Between the ninth and eleventh centuries the Western churches progressively gathered this rather random material together, and arranged it in some sort of order to complete a system of Sundays covering the whole year. The Gallican churches numbered the summer Sundays serially after Pentecost; but after the Octave of Pentecost became Trinity Sunday in the tenth century, the more usual method was to number them serially after Trinity. Rome fought a rearguard action, valiantly endeavoring to stick to its own original method of treating the secular year as primary and intercalating movables into it. Accordingly, Rome did not treat the summer Sundays as a single series after Pentecost—much less as “that great season of the Holy Ghost” which some visionaries, ignorant of the history of the subject, have been fain to find—but as a number of groups of Sundays, tied to outstanding Roman festivals. There might be five Sundays after the Octave of Pentecost, or none—the variability of the Church Year was taken up at this point, avoiding displacing the Sundays of half the year with the same wide swings as Easter. This was the next best arrangement to a fixed Easter, and it is a pity that it did not endure. One Sunday before, and six after, “The Apostles” on June 29 were appointed, five after St. Lawrence on August 10, and six after St. Cyprian on September 14.

Ultimately, however, the specious clarity of the Gallican series commended itself to the Franciscan order, and in the thirteenth century the Franciscan Missal and Breviary became the basis of the standard Roman use generally adopted in the Roman Communion. Meanwhile, Rome had been very reluctant to accept the festival of Trinity Sunday, and did not do so finally until 1334 at the expense of the First Sunday after Pentecost, which was displaced and which remains to this day in the Roman books as a Sunday service always celebrated on a weekday!

Even at the Reformation the story was not quite finished. The English Prayer Book of 1662 made provision for a Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and two Office Lessons on the Second Sunday after Christmas, although the latter did not attain the dignity of a liturgical day with a proper Epistle and Gospel of its own until the American, English, and Scottish books of 1928.

All this various material is now assimilated into a complete and comprehensive pattern of the entire year. It has a simple and effective plan, which falls into two halves. The first part runs from Advent to Trinity Sunday, and is known as the “Festal Cycle.” Clause by clause, and phrase by phrase, it takes up the structure of the Creed, and dramatizes each point of the Christian faith in a series of festivals. The pattern is determined by an outline biography of the life and work of our Lord. Then from Trinity to Advent again, the Church turns from the dominant concern with Christian believing to the practical problems of Christian living. In this second half, there is no particular order or arrangement, but there is a very considerable content of teaching and example on the problems and the goals of this life.

The seasons which make up these two grand divisions of the Christian Year have their own distinctive characteristics and make particular contributions to the whole. Very largely they have their effect from the content of the lessons from the Bible read therein. Next we shall consider the way in which our Church uses the treasures of Holy Scripture.

It is gratifying to note that the Episcopal Church makes greater use of the Holy Scriptures than any other, Catholic or Protestant. Our Protestant brethren are usually content to read only one lesson from the Bible at a given service. We always have two—sometimes three, if you count our comprehensive recitation of the Psalms, which other Protestant churches use very little. As to the Church of Rome, it is true that they have a wider coverage of Epistles and Gospels at the Mass than we do, because they have so many more Holy Days of one sort and another. But the original systematic reading of the Bible at Matins has been curtailed to a mere “token” scheme—as Cranmer complained, certain books were begun in various seasons, “but they were only begun, and never read through”—and the so-called “chapters” at the other Hours of Prayer have been reduced to a single verse. We have remained faithful to Cranmer’s announced objective, that “all the whole Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over once every year” at the daily services of Morning and Evening Prayer. And our latest Lectionary, by providing several choices on Sundays, made nearly all the most worth-while passages available for use at the Sunday services as well.

It has been estimated that something like 95 per cent of the Prayer Book is in the words of Holy Scripture. The Epistles and Gospels, the Psalms and Canticles, the various Sentences, and the groups of Versicles which form the structural turning-points of nearly all the offices of the Book, take up a very large part of it. And all the prayers are themselves a “saturated solution” of scriptural language.

All the great religions of the world have recorded their essential teachings in sacred books, which each reverences as a divine revelation. No ancient faith is, however, properly a “book religion” in the sense that it started with a book, as certain modern sects have done or as a narrow Protestantism without historical perspective sometimes assumes that Christianity did. In each of the great religions there was the same course of development: first a living movement, taught and propagated “mouth to ear,” and preserved, sometimes for considerable periods, in an oral tradition; then, as the movement gathered strength, a fertile production of written records of its origins, fervent presentations of its principles, outpourings of devotion; and at length the formative period of that religion closed with an authoritative collection of its classical writings as its “canon of Sacred Scripture,” arrived at by a process of selection from among its early books.

The content and extent of such scriptures are various. They may comprise some or all of these chief classifications: historical, with the narratives of the heroic ages of the faith; theological, containing their doctrinal revelation of God; ethical, with precepts of right conduct; and devotional, with collections of hymns, prayers, and even complete liturgies of worship.

Judaism and Christianity are alike in being historic religions; they are entirely unique in the sense in which they are historic religions. They are not merely religions in history, but truly historic religions based upon facts, grounded in things which really happened—while all other religious systems are developments of philosophical or devotional speculations. Brahminism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism, all present ideologies in the dress of mythologies. Only the Jewish-Christian line is firmly factual. The very content of its beliefs and the pattern of its worship are definitely linked to events which actually occurred. In this very fact lies the cosmic validity of the Christian faith, as the revelation of God through history.

We, therefore, find that these two religions stand together again in a special emphasis upon one particular group of their historical books—what may be called their “charter narratives” of the life and teaching of their founders. By the time of Christ, the Jews had classified their Scriptures into the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Both the great religious teachers and most of the basic historical narratives were grouped together into the second of these divisions, and all later history, as well as much ethical and devotional matter, was relegated to the third; but the first, comprising the five books of the Pentateuch, was exalted as the Jewish charter narrative, embodying the life, work, and teaching of their great leader, Moses. In liturgical use, the Law was the ritual climax of the synagogue service, accompanied by significant ceremonies of respect and attention. This precedent was exactly followed by the Christian Church with regard to the ritual use of the four biographies of its Founder, which bear the significant title of “Gospels”—the “Good Tidings” of God’s condescension and man’s exaltation.

The Church continued the Synagogue custom of reading passages from the Scriptures for edification, and also as the basis of a discourse grounded upon them, applying them by way of exposition, instruction, or exhortation—in other words, a sermon. An instance of a Synagogue service, containing a lesson and a sermon, is recorded in Luke 4:16-22. And the first description of the Christian Liturgy, written by St. Justin Martyr in the year 150, mentions both: “The memoirs of the Apostles or the writings of the Prophets are read as long as time allows. Then when the reader ceases, the President gives by word of mouth his admonition and exhortation to follow these excellent things.”

It was definitely the use of certain books at the Eucharist by the Church which established them as Christian Scriptures. From first to last, liturgical use was intimately involved in the publication and the acceptance of the elements of the biblical canon.

Each of the first three quarter-centuries of the Church’s life contributed a characteristic Lesson to the Liturgy. During the first of these, the only Scripture which existed was the Old Testament, which the Church, from the beginning, adopted from the use of the Synagogue and acclaimed as a prophecy fulfilled in Christ.

About twenty-five years after the Resurrection, a new element began to appear, in the form of important Letters from the great missionary Apostle, St. Paul. These were definitely “published” by reading them serially at the Christian services. When each church had finished the Letter addressed to itself, it exchanged it with a neighboring church. A very little of this sort of thing sufficed to cause the letters of the founding Apostle to be recognized as Christian Scriptures and to establish “The Epistle” as a fixed feature of the Christian service.

Another quarter-century brought forth the first of the Gospels; to which each of the next three decades added another version of the biography of our Lord. As these circulated throughout the Church, they were read at the Liturgy in the same manner as the Prophecy and the Epistle. Containing as they did the definite form of what had always been the heart and center of Christian preaching, they were incorporated into the service with the same ceremonial solemnity which had been accorded to the reading of the Law in the use of the Synagogue.

This method of procedure did not quite stop at this point. The remainder of the first century of the Church’s history was rounded out by the appearance of the sub-apostolic writings, such as the General Epistles and the Apocalypse of the New Testament, as well as the Letters of Clement, Ignatius, and Barnabas, and the little treatise called the Teaching—all of them published in the same manner by being read at the Liturgy. Some of them found a permanent place in the Church’s liturgical Lectionary, and therefore ultimately in the official Canon of Scripture, and some did not, according to the Church’s judgment in the course of the next two centuries as to their content of apostolic authority.

Advent

The name of this season means simply the “coming” of the Lord. Originally it had in mind his coming into human life at his Incarnation: it was an expectation of the Nativity. Medieval times added another idea in the form of the solemn cosmic background of his Second Coming to judge the earth.

The certainty of the end of this present world, and the inevitability of death and judgment for each person, are obviously matters which ought to be brought to the minds of Christian people at some time: and this is an appropriate time, in the dark hours of the ending of one year and the beginning of another. At least we do not overuse these themes, as do certain enthusiastic sects, as an escape from present reality. But in spite of the fact that the “Judgment” theme is not wholly absent from any Advent Sunday, and their color is solemn violet, Advent is not a penitential season; it is not fasted. The Second Coming, however sombre and awesome, remains in the background. The foreground is occupied by the original conception of the season, the looking forward to the celebration of the Incarnation.

Thus the Gospel for Advent Sunday is our Lord’s coming to the Holy City, to his redeeming work. This incident is not used biographically—in that sense it would belong on Palm Sunday—but typologically: it was simply the best single action the Church could think of to show who was coming.

The Gospel for the Second Sunday in Advent is all about the end of the world; but a new emphasis was given to this Sunday by a new Collect of the Day at the Reformation, which took up some significant phrases from the Epistle to make this day known to all the Protestant world as “Bible Sunday.”

Then on the third and fourth Sundays, we have the figure of John Baptist, the Forerunner, who prepared the way for our Lord’s ministry. Note that on the Fourth Sunday, the expectation of the Nativity is insistent: “Rejoice! The Lord is at hand!”

Christmastide

Christmas and Epiphany were originally doublets. December 25 was the Western celebration of the Nativity; January 6, the Eastern. Both parts of the Church agreed to keep the Birth on Christmas, the East celebrating his Baptism on Epiphany, the West, the Visit of the Magi. Our arrangement is perhaps as good a method as could be devised for weaving together the quite independent accounts of the Nativity in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke. St. Matthew intimates that the Naming of the Child took place before the Visit of the Magi, so it is all right to have the Epiphany after the Circumcision. But it always seemed to me that twelve days after Christmas was surely a little late for the Visit of the Magi, and maybe it was quite in order to bring the Shepherds and the Kings together in a children’s Nativity pageant.

The one thing that is out of order in this season is Holy Innocents’ Day, three days after Christmas. It should follow the Epiphany, not precede it. But we can’t change that now; it has been a feature of the Christmas season ever since the year 500. The other two festivals which follow Christmas Day, those of St. Stephen and St. John the Evangelist, seem actually to be older than the observance of Christmas, since the Armenian Church, which keeps the Nativity in the old Eastern way on January 6, has these festivals in December. The three holy days which thus always follow Christmas Day have been linked together by calling the saints commemorated “the Companions of Christ,” and by the rather whimsical rationalization that St. John was a martyr in will but not in deed, the Innocents in deed but not in will, and St. Stephen both in will and deed. A pure rationalization, of course—yet not without some devotional profit.

Epiphanytide

The Sundays of the Epiphany Season are really common Sundays, like those in Trinitytide, as their green color would indicate. The first four have a little survival of course-reading in their Epistles from Romans 12 and 13. At first sight they look moralistic and rather miscellaneous. Nevertheless, they are not accidental.

The original Epistle of the Day of the Epiphany, as it still exists in the Greek Church, is the short passage from Titus which the Western Church has since transferred to our early service on Christmas. Its keynote is: “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world” (Titus 2:11). The next four Sundays after Epiphany exploit this theme, using the kindred keynote in Romans 12:2: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Thus the purpose of these Epistles is to present the moral consequences of the manifestation of our Lord in human life, just as the moral meaning of the Resurrection is intimated in the stirring text, “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above” (Col. 3:1). If it weren’t for something of this kind, the impression of the events of the Nativity would be in some danger of being merely theological, or poetical, or even mythological. Just as the feast of the first martyr St. Stephen, the very day after Christmas, reminds us that he who came, himself came to suffer, so these “moralistic” Epistles in Epiphanytide remind us that the Christian religion is before all things practical, to be applied to the tasks of daily life.

As remarked before, this season is of variable length, owing to the movements of Easter in the year. We are sure of only one Sunday; and we may have all six. Four Sundays occur more than half the time, and may be regarded as its normal length. Hence, the unity of the Epistles for these four.

The Gospels, however, have a plan for all six. Indeed, they have a double plan. They are in the order of the events of our Lord’s life, which they summarize to a certain extent. But they are also selected as particular examples of the epiphanies or manifestations of the power of his Incarnation.

The first Sunday gives the incident of Christ among the Doctors—the one event when he was twelve years old that intervenes between the Infancy and the beginning of his Ministry. The second presents his Baptism; the third, his first miracle at Cana; and the fourth, a typical pair of his miracles of Mercy, the healing of a leper boy by touch, and of the centurion’s servant by word. The fifth and sixth record some of his final teaching to his Disciples about the end of all things in the parables of the Wheat and the Tares and of the signs of the End.¹

These last two Sundays have a very peculiar function. They are the so-called “wandering Sundays.” With a late Easter, they are used in this place, and solemnly conclude the Epiphany Season with the prophecies of the final and supreme manifestation of our Lord to judge the world. But with an early Easter, they are not used here, but instead are inserted at the end of the Trinity season, as a Second and Third Sunday before Advent. They are, of course, equally appropriate as an introduction to the Advent theme of the Second Coming.

Pre-Lent

The great Season of Lent is always preceded by three Sundays with peculiar names—Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima Sunday. (They mean simply the 70th, 60th, and 50th day before Easter: accurate according to Roman reckoning for the last of them, and applied by analogy to the others.) Like the Sundays in Advent, they are in violet, but they are not a penitential or a fasting season; only a time of reduced solemnities, giving up Te Deum and Gloria in excelsis until Easter restores them to us with greater splendor.

This “Penumbra of Lent,” as it has been called, really represents former “highwater marks” of that season, since the Church experimented with longer Lents, only to find that six weeks was enough to ask of feeble human nature. But the three Sundays acquired their peculiar character from two other sources.

