to us, or apprehend the same thoughts in a somewhat different shape or order, and clothe them in a somewhat different phraseology? It would only be more unreasonable to require us to transact our common affairs in the dialect of Chaucer. Doubtless the chief blessings, which we have to acknowledge or ask, are the same in all ages of the church; but it is certain, that it is the acknowledgment of distinguishing blessings, which gives the greatest life to devotion. Common air is more worth than the greatest worldly success; but for which of these is one likely to express the liveliest gratitude? It is nature to be more thankful for a favour which has a personal and appropriate value. The form of words, which is suitable alike for our use, and for that of men who lived from the fourth century to the seventeenth, has no special fitness for the use of either. To stand on common ground, we must leave that personal ground where the most fervent devotions would be offered.

Again; with the progress of scriptural knowledge, the sentiments entertained with regard to some points involved in the episcopal formularies, have experienced change. The mass of episcopalians of the present day dissent in some particulars (unimportant they will say) from the sentiments of the authors and compilers of their service-book; and are compelled in the use of it to attach some new meaning to plain words, or abstract their attention from the public worship, where certain odious passages occur,-practising in either case a mental reservation, painful to themselves, and capable of being misconceived by others. On the other hand, to just the extent that they reverence the form in which they worship, they are tempted to profess or adopt a belief in some respects unscriptural; and piety, by this deplorable arrangement, is made to turn traitor to truth.

Nor is this all. The volume with which our earliest religious recollections are associated, and which we are told has guided the devotions of generations before is very apt to take a place in the mind which is due

us,

to holy scripture alone. Our admirable liturgy,—as the phrase is in episcopal pulpits,-is very apt to be as much venerated, and as confidently appealed to as the Bible, even by some by whom it is as little read; and we have heard it spoken of, in and out of church, in terms, which seem to us little applicable to any other book than that of inspiration. So great has been the influence of the feeling of which we speak, that the ritual which Blackstone* declared to have been preserved in the sixteenth century principally by the terror of penal laws, was pronounced by Paley in the eighteenth, to have such an authority, that only by the most spirited measures could necessary alterations be expected to be forced into it.† Nay, the word of God is by many not thought fit to go abroad without the book of common prayer by its side. Propose in some places, where the church is in power, to send but a few Bibles to the east or west, and the cry, ecclesia in periculo! is up. The scriptures and the servicebook are brought out tied together, and like the

* Of the law, 1 Eliz. c. 2. enacting, that if any person whatsoever shall speak any thing in derogation, depraving, or despising of the book of common prayer, he shall forfeit-for the third of fence all his goods and chattles, and suffer imprisonment for life, Blackstone says, (Comm. vol. iv. p. 51.) "These penalties were framed in the infancy of our present establishment, when the disciples of Rome and Geneva united in inveighing with the utmost bitterness against the English liturgy; and the terror of these laws proved a principal means, under providence, of preserving the purity as well as decency of our national worship."

"As the man who attacks a flourishing establishment writes with a halter round his neck, few ever will be found to attempt alterations. but men of more spirit than prudence, of more sincerity than caution, of warm, eager and impetuous tempers; consequently if we are to wait for improvement till the cool, the calm, the discreet part of mankind begin it, till church governors solicit, or ministers of state propose it, I will venture to pronounce that (without His interposition with whom nothing is impossible) we shall remain as we are till the 'renovation of all things.'

The reference is to the part taken by bishop Marsh, and the high church party in England, with regard to the Bible Society. The sentiments advanced by them have not wanted distinguished advocates in this country.

An account of the English controversy may be found in the

customers of the speculator in the story who dealt in commodities of various worth, the hungry for religious instruction must take both or neither.*

-

II. The English form of worship is substantially one form Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, fastdays, feast-days, and saint-days, the whole year long and every year, it is almost all the same. "Through all the changing scenes of life," it plods resolutely on the even tenor of its way. Come a famine, an earthquake or a war; be a church in the garment of praise, or in the spirit of heaviness; let a pestilence depopulate a land, a fire lay a city in ashes, an in- ́ surrection threaten a state, or a despaired of victory preserve it, when you would expect to hear only one lond burst of praise, or thrilling cry for mercy, the inflexible prayer-book claims all its due. The enthusiasm of the worshipper must be content to be checked in mid flight, while the minister begins at the beginning, and reads to the end, and then submit to vent itself in some preconstructed prayer (called appropriate) consisting of a score of lines. The whole round of every day topics must needs be gone regularly through, and only a corner left for the overwhelming calamity, or the transporting success. Now all will admit, that the same sermon, preached thus often, with only a sentence or two varied to suit the time, would soon fail to sustain attention. Is there not equal cause to fear, that the same form of words, so often repeated in prayer, will unavoidably come to fall from the lips, and on the ear, without an answer

Eclectic Review, vol. 8. pp. 1209, et seq. and in the Christian Observer, vol. 11, pp. 173. 289. 392, et seq. Dr. Marsh laid down, among other things, that respect for the liturgy is "diminished by the institution and operation of a Bible Society."

