Transcript
Dr. Kirst, members of the seminary community, I should like to begin this evening by pleading guilty to deliberate suppression of the evidence. I should not like to leave the impression that the decline of worship in the Reformed churches ended with the 18th century and that recovery everywhere began with the 19th. That would not be true. In many quarters, the decline continued at the same time as in other places the recovery was beginning. In some places, I
suppose, we would have to say the decline continues even into our own time. It would also be a neat arrangement if during the 17th and 18th centuries there had been no signs of recovery anywhere, but that would not be true either. And it is at that point that I am guilty of withholding information. For in the early years of the 18th century, there was a liturgical reform of literally astounding proportions. Apparently, at the time, it had
little influence beyond its own immediate area, but more than a century later in the process of liturgical recovery, it was looked to as one of the great landmarks on the way. Though not entirely free from both the rationalism and the pietism which so nearly wrecked the liturgy in these centuries, it stands as a kind of lonely harbinger of things to come in an age of liturgical sterility. I refer to the liturgy of the churches of Neuchâtel
and Valenguin, first published in 1713, the work of Jean-Frédéric Osterwald, whom Karl Barth once called the last churchman in the grand manner. Before we look at it in detail, let me make one small correction. In a strange way, the influence of this liturgy reached far beyond its own small territory, for it became the official liturgy of the Huguenot congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, which was, until its closing a few years ago, the last survivor of
the original Huguenot churches in this country. In 1853, the Charleston congregation had it published in English. It can qualify, therefore, as one of the reform liturgies actually used in both colonial and modern America. Since this liturgy was so largely the product of one man, it will be necessary to say a word about Jean-Frédéric Osterwald, its author. Born in Neuchâtel in 1663, his education was similar to that of his close friend, Alphonse Tourtan, in Geneva, about
whom we spoke last night. Strange to say, especially in view of the influence of Anglicanism on his work, Osterwald never visited England. His basic training was received at that celebrated academy in Saumur, which the more orthodox in the French church were suspicious of because of the theology taught there by the celebrated Moses Amiro. Ordained to the ministry in Neuchâtel in 1683, Osterwald never again left his native city. He felt, as he said on one occasion, that
he saw the whole world in Neuchâtel, and he died there universally mourned in 1747. Elected a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in England in 1700, the friend and correspondent of such leaders in the English church as Archbishop William Wake and Bishop Gilbert Burnett, Osterwald soon developed a great admiration for Anglicanism, especially in its latitudinarian phase. His theological mind had already been predisposed toward liberalism by his education at Saumur and by his
private study with Claude Pagent, one of the liberal leaders in the French church. As early as 1701, he expressed dissatisfaction with the liturgy used in Neuchâtel, which was a modified form of Pharrell's manner and fashion. Writing to his friend Tourotin in Geneva, he said, it is supremely important to think of the reformation of worship, for it is in a deplorable way among us, and our opponents are right when they say that Calvin introduced a form of
worship unknown to antiquity. A year later, he was still of the same mind. Our plan is to draw up what can be called divine service, for it cannot be said that we have it. And our reformers under the pretext of reformation have horribly disfigured it. We want to restore to our worship all of the essential features, adoration, praise, the fashion of sin, reading, and prayers. Such items from his correspondence clearly indicate that Ostervald had begun work
on a new liturgy. Indeed, it seems to have been ready in manuscript form as early as 1706, when he submitted it to various friends. But circumstances prevented its publication and introduction in Neuchâtel before 1713, and even then it was bitterly opposed by some. That it was ready long before its formal introduction is shown by the fact that an English translation, probably for the benefit of his Anglican correspondence, was published in Basel a year before the official
French version in Neuchâtel. Ostervald's preface is almost of greater interest than his liturgy. It could be called the first liturgical manifesto in the reform churches. Let me give you a selection from some of its more important sentences, and remember if you can, as I read, that this was written in 1713. When the order of divine service is settled, it is celebrated as well by the people as by the minister in a manner more edifying, grave, and
decorous than when it is entrusted to the discretion of the clergy. The preservation of uniformity in worship is another valuable consequence of liturgies. In matters of worship, the practice of the past ages of the church should be entitled to great consideration. In truth, people ought not to attend on divine service merely as auditors or spectators nor ought they merely to follow in thought that which is uttered by the ministers of the church, but they ought also
to speak on their part and at least to answer amen to all that is spoken in the name of the assembly. It is admitted that the ancient mode of celebrating divine service was by parts or intervals and by antiphonies, that is to say responses. The primitive Christians retained this practice in their worship and especially in that excellent and admirable liturgy which they employed for the communion service. But one of the principal objects contemplated in the form