Septuagesima Sunday was once upon a time “New Year’s Sunday,” the first Sunday in the Spring, when the Roman year began with the vernal equinox. This extension of Lent from the original brief commemoration of the Passion has now put it back into what is normally late winter. But that is the reason for the use of the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard on Septuagesima Sunday, and the parable of the Sower on Sexagesima Sunday—days originally reflecting the first work of the new year in the preparation of the vineyards and the fields.

The Epistles for all three Sundays record another situation. In the year 568 the Lombards invaded Italy, overran the province which still bears their name, and very closely invested Rome itself. The peril lasted so long that it left a permanent mark on the Christian Year in the West. The Pope organized a series of intercessions for the four Sundays from Septuagesima Sunday to the First Sunday in Lent, held at the shrines of the four patron saints of the City of Rome, in inverse order: St. Lawrence, St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John Lateran (the papal cathedral). You will still see those names at the head of the services for the three Sundays in the Latin Missal, though the Pope has not gone to those churches for the official “stational mass” on those days since the seventeenth century. The Epistles for the three Sundays are all from St. Paul, and perfectly express the distress of the time when they were chosen. The first Sunday presents the figure of the Christian athlete; the second, the sufferings of the Christian; and the third, the final triumphant peace, in the marvelous hymn of Christian love in I Corinthians 13. (That last is not mere sentimentalism, as so many people take it; St. Paul is not talking about love as an emotion, but as a motive.)

Thus the Sunday themes in the Pre-Lenten period give a twofold challenge: it is a call to arms and to labor. As an introduction to the great Penitential Season, it strikes the keynote of a Lent which shall not be merely a spiritual “retreat”—which might be all too likely to be a retreat from reality—but a positive self-discipline in active and effectual conflict with the soul’s inveterate enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Lent

Lent, as we have it now, is the Church’s penitential season of forty weekdays beginning with Ash Wednesday, in preparation for the chief feast of the year on Easter Day. The six Sundays contained in it are not counted; no rule of fasting or abstinence applies to them, of course, since every Sunday, no matter when it occurs, is a weekly feast of the Resurrection.

But this season was not created as a whole. It grew up gradually, extending itself from the 40 hours mentioned by Irenaeus in the second century, to the six weeks at the time of the Council of Nicaea, then to the full precise 40 weekdays in the time of Gregory the Great. And the length of the season, as we mentioned earlier, was determined by the preparations for the Easter Baptisms, not by any other necessity.

Consequently, the provisions for the Lenten Sundays are lacking a unified plan. This is a bit unfortunate, since no season of the year has greater devotional or practical importance, and in none is the Liturgy, on the whole, better attended by the people. It takes a good deal of ingenuity to preach on these Sundays a course of sermons which will be definitely integrated and yet in some correspondence with the liturgical lessons.

There is some rather heterogeneous material here. Passion Sunday is perfectly planned, with both Epistle and Gospel on the same great theme: and the Gospel sets forth the eternal and cosmic significance of the Passion, rising to the tremendous assertion, “Before Abraham was, I am.” But it arrives at that climax by way of a very bitter rabbinical dispute.

The Fourth Sunday (now “mid-Lent,” although once it began the season) was celebrated at Rome by the Bishop’s visitation to the Church of Holy-Cross-in-Jerusalem. Its Epistle was chosen in compliment to the local parish, with the allusion to “Jerusalem which is from above is free, which is the mother of us all.” A very fine verse, but somewhat dearly bought by the intensely rabbinical argument of St. Paul’s in which it is embedded—all that about Hagar and Mt. Sinai, and so forth.

The Third Sunday is very interesting, with its “Christian education” Epistle (“Be ye followers of God, as dear children”) and its dramatic Gospel of the Empty House from which the evil spirit has been cast out—an allusion to the solemn Exorcisms of the candidates for Baptism which were performed that week. Even though we have forgotten all about these “Masses of Scrutiny,” this parable has been the inspiration of any number of most effective Lenten sermons.

The Second Sunday has a Gospel which has the least content of any in Lent: the incident of the Woman of Canaan. I have always winced a little at the open affront of the words “It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and cast it to dogs!” with which our Lord saw fit to try the woman’s faith. It was an awkward moment—not made any better by the perfect tact and good humor with which she took the rebuff. Moreover, this is the one Gospel in the season which is definitely out of its chronological place in our Lord’s life. It comes between those appointed for the fourth and fifth Sundays of this season. The explanation is that this Sunday once stood actually vacant of any provisions at all. Four times a year, the Ember Weeks ended with long vigil services on Saturday night, with the Ordination Mass at midnight. That was counted as the Sunday service; there was no other. After the vigil mass had been anticipated to Saturday morning, hastily and rather clumsily the “vacant” Sundays were filled with material taken from the weekday uses—in this case, from the previous Thursday, where Rome still has it. The Roman Gospel for this Sunday is the equally aimless incident of the Transfiguration, repeated from the previous Saturday. The Liturgical Commission has suggested that we now substitute the very strong passage on the House on the Rock, the conclusion of our Lord’s “Sermon on the Mount,” which would be a real strengthening of the Lenten list, besides coming in the proper biographical order of Gospel lessons which is observed in the rest of the season.

The First Sunday in Lent does very well, with an Epistle which alludes to Fasting and with the Gospel of the Temptation of our Lord.

Palm Sunday had a double service, which goes back to the rites of Jerusalem in the fourth century. First came the Blessing of the Palms, with a Gospel of the Triumphal Entry, as we have it on Advent Sunday. Then after the Procession, the liturgy began all over again, with a great “Mass of the Passion.” Cranmer, in the name of simplicity, abolished the Blessing of the Palms along with all the other interesting irregularities of the old Holy Week services. This left Palm Sunday with a liturgy exactly parallel to that for Good Friday, and there was no allusion to the actual events of Palm Sunday in any Anglican Prayer Book until our Lectionary of 1892 brought in the Triumphal Entry as a lesson at Evensong. The most recent English and Scottish Prayer Books allow the Gospel of the Triumphal Entry on this Sunday, provided that St. Matthew’s Passion is used at one service. The Liturgical Commission is recommending something of this sort for our next Prayer Book.

Easter

The original plan for the observance of the prime feast of the year, the Resurrection of our Lord, was to cover the whole narrative of the Resurrection Appearances in the Easter Octave. That is why both of our Gospels on Easter Day mention only the Empty Tomb, without going on to the positive evidence of the Risen Life. It might perhaps be better to have for the late celebration what was the original Roman Gospel, from St. Matthew 28, which Rome has now anticipated to Saturday morning from its former position at Easter Midnight.² St. Mark’s version, “very early in the morning the first day of the week,” remains nearly ideal for the early service. (In Roman use it is the Gospel for the day.)

The First Sunday after Easter now has only the events of the evening of the Day of the Resurrection; it does not go on to the Appearance “eight days after” to the disciples, when Thomas was present. Apparently, Cranmer did not want to repeat the matter of the Gospel for St. Thomas’ Day, December 21. But this is one of the few cases where both Eastern and Western lectionaries give just the same Gospel; and it would be a good idea to restore it.

The Second Sunday sums up the Redemption wrought in Christ with the parable of the “Good Shepherd.” The Good Shepherd, with the lamb in his arms, was the figure which the early Church always used for the Redeemer. The grim figure of the Crucifix did not come in for a thousand years!

The next four Sundays do not look backward upon Easter, but forward to Pentecost. The Early Church did not speak of “Eastertide,” but of “The Pentecost”—meaning not the terminal fiftieth day, but the whole contained Fifty Days between the two great feasts. It was not till the fourth century that the festival of the Ascension was introduced, marking off the Forty Days of the Risen Life; and not till the twelfth that Ascension Day acquired an Octave of its own. Hence, the Sunday after Ascension has no reference to that event, but is an “Expectation Sunday” looking forward to Whitsunday.

The Epistles in Eastertide are taken from the General Epistles (James and I Peter), whereas through most of the rest of the year they are from St. Paul. These Epistles are of a very practical nature, and very well apply and extend the keynote, “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,” which is read on Easter Day.

This series of General Epistles originally contained ten selections, and the overplus continues on Trinity 1-3 and 5—rather effectively tying the seasons together with their insistence on righteousness of life as the necessary fruit of the redemption wrought in Christ.

Whitsunday, which once terminated the great fifty-day Festal Season, is obvious. Notice that it does not have an Octave, but a Week: its Proper Preface is “upon Whitsunday, and six days after.” In other words, its Octave Day has been converted to the special festival of Trinity Sunday, which sums up and concludes that great Festal Cycle which dramatizes the contents of the Creed.

Trinity Sunday arose from a reinterpretation of an Epistle and a Gospel which had been appointed for quite different reasons. The Eastern Church to this day keeps the commemoration of All Saints on the Octave of Pentecost. This was observed for a time in the West. The Epistle for Trinity Sunday is really an All Saints’ Day lesson. And the Gospel, our Lord’s discourse on Baptism to Nicodemus, was a sounding out of the Whitsuntide Baptisms, which were once nearly as much of a feature as those on Easter Eve. And in the tenth century at Liége, it seems to have occurred to someone who was trying to find a “liturgical unity” between this All Saints’ Epistle and this Octave-of-Pentecost Gospel that the common element was the confession of the Eternal Trinity: the Son speaking of the Father and the Spirit in the Gospel; the Saints in glory crying “Holy, holy, holy,” in the Epistle. All that was needed was to add a new collect to have a new feast.

Trinitytide

As we suggested before, all this long series of Sundays after Trinity, occupying half the year, and carrying any amount of practical teaching on the Christian life, does not have any over-all plan. And we simply do not know how it all came to be as it is.

The Epistles for four of the first five Sundays have been accounted for. They are, however, interrupted by a Pauline selection for an Ember Season on the fourth Sunday, because this was originally an Ember Sunday. This Ember Season was once the first week in June, but has now been frozen (a bit awkwardly) into Whitsun Week.

The Epistles for the rest of Trinitytide are taken from the Epistles of St. Paul, in exact order, just as the passages occur in the Bible. They are really a selection from a seventh-century list of 42 passages. For the most part, they are sufficiently separated from each other so that they are not a true series of course-reading, but more of a list. Few people notice that there is such a course in the provisions for the year. Note, however, that this order is interrupted on the Eighteenth Sunday, which was another of those “Ember” Sundays—in this case the one that was supposed to follow the September Ember Days.

As to the Gospels, nearly all that can be said about them is that all of them, except for Trinity 21, are taken from the Synoptics—while in Eastertide all of them are from St. John. But there is no such sequence of these selections from the Synoptics as the Greek Church has at this period of the year. There is no order, sequential, chronological, biographical, or even theological.

Trinity 5 was originally the Sunday before the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul on June 29, and its Gospel is the call of the first three Apostles. The last Sunday in the season, Next before Advent, mentions St. Andrew, and may have been influenced by the proximity of St. Andrew’s Day. It is probable that the rest of the assignments were just as accidental; but the clues, if there were any, have been utterly lost.

Since the Epistles in Trinitytide are read in a sequential arrangement, and the Gospel in no arrangement at all, it is a waste of time to try to find a “liturgical unity” between them. They have no necessary connection, any more than any other two passages of Scripture. Any common element is a coincidence, or an eisegesis. The modern Roman system, which dislocates first by one, and then by two Sundays the somewhat older matching of Epistle with Gospel which we have inherited, is no better and no worse than our own.

There is one apparent defect in the Trinitytide Gospels which really contains the answer to an important problem. On Trinity 2 we have St. Luke’s “Great Supper,” and on Trinity 20 St. Matthew’s form of the same parable, his “Marriage Feast.” Then on Trinity 7 there is St. Mark’s feeding of the Four Thousand, and on the Sunday before Advent St. John’s Feeding of the Five Thousand—which is also recounted on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. Now in the limited provisions for the Sundays of the Christian Year, it is obviously not desirable to waste an opportunity by giving a Gospel which is a duplicate of one used on another occasion. This is the defect.

The problem is one likely to be felt very keenly by newcomers to the Episcopal Church, as indeed it was by this writer in his early experience in the Church. All of the worship of the Church is centered in the Holy Eucharist. And yet there was nothing whatever on that vital Sacrament on any Sunday in the liturgical lectionary for the Christian Year.

And the apparent defect answers the problem in this way: While a modern mind would pick out a factual narrative like St. Paul’s in I Cor. 11 or an exposition like our Lord’s long discourse on the Eucharist in John 6, the early Church preferred to give a living picture. The dramatic Feeding of the Multitudes was such a picture. It was, indeed, a Sacred Meal on a very large scale. The Church presented it simply as the Sacrament which it undoubtedly was, though the Evangelists, as we now think, actually misreported it as a miracle. In the same way, the Great Supper and the Marriage Feast were pictures of the Messianic Banquet, the “eating and drinking in the kingdom of heaven,” to which the Jews looked forward and which Christians enjoy eternally.

Thus while on the face of it, it might appear that the Church was neglecting the opportunity of emphasizing the Eucharist as the heart of its worship, the Early Church considered that it was giving five Sundays—a tithe of the year—to that great theme.

This interpretation has been incorporated in the Lessons at Morning and Evening Prayer for the Sundays in question. But it would seem desirable, and may prove possible, to make some substitutions for the Gospels on these Sundays, which would at once remove the wasteful duplications, and make plain to our modern minds what was the actual underlying purpose of the primitive Church.

The particular character of the religion of our Church is not merely expressed by our Prayer Book—as would be expected; it is actually determined by it. There is an old Latin aphorism which runs Lex orandi, lex credendi: “The Law of Praying is the Law of Believing.”¹ In other words, what the Church’s religion really is, is set forth in, and may be concluded from, what she says when she talks to God.

This principle is of considerable importance, particularly for us. Our Church has been described as “the roomiest Church in Christendom.” It contains quite comfortably most of the known varieties of religious opinion, from extreme Evangelicals professing an individual and emotional religion to those who lay great stress on the intellectual and dogmatic conclusions of theology, and the corporate importance of the Church as the “Ark of Salvation.” We have members who are a great deal more in sympathy with their Methodist and Quaker friends than they are with their “High Church” enemies; and we have other members who, on the whole, are considerably more papal than the Papacy. On the other hand, we have those whose minds are so exceedingly open that they have difficulty in believing anything very hard, and who are scarcely to be distinguished from Unitarians or advocates of Ethical Culture. Some are distinctly attracted toward the “wish-fulfilments” of Christian Science or New Thought. We even occasionally encounter a “British Israel” fanatic, or someone whose fancy has been captured by the sheer mythologies of theosophy.