* The manner in which churchmen speak of their liturgy is sometimes to the last degree extraordinary. Dr. Mayhew quotes a Dr. Bearcroft, who in a sermon preached in 1744, before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, congratulated his associates that "the word of God mightily grew and prevailed in New England according to the liturgy of the church of England."

at the heart? It is no reply to this to say, that the topics of prayer are things of permanent interest; for is not this the case too, we would ask, with the materials of pulpit discourse? Ought not a sermon to be made up of thoughts of eternal and unchanging interest? The question is not whether the ideas are always alike important, but whether the words do not lose by use their property of being a vehicle of thought, and cease to suggest ideas, either these or any other.*

II. The episcopal form of worship is faulty in its general plan. This is a matter for every individual's Judgment, and if any one is not struck by the fact at once, it is not such as admits of proof. The service seems to us to be broken up into too many and too minute parts, and thus to lose that connexion, which is a virtue in every kind of composition. We should think it much better if it were more consolidated, that there might be to a greater degree a mutual dependence and coherence of the parts, and the mind not be continually arrested on the current of its feelings by the

* An illustration of this may be drawn from what most persons perhaps experience with regard to the Lord's The conprayer. sequence of our, familiarity with it from childhood, is, that it is only by an effort, and a strong one, that we can attach to its words the ideas for which they stand. We are never, perhaps, fully aware of its significance, and could a person be found who was unacquainted with it before, it would strike him, we doubt not, as possessing an eloquence and fulness of meaning, very partially perceptible by ourselves, In connexion with this subject we may remark, that when congregationalists, in attending on episcopal worship, imagine themselves impressed by the solemnity of the service, they would do well to consider whether it is not rather its novelty that impresses them; and whether all the while that it appears so striking to them, to whom it is new, it is not very fatiguing to the stated worshippers, to whom it is old. An unprejudiced churchman is as strongly affected by the simplicity of congregational worship, as a congregationalist by the pomp of episcopal; and both for the same reason, operating however not to the same degree on both, that the ardour of devotional feeling ceases to be checked in them, by familiarity of the form of expressing it. There is a remark to this effect, if we mistake not, in some work of Mrs. Barbauld.

forms of closing one prayer, and introducing another.
As it is, if the numerous prayers contain each of them
what belongs to a prayer, the repetition must be not a
little tiresome; if not, they are defective in them-
selves. The arrangement is not happy. No good
reason appears why parts of the service should stand
in the appointed order rather than another.-There is
too much of it. With a little variety of topics and
expression, it might keep alive attention a much
longer time, but what is at once so long and so unal-
terable has not the power to do this. Yet so over-

looked was this radical blemish, that one scrap of de-
votion is piled on another at the end of the litany, as
if the only object were to draw it out to a given length.
Repetitions and redundancies, omissions and defects
must be looked for in every human composition; but
they are worth avoiding when they may be avoided,
and certainly so obvious mismanagement need not
have had place, as that which introduces the Lord's
prayer six times (as it may occur,, in the same ser-
vice, and the Gloria Patri we know not how many.
The Psalms, containing as they do, the richest vein
in the world of devotional thought and language,
which wrought into the texture of the service would
give it quite another character, are, by a most infeli-
citous disposition, transplanted into it in a mass, and
with all their localities and personalities of meaning,
appointed to be read in selections of whole chapters
at once, by the whole array of worshippers. We are
told that they are not used as part of the public pray,
er. We reply, that they ought to be; and that we
know no good reason, why they should be reserved
from a use for which they seem almost designed, so
fitted are they for all purposes of devotion, for ano-
ther less definite use, in which, unskilfully applied to
it as they are, they are very far less edifying.

IV. The episcopal service appears too formal to cherish the spirit of devotion, and too pompous to be a fit religious homage. What with the standing, kneeling, and sitting of the worshippers, the wardens

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