THE WORKMANSHIP OF THE PRAYER-BOOK.*

THE Bishop of Edinburgh's small volume on The Workman- ship of the Prayer-Book deserves to be very widely read. Based upon sound and extensive learning, it is written in a spirit of reverent discrimination and animated by a literary taste and judgment of excellent quality. Thus it is eminently calculated to assist the ordinarily instructed Englishman who already in some measure realises the priceless character of the heritage which he possesses in the service-book of the National Church to become alive to the extraordinary good fortune—not to say special intervention of Providence— exhibited in the emergence and survival of such a treasure from the ecclesiastical welter of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries. Let us think as bitterly as we please of Cranmer as a time-server. Let us refuse, if we will, to acknowledge that his bearing at the stake redeemed the lamentable weaknesses and cowardices of his life. And yet his name must shine out as that of the recognised chief of the company of sacred artists who endowed the Church of England with a devotional language which in its beauty, dignity, and sober intensity of expression is almost beyond praise.

It has often been the subject of wonder that amid the turmoil of medizeval life in Italian cities there were produced paintings and sculptures which bear the impress of thought and imagination directed, with apparently unbroken intent- ness, on subjects the deepest and most sublime. And, indeed, that is wonderful enough, even when the artists were monks. Yet much greater, surely, is the marvel that men actually engaged in the stress of ecclesiastical warfare, at a period when the very foundations of Church life must have seemed to be rocking, should have been able to detach themselves from the temper of conflict, and concentrate their minds on the elaboration of a manual for worship in the vernacular, in tune not with the passion of the moment, but with the most permanent and most profound of the needs and aspirations of human nature. Of course, in the main, the work of Cranmer and his colleagues was confined to the selection, revision, adaptation, and rendering into English of existing forms of prayer and praise ; and Bishop Dowden, it should be clearly understood, confines his examination and apprecia- tion of the work so done to its literary and liturgical aspects. He does not enter into controversial questions, either of doctrine or of ritual. Bat—setting such limits to his criticism—be makes it very clear that the compilers of the English Prayer-book were animated by the highest ideals of public worship, alike on its spiritual and its :esthetic sides, and pursued those ideals not only with masterly skill, con- sistency, and success, but with a genuine inspiration of genius. In some respects, though the parallel must not be pressed too far, their work suggests that of a great musical composer who, in adopting, enriches and intensifies the beauty of ancient folk-songs. Especially may this be said of the treatment by Cranmer and his associates of the venerable Latin collects, to the use of which every English priest had been accustomed in the mann' service-books. With fine literary and human insight they discerned that mere translation of a Latin prayer would in many cases entirely fail to provide a form in which devout Englishmen, unused to pray in Latin, would naturally embody their religious desires. Some transposition of key was often necessary, some variation in the harmonies —even, in certain cases, some introduction of anew thought before the standard of devotional utterance which these true The WorkmanPhip of the Prow-Book in Mt Literary and LiturgleaL Atipects. By John Dowden, D.D., Bishop 01 Edinburgh, London Ilethueu and Co. (,3s. Od.]

artists set before themselves was attained. "Thus in the wonderfully beautiful Collect for the Sunday next before Easter," as Bishop Dowden says, there is a suggestion of humble gratitude in the phrase 'of Thy tender love towards mankind' which at the very outset strikes the true keynote of feeling. It suffuses the whole prayer with its flush of emotion, and we could not let it go. Let us remember that it is to Cranmer and his companions that we owe it." For there is no corresponding phrase in the original Latin collect.

Several remarkable illustrations are given by Bishop Dowden of his claim that— Where there has been some departure from the sense of the original there is not unfrequently a real 'gain in the change. Who would prefer unseen good things' (bona invivibiiia) to such good things as pass man's understanding' (6th Sunday

after Trinity) It is nothing short of what Mr. Matthew Arnold (in dealing with another subject) styles natural magic'

to find 'Ecclesiam tuani illustra' converted into Cast Thy bright beams of light upon Thy church' (St. John the Evangelist). Other amplifications are scarcely less happy ; as when inter mundanas varietates' (4th Sunday after Easter) becomes that so among the sundry and msnifeld changes of the world.' Or, again, Who seest that we are destitute of all power' (2nd Sunday in Lent) seems meagre by the side of Who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.'" A signal example of a felicitous rendering of a phrase in itself admirable and charged with religious feeling is that which converted "et Inerita supplicum excedis et vote," into "and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve." "The warm glow of emotion which touches and brightens many of our Collects, at points where it is lacking in the

originals, has for me," says Bishop Dowden, "all the appear- ance of being the natural and genuine outcome of a devout

mind stirred by the work upon which it was engaged. It raises before my mind's eye the picture of the translator on his knees as he wrote." The thought is a natural and welcome one, even though, when one recalls some of the pictures of Filippo Lippi and the. character he bore, the attribution of deep spirituality to the compilers of the Prayer.

book cannot be regarded as absolutely necessary. But as to the perfection of the art exhibited in such work as that exemplified in the passages just quoted there can be no doubt whatever.

Hardly less impressive is the evidence adduced by Biehop Dowden of the careful and strenuous endeavours which were made by the compilers of the Prayer-book to accumulate all available light, alike from ancient and from contemporary

sonrces, from the East as well as from the West, upon the selection and treatment of material for use in the Liturgy of the reformed Church of England. Thus the reader is

enabled to recognise the nature of the influences re- spectively exercised by the reformed Breviary prepared by Cardinal Quignon under the authority of Pope Pius VII., y the Prince - Elector and Archbishop Hermann von

Wied's essay towards a reformed Liturgy (1543), prepared with the aid of Bueer and Melancthon, by the Eirchen- Ordnung for the Lutheran churches of Brandenburg and Nuremberg put forth in 1533, by the ancient Spanish service- books called Mozarabic, and by the veierable Greek liturgies.

All these embodiments of ancient piety and of reforming zeal and culture were, as Bishop Dowden shows excellent

reason for believing, passed carefully and critically in review by Cranmer and his fellow-workers so far as they were then available for study. And so our reformers were enabled in a

very real sense to make the English Church the "heir of all the ages," and to establish for her that position in which, as a French Roman Catholic of the nineteenth century has strikingly acknowledged, it is at least conceivable that

divided Christendom may at some future day find a centre of rally and reunion. These considerations, however, by no means suggest, still less justify, the idea that all is liturgically for the best in the best of all possible Churches. On the con- trary, Bishop Dowden's finely sympathetic appreciation of the workmanship of the Prayer-book, as we have it, gives the more weight and authority to his recognition of its faults, and to his repeatedly urged plea for a liturgical revision. In that direction he makes various suggestions marked by the spirit, at once critical and conservative, which distin- gnished the original compilers. We may not be able to agree with him in every case, but we should certainly wish to see him in an influential place on any body to which the

delicate work of revision might be entrusted. In so far as his influence prevailed, the Church of England would have assured to her a.Prayer-book in 'which, following the example of the sister and daughter Communions in Ireland and America, she would possess more elasticity of resource for dealing with the needs of the times, and in which some obscurities of meaning would be cleared up, but which would retain altogether unimpaired its present beauty of thought and archaic dignity of diction. As to the kind of changes any future revisers of the Prayer-book ought, from a literary and devotional point of view, most carefully to avoid, some remarkably effective illustrations are contained in the present volume, drawn from the abortive attempt of 1689. By those examples and others, far more terrible, of occasional prayers put forth by authority in the reign of Elizabeth, Bishop Dowden shows how much cause we have to be thankful for what we have escaped, as well as for what -we possess.