The prayer book and the Christian life; or, The conception of the Christian life implied in the Book of common prayer

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Preface

'T^HE contents of this little volume consti- -*" tuted the substance of the Bohlen Lectures delivered in Philadelphia in February, 1898. The matter has been somewhat differently arranged, the lectures having been subdivided and slightly enlarged in order to render the treatment of the theme more succinct and complete. The object of the treatise is to indicate the conception of the Christian Life which the Book of Common Prayer presupposes, elucidates, and strives to nurture. From the method of its nurture the character of the life is deduced. It was of course impossible, in treating of the services of the Prayer Book, not to make an interpretation of them, and in that interpretation all may not agree. The intention of the interpretation, however, is not polemical. It is simply to elucidate the characteristic features of

VI PREFACE

life as religious by an exposition of the discipline to which the Prayer Book subjects it. It is hoped that the largeness, healthfulness, and genuineness of the Christian Life may, in some measure, be made clear by the practical comment of the Prayer Book upon it, and that the Prayer Book itself may be better appreciated and more diligently used as the fulness of its scope and the sanity of its method become apparent through the perception of its bearing upon

life.

C. C. T.

October^ 1898.

Contents

Chaptbr Pagb

I. Unity in Variety of Religious Life . 3

II. Prayer the Root of the Christian

Chapter I Unity In Variety Of Religious Life

'T^HE Book of Common Prayer has usually ^ been treated with reference to its bearing on ecclesiastical, theological, and liturgical matters. It has been regarded chiefly as a thesaurus of devotional expression, of doctrinal definition, or of ecclesiastical tradition. As such it has been used as an armory from which church combatants have drawn the potent weapons for their conflicts in the various departments of polemical encounter. Its sources have been diligently traced, and its expressions have been minutely searched, to supply material for such controversial discussion, or for the disciplinary action attending it. Like the Lord's Supper, which was instituted to be a bond of union and has been made a chief storm-centre of contention and excommunication, the Prayer Book, fashioned to be a manual of worship inclusive, in its charity, of wide differences of apprehension, has often been turned into a barrier to part Prelate from Puritan, to divide High Churchmen from Low Churchmen, to dissever Christian people into parties rancorous and belligerent.

As, however, the Eucharist, apart from theories concerning it, forms in its positive content a point of contact and unity for all sorts and conditions of Christians, so the Book of Common Prayer, in its positive content, apart from theories supposed to lurk beneath its expressions, furnishes a ground of common sympathy and a bond of practical union among all sorts and conditions of Churchmen. The intention of this volume is wholly irenical. But one would be very inexperienced or very blind to suppose that this irenical purpose could be compassed by any attempt to reduce all religious life, or the true expression of it, to the dead level of one exact pattern, or by any effort to explain away those real differences of conviction which have always characterized the Christian Church. These distinctive apprehensions of piety are founded in diversity of moral temperament and mental constitution. From their persistence they promise to be permanent and must be reckoned with. The aesthetic or practical trend of the nature, the mystical or rational temperament of the individual, the subjective or objective bent of the mind, — these have always existed, and will presumably always manifest themselves as existent in that department of life we call religious, as well as in that which we call secular. For these two departments of life, the religious and the secular, are to a Christian consciousness only subordinately two, being in reality but different sides of the one life in God. Men and women equally devout but unequally or diversely endowed have illustrated this natural and healthful divergence of type, while religion has persisted in them all. Any guide or directory of worship therefore which aimed at their suppression or extinction would prove abortive, and find itself discredited in its attempt to discredit a diviner order than its narrowness could descry. The attempt therefore will be to show that the Prayer Book offers a point of higher unity for the religious consciousness in its exposition of and contribution to the potent reality of the Christian life in all its varied forms.

There is nothing more apparent or impressive than the appearance and permanence of distinct types of Christian life ; and it is well to recall the fact that they emphasize unity rather than disparity. The essential reality of religion is found to be in all of them and is in its signal vitality the germinal impulse of all typical divergence. Religious vitality is in fact too pervasive and intense in human nature not to manifest itself through any and every medium which may be present to it. It forces itself into prominence in manifold forms because no phase of individual endowment is strange or alien to its embrace. Just because it is so fundamental in human nature religion uses every channel which human nature offers through which to express itself, and cannot be restrained of expression any more than a sunbeam can be repressed in shining because the medium through which it shines happens to be blue or green or violet. The light of the sun is behind all the colors of the spectrum, and is manifest within them, and they all bear witness to the true light which lighteneth every color entering into the atmosphere which enwraps the world of vision. This analogy holds good in the realm of spiritual life, and the Book of Devotion, which would train the spiritual vision both to perceive and receive the divine light, must awaken and deepen the recognition of a common religious life in many divergent manifestations, and acknowledge an essential unity of religious hope and aspiration in manifold varieties of expression. Otherwise it could never be a Book of Common Prayer. y