And yet we leave all these people alone! Oh, I don’t mean that we ignore their peculiarities and that we can’t argue with them. We have a lovely time doing that. In fact, our continual and valiant efforts to convert each other form one chief reason why the Episcopal Church as a whole is better informed, and more alive, and more conscious of the vital principles of its theology, than any other Protestant Church in existence. But the one thing we do not do is to kick them out of the Church because they don’t agree with us. They are perfectly free to adopt their own personal interpretations of the meaning of religion—which, after all, may be the only way in which their kind of minds may be able to make any sort of approach to the central mysteries of the faith, to those truths which are so great that they can never be completely comprehended by man’s finite mind here upon earth, and the full understanding of which is reserved until we shall see God in heaven.

In other words, our Church leaves individual thought free, on the condition that its members acquiesce in the working facts. We do not put out of the Ministry a clergyman who does not believe in the Apostolic Succession, for as long as he stays and works in the Church, he is in the Apostolic Succession; and that is all there is about it. And so with regard to all the other collisions of individual opinion or personal idiosyncrasy with respect to the corporate teaching of the Church. That teaching is conveyed in what the Church does and says in its acts of public worship. Therefore, the one bond of unity in all our individual diversities is the expression of the Church’s faith in its official actions—that is, it is set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.

What, then, is the fundamental presentation of the Christian religion, as expressed in the Prayer Book, which justifies this refusal to submit to papal “unity,” and our holding ourselves aloof from the able and earnest advocates of righteousness of life, who surround us on every side?

The Goal of Religion

Every religion is a belief in effectual contact of supernatural spiritual powers with humanity, to help man where he cannot help himself. Primitive man felt himself very little and weak before the unpredictable and irresistible forces of nature. The first men (who had exactly as good brains as we have) recognized plan, purpose, and intelligence behind the operations of the physical world; but they felt them to be arbitrary, and often unfriendly. Their conclusion was that these unseen powers needed to be propitiated. They sought protection (as we still do) “from lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death.” Their primary emotion was a very real fear. Since then, our race has sublimated this “fear of the Lord,” which is “the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10), into reverence, awe, adoration, and thanksgiving. But for them it was sheer dread. Their acts of worship often were simply magic, to appease hostile forces. They were certainly “escapist”—the avoidance of unpleasant actualities, rather than that “acceptance of the universe” which some moderns have thought a reasonable aim. (“I accept the universe!” rapturously cried Harriet Martineau. “Gad!” said Carlyle, “she’d better!”) We still have to take account of this in our religion. We still ask to be delivered from calamities beyond our power to prevent, as in the phrase quoted above from the Litany; or compare the passage still used in the Liturgy of St. Basil: “For thou, Lord, art the help of the helpless, the hope of the hopeless, the saviour of the afflicted, the harbor of mariners, the healer of the sick.” But just as the history of religion did not stop there, we must not let our own religion be confined to an escape from present reality.

Though the earliest religion was magical in its method and entirely unmoral in its objectives, mankind very soon realized that it had to contend not only with malicious forces without, but with evil within. Far more human suffering is caused by the actions of men, than by the calamities of nature. More than protection from external events, man needs help to live his own life to best effect. If religion is to be anything more than a kind of celestial accident-insurance policy, it must be ethical through and through. This idea is perfectly expressed in the Collect of the Second Sunday in Lent: “Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves; Keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls; that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

In the magical period of religion, sin was merely the breaking of arbitrary taboos. As ethical consciousness grew, it was seen that God’s will was not expressed in inscrutable decrees handed down from Sinai, but written in the way the world is made and human society put together. Its test is social. Sin is an expression of selfishness—the seeking of one’s own advantage to the detriment of others. Every kind of sin is typified in the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”—that is, “You must not tell what you know is not true at somebody else’s expense.”

Saving Grace and Redemption

The really dreadful thing about an act of sin is that it is utterly irrevocable. A sinful act cannot be undone; one cannot even make up for such an act. The restitution of a theft does not wipe out the inconvenience and the distress of having had the thing stolen. And theft is the most elementary of sins, and the easiest to make some kind of satisfaction for. The man who has stolen his neighbor’s good name by the sin of slander finds he can never give it back at all. And so on up to the deadly sins of adultery and murder, for which no man can make any atonement whatsoever.

So the horrifying thing about sin is that it can never be wiped out. The whole universe is henceforward just so much the worse, because we did that particular thing. But though God himself cannot change the past, there is always infinite hope for the future. That is why contrition is saving. It is not mere remorse for an unalterable past; it is new purpose for the future. It does not spring from a flight from punishment, felt or feared, but from the love of God and love of good.

And yet “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” The more a man needs the saving grace of Contrition, the less he is capable of experiencing it. The worse a man is, the less his conscience troubles him. The bad man does not lament his sins; he forgets his sins or even exults in them. It is the saint who experiences sorrow for sin. The whiteness of the almost perfect soul shows the faintest stain. These observed facts inspired Canon Moberly to his tremendous paradox that the only man who has ever lived who was capable of offering to God an atoning Contrition for the sins of the whole world was the one Man who had never sinned!

Every evil act which any man commits makes it that much harder for him to do good thereafter. And because it has made the world just so much worse, it also makes it harder for every man that comes after him to do good. If the natural order were all there is to the universe, it would seem that the human race was doomed, and the whole world given over to the Powers of Darkness. And yet that does not happen! By every natural law, the world ought to be continually getting worse. Against all the probabilities, it is continually getting better. There are spiritual forces at work which are more mighty than the natural. Ninety-nine good apples will never reform the one bad apple in the box; but again and again, one good man has cleaned up a foul slum.

Note that we are dealing with facts. It is a fact that human nature is corrupted by sin, our own and our forebears’, so that it is easier for us to do evil than to do good. This is the doctrine of Original Sin; and though it is now much out of fashion to admit that there is such a thing, we should do well to note the scorn which Chesterton pours upon those who presume to doubt “the one doctrine of the Church which can be proved!” It is not at all necessary to trouble our heads overmuch with the historicity of the poetic story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent, which wrapped up this observed fact of experience in pictorial form.

Redemption is also a fact. Some men, going downhill just as fast as they could, have been stopped in their tracks, whirled about, and set to make the difficult climb upward again to heaven. This is Conversion—a once vivid word that has been conventionalized into a cliché. How is it done? Well, after all, goodness is contagious as well as evil; though sometimes we devoutly wish that good examples were more “catching” than they seem to be. I once knew a woman who said she had been converted while my father was praying: he wasn’t even talking to her! Then there have been hardened criminals who have been converted by the death of a neglected mother. This redemptive power of innocent suffering of another brings us very close to the mystery of the Cross. Not to confuse ourselves with many instances, we as Christians know that while God is continually speaking to the hearts of all men, to just the extent that they are willing to listen to him, yet it is our special happiness that we have been brought to the way of salvation by the work of Jesus Christ, who “was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of eternal life.”

And this is the central Mystery of our Faith. It is a Mystery in the same way that the eternal Being of God, the Person of our Lord, or the Sacraments of grace, are Mysteries: they are facts of religious experience, verifiable by each man in his own soul; but though they are experienced, they are so great that they cannot be expressed. “Now we know in part.” All the available explanations of these Mysteries represent only partial ways of approach to their contained truths, which may have some value to the mind that makes them, but no universal validity for all minds. They are only rationalizations. And such rationalizations may be extremely misleading to other minds, yet leave the truth of the fact of common experience quite unaffected.

Various False Doctrines of Atonement

Some of the rationalizations of the Redemption in Christ which have been held in past ages in the Church are distinctly horrifying. Origen in the third century advanced the explanation that it was actually a ransom to the devil. The evil one, who held all mankind in the power of death, was persuaded to accept the death of the Son of God in their stead. And then the devil was tricked, for Christ escaped from death, “because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24). And that completely immoral idea remained as, what might be called, the “standard” explanation of the Mystery for some nine hundred years!

In the Middle Ages, Western theologians replaced Origen’s rather blasphemous theory with speculations more conventional in form, but exactly as immoral. These were most clearly expressed by St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. Superficially, the Anselmian doctrine of the Atonement has a specious clarity and reasonableness which cannot conceal the fact that it is totally artificial and absolutely unethical. Anselm said that the sin of the first man was an infinite sin, because it was a sin against the infinite righteousness of God. Its just penalty was death and eternal torment. And that penalty was justly exacted of all the human race, since Adam at that time was the race (“In Adam’s fall we sinned all”). And no man thereafter could possibly obtain salvation—no matter how good he might be, he was finite and could not pay that infinite debt. Finally, the Son of God himself volunteered to bear the punishment of the sins of the world. Being God as well as man, he was of infinite significance; his sacrifice of infinite value. That did it. The debt was paid, and all men were redeemed who believed in him.

That is the form in which the Atonement is still taught in the Protestant sects. That is the form in which it was imparted to me when I was five years old. Its very first statement is obvious nonsense. How could any finite being commit an infinite sin? How could any short human life, no matter how desperately wicked, deserve the punishment of eternal agony, for ever and ever and ever, from the just and merciful Father of mankind? Not even Hitler or Stalin have earned that—though we must admit that they have tried! And where is the justice of a Vicarious Sacrifice? Christ might offer himself as an innocent victim of the sins of the world—in fact, I most firmly believe that he did—but what would be the morality of God’s applying that to a plenary release of the punishment which we have earned for our own wickedness—more than that, which we need if we are to be brought to our moral senses and restored to the way of righteousness?

No: the theory of a substitutionary Atonement, which is held alike by the Roman Catholic Church and by many Protestant sects around us, is entirely immoral and, moreover, completely useless. It is based upon an artificial and legalistic fiction which, indeed, is a shocking travesty of the character of God. It represents him as an inexorable Judge, whose justice knows only retributive punishment—yet who is so simple-minded that he can be appeased by a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of others.

The trouble with this doctrine is that it confuses the issue. It seems to say that the most important thing is to escape the earned consequences of our misdeeds. It has lost sight completely of the belief of the primitive Church, which the Eastern Orthodox Churches in the cradle-lands of the faith have never lost, that the purpose of religion is to lift up human nature to such God-like stature that it is above the possibility of sinning—not to bail men out of the deserved punishment of their sins. The Angel who announced to St. Mary the birth of the Son of God put in a single expression the real objective of the Christian religion: “Thou shalt call his name Jesus [whose Hebrew meaning is Saviour] for he shall save his people from their sins.” And that does not mean in their sins, or in spite of their sins, or from the results of their sins.

These medievalisms really represented a survival of the crude fear of primitive man, contaminating the highest expression of religion which man has ever attained. Their notion that the Father of all mankind was so frozen in the austere requirements of his Justice that he could not forgive his erring children until he had been “propitiated” by vengeance upon some other victim, was an incredible slander on his character and took no account of the essence of his Being, since “God is love.” It set up a false antithesis between the principles of Justice and Mercy. In their imperfect application among men, it is true that these ideas are often opposed. But in their perfection, in the heart of God, surely his Justice is perfectly merciful, his Mercy is perfectly just.

These misapprehensions of the character of God and of the nature of the Redemption were really the root-stock of all the “deformations” of religion which made the Reformation necessary, of all the “magical” ideas about the sacerdotal powers and operations of the Church against which the Reformers were in such fierce protest. But most unfortunately, while the Reformers tilted valiantly at all sorts of external applications of these notions, the ideas themselves were not criticized at all, and they went unreformed at the Reformation. They still dominate popular Protestantism in the so-called “evangelical” sects of the present day. The self-named “fundamentalists” are really clinging to some of the worst literalisms and legalities of the Middle Ages. The heart of their system is an unreformed Romanism!

The Real Reformation

It is remarkable that the real Reformation did not take place in the sixteenth century, but in the nineteenth. It did not take the form of a battle with Roman Catholicism, but with the dominant Calvinism, which, however, had perfectly preserved the medieval conception of God and of the theology of the Atonement which lay at the root of all the abuses of the Western Church. Though it came about very quietly, and with no new schisms in the Body of Christ, it was a theological revolution. It was the completion of the Reformation. More than that, it was, as I have said, the only real Reformation, since it struck at causes while the sixteenth century had tried to remedy symptoms.

The real Reformation rejected point-blank any idea of a Substitutionary Satisfaction as an essentially immoral idea. It viewed the Atonement not as a reconciliation of God to man, but of man to God. The Father of mankind does not need to be tricked into forgiving his children; but they do need to be brought to accept the forgiveness which he is eternally ready to give. The significance of the great tragedy upon Calvary was primarily moral in its infinite appeal to reconcile us to God.

Now this idea of a “merely moral” Atonement has been criticized as not an adequate explanation of this great Mystery, and not a sufficient representation of Christian experience. That is quite true; it is not. The Sacrifice upon Calvary was something more than a sentimental appeal. It was an accomplished action: it was a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice . . . for the sins of the whole world.” On any lesser view, “what think ye of Christ?” (Matt. 22:42) He was a sublime moral teacher, and gave the example of a perfect human life. But can that redeem human nature from its sinfulness? Surely it is our experience that Christianity is something more than an ethical culture society. And the adjuration to follow the perfect Example has never been effective. Weak human nature says to itself, “But he was God, and I am only man,” and excuses itself for all its ignominious failures. It has been justly said that Christianity is not something which has been tried, and failed—it is something which has been inspected, and found difficult, and not tried!

The trouble with the medieval idea of a Vicarious Atonement, as still held by fundamentalist Protestants, is that it does not work. It might avail to save man from the consequences of his sins; it does nothing to raise him above his sinfulness. And the mere motion of a “moral” Atonement among Modernist Protestants is equally ineffectual. Mere teaching and example do not save the sinner from his sins. That is the fallacy of Socrates, who said that “knowledge is virtue.” Most unfortunately, it is not. A man may know perfectly well what is right and best for him to do, and still choose to do the wrong and the worse. If Religion is nothing more than that, it is little if anything more than a psychology or a system of auto-suggestion—which is precisely what it is among very many modern Protestant churches.

Now it is the unique, the amazing, and the incomparable heritage of our Church that the real Reformation of the nineteenth century was almost perfectly anticipated in the liturgical work of Cranmer. The final breach with medievalism which in our time has split some other churches up the middle, required no change whatever in the Book of Common Prayer. But far more important than that, Cranmer kept firm hold of some vital principles of the ancient undivided Christian Church, which do for religion what both the medieval and the modernistic theories are powerless to do: they show how our religion can be put to work; how the Atonement can be effectually applied to each of us; how the full circle can be completed; and how Salvation can be shown to have been not only wrought for us, but in us.

Salvation Wrought in Us

The primary emphasis of the Scriptures and the primitive Church was upon the Incarnation. God made man in his own image, partaker of his divine capacities for intelligence, will, and love. Man was, therefore, endowed from the beginning with immeasurable possibilities. Nevertheless, “sin entered into the world, and death through sin” (Rom. 5:12). The divine image was defaced, and man made incapable of saving himself from his degradation and attaining that God-like life which God designed him to have. So the Incarnation was the entering of a new divine force into human life. God became Man to show what human life could be—such life as God purposed for the first man; such life as God desires for every man; such a human life as God himself lived!

