^ 
 
 CL 
 
 BR 45 .B63 1898 
 
 Tiffany, Charles Comfort, 
 
 1829-1907. 
 The prayer book and the 
 
 Christian life 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
f- 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 AND 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 OR THE 
 
 Conception of the Christian Life implied 
 in the Book of Common Prayer 
 
 CHARLES C. TIFFANY, D.D. 
 
 ARCHDEACON OF NEW YORK 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1898 
 
Copyright, 1898, 
 By Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 'npHE contents of this little volume consti- 
 ^ tuted the substance of the Bohlen Lec- 
 tures delivered in Philadelphia in February, 
 1898. The matter has been somewhat differ- 
 ently arranged, the lectures having been sub- 
 divided and slightly enlarged in order to render 
 the treatment of the theme more succinct and 
 complete. The object of the treatise is to indi- 
 cate the conception of the Christian Life which 
 the Book of Common Prayer presupposes, eluci- 
 dates, and strives to nurture. From the method 
 of its nurture the character of the life is de- 
 duced. It was of course impossible, in treating 
 of the services of the Prayer Book, not to make 
 an interpretation of them, and in that interpre- 
 tation 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 disci- 
 pline 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 com- 
 ment 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 
 
 Chapter ^^^^ 
 
 I. Unity in Variety of Religious Life . 3 
 II. Prayer the Root of the Christian 
 
 Life ^^ 
 
 III. Common Prayer indicative of Social 
 
 Christian Life 25 
 
 IV. The Christian Life as Intelligent . 39 
 V. The Christian Life as Rational . . 47 
 VI. The Christian Life as Salvation . . 61 
 VII. The Christian Life as influenced by 
 
 the Holy Scriptures 72 
 
 VIII. The Bearing of the Collects on 
 
 the Christian Life 89 
 
 IX. The Influence of the Christian 
 
 Year on the Christian Life ... 97 
 X. The Christian Life as Taught by the 
 
 Sacrament of Baptism 113 
 
 XI. The Lesson of Confirmation for the 
 
 Christian Life 125 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 XII. The Lord's Supper in its Bearing on 
 
 THE Christian Life 139 
 
 XI I I. Clergy and Laity — The Ministry of 
 
 Instruction 153 
 
 XIV. The Ministry of Consolation ... 163 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 AND 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 UNITY IN VARIETY OF RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 ^ I ^HE Book of Common Prayer has usually 
 -*- been treated with reference to its bear- 
 ing on ecclesiastical, theological, and liturgical 
 matters. It has been regarded chiefly as a the- 
 saurus of devotional expression, of doctrinal def- 
 inition, or of ecclesiastical tradition. As such 
 it has been used as an armory from which 
 church combatants have drawn the potent weap- 
 ons 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 disci- 
 plinary action attending it. Like the Lord's 
 Supper, which was instituted to be a bond of 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 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 bar- 
 rier 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 theo- 
 ries concerning it, forms in its positive content 
 a point of contact and unity for all sorts and 
 conditions of Christians, so the Book of Com- 
 mon Prayer, in its positive content, apart from 
 theories supposed to lurk beneath its expres- 
 sions, 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 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 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 tem- 
 perament 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 illus- 
 trated 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 there- 
 
THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 fore will be to show that the Prayer Book offers 
 a point of higher unity for the reHgious con- 
 sciousness in its exposition of and contribution 
 to the potent reahty of the Christian hfe in all 
 its varied forms. 
 
 There is nothing more apparent or impres- 
 sive 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 reli- 
 gion is found to be in all of them and is in its 
 signal vitality the germinal impulse of all typi- 
 cal divergence. Religious vitality is in fact 
 too pervasive and intense in human nature not 
 to manifest itself through any and every me- 
 dium which may be present to it. It forces 
 itself into prominence in manifold forms be- 
 cause 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 sun- 
 beam can be repressed in shining because the 
 medium through which it shines happens to be 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 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 wit- 
 ness to the true light which lighteneth every 
 color entering into the atmosphere which en- 
 wraps 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 mani- 
 fold varieties of expression. Otherwise it could 
 never be a Book of Common Prayer. 
 
 The permanence, however, of variety in types %^ 
 
 of religious character need not introduce per- 
 manent confusion into our idea of a common 
 religious life, or of its value and eternal sig- 
 nificance 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 
 
8 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 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 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 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 apti- 
 tude of Origen and Augustine, of Tauler and 
 a 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 Ori- 
 ental, 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 irrepres- 
 sible 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 in- 
 dubitably one and insistent and indestructible. 
 No circumstance is competent to circumscribe 
 its activity, and no situation adequate to an- 
 nihilate its vitality. 
 
 It is the contribution of the Book of Com- 
 mon Prayer to the development of this great 
 underlying Christian life of all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men which we are to consider in 
 these pages. " And," to quote the admira- 
 ble 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 con- 
 fined in the intellectual mould of any particular 
 party or sect or set of men ; or that the beauty 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE n 
 
 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. 
 
12 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PRAYER THE ROOT OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 ^ I ^HE 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 con- 
 fession 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 Nean- 
 der held, " Pectus est qiwd fecit Theologiun!' the 
 Prayer Book's unwritten motto is, " It is the 
 heart which makes the Christian." Its very 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 13 
 
 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 ex- 
 ternal or natural relation to God, but essentially 
 in his spiritual contact with Him. The physi- 
 cal law of man's natural environment is truly 
 a Divine law, and is significant of a direct rela- 
 tion 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 subsid- 
 iary. Nor is man's relation to God as Moral 
 Governor the supreme relation even. This rela- 
 tion 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 con- 
 duct springs. That out of which proceed the 
 issues of life indicates the point of ultimate con- 
 tact of man with God. The supreme relation is 
 the relation of the spirit of man to the Spirit of 
 
J4 THE PRA YER BOOK AND 
 
 God, the contact of person with person, the 
 A. 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 recog- 
 nition of a Divine responsibility. In other 
 words, according to the Prayer Book, Religion 
 is the basis of the moral and ideal life of man ; 
 of which religion, Richard 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 nine- 
 teenth century, Richard Rothe, who affirms in 
 his Christian Ethics that the God-conscious- 
 ness 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 cor- 
 relation with the Divine, and its aspiration for 
 the Divine. The underlying conception of the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN II FE i^ 
 
 being whom prayer is to guide, elevate, and con- 
 sole 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 mortal- 
 ity. 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 
 
1 6 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 act, in fine, by the house in which it dwells. 
 The master mind itself proclaims the sover- 
 eignty 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 pro- 
 claims 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 des- 
 tiny. 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 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 17 
 
 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 com- 
 pared to the vapor or the flower, short-lived 
 indeed, but whose origin we know and whose 
 fruitfulness does not die with their disappear- 
 ance, 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 vibra- 
 tion, 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 rec- 
 ognition of God in prayer is a recognition of 
 relation, a relation which is not a servitude 
 
 3 
 
1 8 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 but a sonship ; a relation of intercourse as well 
 as of obedience. The recognition of prayer 
 moreover is one of mutual relation. It recog- 
 nizes 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, con- 
 trolled, and crowned by God, but also God- 
 accompanied. 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 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 19 
 
 channels, when the great sea gathers itself to- 
 gether 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 sup- 
 plication 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. 
 Prayer simply discerns by its fine instinct that 
 
20 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 spiritual law which binds all spiritual life 
 together and instinctively affirms life by spirit- 
 ual intercourse and sympathy and companion- 
 ship 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 can- 
 not be content without that eternal life which is 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 21 
 
 in the Father and in his Son, Jesus Christ. 
 Hence hfe comes to Hght in its immortaHty 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 character- 
 istic sagacity, " Man's ideal never reaches be- 
 yond his Gods," and the ideal elevation of man 
 which is the postulate of Prayer finds its reason- 
 able basis in the nature and character of God 
 which it implies. For He who heareth prayer 
 is not a remote or an indifferent Deity. Im- 
 personal 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 ascrip- 
 tion of St. Paul. He is the father of the family 
 of mankind. '* He remembereth our frame, and 
 considercth that we are dust " ; and, '' like as 
 a father pitieth his children," stands ready to 
 answer their appeal and draw them within the 
 
22 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 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 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 23 
 
 homage from man's service to God, and in- 
 volve 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 exal- 
 tation ; 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 pil- 
 grims, " a being in heaven before we get at 
 
24 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 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 enthu- 
 siasm, which makes life vital, and stimulates 
 courage and endeavor. It brings also the 
 peace of submission, because it has the wit- 
 ness 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 satis- 
 fies its longing and is its eternal life. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 COMMON PRAYER INDICATIVE OF SOCIAL 
 CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 "^ I ^HE high ideal of Hfe, 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 move- 
 ment 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 of the indi- 
 vidual 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 
 
26 THE PRA YER BOOK AND 
 
 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 Angli- 
 can Communion threw off the bonds of the 
 Papal authority. That practice has been 
 eloquently defended and described by its ad- 
 vocates as the more life-like, the more compre- 
 hensive, 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 hope- 
 lessly following a hard form of prayer from 
 beginning to end, but like a concert of musi- 
 cal instruments, each different, but concur- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 27 
 
 ring 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. 
 
28 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 For the English thought is to unite the peo- 
 ple, 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 mem- 
 bers 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, 
 
 ** Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille 
 Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt," 
 
 which may be freely rendered, 
 
 "A special gift may be evolved apart, 
 But character amid life's common stream." 
 
 Common worship points directly to the 
 ideal Christian life as led among one's fellow 
 men; as a life of engagedness in life's common 
 tasks, a life involved in the common yet divine 
 relations of the family and of the state ; a life 
 in which diligence in business is not alien from 
 fervency of spirit, but is a legitimate expression 
 and illustration of " serving the Lord." The 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 29 
 
 religious life is not by the Common Prayer 
 marked off as the life especially of particular 
 little communities, sets, sects, guilds, brother- 
 hoods, conventual as bound by a restrictive rule ; 
 but rather as the broad life of humanity based 
 on the moral rule of Christ's word and life, who 
 himself came eating and drinking, was found 
 in society as well as in the church, and sent 
 his disciples into the world, not out of it. As 
 he came into the world and sanctified mar- 
 riage by his presence and first miracle, and into 
 the workshop of Nazareth where he elevated 
 the work of the hands into a daily living sacri- 
 fice of our powers to God, and mingled with 
 the family life of the poor and the festivities 
 and banquets of the rich, leaving the imprint 
 of divine consecration on all of them, so the 
 common worship of Him involves the common 
 life in Him, and marks the lawyer, the physi- 
 cian, the merchant, the mechanic, the artist, the 
 musician, as responsive to a divine calling, as 
 well as the bishops, priests, and deacons, albeit 
 in differing departments of the one great service 
 of God. He who gives the cup of cold water 
 is rendering as truly worshipful service to God 
 
30 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 as he who bears " the chahce of the grapes of 
 God." He has met as distinct recognition in 
 the words of the Master, and his reward is as 
 distinctly spoken by his sacred lips. 
 
 As common worship indicates a common un- 
 dertone of service in the Christian body whose 
 members are variously occupied, so it suggests 
 that view of worship in work which sanctifies 
 the whole week and consecrates the outer tem- 
 ple of God's world, as well as the inner temple 
 of the sanctuary which man has builded. And 
 that view is this, that in every legitimate occu- 
 pation, made legitimate by its ministry to the 
 essential wants of man in the enlargement 
 and enrichment of his capacity, which is God's 
 endowment of his nature, we are to find an op- 
 portunity to meet God and receive his spirit 
 into our life, according as our work is done in 
 the spirit of Christ, as part of the soul's life in 
 Him and in his world. In this view the common 
 worship of the sanctuary indicates the common 
 worship of life, so that man is never to view 
 himself as apart from God, not merely because 
 he is always living under his ken, but because 
 he may be always rendering unto Him accept- 
 
 Hi. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 31 
 
 able service and be always coming into direct 
 unison with him. Of course this does not 
 discourage or forbid certain offices and fra- 
 ternities or sisterhoods, guilds, communities, 
 as certain exigencies may arise requiring their 
 special efficiency. But these are special for 
 specific ends, and the Prayer Book knows them 
 not. These come and go as the exigencies 
 of life call out for them or call out against 
 them. But the broad life of humanity goes 
 on forever, the life of the family, the life of 
 society, the life of business activity, the life of 
 the state. These constitute the permanent reli- 
 gious sphere and those living in the pure 
 discharge of their duties as a spiritual function 
 are the Religious par excellence. Here we are 
 to look for the great achievements in the King- 
 dom of Righteousness, which is the Kingdom of 
 God, just as it is that along the hillsides and 
 in the valleys and upon the broad plains, and 
 not chiefly in the conservatories and glass 
 houses, we are to look for the harvests which 
 feed the world. 
 
 This common service as a common worship 
 by humanity, suggested in the Common Prayer, 
 
 ^- 
 
32 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 indicates another correlated feature of the nor- 
 mal Christian life It is the service of God in 
 the service of men, i. e. the going about doing 
 good. To build the temple of a renewed soul 
 is better than to build a cathedral; to regen- 
 erate a community or a corner of a commu- 
 nity is to cause to be builded together as lively 
 stones those in whom God dwells. The awful 
 but benignant sanction of the judgment, as 
 portrayed by Christ, is too emphatic to allow 
 any one to blink at the worship of God con- 
 tained in the kindly and helpful service of 
 mankind. The Son of Man is discerned and 
 served in the sons of men. And when the 
 Divine Master picked out the imprisoned, the 
 impoverished, the sick lying uselessly by in pain, 
 as his especial representatives, he struck a note 
 of hope for all men as he bade us go forth and 
 minister unto them as unto him. We seem 
 to see little of the Son of Man in these sons of 
 men. But his eye pierced through all their 
 degradation and criminality, through all their 
 ignorant and stained condition, through all 
 their pain and uselessness, and descried the 
 secret shrine in every heart where the Divine 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IIFE 
 
 ZZ 
 
 Word, which lighteth every man coming into 
 the world, was whispering and striving to shine in 
 the darkness which comprehended it not. Out 
 of such he declares may come beings trans- 
 formed by the renewing of their mind ; so that 
 they who walk in darkness may see a great 
 light, and they who sit in the shadow of death 
 unto them may the light shine. Thus the wor- 
 ship of ministry for him is not simply an ex- 
 pression of the lips, but an action of the life. 
 It is hopeful and inspiring with its boundless 
 possibility of bringing in '' the Christ that is 
 to be." 
 
 This common life of service in the world, 
 foreshadowed by the life of common worship 
 in the sanctuary, gives suggestive assurance 
 also that the ideal of Christian life is life in a 
 Kingdom of God here on earth. Safe trans- 
 ference to another sphere of being is not the 
 Church's only end and aim. The great here- 
 after is indeed an object of anticipation and of 
 preparation, but preparation for true life be- 
 yond is the preservation and propagation of 
 true life here. This earth is the especial sphere 
 of reality and duty now; and into it are to 
 
 3 
 
34 THE PRA YER BOOK AND 
 
 come the life and law of God, to transform it, 
 not merely individual souls in it, but its man- 
 ners, laws, principles, institutions, into an habi- 
 tation of God through the spirit. Thus the 
 kingdoms of this world shall become the King- 
 dom of God, a kingdom which while not of 
 this world is to be in this world, the final an- 
 swer to that fruitful prayer of word and work, 
 "Thy Kingdom come." The ideal of the Chris- 
 tian life is the Kingdom of Righteousness, in the 
 sense that society shall constitute a righteous 
 organism founded in the truth, not in the mere 
 expediency of transient policies. That Kingdom 
 is not meant to be simply an instrument for the 
 alleviation of temporal necessities, but a vehi- 
 cle for permeating the whole life of the com- 
 munity and the state with the eternal princi- 
 ples of God's love and justice, so that he shall 
 reign in it not merely by control as now, but 
 as the inspiration of its life and the moulder of 
 its manners, enshrined in its institutions, posi- 
 tively expressed in its laws, and alive and 
 recognized in all the relations of its life, as 
 these come to reflect the righteousness and 
 mercy and purity and love which shone forth 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 35 
 
 in the word and life of His well beloved Son. 
 For the correlation of prayer is response, and 
 the church is not forever to go on praying 
 without an answer. The supplication, '* Thy 
 will be done on earth as it is in heaven," is not 
 a phrase without a meaning, a wish deprived of 
 certain expectation. In it the church passes 
 out beyond itself, as a shrine of worship and 
 spiritual discipline for individual souls, into the 
 larger sphere of all man's interests and en- 
 gagedness in the world, which it is to leaven 
 with its own truth and grace until the whole 
 be leavened. The normal Christian life is life 
 in this Kingdom come and to come. 
 
 Thus we have lingered at the portal of the 
 Book of Common Prayer, and read the inscrip- 
 tion written on it, that we might gain some 
 intimation of the Christian Life it presupposes 
 and to which it seeks to minister. We shall 
 open its covers and look at its pages in the 
 next and following chapters to see how it fulfils 
 the promise of its inspiring title. 
 
36 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS INTELLIGENT 
 
 ^N opening the covers of the Book of 
 Common Prayer, a glance at its pages 
 reveals a suggestive element of its contents 
 even before we read a single sentence of them. 
 It is an English book, a circumstance which 
 strikes us as inevitable in a manual written 
 for the English race, but which, when the 
 Prayer Book was compiled, was a startling 
 innovation in the usage of Western Christen- 
 dom. Latin is what any Churchman would 
 have naturally been led to expect at that 
 time, since in that language the services of 
 the Church of Rome (which before the Refor- 
 mation dominated Western Christendom) had 
 for centuries been conducted. It may seem 
 strange that the speech of a Pagan people 
 should have become the ecclesiastical usage, 
 and that, if a vernacular speech was not to be 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 37 
 
 allowed in the worship of the Church, recourse 
 was not had to the Hebrew or the Greek. 
 The one was the language of the temple and 
 the synagogue in which our Lord worshipped; 
 the other the language in a dialect of which 
 he spoke, and in which his Apostles wrote. 
 Both these languages had become sacred to the 
 Christian by their association with the revelation 
 recorded in the Holy Scriptures. But the use 
 of Latin points with unmistakable precision to 
 the primitive practice of conducting worship 
 even in Rome in a " language understanded by 
 the people." The Church in Rome, which St. 
 Paul in his Epistle addressed in Greek, became, 
 as it grew, an integral portion of the Latin 
 nation, which naturally used in its public de- 
 votions the language employed in secular life. 
 Not even the nearness of the times of the 
 Apostles nor the possession of Greek Gospels 
 and Epistles brought with it an obligation to 
 pray in a foreign or unknown tongue. For 
 English speaking people to conduct divine 
 service in the English language is thus a true 
 following of the Apostles, is in fine the exact 
 apostolic usage. Just as the true reproduc- 
 
38 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 tion of an Englishman is not he who imitates 
 him, for an Englishman imitates no one, but 
 he who like him stands by his own traditions 
 and is self-poised, so the true following of 
 any example is always a following in the 
 spirit. A slavish adherence to the letter 
 often cramps or even kills the life which the 
 letter once embodied and expressed. Ec- 
 clesiastical tradition however does not always 
 follow the life giving principle of the Apos- 
 tle, '* Let all things be done unto edifying." 
 Rome's ecclesiastical dominion grew, and it 
 imposed its accustomed language on all over 
 whom it came to rule. It was a sign of domin- 
 ion on the one hand, and arguments of senti- 
 ment or utility supported it on the other. 
 Latin was associated with the language of St. 
 Peter, on whose chair the Pope assumed to sit, 
 though of course St. Peter's familiarity with 
 Latin is at least problematical, while his knowl- 
 edge of Palestinian Greek is beyond question. 
 And, besides sentiment, came in the argument 
 of utility. It was urged as a bond of Catholic 
 union that all Christian worshippers should 
 worship in the same exact words. It was 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 39 
 
 argued that the translation of sacred expres- 
 sions and dogmas into many tongues might 
 gradually change their sense and bring in 
 heresies, an argument far more applicable to 
 the preservation of creeds and dogmas in origi- 
 nal manuscripts than to the prayers and praises 
 of a popular assemblage of worshippers. And 
 thus Latin maintained its monopoly of the lan- 
 guage of the sanctuary, when it had ceased 
 to be a living language, when none spoke it 
 save scholars and statesmen, who added it as 
 an accomplishment to the use of their native 
 tongue. 
 