of worship for the ordinary morning and evening service was to reestablish the reading of scriptures as a part of public worship. Sermons were at first only an interruption of worship, an addition to the reading, and were not regarded, as by many at the present day, as the most important part of public service and the principal object for which the people assembled. Nor does it suffice that the scriptures be read in the churches before the assembly is
formed or the worship commences. Such reading does not constitute a part of divine service. In Ostervald's preface, we hear for the first time what could be called an ecumenical note. The desire, as you will have heard, to bring worship into conformity with the practice of the church in all ages. It will not be sounded in the reformed churches again for some time. And that is why it was of great significance. Ostervald's Sunday service followed the traditional
structure of the Calvinist pattern with some modifications borrowed from the Book of Common Prayer. The decalogue and confession are Calvin's, although the use of the Lord's Prayer after the confession, rather than at the end of the service, is an Anglicanism. On the other hand, the reading of two lessons from a fixed table, the use of canticles, the use of the creed after the second lesson, are all Anglican enrichments of the Calvinist structure. Anglican also is the
placing of all the prayers of thanksgiving and intercession before the sermon. You didn't realize how Anglican you were in the Presbyterian Church. As he indicated in the preface, Ostervald also included forms for daily morning and prayer without a sermon, as well as a very sizable treasury of prayers, not only for the festivals of the Christian year, but for special occasions and needs. Some of these were his own composition, but the majority were borrowed from the liturgies
of other churches. The Eucharistic liturgy is contained in a separate sacramental section and represents the most complete break with previous tradition. Calvin's Eucharistic liturgy found no favor in Ostervald's eyes. I believe that you will agree that the liturgy of the Holy Supper in use among us is no good at all and indeed can hardly be called a liturgy. It has absolutely nothing in common with the way in which the Eucharist was celebrated in the primitive church.
It is a dry harangue without any unction in which Calvin has inserted his ideas about partaking of the substance of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, ideas as absurd as those of the papists. That quotation is very revealing of a number of things, most revealing of the essential weakness of Ostervald's reform and the way in which it just missed greatness. It had no real theological basis, or rather its theological basis was 18th century liberalism to
which it sought to add all kinds of improvements. Not only did Ostervald have no use for Calvin's theories of the Eucharistic presence, theories that were much more Catholic than Ostervald's, but he was apparently totally unaware of Calvin's strong belief in the unity of word and sacrament, something much more ecumenical and primitive than Ostervald's liturgy despite all of its ecumenical borrowings. Despite the fact that Ostervald's Eucharist contains such things as the Sursum Corda, the Preface in Sanctus,
the Gloria in Excelsis, it remained much more foreign to the essential meaning of the liturgy in the ecumenical sense than the despised and didactic liturgy of John Calvin. If Ostervald could have used Calvin's Catholic structure and Eucharistic theology as the basis for his improvements, how different the history of reformed church worship might have been. But the time was not ready, and so with all of its great enrichments and valuable additions, Ostervald's liturgy remains the child of
the 18th century. It has often been commented that Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo marked the end of the Age of Enlightenment and the beginning of the Romantic era. As with any great movement of the spirit, it is hard to say where and how it began. Possibly the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the European Holocaust, which succeeded it for almost a quarter of a century, shook the prevailing faith in the nobility and rationality of human nature, much
as in a later era, the First World War was to shatter the foundations of theological liberalism. Whether that or something else be the reason, the fact remains that in the closing years of the 18th century and the opening years of the 19th, the center of interest shifted from Greek and Roman antiquity to the Middle Ages, from classic to Gothic. It can be seen in architecture, it can be seen in literature, inevitably it had to be seen
in religion. The Oxford movement in the Church of England or the so-called German high church movement are but two illustrations. It was inevitable that sooner or later it should involve the reformed churches. Obviously, in the case of the reformed churches, it would be later rather than sooner, for the reaction against the Middle Ages had been much more complete in them than in either the Anglican or the Lutheran communions. One is not surprised, therefore, to find
that in the early years of the Gothic Age, most of the references in reformed authors are rather patronizing sneers about Puceism, medieval monkery and that sort of thing. So completely had the liturgical consciousness lapsed in most reformed circles that Anglican and Lutheran liturgical revivals were greeted derisively and the liturgical chaos of the reformed churches held up to praise as a model of apostolic simplicity in contrast to the medieval mumbo jumbo that was being reintroduced into other