The permanence, however, of variety in types of religious character need not introduce permanent confusion into our idea of a common religious life, or of its value and eternal significance for every individual as for the whole race. The peaceable fruits of righteousness, ripened in varying atmospheres of religious devotion, vindicate their genuineness, though their special forms and flavors may suggest also their limitations and deficiencies. The mystic and the rational thinker; the man submerged in the flow of subjective emotion, and the man buttressed by the strong conviction of objective truth; one whose whole instinct is practical action, and another whose irresistible trend is to theoretical speculation ; all these, and many other types have vindicated their right to be by the beauty of their personal piety and by the value of their contributions to Christian thought, in its discrimination as well as in its application of Christian truth. Through all these divergences there has run one common constant stream of divine reality. The variance discernible in the individuals composing the Apostolic College, afterwards incorporated and expressed in schools or classes of men; the calm practicalness of James, the speculative elevation of John, the emotive ardor of Peter, the sagacious activity of Andrew, the reclusive devotion of Nathaniel, the doubting faithfulness of Thomas, the spiritual rationality of Paul ; all this variance at the source has been, as it must ever be, repeated in the stream, as that has gathered volume from the rills poured into it all along its course, until it has become the majestic movement of the River of God, which holds within its murmur the voice of many waters.^ How distinctively poorer the Christian world had been without the special gift and aptitude of Origen and Augustine, of Tauler and ^ Kempis, of More the Catholic and Leighton the Protestant, or in latter days in the Anglican Communion of Keble the sweet singer, and Arnold the strong teacher. Yes, within the compass of the Anglican Communion itself, without searching through the records of Oriental, or Roman, or German, or non-conforming English Christianity, the essential Christian life, in infinite and inspiring variety, has been fed and nurtured and strengthened by the manna from heaven gathered in this receptacle of the Book of Common Prayer. Every school has so really found there the food convenient for it that each variant type has claimed it for its very own. And the claim has been verified by the result, and is to be vindicated in all soberness because the Prayer Book has been to each type or school its own, while not merely its own. It has been so much to each because it has been more than each could discern, namely, the purveyor of lO THE PRAYER BOOK AND

that fundamental Christian life which underlies all types of Christian living and thinking, and is greater than them all, and which is so irrepressible and inevitable that it must press into and express itself out of all the variable conditions of the soul's existence. It is like nature, which carries its regnant law into the tropics as well as to the poles, indefinitely variable because indubitably one and insistent and indestructible. No circumstance is competent to circumscribe its activity, and no situation adequate to annihilate its vitality.

It is the contribution of the Book of Common Prayer to the development of this great underlying Christian life of all sorts and conditions of men which we are to consider in these pages. " And," to quote the admirable language of Bishop Gailor of Tennessee, "whatever else may be said of the type of Christianity which that book sets forth, it can^ not be said that it is morbid or unhealthy or anything but sane in its views of man and God; or that its ideal is cramped and confined in the intellectual mould of any particular party or sect or set of men ; or that the beauty of holiness and the standard of righteousness which it inculcates is less than sufficient for the high and noble and splendid satisfaction of human nature in its best endeavor for truth and freedom."

I judge that this will become apparent as we study the Book of Common Prayer more closely.

Chapter II Prayer The Root Of The Christian Life

'THHE ideal of the Christian Life and the ^ contribution of the Prayer Book to it is foreshadowed by certain features of that Book, which may be read in its title and seen before one opens its covers.

