ing this presupposition of all science, are as melodious and majestic in language as they are sane, profound and true in thought :

If Nature should intermit her course, and leave altogether, though it were but for a while, the observation of her own laws;

If those principal and mother elements, whereof all things in this world are made,

Should lose the qualities which now they have;

If the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads
Should loosen and dissolve itself;

If celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions,
And by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it
might happen:

If the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant
doth run his unwearied course,

Should as it were through a languishing faintness begin to stand and to rest himself;

If the moon should wander from her beaten way,

The times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture,

The winds breathe out their last

The clouds yield no rain,

gasp,

The earth be defeated of heavenly influence,

The fruits of the earth pine away as children at the withered breasts of their mother, no longer able to yield them relief ;—

What would become of man himself, whom these things now do all serve ?

Of Law there can be no less acknowledged

Than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the

harmony of the world;

All things in heaven and earth do her homage :

The very least as feeling her care,

And the greatest as not exempted from her power;
Men and creatures of what condition soever,
Though each in different sort and manner,
Yet all with uniform consent,

Admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

Another idea which is nowhere adequately

suggested

in the Bible or in the present Book of Common Prayer is that of fellowship in the inner life as a source of moral strength; and yet, according to the principle followed and generally justified by the adaptors and constructors of manuals of religious worship, one could place together great sentences expressive of this principle, which might well be chanted by every congregation in the land. Such a composition, which has already proved its moral efficacy in congregational singing as a chant, is the following:

Fellowship in the moral life is salvation: Infinite is the help that man can yield to man :

It is our moral nature longing to be fed and strengthened
that urges us into fellowship :

Fellowships we need, that will deify Duty, and worship
Goodness as a god.

Forsooth, such fellowship is heaven and lack of fellowship
is hell.

Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death:

And the deeds that we do upon the earth-it is for fellowship's sake that we do these deeds.

Oh, what is heaven but the fellowship of minds

That each may stand against the world by its own meek and
incorruptible will?

The tidal wave of deeper souls into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares out of all meaner cares.

Akin to the foregoing, and yet supplementary, because it more vividly presents the idea of the unity of mankind as a spiritual organism, is the following series of verses, taken chiefly from the Bible :

Who is weak, and I am not weak: who is offended and I burn not?

For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to

himself.

Whoever degrades another, degrades me; and whatsoever is done or said, returns at last to me.

I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink;

I was a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed me;

I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye

came unto me.

When saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee; or thirsty, and gave thee drink? Or when saw we thee sick or in prison, and came unto thee?

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

The same heart beats in every human breast.

Someone observing the part played by popular political songs in driving James II. "out of three kingdoms," invented the now current adage, “Let me write a nation's songs, and let who will make its laws." Unhappily, the songs which spring spontaneously into popularity and move the masses to some decision, act only in great crises, and in the moment of intense excitement; and they are never such as rebuke the populace for their own shortcomings or instruct them in their own duties. Accordingly, the adage which will become the motto of the wise statesman of the future will be, "Let me write a nation's ritual, and let who will make its laws."

CHAPTER X

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THE LECTIONARY

"THE Divine Service," say Procter and Frere, in their volume entitled A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, "mainly exists for the purpose of the orderly recitation of the Psalter and reading of the Bible." Thus it comes about that the Book of Common Prayer, as it were, contains the Bible within itself, and that whoever writes of the one must be continually treating of the other; in the Prayer Book the Bible is presented from the standpoint of Anglican idealism.

Hence it was necessary that in this volume I should especially dwell upon the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer; for these-so the Prayer Book presupposes-express the secret of the Old and the spirit of the New Testament; and in the very pre-eminence given to them we find proof that to the Church, even in its Protestant form, not all parts of the Bible were of equal significance, and that the teacher felt that he must use his own judgment in selecting the elements which he counted vital. It is this same principle, carried further, which has guided my criticism of the Psalter. But hitherto, unfortunately, there has also prevailed another and a conflicting idea; for, while it has been recognised that the parts of the Bible differ in value, it has at the same time

been maintained that, although all may not be equally precious, nevertheless any part is of greater worth than the best portion of any other literature, except those compositions which have been directly inspired by the Church.

The idea of literary selection which prompted the Church to bring to the forefront the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer led it to choose from the Gospel of Luke the superb canticles known as the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, and assign them a distinguished place in Divine Service. Equally fine in discrimination was the judgment which caused the Te Deum (composed by Niceta, the missionary bishop of Remesiana in Dacia, at the end of the fourth century) and the Apostles', the Nicene and the Athanasian Creeds to be preserved and used regularly by the Church. But the conflicting ideathat everything in the Psalter is worth reading once a month and everything in the Bible once a year-is a notion which cannot be defended from the point of view of the spiritual education of a people. There was more justification for it before the ethical import of Greek literature was appreciated, before modern science had begun to compel Christians to recognise as a virtue the intellectual duty of thinking for oneself and speaking out one's deepest convictions, and before modern nations had produced literatures of their own, which, if not absolutely equal in ethical insight to the Bible, nevertheless, because of their nativeness, have more power as instruments of instruction and inspiration than a remoter literature could have. The uniqueness of the Bible as a divine revelation can no longer be maintained.

For two reasons, then, the Lectionary must be thoroughly overhauled. First, some of the passages appointed to be read as lessons are not worth the time