 The striking fact, then, that the Book of 
 Common Prayer discarded the language of 
 the existing missals and breviaries is very sig- 
 nificant of its conception of the Christian life 
 it would nurture and strengthen. That life was 
 to be intelligent, and its devotion was not to 
 root itself in superstition, but in knowledge. 
 The use of English was a silent but strong 
 assertion of the value of the worship of the 
 mind. The Supreme Master had commanded 
 men to love God with the mind, as well as with 
 the heart and soul. That love, coming unto God- 
 
40 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 in worship, must know that he is and what he 
 is, " that he is the rewarder of such as diligently 
 seek him." Man must worship God in truth as 
 well as in spirit. He cannot acceptably use 
 worship as an incantation or magic rite. His 
 praying is not simply saying prayers. Worship 
 is the expression of genuine desire, and to be 
 acceptable must be the genuine language of 
 the heart, not a mere formula. Our fathers, in 
 accordance with this, said it must be under- 
 stood. According to their conception, worship 
 was not simply awe before an inscrutable power 
 whom men should seek to placate by the flat- 
 tery of importunate appeal. It was not the 
 worship of an unknown God, to whom we ad- 
 dress ourselves in an act of homage whose force 
 and bearing we may not compute. The wor- 
 ship of God through Jesus Christ was to them 
 a reasonable service. It is not, indeed, an act 
 which plumes itself on the understanding of 
 all mysteries, nor which pretends to fathom 
 the depths of the Divine Being. It is not an 
 assumption that all God's ways are known and 
 plain to us, but it is founded on knowledge so 
 far as that goes. It addresses itself to attributes 
 
THE CHRISTIAiV LIFE 
 
 41 
 
 in God's nature which it is assured do exist, 
 and which the infinite content and range of 
 the Divine nature beyond our knowledge do not 
 contradict but immeasurably strengthen. The 
 pattern of prayer set by the Master of all 
 souls, while it comprehends all human wants, 
 is marked by the directness and simplicity of 
 a child. It asks, not wrestles, nor argues, nor 
 cajoles, that it may receive. It does not batter 
 down the door, but knocks at it. And it ad- 
 dresses the Divine from the basis of the human, 
 in the quiet assumption of their coincidence. 
 "Forgive as we forgive," it says, attributing 
 the same disposition to the Heavenly as to the 
 earthly Father, without presuming to limit His 
 boundless mercy to man's imperfect and par- 
 tial exercise of it. 
 
 In Christ, the Christian finds that the same 
 quality which he shares with his fellow men 
 is as really, while far more fully, resident in 
 God; and it is on the basis of this known 
 clemency of disposition that man rests his pe- 
 tition for forgiveness. As the prayer which 
 the Lord Jesus set to be a joattern of devotion, 
 as an example both of acceptable brevity and of 
 
42 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 the rational expression of known and recognized 
 wants, as this simplest and grandest of forms 
 is accompanied by a depreciation and denun- 
 ciation of vain repetition and much speaking, 
 it is quite evident that once praying it "with 
 the spirit and the understanding also " is more 
 pleasing to the Divine mind and more effica- 
 cious with the Divine will than the rattling 
 discharge of a decade of Pater Nosters. In 
 fine, the printing of the Prayer Book in the 
 English tongue, to secure the intelligent and 
 sincere devotion of the English worshipper, is 
 in strict accord with the tone and temper of all 
 that the New Testament has to say concerning 
 the worship of God. 
 
 Thus in its conduct of common prayer the 
 Prayer Book, like the Gospel, gives most sig- 
 nificant suggestion of its ideal of the common 
 Christian life. By its pica for intelligence, it 
 seeks to bring the life out of the shadows of 
 ignorance and credulity into the full sunlight 
 of knowledge and conviction. It proclaims the 
 marriage and forbids the divorce of faith, 
 through which man appeals to God, and reason, 
 through which God appeals to man. It incites 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 43 
 
 to study and investigation because God's 
 thought is thus disclosed to man's thought. 
 It claims the earth whereon our life is led as 
 the "Lord's with the fulness thereof," and 
 regards even the physical instruments, as the 
 telescope and microscope, which search into its 
 wonders and reveal the Divine thought held in 
 its bosom, as instruments fashioned for a sacred 
 use, even the use of deciphering God's record 
 of himself in the work of his hands. Such an 
 intelligent faith is not afraid lest it peradven- 
 ture be wrecked by the storms of controversy, 
 for its Christ walks serenely on all these waters. 
 The calm and assured faith in God, which 
 underlies the very form of the Prayer Book's 
 devotion as a reasonable service, renders futile 
 all fear of banishing God from his universe by 
 discovery or from his Bible by criticism. That 
 terror is but a relic of the superstition which 
 feared so much because it knew so little. The 
 unexpressed but conscious postulate of the 
 " Common Prayer writ in the native tongue " is 
 that, as knowledge grows from more to more, 
 more of that reverence, whose voice is wor- 
 ship, will dwell within the soul. The rational 
 
44 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 faith in which it is conceived fosters no dual- 
 istic scheme of nature without, or of the mind 
 within. It lends no ear to the Manichean 
 protest against matter, nor to the obscurantist 
 protest against reason. It consequently feels 
 no distrust of discoveries in the realm of na- 
 ture, and would stimulate rather than discour- 
 age that wide survey and keen discrimination 
 which in our day has created the world anew. 
 The faith which the Prayer Book invokes 
 and inculcates is one which could stand 
 unshaken amid the earthquake shock of the 
 Copernican system, that mightiest of natu- 
 ral revolutions. That scientific revolution in 
 thought displaced our planet from the centre 
 and transported it to the circumference of the 
 solar system, and stigmatized as a speck of 
 star dust what had been regarded as the cen- 
 tral mass. It sent the earth spinning through 
 space as the satellite of a system itself a satel- 
 lite, though it had once seemed to be the im- 
 movable pivot of all celestial movement. So 
 remote and insignificant a planet as the world 
 was now declared to be, seemed to some to 
 dwarf the importance of the race which dwelt 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 45 
 
 upon it, and to render the assertion of God's 
 dwelling among that race in the Incarnation 
 of his Son an incredible audacity of religious 
 arrogance. But faith allied to reason rested 
 secure in the assurance that the infinite power 
 which the new knowledge unfolded rendered it 
 yet closer akin to the infinite love disclosed to 
 faith in the Gospel, This divine visitation of 
 the least of the stellar tribes seemed to com- 
 port yet more fully with the Master's word, 
 about the search, by the head of the house- 
 hold, for the least lost coin of the treasury 
 and the feeblest sheep of the fold. The stead- 
 fast faith in the unseen rested all the more 
 secure in the conviction, that that revelation 
 has not the least evidence for its verity which, 
 though it humble man, exalts God. 
 
 Thus it is that the increasing knowledge of 
 nature has its confirmation for the faith which 
 penetrates beyond nature, and finds in it its 
 ally, not its enemy. 
 
 Hence it comes that the normal religious 
 life is one which is alert in intellect. If true 
 to its Master it must recognize as his call that 
 impulse within us which aims at the highest 
 knowledge of nature and incites to the fullest 
 
46 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 discovery of the secrets locked in her bosom. 
 It rejoices to believe that man touches the 
 outer garment of the invisible spirit in the 
 world of matter, from which touch there flows 
 forth much healing of the mind. The careful 
 scrutiny of Lyell among the rocks, the pro- 
 found contemplation of the law of living things 
 by Wallace and Darwin, the craving impulse 
 of Nansen to penetrate the unknown within 
 the icy regions of the pole, these to an intelli- 
 gent faith are not irreligious longings, their 
 curiosity is not impious, their pursuit is not de- 
 moralization. These enter in their research a 
 high and noble realm where the Master accom- 
 panies, even as when he walked with the dis- 
 ciples through the Galilean fields and bade 
 them consider the lilies how they grow, and 
 mark the whirling flight of the birds in the 
 sky, and know that the Father's thought and 
 care were among them. Yes, Christ conse- 
 crates the intellect, and that consecration is 
 not a lullaby, but an awakening. The stimu- 
 lus to research and investigation, to discovery 
 and contemplation, stirs in the voice which 
 calls us to live on God's footstool as the Sons 
 of God. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 47 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS RATIONAL 
 
 A N intelligent Christian faith is intelli- 
 •^ •*" gent in regard to the inner as well as 
 the outer life of man. While it has no dread 
 of nature or the science of it, it cherishes as 
 well no obscurantist fear of the inner world of 
 reason. It does not turn off from the realm 
 of mind as from a region of false lights and 
 delusive mirage, but rejoices to trust it as en- 
 kindled by the Divine Word "which lighteth 
 every man coming into the world." To this 
 inner conscience and consciousness it perceives, 
 the Divine Word himself continually appealed. 
 But while trusting this verifying faculty, as 
 his Master trusted it, the wise householder, 
 instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven, recog- 
 nizes the necessity to keep the inward eye clear 
 lest the light in it become darkness. It does 
 not therefore disregard the voice of the uni- 
 
48 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 versal Christian reason, the conviction or the 
 confession of the Church Catholic, or resist as 
 irreconcilable with the voice within the claim 
 of authority without which comes attesting the 
 record of the ecumenical consciousness. But 
 while it gives friendly reception to the utter- 
 ance which claims the authority of the past, it 
 tests it, that it may the better discover its mean- 
 ing or detect its limitation, or mark how it 
 holds in the germ that which now has come to 
 fuller apprehension in the ripened experience 
 of the race through the Divine leading. 
 
 For a reasonable faith holds that the Divine 
 Word which has been ever speaking is speaking 
 still, and that any ecumenical utterance finds 
 its authority in the consenting conviction of the 
 many voices which find expression in it. Thus 
 to it the supreme witness to the truth is not 
 simply truth as other men of other times have 
 conceived it or uttered it, but that accord of 
 the two voices of the past and of the present 
 which discloses an undertone of concordant 
 meaning in both, though the single note of the 
 remoter time may have been modified in its 
 emphasis or developed in its force as it is 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE ^g 
 
 expressed in the fuller and more vibrant chord 
 of to-day's utterance. To it legitimate theo- 
 logical thought does not assume the form of a 
 mere archaeological pursuit. It is not a study 
 of fossils witnessing to an earlier life which 
 has no vital connection with or development in 
 the thought of to-day, and which we can only 
 lament as extinct, and therefore strive to force 
 ourselves back into it again. It rather holds 
 Christian thought to be as legitimate to-day as 
 yesterday, not as being cut off from yesterday, 
 but as being an evolution out of previous life 
 into nobler and more impressive or expressive 
 forms. 
 
 And it learns this lesson from the progres- 
 sion of the race in faith and morals deline- 
 ated in the Holy Scriptures, wherein the day 
 spring from on high hath visited us as a shin- 
 ing light which shineth brighter and brighter 
 unto the perfect day. This Scriptural witness 
 to a gradual revelation has its impressive and 
 authoritative lesson for the development of 
 Christian truth, which is a continuous growth 
 into the knowledge of Christ. The analogy of 
 the old growth to the new is complete, and has 
 
 4 
 
so 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 the assurance of being God's method, which 
 changes not. As the law of Moses expanded in 
 significance and fulness through the spiritual in- 
 sight of the prophets applying and elucidating 
 it in relation to the problems of their times, so 
 the comprehension of Christian truth is des- 
 tined to grow from more to more "until we all 
 come in the knowledge of the Son of God to the 
 measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." 
 He of whose fulness we have all received rele- 
 gated (as illustrated in the vision of transfigu- 
 ration on the mount) Moses the lawgiver and 
 Elijah the prophet, supreme in their day, to the 
 realm of the subordinate and relative ; a posi- 
 tion their contemporary followers could not 
 have conceived possible. Those also who own 
 His supreme lordship and mastership are and 
 must ever be striving to comprehend the height 
 and depth and length and breadth of that which 
 passeth knowledge, and to come into that 
 larger and fuller possession of his mind which 
 relatively dwarfs the conceptions even of the 
 greatest men who have gone before us. 
 
 The growth of Christian knowledge is not a 
 growth beyond Christ or apart from him, but 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 51 
 
 into him. Christ being what he is, that growth 
 cannot be other than limitless. As in him 
 dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, it 
 follows that in the highest reach of intellect 
 and expression man is to count not himself to 
 have apprehended, but to follow after if that he 
 may apprehend. He is to hear the cheer of 
 the Master's voice ever saying, "Ye shall see 
 greater things than these," He is stimulated 
 to deeper search for the unsearchable riches of 
 that Master's mind and meaning by the prom- 
 ised guidance by his Spirit into all truth. But 
 he cannot regard as all truth the fragments 
 other men or ages have gained, however valu- 
 able and important, for it is the all-truth, not 
 of the limited and imperfect minds who have 
 sought, but of the All-perfect and the All-fair 
 whom they sought. We see in our own age men 
 rejoicing in the truth which an age previous 
 could not discover since it could not bear, 
 and find that increasing knowledge brings also 
 increasing capacity to know; that its advance 
 is from strength to strength, and from glory to 
 glory. The progress of moral perception is too 
 patent to be denied. The attitude of the whole 
 
52 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 Christian world towards slavery, for instance, 
 is other and far higher than it was for ages 
 in the Christian Church. The vast provision 
 and care for the sick in hospitals, for the weak- 
 minded, as for the insane, for the reformation 
 of criminals and the sanitary and decent hous- 
 ing of the poor; this whole humanitarian de- 
 velopment which so strongly marks our century 
 is not only a progress and advance in practical 
 Christianity, but is a direct outcome of an 
 enlarged and deeper vision of the humanity of 
 Christ and of its meaning for the world. 
 " Ecce homo ! " is the cry which has led the 
 Christian world into nobler practice than it 
 ever attained in any earlier age. The old 
 controversies and decrees concerning the meta- 
 physical relations of the Divine and human in 
 Christ, which found expression through the 
 earlier Councils, these had their value for a 
 speculative age and form to-day an intellectual 
 basis for the more practical thought of our time. 
 The realization and amplification of that truth, 
 however, as it has sunk into the life and con- 
 sciousness of men has deeply stirred and modi- 
 fied the life and manners of our age. It has 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 53 
 
 turned the assertion of the Divine right of 
 kings into the demand for the Divine rights of 
 the people. That wonderful change in the con- 
 ception of government which has swept over 
 all Western Europe in our century, which holds 
 no longer that the nation is for the ruler, but, 
 whether under the republican or monarchical 
 form, that the government is for the nation, 
 this assertion of the democratic principle has 
 come of profound conviction of the value and 
 capacity of man as evoked by a larger and 
 nobler conception of the Incarnation of the Son 
 of God, who is the Son of Man. 
 
 It is plain to see that there are yet waiting 
 large departments of Christian truth which 
 promise rich fruitage for Christian knowledge 
 and Christian life when once developed by the 
 enlarged Christian experience of that ancient 
 Church, which is the church of to-day and not 
 the infant Church of the earlier centuries. One 
 such sphere is the doctrine of God the Holy 
 Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life, a depart- 
 ment of Christian doctrine which has hereto- 
 fore had but scant notice from theologians even 
 though under the dispensation of the Holy 
 
54 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 Ghost the life of the world to-day is specially 
 ordered of God. The visible presence of the 
 Divine Son of Man is withdrawn, that the reign 
 of his Spirit may begin and extend in power, 
 that greater works may be done by Christ, 
 through the Spirit, "according to the power 
 which worketh in us," than were possible 
 while the limitations of his mortal nature lay 
 about him. How vast that range of knowledge 
 opened by the Spirit which searcheth the deep 
 things of God! which stretches on until the 
 earthly and the heavenly seem to melt into 
 one horizon and join together the earth and 
 the sky, man's dwelling place and the source 
 of spiritual light and life. What radiance may 
 we not expect the developed doctrine of the 
 Holy Ghost to throw on both the Church and 
 the world, on worship in spirit and in truth, 
 its services, its sermons, and its sacraments, 
 and on the life of the Spirit in the truth, as it 
 touches the vast and complex problems of our 
 human intercourse and human destiny. 
 
 Some may naturally ask, What, amid all 
 this expectant development of Christian truth, 
 becomes of the faith once, or once for all, de- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 55 
 
 livered to the saints? Yet one might as well 
 ask of Science, what, amid all your fresh en- 
 lightenment, your law of gravitation (unknown 
 to the fathers), and your heliocentric solar sys- 
 tem, destructive of ancient postulates and forms 
 of speech, your new chemistry and biology and 
 geology; what amid all these becomes of the 
 universe made once for all and as we formerly 
 fancied in six terrestrial days ? And the an- 
 swer is the same in both cases. The cosmos 
 was evoked from chaos once for all, and in it 
 existed all that now exists, either as present 
 reality or prospective certainty. No new law 
 has been interposed and if new forms appear 
 they were germinant there from the beginning. 
 Science has not added a jot or tittle to the 
 universe, but only something to the knowledge 
 of it. It has simply educed and explained its 
 ancient treasures. It brings in a new creation 
 only in the sense of elucidating the old crea- 
 tion. Gravitation reigned before Newton, and 
 evolution was going on amid the star dust a:ons 
 before Darwin studied his pigeons. Coperni- 
 cus did not disturb the sweet influences of the 
 Pleiades recognized in Job's day; he merely ex- 
 
56 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 panded the single note of one constellation into 
 the larger chorus of the illimitable heavens. 
 And yet, though the law and the fact were there 
 of old, who does not own the mighty power for 
 good, through this great unfolding of them, in 
 the elevation of man's thought, in the expan- 
 sion of his spirit, in his awe of the mighty fab- 
 ric in which he dwells, in his reverence for the 
 order and truth and wisdom and beauty in- 
 herent in the Eternal Mind from which it all 
 proceeds? 
 
 So it is of the faith once delivered. It is all 
 contained, every atom, in Him, who is the 
 sacred object of it. But as has been so well 
 said by Professor Du Bose : 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is what the Church believes 
 Him to be. He is and always will be very much 
 more in Himself than our science of Him. 
 Christology will, therefore, never be complete; 
 but it is quite enough to convince us that there 
 is a truth in it of which, while it is greater 
 than our knowledge, we may yet know more 
 and more. No human mind can grasp the 
 unity or organic whole of nature, yet science 
 knows that nature is such a whole, and that it 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 57 
 
 can forever approximate to it. So the Church 
 knows that Jesus Christ stands to us for a fact 
 of God in nature and in humanity, of which it 
 may know the truth, although it can forever 
 only approximate to the whole truth." 
 