The Title is very significant We have before us a Book of Common Prayer. Its effort to lead and educate the Christian flock is founded primarily in devotion, not in instruction. It is not chiefly a statement of the faith addressed to the understanding, though it contains a confession of the faith as an act of worship. Its appeal is to the heart and conscience through the act (which it essays to guide) of man's approach to God. If it be true that, as Neander held, " Pectus est quod fecit Theologum,' the Prayer Book's unwritten motto is, "It is the heart which makes the Christian." Its very conception of the ideal of man's life is grounded on his right relation to God and right approach to him. Its system is Theo-centric. It finds the root of all true living not chiefly in man's external or natural relation to God, but essentially in his spiritual contact with Him. The physical law of man's natural environment is truly a Divine law, and is significant of a direct relation to God through man's physical life ; and were this physical or natural relation regarded as chief it would involve, first of all things, the education of the natural faculties and an athletic discipline. But this, while important, is subsidiary. Nor is man's relation to God as Moral Governor the supreme relation even. This relation of moral accountability for our actions is intimate and sacred, and brings the soul into instant and conscious contact with God's mind and will, as expressed in the moral law. But the regulation of conduct yields in importance to the regulation of the heart and will from which conduct springs. That out of which proceed the issues of life indicates the point of ultimate contact of man with God. The supreme relation is the relation of the spirit of man to the Spirit of

»4

God, the contact of person with person, the touch of the human individuality with the Divine Being. And all this finds the expression of its reality in the direct appeal of prayer and praise. It discovers the inspiration of its life in the apprehension of a Divine watch and ward, and the salutary control of life in the recognition of a Divine responsibility. In other words, according to the Prayer Book, Religion is the basis of the moral and ideal Hfe of man ; of which religion, Benjamin Whichcote wrote so finely in the seventeenth century, when he said, ** Its seat is the inward man, it is the first sense of his soul, the temper of his mind, the pulse of his heart."

And this is quite in accord with the postulate of that rare philosophic thinker of the nineteenth century, Richard Rothe, who affirms in his Christian Ethics that the God-consciousness in man is the only explanation of his self-consciousness. For the self-consciousness of man only thoroughly comprehends itself when it realizes its dependence on the Divine, its correlation with the Divine, and its aspiration for the Divine. The underlying conception of the being whom prayer is to guide, elevate, and console IS " Man as God's child." The ideal of his life is that eternal life which is to know God and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. It is the life immortal held within the shrine of mortality. Duty to such a being can never be what some scientific inquirers into the genesis of morals catalogue it, "the sum of the prudential experiences of mankind." Its mandate is heard as the echo of that imperative voice of God which brings the eternal law of His own being into the sphere of man's temporal existence and so renders the earthly life eternal in its quality, a valid though transient manifestation of the eternal reality of God. The genesis of such a soul can never rest in its natural history. Like its Lord and Master, when once it has reached the final Adam it says of him "who was the Son of God." Its quality cannot be measured or gauged by the form or manner of its temporal development, by the stages which the physical organization of the race as of the individual may have passed through, by the refinement or the frailty of its mechanism, by the instruments it uses to plan, or think, or act, in fine, by the house in which it dwells. The master mind itself proclaims the sovereignty of the Spirit over the conditions which encompass it, and subordinates the limitations which these conditions impose on its action to the range of its own purpose, which it is restless to attempt even if it cannot wholly achieve its resistless impulse for advance and enlargement. Thus the very fact that a Book of Devotion is furnished as the essential nutriment of life proclaims the ideal of that life to be one which is God-given, God-controlled, God-crowned. It embodies by its very appearance the challenge of Tennyson's question, " What matters it how much a man knows and does if he keep not a reverential looking upwards? he is only the subtlest beast in the field then."

This vivid and practical apprehension of the Divine and the Eternal as the moulding germ of the ideal life of man gives tone to all the afterthought concerning man's culture and destiny. If it invests life with a solemnity of responsibility, it is yet the solemnity of high station and of boundless possibilities. It is not the solemnity of gloom and disheartenment such as comes and must come of an atheistic or agnostic conception of man, which finds no splendid purpose writ in his constitution, and no discernible or lasting outcome of his achievements or aspirations ; which regards God simply as an unknown force which it is hopeless to resist, as it is hopeless to try in the least to comprehend ; and which reduces humanity to a perpetual orphanage, since the lower creation cannot explain him, and the higher as constantly eludes him. If in his temporal existence man may even in a theistic conception be compared to the vapor or the flower, short-lived indeed, but whose origin we know and whose fruitfulness does not die with their disappearance, yet such a conception removes him far from the horror of being likened to a mere breath whose existence is simply a vibration of an all-pervading atmosphere, which vibration, as philosophers tell us, has existence but no being, its transitoriness being all there is of it as individually distinct from the general substance which underlies all things. The recognition of God in prayer is a recognition of

relation, a relation which is not a servitude

z but a sonship ; a relation of intercourse as well as of obedience. The recognition of prayer moreover is one of mutual relation. It recognizes not only that " in Him we live and move and have our being," absolutely and without limit, but also that relatively **in us He lives and moves and has His being." The two once recognized cannot exist apart, but must move on together. On man's part the voice of that mutual relation is prayer, —

''A breath which fleets beyond this iron world, And touches him who made it.*'

On God's part it is Revelation by that eternal Word which lighteth every man coming into the world.