The humanity of Christ was very real—“tempted at all points like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:14). Our Lord entered human life like every man, by the gate of birth, and left it by a painful and shameful death. He endured hunger and cold and weariness; he met with lack of understanding and hatred and utter rejection; he was limited by the ignorance of his human life; he wrestled with spiritual suffering and even doubt to the point of despair; he drank the cup of humanity to its bitter dregs—yet in it all he showed the possibility of a perfect human life, lived in unbroken conscious communion with the Father of all. And because he was victorious over all the conditions of our humanity—even over temptation, even over sin—therefore, he was victorious over “the last enemy that shall be destroyed,” which “is death” (I Cor. 15:21). The Resurrection itself was not a raw miracle, an interference of Omnipotence with the order of nature, but the victory of our humanity in Christ, the necessary consequence of his perfect life. The human spirit in Christ was triumphant over mere physical matter. His Risen Body had none of the limitations of our mortal flesh; it had the potentialities of pure spirit. No longer “cabin’d, cribb’d, confined” by physical conditions, his spirit was enthroned, and the mortal body made the slave, the tool, of the victorious spirit.

All this—and not the Cross alone—was the great “Transaction,” the actual historical event, which won the redemption of all mankind; which demonstrated the possibilities of human life and transformed the hope of immortality from an immemorial wish to a proved fact.

That is Salvation wrought for us: but how is it wrought in us? How do we come into effectual contact with this divine power in human life and make it our own? How do we appropriate the benefits of the Redemption? The Protestant tradition says that it is “by faith.” “Only believe!” But that is sheer magic. The Reformers were very clear about the iniquity of the idea of the Treasury of Merits of the Saints, whereby the superabundant good deeds of some men might be transferred to cover the deficits in the accounts of others. But they failed to see that it was just as immoral to claim such a transfer of the infinite Merits of Christ, so as to save men from their just deserts, without making them any better people.

Scripture itself gives the answer. Our Lord said many things about the work of the Holy Spirit in the Holy Church. But the most significant thing of all was perhaps his saying, “I will not leave you orphans: I will come unto you” (John 14:18). The Holy Spirit, in other words, was to be not the Vicar of Christ’s absence, but the effectual means of his presence. The Ascension was the crowning event when Christ left this world with his human body, in order that he should be no longer present with a few people at one time and place, but with all Christians at all times and in all places. He is forever in his Church: “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:20). And that not merely “in spirit,” that is, by influence and as an idea, but actually and personally. The Church is the Body of Christ—made one, and made alive, by his indwelling personal presence. And most of all, the Sacraments are not the merely ornamental observances which most Protestants make of them, marginal and dispensable ceremonies; they are the effective means of our personal contact with the living Lord. They are not a mere meeting and greeting—they are an incorporation. By them our imperfect and faltering human nature, at its most need, is restored and empowered by his perfect and victorious humanity: “that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.” “Christ is Son of Man, that we sons of God in him may be.” While we have other convincing contacts with our Lord’s divine power, it is first and foremost by the Sacraments that we are remade into the divine likeness, lifted up above our human weakness, and conformed “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).

O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight, and to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood, which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe, should strive and should prevail.

And that a higher gift than grace should flesh and blood refine;
God’s presence and his very Self, and Essence all-divine.

These words of Newman’s hymn come nearer than anything I know to expressing the full cycle of the purpose of God for the Redemption of mankind. They give the whole pattern, both how our redemption was won, and how it is appropriated, applied, and made a living force in us.

It is our Catholic heritage that we insist that the Church and its Sacraments are not mere optional additions to the Christian faith: they are integral to the Redemption, a necessary part of what the Christian revelation is, and indispensable to its operation. It is not a mere paradoxical phenomenon that in the Creed, the Church is made the object of its own faith! This is a sine qua non for the effectiveness of the Redemption; it is the one thing which popular Protestantism of either camp lacks disastrously.

Without it, Fundamentalism has no clue as to how the Atonement operates in us, and has to cling to medieval magic to offer any explanation of it, at all. Without it, Modernism with its “moral” Atonement is equally helpless to show how the Redemption was achieved for us.

But it is the special good fortune of our Church to hold both Catholic and Evangelical truths together in perfect balance, and so to see the whole picture. In the Incarnation, Christ was made one with us; he took our humanity wholly, so that by his holy life as well as by his saving death, he fought the battle and won the victory of all mankind. Then in the Church, we are made one with Christ—“members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.” And through the Church, we do receive “a higher gift than grace”: our imperfect humanity is empowered and conformed to his victorious humanity, so that we hold “Christ in us the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27).

It is primarily because of this our Catholic heritage, clinging stedfastly to the most ancient faith of the Undivided Church at the beginning, that we are so modern, too. We believe in a God of love, not of wrath; in a divine discipline of man which is remedial, not vindictive; in a Redemption which is a reconciliation of man to God, not a propitiation of God toward man; in prayer which is an uplifting of man to be a co-worker with God, not a spell or charm to change the order of the universe; in Sacraments which are Mysteries, but which are not magic, which through our appropriation of them avail to transfigure human nature into the likeness of Christ. “Brethren, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2).

We have seen that the religion of the Prayer Book is altogether outstanding, and almost unique, in the balanced completeness of its teaching. It presents the process of human salvation as a dynamic transformation of character by the power of the Incarnation, through the Sacraments of grace which in turn bring us into effectual personal union with him.

How was it that our Church, alone among Protestant churches, achieved a real Reformation in the sixteenth century—so real a Reformation that it did not need re-forming again in the nineteenth century? And how, on the other hand, did it come about that our Church was enabled to hold fast to the things in the medieval Church from which it sprang that were really primitive and really vital, without retaining those distortions of the Dark Ages against which we protest under the name of “Romanism”?

The explanation of this remarkable, and most fortunate, situation is really quite simple. In the first place, the “Deformations” of the Christian faith which made the Reformation necessary were almost exclusively a matter of interpretation: they were not anything inherent in the Latin rituals, which in some respects are rather rude and crude, but which are for the most part innocent of the misrepresentations which medieval speculations had forced upon them. And in the second place, Archbishop Cranmer, who was the presiding genius and, for all practical purposes, the sole author of the translation and adaptation of the old materials into a Book of Common Prayer in the English tongue, had the benefit of an extensive acquaintance with the service books of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which had the invaluable characteristic of preserving the faith of the primitive Church in fuller, more eloquent, and more unmistakable form than the Latin services. The direct use of Greek materials in our Prayer Book has been, as we shall see, rather slight in extent, but exceedingly important in determining the objectives and the meaning of our services.

The Deformation of Latin Christianity

The rootstock of the Deformation of Western religion was precisely that misapprehension of the nature of the Atonement which we have been examining. Instead of seeking an actual redemption from sin in such a transformation of human nature as would lift it above the possibility of sinning, the Western Church put the emphasis, to a disastrous degree, upon an escape from the consequences of sin. Latin Christianity saw the whole drama of Salvation not as a dynamic process, but as a judicial act. God was viewed as a kind of Oriental despot, arbitrary and vengeful, who demanded vindictive punishment for sin, but who did not care whether the real offender was punished provided somebody paid the fine!

From the lawyer Tertullian to the lawyer Calvin, this legalistic and morally shocking fabrication dominated the thought of the Western Church. It gave rise to all the distortions of faith and worship against which the Reformation was in protest.

Baptism is a new birth into the family of the Church, an adoption as a child of God, the beginning of a new spiritual life. As such, it buries the old life under the baptismal waters and is an effective remission of past sins. But notice how easy it is to misinterpret moral forces as magic. In early days, men had a tendency to put off being baptized in order to have more sins forgiven! Constantine was not baptized till he was on his death-bed (he was certainly old Mr. Safety-First; he did not believe in taking any chances! Later, when the development of the Sacrament of Penance offered a “second remission” (of sins after Baptism), Constantine’s canny caution became unnecessary. But a similarly magical effect was attributed to infant Baptism.

As we learn from Holy Scripture, the whole family of converts to the faith were received together into the Christian Covenant, regardless of their age (the “families” of Lydia, Stephanus, the Philippian jailer), as was the existing custom in the case of proselytes to Judaism. Thereafter, it was logical to bestow this Sacrament upon newborn children that they might grow up as members of the spiritual society. But it is altogether too easy to consider that a person had been “saved” because he had been christened, and give little or no thought as to whether subsequently he had really been Christianized. It is quite possible to sympathize with the suspicion which the Baptist denomination has always directed against this Catholic practice, in the way that the people have understood and used it. The Baptist feels that unless there is personal faith—repentance and purpose of amendment—no remission is possible and the pretended “Sacrament” is raw magic. Perfectly true. What the Baptist does not understand, and what our own people also unfortunately have not altogether grasped, is that the Church teaches that what is imparted in Baptism is only a potential grace. It is a dormant seed which must come to life in the individual to have any effect. A person born on American soil automatically acquires American citizenship with certain latent rights which no other human being has: for instance, he may become President. He also acquires certain responsibilities, such as keeping the laws and paying his debts, duties which his parents or guardians must assume as their obligations “until he come of age to take them upon himself.” And yet a man may forfeit his citizenship by a felony or renounce it by naturalization in another country. Likewise, the rights of membership in the Catholic Church are latent: they may be thrown away by a wicked life or abjured by conversion to another religion, or no religion. They become actual only when faith, repentance, and effective righteousness are living realities with a man.

The Middle Ages saw whole nations which were christened, but very imperfectly: a situation which to a considerable extent prevails to the present day. And the Sacrament of Baptism was, and is, held to be chiefly magical in its effects. We shall see presently what Cranmer did to impart a more vital moral meaning to this service.

The idea of God’s dealings with men as arbitrary and formal in their nature is even more clearly seen in the medieval conceptions of the Sacrament of Penance.

The early Roman Church divided sins into two classes, venial and mortal. Originally, these terms meant literally what they said: the distinction was between sins which might conceivably be forgiven (from venia, forgiveness), and those which were so dreadful and so irremediable that they marked without recourse the suicide of the soul. Fortunately, that conception was just a little too grim even for the Latin mind. We cannot place any limits to the mercy of God and to his willingness to reconcile all men unto himself. So the expressions were watered down again to mean only little sins and big sins. But this relaxation of theory was accompanied by a stiffening of practice: it was considered that one might be able to work off one’s little sins by his own exertions, by extra devotion or beneficence; but the big sins could not be handled without the professional assistance of a priest!

The original idea of the primitive Church about the Sacrament of Penance was very much what is the teaching and practice of our Church today: that the conflict with sin is the personal responsibility of the individual, that in a normal Christian life the Church’s corporate absolutions of the whole congregation are sufficient, and that only when a man cannot cope with his own evil tendencies, does he need to call in a specialist. In other words, the emphasis was upon the overcoming of sin, not the evasion of the punishment of guilt. But the Irish monks of the early Middle Ages in their remarkable missionary return-visit to the Continent introduced the custom of requiring regular private Confessions from the laity. A weekly Confession is logical enough, and conceivably profitable, for a monk who is devoting his whole life to a growth in holiness. But to demand a private Confession before every Communion from every member, as the Roman Church long did, had two effects: it made a weekly Communion a thing of the past for the vast majority of Churchmen, and it degraded the Sacrament of Penance from an extraordinary remedy to deal with grievous sins into a mechanical routine, whose function was not one of spiritual direction, but that of an absolution factory.¹

The same underlying idea of Propitiation attacked the Church’s central act of worship, the Holy Eucharist. It must be understood that this affected its explanation, being powerless to touch its form. To this day the Canon of the Roman Mass stands virtually unaltered since the sixth century and is one of the most ancient of Christian liturgies. It is not, to be sure, the most inspiring form of liturgy which the Christian Church has produced, by many degrees, since it was put together at a time and place not remarkable for knowledge and elevation of spirit, by men obviously lacking in historical information and literary ability. It is as blunt and unfinished as the (equally) Roman Gospel according to St. Mark. One whole paragraph lacks a principal verb, the author simply having forgotten to finish his sentence! It begins with a “dangling participle,” and after sixteen hundred years that participle still dangles in the air. Of course, as long as the Mass is said in a language “not understood of the people,” that does no harm to their sensibilities; but imagine considering such a composition, as Dom Gregory Dix seems to do, as the measuring rod whereby all Christian liturgies are to be judged!

But crude though it may be, there is no harm whatever in the text of the Mass. There is not one word in it which would indicate that it was a Propitiatory Sacrifice, offering up Christ again in a ritual immolation which repeated the Sacrifice upon Calvary. There is not one word to necessitate a belief in Transubstantiation, as against any other particular form of belief in the Real Presence. It is full of the idea of Sacrifice. There is hardly a constituent Collect of the Canon which does not bring in the note of Oblation; but the Sacrifice which it sets forth is entirely primitive, and strictly Eucharistic—it is a Thank-offering for the Fruits of the Earth to be made the means of a divine Communion. And yet the unhistorical, unchristian, and therefore uncatholic, idea of the ritual repetition of a Vicarious Sacrifice was the explanation forced upon this innocent service, in spite of all that the text itself said so plainly and so bluntly.

Even the gracious face of heaven was darkened by the grisly mythologies which medieval times deduced from the doctrines of the Angry God and the Atoning Sacrifice. The primitive Church did indeed believe in rewards and punishments in the life to come, to compensate for the inequalities of this life and to enable every soul to achieve his possibilities and complete the development begun in this life, and to be made fit to be received into the company of “just men made perfect” in the presence of God. But it was reserved for medieval times to concoct the fiction of an eternal red-hot hell for irreclaimable sinners—a concept which makes impossible the solution of the immemorial problem of Evil, the greatest intellectual difficulty of all philosophy and all religion, since on that hypothesis Evil would be everlasting.

For the first thousand years, the whole Church celebrated, in the white garments of joy and with innumerable Alleluias, the triumph of the ending of a Christian’s earthly struggle and the beginning of his heavenly reward. But medieval pessimism felt that practically nobody was good enough to go straight to heaven. Therefore, to a hell seven times heated, they added the penitentiary department of purgatory, every bit as hot, where penitent sinners must sweat out to the uttermost the punishment decreed by retributive Justice for their repented and forgiven misdeeds done in the body. This was mitigated only by the invention of a Treasury of the Superabundant Merits of the Saints, upon which the Pope could draw checks to make up the defalcations of defaulting sinners. And they even cooked up the notion of limbo, which was a kind of annex to purgatory, a sort of juvenile detention home, where unbaptized infants played forever in the beautiful groves where Plato and Socrates and the other righteous heathen walked and talked, all in the most perfect “natural” happiness, yet forever deprived of the beatific vision of God!