 Was there no gain for Christendom when 
 St. John and St. James disclosed and developed 
 the one its subjective principle and the other 
 its objective law; no gain when St. Paul, by 
 the force of his great genius, fit vehicle for so 
 divine an inspiration, transformed the concep- 
 tion of Christ's Kingdom from that of an 
 advanced Jewish sect into that of a Catholic 
 Church; no gain when the great representa- 
 tive of a Christianized circumcision in his 
 Epistle established as its rule the universal 
 moral law instead of the ancient prescriptive 
 ritual } 
 
 Did the Fathers at Nicaea add nothing to 
 the stability of Christian progress, when they 
 evolved, out of the facts long known and lived 
 by, that stately confession hymn, the Nicene 
 Creed } Think as a sober Christian of the 
 confusion and perversion which would doubt- 
 less have come into Christendom had not their 
 
58 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 voice attuned itself in a new but accordant 
 strain to the voice of the Gospel, not adding 
 thereto but evoking therefrom the true key 
 note of all the after progression. Has there 
 come no gain to Christian thought and Chris- 
 tian life, no invigoration of its mental and 
 moral atmosphere, from that clearer and no- 
 bler and deeper apprehension of the Atonement, 
 which has been evolved through long periods 
 of devout study? Whatever may be deter- 
 mined by any as to the particular content of 
 the doctrine, now, at least, the aspect of the 
 fact is changed from that of an ingenious and 
 exceptional plan to meet a special exigency 
 of the race into the revelation of an eternal 
 element of God's nature, an element which 
 manifests itself in all his rule of moral and 
 spiritual beings, the deep and sacred element 
 revealed in that law of sacrifice from which he 
 does not hold himself exempt. Thus construed 
 the Atonement makes Christ hanging on the 
 cross, as well as standing before the empty 
 tomb, the very revelation of God, in the deep 
 things of whose being, the Christ is seen as 
 the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 59 
 
 world. To remove this great doctrinal fact 
 from the realm of the abnormal, the transient, 
 and the temporal into the realm of the unseen 
 and the eternal is a gain for the intellect, for 
 the conscience, and for the heart of man. The 
 Atonement may well evoke a more vital and 
 heartfelt response to its appeal when it is held, 
 not as a perplexing enigma of celestial phil- 
 osophy which bewilders and baffles us, but as 
 the fulfilment in perfect completeness of the 
 law which God out of his own nature has in- 
 laid in our constitution ; which is regnant in 
 all noble life as it reflects God's life and is 
 sacred to all deep affection which echoes his 
 love; which making Christ really ours, makes 
 God really ours, in that as we are Christ's, so 
 Christ is God's. 
 
 We may fitly close this chapter by a passage 
 from the writings of Dr. Philip Schaff. 
 
 "It is proper then to speak of progress in 
 the Church itself. But this progress is never 
 in the true sense creative, but comes only in 
 the way of reception, organic assimilation, and 
 expansion. All historical development in the 
 Church consists in a cumulative apprehension 
 
6o THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 of the life and doctrine of Christ and of his 
 Apostles, and a progressive and ever increasing 
 appropriation and manifestation of their spirit 
 and method." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 61 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS SALVATION 
 
 TF progress in the apprehension of the truth 
 -^ is so essential, what becomes, it may be 
 asked, of the truth essential to salvation if it 
 needs must be a growing and expanding truth. 
 Christ came to save men, and was there not 
 enough truth to save men in the beginning, and 
 if so what is the use of more ? The answer is 
 patent. Salvation is accord with God, and to 
 come into accord with God is not simply to 
 know, but to assimilate and come into harmony 
 with what we know. The instrument of sal- 
 vation is faith, the faith which is not chiefly 
 intellectual assent but moral surrender, the 
 committing of one's soul and life to the truth 
 of God, the knowledge of which it possesses. 
 Thus to believe Christ as he is revealed to us 
 by coming unto him for rest, and taking his 
 yoke upon us to guide our labor into rest, i. e. 
 
62 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 by moral and spiritual surrender, this is for 
 every soul salvation. But as we know more and 
 learn more of Him, fuller surrender still is pos- 
 sible and also imperative for that accord with 
 God, which is salvation. So St. Paul evidently 
 felt when he spoke of leaving the things which 
 are behind and pressing forward towards the 
 mark for the prize of the high calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus. He had had a knowledge of 
 Christ very real, very consolatory, very stimu- 
 lating; but he came in the course of his growth 
 into the knowledge of Christ to feel that his 
 previous knowledge had been a knowing of 
 Christ after the flesh, from outside, as it were. 
 But much as that knowledge had done for him, 
 it could not satisfy him longer. Now hence- 
 forth know we him no more after the flesh, he 
 exclaimed, but in the fuller truth of experience, 
 and thought, and service, which had revealed 
 him yet more completely; in the enlarged appre- 
 hension of his fulness which was ever growing, 
 so that now his salvation was nearer and greater 
 than when he first believed. 
 
 The completeness of man's salvation demands 
 the intelligent reception of the truth, and a 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 63 
 
 growth into the intelligent reception of it. All 
 Christ's similes of the Christian life are similes 
 of growth, of the growth of the building to com- 
 pletion, of the body to perfect harmony and 
 health, of the leaven which spreads through all 
 the lump, of the seed which expands into the 
 wide branching tree, or from a handful multi- 
 plies into the harvest. But there are those 
 who speak of the deposit of the faith as of the 
 deposit of a certain sum in a bank, to be kept 
 intact in some ancient napkin and not put out 
 to increase. They talk of the truth that is to 
 be believed, as though it were a certain definite 
 amount of statement which could be weighed in 
 the intellectual balance of one age, or meas- 
 ured by the definite doctrinal standard of one 
 special time. The various Confessions so called 
 of the various churches of the Reformation and 
 the Decrees of the Council of Trent as a reply 
 to them, are so many attempts thus to define 
 and measure truth for their time, doubtless 
 their authors thought for all time. But the 
 places that knew them know them no more. 
 How are these carefully elaborated statements 
 outgrown, so that they must be explained even 
 
64 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 to explaining them away in order to hold on 
 to them, and what sane man or church would 
 essay such a task to-day? How different are 
 these exclusive and excluding statements, seek- 
 ing to limit the action of our Christian intel- 
 lect within the bounds of a special confession, 
 from those wonderful inclusive statements we 
 call the Catholic Creeds, not into which we 
 look, but through which we look up to God; 
 which give us the great data of revelation, and 
 leave the fulness of the apprehension of them 
 to that growth in the mind of the Spirit which 
 comes of experience according to the measure of 
 the gift of Christ. Well may the Christian lips 
 sing Siirsiini Corda as the Christian mind rec- 
 ognizes in Christ the light of the world, shin- 
 ing into every realm of his creation, that his 
 disciples may follow him there as children of 
 the light and of the day. 
 
 In thus recognizing the note of intelligence 
 in the normal Christian life, evoked by the 
 sound of the English tongue as the order of 
 the Common Prayer begins, we but anticipate 
 the lesson indicated in every service which the 
 book contains. Let us but irlance at the con- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 65 
 
 tents of this book, and at once we are struck 
 with the presence of exhortation and explana- 
 tion in all its services. The Daily morning 
 and evening Prayer, after the scriptural call to 
 God's presence, begin with the exhortation to 
 the people setting forth the nature of the wor- 
 ship in which they are to engage. However 
 tedious and cumbersome this daily iteration of 
 what has been stigmatized as the little preach- 
 ment may have come to be during the centu- 
 ries in which intelligence has spread, and the 
 leaven of the Prayer Book has raised the whole 
 tone of reasonable worship in the Church, and 
 however wise the action of our revisers in 
 making the use of it optional, save on Sunday 
 morning, still its presence in the early age of 
 the Reformation was a distinctive feature wit- 
 nessing both to the necessity of enlightening 
 the mass of the people, whose worship in an 
 unknown tongue had taken on largely the char- 
 acter of an incantation, and to its conception of 
 true worship as an intelligent act of intelligent 
 beings. Let these exhortations stand, though 
 their use may be wisely curtailed, stand as 
 monuments to witness to the Church's im- 
 
 S 
 
66 THE PRA YER BOOK AND 
 
 primatur on worship as a reasonable service, 
 and on life as a life led in reason as in faith. 
 
 This feature of explanatory exhortation at- 
 tends, as we have said, all the specially great 
 services of the Book of Common Prayer. Bap- 
 tism, Confirmation, the Administration of the 
 Holy Communion, all share this feature in 
 common with the order for Daily morning 
 and evening Prayer. And even the more 
 individual services, such as that of Holy 
 Matrimony, and the private services, such 
 as the visitation of the sick, and of prisoners, 
 share this feature. Everywhere and in every 
 place worshippers are to know what they are 
 about. The opns operatnin theory is not that on 
 which these offices of worship are constructed. 
 The subjective as well as the objective element 
 must be present. There must be the indi- 
 vidual response as well as the declared truth, 
 the actual reception as well as positive dona- 
 tion of the grace. The analogy of nature, — 
 since nature is God's ordinance and revela- 
 tion in matter, — serves in the realm of the 
 spirit. As there is no sound without the 
 ear's auditory nerve receiving and conveying 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 67 
 
 the vibrations of aerial movement to the brain ; 
 as sight is the eye's report back of the mes- 
 sage of the sun's rays; as in fine there is no 
 sensation, in all the assault of nature on the 
 senses, until the senses have actively responded 
 to the assault, so in the realm of spirit, the 
 effect of truth and grace is conditioned by 
 the reception it obtains. Truth and grace are 
 indeed not created by man's response to them; 
 they are forever the objective realities of God. 
 Independent of man's recognition, they abide 
 from everlasting in the bosom of the Eternal. 
 But their power over life and character is con- 
 ditioned by the soul's response. Holiness, 
 purity, righteousness, worldliness, uncleanness, 
 injustice; these come as man relates himself in 
 harmony or in opposition to the objective truth 
 and grace of God. Jangle all the bells in 
 Christendom, and there is no sound for all the 
 tumultuous leaping of the air, unless, entering 
 the winding labyrinth of the single ear, the 
 motion combes in touch with the living action 
 of the brain, which answers to it. Proclaim in 
 sermon, or offer in sacrament in clearest meas- 
 ure the living law of the Gospel, and without 
 
68 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 the soul's consent it leaves the soul impover- 
 ished still. Thus it is that the apprehension 
 of the truth and the recognition of God's grace 
 are so essential to vital worship and to the 
 normal Christian life which it seeks to sanctify 
 as God's in all its ways. Eternal life is God's 
 gift, participation in it requires man's act of 
 recognition and response. 
 
 Let us note, however, that this hortatory 
 and explanatory feature of the Book of Common 
 Prayer, inserted to secure an intelligent appre- 
 hension of its worship, is not an attempt to 
 deny or dissipate the mystery of the spiritual 
 life, or of the Being or the influence of the 
 Eternal Spirit. It presupposes the reasonable- 
 ness of prayer when it indicates its proper 
 form, but it does not exploit its mystery. 
 How our thoughts in worship reach the Eternal 
 Mind, how our words in worship enter the 
 Eternal Ear, and how the answer comes, these 
 things must be left for the day when "we shall 
 know even as we are known." The peace 
 which proceeds of worship is a peace which 
 passeth understanding. Were it not so it 
 would be unreal, for it is the mystery of life 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 69 
 
 reposing in the mystery of godliness. It is 
 the unutterable yearning of the soul which 
 cannot comprehend itself to find rest and 
 strength and life in one who comprehends it, 
 but whom it cannot comprehend. It is the 
 outcome of 
 
 " . . . . those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realized, 
 High instincts before which our mortal Nature 
 Doth tremble like a guilty Thing surprised . . . 
 Which be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day. 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing; 
 Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal Silence." 
 
 In this mystery of prayer, and of salvation 
 through its holy communion, " Deep calleth 
 unto deep. " It were a shallow thought indeed 
 to think to explain away its mystery. But it 
 is a noble thought to unfold that mystery as 
 the reasonable refuge of the mystery of life and 
 being. And so of the mysteries of the sacra- 
 ments which body forth the mystery of the 
 soul's birth from above, and of its nourishment 
 
70 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 by the very life and being of its Lord. The 
 law of the soul's response finds sovereignty 
 here, as elsewhere in the realm of the spirit, 
 a response not creative but receptive of God's 
 grace. The exhortation stands for an intelli- 
 gent participation in the act that there may be 
 an active cooperation, and so an efficacy of that 
 which is symbolized in the washing of water 
 and the partaking of the bread and wine. But 
 who may explain the action.? He only who 
 can comprehend the soul, in its origin, its 
 nature, and its destiny. Not he who is en- 
 wrapped all about with its mystery, who feels 
 the need of heavenly things, and reaches out 
 towards them, and believes he receives their 
 benefit, but who, while realizing the effect, 
 can no more explain the method of its im- 
 partation than he can understand how his 
 thought is connected with the movement of 
 his brain, though he accepts that connection, 
 or explain how his arm moves at the mo- 
 tion of his mind, though he daily, hourly, nay 
 every moment, is aware that muscle and nerve 
 are obedient to the mandate of his will. As 
 was long ago well said by Schleiermacher, "To 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 71 
 
 clear up is not to clear out." We leave un- 
 touched the content of mystery in worship and 
 in life. Thus only we fulfil their high behest, 
 for in their nature they are mysteries, high, 
 we cannot attain unto them. But for the 
 conduct both of life and worship we seek the 
 light of intelligence and reason, that their mys- 
 tery may beckon and not baffle us. For, like 
 the heavenly bodies in space, these spiritual 
 realities abide, but we may approach them 
 with the calm reverence of the astronomer or 
 with the heated fancy of the astrologer. The 
 latter gazes on the stars to turn their mystery 
 into the mystification of portents, which reflect 
 his own grotesque and wayward dreams, and 
 give birth to omens both of delusive hopes and 
 irrational fears. But the astronomer gazes up- 
 ward, with the reverent homage of intelligent 
 research, to learn what the stars teach him, and 
 marking their orbit, motion, order, transforms 
 what shines so far above him in the unfath- 
 omable mystery of space into a sure and cer- 
 tain guide for his pathway on the earth. 
 
72 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS INFLUENCED BY THE 
 HOLY SCRIPTURES 
 
 "\T7E have indicated the character of the 
 Christian Life as one of Divine pur- 
 pose and communion, of brotherly interest and 
 ministration, of intelligent thought and investi- 
 gation, both in the region of nature and in the 
 realm of spirit. These features have been sug- 
 gested by the contemplation of the Christian life 
 as a life of Prayer, of common Prayer, of com- 
 mon Prayer in the common tongue of the living 
 worshipper. We will proceed now to scrutinize 
 more minutely the elements which constitute 
 the substance of the Ritual. The permanence 
 and progress of the Christian Life, its oneness 
 with the past, its connection with the present, 
 and its anticipative hold upon the future, are 
 all suggested by the association of the worship 
 with these three things : the Holy Scriptures, or 
 sacred literature of past ages ; the Collects, or 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 73 
 
 the devout utterance of past ages ; and the 
 Christian Year, or religious sequence of worship 
 recalling past ages. These features are funda- 
 mental in the Prayer Book, their correlated 
 truths are fundamental in the normal Christian 
 life. 
 
 Nothing is more striking than the association 
 of English worship with the Bible. Its call 
 to worship in the opening sentences of the 
 Daily Prayer is resonant with the voice of the 
 Prophets and Apostles of olden time. God's 
 word, not man's, strikes the key note of its de- 
 votions. Whether as exhortation, or promise, 
 or invitation, each Scripture sentence brings 
 with it the aroma of an ancient association to 
 mingle with the atmosphere of present worship ; 
 it is a sacred oracle attuned to the strain and 
 stress of the spiritual want of to-day. And as 
 the worship opens, so it continues. It is 
 throughout simply saturated with the Scriptures. 
 Its opening and invitatory burst of praise is an 
 old psalm of the sanctuary and the synagogue. 
 From this it turns to the Psalter, so rich in its 
 record of spiritual experience that every mood 
 of the religious life in all time finds expression in 
 
74 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 it, from the Alleluia of its joy to the De profundis 
 of its sorrow and desolation. When David was 
 supposed to have, as an author, almost a 
 monopoly of the Psalter, Edward Irving, that 
 Jeremy Taylor of Scotch divines, wrote of him, 
 ** His soul was like a harp full-stringed over which 
 the angels of joy and sorrow swept as they 
 passed, and which vibrated to every touch of 
 human want or emotion." Our own Bishop Lay, 
 in his homely and quaint prose, used to say of 
 it, "The reading of the Psalter is for the Episco- 
 palian what the experience or class meeting is for 
 the Methodist, only with the personal pronoun 
 I subdued or left out altogether." Then the 
 lessons from the Old and New Covenant come 
 on, holding up ancient history as a mirror 
 of modern motives, and proclaiming the same 
 Law and Gospel to be regnant in the time im- 
 mediately present as in times far past. Each 
 special service has its special scripture. In 
 Baptism we read from the Gospel of Christ's 
 treatment of children as the plea that " he favor- 
 ably alloweth this charitable work of ours in 
 bringing this infant to his Holy Baptism." Con- 
 firmation has its lesson concerning the laying on 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 75 
 
 of the Apostles' hands. The Holy Communion 
 not only stations the Law given by Moses at its 
 gate, but in its Epistle and Gospel provides 
 the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ 
 for the comfort and instruction of the soul which 
 has passed through the gate into the streets of 
 the city to sit down at meat with the Master. 
 If the Marriage Service does not contain a 
 Gospel, it refers to it in its fine phrase con- 
 cerning the holy estate which " Christ adorned 
 and beautified with his presence and the first 
 miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee," 
 and associates it with the Epistles quoting the 
 commendation of St. Paul concerning the hon- 
 orableness of marriage in all men. The Burial 
 Service is ushered in with the old Testament's 
 anticipation of triumph and consolation, and is 
 alive with the voice of Angels proclaiming the 
 risen Lord, who is affirmed to be the pledge 
 of our immortality in the glowing argument of 
 the Apostle Paul. 
 
 Thus all life from the cradle to the grave is 
 wrought about with Scripture. And what is the 
 meaning of it, if not this, that there is a per- 
 manence of the normal religious life which to be 
 
76 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 profound and true may, nay must, draw an 
 inspiration from the past, wherein men lived 
 and wrought and suffered under God as we, 
 and yet whose past looked inevitably on to our 
 present, " God having provided some better 
 thing for us, that they without us should not be 
 made perfect." It is not the purpose here to 
 draw out a doctrine of Holy Scripture, either 
 from the Article which makes it a final arbiter of 
 doctrine, or from the liturgical affirmation con- 
 cerning it as the oracles of God. It is patent 
 from the use of it that the Church in its Prayer 
 Book holds that God in times past spake unto 
 the fathers by the Prophets, and hath spoken 
 unto us by his Son, and that that voice rightly 
 understood is the supreme spiritual authority 
 and guide. Theories of inspiration, or compo- 
 sition, or compilation, these fortunately are not 
 found in any part of the Prayer Book, for their 
 place is in the outer court of criticism, and not 
 in the inner court of the sanctuary where men 
 ought to worship. These come and go as men 
 learn or unlearn, as the new light dawns, or the 
 old light glows afresh. But worship is the con- 
 tinuous attitude of man towards God, not to- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 77 
 
 wards the servants of his will, even the holiest 
 of them. What the " sundry times and divers 
 manners " in which He spake through men in- 
 volve, will evolve in his providence as like the 
 commended Bereans we search the Scriptures, 
 or like the prophets themselves search diligently 
 what or what manner of time the spirit of Christ 
 which was in them did signify, " unto whom it 
 was revealed that not unto themselves but unto 
 us they did minister." 
 
