The Book of Common Order

The prominence given by Knox and the Scottish Parliament to the Confession of Faith is an eloquent testimony to their belief in truth as the force to change into its own image the character of a nation. Perhaps, indeed, their confidence that pure truth will, as a matter of course, produce pure lives was too sanguine; because the history of Scotland may be quoted to prove that a great deal of excellent truth may lie at the bottom of a nation’s mind in a condition far from operative. On the whole, however, their belief in the power of truth to produce conduct like itself is far more respectable than the notion, not infrequently ventilated nowadays, that, if only there be sincerity in the heart, it does not much matter what are the doctrines in the mind; for this amounts to a concession that, if the truth be not found, something else may answer just as well. Knox had a profound belief that, if the truth about God and man were planted in the intellect, it would bring, forth fruits of both religion and morality; his aim being to fashion a nation at once loyal towards God, and righteous towards man. In his hopes the godward element had the priority; and, therefore, it will be best to begin with the provision which he made for worship.

The practice of extemporaneous prayer in the pulpit is so general in the Presby7%rian Churches, and has prevailed so long, that many people are unaware that it does not go back to the beginning. But, at the Reformation, the Scottish Church possessed forms of worship no less than the other Churches which sprang into existence at the same time, and these must have been of special utility in the prevailing scarcity of preachers; because Protestant worship was thereby rendered possible in many places where a regular ministry was not yet procurable. The Book of Common Order was never, indeed, in the strict sense, a liturgy — that is, a prescribed form from which no departure was permissible. On the contrary, it embodied instructions, at sundry places, that the printed prayer should be used, “or another like it “; and at certain places the conductor of the worship was invited to trust to his own inspirations at the moment and to his acquaintance with the circumstances of the case. Thus, its most appropriate name would have been a Directory for PubHc Worship — the title of the book, compiled by the Westminster divines, by which it was superseded.

It would appear, therefore, that from the first a prayer-book was employed in Scotland more as a help to those of meaner capacity, it being taken for granted that, as competent men were secured, the printed form would be dropped, those who led the devotions of the congregations trusting to their own knowledge of the situation and to the fervour supplied at the moment. And, on the whole, this has been the conception of public worship to which Scotsmen have given their suffrages ever since. The attempt of an English monarch in the seventeenth century to impose an alien form told heavily against a liturgy in the popular mind; and of course during the period of the Covenant the preachers on the moors were not likely to pray by book. The question is, however, an open one, and the Scottish Church is quite entitled, in this as in other matters, to try experiments. Ministers arc often deeply dissatisfied with their own attempts at public prayer; and, as culture advances, the lack of form and beauty in extemporaneous utterances will probably be increasingly felt. In all the larger Presbyterian Churches of Scotland efforts have recently been made to supply ministers with aids to public devotion; but the fact that these have proceeded from self-constituted committees and not from the authoritative courts seems to prove that the Church is not yet prepared to move in the matter. It may eventually turn out that the original practice is the one in which the Church of the future will rest — to have forms which may be strictly adhered-to on occasions of special dignity or solemnity, and may be resortedto by the officiating minister when he is so disposed, but from which departure is not only allowed but recommended, as often as special prayer is called for by novel circumstances or as the tide of devotion flows spontaneously in the preacher’s heart.

There is some evidence that the English Book of Common Order, issued in the reign of Edward VI., was occasionally employed in the earliest stages of the Reformation in Scotland; and there is nothing surprising in this taking place at a time when Knox himself was officiating as a minister of the Church of England. For the English congregation of which he was minister at Frankfort, Knox prepared a liturgy, or used one prepared by others; and in his congregation of exiles at Geneva he used this or a modification of it; it being printed with an express intimation that it had obtained the sanction of John Calvin, on whose own order of worship in the same city it was, indeed, modelled. For some years after Knox’s final return to his native land this Order of Geneva, as it was called from the circumstance that it had been compiled and used in that city, was adopted in Scotland; and it formed the basis of worship for a long time. In 1564 an enlargement took place, and every minister, exhorter and reader was instructed by the General Assembly to possess himself of a copy and use it in prayers, marriage and administration of the sacraments; and this was frequently issued in subsequent years, with slight modifications.-^

To the Order of Geneva, when thus published in Scotland, two important appendices were added — Calvin’s Catechism and the Psalms of David in metre.

The practice of writing catechisms for the young was general among the Churches of the Reformation, going side by side with the composition of confessions of faith; and the greatest men of the age, like Luther and Calvin, did not disdain to stoop

For full information on all such questions see C. G. McCrie, Public Worship of Presbyterian Scotland.

to this humble task; herein showing their wisdom; for the influence is incalculable which religious truth exerts on the subsequent life when it has been imprinted on the mind in early years. Luther’s Catechism is one of the classics of Germany; and of Calvin’s John Knox expressed the opinion that it was the best which had ever been produced. The Westminster Assembly’s Catechism, which displaced that of Calvin, is acknowledged to have been for hundreds of years one of the principal factors in the formation of the Scoto-Irish character, not only in the native homes of the race, but in the new countries which this race has helped to build-up in distant parts of the world. The general aim of all the catechisms of the Reformation was to inscribe on the memory of the young the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer, as embodying the sum of saving knowledge. This arrangement does not appear so palpably on the face of the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism; but the question and answer for which the latter is so famous, “What is man’s chief end? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever,” are substantially borrowed from Calvin’s Catechism.