The Reformation was quite right in denouncing all this as an artificial and completely unethical system. But the incensed Continental Reformers, for the most part, valiantly attacked all the wrong things. They assailed the Eucharist itself, not merely the medieval distortions of its meaning. They denied the Christian Priesthood, instead of elevating that idea to a more spiritual plane. They rejected purgatory—but had to fall back upon the idea of an eternal heaven and hell which was just as inferential and as medieval. They rebelled against Works of Supererogation and the Treasury of Merits; but, as we have noted, they failed to see that to profess to transfer the Merits of Christ to undeserving sinners by means of a Substitutionary Atonement was exactly as immoral as to use for that purpose the Merits of the Saints. They had some glorious rows about such external symbols as vestments and ceremonies; and in the heat of the fray they abandoned the rich treasures of devotion preserved in historic Christian worship since the beginning, and weakened or completely abandoned the Sacraments.

The really remarkable thing in all this is that Cranmer was not more tainted than he was by these universal presuppositions of his age. So far as I know, there are only two instances of them in his Prayer Book. “Satisfaction,” and “provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation toward us,” probably mark the full extent of such infiltrations.

How was it that the Church of England achieved a real Reformation, which accomplished a restoration of the pristine Christian faith, whereas the Continent plunged into a false Reformation which based itself firmly upon all the things that were wrong in medieval Romanism, and destroyed all the things which were right—namely the primitive faith, ministry, and worship?

There were three chief reasons for this happy state of affairs: the character of the native English Reformation; Cranmer’s use of his Latin originals; and the influence of the Greek liturgies.

The English Reformation

Some two centuries before this time, a premonitory movement had swept through England in the prophetic work of John Wycliffe. He condemned the Church’s possession of wealth as demoralizing to the Christian character, and its abuse of power as incompatible with the Christian mission. He emphasized the preaching of the Gospel and opened the Scriptures in the English tongue. He deprecated the claims of the Priesthood to magical powers and denounced the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Though suppressed at the time, these principles remained as a kind of “grass-roots” substratum in the minds of the English people. They came to the surface again and again afterwards, as late as the rise of Methodism. They furnished the soil upon which the distinctive English Reformation grew. They determined the limits which it never thought of exceeding. This helps to account for the fact that this movement in England owed so little to the far more trenchant, spectacular, and destructive efforts of the Continental Reformers.

There is no real Calvinism in the Prayer Book. It has been thought that certain modifications of the Communion Service were made in order to express, or at least to make room for, the sort of subjectivism known as “Receptionism,” which was espoused by Calvin. What actually is there is a powerful and balanced expression of both the objective and subjective realities in that Sacrament, neither of which is a reality without the other. How can anyone “receive” something which in some sense is not objectively there? On the other hand, what difference does it make what the Elements are alleged to be “made,” unless they are in some way “received” in the soul, by faith?

Again, there is no Lutheranism, either. There are quite a number of passages from Lutheran sources, including such relatively unimportant matters as the Confession and Comfortable Words in the Communion, forms for Private Baptism, the use of Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments as the basis of the Catechism, and details in the Marriage and Burial Services. But they avoid incorporating one single expression of Lutheran doctrine. If comparison be made with their originals, it is remarkable how careful Cranmer was to leave out all the weary and dreary rantings about Original Sin, Total Depravity, and the like. Hence, the Lutheran contributions to the Prayer Book have at the most a literary interest; they possess no theological significance whatever.

Thus the Prayer Book is not derivative, a faltering watery reflection of Continental Protestantism. On the contrary, it firmly and advisedly rejected all the novel theology which Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli had to offer. The English Reformation grew on its own soil. And it maintained a living continuity with the primitive faith expressed in the Church’s ancient worship, instead of scrapping the whole thing in favor of what some headstrong bigot decided for himself ought to have been the case. What the distinctively English form of the Reformation was is to be sought not in the confusing ephemeral controversies of the time, but in the Book of Common Prayer.

The Use of Latin Sources

Cranmer’s First English Prayer Book was primarily, and all but exclusively, a translation of forms of worship already in use in the Church in the Latin tongue, presented in a consolidated and simplified form. His announced purpose was to bring the ancient Catholic and Apostolic worship of the Church of England to the use and understanding of the people, not to alter its teaching. He did not consider, for example, that there was anything the matter with the Mass which a judicious translation into English would not cure. He would transfer expressions which had been misinterpreted to other contexts, where they could do no harm; but he would not eliminate any of them. Our Communion Service is actually the Mass in English, in what Dr. Brightman calls, in one place, a “liberal translation” and, in another, an “eloquent translation”—but it is all there.

Most of Cranmer’s work was matured under the resolute supervision of King Henry VIII, who held with immense firmness the inherited Christian faith, which he made so little attempt to apply to his personal life. It is one of the important paradoxes of history that our Church owes the integrity of its faith, worship, and ministry, to a considerable degree, to the fact that Cranmer was not a very strong man. He was animated by no such force of character, originality, and conviction as were displayed by Luther and Calvin. Perhaps, for that very reason, he was also lacking in their animosity, contumaciousness, and self-will. Luther, for instance, had his troubles with Bishops and, in consequence, discarded the Apostolic Succession—which he could perfectly well have retained, since there were Catholic Bishops who espoused his side. He was rudely contemptuous of medieval doctrines of Sacrifice, and therefore destroyed the traditional liturgy.

Cranmer, on the other hand, was an only too subservient politician; and the English Reformation was urged on, both under Henry and Edward, for primarily political reasons. The only really vital point in England was the declaration of independence from the pretensions of Rome; and even this was repudiated rather as a political issue than as a corruption of the constitution of Christ’s Church.

In respect to the other matters which caused such a destruction of ancient landmarks on the Continent, Cranmer took as his guide the old saying, which is almost the unofficial motto of the Church of England: Abusus non tollit usum—“the abuse of a thing does not preclude the proper use of it.” So in England Bishops were retained to secure the ancient apostolic commission of the Ministry, though they were brought under constitutional control. The whole system of the ancient worship was kept as perfectly harmless, once you got at it to see what it actually said. The faith once delivered to the Saints was preserved in the ancient Creeds, with no attempt to qualify them by cantankerous modern formulas—the Thirty-nine Articles did not exist in any form till after the Second Prayer Book.

There are few more instructive illustrations in history of the power of an overruling Providence to bring strength out of weakness and to make even the wrath of man to praise him than the way in which Cranmer’s political timidity served to preserve the pure Catholic and Apostolic character of the Church of England. The very fact that it did not present a new worship is itself demonstration of the fact that it was no new Church.

When, thus, it is asked whether it is true that the Church of England was founded by Henry VIII, this writer is in the habit of retorting: “Certainly! In just the same way that the Christian religion was founded by Pontius Pilate!” Both were pretty bad men; both took a vital hand in the actual turn that events took; but the Christian faith existed before Pontius Pilate and would have been essentially the same if he had never been born. So the personal wickedness of Henry did not suffice to make a new religion in England, nor even to affect the character of that Church as newly expressed in the Book of Common Prayer. Precisely because Cranmer was a preserver, not an innovator, it remained the same Church. “Where was your Church before Henry VIII?” cried Fisher the Jesuit. “Where was your face,” calmly replied Archbishop Laud, “before you washed it this morning?”

It should be added that the particular form of the Latin services used by Cranmer was, of course, that of the local diocesan rites then in use in England—the Roman Church did not impose its service books upon its whole obedience throughout the world until after the Council of Trent. These English “Uses,” as they were called, were identical with the Roman in nearly all important respects. Nevertheless, there was one variant in the Sarum Rite, which was predominant in England, which had a really very important effect upon the religion of our Prayer Book.

The most frequent Roman form of Absolution runs: “May Almighty God have mercy upon thee, and bring thee, thy sins forgiven, to everlasting life.” That formula comes very dangerously near justifying that popular misapprehension in the West, of which mention has been made before, that men are saved in their sins, or in spite of their sins, instead of from their sins. It is of great importance that the Sarum form used by our ancestors in England interpolated the significant phrases “deliver thee from all evil, preserve and strengthen thee in all goodness,” into the bare, brief Roman form of the text.

This instance—and it does not stand alone—is of considerable importance for the distinctive character of the Anglican religion, before as well as after the Reformation. It was not for nothing that Pelagianism—the idea that man’s own exertions are essential in his own salvation—was the only heresy of British origin. That idea spoke for something in the national character which endured long after the one-sided emphasis which stamped it as a heresy had been corrected. The example of it in this Sarum interpolation was simply transforming as to the effect of Absolution. It made it stand for the actual redemption of the sinner, not the mere whitewashing of his sin. It laid demands on human effort, in cooperation with divine grace.

And this hint was not thrown away upon Cranmer. He consistently carried it out through all the penitential passages in all the services. His “confirm and strengthen you in all goodness,” in the Communion Service, derived directly from that Sarum note, was extended and reenforced in the other forms:

That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life.

That the rest of our life hereafter may be pure and holy.

That we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life.

Influence of the Greek Liturgies

Nor did Cranmer stop here. This same dynamic idea of religion, of the grace of God operating powerfully within us and enlisting our own most earnest cooperation, is found throughout the offices of the Prayer Book. Primarily, Cranmer imbibed this idea from the Greek Orthodox liturgies. His constant appeal was to the standards of the primitive Church, which he correctly considered had been preserved uncorrupted in the services of the cradle-lands of the Christian faith. These ancient churches have always maintained the scriptural and apostolic conception of human salvation as a vital process of the transformation of character into the likeness of the Divine Humanity of the Lord, by being brought into personal contact with him in his holy Church, which is his living Body in this present world. And besides the small, but vital, expressions of this nature which Cranmer took from the Greek liturgies, he made excellent use of anything of similar nature from any other source and incorporated these in forceful and soul-stirring phrases.

This was true of the service of Holy Baptism, which it has proved so easy to conceive as a mere formality or as sheer magic since it may be administered to an unconscious infant without even waking him up! Here, energizing ideas which furnish two of the most outstanding characteristics of our service are impartially drawn from Lutheran and from ancient Greek sources. The commission, “manfully to fight under his banner, against sin, the world, and the devil,” is from Hermann of Cologne. “Remembering always, that Baptism doth represent unto us our profession, which is, to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto him, that as he died and rose again for us, so should we, who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness, continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living”—those vital ideas of St. Paul came into the First Prayer Book in the words of St. Basil the Great. It is true that these vigorous expressions have not been in the American service since 1928; but we still have Cranmer’s summary of the same ideas in the Thanksgiving after Baptism: “that he, being dead unto sin, may live unto righteousness, and being buried with Christ in his death, may also be partaker of his Resurrection.”

Again, Cranmer salvaged a feature which was in the old Baptismal Service, but which had withered on the vine, and transplanted it to a place where it has an absolutely maximum effect upon the minds of us all. The Sarum rite of Baptism began at the church door with the ceremony of enrolling the candidate for religious instruction in preparation for Baptism. This had become an empty formality at the Baptism of Infants since, of course, they were taken straight to the font and promptly baptized. But this part concluded with a prayer that the candidate might “daily increase, that he may be made meet to come unto the grace of Baptism.” It was in his Second Prayer Book that Cranmer had the happy thought of making this inherently valuable idea, which had ceased to carry any meaning where it was, the basis of the new Form of Confirmation: “Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace, that he may continue thine forever; and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom.” These words, spoken to each of us at the impressionable time of adolescence, at the moment of high resolve that marked our coming to the age of self-responsibility in the faith, remain in our minds as the very focal point of the whole Prayer Book, the central line of reference of our lives, and the quintessential meaning of our Church.

So, likewise, Cranmer contributed a vital and dynamic touch to the expression of that great continuing and sustaining experience of the Holy Communion, which is the heart of our worship, the hearth-fire of our family unity, the Table of our Spiritual Bread. To this end, he brought “light from the East” to the meaning and method of the Communion, which had been obscured in the Dark Ages of the West.

There are a good many objections to the medieval doctrine of Transubstantiation as an explanation of the sacramental mystery; but the really fatal trouble with it is that it necessitates a second miracle of detransubstantiation. Otherwise, the very Body of Christ, as our Lord pointedly intimated in another connection, when received by a man’s mouth, would not “enter into his heart, and into his belly, and goeth out into the draught” (Mark 7:19). Consequently, some excessively unpleasant controversies in the Middle Ages compelled some Roman theologians to make the confusing and paradoxical assertion that, although by their hypothesis the “accidents” were utterly divorced from the “substance” of the Sacrament, yet the instant the “accidents” were altered in appearance, the supernatural “substance” vanished! As soon as the Bread ceased to be recognizably Bread, it was no longer the Body. In other words, if the wafer is held in the mouth till it tastes ever so slightly sweet, when in fact it has begun to be digested, then it will no longer be the body of Christ, but mere bread, to go the homely way of all digestion.

Thus, according to Roman theory, the Holy Communion is, at the best, only a transient experience, a passing contact. And that simply does not square with Christian experience. We know that the Communion is an enduring and abiding enrichment of the soul. And from the Liturgy of St. Basil, Cranmer borrowed words to say so unmistakably: “And made one body with thy Son, Jesus Christ, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.” Indeed, he felt this idea so important that he underscored and said it over again in the Prayer of Humble Access: “that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”

The Prayer Book has many other examples of this sort of dynamic and practical religion which calls upon the human will and forms human character. They range from the marriage vows with their discipline of self-responsibility to the Prayer Book concept of the state of the Faithful Departed, as a life and growth in the heavenly kingdom, and a perfecting in the Mystical Body of Christ.

This means, among other things, that though the offices of the Prayer Book are necessarily corporate in form, because they are devotions which we perform together, they are intensely personal in their application. Nowhere is the individual soul more prostrate before the infinite Majesty of God than in that grandest and most corporate act of our religion, the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Yet the completion of that great Action comes to us in intensely personal terms: “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.”

Therefore, though the Prayer Book was drawn up for congregational, rather than individual, use, its worship is not something performed for the people, but by them. If they do not enter into that worship, if they do not make the general supplications of the Church their very own, if they are content to drift in that sort of hypnotic dream into which it is so easy to fall in accustomed liturgical services, then they are contributing nothing, and receiving nothing, either; and they might as well be out on the golf course, getting some healthy exercise. The conclusion, indeed, that some of the shrewder and more impervious have come to!