 But the constant quality of Scripture lies not 
 in the realm we label '* Introduction," in names, 
 dates, sequences, and what not of the outer form, 
 but in that inner core of life and living truth 
 which is profitable for instruction in righteous- 
 ness; in that Divine quality which quickens 
 the spirit by its inspiring force; in that prac- 
 tical efficiency which can fashion the use of 
 Divine truth in all things unto edification, so 
 that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly 
 furnished unto all good works. Now the litur- 
 gical use of Holy Writ makes manifest this 
 quality of the Scriptures, and applies it in many 
 salutary ways. First of all it gives the sense of 
 the permanence of the Divine Presence in the 
 
78 THE PRA YER BOOK AND 
 
 life of humanity in all its changeable estate; 
 then the assurance of the ineradicable pos- 
 session by humanity of the religious instinct 
 which recognizes God's presence, and then the 
 conviction of the universal necessity of the de- 
 velopment of the religious life, which incorpo- 
 rates God's truth, for the development of the 
 worthiest life of men. This on the conservative 
 side. And on the progressive side, the litur- 
 gical use of the Scripture as fully shows that 
 the very nature of the religious life is such that 
 it is a growth up into God ; that both the un- 
 folding capacity of man and the unfailing fulness 
 of God require and involve the ever increas- 
 ing apprehension and enlarged application of 
 divine truth on the part of men, the progress, in 
 fine, of humanity into a fuller life in God. 
 
 Thus the lesson of the Scriptures for the pres- 
 ent age is one of hope, of widening scope, of 
 higher achievement, than all the past can show. 
 By the liturgical use of the Holy Scriptures in 
 its daily worship, the soul is brought face to face 
 with both the permanent and progressive ele- 
 ments of the religious life; its claim on his rev- 
 erent faith in the past and the vindication of its 
 
>. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 79 
 
 practical hold on the things of the present. 
 And it does all this by simply unfolding to the 
 mind what religion has been in the world and 
 how it has been. History has been well said 
 to be " philosophy teaching by example," and 
 the Bible may be as truly said to be '' theology 
 taught by life." For in the Bible, its narratives, 
 its poems, its prophecies, its histories, and its 
 letters, we learn at once of religion as a concrete 
 reality. We find, from the very way in which 
 its messages come to us, that God's revelation 
 to men was a ruling of them. He came down 
 into life, the life of Abraham the individual, of 
 Israel the race, not first of all into a literature 
 through a book full formed. 
 
 That was the conception of Mohammed as 
 presented in the Koran, and of Joseph Smith 
 in his Mormon Bible. They professed to re- 
 ceive these long literary compositions direct 
 from heaven, and these they presented as the 
 revelation of the Divine will and as the law 
 of the Divine life. To them revelation came in 
 the form of a composition. To the Hebrew it 
 was recognized as a communication to the soul 
 and life. Therefore the Hebrew and the Chris- 
 
So THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 tian Scriptures are not like these later Bibles 
 of the Mohammedans and Mormons ; they are 
 not compositions about a life antecedent to its 
 actual realization, but are the literary outcome 
 of a life already lived or being lived in the 
 recognition of God, who had already revealed 
 himself to that life and inspired it. Revelation 
 to them was not in the letter, but in the spirit. 
 Its method was not the dictation of a book, but 
 the inauguration of a Hfe, whose origin, move- 
 ment, growth, the Book records, and out of 
 which, filled with the same inspiring spirit as 
 the life, we draw our instruction and inspiration 
 as from the life itself 
 
 To be confronted with the Scriptures then 
 in worship is to be brought face to face with 
 the life of the race in God from the begin- 
 ning. It is to be made to recognize the ever- 
 lasting purpose of God to bring men to their 
 highest self by bringing them to Himself. It 
 is to be brought into touch with the vitality 
 of the rehgious life we ourselves are seeking 
 as evidenced in every stage of man's progress, 
 and to learn the doctrine of God and of man's 
 relation to him, not so much by dogmatic 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IIFE 8 1 
 
 statement, or philosophical speculation, as by 
 a contemplation of the life of a people con- 
 sciously led by him ; led by him through all 
 the centuries as well as through the wilder- 
 ness, " to prove them and know what was in 
 their heart, whether they would keep his com- 
 mandment or no," who " humbled them and 
 suffered them to hunger and fed them with 
 manna, that he might make them know that man 
 doth not live by bread only, but that by every 
 word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the 
 Lord doth man live." 
 
 The atmosphere of a worship thus replete 
 with Scripture is one which breathes vitality 
 and reality into religious living ; the vitality 
 and reality of the life of God in the life of 
 humanity. It discriminates religion from the 
 region of heated fancy and hysteric feeling, as 
 breathing the free air of genuine life and strug- 
 gle. It dissipates the doubt that religion may 
 be a passing phase of man's development, as 
 Auguste Comte affirmed, proper enough, nay, 
 inevitable in the childhood of the race, but to 
 be put away with childish things as the grown 
 man enters the realm of thought and knowledge 
 
 6 
 
82 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 and reasonable action. Through the Scripture 
 the assurance is confirmed that that Hfe cannot 
 be ephemeral in its fundamental elements which 
 has filled past ages with its power; that that 
 cannot be a mere individual sentiment which 
 has proved the strength of a great and beyond 
 measure influential civilization. And thus the 
 historic continuity of religion, recorded as it 
 was enacted in the pages of the Bible, brings 
 with it the conviction of an everlasting pur- 
 pose of God to bring mankind into living and 
 loving relation to himself, the recognition and 
 acceptance of which purpose by man consti- 
 tutes his religious life. This affirmation of the 
 soul, so strong and abiding, so salutary and 
 so inspiring, vindicates itself as distinct from 
 delusion by the fact of its long illustration in 
 the history of mankind. Thus the single soul, 
 the man of modern times, we of to-day, gain 
 the assurance which is a natural deduction from 
 past experience, that in our moral and spiritual 
 endeavor we are not helpless strugglers against 
 the world and the universal trend of things, 
 but are co-workers together with God, the 
 unfolding of whose purpose the Bible portrays. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE Zt, 
 
 The spirit we receive out of the Scriptures is 
 one of confidence; "not the spirit of fear but 
 of power, of love, and of a sound mind." 
 
 The very imperfections and crudities attend- 
 ing the historical progress of religion ; the de- 
 pravities and cruelties mingled with it, as seen 
 depicted in this honest and almost naive chroni- 
 cle of Holy Writ ; these do not witness against 
 the reality or worth of religion, but for its per- 
 sistent power and for God's unfaltering purpose 
 to evolve a moral and spiritual life for mankind 
 out of and in the midst of the most untoward 
 circumstances. Ignorance, stubbornness, moral 
 blindness, abominable idolatries, and debasing 
 sensualities pressed in upon it and ofttimes 
 perverted it. We see it in these pages as a light 
 shining in the darkness, which comprehended it 
 not ; but the light though obscured never went 
 out. The sign and witness of the power of reli- 
 gion were just these continual conflicts, this un- 
 ceasing confrontmcnt of evil, with the rebuke of 
 God; this brooding of the Spirit of God over 
 the moral chaos and the projection of a moral 
 cosmos out of it. It did not come at first in 
 perfect form, unstained, unmarred, but was 
 
84 THE PRA YER BOOK AND 
 
 ever a growing power of moral order as the mind 
 grew in spiritual enlightenment and the con- 
 science cleared under the discipline of God's 
 providence. We may wonder that the author 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews could refer to 
 Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah 
 as heroes of faith, and they would indeed prove 
 sorry samples of sainthood seen by the after 
 light; but with all their faults it was their faith 
 in God which ennobled their lives above their 
 fellows, and rendered possible as their succes- 
 sors in the leading of the nation such heroes as 
 Samuel, David, and the Prophets. 
 
 The final outcome of all this history, seen as 
 we turn from the Old Testament to the New, is 
 the crowning vindication of both the perma- 
 nence and the progress of the religious instinct 
 guided and moulded by the hand of God. 
 For of Israel according to the flesh came 
 Christ Jesus, a name confessedly above every 
 name in the moral and spiritual realm, a name 
 to which all bow in that reverence of supreme 
 deference to absolute righteousness, which 
 no force of will can repress even when the 
 reverence of obedience is withheld. It is not 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 85 
 
 irreverent to say that Christ came not uncon- 
 nected with the past. His Hfe was not pro- 
 jected into the Hfe of the race by a sudden 
 Divine fiat, all unrelated to the life which had 
 preceded him. It was only " in the fulness of 
 the times " that God sent forth his Son into 
 the world. He was the culmination of the ever- 
 lasting purpose of God, which had been mani- 
 fest in all that had gone before. He is the 
 crown of humanity, as he is the earthly image 
 of the invisible God ; the Son of Man, the 
 Son of God ; the one in whom the law of God 
 was transfigured into the life of God, and in 
 whom love, which underlies the law and is the 
 life, reveals itself as sacrifice. He comes to 
 us in the Gospels as one bearing the burdens 
 of humanity and engaged in all its activities ; a 
 very real personage, who lived and taught and 
 suffered ; not exempt from the laws pertaining 
 to humanity, not apart from its infirmities, but 
 still the perfect fulfilment of all God's thought 
 concerning it. And this one, so matchless in 
 character, so boundless in devotion to his fellow 
 men, whose thought still penetrates the world 
 and elevates its spirit to regions before un- 
 
86 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 known and not yet attained ; He, the exhaust- 
 ive illustration of the law of sacrifice in man's 
 relation to his fellow men, whose word passeth 
 not away, but which speaks with authority to 
 the mind and conscience of this century, this 
 one based all his doctrine of man and all 
 claim to their spiritual allegiance on the assur- 
 ance that God spake in him and that his being 
 was one with the Father. He knew man and 
 what was in man so well that his word con- 
 cerning him, his being, his relations, his des- 
 tiny, is recognized as the supreme word, as the 
 word still regnant in modern civilization. 
 
 He who knew man so well has the witness 
 that he knew his own manhood too, its nature, 
 its secret source of power, its spiritual relation- 
 ship, its destiny. And that was all affirmed to 
 be in God, that was all depicted as the fulfil- 
 ment of a divine purpose which was from eter- 
 nity, a plan which affirms that man's relation 
 to God and his service to him is the ultimate 
 purpose of his being, and vindicates religion, 
 which is man's recognition and response to 
 God's purpose, as the supreme and abiding 
 element of life. Other elements may lie latent 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 in some or be obstructed and seem altogether 
 absent in others, as the faculty of art, or of 
 science, or of philosophical speculation, which 
 represent the mind as related to special de- 
 partments of the manifold life of the spirit. 
 But this direct relation to the Author of life, 
 this supreme relation of religion, is the one 
 which is universal, which is permanent, and 
 which is the root of progress in all that most 
 ennobles and distinguishes humanity. 
 
 Thus to be brought in worship constantly 
 face to face with the Scripture concerning 
 Christ is to gain the sense of that supreme 
 stability and absolute worth in religion which 
 makes it man's one secure possession. Tracing 
 in the older Scripture the religious struggle 
 and growth of man up to Christ, and in the 
 newer the life and enthusiasm and joyous con- 
 fidence of men believing in and inspired by 
 Him, this brings the assurance of a growth 
 and development of spiritual power through all 
 its changes, which stamps it as a divine real- 
 ity, which the world can never give nor take 
 away. For, as Dean Stanley so well said, ** It 
 is the transitory which stands still and fades 
 
88 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 and falls to pieces; the eternal continues by 
 changing its form in accordance with the move- 
 ment of advancing ages." The Scriptures in 
 fine breathe an atmosphere in which martyrs 
 and confessors may well be bred, as they have 
 been bred ; the atmosphere of a stalwart man- 
 hood and of a quenchless enthusiasm. And 
 this is the characteristic which the Scriptural 
 quality of the Prayer Book's worship engenders 
 in its revelation both of the permanence and 
 progress of the spiritual life of men. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 89 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE BEARING OF THE COLLECTS ON THE 
 CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 TN the devotional use of the Collects of the 
 -*- ages, as given in the Prayer Book, the 
 worshipper voices his prayers and praises in 
 the language of other men and other times. 
 No objection need lie against such worship as 
 archaic and artificial, as a crass conservatism 
 which cramps worship by restricting .its expres- 
 sion to an ancient formula, and by depreciating 
 the utterance of present wants in the language 
 of the present hour. For the fundamental 
 wants of human nature and the essential adora- 
 tion of the heart are the same in all ages. 
 What has once expressed them well has ca- 
 pacity still to utter them. Common worship 
 can only voice the fundamental and, because 
 fundamental, the common wants of men. The 
 special exigency of each individual must find 
 its expression in the closet. "The heart 
 
go THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 knoweth its own bitterness, and the stranger 
 intermeddleth not with its joy." In the con- 
 gregation we must express what we share in 
 common, one with another. If ours is to be 
 common worship, not individualistic, a com- 
 mon form must fashion it. It cannot depend 
 on any one man's mood, nor express itself 
 through any one man's interpretation. The 
 demand of common worship is for common 
 utterance. Now what common utterance can 
 promise so much completeness as that which is 
 common, not merely to one community or to 
 one age, but which is replete with the aspira- 
 tion and supplication of all the ages; which 
 is not a modern manufacture but an ancient 
 growth; which condenses into itself the sigh- 
 ing and singing of hearts long since at rest, 
 together with the exultations and the plaints 
 of those still compassed about with the trials 
 and the joys of this present time.? This is 
 the usage of the Book of Common Prayer. 
 
 There was temptation enough at the time of 
 its formation to cut off altogether from past 
 usages which had been so overladen with abuse. 
 But the liturgical instinct was keen and subtle 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 91 
 
 enough to respond to the vibrant touch and 
 living association of the old forms of devotion. 
 The Reformers did not think they were cutting 
 themselves off from the true life of the past. 
 They were reaffirming it rather by their ex- 
 cision of so much cumbrous and illegitimate 
 overgrowth, which hid the form and perverted 
 the spirit of that past. They felt the more 
 drawn to the heroes of the age of primitive 
 simplicity, in that they were striving to restore 
 that primitive simplicity. They would not 
 make or declare themselves ecclesiastical or- 
 phans by rejection of the Fathers. The fires 
 of devotion which burned anew in tjiem leaped 
 in response to the enkindling devotions of the 
 olden time. Thus out of that past they drew 
 those matchless forms and set them to our 
 lips, so that, with hearts attuned to the same 
 sanctity of desire, the mouth might speak with 
 the same melody of utterance. 
 
 We cannot here enter into any examination 
 of the wonderful beauty, dignity, serenity, 
 spirituality, of these ancient Collects. Each 
 utters its own separate note, yet all combine, 
 through the unity of the Christian year, into 
 
92 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 a rich harmony of rounded Christian expe- 
 rience. But the chief value for us of the use 
 of these matchless forms lies not in their 
 pervasive beauty and order, though these 
 invest the Christian life with a sense of its 
 completeness and elevation, which suggest its 
 refinement of tone as well as its strength of 
 character. It lies in the impression of the per- 
 manence and progress of a Christian experience 
 which comes inevitably, if unconsciously, from 
 using as our own the forms which framed the 
 petitions of the bygone saints of old. With 
 the Lord's Prayer falling from the Master's 
 lips as the key note, the stately progression 
 continues from age to age, from the days of St. 
 Chrysostom to the times of the Reformation. 
 For with the older Collects are mingled those 
 now old to us, but new when the Prayer Book 
 was compiled, namely, the comprehensive and 
 sonorous " Prayer for all sorts and conditions 
 of men," and the "General Thanksgiving" of 
 Bishop Reynolds, which have vindicated by 
 their fulness of meaning and beauty of expres- 
 sion their right to stand among the more an- 
 cient forms. But this use of the old forms, so 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE c)3 
 
 apt in the expression of our own wants, inten- 
 sifies the impressing of our unity with the 
 Christian life of old. That life is ever indi- 
 vidual, but not simply individual; it is a life 
 of communion and fellowship with all saintly 
 souls, or souls striving to be saintly. It is a 
 practical realization of that communion of 
 saints which we declare in the Creed to be 
 an article of our belief. It brings in the 
 sense of oneness with the vast throng whom 
 no man can number, who have striven and suf- 
 fered and been consoled as we; of that "one 
 army of the living God," whose equipment and 
 armament may have varied, but whose advance 
 has been steadfast through all the changes of 
 the centuries. It imparts a sense of kinship 
 with the martyrs and confessors who have suf- 
 fered for the faith; with the saints and the 
 doctors who have adorned it with the resplen- 
 dent light of learning and devotion; with the 
 heroes who have stood for it amid all contend- 
 ing forces of pagan unbelief, or the tyranny of 
 unrighteous ecclesiastical rule; with the vast 
 multitude who in all ages have lived faithful 
 and true lives in the following of their Lord, 
 
94 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 who indistinguishable from one another yet 
 stand in their intermingled strength and sweet- 
 ness like the milky way of the skies, a bridge 
 of light leading to the celestial country. Yes, 
 as the Christian worshipper to-day uses the 
 same petitions which they of old time prof- 
 fered, he gains a vivid sense of the power and 
 reality of these prayers through the attesting 
 lives of those who by their use gained strength, 
 and feels himself conjoined by an indissoluble 
 bond of unity to the whole family of God. For 
 therein, as in the Scriptures, he finds witness 
 again to the permanence of that life to which 
 his own soul is so strongly moved, and holds 
 on in increasing confidence to the reality of 
 that faith and hope to sustain him, which has 
 upheld through all the ages the highest life of 
 men. 
 
 But not only do these Collects minister to 
 the sense of permanence and oneness of the 
 Christian life since the coming of the Christ. 
 Its progress is not less suggested and assured. 
 For these prayers have themselves come into 
 being in the ever advancing stages of that life, 
 and themselves form a progression in worship 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 95 
 
 as in life. It was aptly said by that lofty reli- 
 gious genius, the matchless Phillips Brooks, 
 that "the only way to get rid of a past is to 
 make a future of it." And we may say as 
 truly, that the only way to really gain a past 
 and make it ours, is to grasp its life so as to re- 
 produce it in forms fitted to our time and cir- 
 cumstances. It must not remain to us simply 
 a bygone thing of wonder and admiration, with 
 which we have no vital connection, like an 
 Egyptian pyramid, or a cave dwelling in a 
 cliff. These belong to a civilization with 
 which we have nothing in common, from which 
 we can gain no impulse, to which we turn only 
 in curiosity, as we turn to a fossil form em- 
 bedded in the rocks. The past becomes ours 
 only as it vivifies our life. It is real to us not 
 as a mere accumulation of material deposited, 
 a talent wrapped in a napkin as in a shroud. 
 To be living to us, as it was to them of old 
 time, it must be as the seed which reproduces 
 a harvest, similar but not the same. So these 
 ancient Collects make the past real to us, 
 as they make the present real; their vitality 
 as ancient witnesses depends on the vitality 
 
96 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 of their present ministration, in joining past 
 and present together in one. They in worship 
 perform the function so essential to the abid- 
 ing permanence and progress of the Christian 
 life, which is, to quote the felicitous phrase of 
 Pere Gratrey, "To speak the Word of God 
 afresh to every age, in accordance with the 
 novelty of the age, and the eternal antiquity 
 of the truth." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 97 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR 
 ON THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 'nr^HE Christian year is that happy and in- 
 -*- delible feature of the Common Prayer 
 which adds its testimony to the value of the 
 life which is ever new as it is ever old. As 
 the Bible is witness to the permanence and 
 progress of religion in all ages, as the Col- 
 lects bear their testimony to the religious per- 
 manence and progress of all the Christian 
 centuries, so this Christian year, tracing the 
 footsteps of our Lord from Bethlehem's man- 
 ger to the ascension from Olivet, is the attes- 
 tation to the life and power of Him who is both 
 the root and the offspring of David, the alpha 
 and the omega, the beginning and the ending, 
 which is and which was and which is to come, 
 and to that life of his followers in Him, which 
 if it be a permanent abiding in his love must 
 be a continuous growth into his image. 
 