The use of singing in public worship was a point on which opinions were divided at the period of the Reformation; but happily Knox and those who followed him leaned to the positive side, though they only went so far as to place it among the secondary elements of worship. Naturally the Book of Psalms was first turned-to for the materials; and in the congregation of the refugees at Geneva men of talent were found, among whom the names of Sternhold and Hopkins have survived, to translate the sacred lyrics into singable verse. In the Order of Geneva, as it was issued at Geneva in 1556, fifty-one Psalms appeared, but, after this, the work of translation went on, and the services of new versifiers were secured, among whom William Kethe and John Craig, Knox’s colleague in Edinburgh, are deserving of mention, till in the edition, already referred to, of the prayer-book published in 1564 the whole hundred-and-fifty appeared, each with its own fixed tune.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of this contribution to Scottish religious life. In every generation since, hundreds of thousands of Scotsmen and their descendants in other countries have practically known the Psalms by heart and thus have had the opportunity of continually tasting the literary charm and extracting the spiritual essence of one of the choicest and most varied of the books of the Bible. In the eighteenth century there were added to the materials of praise, under the name of the Paraphrases, sixty-seven translations from other parts of Scripture; and in the nineteenth century the use of hymns was introduced on such an extensive scale as to threaten to supersede the Psalms. At present the Church is embarrassed with its riches in the materials of praise; and measures of compression will no doubt require to be taken in the future; but a door of entrance will still have to be kept open for the new births of sacred poetical inspiration which time may bring forth. Still the Psalms will not lose their position of preeminence. At the time of the Westminster Assembly the old version was largely superseded by that of Rous; and this, in its turn, will no doubt have to give place to a better. Praise has of late been securing an increasing proportion of the time spent in public worship, the sermon being thereby shortened; but it is not to be forgotten that Psalms and Paraphrases are replete with doctrinal instruction; the hymn-book being sometimes not inaptly called the layman’s confession of faith.

It cannot be denied that among the reasons why the Scottish Book of Common Order lost its hold so soon and so completely on the nation, while the English one experienced precisely the opposite fate, must be reckoned its own literary inferiority. It was not composed with the same diligent use of ancient material, gathered from the liturgies of the pre-Reformation period; its spirit is harsh and denunciatory; and its language is lacking in music and felicity. The responses of the congregation are deliberately excluded; and many of the prayers are wearisomely lengthy; one prayer, for example, to be used at the Visitation of the Sick, extending to nearly six pages. On the other hand, there is embodied in the Baptismal Service a brief sum of Christian truth which is of rare literary and theological merit; and there are other materials not a few to which it will be well to recur when any new directory for public worship is authoritatively undertaken. One feature on which members of the Church of England often dwell with fervour in their own Prayer Book is the Christian Year; but this is entirely absent from the Scottish one. In making a clean sweep of the saints’ days of the old Church, Knox and his coadjutors abolished also the scheme by which the Church was reminded, by the revolution of the seasons, of the great events in the life of the Saviour, such as His Birth, His Passion, His Resurrection and His Ascension. The motive of this sacrifice may have been sufficient at the time; but it is a question whether now, when the worship of saints and angels is not likely to come back, this Quoted in preceding chapter, loss ought not to be recovered. In the service-books of the Church of Rome there is embodied, not only the Christian Year, but the history of the Christian Church. This is associated with the worship of saints, the notices of whom are full of elements that are legendary and unhistorical. On the other hand, the mind of the ordinary Protestant is nearly a blank as regards the entire period from the year 100 to 1500 A.D.; and it is well worthy of consideration in what way the examples of martyrs and reformers can be brought to bear on the minds of the people in the worship of the Church. Of the lives of the heroes of religion to the close of the Canon of Scripture worshippers obtain an extraordinary grasp through the public reading of the Old and New Testaments; many a shepherd on the hill and peasant in her cottage being more familiar with every detail than is the best classical scholar with the literature of Greece and Rome; but with the history of the twenty centuries created by Christianity the average Presbyterian is woefully ignorant; and yet these also abound with figures and scenes acquaintance with which would be “profitable for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” Thus it will be seen that this comparatively secondary portion of Knox’s labours raises many questions the solution of which belongs to the future of our country. But this is characteristic of such a spirit as he was; and we cannot remind ourselves often enough that the tasks of the Scottish Church are still far from accomplished. They are, indeed, only beginning; and all forms of belief and practice are subject to modification and development. The supreme standard remains the same; but it is not a restricting and hampering but an emancipating force. And all arrangements deduced from it are subject to improvement under the teaching of experience and the experiments of time. It would be a poor way of honouring a man who grappled so fearlessly with the problems of his own age and dealt so courageously with the authority of the past to erect him

into an oracle from whose utterances it is considered impious to depart; but it is far more foolish to make the mere negligence of subsequent generations a reason for not attempting to complete the tasks which he initiated but had not time to perfect.