The necessity for this personal participation needs continually to be re-emphasized, for it is the hardest thing in the world to rid mankind of its most ancient superstition, a belief in magic. It is very easy for a man to have faith that certain solemn ceremonies will somehow do something for him entirely without his understanding or cooperation if only he is willing for them to do so. So Roman Catholics constantly attend rituals in a language completely unknown to the great majority of them and even think that the most incidental and extraneous portions of them have saving value: like the medieval woman Dean Ladd tells about, who, when unable to come to church for a Mass for her recovery from sickness, requested that at least a Deacon come and read the Gospel for the Day over her bed; and when that proved impracticable, settled for a Subdeacon who read two Epistles!

But Protestants have the same failing, as indicated by that marvelous penetrating satire of Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railway,” which tells about the modern men who scorn the toilsome footpath way of Bunyan’s “Pilgrim” and expect to be carried comfortably and effortlessly through life on the upholstered seats of the Church’s train, with the valuable luggage of their sins safely checked in the baggage car, only to be extremely disconcerted at the end of the journey by the discovery that this train does not go over Jordan!

A really devoted layman is reported to have said that it was a great comfort to him, as he sat by his blazing hearth with his family and friends on a cold Sunday evening, to think that at that moment the family devotions of the whole parish were being duly performed at Evensong in the church! [Though the situation might be somewhat different if the devoted layman, prevented from public worship in church, engaged in similar liturgical devotions at home.] This was no better than the defense once heard of that admitted “abomination,” the Solitary Mass—advising a priest to go ahead with an announced celebration even if no one had turned up to participate with him in it, on the ground that it was offered on behalf of the whole body of the Church, who were to be considered as being present by faith and communicating by charity!

This kind of superfatted satisfaction which some nominal Episcopalians display at merely “belonging” to the best Church on earth, must certainly be the reason why in some parts of this country our average score of church-attendance falls below that of any other body, Protestant or Catholic. There is no use whatever in “belonging” to any Church, unless that Church “belongs” to you! And that is a possession for which you cannot pay by anything but the giving of yourself.

The center of the Church’s worship, and the heart of its life, is the Holy Eucharist. This great action is presented to us both as Sacrifice and Sacrament. Let us now explore what we mean by these expressions which have been, and still are, considerably misinterpreted in some quarters.

Modern times are disposed to consider that the use of Sacrifice in religion belongs to the remote past. It would seem to reflect naïve and anthropomorphic ideas of the gods. Primitive man certainly believed that the gods needed propitiation, since they were powers which often appeared to be hostile and ruthless to man. Perhaps, they reasoned, the gods were jealous of too much human happiness, and therefore it might be well to punish oneself before one were punished, by voluntarily giving up something that could be spared instead of losing what one could not afford to lose. Thus sacrifice might entail a willing and precautionary loss. And it was considered that the gods enjoyed eating, as man did himself. No doubt, they too preferred animal food; and so the practice of sacrifice entailed a good deal of killing. The temples were slaughterhouses. Among much that was revolting, we turn away from the dark and dreadful records of human sacrifice, which are found even in the Old Testament.

It is no wonder that the New Testament avoided calling the Holy Communion a sacrifice, or its ministers Priests. There was a sharp contrast with the Jewish Priesthood, which administered a formalized religion and turned the Temple monopoly of sacrificial worship to personal profit. There was an even deeper chasm separating them from the heathen priesthoods. These latter were rejected on religious grounds, since Christianity, like Judaism, considered that polytheism was the worship of devils and evil powers. Further, polytheism was fundamentally unethical, making no connection between religion and morality: its very worship was an unholy thing, with its temple prostitutes and outrageous orgies.

Nevertheless, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, which was certainly current in the second century, and may even have appeared in the first, calls the Eucharist a Sacrifice. And the earliest Liturgies speak of the Bishop, who was then the local Pastor and the normal Minister of all Sacraments, as a Priest. In other words, just as soon as the Christian Church was strong enough to stand on its own feet, and to display its own unmistakable character without danger of confusion, it was recognized that its worship was essentially sacrificial. This development had its roots in the Epistle to the Hebrews. It evolved with a great deal of devotional richness and without deforming misinterpretations in the Eastern Churches. They had inherited an uncorrupted primitive rationale of Sacrifice. And to this day they speak of the Sacraments as Mysteries—that is, spiritual realities, which can never be completely understood or pinned down to mechanical explanations.

It was otherwise in the literalminded West. When we come to medieval times, we find that the Roman Church had inherited a tradition of Priesthood and Sacrifice, but did not really know what to make of either. How could the offering and receiving of simple articles of food, Bread and Wine, be called a Sacrifice? The West had lost its racial memories and did not have the key to what the earliest members of our race meant by this method of worship. They looked back on what they knew of the externals of that worship and evolved a rationalization of them. Though offered in perfect good faith, it happened to be historically erroneous and deleterious in its consequences. But unfortunately it still lives—even in some Anglican quarters. It consists in defining the meaning of a Sacrifice as “the suffering of a victim, or the destruction of an offering.” And they applied this definition to the Holy Communion by saying that just as the burnt-offering or the poured-out libation was destroyed, so the Bread and Wine were destroyed by being eaten. But the killing of the animal must also be represented by some kind of repetition of the Sacrifice upon Calvary. They scorned the idea of a “mere Sacrifice of Bread and Wine”—they insisted upon some kind of ritual immolation of Christ. The Greeks had spoken of the “bloodless Sacrifice,” no doubt to contrast the offering of pure and simple elements of Bread and Wine with the blood-streaming pagan altars. But the Latins twisted this into a literality: you killed him, but you did not hurt him! They still speak of a mactation—the slaying of a sacrificial victim. And the Council of Trent formally defined the “Sacrifice of the Mass” as a truly propitiatory Sacrifice, an offering up of Christ in a mystic Death to appease an offended God.

The Nature of Sacrifice

Because these ideas are unhistorical, they are actually heretical. It is very necessary to examine what the real principles of this ancient form of worship were, if we are to avoid most serious misapprehensions.

The actual meaning of sacrifice in universal primitive religion was purely and simply a dramatization of grateful thanksgiving. The gesture of “giving to God” was an act of worship, in recognition of God’s sovereignty and of man’s dependence upon his bounty. “All things come of thee, O Lord: and of thine own have we given thee” (I Chronicles 29:14). But what shall we give? Obviously, the most valuable thing that he has given us. To us moderns, that might mean something of the order of “gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.” But primitive man saw more truly. To him who always lived on the subsistence-margin of famine, his most valuable possession was the food whereby his life was sustained, which he received from the hand of God’s providence and which, he felt, was not only God’s means of maintaining his own life, but was, for that very reason, in some sense a communication of God’s life, the sole source of all life, to his own. Other “possessions” were mere tools or ornaments—dead things, no proper gifts to the Living God.

Consequently, the medieval definition is dead wrong: it is not of the essence of primeval sacrifice that the living thing should suffer or die; it is of its essence that the thing offered should be edible. Any food or drink is proper matter for an oblation. An animal might be preferred because it would be more valuable and less easily replaceable than a handful of meal or a little oil. But the animal was killed only because it could not be eaten alive, and the killing was not a sacrificial act. It was performed by the owner, not the Priest, and outside the Temple, before the carcass was brought in to be offered in the proper sacrificial action.

The Old Testament illustrates the three types of Sacrifice. The oblation might be wholly given to God, in a whole-burnt-offering or a libation; it might be shared with God, as by the burning of the “fat of the kidneys” upon the altar, while the rest of the animal was consumed by Priests and worshippers in a sacred meal; or it might be symbolically dedicated to God, but actually wholly consumed by the offerers in a communion feast.

In these modes, we note that the “giving to God” was always symbolic, an acted metaphor. It would be “sent up” in the less material form of the smoke of the burnt-offering “for a sweet-smelling savour,” if offered to the gods on high; but equally it would be “sent down” to the gods of the underworld, by being thrust down into a cavern or a volcanic fissure. Either way, it was only a gesture. But always the participation of the worshippers in a communion feast was a very real fact, and was regarded as a partaking in the life of God.

This evidence does not lie on the surface of the Old Testament documents by any means. They present a highly formalized system of worship, not at all self-explanatory; they are intelligible only in the light of comparative religion. Jewish worship went through vicissitudes which obscured its underlying meanings very extensively.

Sacrifice in the Old Testament

The original Jewish cultus was the worship of an essentially tribal God, of a people, and a land. This is interestingly illustrated in the story of Naaman. When he was cured of his leprosy by the God of the Hebrews, he made the curious request that he be allowed to take home to Syria two mules’ loads of earth. The reason was that henceforward he proposed to worship only the God who had cured him. But as that God could be worshipped only on his own sacred soil, he needed to take some of that soil back with him, to set up a sort of “extraterritorial” chapel in Damascus.

The whole nation had to wrestle with that same problem when the people of Israel were taken out of the “Holy Land” in the Exile, when the conquering Assyrians applied the formula of transfer of populations to the quieting of restive subjects. On the foreign soil of Mesopotamia, the old sacrificial worship was regarded as being impossible. Instead, there was set up, as a substitute, the worship of the Synagogue, which consisted of reading of Scriptures, preaching, and prayers only. They did not even have music: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept. . . . As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Ps. 137:1–4)

The result was a curious and quite unintentional “Protestantizing” of Hebrew devotions, a transition from the “Solemn High Mass” of the Temple sacrifice, to the “decent godly Morning Prayer” of the Synagogue. After the return to Palestine, this trend was recognized and deliberately rationalized by the Prophets:

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:6–8)

Noble, poignant, and spiritually true though these words are, their effect was not to sublimate the old sacrificial worship and fill it with effectual meaning, but to set it aside as unnecessary. Their tendency was precisely that of modern popular Protestantism, to scout the effectiveness of Sacraments, and by intellectual appeal to try to secure the objective of transforming the worshipper to righteousness of life.

Without the Prophet to spiritualize him and to proclaim the vital meaning of his holy work with something of the winning rapture of a Gospel, the Priest always tends to degenerate into a mere functionary. This is just what happened to classical Judaism after the Exile. The Priests monopolized sacrificial worship at the one central sanctuary at Jerusalem; but all their elaborate ceremonials were perfectly lifeless at the time of our Lord. This is why the clear outlines of the pure and primitive sacrificial worship are so little obvious in the religious literature of the Jews.

The Common Meal and Its Sacrificial Import

And yet throughout all these vicissitudes, the primitive rationale of Sacrifice remained uncontaminated, unequivocated, unformalized, in the most elemental of all sacrifices and the most fundamental of all Priesthoods, the Common Meal of every household, conducted by the Father of the Family. This meal was in all respects a perfect communion-sacrifice: it was always offered to God and partaken of by those present. It was recognized as being an essentially religious occasion, since it was required that conversation at table should always be serious and preferably religious. The sublime discourses in the 13th and 14th chapters of St. John’s Gospel are a supreme example. (The Fourth Gospel, which never repeats matters in the first three except to correct or to supplement them, does not trouble to record the Institution of the Eucharist; but it does give us the table conversation at the Last Supper.)

The intrinsically religious character of the Jewish meal was due to the fact that it was recognized as an essentially sacrificial action. St. Paul perfectly states its basic idea when he says: “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” (I Tim. 4:4,5). To this day, the Orthodox Jew actually believes that unblest food is indecent. It might serve as hog food or dog food; but it cannot be nourishment for rational, spiritual beings. The thanksgiving which offers it to God lifts it from the animal to the human level.

And because it was a Sacrifice, it was also a Sacrament, a use of physical means for spiritual purposes. The homely needs for the maintenance of physical life were made the means of the renewal of spiritual life. And that not because we receive it, but because God gave it. The life received was understood absolutely as the life of God. Again and again, the ritual directions of the Old Testament command, “Ye shall not eat the blood, which is the life thereof.” (Cf. Lev. 7:14.) That is, in partaking of animal food, you did not want to receive the life of the animal—that was to be given back to God who gave it—but nothing less than the very life of God, imparted to sustain the human life which he also had given. So, in turn, this sharing together of the life of God created a bond between themselves in the society of the family and friends who partook of this Sacrament of Daily Bread—the tie of spiritual kinship and mutual fellowship.

Thus the Common Meal of the family was an altar of worship: always a religious act; most formally so in the Kiddush (the Sanctification which ushered in the eves of Sabbath and Festival) and in the complete Liturgy at the Passover. In a society of any kind, it was the essential bond of unity. There it was called the Chaburah (from the Hebrew Chaber, “neighbor”) or Meal of Fellowship. The Last Supper was such a Chaburah, and from it stemmed the Christian Eucharist and also the Agape or Love-Feast of the New Testament, and about five hundred years thereafter—indeed, we have essentially the same thing in a Parish Supper at the present day. So also the so-called “Miraculous Feedings” were probably nothing but Meals of Fellowship on a very large scale, and being remembered as religious occasions with sacramental, and therefore supernatural, meanings were misreported as physical miracles in the New Testament.

These sacrificial significances of the Sacred Meals of the Hebrews are of the greatest importance to Christians, since it was from such a meal, not from the formalized Sacrifices of the Temple, that the central religious observance of the Christian Church was derived. It is of special importance to note that, in spite of the simplicity, informality, and indefiniteness of the ritual used at those meals, underlying them was a full belief that they presented a real sacrifice, a real presence, and a real communion. The Last Supper occurred against the background of these beliefs in Judaism. They were assumed and taken for granted by the Disciples. They were the necessary foundation for the small element of added belief in the Christian Eucharist.

This fact is of the greatest moment. I know when I first came into contact with the worship of the Catholic Church, I was a great deal startled at the doctrine of the Real Presence of our Lord in the Holy Sacrament: that the earthly elements of Bread and Wine were actually the means whereby men might be brought into convincing personal contact and union with the Living Christ. Wonderful such a doctrine certainly was, and of the utmost value for the life of the soul and the empowering of human nature if it could be received as true; yet after all, was not such a tremendous assertion altogether too much weight to put upon four words—This is my body—words which in themselves might quite honestly be taken in a purely metaphorical sense, as, indeed, most Protestants do take them?

And this is quite right. Such a belief would be too much weight to put on those four words alone. The Church of Rome, which does just that, has no explanation to offer for the Sacramental Mystery but sheer magic; it habitually speaks of “the miracle of the Mass.” But the faith of the Apostles was not solely dependent upon those words. For them, that faith rested on the broad foundation of their conviction as Jews that every Sacred Meal afforded a real sacrifice, a real presence, and a real communion of the life of God. The new element was that this Sacrament brought them in precisely the same way into union with the life of Christ. This must have been especially unmistakable to them in our Lord’s words about the Cup: Drink ye all of it. The Jew had had constantly dinned into his ears that he must not “drink of the blood, which is the life” of the sacrificial animal. (E.g., Lev. 17:10–11.) But the Christian, directly to the contrary, is not only made “one body” with his Lord—he is privileged to partake of his very life! The shock at the breaking of this immemorial taboo must have rammed the point home in the minds of the Disciples.