 X 
 
98 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 It is in the devotional progress of the Chris- 
 tian year that the religious life is brought face 
 to face with the Lord and Master of it ; with 
 the Christ which was of old that he might be 
 formed anew in every believing heart. And 
 that life as we trace its stages is seen and felt 
 to be the ever expanding life, perfect at each 
 stage, yet each stage a stage of perfection be- 
 yond that which preceded it. The life of the 
 obedient boy passed beyond the abnegation of 
 the passive infant life; the life of perfect ser- 
 vice in the home to earthly parents budded 
 into the recognition and acceptance of wider 
 service in the ampler house of the Heav- 
 enly Father ; the years of perfect labor in 
 the workshop emerged through the tempta- 
 tion struggle of the wilderness into sterner 
 struggle in the world's wilderness of sin ; the 
 perfect teaching and the perfect work (the 
 parable and miracle of perfect devotion) deep- 
 ened into the perfect obedience of suffering 
 and the cross, wherein we find the culmina- 
 tion of the perfect sacrifice which runs through 
 and consecrates every feature of that sacred 
 life. We see the mount of exaltation rising 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE gg 
 
 from out the very edge of the valley of death's 
 shadow. The " It is finished " of the earthly 
 renunciation becomes the transition point to 
 the sphere of heavenly dominion. The burial is 
 the seed of resurrection, the perfect submission 
 of the cross, the germ of perfect power on the 
 throne. As we thus follow the steps of that 
 most holy life, we find in it the highest illus- 
 tration of spiritual permanence and progress; 
 ever full life in God, ever the expanding power 
 of that life. And thus the Master becomes all 
 our own. His word transforms God's general 
 law into a direct personal appeal, and witnesses 
 to the divine calling of every portion of our life 
 and to the inevitable progress of it, if it be life 
 in him. It translates all its obligation into the 
 realm of love, and suffuses the snowy purity 
 of its divine morality with the warmth of per- 
 sonal affection and allegiance. Thus the reli- 
 gious life is made full as it is made personal, 
 for, in the words of Tennyson, the poet prophet 
 of our time, "Christianity with its divine mo- 
 rality, but without the central figure of Christ, 
 the Son of Man, would become cold, and it is 
 fatal for religion to lose its warmth." 
 
lOO THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 Above all other aids to devotion in the 
 Prayer Book the use of the Christian Year 
 makes prominent this one distinctive feature 
 of the Christian life. By it our gaze is centred 
 on a person, and faith is disclosed as a living 
 relation to him, and is not depicted as chiefly 
 an acceptance of propositions about him, which 
 is commonly styled acquiescence in dogma. 
 Dogma has its rightful place. It is, like the 
 science of any truth, a matter for the schools. 
 The mathematical formulae of the sun's mo- 
 tion, of the parallax of the stars, of the law 
 of gravitation, are most valuable, nay, essen- 
 tial and inevitable, in giving us fixed laws of 
 thought concerning them. But the sun's light 
 and warmth are what we live by. It is basking 
 in the sunlight, not the acceptance of or acqui- 
 escence in accurate formulae of scientific pre- 
 cision concerning its nature and action, which 
 sends the glow of life through our frames. 
 Botany gives us the science of the earth's flora 
 and clears our thought concerning it. But we 
 live by the garden, not by the treatise upon it. 
 These sciences do not add to or make potent 
 the facts of which they treat. They only clas- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE loi 
 
 sify and explain them. And it is so with dog- 
 matic theology. It is a mental clearance. It 
 possesses the value of an accurate statement of 
 Christian truths and of their relations. But to 
 accept a dogma is not salvation. Salvation is 
 to accept Him whom the dogma defines. The 
 Prayer Book's conception, judged by its use, 
 is not salvation by propositions, but salvation 
 by Christ. Its baptismal requirement is not a 
 confession, or philosophical explication of doc- 
 trine, but a creed, an acceptance of facts which 
 bind the soul to a living person. And the 
 Christian Year has for its object, not the in- 
 stilling of a scheme of doctrine, but the vivid 
 presentation of a living Lord, whom to know 
 is life eternal, whom to love is bliss ineffable, 
 "whom to serve is to reign." 
 
 The normal Christian life as indicated by the 
 features of its worship just enumerated, viz. its 
 Scriptural association, its use of the ancient 
 Collects, and the following of the Christian 
 Year, is thus portrayed as a life of assured 
 reality as historically vindicated, of legitimate 
 development as historically associated, of gen- 
 uine vitality as rooted in the historic Christ. 
 
I02 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 It holds within it a sense of permanence, and a 
 prophecy of progress, which strengthen and 
 irradiate it with the illimitable hope which 
 affirms, "The eternal years of God are hers." 
 One who is a partaker of it does not wander in 
 the realm of hectic dreams, does not follow 
 illusive phantoms, does not chase elusive un- 
 realities. He dwells in the secret place of the 
 Most High. There is a calmness within which 
 comes of a sense of permanent possession, and 
 a vitality which indicates healthy conviction 
 and enduring energy. 
 
 But for all this, one of the chief charges 
 which is brought against religion to-day is, not 
 that it has no value of restraint and guidance 
 for the unthinking and ignorant, but that it is 
 destined to pass as unvindicated to minds en- 
 lightened by the disclosures of knowledge and 
 thought characteristic of this century. It has 
 had, men say, its uses and abuses, but what 
 renders it a creed outworn is that its postu- 
 lates are not verifiable. It is an instrument of 
 the past. Henceforth men will be guided by 
 what they know, not by what they have be- 
 lieved. Much of the indifference to religion 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 103 
 
 lurks in the suspicion that it dwells in the re- 
 gion of uncertainties. 
 
 It is an immense tribute to the value of 
 the Book of Common Prayer that it generates 
 a spirit the opposite of all this. It stands 
 for the distinct credibility and reliability of 
 the data on which its worship is based and by 
 which its life is vindicated ; not directly as it 
 were, but rather presumptively, as involved in 
 the devotional use of its historical documents. 
 And the question arises. Is the Prayer Book 
 justified in this use.** Whatever it teaches, has 
 it a right to teach that the religious element in 
 mankind is a valid and fundamental character- 
 istic, a permanent postulate of man's nature, and 
 not a temporary form of his experience } Is it 
 indeed, can it be shown to be, an expanding 
 power conditioning man's noblest growth, 
 because rooted in the profoundest depths of 
 his being .^ 
 
 There is but one answer to this challenge 
 from one nurtured in the use of the Book of 
 Common Prayer. The religious element in 
 man is as fundamental and pervasive as any 
 other element of his nature. If catholicity or 
 
I04 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 ubiquity of presence is a testimony to validity, 
 it can stand confident in the presence of sci- 
 ence, art, or literature. These, which seek 
 at times to replace religion, are its children, 
 and remind one of Lear's ungrateful daughters 
 when they try to dethrone their parent. Are 
 the results of these declared verifiable because 
 an eclipse may be forecast, because the frame 
 thrills at the touch of beauty, or the mind re- 
 sponds in consent to intellectual appeal } But 
 has not religion its verification in its results .'' 
 Was ever any vindication of the truth more tri- 
 umphant than that given by the Person of the 
 Master of our souls, when he claims to be the 
 Truth } Does Christ make no convincing appeal 
 to the heart or the intellect } Were eyes ever 
 smitten with such a vision of loveliness as the 
 soul by the image of Jesus of Nazareth } Has 
 Christ's word no verification in the realms of 
 human life which it has purified and sweetened, 
 in the realms of thought it has cleared and ele- 
 vated, in the regions of action it has made just 
 and merciful and reasonable and strong? Chris- 
 tian civilization, with all its faults and crudi- 
 ties and unrealized possibilities, is, compared 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 105 
 
 with any other civilization, a potent vindica- 
 tion of Christian truth. The Christian re- 
 ligion stands fearlessly before the Master's 
 searching test, "by their fruits ye shall know 
 them." The leavening power of that civiliza- 
 tion has been the mind of Christ; the mind of 
 Christ was the consummate flower of the long 
 abiding of Israel under the shadow of the Al- 
 mighty, when once touched by the light which 
 streamed direct from heaven. And the fruitage 
 of that mind, which dwelt in the secret place 
 of the Most High, has been the spiritualiza- 
 tion of life, the elevation of its ethical standard, 
 the purification of its manners, the repression 
 of its animalism, the ennobling of manhood, 
 the elevation of womanhood, the amelioration 
 of childhood. The vast expansion of sympathy, 
 help, enlightenment, and kindly care which we 
 call the humanitarian movement of our time, 
 finds its root in Christ's life and word. No 
 department of that life but the mind of Jesus 
 has touched, and touching adorned, nay, rather 
 expanded and glorified, 
 
 " As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by." 
 
 And yet it is the judgment of sober reason 
 
io6 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 that in its effect upon social institutions and 
 the intricate problems of human competition 
 and co-operation that mind is not only unex- 
 hausted, but has scarcely begun to be felt and 
 understood. The abolition of slavery may be 
 regarded as but the prelude to that full free- 
 dom of mankind when once the Son shall have 
 made it free, and it shall be free indeed. 
 Therefore we say that the legitimacy of reli- 
 gion as a factor in man's life is verifiable. No 
 fulfilment of scientific prophecy as of the real 
 presence of an unseen planet, no building up of 
 an unknown and extinct creation from a frag- 
 ment of its bone, no vindication of scientific 
 prediction, in fine, affords clearer evidence of 
 the truth of its data and the soundness of its 
 methods, than is furnished to religion by its 
 salutary and ennobling influence on the indi- 
 vidual, on society, on the state. "That which 
 we have seen with our eyes, and which we have 
 looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the 
 word of life," in its effects, is potent verifica- 
 tion of the divine reality, of that word seen, 
 looked upon, and handled by the Apostles in 
 its source, the person of the Christ. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 107 
 
 In derogation of this claim, however, men 
 are not slow to point to many evils which have 
 been attendant on the development of religion 
 and to some generated by it. The Inquisi- 
 tion, indeed, is not a lovely feature of Christian 
 ecclesiasticism, nor the patronage of slavery in 
 Christian times, nor the persecution of the 
 Jews, nor the auto-da-fe of heretics. Super- 
 stition and fanaticism have all along beclouded 
 the truth of Christianity, and worldliness and 
 ambition have continually perverted its path- 
 way. But the question is not whether religion 
 sprang forth complete and purified in the be- 
 ginning, not whether it has made no mistakes, 
 and cherished no errors, and enforced no wrongs, 
 but whether it has persisted with the vigor of 
 an original force, until it has become more 
 and more a power for good in the life of men. 
 Neither art nor science can stand the test 
 sought to be applied to the disparagement of 
 religion. Astrology and alchemy once stood 
 in the place now held by astronomy and chem- 
 istry. These were erratic movements in the 
 course of scientific progress, which do not, how- 
 ever, throw doubt on the validity of science. 
 
io8 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 Something was gained even by their fanciful 
 investigations for the science which emerged 
 from their bewilderments and discarded them. 
 Esthetics form still a valid department of man's 
 culture, for taste is a persistent element of hu- 
 man nature which cannot be extirpated, though 
 its final decisions contradict and bar out the 
 earlier dicta of its utterance. Angelo and 
 Tintoret, Beethoven and Wagner, are still 
 valid interpreters of beauty to sight and sound, 
 though plastic art has developed from the war- 
 paint of the Indian to the glow of Claude and 
 Titian, and the tom-tom of the savage may 
 have been the remote progenitor of the unfin- 
 ished Symphony of Schumann. In fine, any 
 valid endowment of human nature vindicates 
 its permanent vitality by its power of survival 
 over error, and by its growth through imper- 
 fection to perfect form. It is a strong and 
 striking tribute to the presence of an eternal 
 force within the Church that it contains this 
 power of reformation and recuperation. Ref- 
 ormation is not something to be excused and 
 apologized for, as though it were a blot, though 
 a necessary blot, upon the fair fame of the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 109 
 
 Church; is not to be regarded as an unlovely 
 scar, a disfigurement of the sacred body, which 
 it behooves us to hide as much as possible; a 
 witness to wounds more than to healing power. 
 No, just that act of recuperation from dire dis- 
 ease, which we call in the Church the Reforma- 
 tion, is the sacred witness to the power of divine 
 life within it. Christ said, — I quote the pun- 
 gent phrase, — " Christ said the Church should 
 not die, but he did not say it should never be 
 sick." And to come through enfeebling sick- 
 ness to jocund health vindicates the inherent 
 vitality of the frame. One might as well be 
 apologetic for his renewed vigor after his recov- 
 ery from the typhoid fever, which has purged 
 his system of many noxious germs, as to be 
 ashamed and to speak in bated breath, as of 
 some family scandal, of that manifestation of 
 germinant divine power in the Church which 
 we call the Reformation. It is rather a strono: 
 proof of the permanence of the Church that it can 
 "be transformed by the renewing of its mind." 
 But, once more, men say, that for all its 
 early origin and persistent hold, for all the 
 purifying power it shows in what we call the 
 
no THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 permanent relations of man's life, religion yet 
 differs fatally from art and science in that its 
 fundamental postulate is not knowledge, but 
 faith, not conviction which comes of known 
 fact, but assumption which arises from felt 
 necessity. Its evidence is from the realm of 
 the unseen, its substance is not of possession 
 but of hope. 
 
 What then shall we say about the solid 
 globe.-* Modern science reduces it to force, 
 and the conflict or co-operation of forces. It 
 too is the visible effect of an unseen power 
 which we assume from a felt necessity, that is, 
 if any coherence is to be found in nature, and 
 any coherent reading of it, which we call sci- 
 ence. To read it at all, man must assume 
 things which he cannot prove, assume them 
 from the felt necessity of the case; as, namely, 
 the permanence of natural law, the faithful 
 report of the senses to the brain, and the integ- 
 rity and reliability of the action of our intel- 
 lectual powers. These are the assumptions of 
 science, in the realm of the unseen ; not irra- 
 tional but beyond the region of proof. They are 
 an illustration of what the great Laureate said, 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE iii 
 
 " All that is worth proving is beyond the power 
 of proof." Religion does nothing more. It 
 only acts in a different department of our be- 
 ing, in that which allies us with the unseen 
 and eternal rather than with the visible and 
 temporal. Man's spiritual nature is irrepres- 
 sible, it is originant, persistent, expansive, 
 manifest in its effects, and these of the highest 
 worth. And it cannot be irrational to rest 
 confident in the postulates it involves, of God, 
 of man's spiritual nature, of ethical relation, 
 of religious aspiration, seeing these are the 
 inherent necessities for the explication of its 
 phenomena which prove their validity by their 
 worth. The one irrational conclusion would 
 be to affirm that our consciousness is true in 
 its deliverances concerning nature, and false in 
 its deliverances concerning morals. If we dis- 
 trust it as it speaks in conscience, we must 
 distrust it as it speaks in reason. To sweep 
 away as invalid the postulates of religion is 
 to declare untrustworthy the postulates of sci- 
 ence; is to bring in universal scepticism. 
 
 We hold then that religion, as taught and 
 assumed in the Prayer Book, is a permanent 
 possession of mankind, and that the religious 
 
 at" 
 
112 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 life which it advocates is a life of unclouded 
 rationality, of progressive power, of illimitable 
 hope; it is secure, it is inalienable. It has the 
 promise of the life which now is and of that 
 which is to come. Its energies are called out 
 in steadfast and enthusiastic action, for they 
 are co-operative with God's purpose. Its aspi- 
 ration after things honest, true, lovely, and of 
 good report (in every realm of God's creation) 
 is hopeful and courageous, for it is the fulfil- 
 ment of God's plan. It is assured as it looks 
 back, or around, or before, or above, for its 
 call is to "the confidence of a certain faith," 
 and to "the comfort of a reasonable, religious, 
 and holy hope." It is not a negative denial of 
 life's fulness, but a positive assertion of man's 
 divine capacity to grow ever more and more 
 both in the knowledge and manifestation of 
 the truth. It is not hesitant, or apologetic, 
 and cannot be ashamed. Its voice is a veri- 
 table Siirsiivi Corda, whether it call to duty, 
 to conflict, or to achievement, and the soul's 
 true answer is, " I will lift up mine eyes unto 
 the hills, from whence cometh my strength. 
 My help cometh from the Lord, which made 
 heaven and earth." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE ii3 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS TAUGHT BY THE 
 SACRAMENT OF BAPTISM 
 
 \ T TE are now to look at the normal Chris- 
 ^ • tian life as taught by the sacraments, 
 as they are ministered according to the Book 
 of Common Prayer. About these sacraments 
 the storm of controversy has raged, so that in 
 entering their atmosphere it is difficult not to 
 be engulfed in it. But on any theory the sacra- 
 ments themselves witness to all men two great 
 conceptions of life, viz. life begotten of God and 
 life nourished by God. They bear their tes- 
 timony to the vital connection of God's spirit 
 and man's spirit. They indicate by their strik- 
 ing symbolism that the truly natural life is 
 what we call the supernatural life, by which is 
 meant that man's true nature joins him on to 
 God, that the life which is of God must be 
 man's life, or he falls short of the ideal of his 
 
 8 
 
114 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 life. In this normal Christian life, or the re- 
 ligious life in conformity to its law, Baptism 
 stands for the initiation, and the Holy Com- 
 munion for the perpetuation and development. 
 What light they throw upon the normal Chris- 
 tian life, as they are conditioned and minis- 
 tered by the ritual of the Prayer Book, we 
 proceed now to inquire. 
 
 We look first at Baptism. And the first point 
 which strikes us in relation to Baptism is its 
 universality of intention. It is meant for all, 
 men, women, and children ; nor is it in the 
 Prayer Book restricted to any special class of 
 these. It is not limited to children of commu- 
 nicants. The special sin of neglect by father or 
 mother does not furnish an impediment. Ille- 
 gitimacy of nature does not banish from the 
 legitimacy of the Kingdom. Baptism in its 
 primal attitude stands for the universal grace of 
 God; it declares a Divine Fatherhood which is 
 not willing that any should perish. It proclaims 
 that, as the redemption through Christ is for all, 
 so his Kingdom, in which his life maybe most 
 completely and normally lived, is for all. By 
 this symbolical witness and seal to the largeness 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 115 
 
 of God's mercy and forgiveness, Baptism makes 
 known that, in gaining this life from above, 
 it is not man who first seeks God, but God 
 who first seeks man. It teaches that man's 
 attitude in regard to God's grace is not to 
 create it or compel it, or to deserve it, to win 
 it by penance or to wring its reluctant com- 
 pliance by agony of argument and the soul's 
 distress, but that his true attitude is simple 
 acceptance of it. In redemption he grasps a 
 hand already held out. The grace and help 
 from above are the priiLS in man's spiritual 
 life. " We love him because he first loved 
 us." And this love which wrought the re- 
 demption in Jesus Christ is not repelled by 
 any hereditary taint which we call original 
 sin, — so called because it makes sin origi- 
 nant in each human soul engendered of Adam. 
 Whatever according to the 9th Article that sin- 
 ful trend may deserve. Baptism declares that 
 it gets grace. And as Baptism in the case of 
 infants precedes actual trangression, the appli- 
 cation of this sacrament to them teaches that 
 God's grace goes before (prevents) them as 
 well as follows them, anticipates their desire 
 
1x6 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 as well as responds to it, is meant to preserve 
 from transgression as well as to remit it; in 
 fine, claims all children as God's children from 
 the start. Thus the root of the normal religious 
 life, as construed by Baptism, is consciousness 
 of life as a vocation of God. It is a recogni- 
 tion of his voice calling to our earliest days, 
 "Come up higher." It stands for the spirit 
 of adoption by which we cry, Abba, Father. 
 Hence it is evident that children are brought 
 to Baptism not in the first instance to make 
 God gracious to them, but because he is gra- 
 cious to them. The Scripture from St. Mark's 
 Gospel read in this service is a kind of apologia 
 pro gratia sua; a vindication of this service of 
 grace by reason of God's disposition of grace; 
 a recognition of the truth that "of such is the 
 Kingdom of Heaven," by initiating them into 
 that Kingdom. The exhortation following 
 this Scripture points out: "Ye perceive how 
 by his outward gesture and deed he declared his 
 good will towards them," — and declares further 
 that we perform this act of Baptism because 
 we are thus "persuaded of the good will of our 
 Heavenly Father towards this infant. " There 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 117 
 
 could not be a stronger attestation of what men 
 call the prevenieht grace of God than the Bap- 
 tismal Service of the Book of Common Prayer. 
 And this means that Christian ordinances do 
 not create the grace they signify, but simply 
 witness to it and apply it. They too are the 
 outcome of the prevenient grace which estab- 
 lishes them as its witnesses and agents. They 
 are called in ecclesiastical language seals, be- 
 cause they make valid, by a divinely ordered 
 act, a general fact in a particular case. So 
 that, whatever Baptism effects, it does not cre- 
 ate the gracious disposition of God towards 
 the recipient of it. It is the result of that 
 disposition, not its cause. A great deal of stir 
 was once made in New York by the assertion 
 of a non-episcopal divine that the Baptismal 
 Service of the Episcopal Church taught or im- 
 plied the damnation of unbaptized infants. One 
 should rather say that it implied the impossi- 
 bility of the damnation of any infant. For it 
 certifies God's gracious disposition to all man- 
 kind; he who redeemed all, calling each one 
 into his Kingdom. Love is the root of Baptism, 
 not wrath. And if God be for them, who can 
 
Ii8 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 be against them? An earthly parent's neglect 
 will certainly not abrogate a Heavenly Fa- 
 ther's disposition, and we may leave all these 
 morally immature souls securely in the arms of 
 Him who declared, long years before a single 
 child was baptized, "Of such is the King- 
 dom of Heaven." 
 
