THE SARUM DAY HOURS.

Day Hours of the Church, according to the use of the Church of England, &c. London: Masters.

SINCE the publication of Mr. Palmer's Origines, the English Church has entered upon a new liturgical era, of which we have as yet to see the ultimate results. The sympathies necessary to a successful prosecution of the study were in the first instance awakened by those lectures of Dr. Lloyd's, when Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, to which some of the leading minds in the movement of 1833 are said to have been, under GOD, very largely indebted. Mr. Palmer's learning and industry undoubtedly sounded the note for the revival of Church principles in their liturgical aspect, and his book was very widely read. It reflects a double character-one gained from the intellectual and religious school with which he was associated-and a second, derived from his own inner character. On the one hand it is full of genuine sympathy with antiquity, picking up its very fragments and hoarding them with reverent admiration on the other, it is at times nervous and timid, as if afraid of the bark to which it has committed itself, and holds language, as if great names and principles had been invoked only that men's honest respect for them should be repressed and disappointed. Still it is a work to be named with respect, and generally to be consulted with advantage: although, the progress of liturgical science enables us to regard it with less interest for the sake of its own use and value, than for the effect it has unquestionably had upon the liturgical and devotional literature of our day.

Mr. Palmer's work, as we have said, was little less than the parent of liturgical study in the modern Church of England; but its intellectual results were not, as we venture to think, of such importance as others which its author, perhaps, less directly contemplated. Before the Church movement the Prayer Book was regarded by the majority even of clergymen, as a fragment of an earlier age, valuable as expressing here and there the subjective religion of the day, and endeared to them by the memories of those who had used it and passed away. But it was confessedly archaic and unintelligible: it was in the hands of men who had parted company with the intellectual and religious atmosphere which had given it birth, and to which it would appear in the light of a living and expressive language. It belonged, in short, to the traditions of the early ages and its possessors were children of the traditions of Calvin, of Wesley, of Paley, of Whitby,-traditions which had for the while obscured the intellect and palsied the will of our portion of VOL. XX.-AUGUST, 1858.

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the Body of CHRIST. Mr. Palmer showed that it was part of a living whole: that it expressed a mind and aspirations which were notoriously those of the undivided Church;-that it was but a portion, a fragment of a gigantie literature which in the days of her strength and youth had been thrown off into formulæ of fervid and majestic beauty from the warm heart of Christendom ;-that to be understood, it must be used by men who lived the moral and intellectual life of the Primitive Ages. Thus, at any rate, did the Oxford movement interpret Mr. Palmer's work: and, as a consequence, he has ministered to a devotional energy, which we will not believe that he can regret or deprecate, but which has gone beyond him.

His more direct successors are Mr. Maskell, Mr. Neale, Mr. Procter, and Mr. Freeman. Addressing themselves to the structure and archaeology of the Prayer Book, these writers have carried forward our knowledge of its remote and immediate parentage, of its distinctive theological animus, and of its guiding principles to a point of advanced attainment. But although they are the eldest-born, they are not the only children of the liturgical movement. It was impossible that devotional minds could become acquainted with those prayers and praises of which the Prayer Book is a representative portion, and not long to add them to the devotional stores of the modern Church. It was indeed notorious to scholars that the prayers of Andrewes and of Wilson were pregnant with the thoughts and phrases of antiquity. But it was desirable that men should hold communion with the ancient Church through a devotional medium which assured them that they were doing so, and which would teach them new reasons for valuing the Book of Common Prayer. Mr. A. Christie's Day Hours of the Church was a consequence of this feeling, and was, we believe, contemporaneous or nearly so with another more direct translation of the Roman Breviary, as both, probably, were traceable to a paper which appeared in the Tracts for the Times. It must be admitted that these early efforts at popularizing ancient modes of prayer were not very successful. They were not the results of a wide-spread want which had been stimulated to conscious energy; they were meant to create one. As a consequence, they were dismissed as being behind their time: their real fault being, that they were before it. Besides, sufficient care was not taken, as to points of doctrine and structure, to bring them as far as possible into harmony with the temper of mind to which they were addressed; so they were exposed to the charges of Romanizing or of archæological dilettantism, as the case might be. And there was this great drawback common we believe to all the liturgic devotions of this class and period, that they were compiled partially from Roman sources, instead of being drawn from the Sarum Rite,-the true well-spring and parent, as our readers know, of the Prayer Book of the Church England.

Mr. Chambers' "Psalter according to the Use of the Church of Sarum" however little open to the last objection, is doubly so to that of being but partially adapted to practical and soul-edifying use in the Church of to-day. The involved structure and quaint terminology of its translations and Rubrics, the luxuriance of its invocations, above all, its substitution of an improvised translation of the Psalms for that unrivalled Prayer Book version which is the envy of other communions, and is wound so tightly round the heart of the English people-were disadvantages which made it from the first little other than a liturgic curiosity. It has, we believe, been used by one Society of ladies: and we are unable to account for this except by recollecting the idiosyncrasies of taste and strong will of their Superior. With every feeling of sincere respect for its devoted author, he must be held to live too energetically in the fourteenth century to minister congenial food to the soul of the nineteenth.

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But the principle of observing the Canonical Hours, and the structural peculiarities of the ancient services have found their into many publications of late years, which have shrunk from direct reproduction of the system. To omit other examples, the principle of the Hours is the idea of a well known little manual, by the late Mr. Troyt, while the most salient features of the Services for Prime and Compline reappear in the Family Prayers of the late Mr. Suckling. It was indeed hardly possible that it could be otherwise, when the system had been fairly presented to religious minds. It attracted them by a language, which being mainly that of Inspiration, could secure reverence without coldness, and be trustfully affectionate, yet without familiarity.