less fortunate, less enlightened churches, shades of Lutheran kranmer. It is difficult to say where or when the liturgical fever of the Gothic Age first spread into one of the reformed churches. We have only official actions and publications to go by. The secret aspirations of individuals are unknown to us. In 1861, when in some places this liturgical revival was already underway, the Genovese philosopher Henri Amiel confided to his journal, Our churches are too little open, our cemeteries
too much. The result in both cases is the same. The tortured and trembling heart which seeks outside the scene of its daily miseries to find some place where it may pray in peace or pour out its grief before God or meditate in the presence of eternal things with us, and us of course were reformed, with us has nowhere to go. Our church ignores these wants of the soul instead of divining and meeting them. She shows very
little compassionate care for her children, very little wise consideration for the more delicate griefs, and no intuition of the deeper mysteries of tenderness, no religious suavity. Under a pretext of spirituality, we are always checking legitimate aspirations. We have lost the mystical sense and what is religion without mysticism. Amiel's is the complaint of the romantic against what had come to be the liturgical life of the reformed church. How many others felt as he, it is impossible to
say. But judging from the ready response with which the liturgical revival met in the reformed churches, they must have been a considerable number. When it happened, it happened everywhere at about the same time. While there are interesting connections to be traced out, the impulse toward a better liturgy seems almost simultaneously to have taken hold of men in reformed churches as widely scattered as Scotland, France, Switzerland, and the United States of America. The only major reformed church
to be unaffected was that of the Netherlands, and there some of the historical reasons which we have already examined would easily account for the delay. It would be very striking thing if I could claim that this revival was begun in the United States, and that thus for once there was a movement that went from here to Europe. That would probably be an exaggerated claim. But it can be said that liturgical stirrings began here as early as
anywhere else, and that in many ways they did influence developments in Britain and Europe. In any event, one of the earliest references to the subject I have been able to find is in an address delivered in Philadelphia in 1835 by one of the most colorful pulpit celebrities of the time, Dr. George Washington Bethune, a great pig face of a man, as Templeton Strong described him, Dr. Bethune, the son of a millionaire merchant in New York, graduated
from Princeton Seminary in 1826. But he chose not to enter the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in which he had been baptized and educated, but identified himself instead with the Dutch reformed church. An address delivered at an installation was in reality his justification for his making the change, and here was one of the reasons which he assigned. The reformed Dutch church has a liturgy adapted to all the offices and occasions of worship. It is perhaps to
be regretted that its disuse has become so general among us, perhaps from a weak desire to conform to the habits of other denominations. Certainly there are occasions when the forms of prayer are at least as edifying as many extemporaneous effusions we hear from the desk, and it is evident that the wise fathers of the church did not intend that their liturgical forms should remain a dead letter in our books. That Dr. Bethune was an inveterate European
traveler with a vast acquaintance with the continental reform churches, especially in France, may have influenced his point of view. But it must also be borne in mind that this was an era when large numbers of secessions from both Presbyterian and reformed churches were taking place to the Episcopal Church. The slovenly and careless worship of our churches was often cited as a principal reason. Dr. Bethune and those who shared his mind were anxious to plug that hole
in their dike if they could. At any rate, the revision and improvement of the liturgy of his church became one of his chief ambitions, which he finally saw achieved in 1857 with the first great revision of the liturgy of any Dutch church since the Synod of Dort. Dr. Bethune's revision, so it may be called, was a very mild one. But it did provide a complete Sunday morning service instead of two prayers as the older form had
done, a new marriage service, a lectionary, and what was almost unheard of in reformed church circles, an office for the burial of the dead. Meantime there had been stirrings of a liturgical kind in the sister German reformed church, much more familiar still with continental developments than its Dutch sister. The German church leaders were aware of liturgical developments in the recently united evangelical church in Prussia. But an even more powerful influence seems to have been the Reframyrtes
Kirchenbuch published in Zurich in 1847 by J.H.A. Ebrard, at that time one of the professors in the theological faculty, where if I'm not mistaken, he succeeded the celebrated David Strauss. Ebrard's book was itself a pioneering work, a kind of thesaurus of prayers, services, and offices from all of the continental reform liturgies arranged for the church year and supplemented with material from the Book of Common Prayer as well as from Ebrard's own pen. In some