 Lest the very strong and repeated expres- 
 sions in the Holy Scripture concerning the 
 universal obligation of Baptism, and its neces- 
 sity for entrance into the Kingdom of God, 
 misfht seem to militate ag^ainst this charitable 
 view concerning unbaptized infants, involved 
 in the Prayer Book service, it may here be well 
 to remind ourselves that such Scriptural ex- 
 pressions apply to the Baptism of the conscious 
 and converted subjects of it. Our own service 
 for the Baptism of adults, after quoting our 
 Lord's words to Nicodemus, proceeds with this 
 exhortation: "Whereby ye may perceive the 
 great necessity of this sacrament when it may 
 be had." We are to recognize in this declara- 
 tion of Christ to the ruler who came under the 
 concealment of the darkness to confer with him, 
 as well as in the exhortation of St. Peter to 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE up 
 
 the converted on the day of Pentecost, and in 
 other strong expressions of the New Testament, 
 concerning the "answer of a good conscience 
 towards God" in Baptism, allusion to the duty 
 of the confession of Christ and enrolment under 
 his leadership, as well as of belief in him and 
 subjective trust to him. The birth "of water 
 and of the spirit " corresponds to the affirmation 
 of St. Paul, " With the heart man believeth unto 
 righteousness, and with the mouth confession 
 is made unto salvation." Thus the Scriptural 
 expressions concerning Baptism involve the 
 subjective as well as the objective element 
 in it; i. e. the disposition of the recipient as 
 well as the force of the act. For Baptism as 
 generally treated in the New Testament re- 
 lates to adult converts and is regarded as their 
 admission into the Christian Church on the 
 confession and acceptance of the faith of the 
 Church. It is the divinely appointed mode 
 of that confession. Therefore the Scriptural 
 assertions concerning the receiving of Baptism 
 involve the aspect of it as a confession, as the 
 expression of a moral disposition and deter- 
 mination on the part of the baptized. The 
 
I20 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 strong utterances of our Lord on the necessity 
 of the open confession of his name, which run 
 through all his teachings, enter as an element 
 into his and his disciples' utterances on the 
 necessity of Baptism. The members of the 
 Kingdom must be born of the spirit inwardly, 
 and of water, involving the confession of 
 Christ, outwardly. They must be joined to the 
 Master and to the Brotherhood. The indica- 
 tion of this confessional element of Baptism is 
 found in the Baptismal Service for Infants in 
 the Prayer Book in the answers of the sponsors, 
 which promise for the child the fulfilment of 
 that confession and the promise of obedience 
 to God's holy will and commandments. 
 
 But the Baptism of infants in the Prayer 
 Book speaks of it as a new birth before faith 
 and confession are possible. Yes, that is its 
 great privilege, and in order to gather its 
 meaning we are to remember what birth is. 
 It is not the beginning of life. Nothing is 
 born which is not already living. Birth is that 
 critical change in the history of a living being 
 which ushers it into the sphere where alone 
 its life can meet the conditions and influences 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 121 
 
 essential to the full development of its latent 
 powers. The Council of Ephesus, in giving the 
 Blessed Virgin the much misunderstood, often 
 mistranslated, and generally abused title of 
 theotokos {Q£ot6ko<^), meant to affirm the real- 
 ity of the incarnation in the pre-natal as well 
 as in the post-natal life of Jesus Christ. It was 
 meant to assert that the Divine Word was 
 incarnate before Jesus was born into his 
 Kingdom, the world. And in analogy to 
 this, Baptism, as new birth or regeneration, 
 stands for the placing in its proper spiritual 
 environment of the being already redeemed to 
 God in Christ Jesus. It does not involve (as 
 the declaration of the House of Bishops in 1871 
 pointed out) a change of moral character in 
 souls as yet incapable of moral action, but it 
 involves the engrafting of the already redeemed 
 life into the body of Christ, his Church, to 
 which the promise of his presence and of his 
 guidance by his spirit is given; all which is 
 fitted to educe normal moral character from 
 the child's first conscious breath. Thus the 
 ideal of the Christian Life according to the 
 Baptismal Service of the Prayer Book is nur- 
 
122 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 ture, not conversion. When that ideal is not 
 attained, conversion comes in of course, and 
 of necessity. But the normal expectation is 
 avoidance of its necessity, at least in that criti- 
 cal experience of it which reverses the whole 
 trend and tone of the moral life, which has 
 become immoral in its root. Children are not 
 to be converted and become as men, but men 
 are to be converted to become as little children. 
 Before, however, treating of that nurture, it 
 may be well to remark that Baptism by intro- 
 ducing the redeemed soul into the family of 
 God as its proper spiritual environment (con- 
 stituting it a very member incorporate in the 
 mystical body of God's Son, which is the 
 blessed company of all faithful people) rejects 
 that individualistic conception of Christian 
 Life which makes religion merely personal, or 
 exclusively individual. To assert that religion 
 is simply a matter between God and the soul, is 
 to the conception of the Common Prayer a par- 
 tial truth. Religion is essentially a matter 
 between God and the soul, but it is not only 
 that. It involves relationship with other souls 
 equally the recipients of God's grace; and it 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 123 
 
 finds in that association and relationship, and 
 in the ordinances which express it and bind 
 it together, a most fruitful means of develop- 
 ing the individual Christian life. Baptism 
 makes the normal Christian life to begin in 
 a sense of companionship and relationship. 
 As the infant comes to consciousness, it is, if 
 he be rightly instructed as to his baptismal 
 privilege, to the consciousness of membership 
 in a sacred community, as being called unto 
 and adopted into God's family of which Christ 
 is the head. By the divine intention and pro- 
 vision and gracious gift, he is "a child of God, 
 a member of Christ, and an inheritor of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven." His part and duty is 
 therefore response, the response of his own con- 
 sent; and that response is fostered, stimulated, 
 and in large part secured, through the medi- 
 ating ministry of the church of which he finds 
 himself a member, its instructions, its prayers, 
 its sacraments made alive by the Holy Spirit and 
 of God. His spiritual life is thus not wholly 
 introspective, but is, so to speak, circumspec- 
 tive. It involves the sense of brotherhood and, 
 as one of that brotherhood, of loyalty to Christ, 
 
1 24 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 just as inevitably as citizenship in the State 
 involves the recognition of fellow citizens and 
 the sharing of a common patriotism binding 
 all to one country. Christian nurture, there- 
 fore, which infant Baptism involves, is not 
 based solely on the idea of an isolated indi- 
 vidual experience, but on the conception of 
 participation in a family life. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 125 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE LESSON OF CONFIRMATION FOR THE 
 CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 TN the order of the Church's discipine be- 
 -■- tween the two sacraments, Baptism and 
 the Lord's Supper, the Rite of Confirmation 
 comes in. None of the Church's children, for 
 whose nurture she is responsible, are to be 
 admitted to the Holy Communion "until such 
 time as they be confirmed or are ready and de- 
 sirous to be confirmed," and the minister is 
 "earnestly to move the Persons confirmed to 
 come without delay to the Lord's Supper." 
 
 The light which Confirmation thus throws 
 upon the Christian life is significant. It is, 
 in itself, the ofiBcial recognition and culmina- 
 tion of that Christian nurture which the spon- 
 sors in Baptism are pledged to secure to the 
 baptized child. It emphasizes the subjective 
 or confessional side of Baptism, while it is 
 significant in the method of its administration 
 
126 THE PRAYER BOOK AxVD 
 
 of the great truth to which Baptism bears wit- 
 ness, that salvation comes not primarily of 
 one's native resolution nor of the Christian 
 knowledge and instruction one may have re- 
 ceived, but of God's favor and goodness in 
 the bestowal of the grace of his Holy Spirit. 
 For Confirmation is "ministered," and that by 
 the Chief Pastor of the flock, to "signify by 
 the laying on of his hands, after the example 
 of the holy Apostle, God's favor and gracious 
 goodness towards them." But the essential 
 preliminary of this Episcopal act is that " with 
 their own mouth and consent openly before the 
 church they ratify and confirm" what was prom- 
 ised for them in Baptism. That is, the bap- 
 tized are both to confirm and to be confirmed. 
 They are not to be confirmed until they con- 
 firm, until they, "having come to the years of 
 discretion," have been thoroughly instructed in 
 the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Com- 
 mandments, and in the Catechism's exposition 
 of the same, that they may be able intelli- 
 gently to "ratify and confirm" the promises 
 made for them in baptism, and "promise that 
 by the grace of God they will evermore en- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 127 
 
 deavor themselves faithfully to observe such 
 things as they, by their own confession, have 
 assented unto." 
 
 Confirmation therefore, as the act of the con- 
 firmed, bears witness that there must be sub- 
 jective assent and response to the objective 
 grace of God, witnessed to and sealed in Bap- 
 tism, in order that that grace may prove effect- 
 ual. And, as the church's act by the Bishop, 
 it also bears witness that Confirmation is not 
 only an assumption of responsibility on man's 
 part, but that it is also an assurance of grace 
 on God's part, who promises, as the laying 
 on of the hands of the Bishop signifies, to 
 "strengthen them with the Holy Ghost." 
 Confirmation thus witnesses to both the duty 
 and the privilege of the Christian life. It 
 teaches that no effort of man to meet his re- 
 sponsibility but meets the responsive grace of 
 God to enable him to accomplish it. While 
 it marks the Christian life as sober, it makes 
 it anything but sombre. It emphasizes its 
 dignity as an intelligent service of God, which 
 it characterizes as our bounden duty. It in- 
 tensifies as well its exaltation and joy, in its 
 
128 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 recognition that God ''worketh in us both to 
 will and to do of his good pleasure," which 
 constitutes its unspeakable privilege. 
 
 As so much in Confirmation and the Chris- 
 tian life depends upon Christian nurture, in 
 order to understand the Prayer Book's con- 
 ception of that life we must scrutinize the sub- 
 stance of the nurture unfolded in its pages. 
 Now if we look not only at the responses and 
 pledges of the sponsors in Baptism as indicat- 
 ing the demand and expectation of the Church 
 in regard to the child which it receives, but also 
 at the general tone of the services which it 
 provides for its nutriment of worship, it be- 
 comes evident that emphasis is laid in the Com- 
 mon Prayer chiefly on "life as a blending of 
 piety and morals " ; piety, or the love of God, 
 being the inspiring motive, and morality, or 
 obedience to his will, being its indispensable 
 manifestation. In the Catechism the Apostles' 
 Creed (in its exhibition of God the Father, who 
 made me, of God the Son, who redeemed me, 
 of God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth me) is 
 given as the inspiration of a life for God and in 
 God. And God's holy will and commandments 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 129 
 
 furnish the rule by which that inspiration is 
 to guide the life. The stress is laid, not on 
 emotion, but on the fulfilment of life's duties. 
 The faith enjoined is not exhausted in 7iotitia, 
 perception of the truth, or assensus, acquies- 
 cence in the truth, but only in fiditcia, trust 
 to the truth. A "faith which works by love" 
 is its command and demand. 
 
 In the Collects of the daily services the bap- 
 tized is taught to pray that he may " so hear 
 God's word," not only that he may understand 
 it, but "that it may bring forth in him the 
 fruit of good living"; that he may so receive 
 God's guidance that "all his works may be 
 begun, continued, and ended in him," that he 
 may be so purified that he "may love the 
 things which God commandeth" ; that he may 
 be so enlightened that he "may perceive and 
 know what things he ought to do, and have 
 grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same." 
 "A life of love fulfilling the law," that is 
 the undertone of the whole Book of Common 
 Prayer. It is not a life of ecstasy, nor simply 
 of orthodox acceptance of a creed, but a life of 
 obedience, and its end is character; the Di- 
 
 9 
 
130 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 vine will interpenetrating and incorporating 
 itself in the human will. One is to so "thank- 
 fully receive Christ's inestimable benefit of re- 
 demption as to daily endeavor himself to fol- 
 low the blessed steps of his most holy life." 
 That is the end and aim of the Christian nurture 
 of the Prayer Book. As Dr. McConnell, in his 
 stimulating History of the Episcopal Church, 
 has well said: "Its purpose is to produce 
 and conserve goodness. Its dominant tone is 
 ethical rather than intellectual or emotional. 
 It has often been taunted with ' lack of vital 
 piety,' with worldliness, with cold morality. 
 Dogmatists and emotionalists from within have 
 attempted to transform her genius, but have 
 not succeeded. The abiding instinct has kept 
 her steadfast to her conception of the church 
 as an Institute of Righteousness. This has 
 determined her position towards doctrine, dis- 
 cipline, and worship, and fixed her conditions 
 of membership and intercommunion. Her 
 great test of the truth and value of doctrine is 
 its immediate effect upon living. . . . Her lit- 
 urgy is valued and insisted upon, not chiefly for 
 its beauty or antiquity, or its fitness to express 
 
THE CHRIST/ AN- TJFE 131 
 
 exalted emotions, but because of its discipli- 
 nary power to uphold the soul in right living. 
 . . . The only condition on which she will 
 turn the key of the Kingdom of Heaven to 
 bind or loose is an ethical condition. She 
 bids to the Holy Sacrament all those who 'do 
 truly and earnestly repent them of their sins, 
 and are in love and charity with their neigh- 
 bors, and intend to lead a new life walking in 
 the commandments of God. ' " 
 
 While then the Christian life (according 
 to the Prayer Book) is normally and pri- 
 marily a life of righteousness, of character 
 imbued with the spirit and mind of Christ, 
 the services to which the baptized is intro- 
 duced emancipate his conception of religion 
 from the limitations of an isolated individual- 
 ism, i. e. from regarding it simply as a personal 
 concern. It comes to him in the form of a 
 communal life. As a type of such service we 
 need look only at the Litany, whose compre- 
 hensiveness of thought is unmatched save by 
 the beauty of its diction. Its deprecations 
 are very searching indeed regarding individual 
 character and personal responsibility both tem- 
 
132 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 poral and eternal. Evil, mischief, sin, blind- 
 ness of heart, pride, vainglory, hypocrisy, 
 envy, hatred, malice, all uncharitableness, in- 
 ordinate affections, deceits of world, flesh, and 
 devil, hardness of heart, contempt of God's 
 word and commandment, — from all these per- 
 sonal perversions of character, the reiterated 
 response goes up, "Good Lord deliver us!" 
 deliver us amid all life's joys and tribulations, 
 in death's dark hour, and in the judgment day. 
 But in the supplications we pass into a not less 
 sacred, yet into a wider realm. The whole 
 church emerges as the object of our care; the 
 State with its rulers and magistrates, all the 
 representatives of Christ's ministry, and all 
 looking forward to that ministry, that they may 
 be laborers and not drones; all people, all na- 
 tions, a universal peace on sea and land, all 
 the erring, all the deceived, the strong, the 
 weak, the fallen, travellers on land and sea, 
 the sick, the young, the imprisoned, orphans 
 and widows, and the desolate and oppressed, 
 and many more; all enter within the scope of 
 supplication, and all thus become the objects 
 of solicitous regard and aid. The horizon of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN' LIFE 
 
 ^ZZ 
 
 religion is made coextensive with the horizon 
 of life; and all life of the state and of society, 
 as of the church, is regarded as a service of 
 God. It is to be fashioned into a department 
 of his kingdom, by infilling it with the Chris- 
 tian temper and the religious character. As 
 soon then as one finds his true life he is led 
 out beyond it, loses it, as it were, to find it 
 multiplied and enlarged in other lives which it 
 is to stimulate, and to which it is to minister. 
 The whole tone of the Litany, as of the other 
 offices of devotion in which the child is led in 
 worship, is altruistic; altruistic not in that 
 bald and excessive sense which stigmatizes the 
 saving of one's own soul as selfish, and pro- 
 claims devotion to the souls of others the only 
 true Christian devotion; but in the sense that 
 the value of one's own soul (which according 
 to the Master outweighs and outmeasures the 
 whole terrestrial creation) is made the standard 
 of the value of other souls, which are to be 
 loved and treasured as one's own. To seek to 
 save one's own soul is the least selfish of acts, 
 if one catches the meaning of what its salva- 
 tion is. That is surrender of the soul to God. 
 
134 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 It is the saying, I will not live by myself, or for 
 myself. I will live to him who loved me and 
 gave himself for me. Such care is a first duty, 
 and a transcendent duty. It is the only worthy 
 return to God who gave the life to give it back 
 to him to fashion and direct. But in its sur- 
 render to its Father is involved the surrender 
 to the brotherhood as well. Living to him 
 who loved me and gave himself for me, is to 
 live also to these whom he loved, and for whom 
 he gave and gives himself too. This is the 
 true Gospel altruism, to love one's neighbor as 
 one's self. There is a true self-consideration. 
 It is one which does not end in self-considera- 
 tion, but will consider all souls as members of 
 one body. 
 
