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They, like archbishop Wake, attribute the origin of the Roman, Oriental, Ethiopic and Mozarabic liturgies to St. Peter, St. James, St. Mark and St. John, and observe that all other liturgies are copied from one or other of these.
Wretched are the persecutors, like a troubled sea, casting up mire and filth, vainly opposing the sinner's duty of personal inquiry for salvation, and harassing him if he refuses to submit to human dogmas, creeds, catechisms, and liturgies the inventions of men.
The same ritual, prayers, liturgies, sacrifices, sermons, hymns. The same implements, frankincense, candles, holy water, relics, amulets, votive offerings. The same symbols, the cross, the ball, the triangle, the serpent, the all-seeing eye, the halo of rays, the tree of life. The same saints, angels, and martyrs. The same holiness attached to particular cities, rivers, and mountains.
All the skill in the world will not enable him to secure for the face precisely the expression he would have it wear, if the materia be insufficient. As a school of Liturgies, the long debate at Philadelphia was doubtless salutary and helpful, but whether the immediate results, as shown in the emendation of the Joint Committee's work, were equally deserving of praise is another question.
And I think in the course of the history of Christianity an inversion has come about. In hymns and liturgies the prima facie and predominant emphasis seems rather to rest on our sinfulness than on God's goodness. But this assumption is unwarranted as regards the mass of soldiers whom we keep on inviting to use the more or less mutilated forms of Morning and Evening Prayer.
If anyone questions this judgment, let him toil through Neale's and Littledale's Translations of the Primitive Liturgies and see whether he can find six, nay, three, consecutive lines which he would be willing to see introduced into our own Communion Office.
The notion of the numen is always vague and indefinite: even its sex may be uncertain. 'Be thou god or goddess' is the form of address in the farmer's prayer already quoted from Cato: 'be it male or female' is the constant formula in liturgies and even dedicatory inscriptions of a much later period.
There is something almost incredible to me in the assumption that one man can, supposedly unaided, lead a congregation in the emotional expression of its deepest life and desires without any assistance from the great sacramentaries and liturgies of the past.
They persevered in their obstinacy, and refused to believe that the blessed saints and holy martyrs who had used the ancient forms had not prayed and crossed themselves aright. "Not those holy men of old, but the present Patriarch and his counsellors must be heretics." "Woe to us! Woe to us!" cried the monks of Solovetsk when they received the new Liturgies.
While forms and ceremonies are retained, they play only a minor part in the expression of her churchliness. Bishops and presbyters, robes and chasubles, liturgies and orders, "helps, governments and divers kinds of tongues," in the providence of God all of these things have been "set in the church." Lutherans in many lands make use of them.
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