of the German sections of Pennsylvania, it was actually used in place of the old Palatinate liturgy, which had largely been discarded, or the unhappy Mayors liturgy, which had been produced to succeed it. Genuine dissatisfaction with their liturgical situation as well as continental influences combined to produce the appointment of a committee to draft a new liturgy for the German reform church in 1848. That committee did not produce its provisional report until 1857, nor was its final work
finished till 1866. Its work was of such a nature as to require a separate and extended notice later on. Suffice it to say here that it was part of the American reform liturgical scene at the period under discussion, and some of its preliminary materials and studies were available in published form. These activities were bound to produce an effect in American Presbyterianism, especially since it had been the heaviest loser to the Episcopal Church. I have in my
library a curious volume under date of 1853 entitled A Presbyterian Minister Looking for the Church by one of 300. It is a long-winded, petulant attack on the Presbyterian Church by one of her former ministers, who had become an Episcopal clergyman and who chose, for obvious reasons, to remain anonymous. Naturally, objections to Presbyterian worship figure on almost every page, and there are some shrewd hits as to what it was compared with what it ought to be,
historically considered. The title certainly could not have meant that 300 Presbyterian ministers had left for the Episcopal Church, but it might have meant that that number were dissatisfied. Many were eyeing the Episcopal pastures rather enviously, so much so that even the faculty of Princeton Seminary at one point bethought themselves about matters liturgical. The Presbyterian pioneer, however, was Dr. Charles Washington Baird, the son of one of Dr. Bethune's close friends and later the definitive historian of the
Huguenot immigration to America. Here again, the continental contact is significant, for after his graduation from Union Seminary in 1852, Mr. Baird served for two years as Minister of the American Church in Rome, and then on returning to this country for two years more as Secretary of the American and Foreign Church Union. It was during this period that in 1855 he published his eutachsia, or the Presbyterian liturgies, which incidentally was republished just a year or two ago
by one of our smaller publishing houses. Eutachsia contained nothing very startling, though it must have come as something of a shock to many of his Presbyterian colleagues. It was nothing but a description with some texts of the liturgies of both Calvin and Knox together with the claim, not entirely justified, that Calvin's liturgy had been of significant influence in the framing of the English Book of Common Prayer. At least such an assertion gave those renegade Presbyterians in
the Episcopal Church something to think about. Eutachsia also contains some flattering references to the liturgy of the Reformed Dutch Church as the only surviving example of what had once been the universal practice of the Reformed churches. Baird followed his eutachsia in two years with his Book of Public Prayer, modeled somewhat after Ebrard, a collection of prayers and services from all of the early Reformation liturgies of such men as Calvin, Bucer, and Knox, but he was a
little late. For in 1856, they had appeared in New York, preques ecclesiasticae, the forms of public devotion instituted by Calvin, John Knox, Martin Bucer, Micronius, and other Presbyterian divines adopted and used in various branches of the Presbyterian Church. The compiler's name is not given, but obviously he was someone who wished to board the Baird bandwagon. Having discovered these early Reformed liturgies, Presbyterian and Reformed ministers alike rushed into print with collections of them, and the next several
decades saw at least a dozen. At last, Reformed churchmen could hold up their liturgical heads, for they too had a tradition, prayer book and liturgy, every bit as ancient, even if somewhat more thoroughly ignored than that of their Anglican neighbors. We shall return to our own country a bit later. To keep the thread of the story, we must record the fact that a year after its appearance in the United States, Eutaxia enjoyed an English edition. Its
British sponsor, who added both a preface and an introduction, was Dr. Thomas Binney, the minister of King's Way House in London, who had himself been interested in liturgical questions, although a mere congregationalist. It can easily be assumed that it soon found its way to the bookstores in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and a timely arrival it was, since events in Scotland seemed to indicate that liturgical stirrings had at long last reached the church there too. For in the
year 1857, Dr. Robert Lee, minister of Old Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh, had begun his liturgical reforms, which were to attract the attention of the entire Scottish church. Old Greyfriars had suffered from an explosion. They had gunpowder stored in the tower, and it had been reopened for worship in the year 1857. When it was reopened, not only did the minister request the people to kneel for prayer and stand for praise, but he read the prayers for the
service from his own collection, prayers for public worship, which he had had published that same year. The comments of a rather hostile critic are not without interest. An experiment has been lately tried in Edinburgh, respecting the method of celebrating public worship, which if it not be interfered with by the church judicatories, may lead to important consequences. Dr. Robert Lee, on the reopening of Old Greyfriars Church, is said to have deviated to a somewhat startling extent from