 The Christian life then which is regarded, 
 as Baptism regards it, as a vocation of God, is 
 one suffused with human sympathy and inter- 
 penetrated with mutual helpfulness. It will 
 have none of that impassive cynicism which, 
 declaring the laws of society inexorable, leaves 
 those laws to work out their result unalleviated 
 by human kindness, and declares that the re- 
 sult, exact and unerring though pitiless, is 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 135 
 
 the only true benevolence, because the only- 
 benevolence of law. But religion recognizes a 
 higher social law than the clashing and clang- 
 ing of an impersonal social machinery. Per- 
 sonal character and destiny can never, according 
 to the Christian faith, be wrought out by im- 
 personal forces. Its moving power is not me- 
 chanic but dynamic. Spiritual influences alone 
 are competent to evolve spiritual character. 
 The building up of man, not as the supreme 
 animal, but as a moral being whose self-deter- 
 mination constitutes him a spiritual character, 
 must involve spiritual appeal to that self-deter- 
 mination. And that spiritual appeal is not 
 only to the law of conscience, though it is that 
 primarily, but is also the appeal of sympathy 
 which is the law of life; the appeal of sympa- 
 thy through helpfulness and sacrifice. There 
 is a struggle for existence and a survival of the 
 fittest in the moral as in the physical world, 
 but that struggle is in its own atmosphere and 
 on its own plane. The realm of this moral 
 struggle is one where personal interest and 
 heartfelt sympathy, and the helpfulness of the 
 hands which manifest and impart them, are 
 
136 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 strong factors in the achievement. A politi- 
 cal economy which leaves these out and re- 
 gards them as mischievous intermeddling with 
 a natural order which they disturb, but cannot 
 destroy, is one which fails to recognize the 
 spiritual side of life, which is its determining 
 side. It is a Gradgrind theory which impris- 
 ons man within the bars of a terrestrial cage, 
 instead of stimulating his flight in the atmos- 
 phere of spiritual realities. But life as a voca- 
 tion of God, as Baptism declares it to be, is 
 life in the realm of spiritual realities. 
 
 The spiritual altruism of the Christian nur- 
 ture ministered in the Prayer Book has been 
 a strong stimulus to the great humanitarian 
 movement of modern times, which, though pass- 
 ing far beyond the ken of these ancient formu- 
 laries, is yet a legitimate development of them. 
 Their spirit of sympathy and helpfulness finds 
 not a new home, but only a larger habitation, in 
 these modern movements. These express in 
 wiser and ampler form the old regard of the 
 Litany for the imprisoned, the desolate, and 
 the oppressed. Prison reform, tenement house 
 reform, sanitation, societies for preventing 
 
rilE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 ^Z1 
 
 cruelty to children and animals, homes for the 
 rescue of the unfortunate, hospitals, reforma- 
 tories, the thousand and one methods of bring- 
 ing large relief to human misfortune in modern 
 days, are simply enlarged and riper illustrations 
 of the spirit which of old time offered in the 
 Litany its petitions for the evils they mitigate. 
 Of course, there are great abuses possible on 
 this helpful side of life. Alms may impover- 
 ish as v/ell as help. Feeling is not always 
 judicious, and there may be a false charity, 
 which is like a spendthrift who is lavish in 
 generosity, while he fails to pay his debts. 
 But a mythical Micawber does not discredit a 
 real Shaftesbury, and the Borrioboola Gha of 
 the satirist does not lessen the power of the 
 lives of Martyn and Hannington and Pattison 
 in the actual course of the world. If the lar- 
 gess of others always pauperized, we must be 
 all of us living in the poorhouse. For what 
 have we that we have not received.? The Fa- 
 thers labored, and we are entered into their 
 labors. No graduate of a college pays half 
 the cost of his education. The benefactions 
 of founders and endowers put him lastingly 
 
138 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 in their debt. The glories of architecture and 
 literature and art are ours, as the free gift of 
 former generations. Generosity may sometimes 
 relax the muscles of exertion, but indifferent 
 avarice chills the life blood. Humanity can 
 never rise to its ideal and normal life save 
 as it recognizes life's divine vocation, and its 
 consequent ministries of sympathy and help- 
 fulness; and this is the teaching of the Book 
 of Common Prayer. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 139 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE lord's supper IN ITS BEARING ON 
 TPIE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 A LIFE SO noble in its inspiration, and 
 •^^^ so wide in its scope of gracious ministra- 
 tion, as we have seen Baptism and its corre- 
 lated nurture imply, must surely require a vast 
 increment of strength. Amid a world of temp- 
 tation and with the inherent trend to self-in- 
 dulgence, where self-gratification is easy and 
 duty often looms before us as the 
 
 " Stern daughter of the voice of God," 
 
 is there nothing in the church which stands 
 for divine strength, as well as for a divine 
 vocation? 
 
 We turn to consider this element of the nor- 
 mal Christian life as taught and embodied in 
 the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. For this 
 great sacrament stands, to every point of view 
 from which men look at it, for the divine nutri- 
 
140 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 ment of the Christian life. Its very outward 
 gesture and deed presuppose the impossibility 
 of retaining and developing spiritual strength 
 without heavenly food, as really as the impos- 
 sibility of maintaining natural life without 
 physical food. And that heavenly food it sets 
 forth as no less than the very life of the re- 
 deeming Master imparted unto us. This sac- 
 rament is the strongest possible witness to the 
 high and divine nature of man's spiritual life, 
 in that it declares both that man is capable of 
 sharing that life and that his life is abnormal 
 and stunted and unnatural (by the standard of 
 his true nature) if he do not share it. It in- 
 dicates the reasonableness, while it does not 
 detract from the grace, of that great redemp- 
 tion by the cross which it celebrates, in that, 
 while it sets forth its imperative necessity, it 
 reveals how splendidly worth saving that man- 
 hood is which is thus capable of receiving so 
 divine a guest, and which lives its only true 
 life in his blest companionship. For with- 
 out entering into the sphere of controversy 
 concerning the method and measure of this 
 sacrament, the simple contemplation of its 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 141 
 
 essential features shows the vivid relation in 
 which it brings man's spiritual life to the life 
 whose sacrifice of itself it celebrates. On its 
 divine side this service is rooted in the great 
 objective fact of Christ's sacrificial death for 
 man; on man's side, in that devout remem- 
 brance of it which is a participation in it: "Do 
 this in remembrance of me. Take, eat, drink 
 ye all of this." Thus the Master, and so the 
 Apostle: "As often as ye eat this bread and 
 drink this cup ye do show the Lord's death till 
 he come. 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 com- 
 munion of the body of Christ.? " 
 
 By rejecting the doctrine of Transubstantia- 
 tion, our church has removed the words of con- 
 secration from the realm of the literal and 
 physical to that of the spiritual and vital. In 
 affirming that transubstantiation is not only an 
 imperfect but a false doctrine, one not simply 
 obscuring, but overthrowing the nature of a 
 sacrament, it has followed our Lord's own com- 
 mentary on his words concerning eating his 
 flesh and drinking his blood. Great and essen- 
 
142 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 tial as is the truth conveyed by those asserting 
 words, our Lord declared they were to be taken 
 spiritually, not physically. 
 
 To his wondering and perplexed disciples, 
 startled by his strong declaration, '* Except ye 
 eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his 
 blood, ye have no life in you," he answered, 
 "Doth this offend you? ... It is the Spirit 
 that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: 
 the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit 
 and they are life. " This exposition of his words 
 by the Master himself gives the sense in which 
 the Communion Service of the Prayer Book re- 
 ceives and utters them. The Ritual uses freely 
 the Lord's language, but always in consonance 
 with his spiritual explanation of it. According 
 to this the words of Consecration embody and 
 declare the great spiritual truth, the basis of 
 all true Christian life, that Christ's followers 
 must live in him by his living in them. They 
 lift the sacrament and the soul which celebrates 
 it into the atmosphere and power of the Lord's 
 presence. They do not indeed imply or prom- 
 ise a physical manifestation or impartation of 
 him. His presence in the flesh he had himself 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 143 
 
 declared it was expedient should be removed, 
 that his presence by the Spirit might be the 
 more real and effectual in his followers. But 
 the word and action of the Sacrament both in- 
 dicate and guarantee that inward spiritual par- 
 ticipation in his life and nature which is the 
 essential source of spiritual life. " I in them 
 and they in me," the service is ever saying as 
 we receive the consecrated bread and wine, the 
 sacred symbols of his body and his blood: the 
 outward and visible sign lifting us into the re- 
 gion of the invisible and eternal reality. 
 
 The sacrament on man's part is "the memo- 
 rial which Christ hath commanded us to make." 
 This remembrance of him in his death and pas- 
 sion is the subjective condition of receiving 
 within us that life which he alone possesses 
 and can alone impart. That life, the life which 
 he laid down for us, he vouchsafes to give to 
 hearts made ready to receive him by obeying 
 his command, " Do this in remembrance of 
 me." To them he fulfils the gracious prom- 
 ise, " He that cometh to me shall never hunger, 
 and he that believeth on me shall never thirst." 
 To this act of obedient and grateful love he 
 
144 '^^^ ^^^ ^^^ BOOK AND 
 
 responds by the fulfilment of the wondrous 
 word, uttered in the hour of the institution of 
 this sacrament, " If any man love me he will 
 keep my word, and my Father will love him, 
 and we will come and make our abode with 
 him." 
 
 This rooted remembrance, which is the ele- 
 ment which man contributes to a real commun- 
 ion, is one of the deepest mysteries, while it is 
 one of the most assured realities of man's spir- 
 itual nature. The fact of memory is one which 
 attests the continuity of man's being, and shat- 
 ters the senseless theory that he is a mere 
 succession of sensations with no enduring per- 
 sonality in which they inhere. The power of 
 the recall of the past so as to make it the influ- 
 ence of the present, is the indubitable testi- 
 mony to the reality and the real continuity of 
 that past and present. Memory, thus testify- 
 ing to personality, becomes the purveyor of 
 spiritual forces and influences. It is the per- 
 sonality enriching its present life with the 
 treasures stored up by its past experiences, 
 making of these past experiences not dead 
 relics of a vanished life, but principalities and 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IIFE 
 
 145 
 
 powers of the life that now is and is to come. 
 To this great spiritual faculty of man, Christ 
 appeals when he would make his life and 
 sacrifice living realities of man's spiritual 
 experience. 
 
 This remembrance in the Sacrament of the 
 body and blood of Christ is, as set forth in the 
 communion service, threefold. It is first of 
 all individual, a remembrance in the mind of 
 the believer. He calls to remembrance what 
 Christ is to him through the gift of that life 
 and death for him. He communes with him 
 in his heart, and his presence is very real. But 
 not only individually and in the secret recesses 
 of his being is this remembrance held. It is 
 a remembrance in and with the community of 
 the faithful ; a common remembrance, there- 
 fore a remembrance which is a celebration, or 
 common participation in the remembrance; the 
 commemoration of the church which is the 
 blessed company of all faithful people. "We 
 do celebrate," as the phrase in the Oblation 
 asserts. As in the lower yet still sacred circle 
 of the family not only the individual child re- 
 members and hallows the mother's birthday, but 
 
 10 
 
146 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 all the children together celebrate it, and thus 
 add to the power of the personal remembrance 
 by the common family participation; as in the 
 divinely ordered state the patriot not only re- 
 calls the national anniversary, but celebrates it 
 with his fellow citizens, enhancing and deepen- 
 ing his individual allegiance by participation 
 in the common patriotism; so in this far more 
 sacred family, in this high and holy nation, 
 the great underlying fact of its redemption 
 comes in power through a common remem- 
 brance of it, of which this holy sacrament 
 is a celebration. And then the third element 
 of the remembrance enters. We not only 
 remember in our hearts, and remember with 
 others in the common celebration, but we 
 remember before God ; " we celebrate and make 
 here before thy Divine Majesty the memorial 
 thy Son hath commanded us to make." So the 
 word proceeds. The earthly service begun in 
 the silent chamber of the heart ends by usher- 
 ing us into the court of heaven. And we make 
 the memorial there, not indeed to remind the 
 Father of that eternal fact, deep down in his 
 own eternal being, of the " Lamb slain from 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 147 
 
 the foundation of the world," which is as 
 eternally present to his mind as it is eter- 
 nally present in his heart, but to declare our 
 remembrance of it as the ground of our ap- 
 proach and as the plea for our participation 
 in the grace here set forth. With the divinely 
 ordered sacramental symbols of that dying love, 
 we represent before the Father that all-suffi- 
 cient sacrifice whose merit we now plead in 
 act, as we plead it in word, in every prayer we 
 utter for Christ's sake, our hearts attuned to 
 the strain so nobly rendered by Canon Bright 
 in his communion hymn : 
 
 " And now, O Father, mindful of the love 
 Which bought us, once for all, on Calvary's tree, 
 And having with us him who pleads above, 
 We here present, we here set forth to thee 
 That only offering perfect in thine eyes, 
 That one true, pure, immortal sacrifice." 
 
 And thus the memorial of that one great and 
 sufficient sacrifice becomes on our part a spirit- 
 ual sacrifice, a sacrifice of praise and thanks- 
 giving for its love and benefit, of intercession 
 for its grace and merit, and of surrender in its 
 spirit and through its power of ourselves, " our 
 souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and 
 
148 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 living sacrifice" unto him, which is, though we 
 are unworthy to offer any sacrifice, our bounden 
 duty and service. 
 
 I have striven briefly to condense the essen- 
 tial elements of the service of the Holy Com- 
 munion into such statement as seems to me to 
 be the clear indication and meaning of our rit- 
 ual, in order to indicate more clearly the nor- 
 mal Christian life to which it bears witness. 
 The whole service is one common to priest 
 and people, not something done by one for the 
 other, but all remembering, all celebrating, all 
 communicating, and all offering the spiritual 
 sacrifices of love and praise and prayer and 
 consecration, though' one be officially set as 
 the priestly mouthpiece of the priestly people. 
 The appeal of this sacrament is to the life of 
 every one, and its assertion is positive of a life 
 of God in man to-day, through the faith which 
 is in Christ Jesus, who loved us and gave him- 
 self for us. For nothing testifies to the object 
 and the nature of the Christian's faith by which 
 he lives more than this service, which speaks 
 of Christ's real presence as the very food of 
 the soul. The faith which is the root of the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN IIFE 
 
 149 
 
 normal Christian life is not primarily a faith 
 in statement, but in fact. It does not rest 
 ultimately in dogma, or description, but in him 
 whom the dogma portrays in some element of 
 his being or function of his office. It is not 
 the believing about him, but the trusting in 
 him. The dogma, like the law, may be the 
 schoolmaster, but its office and use are to lead 
 to Christ. 
 
 Neither does faith, as set forth in the 
 Eucharist, rest in the Church, the body of 
 Christ, for it looks beyond the body to the 
 spirit of the Lord, which, if it do not share, it 
 is (as the Apostle says) none of his. As his 
 body and his bride the Church is very sacred, 
 and, as we have seen, ministers, as it was in- 
 tended to minister if rightly used, very poten- 
 tially to the life of the spirit. But it is not 
 the termiims ad qiiem of the Christian life. If 
 true to itself, it points beyond itself. Behold, 
 it cries not me, but "Behold the Lamb of 
 God, who taketh away the sin of the world." 
 Both dogma, the mind of the church, and ritual, 
 its discipline, are to the one great end, " Christ 
 formed within you." They are like the tele- 
 
I50 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 scope and spectroscope in relation to the heav- 
 enly bodies. They are not primarily to be 
 looked at, (though their correct construction 
 and accurate preservation are most important 
 factors in their use,) but they are chiefly to 
 be looked through. It is the heavenly vision 
 they disclose to which we are to be obedi- 
 ent. The great value and function of the 
 Church is not to monopolize attention, but 
 to bring the soul face to face with Him whose 
 Church it is. 
 
 The faith thus portrayed as essential by the 
 sacrament of the Lord's Supper is a living 
 faith in a living Lord. The life to which it 
 points is a life which "stands fast in the lib- 
 erty wherewith Christ hath made us free," a 
 life which because of that liberty finds a neces- 
 sity laid upon it, the necessity of grateful love, 
 to consecrate itself Christ's faithful soldier and 
 servant unto its life's end. 
 
 Is not this, it may be asked, an ideal of life 
 overwrought, overstrained, of necessity remote 
 from life's rough tasks and common companion- 
 ships; a life unlike that which is indicated 
 in Baptism as a divine vocation to contend 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 151 
 
 with the sins and cruelties, neglects and injus- 
 tices, of the world; the life of encounter, for 
 guidance and safe conduct in which we pray 
 in the Litany and all the Prayer Book services? 
 But the answer is, "a life remote only in its 
 source." And the very source from which 
 the life springs points not to seclusion and 
 quiet ecstasy, but to vigorous and manly en- 
 deavor, to a life masterful in its conquests 
 as virile in its undertakings. " By thy Bap- 
 tism, Fasting, and Temptation. By thine 
 Agony and Bloody Sweat." The divine 
 strength manifest in these stern experiences 
 is the strength sought and found in Christ, 
 and sought and found for like conflict and 
 like victory. 
 
 And thus through its sacraments, as through 
 all its offices, the Prayer Book indicates the 
 nature of the normal Christian life. It is a life 
 of Divine vocation, of Divine companionship, of 
 manly development in virtue and knowledge, 
 of expanding strength and widening vision, of 
 rational confidence, of bold encounter, of ex- 
 pectant victory ; a life in Christ and with Christ 
 and for Christ, "till we all come in the unity 
 
152 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son 
 of God, unto a perfect man, . nto the measure of 
 the stature of the fulness of Christ, ... of 
 whom the whole family in heaven and earth is 
 named." 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 153 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 CLERGY AND LAITY — THE MINISTRY OF 
 INSTRUCTION 
 
 nr^HE Christian Life as conceived in the 
 -*" Prayer Book is not only one of Christian 
 association, involved in the general concep- 
 tion of it as membership in Christ's Church. 
 The Church is an organized society, and while 
 every member of the same has his vocation and 
 ministry of mutual helpfulness, there are those 
 especially set apart for the service of the 
 brotherhood in things pertaining to the reli- 
 gious life. In fine, there is an official dis- 
 tinction of the clergy and laity involving a 
 distinctive relation of the two. The peculiar 
 people are by reason of their vocation a royal 
 priesthood, but there is also an official priest- 
 hood representative of them, consecrated to act 
 in behalf of the priestly people towards God, 
 and to act for God in special forms of ministra- 
 
154 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 tion for the people. The mutual life of all 
 Christians must be orderly. Let all things be 
 done decently and in order is the Apostle's 
 command, and " order is the parent of orders. " 
 It is well known (and as this is not an ecclesias- 
 tical treatise it need only be mentioned with- 
 out being defended or enlarged upon) that the 
 Prayer Book in its Ordinal and in all its offices 
 assumes the existence of the threefold ministry 
 of bishops, priests, and deacons as valid from 
 the times of the Apostles. It emphasizes the 
 importance of the preservation of this order in 
 its historic integrity, so that "no man shall 
 be suffered in this Church to execute any of 
 said functions unless he . . . has had Episco- 
 pal consecration or ordination." 
 
 What we are to consider is the bearing of 
 this ministry upon the Christian life, and to 
 mark the conception of that life as evinced by 
 this discipline to which it is subjected in order 
 to its successful development. 
 
 The conception of the Christian Life of the 
 Clergy is set forth in the Ordinal, which, con- 
 tains the offices of their consecration ; that of 
 the Christian people as related to the clergy is 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 155 
 
 indicated in the rubrical directions, which reg- 
 ulate the common worship of both. 
 
 As we study the Ordinal and the Rubrics, 
 the oneness of the religious life common to all 
 estates of men in Christ's Church comes at once 
 into prominence. The same faith, the same 
 diligence, the same consecration of the life to 
 the Master, the same following of the Saviour's 
 steps, are enjoined equally upon all men. The 
 sanctity of one is the sanctity of all. The 
 difference of office does not affect in the least 
 the essence of the Christian Life, it only 
 touches the outer form of some of its activities. 
 The clergy as portrayed in the Prayer Book 
 are not a caste, exempt from the demands to 
 which the laity must succumb, or deprived of 
 rights which the laity may claim. In all the 
 essential features of religious living clergy and 
 laity are called to the same task and endowed 
 with the same privileges. If we connote the 
 exhortations of the Baptismal and Ordination 
 services we find the same ideal of religious 
 character held up to all alike, "which is, to 
 follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and 
 to be made like unto him; continually mortify- 
 
156 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 ing all our evil and corrupt affections, and 
 daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of 
 living." This, which is from the Baptismal 
 office, is in complete unison with the ordina- 
 tion promise to "deny all ungodliness and 
 worldly lusts, and live soberly, righteously, and 
 godly in this present world," and indicates that 
 unity of spirit amid differences of ministration 
 which finds utterance in the prayer contained 
 in the office of the "Ordering of Priests," in 
 these words: "that as well by these thy minis- 
 ters, as by them over whom they shall be ap- 
 pointed thy ministers, thy Holy Name may be 
 forever glorified and thy blessed Kingdom 
 enlarged." 
 