Thus a true understanding of the basic principles of the primitive ideas of Sacrifice removes the necessity for postulating some sort of magic or miracle in the Holy Sacrament. A Sacrifice is essentially a Thankoffering of God’s gift of food; it is consecrated by God’s acceptance, not by a thaumaturgic act of Priesthood; it is given back to us to be the food of faith, both symbolizing and conveying God’s gift of life—his own life (there is no other)—in the Eucharist, the life of Christ, who is both God and Man.

Because the underlying ideas are so large and so simple, the Jew did not need elaborate expressions of them. He did not dramatize them with an explicit act of Oblation; he did not beseech God to accept the gifts; he did not invoke the power of God to make them something other than they were by his ordinance; he did not perform any objective and sacerdotal benediction upon them. He conceived that God did not need to be told how to do his own divine work and that man’s only part in the action was simply to give his grateful thanks. He did not say, “O God, bless this food”; he said, “Blessed be God, who hath given us this food.” Nevertheless, he believed that this Thanksgiving by man necessarily brought about a Consecration by God.

This is illustrated in that very early document, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. We find here a form of prayers for the Eucharist which is on an entirely different basis from the later liturgies of the Church, but which seems to have been used by Jewish Christians at the beginning.

These prayers are simply Messianic modifications of the normal Table Prayers at every Jewish meal, as set forth in the manual The Mishna:

The Mishna	The Teaching
What blessing do they say over fruits? Over the fruit of trees, one says, Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, the King of the Universe, who createst the fruit of the tree; except over Wine: over Wine one says . . . who createst the fruit of the vine.	We thank thee, our Father for the holy Vine of David thy servant. . . .
Over the fruits of the earth, one says, . . . Who createst the fruits of the earth; except over Bread: over Bread one says, . . . Who bringest forth Bread from the earth.	We thank thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou hast made known through Jesus thy servant: to thee be glory for ever. For as this broken bread was scattered over the mountains, and gathered together to be made into one, so may thy Church be gathered from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom: for thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.

The Last Supper

This, or something very like it, must have been said at the Last Supper. It is very possible that this document has preserved for us the words which Holy Scripture does not record and the historic Liturgies do not rehearse, when our Lord “blessed” the Bread, and “gave thanks” for the Cup. This seems further probable, since the Fourth Gospel presents to us three unique passages, like nothing in the other Gospels, which seem to be expansions of ideas contained in these prayers: the Parable of the Vine and the Branches in Chapter 13; the long discourse on the meaning of the Eucharist in Chapter 6, which begins with the same conception of “the life and knowledge made known through Jesus thy servant”; and the great High-Priestly Prayer for the Unity of the Church in Chapter 17. It would seem almost certain that the author of the last Gospel knew a ritual such as is recorded in the Teaching, and it is highly probable that this was the ritual of the Last Supper.

While it is not necessary to put into words what everyone present takes for granted, the situation is otherwise in the case of people brought into the Church who do not have this background and these convictions. When Christianity outgrew its Jewish swaddling-clothes, and became a universal religion, when pagan or unbelieving Gentiles were brought into it, then it was necessary to make explicit what had been implicit for the Jews. So we find that the Liturgy reported by Hippolytus of Rome in the year 197, and all later Christian Liturgies, have a form like ours, consisting of: (1) the Thanksgiving for the Redemption wrought through Christ; (2) the Charter Narrative of the Institution of the Sacrament; (3) the formal Commemoration of the Atonement; (4) the direct Oblation of the Holy Gifts; (5) the Invocation of the power of the Holy Spirit to consecrate them; and (6) a conclusion detailing the Benefits of the Holy Communion.

How was the transition made from the formlessness of the Jewish rite to this definite and operative form? It must have been done very early, since all Liturgies, though differing very greatly in length and content, do not differ at all in this outline; so early, that it can hardly be put after the time of the Apostles. And if so, there can scarcely be any doubt as to which Apostle. St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, must have encountered the difficulty of assimilating non-Jewish converts more often than any other. As a matter of fact, his own writings have clear traces of most of these details.

He gives the Narrative of the Institution as a “tradition” received and transmitted. It is hardly to be doubted that this was a fixed feature of his Consecration Prayer, as it has been ever since. So too with the Commemoration of the Passion. It is to be noted that the words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” are found only in St. Paul’s account, and in that of his companion and disciple, St. Luke; they are not in the other two Gospels. It is notable that St. Paul—who was never a Disciple, and had not himself passed through the poignant firsthand experience of the Crucifixion—was the first to feel and proclaim the glory of the Cross. It was his influence that transformed what had been the dreadful symbol of the most painful and shameful death into the sign of all grace and sanctification, so as to set it upon the topmost spire of our churches and to enshrine it in the middle of the altar of God. It is not conceivable that an Apostle who had been present at the Crucifixion would have felt so; it is inevitable that the Lord’s Supper should have celebrated by the Jewish disciples in much the general and formless way that we find in the Teaching—a service which St. Peter could have attended without shame, and our Lord’s mother without tears.

So, likewise, St. Paul was thoroughly conscious of the sacrificial as well as the sacramental character of the rite: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (I Cor. 10:16) And as for the Sacrifice, his comparison of the cup and Table of the Lord with heathen rites, which he calls the cup and table of devils, makes it plain that he regarded the Holy Table as a Christian altar, and the Eucharist as “offered in sacrifice” thereon.

St. Paul nowhere directly alludes to a formal Invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Liturgy: but he has a curious passage in Romans 15:16, in which he alludes to his evangelical work among the Gentiles in what seems to be deliberately sacrificial language. The passage is much more striking in Greek than English, containing words which ought to be rendered liturgy, hierurgy, and oblation. The passage states “that the offering up (oblation) of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.” Which must be confessed to be very curious language, indeed, if St. Paul was not in the habit of invoking the Holy Ghost in his Liturgy—yet just as natural as it is striking if such was his custom.

No one can say, of course, that St. Paul was the author of the Prayer of Consecration, in the sense that he composed it. No doubt, as in the case of the Institution Narrative, there were elements which he “received” as well as “delivered.” But that his powerful mind and his most extensive missionary services had a great deal to do with fixing this outline in the practice of the Church seems hardly to be disputed. Certainly, no other single figure could have hoped to be so unanimously followed by all later Liturgies at all times and in all places.

In any case, the movement of thought in the great Consecration Prayer of all historic Liturgies is perfectly balanced, and perfectly expressive of the spiritual realities of this most ancient form of human worship, a sacrificial action which begins with an offering of Thanksgiving for God’s temporal benefits to man and ends in a participation in the renewal of his life within us.

There are two divisions of the service of the Holy Communion. They are sometimes called the Service of the Catechumens and the Service of the Faithful. The distinction is between a preliminary office of Common Prayer and the offering of the Christian Sacrifice. Originally they were used more or less independently. The early Christians gathered in Church to say their common prayers together. The first part of the Communion Service, with its Epistle, Gospel, Creed, etc., may be called the “Morning Prayer” part of the service; indeed, it is the actual parent of the Order of Morning Prayer, and all the other Hours of Prayer. Sometimes when there was first a Baptism or an Ordination, the service proceeded directly to the Oblation of the Sacrifice, without rehearsing these preliminary matters.

The Introduction

The service begins with the Lord’s Prayer. This is said silently, because it is not a devotion of the congregation, but the conclusion of the Priest’s personal preparation for the celebration.

In the old English rite, the Collect for Purity was also a part of the Priest’s preparation. But now, as the first audible part of the service, it is a singularly poignant and beautiful call to worship. It fulfills much the same office as the Opening Sentence at Morning Prayer, but in much more moving terms, so that it definitely sets the devotional key to the whole service. It has been so admired that often ministers of other churches use it to open their morning service. While this may be a less worthy use of it, we certainly do not begrudge it to them. We have carefully avoided copyrighting the Book of Common Prayer—and anybody is welcome to take it away with him and use it for what it is worth to him. The Prayer Book, as a matter of fact, has been the direct means of a great many conversions. For example, there was the famous year of the New England converts, when the President of Yale College and six of his associates came over to the Episcopal Church—to the intense surprise of the Puritans among whom they lived. And these Yale converts had never heard an Episcopal service; they came to their decision by the study of a copy of the Prayer Book which they found in the college library. And there is an interesting story about Bishop Whipple, when he first went up the Mississippi to his new northwestern diocese. He stopped off at a river landing and held service there. A young lawyer who had recently come out from New England to that wild and woolly part of the country was present with his wife. He heard the Prayer Book service and was much impressed with it; and the Bishop goodnaturedly left a copy of the book with him. The next time the Bishop touched that landing, coming down the river, this man and his wife had been reading the Prayer Book, and had decided to be confirmed. Their seven sons all became clergy of the Episcopal Church: and one of them, Bishop Burleson of South Dakota, was Assessor to the Presiding Bishop of his time.

The “Lesser Litany” (Lord, have mercy upon us; Christ, have mercy upon us; Lord, have mercy upon us), which is familiar to us as following the “Summary of the Law,” is really the terminal Kyrie eleison of a Litany which was once found in this place and led up to the Collect of the Day. In the sixth century this Litany was displaced from the service by the Gloria in excelsis. Anything which was quite such an earnest and almost penitential supplication as a Litany would give a certain shock, like a collision, in immediate juxtaposition with such a sudden shout of praise, “Glory be to God on high!” In just the same way, in the sixteenth century, when Cranmer put into the Prayer Book at this point what was really a litany form, the Ten Commandments with their litany responses, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law” (which was further emphasized as a Litany when the Scots finished it off with a true Litany collect for grace to keep the Commandments), it was again seen that this litany form was incompatible with the Gloria, and Cranmer moved the latter to the other end of the service—I think mistakenly.

As it has stood, therefore, since the Second Prayer Book this portion of the service has been distinctly a penitential preparation. And yet I rather doubt that many present-day Churchmen have felt it to be such. Cranmer’s purpose in putting the Decalogue in here was that it might be used exactly as it always had been used in preparing to make a private Confession. A devotional manual which gives directions for making confessions will furnish an Examination of Conscience, with questions based on each of the Ten Commandments. Irreverent communicants sometimes call such a form a “sin sheet.” That is precisely what the Decalogue in the Communion Service is intended to be—a “sin sheet”: an active searching of our consciences, that we may recall just how we have offended against God’s laws, and so bring an active content of real contrition to the General Confession later in the service. That this was Cranmer’s purpose is evident from these words in the second Exhortation (the one that is so seldom heard now):

The way and means thereto is: First, to examine your lives and conversations by the rule of God’s commandments; and whereinsoever ye shall perceive yourselves to have offended, either by will, word, or deed, there to bewail your own sinfulness, and to confess yourselves to Almighty God, with full purpose of amendment of life. (BCP, p. 87)

As long as people remembered this use of the Decalogue for an Examination of Conscience, and employed it as such in this Introduction to the Communion Service, it served a real purpose and had a real value. But as the pre-Reformation practice of regular private confession died out in the Church, most people did not know of this use, and, in fact, completely forgot what this feature was for. The most absurd hypotheses have been offered as to its purpose. The High Churchmen have tried to explain it as “a fixed Old Testament Lesson”—which is nonsense. Mr. Gladstone claimed that its constant recitation in the Church of England service (where it was always said; they do not have our “Summary”)¹ was the primary reason for the law-abidingness of the English people. If it is forgotten that its real aim is penitential, to awaken conscience, naturally it is then interpreted as a merely didactic feature: but as such, it becomes simply something to be endured until it is over. Actually it seems more or less on the way out. It is required now only under one of those “once-a-month” Rubrics which are so hard to observe. The parson is always intending to put it in some time, but forgets to do so. Over half of each new class entering seminary tell me that they have never heard it used in their lives.

As to the “Summary of the Law,” which usually takes its place, that is purely didactic, not penitential at all: so it is very hard to justify its place in the service; although it has great value of its own, as presenting in positive form those moral principles which are so largely negative in the Decalogue. Some of the old ideas of the Commandments—like the prohibition of the making of images, or the keeping holy of Saturdays—are obsolete and have no application to life nowadays. But if humanity lives upon earth for millions of years to come, they will never be able to exceed or exhaust these positive principles which our Lord implanted in the foundation of the Christian religion: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind . . . and thy neighbour as thyself.” As a supplement to the Decalogue, the Summary has great power. As a substitute, it has made us completely forget the call to the awakening of conscience. Both of them might well be kept in a special office of penitential preparation in the penitential seasons, but in the next Prayer Book, replaced in this position by Kyrie eleison and Gloria in excelsis on festal occasions.

The Collect of the Day, which follows, was perhaps originally “The First Prayer of the Lord’s Day,” as we find it in the ancient Egyptian rite: but in Western use, it seems to have been assimilated to be the summary Collect of the former Litany at the beginning. This is why so many of the Collects of the Day are such vague and general prayers: they have to be general, in order to sum up the devotional form of the Litany. Some of them are extraordinarily beautiful and forceful expressions of Christian devotion. Others however—the numerous Collects of the long Trinity Season, for example—are sometimes very general and often mutually equivalent. Bishop Parsons once told me that in his communicant class on Sunday mornings he used to comment on the Collect of the Day in the course of proceedings, but gave it up because he found himself saying the same things a good deal of the time. For modern use, it might be well if more of the Collects were more individual and incisive in their message.

The Ministry of the Word

After the foregoing “opening exercises,” the next section is quite frankly and properly “didactic,” with the solemn reading of the Holy Scriptures, recalling and continuing forever the original proclamation of the Christian Gospel.

As we noted earlier (Chapter 1), the “Prophecy” or Old Testament Lesson was the first to be used in the infant Church, and the other Lessons were added later. But though an Old Testament Lesson is found in the earliest forms of all liturgies, it has dropped out of most of them: though we still have a few cases where the Prophecy has been retained and read, rather awkwardly, under the title of an Epistle, the real “Epistle” being eliminated on such occasions. The Epistles, of course, are “Letters”—primarily those of St. Paul; though in Eastertide we have a special course of the “General Epistles” of St. Peter, St. James, and St. John.

There is a Rubric after the Epistle: “Here may be sung a Hymn or an Anthem.” This is a revival of a very ancient feature of the service, which was called the “Gradual.” The Latin word gradus means “steps”; the custom was for a trained soloist to go and stand on the steps of the pulpit from which the Epistle was read, and from that coign of vantage sing this rather elaborate anthem. Intrinsically, this is not a bad idea. In Morning Prayer we have the alternation of a Lesson and a Canticle, a Lesson and a Canticle, in what seems a natural rhythm of the service. But for some reason or other this Rubric, which was new in 1928, does not seem to have caught on very well. We are used to hearing the two Lessons read one after the other at the Communion. Some times it is a distinct advantage to do so, when the same theme is carried over from the Epistle to the Gospel. Rather more often, perhaps, it is not, and the two are quite separate in thought. Perhaps if this feature was made very brief, say a single verse of a Hymn, it might be more acceptable.