the accustomed manner among us of conducting the public worship of God in the sanctuary. Very plain and ungainly, the ancient building of Old Greyfriars was, but on entering, a somewhat novel spectacle is now presented. With more or less taste, every window has been filled with stained glass, to an extent, we confess, that suggests the idea of a religious toy. Nor is this the whole amount of alteration, if rumor be correct, the clergyman is said to read
the prayers out of a book, and the people are alleged to be invited at the close of each branch of the petitions to give their response, thus audibly expressing their concurrence with what has been uttered. It should be said that Dr. Lee's prayers were entirely of his own composition and reflected to a large degree a very latitudinarian theology. He had no interest in either ancient or Reformation liturgies, in fact, he disliked them. A kind of Scottish
Osterwald, he was distressed by the condition of worship in his church and proposed to do something about it. A harmonium was added to the possessions of Old Greyfriars in 1863, followed by a pipe organ in 1865. Certainly, all of these changes were not to take place without the notice of ecclesiastical authority. In 1859, the General Assembly, leaving to one side many of Dr. Lee's improvements, did pronounce on his read prayers. Assembly finds that this practice is
an innovation upon and contrary to the laws and usages of the church. And the Assembly enjoined Dr. Lee to discontinue the book in question in the services of his church and to conform in offering up prayer to the present ordinary practice of the church. I should say that when Dr. Lee received this decision, he promptly memorized all the prayers in the book and then went on just as he had done before. In 1865, however, legal proceedings
against him were again begun, which dragged on till 1867. They never reached final determination, however, since the day before the Assembly was to open, Dr. Lee fell from his horse, the victim of a paralytic stroke from the effects of which he died within the year. And you may believe there were those within the Scottish church who saw the hand of Providence in this. The dramatic suddenness of his end left many questions which he had raised unresolved.
Dr. Lee had, however, succeeded in permanently reopening the liturgical question in the Church of Scotland. The movement forward was to be in the control of more cautious hands. In 1858, the year after Dr. Lee had begun his innovations at Old Greyfriars, there appeared a curious little book, obviously hastily produced, entitled Presbyterian Liturgies with Specimens of Forms of Prayer for Worship as Used in the Continental Reformed and American Churches. The author preferred anonymity, but we now know
that he was Andrew Bonar, Minister of the Canon Gate in Edinburgh. Bonar was obviously alarmed by the latitudinarian nature of Dr. Lee's liturgical reforms, yet just as obviously convinced that the liturgical question had come to stay. His purpose, therefore, in rushing into print was to assure his brethren that there was nothing subversive about a liturgy, but that it had an honorable place in the history of reformed churches. Fearing that the liberal theology of Dr. Lee's experiments
would prejudice the whole liturgical future of the Scottish church, Bonar was anxious to show that it did not need to be so. And what did he cite in evidence? Large sections of Baird's Eutaxia, as edited by Binney, and what is even more surprising, both the Liturgy for the Lord's Supper and the Burial of the Dead from the only recently approved liturgy of the American Reformed Dutch Church, as well as some draft prayers for the Festivals of
the Christian Year, which had appeared in the Mercesburg Review as part of the liturgical studies of the American German Reformed Church. No one can say that American church life was unknown in 19th century Scotland. Bonar's plea was based especially on the need of men in the armed forces and of small groups of Presbyterians in Canada for some guide to worship, which they could use when they gathered together in the absence of a minister. A committee had
been appointed by the assembly for that purpose as early as 1849. It reported in 1858, and the result was the publication of prayers for social and family worship. Judged by present standards, it was not a great piece of work, but events were now moving with great rapidity. On January 31, 1865, a small group met to form the Church Service Society. Scarcely enough in number to fill an elder's pew in one of the Glasgow churches, the group
had for its object the study of the liturgies, ancient and modern, of the Christian church, with a view to the preparation and ultimate publication of certain forms of prayer for public worship and services for the administration of the sacraments. Though it was a group dedicated to much hard work, it grew both in numbers and influence until in 1892, it could report a membership of 669. The first fruit of its labors appeared in 1867 with the publication
of Eucologian, a book of prayers and forms of worship which were intended for use with the scheme of the Westminster directory. By 1884, Eucologian had reached its fifth edition. In addition to forms of prayer for Sunday services, it included offices for the administration of the sacraments as well as marriage and the burial of the dead, a table of psalms and lessons, material for the Christian festivals, as well as other miscellaneous materials were included. The formation of
the Church Service Society and the Church of Scotland awakened interest in the other Presbyterian churches as well. The United Presbyterian Devotional Association was formed in 1882, and in 1891, there appeared under its auspices a somewhat slighter volume than Eucologian entitled Presbyterian Forms of Service. In the Free Church, a public worship association came into being in 1891 and in 1898 produced a new directory for public worship. These last two organizations were combined in 1901 after the union
