To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work

by H. C. G. Moule

ii. Next I point to the abundant and loyal Scripturality of the Prayer Book. I venture to say that no Service Book in the world is quite like ours in this. This characteristic lies on the surface; in the wealth of Scripture poured out in every service before the people; Psalms, Lessons, Canticles, Epistle, Gospel, Introductory Sentences, Decalogue, Comfortable Words. At the Font, in the Marriage Ordinance, at the Grave, it is still the same; Scripture, in our mother tongue, full and free, runs everywhere. And below the surface it is the same. Take almost any set of responses, or any single prayer, and see the strong warp of the Bible in it all.

*"THE PREFACE" ON THE BIBLE.

And then go for a moment from the Services to the Preface of the Book, and see what the Fathers of our English Liturgy thought and intended about the place of the Holy Scriptures in worship. I hope my Brethren have all read that "Preface" with care; I mean, of course, the whole length of introductory matter which precedes the Tables of Lessons; nothing of it later than 1662, most of it (indeed all but the first section, written by Sanderson) dating in substance from 1549.[26] I hope it has all been read by you; but I am not quite certain of it, so little attention is at present called to those important and authoritative statements of principle. But however well you may already know them, they will repay another reading; and so you will be reminded again that the really first thought in the minds of the men who gave us our Prayer Book in English was to let "the Word of God have free course and be glorified" [2 Thess. iii. 1.] in all the worship of the people. Those men were learned in the past, and they reverenced history and continuity. But they reverenced still more the heavenly Word, and where they found the ample reading and hearing of it impeded by even immemorial usage, the usage had to give way, without reserve, to the Bible.

[26] I do not forget that some modifications in detail, as to the Lectionary, are quite recent.

Yes, the Prayer Book is, whatever else it is, searchingly, overflowingly Scriptural; full of the Bible, full of Christ. Let us drink its principles and its manner in, that they may come out in our life and our preaching.

And now for a few simple practical suggestions on our ministerial use of the Book.

USE THE BOOK WITH DILIGENCE.

i. First, I would entreat my younger Brother to resolve in the Lord's name that his own use of the Prayer Book in his ministration be to him a thing of sacred importance and personal reality. We need to form such a resolve deliberately, and to watch and pray over it. Do we not know what strong temptations lie in the other direction? We have to use these forms over and over again; before many years are over perhaps we could "take" a whole service, except the appointed Scriptures, without looking at the book: is it not too easy under such conditions to read as those who read not, and to pray as those who pray not? And all too often the Clergyman, younger or older, allows himself almost consciously, almost on principle, to form an inadequate estimate of his Prayer-Book work. Perhaps he regards the prayers as in such a sense "the voice of the Church" that he is willing to be little more than a machine through which the Church offers them. Or perhaps on the other hand he lets himself forget their immense importance, under a strong, and just, sense of the sacred importance of the Sermon. He is alive and awake in the pulpit, and seeks his Lord's presence there, and realizes it as sought; but in the desk—he goes by himself, and much of his precious time there is spent in thought which wanders to the ends of the earth while his voice does its decent but somnambulatory part alone.

*USE IT WITH LIVING REALITY.

I can only appeal with all my heart to my younger Brother not to let it be thus with him. And the only effective recipe against the trouble is faith, exercised in prayer and watching, with a full recollection of the urgent importance of the matter. For indeed it is all-important that the servant of God should be "given wholly to" his work, at the reading desk, at the lectern, at the Table, at the Font.