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Updated: May 19, 2025
The services throughout were marked by simplicity, reverence and freedom from strict and unbending forms; liberty characterized their every part, and room was left for the exercise of the guiding Spirit of God, in a measure not enjoyed by Churches tied to the use of a prescribed worship; at the same time there was a recognized order and a reverent devotion in all parts of the worship which many non-liturgical Churches of this day may well covet.
The spirit of Presbyterian worship has been consistently and persistently non-liturgical and anti-ritualistic, and to advocate the adoption of liturgy and ritual to-day is to depart completely from that historic attitude. A few words on the subject of liturgies in general may not inappropriately close this sketch of the history of Presbyterian worship since the Reformation.
The Protestant Episcopal churches in Alabama were closed from September to December 1865, and some congregations were dispersed by the soldiers because Bishop Wilmer had directed his clergy to omit the prayer for President Davis but had substituted no other. The ministers of non-liturgical churches were not so easily controlled.
All this is of a piece with the general allegorical use of the Old and New Testaments in "Science and Health," but it is a marked departure from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper even in the simple memorial way in which it is kept by non-liturgical churches. Mrs.
One cannot forget that the ultimate, I do not say the only, reason for the founding of the non-liturgical churches was the rise of humanism. One cannot fail to see the connection between humanistic doctrine and moralistic preaching, or between the naturalism of the moment and the mechanicalizing of the church.
Such action on the part of men accustomed to make changes only after careful deliberation, clearly indicates an intelligent choice of a non-liturgical service as opposed to one of the opposite character.
And, in the light of this observation, it is appalling to survey the non-liturgical churches today and see the place that public devotion holds in them. It is not too much, I think, to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestant communities. No better evidence of this need be sought than in the nature of the present attempts to reinstate it.
There we deliberately cultivate in them the perception of beauty, the sense of form, various expressions of the imaginative life. But how much has our average non-liturgical service to offer to their critically trained perceptions? Our church habits are pretty largely the transfer into the sanctuary of the hearty conventions of middle-class family life.
Interest over the revival of 1735 had centred on that colony the eyes of the whole non-liturgical English-speaking world. Whitefield's preaching was to this awakening religious enthusiasm as match to tinder.
Great bodies of Christians have for a period of some three hundred years been worshipping Almighty God in non-liturgical ways, and have not been left without witness that their service was acceptable to the Divine Majesty.
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