of the two churches as the Church Worship Association of the United Free Church. And after the reunion of the churches in 1929, the Church Service Society absorbed its United Free Church sister organization and still continues its program of study and publication. Its place, however, is somewhat less than formerly by reason of the fact that the publication of liturgical forms has now again become the official task of general assembly and not of a private association. The Book
of Common Order, which appeared in 1940, once again gave the Church of Scotland an official standard of worship. One is tempted to say that it gave the Presbyterian Church in this country an official standard of worship as well, for the Book of Common Worship is in most respects an American copy of the Scottish publication. Once again, it is interesting to note how much of a part American liturgical developments played in this Scottish history, especially in the
formation of the first Eucologian. The chairmanship of the committee was held by Dr. George Washington Sprote of North Berwick. Whether he had read Bonar or whether his experience in Canada as a young man had given him some knowledge of American developments, he was certainly aware of them. In his worship and offices of the Church of Scotland, he gave a bibliography of useful liturgies which had been consulted by the framers of Eucologian. One is interested to find
in that bibliography not only the American Dutch and German reformed liturgies listed, as well as Baird's Eutachsia, but even the liturgy of the French Protestant Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the American version of Ostervald's Neuchâtel liturgy. What is more, Sprote acknowledged that the Eucharistic prayer was largely borrowed from the American German reformed liturgy. There is an interesting sequel to that acknowledgement. When in the '70s, the American Dutch reformed church once again set about the work of
liturgical revision, its Eucharistic prayer was largely borrowed from Eucologian, which had originally borrowed it from the German church. This kind of liturgical exchange across the Atlantic, which took place in the 16th century, was a hopeful symbol that the reformed churches in the 19th century, after years of isolation, were beginning to find each other again. The liturgical developments in our American churches may have produced one other European reaction, though this time it is a bit more difficult
to prove. In the year 1850, a young Swiss student spent a year in this country, living in the old Huguenot town of New Rochelle, New York, with the family of Dr. Robert Baird, the father of the author of Eutaxia. It is also to be noted that among those whose friendship he made was Dr. Bethune, the liturgical leader in the Dutch reformed church whom we have already met. Professor Benoit, in discussing Eugène Bersier's liturgical contribution, says, he
had had English blood in his veins through his mother, so that the Anglican liturgy was not without influence on the liturgical developments in the reformed church. That puzzled me a little bit to know how the Anglican liturgy got in your grandmother's veins, but I could not help wondering whether another influence beside that of an English ancestor on the maternal side could not have been his close acquaintance as a young man with those who were leaders in
the reformed liturgical revival in the United States. Receiving his theological education after his return to Geneva, Bersier spent his entire ministry in Paris, where his name became closely associated with l'Église de l'Etoile, which was virtually built for him in 1874. His reputation as a preacher was international, but he became equally celebrated for the form of service which he introduced in his church, which was published in 1876. In the introduction, Bersier gave some of his
reasons for his liturgical reforms. One, since too exclusive a part has been given heretofore to instruction under the form of preaching, so that the sermon has absorbed everything else. To give back to worship itself, to common prayers and adoration, their proper place. Two, instead of giving the congregation the role of passive spectators, say for the singing, to permit them by means of responses to share directly in the worship itself. Three, to affirm the close solidarity which
united the church of the present with that of the past. To introduce into public worship some of the elements of edification which antiquity has left us, so that the voices of believers of all the ages may be united with those of believers today. Four, to restore to the Holy Supper the central place which it must have in Christian worship of which it is the loftiest expression. To return at this point to the true and primitive teaching
of our reformed church. Bersier's Liturgie was a very complete volume of 354 pages with a musical supplement, containing his sister-in-law's settings for the various responses which he had included in his services. I may say he was a better liturgist than she was a musician. These did indeed show the influence of the English prayer book, as did the position of the prayer of thanksgiving and intercession before the sermon. Complete prayers and lessons for the Christian
year were also included. Some of the prayers were Bersier's own and he showed a rare skill. Here is a single example. O Christ, who wast rich, yet for our sakes didst become poor. King of glory, who didst will to become the man of sorrows, teach us to serve thee and the person of our poor and needy brethren, suffering and scorned, lest we be among those to whom thou shalt say at the last day, depart from me.