The ideal of our life then of which devotion is the ultimate factor is life not only given, controlled, and crowned by God, but also Godaccompanied. It is an ideal which is fulfilled only by the worship which opens the heart and life fully and freely to the Divine influence and companionship. Prayer is the vital breath of this ennobled life, prayer which is, to quote the great Laureate once more, "like opening a sluice between the great ocean and our little

"X channels, when the great sea gathers itself together and flows in at full tide."

All objections to the sanity of prayer are based upon an ideal of life below that which the Book of Common Prayer presupposes and holds up before us. If the human spirit is akin to the Divine, so as to recognize it and aspire toward it and find its own completion alone in it, then prayer as the expression of its longing is as natural and rational as a child's proffered supplication for his Father's love and guidance. It is pseudo piety by reason of its shallowness, though it take on the guise of reverence, to regard, as some natural philosophers would have us regard, prayer as an impertinent dictation of ignorance to supreme wisdom. The law of God by which he rules, say these, is fixed from the beginning in the reason of his own being, and therefore must be immutable and irresponsive to any and all appeal. But prayer is not the spirit's appeal against God's law which emanates from his being; it is the striving of the soul to come into full accord with that \ being, and so with the law which reveals him. i Prayer simply discerns by its fine instinct that spiritual law which binds all spiritual life together and instinctively affirms life by spiritual intercourse and sympathy and companionship and request and response to be the imperative condition of its being, an uttermost law of life underrunning all special laws of its expression. The ultimate utterance of all prayer is, ** My soul is athirst for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God ? " Thus in the Lord's Prayer, the pattern and condensation of all possible petition, which brings man's whole life of physical necessity, of moral need, of spiritual enlightenment and guidance, up into the realm of God's thought and benediction, the undertone of it all is that grand diapason, " Thy will be done." It is the voice vibrant with an irrepressible demand for spiritual unison with the central spirit which moves and lives in all things, never a petulant cry to subordinate God's decree of wisdom to man's impatience of His restrictive discipline. Thus it is that the very possibility of prayer sets the ideal of life very high. It gives it an enduring spiritual reality which craves and cannot be content without that eternal life which is in the Father and in his Son, Jesus Christ. Hence life comes to light in its immortality in God, as its source is recognized as in him, and its sustenance as alone of him. It is revealed, to quote Whichcote once more, as " A Divine nature in us, a Divine assistance over us."

It was Lessing who said, with his characteristic sagacity, ** Man's ideal never reaches beyond his Gods," and the ideal elevation of man which is the postulate of Prayer finds its reasonable basis in the nature and character of God which it implies. For He who heareth prayer is not a remote or an indifferent Deity. Impersonal force is not the occupant of the throne of the universe if that force have an ear to hear; nor does the intelligence which inhabits it sit apart in its impassiveness while only keen in its scrutiny. God who heareth prayer is not only "the King, eternal, immortal, invisible," though his being fulfils that majestic ascription of St. Paul. He is the father of the family of mankind. " He remembereth our frame, and considereth that we are dust " ; and, " like as a father pitieth his children," stands ready to answer their appeal and draw them within the sphere of his loving communion. There is a kinship of mutual understanding involved in the offices of prayer, and there is involved an ascription of humanity to God, as well as of divineness to man in it. It makes humanity a reflection of the Divine in which God sees his image and is thus responsive to its appeal, and it gives a sacredness to all human attributes and relations to find their prototype in God, Out of this comes the possibility and the naturalness — so to speak in protest against the assertion of the impossibility and unnatural"- ness — of the Incarnation wherein God truly comes unto his own. Herein we find the ground of our Divine Master's claim not only of service but of heart companionship from his followers when he says, " I call you no more servants, but I have called you friends," — a relation we must deem impossible between Divine power and human weakness, were there not a nexus binding both in indissoluble union. Thus prayer, while it gives us the pervasiveness of pantheism, delivers us from its absorption of the Divine in the human, an absorption which would remove all play of free will homage from man's service to God, and involve God in all the moral aberration and sinfulness which the abuse of that free will creates in man; which would make God the repudiator of his own righteousness, unless sin is declared to be no sin.