The Apostle had ruled, in speaking of the connection of the Charismata with the public worship of the early Church, that gracefulness and order were to be the law of their combination upon the principle that GoD is not the author of confusion (axaraστασίας). Otaolas) as if worship should reflect the awful repose and symmetry of His Everlasting Being. Now this instinct of the religious mind to which the Apostle gives authoritative expression, finds the highest satisfaction in a devotion like that of the Hours. The voxμσún and the ragis-the perfect grace and the faultless order of these simple and sublime devotions alike appeal to the religious mind with the fascination of literary beauty no less than by the felt impress of an apostolical spirit. Especially is this the case with the lesser Hours, by which the communion of the soul with GOD finds expression at regular intervals between the two great authorised services of the Church. The ascent from the LORD's Prayer to the Hymn, connecting the highest verities of Revelation with the advance of the natural day-the antiphon bringing the soul into sympathy with the dominant mystery of the season, the appointed portion of that Divine Psalm, the 119th, the

chapter and collect recalling the Eucharistic Service of the last sunday or Festival-all conspire to attract minds who can already understand and sympathise with the tone and arrangement of the Prayer Book, and are ready to welcome devotions which stand to it in the double relation of an extension and a commentary. No man can use the Hours for any length of time without entering more vividly into the Morning and Evening Service: no loyal son of the Church of England will see in them aught but a new attestation of the beauty of those Services which our holy Mother authoritatively enjoins upon her clergy and recommends to the use of all her children.

This last feature of the devotion-its relation to the authorised services of the Prayer Book, seems to recommend it particularly to the use of the Clergy or such as are training for the Priesthood. And here perhaps we should have been content to stop, had it not been for the too notorious events which have recently occurred at Cuddesden Theological College. An abridged and adapted edition of a portion of these services was in use there, as, we suppose, they are in most places where any number of Clergy are living together. Of course such a practice is distasteful to many nominal Church-people. Those who do not make use of the Matins and Evensong to which they are pledged, are not likely to regard with favour any additional services whatsoever. It was with no surprise therefore (save as regards the policy of the article) that we read the attack in the Quarterly: still less that we heard of Mr. Golightly greedily endorsing it and circulating it promiscuously. It is his trade: the very material out of which he has gained his miserable notoriety, from the day when out of personal pique he first betrayed his friend Mr. Newman.

Nor should we now care to make a public defence of the College, had not the Archdeacons, to whom the matter was referred, on the strength of what they call "an unfortunate resemblance to the Breviary of the Church of Rome," thought well in recommending "the entire reconstruction" of the devotions used in the College, to utter a censure which reaches much further than the particular book which they condemn.

Undoubtedly there is a resemblance such as they speak of. And what then? If the book were taken from ancient sources-say from the Sarum Portiforium (as seems to be implied by the Report), it is obvious that there would be some such resemblance. There would be, e.g. the same kind of texts, perhaps, even the very same texts of the New Testament employed on Whitsunday and on Easter Day, by members of our own Communion as by Clergy of the Church of Rome. This contingency, to Mr. Golightly's mind, is doubtless very shocking. Without wishing to occasion him unnecessary pain, we are constrained to say that we are less shocked than edified by the discovery of any unity of devotional aspirations

to our common Redeemer thus underlying the divisions of Christendom. And further, the Prayer Book, studied intelligently, i.e. traced back to the sources from which it was actually taken, had prepared us to suppose that any compilation which faithfully reflected its spirit would bear this "resemblance." Any educated clergyman is forced to recognise the "resemblance" in his Prayer Book every day of his life. He knows perfectly well that in the Morning Service, the Venite and Te Deum are the two prominent canticles of the Roman Matins; that the Benedicite, the Benedictus, and the Jubilate, are taken from the Service at Lauds; that the First Lesson is an expansion of the Lectio at Matins, and the Second of the Capitulum at Lauds; that the Creed, Kyrie, versicles and third Collect are taken from Prime; that the remaining Collects are translations of or represent the commemorations at Lauds; that in like manner Magnificat is the great closing Canticle of the Roman Vespers, and Nunc Dimittis of Compline; and that in short the same portions of Scripture are regularly used by him in his daily office as are used by the Roman Clergy in theirs. He is perhaps too familiar with the fact to see how "unfortunate" it is. Habit, we know, makes impressions of the kind trite and passive. But at least such a clergyman will not be surprised at such an extension of the principles of the Prayer Book to other books in use among members of the Church. He takes up the Breviary for instance, and remarks that the Psalms proper to the Feast of Pentecost are precisely those selected in the Prayer Book for Whitsuntide. He is not therefore violently shocked when a particular verse of one of these Psalms is selected by persons of both Communions for devotional contemplation or usage. Father Gavazzi some years ago discovered that the Collect for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity actually coincided with that given in the Missal for Dom. Va post Pentecosten-and he placarded the discovery upon the walls of (we suppose) indignant London. But the Archdeacons, as their Report shows, were familiar with the fact which appeared so unendurable to the Italian renegade: and we cannot therefore understand (as they complain of no doctrinal tendencies whatever) why they should have considered it "unfortunate" in the Hours of Prayer used at Cuddesden, that they adhered in this respect with such fidelity to the pattern and mind of the Book of Common Prayer.

At the same time, we must observe that the extracts from the Cuddesden Hour-book, published by the authorities at the end of their recent pamphlet,' go far to show that there must, at least in one important respect, have been a wide departure from the Breviary-type of Service in the condemned Hour-book. It is notorious to persons familiar with the mere outline of the subject, that 1 Correspondence relating to Cuddesden College, in answer to the charges of Rev. C. P. Golightly. Oxford: J. Vincent.