His great prayer of thanksgiving and intercession, by the way, was done in the manner of the made response. Encouraged by the response which his liturgy received in his own congregation in Paris, Bersier was emboldened at the invitation of General Synod to prepare a modified version of it for consideration as the official liturgy of the French Reformed Church. This volume appeared in 1888 with a very complete historical introduction as well as an extended commentary on each of
the services. In the introduction, incidentally, Bersier acknowledged that he had been ignorant of the lost of all liturgical preface, though not, of course, of the Neuchâtel liturgy, when he had composed his own, which in many ways bears a strong resemblance to it. This projected liturgy, as it was called, sacrificed many of the Anglicanisms of the one used in l'Église de l 'Étoile. Gone are all of the responses. The series of collects has been replaced by
the traditional prayer after sermon, which has been restored not only as to language, but to its old place after the sermon. All of the materials for the church year, however, are still included. In the liturgy for the Lord's Supper, the traditional Genovese Eucharistic prayer has been substituted for Bersier's, but the preface and sanctus are still retained. These changes were made in the hope that the project thus toned down might be acceptable to the majority of French
churches, but such was not to be the case. Even though it was rejected, however, it exercised a great influence on the worship of the French church and later liturgical developments there. The half century from 1850 to 1900 saw so many liturgical experiments and improvements that the discussion of all of them could easily occupy more than a series of lectures. Once the process began, it seemed endless. Anyone can easily fill his library with liturgical books produced in
this country alone during that half century. To mention only a few, there was the American Union Prayer Book composed in 1866 by Dr. Abram Reinier-Van Est, a Dutch reform minister who served the American church in Florence. Compiled from the liturgies of both the Anglican and the Dutch reform churches, it was hailed in its day as a model for future ecumenical worship. Or there were the various liturgical publications of St. Peter's Church in Rochester. To my
knowledge, the only congregation ever organized in the American Presbyterian Church a liturgical basis. It was an era also in which many extreme proposals were seriously made. McCree records one such published in Calcutta in 1890 by a Presbyterian elder with, among other things, a form of service for Christ mass, as well as proposals for vestments which included a surplus, purple velvet stole, and a scarlet merino hood to replace a Geneva gown. But while there were, as in
most movements, a few eccentrics here and there, for the most part, this liturgical recovery was carried on by sober and serious minded men who studied hard and knew what they wanted. And to a surprising degree, they got it. To realize how much in our liturgical life today, which we take for granted, we really owe to these pioneers of the 19th century. We have only to imagine, if we can, what worship was like in our churches before
they came on the scene. No stained glass windows, no Gothic aisles, no vested choirs, no responses, in many instances, no organs. These represent but a partial catalog of their innovations, or as they would have preferred to say, their restorations. To say nothing of the improved decorum of public worship, the new significance of the Christian year, the restored importance of Holy Communion. To them also, we owe, for better or for worse, the changed architectural setting of our
worship in many places. Divided chancels were unquestioningly imitated from Anglican custom, with no thought given to the fact that the purpose for which they were originally designed bore little relation to any of the needs of a worshiping congregation in a reformed church. Georgian buildings were incredibly and disastrously darkened on the thesis that religion was a somber business. The old white pews with their mahogany or cherry tops were replaced by walnut or golden oak, usually stained. I
can still recollect one lovely old town church, now partially restored, which had been built rather handsomely at the end of the 18th century by a local architect with the slightest favor of Baroque. In the middle of the 19th century, it was painted chocolate brown from the top of its towers to the base of its foundation, to stimulate the then fashionable brownstone. And all the clear glass windows replaced with a hideous green, the finished product being solemnly
described in a pamphlet at the time as a fine example of Romanesque. To be sure, it would be unfair to blame the liturgical revival for all of these abortions, but they were in many ways a result of the same spirit. It could be said, however, that in many ways, this was the golden age of the liturgical life of the reformed churches. A writer in a recent annual of the Church Service Society has lamented the fact that
the liturgy is no longer the controversial thing it once was. Study groups, publications, conferences were the order of the day. While the revivalists were fought at many points, as witnessed the curious activities of Jacob Primmer in Scotland, they relished in the battle and gave as good as they got. The unfortunate thing was that their work fell into the hands of generation less well-trained theologically than they. Scottish pioneers like Sprote and Leishman knew the liturgical history
and the theology of the reformed churches. Americans like Bethune or Baird were proudly aware of the tradition in which they stood. Bersier's short introduction to his liturgical project is still a mine of information about worship in France and French speaking Switzerland. But once the way had been cleared, those who walked in it were by and large little interested in anything but improvements. Very often it was easier to imitate the Anglican Church than to dig for buried