The principal Lesson is the Gospel. As a matter of reverence to this narration of our Lord’s own words and actions, we stand at attention, just as we do at the Creed.

The Creed itself is our response to the proclamation of God’s Word. You will note that the Epistle concludes by saying, “Here endeth the Epistle”; but when the Minister comes to the last words of the Gospel, he says nothing. It has been whimsically said that he does not say, “Here endeth the Gospel,” because the proclamation of Christ’s Gospel never comes to an end! But actually the reason is that the Creed is the answer to the reading of the Gospel.

The Creed ought to be said throughout, standing at attention. There are some enthusiasts who make a point of kneeling at the so-called “Incarnatus” passage: “And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man.” There can be no possible objection to one’s honoring the Incarnation in the most solemn manner possible, though one must say that kneeling is a somewhat awkward gesture and, moreover, one which destroys the basic idea of standing at attention. Our ancestors in England avoided that by making a profound bow, without kneeling. And they did one thing more, the need of which I recognized the very first time I ever saw the Creed said in a Roman Church: they prolonged their reverence over the still more poignant “Crucifixus” passage—“And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried”—a point at which the Romans have relaxed their attention entirely, and are staring idly about the church.

After the Creed, the Sermon is the application of the Church’s teaching in the Scriptures and the Creed. A Sermon is not absolutely indispensable: its Rubric is the only one in the Prayer Book which is in the present indicative. The other Rubrics order that “the Minister shall” say or do this or that; but this one merely states that “then followeth the Sermon”—meaning, this is the place for the Sermon—if any! Until 1928, this was a “shall” Rubric: with the result that some men felt they had to put in at least a five-minute instruction, even at an early service. As there are very few people with such devotion that they can really appreciate a Sermon before breakfast, perhaps it is just as well that this custom should no longer be thought necessary, even by the literalminded.

The Offertory

The Offertory is primarily the offering of the elements of Bread and Wine. That is what is really offered, as the essential constituents of the Christian Sacrifice. The Offertory does not mean the “Collection.” But the “Collection” of the alms of the people came into connection with the sacrificial action in a perfectly natural way. The Bishop would choose one loaf and one flask of wine for the service; and what was left over went for the not specially interesting, but really quite unavoidable, necessity of feeding the clergy. But as time went on, these “gifts in kind” went out of fashion. We no longer live by barter, exchanging the products of our hands for those of someone else, but sell them in the market for money, the common medium of exchange. There is no need for anyone to be shame-faced about the “Collection.” It is a great deal more than a mere disagreeable necessity in order to keep the Church running. The holy elements themselves, the very Bread and Wine which are sacrificially offered, are both purchased out of that collection. More than that, it represents the sacrificial gift of a part of the worshippers’ own lives, of their labor and of themselves.

Bishop Nichols of California, who ordained me, used to emphasize the importance of the Offertory as a single action of Christian Sacrifice, in which we all give to God. He said that we have had altogether too much of the pump method of raising money in the Church: “The Church needs the money! The Church needs the money!”—and we have heard too little of the spring method, the voluntary overflow of people’s devotion, expressive of the fact that people need to give in acknowledgment of the truth that all the world is God’s. There is an awful lot of nonsense, he said, in the talk of the opposing ideologies of Socialism and Capitalism. Neither one of them possesses the slightest reality! The obvious fact is that the sole owner of all “real property” is God. The utmost that we can have is a life estate, the use while we are here of the things which God has lent to us as his stewards and trustees. We shall not need to worry about the finances of the Church, once men realize that they need to give in realization of the incommunicable Majesty of God, in recognition of his sovereignty in this world, and in willing worship of him.

Now, it is entirely proper that time be saved by having two things going on at the same time: while the Alms are being collected, the elements can be prepared simultaneously. But you will note that the Rubrics make it very clear that the Alms should first be “presented and placed upon the Holy Table,” and afterward “the Bread and the Wine” should be “offered and placed.” This is a true order of climax and prevents a false climax, such as is usually seen when the elements have been offered first, and the impressive feature is the grand ceremony of “the elevation of the cash”—with everyone standing up and singing lustily: “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.”

The Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church, which follows, is definitely an Offertory Prayer, which offers both the Alms and the Oblations to God, and then goes on with a General Intercession. Curiously enough, we now have this Intercession in the place where Justin Martyr first described it in the year 150—after the Sermon and before the Prayer of Consecration [although in the Liturgy as described by Justin the Intercessions come before instead of after the Offertory]. Later there grew up an idea that it was very suitable to present the Intercessions for all members of the Church after the Consecration, in the presence of the sanctified elements. In Syrian regions, they even spoke of the special blessedness of offering our Intercessions to God “while the Lamb is lying sacrificed upon the Altar!” The best you can say of that, is that it is very high-flown “High Church” language.

The Roman Church has these prayers divided, before and after the Consecration. Cranmer’s First Prayer Book united them before the Consecration Prayer. When the rearrangements of the Second Prayer Book made it advisable to move it elsewhere, he selected this place because the people were already familiar with a General Intercession in English, in the form of the “Bidding Prayer,” at High Mass in the old Latin services. And the Bidding Prayer, in turn, was a survival of the “Gallican” tradition, which had lingered on after Charlemagne extinguished the Gallican rite about the year 800. The Gallican alone among the great rites had preserved the Intercessions in this most ancient place for them. Probably Cranmer did not know about Justin Martyr; but it was a happy result that he would end by restoring a genuine primitive structure of the service at this point.

After this prayer, a good many of the congregation sometimes go home. In a big city this is perhaps inevitable—especially at a service, say, on Easter Day. One should not be so mean as to say that they have not come to Church for religious reasons; but certainly those reasons in some cases do not include any idea of making their communions. There is quite a large group of people who belong to what has been called “The Brotherhood of the Resurrection.” They are always there on Easter Day. A former Bishop of Tennessee was rector of Christ Church, Nashville, for about fifteen years. Once a prominent citizen of Nashville said to him, “Dr. Dandridge, why is it that you never preach on any subject except the Resurrection? I’ve heard you six or eight times now; and every time you have preached about the Resurrection!” Obviously, he was a member of the Brotherhood.

The fact is that in addition to the “pillars of the Church,” we have some well-meaning people who have been described as “flying buttresses” because they support the Church from the outside! In a way, they may even “belong to the Church,” but they have not come all the way in, to the extent that they can really feel that the Church belongs to them! This withdrawing of some of the congregation after the Prayer for the Church is a revival of the old Dismissal of the Catechumens, when they turned out those who were not yet in the full communion of the Church, or those who had fallen from its grace and were excommunicated. If people want to put themselves in such a classification, there is nothing much we can do about it, but to let those who are hardly converted depart at this point.

“Draw near with faith”

The Offertory is linked to the great Prayer of Consecration by an immediate penitential introduction, consisting of the Invitation, Confession, and Absolution. Formerly these parts came after the Consecration as a preparation for the receiving of the Holy Communion. But they form an equally appropriate approach to the whole grand action as a whole. They symbolize the chancel steps, up which the communicants “draw near with faith” to receive the Sacrament.

The little Invitation always impresses us profoundly with its simplicity and vividness. It is interesting that both of the Great Sacraments contain a passage which conducts us up to a sort of height of life, where we are able to look at our past, present, and future in a moment of time. In the Baptismal Vows, we have the Renunciation of past evil, the Declaration of present faith, and the Intention for the future to live according to God’s Commandments. Here in the Communion, the past and future are the same as in Baptism: “Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins,” “and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways”; but the middle term, that of the living present, is not one of faith (“Dost thou believe in all the articles of the Christian faith, as contained in the Apostles’ Creed?”)—it is love: “and are in love and charity with your neighbours.” Faith is the key to the outer door of the Church; but love is the price of admission to the altar of God.

The form of General Confession which follows has very strong language, much stronger than the one in Morning Prayer; so strong that some people feel it to be excessive. Perhaps they are partly right. The expression, “provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us,” reflects a medieval idea of God which is not in harmony with the Christian revelation. But the rest of the language is not at all too extreme if you realize what its purpose is. It is not intended to be taken in all respects individually and personally. Of course, there are times when we have been very bad children, and there is nothing we can say to God about ourselves that is too much—we long to rub ashes in our hair. But there are other times when that is not true, when perhaps the worst thing of which we can accuse ourselves is that we may have been a little too crisp in our remarks before we had our morning coffee, or something like that, and when it seems that these tremendous phrases of absolute and abject contrition are too much. It is then that we need to remember that this is a General Confession, the Confession of the whole Church, laying before God the sins of all the world and its own complicity in these things. At this moment there are some very terrible things going on, on the other side of the world, of which the most pure and righteous and holy soul can only say that “the remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.”

The following Absolution opens a clear tract for the future, with a riddance of the mistakes of the past.

The Consecration

Now follows the central part of the service. The Roman Church calls it the Canon, which means “the Rule” or fixed way of saying the service. It begins with the little dialogue, which summons the participation of the congregation in the call, “Lift up your hearts!” and the people’s reply, “We lift them up unto the Lord.” And then those significant words to which we have referred before, “Let us give thanks” unto our Lord God—words which gave us the ancient name of the service, the Holy Eucharist, that is, Thanksgiving.

Then follows the Preface. The Roman Church nowadays divides this from the Canon, and thinks of it as a Preface to the Canon. That was not the original idea. In the old Roman books it is properly a Preface of the Canon, an integral part of the Great Thanksgiving. In the first written form of the Liturgy, in Hippolytus, the Thanksgiving was one unbroken prayer, from “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty,” to the final Doxology. The Sanctus was afterward inserted into this prayer, as a choral response, dividing it into two parts. But the Preface is the beginning of the Thanksgiving for the Redemption in Christ. The Proper Prefaces, inserted at Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, etc., are appropriate to specialized phases of that Redemption.

After the choral response of the Sanctus (the song of the Angels in the book of the Prophet Isaiah) there follows what we call the Consecration Prayer. It is somewhat too long, and its last paragraph is too repetitious. That two pages of unbroken attention is one reason why people think that the Communion Service is so lengthy. A visitor to the church will see the communion vessels on the altar, and say “O dear, is it Holy Communion this morning? Too bad—it’s such a long service!” Well—it isn’t. The Communion is actually about five minutes shorter than Morning Prayer with the same length of Lessons—provided, of course, that the Sermon is not longer. The Sermon comes a little earlier at this service, before the clergyman is fairly “warmed up,” as it were, and consequently there is a little danger for the Sermon to be a little longer. Nevertheless, the service itself is not longer. Perhaps one might say the trouble is that it is heavier. I am convinced that shortening the Consecration Prayer by one minute would have the effect of lightening the whole service by about ten minutes—because tedium is not caused by total length, but by too much of the same thing at a time. People will emerge fresh as daisies from nearly two hours of the service for the Ordination of Priests, because they are so interested by the great variety of the action; while if one preaches for twenty-five minutes to a congregation who have been babied into the idea that twenty minutes is the proper length of a sermon, they will be absolutely broken down by the intolerable length of the service!

The structure of the Consecration Prayer is admirable. The song of the Sanctus which ends, “Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High,” is picked up at once with the words, “All glory be to thee, Almighty God, our heavenly Father.” The Thanksgiving for the benefits of the Redemption is completed, and merges in the Charter Narrative of the Institution of the Sacrament, which is our warrant before God and man for doing these things. “Wherefore . . . having in remembrance” these saving acts, we go on to offer the Christian “Oblation.” Then in most solemn terms, we beseech God the Holy Spirit to “bless and sanctify . . . these gifts and creatures of bread and wine,” that we may receive them as Christ’s Body and Blood.

It is the last paragraph on the Benefits of Communion, which follows this, which goes around three times in a circle, repeating over again the same ideas. It could be considerably shortened without leaving one single idea or important expression out of it, simply by removing the repetitions.

The Holy Communion

The “Communion-time,” which completes the action and concludes the service, has given us the name most frequently used for the service as a whole. In this portion we receive the Holy Gifts, which have been solemnly consecrated to be the pledge and means for a convincing personal contact with our Lord. This partaking of the Christian Sacrifice, not the mere offering of it, is the real purpose and goal of the whole action.

First, comes the Lord’s Prayer, in a very significant place, at the climax of the service. We have spoken before of its great importance in this service, above all others. It is followed by the Breaking of the Bread—a ceremony so ancient that it furnished the most frequently used name for the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament.

The Confession and Absolution have come earlier in the service; but at this point we have what we call, following some quaint words in the Scottish Prayer Book, the Prayer of Humble Access: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.” This prayer repeats and reinforces an idea already brought up in the Consecration Prayer, the tremendous assertion, peculiar to the Anglican Church, that the reception of the Communion is a continuing, abiding, and enabling Presence: “that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”

The actual reception of the Communion is just as intensely individual, as the great service of the whole congregation is corporate: “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life . . . .”

Then there is the Thanksgiving after Communion, for the inestimable benefits received. Perhaps some day this may be said congregationally, as we now say the General Thanksgiving in Morning Prayer.

The Gloria in excelsis is now tied to this Thanksgiving. But I think it is a structural mistake to attempt at this point to attain another climax, when the whole service is on the downward limb—the plane is coming in for a landing. It is Browning’s “resolution to the C-Major of life”; it is the solemn conclusion of the whole matter; and if we now try to sound the exuberant joy of the Christmas Angels, this is the wrong place for it. At the beginning of the service, where the Roman Church uses it, its effect is altogether different—it simply takes you up to the heavenly places; but here, at the other end of the service, is not the best place for that. Not that anyone has any right to take the liberty of shifting it from one end of the service to the other now; we must simply be patient until the next revision of the Prayer Book.

A final Benediction in the Name of God was originally a Prayer of Blessing. A declaratory Benediction came from the custom of the Bishop’s blessing his people as he went out in the recessional. But it is a very suitable conclusion of the service—provided that we do conclude it here. If there are Ablutions, recessional Hymns, a Choir Prayer with far-heard Amens, and finally the extinguishing of the candles by the altar boys before the people can go home, then there will be some little difficulty in keeping the final Rubric, “Then the Priest shall let them depart with this Blessing.”

Such is the general outline of the Communion Service. There may be a few places where its movement can be improved; but on the whole it is admirably constructed to express, in a simple and direct way, a great corporate Action, which is a foretaste of things divine in heaven, and, at the same time, the most personal and individual union of each soul with God through the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we are “accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6).