So much we learn from prayer as petition. But praise is permanently involved in prayer as well as petition, because the undertone of prayer is praise, being the ascription of power to him whose aid is sought, and of the grace which will grant it, for without these two, might and love, prayer would be a plea to impotence or an appeal to an indifferent or a vindictive heart. He who proffers his request irresistibly exhales the incense of thanksgiving. The very attitude of prayer is adoration, and he who seeks by prayer to live in God's communion lives in that high realm of exultation which is exaltation ; as the Apostle phrases it, a "sitting together in heavenly places," a ^* conversation which is in heaven," a "coming unto Mount Zion and an innumerable company of angels " ; or as Bunyan quaintly describes it of his pilgrims, "a being in heaven before we get at it"; or, as Wordsworth translates it into the serene poetry of the Lake country, a " moving about in worlds not realized." That is, this praiseful element of life lends it a spiritual glow which witnesses to rays of light falling on it from beyond the sphere of sun and moon and stars,

** Where every soul shines as the sun, And God himself gives light"

Thus the praiseful element of prayer imparts as it implies a conscious or unconscious enthusiasm, which makes life vital, and stimulates courage and endeavor. It brings also the peace of submission, because it has the witness in itself that life is not all of the earth earthy, imprisoned in physical forces, limited in its range to transient achievement, or as the fine old hymn has it, " vexed with trifling cares." And this because the soul can never find a full expression of itself in the mere reading aloud of its physical laws, but is impelled to utter its tribute of thanksgiving to Him whose outer garment the laws of matter weave, but whom himself to know alone satisfies its longing and is its eternal life.

Chapter III Common Prayer Indicative Of Social

^ I ^HE high ideal of life, which is involved •^ in the thought of it as a life of which prayer and praise are the essential expression, is not and cannot be individual merely. It finds its full realization only in so far as it is communal, or involved with the life and movement of other men. So at least the title — for as yet we have not looked into its contents — of our Book of Devotion indicates. It is the Book of Common Prayer. It is the Book of the congregation, the Book not oT the individual Christian only, but of the Church. It is, so to speak, not only the common property of Christians, but their property in common. They must, to fulfil its full purpose, use it together. As such it is distinguished from many of the manuals out of which it is made up. It implies the expectation of a common movement in worship, not merely of many separate acts of devotion in the same place, joined together in one only at some special crisis in the service to which each turns to give momentary attention and then lapses back to its own individual pre-occupation. This is the Roman use, from which the English service was reformed, when once the Anglican Communion threw off the bonds of the Papal authority. That practice has been eloquently defended and described by its advocates as the more life-like, the more comprehensive, the more natural. Such is Cardinal Newman's description of the service of the Mass, with its attendant congregation each absorbed in his own private devotion. "Each," he writes, " in his place, with his own heart, with his own wants, with his own thoughts, with his own intention, with his own prayers separate but concordant, watching what is going on, watching its progress, uniting in its consummation; not painfully and hopelessly following a hard form of prayer from beginning to end, but like a concert of musical instruments, each different, but concurring in a sweet harmony, we take our part with God's priest, supporting him, yet guided by him.

There are little children there, and old men, and simple laborers, and students in seminaries, priests preparing for mass, priests making their thanksgiving, . . . but out of these many minds rises one eucharistic hymn, and the Great Action is the Measure and the Scope of it." The resonant bell sounds to call the attention to it. But the English service requires no bell to remind the congregation that a special part of the service is about to come. All are intent on the same office, all are moving together towards the one goal. The service at the altar is the people's service ; the officiating priest is the mouthpiece of the attentive as well as attending priestly people. He is not doing something for them apart from them, most of which they cannot hear, none of which they need to follow. He is leading them. They hear and follow his voice, for it is not the voice of the stranger, it is theirs also. The introduction of the reminding bell in Anglican worship would be an inconsistent intrusion and a bald and senseless plagiarism.

For the English thought is to unite the people, to bring them through common worship to the recognition of their common life, the common life of devotion, and of ordinary association and intercourse. The pervasive unity of the Christian body is the basis of the Common Prayer. It is founded on the thought which St. Paul expresses, that " we are members one of another," so that if one rejoice or sorrow, all rejoice and sorrow with that one, and moulded on the idea Goethe so well expresses when he writes,

which may be freely rendered,

** A special gift may be evolved apart, But character amid life's common stream."