treasure in one's own backyard. The historical and the theological meant less and less as the demands of the psychological and the aesthetic loomed larger. Looked at from one point of view, it could be said that we are no further along in the matter of worship than we were in 1880, having dissipated most of our energy on a great number of trivial things. It is hard to think anything else when in the minds of many people all
that is necessary to be liturgical is to turn your collar around, divide the chancel and sing some choral responses. One wonders without much information about the attitude of lay people during all this development. Reading the history, I'm impressed that the liturgy was so exclusively a clerical pastime that with few exceptions it was a bother that was going on well above the layman's head. That many did not like it, we can be sure. The pietist remembering how
closely liberalism and liturgy had been allied was very suspicious. Indeed, is not that still the case? In how many places is an interest in liturgy greeted with the implied or overt statement that the minister has lost his gospel? But even in those congregations in which the liturgical movement was accepted, we can believe that for many it was just another way of doing things, which if the minister liked the congregation would tolerate. Hunning records an interesting observation
about Bersier's own congregation in Paris. Different visitors to Paris have assured me that even in Bersier's church, under the leadership of this earnest man himself, many come in after the liturgical part of the service is ended while others sit through it with obvious boredom. Who can doubt that such was probably the case in many another congregation which had gained the reputation for being liturgical. The obvious conclusion would be that there had been a real failure to
give instruction in the meaning of worship, to explain and interpret to the layman what all these improvements in addition to the service signify. Surely the laudable intention to make them more than spectators, really active participants in the service, involved more than giving them a few responses to sing or teaching them to say amen at the end of the prayers. It ought to have involved nothing less than their complete re-education as to the meaning of their
membership in the body of Christ. That that never happened or was never intended is best indicated by the simple fact that almost all of the liturgies under discussion were published as books for the pulpit and never as books for the pew. They were intended to guide the minister in the enriched conduct of public worship to save him from the erratic theology of improvers like Dr. Lee. They were never meant to guide the layman in the development
of his ministry as a member of the congregation. Even the Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland, a communion of well over one million members, had at last reports sold something like 20,000 copies. But there is something deeper here. The movements we have been describing were responsible for all kinds of improvements in our worship for which we should be grateful. But they seem never to have faced the basic question of the subject with
which they were dealing. One looks in vain, for example, for a discussion of liturgy or how it involves the congregation. Despite almost universal recognition of the necessity for more frequent celebrations of the Eucharist and some real progress in that direction and some I may say more apparent than real, as for example the celebration of the sacrament at odd hours for the spiritually elite in the Anglican manner, there is no discussion of the relation of word to
sacrament, no discussion of the meaning of the Eucharist itself in anything more than a petition of the time-honored confessional language. To be sure, the table had begun to recover some of the significance it had lost to the pulpit. But the 17th and 18th century conception of the liturgy as something done by the minister for the people still largely prevailed. The chief concern was to see that he did it better and that of course was something.
Yet who can deny that we still suffer from the fact that in the recovery of our liturgical life in the Reformed Church's aesthetics have largely preceded theology? Indeed is it not this fact that still forms one of the chief impediments to a genuine liturgical life in our churches? It cannot be denied that the 19th century recovered the form which preceding centuries had lost or abandoned. But the theological content of the form was still where it had
been. The liturgy was still an orderly and impressive, not to say pretty, way of doing things, no matter what the theology. After all, in the 19th century even the Unitarians went liturgical and produced prayer books. The Reformed Churches still had to discover what could be called a theology of the liturgy. Fortunately, at the very same time which we have been considering, movements in that direction had begun. The theological foundation which could adequately bear a liturgical structure
began to be hammered out. While most of our liturgical minds were busy improving what we do in worship, there were a few who began to ask why we do what we do. And it is with their story that we must next be concerned, for without them there would really have been little to improve. Let us pray. Amen. Support us, O Lord, all the day long of this troublous life, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes.
The busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy great mercy grant us a safe rest, a holy lodging, and peace at last. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.