 The vocation of the clergy then, as that of 
 the laity, is to what may be called a natural 
 spiritual life. They are to be of the people in 
 their mode of religious living; for the natural 
 relations of life are of divine institution, and 
 are not barriers to the Master's approach, but 
 means through which he enters into commun- 
 ion with the soul. Thus, in the questions of 
 the ordination examination it is taken for 
 granted that the clergy share and mingle in 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 157 
 
 the common life. "Will you be diligent to 
 frame and fashion your own selves d^x^ your fam- 
 ilies, according to the Doctrine of Christ?" 
 it is asked. Celibacy, or exclusion from ordi- 
 nary family ties, is not of the essence of the 
 clerical character. There may be times when 
 it is proper and expedient for a clergyman to 
 remain single, as is also true for the laity. 
 Such exigency is not exclusively clerical. 
 
 St. Paul evidently considered the exigencies 
 of his time as giving great weight to the value 
 of the single life. But the references to this 
 subject by the Apostle, and by his Master and 
 ours, are to a temporary expedient. There is 
 no superior sanctity in celibacy, so that the 
 clergy who are to be ensamples to the flock 
 must practise it. The clergy and the laity are 
 co-workers together for one and the same ob- 
 ject, and are not to be separate in their sym- 
 pathies or to be kept apart through diverse 
 disciplines. 
 
 What light then does the existence of clergy 
 and laity throw upon the nature of the reli- 
 gious life which they share in common } It 
 shows, first of all, the serious nature of that life 
 
158 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 in its deep need of guidance and discipline 
 and instruction for its adequate development. 
 Christian life is not a holiday pastime. Man 
 in religion is called to a high and strenuous 
 endeavor. That life is likened pre-eminently 
 in Scripture to a warfare, in relation to evil 
 within and without, to a race, in reference 
 to its arduous and necessary attainment, to a 
 taking of the yoke, which symbolizes obedient 
 service. A ministry divinely set to accom- 
 plish a discipline of instruction and worship 
 is a perpetual witness to the sober task of 
 religion; it inbreathes the earnest mind, and 
 divests its atmosphere of all trace of ease, 
 or carelessness, or indifference. It marks the 
 religious life as supreme both in the dignity of 
 its aim and in the strenuousness of its effort. 
 The ministry which is appointed for the ser- 
 vice of the body of believers emphasizes the 
 necessity of that service, and ennobles it as 
 worthy the enterprise of earnest minded men. 
 Yet it does not in witnessing to religion as 
 sober make it sombre. Its voice is a voice of 
 cheer as well as of exhortation. Its presence 
 testifies to its task, but to its hopefulness as 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 159 
 
 well. It is a witness to need, but also to re- 
 lief. While it depicts the Christian life as 
 one involving earnest and unremitting effort, it 
 discloses as well the reality of a divine inter- 
 est and aid to make that effort effectual. Why 
 is the ministry placed in the midst of Christ's 
 Church .-* "I am among you," said Christ of 
 himself, "as one that serveth. " His pres- 
 ence was itself a confession of human need, 
 but it was a revelation as well of divine rescue. 
 Such also is the testimony of his ministry. 
 The clergy are for necessary service, but are 
 appointed for hopeful service. Christ has set 
 them in the church. They are not the mere 
 evidence of a human want which created them, 
 and threw them up on the surface of its neces- 
 sity. They are the sign of the divine interest 
 which appointed them. " He gave some apos- 
 tles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some 
 pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the 
 Saints, for the work of the ministry, for the 
 edifying of the body of Christ." So the very 
 presence of the ministry testifies to Christ's 
 presence and care, and the Christian life thus 
 guarded may well be a life of aspiration, of 
 
i6o THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 enthusiasm, of joyful anticipation, because a 
 life which God has set himself so sedulously 
 to protect and develop. It makes life sacred to 
 find it so carefully tended, and brings the sense 
 of a divine companionship into it, as one which 
 Christ watches. Its immeasurable worth is 
 disclosed in the fact that God so ardently de- 
 sires to bring it to perfection. 
 
 This is the more impressed on us when we 
 come to note not only that the ministry is, but 
 what it is. How is it to aid the Divine life in 
 man .'* What light do its functions shed on the 
 Christian Life it fosters? 
 
 First take its element of instruction. The 
 ministry are especially appointed to be preach- 
 ers by the authority which established them. 
 "Preach my Gospel to every creature" accom- 
 panies the Apostles' commission to go into all 
 the world, and forms the first element of it. 
 St. Paul avers that " it pleased God by the 
 foolishness of preaching to save them that be- 
 lieve." What preaching means we gather 
 from the letters of the first great preachers, 
 which we call Epistles, and which let us into 
 the very life of the early Church. Preach- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE i6i 
 
 ing according to these ensamples is not merely 
 the recitation of gospel facts, but the applica- 
 tion of them in their principles to the daily life 
 and changing circumstances of men. The pul- 
 pit stands for applied Christianity. Its object 
 is not merely the statement of a mystery, but 
 a flooding of life with the light of the mystery. 
 It is not so much an explaining of life as suffus- 
 ing it with a sense of heavenly worth and glory 
 by reason of the mystery of godliness revealed 
 to it in the Gospel preached. It is showing ^. 
 
 how the least things of life may be done in the 
 spirit of the greatest, through the inspiration 
 from on high. Preaching, in fine, is bringing 
 Christ to bear on daily life. Amid all the 
 divineness of its heavenly vision, it is meant 
 to keep life steadfast and efficient as a work 
 among men and a work for men. And yet by 
 its unfolding of the sublime truths of the Gos- 
 pel it wards off all taint of dreariness and life- 
 less routine from duty, because of its stimulus 
 to an intelligent apprehension of the faith. 
 
 Preaching thus is meant to keep faith practi- 
 cal and to elevate practice into a living energy 
 of love. Its legitimate tendency is to discrimi- 
 
 II 
 
1 62 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 nate religion from superstition through the 
 intelligence with which it illumines it, and to 
 make life religious through the divine vision 
 and mandate with which it confronts it. It is 
 an amazing witness by its very function to life 
 as a walk with God, for it constantly proclaims 
 his law and presents his truth afresh in its 
 bearing on the duty of the hour. It may be- 
 come very dead and prosy by declining into 
 a mere repetitious statement of worn out argu- 
 ments and abstract dogmas. But it is meant 
 to be daily bread for daily living; not a disci- 
 pline of the schools, but a converse with those 
 by the wayside of life. It is fitted to impart 
 that ideal impulse to actual life which comes 
 only of the association of its common tasks, its 
 petty cares, its vexing perplexities, its blind- 
 ing sorrows, its successes and its joys, with a 
 life above and beyond itself, "a life hid with 
 Christ in God." Hence the value of a minis- 
 try whose members are partakers of the com- 
 mon life, as well as scholars in the truths of 
 God. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 163 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF CONSOLATION 
 
 "^T 7HILE preaching is a great function of 
 ' ^ the ministry, it is not its only func- 
 tion. There is the ministry of official as well 
 as of personal declaration, wherein the clergy- 
 man speaks, by reason of his office, the authori- 
 tative message of God to his people. This lies 
 in the ministration of the sacraments and the 
 declaration of absolution. As elsewhere we 
 have treated of the Christian Life as illus- 
 trated in the sacraments, let us here look at 
 the declaration of absolution, as taught in the 
 Prayer Book, in its elucidation of the Chris- 
 tian Life. 
 
 In what does one find the root principle of 
 the Christian Life.'^ Is it not in the fact of 
 forgiveness, or of God's coming to the soul in 
 reconciliation.-* If all God's revelation of him- 
 self in Christ were simply to show a divine 
 
1 64 
 
 THE PR A YER BOOK AND 
 
 excellence in human nature, it might awaken a 
 boundless admiration in human souls, but it 
 would prove anything rather than a ministry of 
 consolation to human life. For the fact of sin 
 is a root fact in human consciousness and ex- 
 perience. There lies in each soul, as it comes 
 to know itself, the sense of defect of goodness, 
 and the perception of that law in the members 
 which wars against the law of the mind, bring- 
 ing us into captivity to the law of sin. The 
 supreme want of human life is to reach God as 
 a sinner. We must come to him in reconcilia- 
 tion. There must be in the Divine Mind the 
 element of forgiveness if there is human help 
 there. The Christ who comes to impart life 
 must come to the world to save sinners, else he 
 does not reach us. The fundamental fact from 
 which all growth into godliness proceeds is 
 the fact that in Christ God is reconciling the 
 world unto himself; and that to each soul he 
 is saying, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." His 
 advent, to awaken in men immortal hope, must 
 be the tacit declaration : " No taint of heredi- 
 tary tendency to evil, repugnant to me as that 
 trend of nature is; no actual yielding to the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 165 
 
 law of sin, setting the human will against my 
 own, hateful as this wilful trangression is; 
 no mystery of iniquity in man, in fine, shall 
 suffice to quench the mystery of godliness in 
 Christ, who taketh away the sin of the world." 
 He comes in order to reveal the eternal heart 
 of God in which the Christ is as a " Lamb slain 
 from the foundation of the world." Believ- 
 ing in God, as seen in Christ, as one who in 
 the face of all sin, original and actual, seeks 
 to join man's soul to himself, who bids men 
 love him because he first loved them, the soul 
 gains power to lead a new life. The longing 
 for that new life rises, the strength to gain it 
 rises, the ideal of it rises. A sinful life may 
 become a life hid with Christ in God. All 
 the future Christian life is thus contained in 
 the seed of forgiveness. 
 
 In the ministry of reconciliation the declara- 
 tion of the fact of Divine forgiveness must be 
 made a fundamental feature. And the record 
 of the Gospel meets this necessity. Christ 
 after his resurrection gave command that 
 "repentance and remission of sins should be 
 preached in his name among all nations," and 
 
1 66 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 he declared to his disciples, as he breathed on 
 them, "whosesoever sins ye remit they are 
 remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye 
 retain they are retained." However we con- 
 strue these words, they set the fact and doctrine 
 of forgiveness in the very forefront of Christian 
 truth. 
 
 The Prayer Book meets this fundamental 
 want in its Declaration of Absolution contained 
 in the daily offices of morning and evening 
 prayer, and in the weekly office of the adminis- 
 tration of the Holy Communion. Its interpre- 
 tation of the words of the Risen Lord to his 
 disciples, "Whosesoever sins ye remit they are 
 remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye 
 retain they are retained," is found in its pro- 
 vision for carrying them into effect. Both the 
 rubric which directs the manner of its use and 
 the words themselves of the Declaration of Ab- 
 solution show the mind of the Anglican Com- 
 munion in regard to the function of the minis- 
 try in relation to the forgiveness of sins. The 
 Declaration follows the confession of sin and 
 the prayer for forgiveness. Then the priest 
 rises to give the assurance of God's attitude 
 
THE CHRISTIAN- LIFE 167 
 
 and disposition towards the repentant sinner, 
 and of Christ's commission to his ministers 
 authoritatively to declare that disposition. The 
 fact of forgiveness is not to remain doubtful to 
 any penitent soul. " He pardoneth and absolv- 
 eth all those who truly repent and unfeignedly 
 believe his Holy Gospel " ; the Gospel of for- 
 giveness. God's attitude and act are sure. 
 He for his part will most surely keep and 
 perform them. And in view of this Divine 
 certainty the sinful soul is bidden to ask for 
 the grace of true penitence by the Holy Spirit, 
 that its repentance may give free course to 
 the mercy of God, that it may be glorified in 
 man's deliverance according to the will of God. 
 To make this positive and authoritative dec- 
 laration is inherent in the ministerial com- 
 mission, and the fact that it is so is a strong 
 attestation to the individual soul of the gen- 
 eral fact of forgiveness contained in the Gospel. 
 Whosoever thus accepts the fact thus declared, 
 his sins are remitted, whosoever refuses, his 
 sins are retained; but sins are remitted by the 
 mercy of God only through man's own act of 
 acceptance, and they are retained in spite of 
 
1 68 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 God's mercy only by man's own act of re- 
 fusal. The ministerial function in the act of 
 forgiveness, is thus not the conveyance of for- 
 giveness but the authoritative attestation that 
 God forgives. The priest stands in his office 
 as the commissioned witness to that attitude 
 and disposition of God which welcomes peni- 
 tent sinners. 
 
 The fundamental want then of man in com- 
 ing to God in reconciliation is thus ministered 
 to by the declaration of absolution in a most 
 effective way. The essential element of the 
 Gospel of Christ, forgiveness, is taken up into 
 the worship of the Church and made prominent 
 and personal to men then and there. The fact 
 would be true, forever true, by Christ's word in 
 the Gospel, were it not made conspicuous in the 
 worship of the church. It is not true because 
 the minister declares it, but the minister de- 
 clares it because it is true, and he has power 
 and commandment to declare it because it is 
 a truth so essential to the Christian Life of 
 every soul. The precatory form of the declara- 
 tion of absolution in the communion service is 
 based on the fundamental position elucidated 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 169 
 
 in the declaration in the morning and evening 
 prayer. Its wording is not so strong as the 
 longer form, but it is essentially the same in 
 meaning. 
 
 The whole tone and act of the service of the 
 Prayer Book in this regard are most healthful. 
 The confession is not to or through the priest, 
 but with the priest to God, and the declaration 
 by the priest is for himself as well as for the 
 people. He as priest announces officially to 
 himself as sinful man the same great truth of 
 God on the same condition. His function is 
 not the conveyance of the fact, but the convey- 
 ance of the knowledge and assurance of the 
 fact, with and by the authority of the Great 
 Master, who sealed the fact of forgiveness in 
 his own blood. Thus the Christian Ministry 
 stands in its very office for the great fact, that 
 God in Christ is reconciling the world unto 
 himself. And in this as in his other min- 
 istrations the minister's function is to bring 
 men directly face to face with God, "unto 
 whom all hearts are open, all desires known." 
 Confession is directly to God, pardon is direct 
 from him. The priest stands as the authori- 
 
I70 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 tative witness to this direct relation of God to 
 man in the authoritative declaration which he 
 makes of it. Auricular confession, which makes 
 confession of sin through the priest essential, 
 is a discipline which came into no part of the 
 Church until after many centuries. It found 
 its first Synodical authorization at the Fourth 
 Lateran Council, a. d. 121 5. The primitive 
 Church did not practise it. The Prayer Book 
 makes no general provision for it. In some 
 extreme and exceptional condition, where by 
 self-examination the individual cannot quiet 
 his own conscience, he is told, in one of the 
 occasional exhortations in the communion ser- 
 vice, to go to some minister of God's word and 
 open his grief that he may receive " such godly 
 counsel and advice as may tend to the quiet- 
 ing of his conscience." But this is not in 
 order to render God's pardon more efficacious 
 because spoken by his minister, but to render 
 repentance more efficacious by the minister's 
 instruction of the sinner. It is a discipline for 
 man's approach to God, not a medium of God's 
 approach to man. 
 
 The Prayer Book of the English Church 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 171 
 
 speaks of the benefit of absolution as well as 
 ghostly counsel and advice, and there is given 
 for such cases a form of personal absolution, to 
 be found in the private Office for the Visita- 
 tion of the Sick. Both the phrase and the form 
 were omitted from the American Prayer Book, 
 doubtless for fear of fostering the notion that 
 only through sacerdotal mediation could par- 
 don be obtained for such extreme cases. That 
 could not indeed have been the meaning of 
 the English Book, which in its daily service 
 so exclusively employs the declarative rather 
 than the communicative form of absolution, 
 and whose whole spirit is to affirm that the in- 
 tervention of the priest is not needed between 
 the soul and God. Its key note, as that of our 
 own Prayer Book, is, " I will arise and go to 
 my Father, and will say unto Him, Father, I 
 have sinned." Its declaration of absolution, as 
 ours, is, " He pardoneth and absolveth all those 
 who truly repent and unfeignedly believe." 
 Its general regimen is public confession, and, 
 if there be an exception in some extreme case 
 allowed, it is not allowed in order to over- 
 throw and repudiate the doctrine and attitude 
 
172 
 
 THE PRAYER BOOK AND 
 
 affirmed and maintained in its daily offices of 
 devotion, but simply to " minister to a mind 
 diseased " that it too may escape from its mor- 
 bidness and come to grasp the significance of 
 the declaration of absolution, before all the 
 people, that God himself effectively pardons 
 the soul which comes directly in penitence to 
 him. The priesthood are witnesses not medi- 
 ators, declarers not conveyers of his grace. 
 This runs all through the services of whatever 
 nature which the Prayer Book furnishes in its 
 delineation of the relation of priest and people. 
 The whole tone and expression of the Col- 
 lects illustrate this attitude. The Collect for 
 Ash Wednesday, to be repeated each day in 
 Lent, is a very patent instance as intended for 
 the specially penitent season of the Christian 
 Year, and it stands in complete harmony with 
 all the other Collects of the Book: *' Almighty 
 and Everlasting God, who hatest nothing that 
 thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of 
 all those who are penitent, create and make in 
 us new and contrite hearts that we worthily 
 lamenting our sins and acknowledging our 
 wretchedness may obtain of thee, the God of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 173 
 
 all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness, 
 through Jesus Christ our Lord." A Book 
 which abounds in such prayers, which makes 
 no provision for the instruction of private con- 
 fessors, and contains no hint of the secret 
 discipline of the confessional, which bids its 
 ministers authoritatively to declare publicly 
 each day to all people, that God "pardoneth 
 and absolveth all who truly repent and un- 
 feignedly believe," may truly claim to put the 
 doctrine of forgiveness openly in the forefront 
 of its delineation of the Christian Life. It 
 moreover associates that doctrine with the 
 co-ordinate truth that the Christian Life is an 
 immediate relation of the soul to God, which 
 requires no priestly mediation to make it 
 effective. The one only Mediator according 
 to it is He who, being both God and man, has 
 broken down every barrier suggestive of in- 
 direct and difficult approach to the Father 
 reconciled in Him. 
 
 The tone of the Prayer Book moreover in 
 every part in regard to sin, while solemn, is 
 that of solemn hopefulness. It is hopeful, 
 for it is the witness of reconciliation. Its De 
 
174 
 
 PRAYER BOOK AND CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 Profundis and its Magnificat run into each 
 other. It speaks of cheer, though it speaks to 
 sinners. How radiant is the Service of Holy 
 Communion especially with hope and bless- 
 ing ! It is interpenetrated with the assurance 
 that where sin abounded grace doth much 
 more abound; that "not as the offence so also 
 is the free gift; for if through the offence of 
 one many be dead, much more the grace of God 
 and the gift by grace, which is by one man, 
 Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many." It 
 is full of comfortable words to the sinful, for 
 they are words to the redeemed. It seems to 
 be singing as its Eucharistic hymn : " Beloved, 
 now are we the Sons of God, and it doth not 
 yet appear what we shall be, but we know that 
 when He doth appear we shall be like Him, 
 for we shall see Him as he is." The Christian 
 Life which it presupposes and to which it min- 
 isters has so deep a root in the loving and for- 
 giving heart of God, that it is fully furnished 
 with motive, stimulus, and inspiration to fight 
 the good fight of faith and lay hold on eternal 
 life. 
 
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