The Book of Common Prayer, as arranged by Convention in 1790, is well worthy of notice, and, in many points, of imitation. These pages are not the proper place for a theological discussion, and my only reason for touching upon the subject at all is, that the public voice is constantly calling for some modification of the great length of our present Sunday services, and I therefore conclude that the following observations may be interesting to some of my readers.
The leading points of retrenchment are—removing all repetitions, such as the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Collect for the day; a portion of the close of the Litany is omitted at the discretion of the minister. The Communion Service is not read every Sunday. I suppose the Church authorizes this omission at the discretion of the minister, as I have attended service on more than one occasion when the Communion was not read; when read, Our Lord's commandment, Matthew xxii. 37-40, follows the Commandments of the Old Testament, and a short Collect, followed by the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the day, finish that portion of the service. Independent of the regular Psalms, for the day, there are ten separate short collections, any one of which the minister may substitute for the proper Psalms, and the Gloria Patri is only said after the last Psalm.
The leading features of difference from our own "Common Prayer" are as follow:—They appoint proper Second Lessons for the Sunday, instead of leaving them, to the chance of the Calendar—they place the Nicene and Apostles' Creed side by side, and leave the minister to select which he prefers, and to use, if he think proper, the word "Hades" instead of Hell. They remove the Athanasian Creed entirely from the Prayer Book, leaving to the minister to explain the mysteries which that creed so summarily disposes of. When it is considered how many Episcopalians are opposed to its damnatory clauses, and how much more nearly the other creeds resemble that model of simplicity, the Lord's Prayer, they appear to have exercised a sound discretion in this excision. Few deep-thinking people, I imagine, can have heard the children of the parish school reading the responses of that creed after the minister, without pain.
Lest the passing opinion of a traveller upon the subject be deemed hasty or irreverent, I beg to quote Bishop Tomline's opinion. He says—"Great objections have been made to the clauses which denounce eternal damnation against those who do not believe the faith as here stated; and it certainly is to be lamented that assertions of so peremptory a nature, unexplained and unqualified, should have been used in any human composition.... Though I firmly believe that the doctrines of this creed are all founded on Scripture, I cannot but conceive it to be both unnecessary and presumptuous to say that, "except every one do keep them whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." Mr. Wheatley also, when writing on the Creed, says, that the third and fourth verses constitute the creed, and that what follows "requires our assent no more than a sermon does, which is made to prove or illustrate a text."—To resume.
They have proper prayers and thanksgivings for individuals who desire their use, instead of, as with us, introducing a few words into the ordinary service. They have provided a liberal collection of psalms and hymns for singing in church, and no others are allowed to be used. Each psalm and hymn has the Gloria Patri suited to it marked at the beginning. The inconvenience of the total want of such a provision in our Church is most palpable. Not long before I went to America, I was attending a parish church in the country, where a great proportion of the psalms and hymns used were the minister's own composition, and if I recollect right, the book cost half-a-crown. I came up to town, and I found my parish church there had a selection under the sanction of the Bishop of London. Since my return from America, I have gone to the same London church, under the same Bishop, and I have found a totally different book in use.—The foregoing are the principal alterations in the Sunday services.
The alterations in the other services are chiefly the following:—In the full Communion Service, the word "condemnation" is substituted for "damnation," in the notice of intimation. The whole of the damnatory clause in the exhortation, from the word "unworthily" to "sundry kinds of death," is expunged. The first prayer in our Church after the reception, is modified by them into an oblation and invocation, and precedes the reception. The remainder of the service is nearly the same as our own.
They have removed the objectionable opening of the Marriage Service; but, not content with that, they have also removed the whole of the service which follows the minister's blessing after the marriage is pronounced, and thus reduced it to a five minutes' ceremony. While on this subject, I may as well observe that, from inquiries I made, I believe but few of those marriages take place by which husband and wife are prevented from kneeling at the same altar, by which their highest interests can never be a subject of mutual discussion, and by which children are either brought up without any fixed religious ideas at all, or else a compromise is entered into, and the girls are educated in one church and the boys in another. In short, I believe the Romanists in America marry but rarely out of the pale of their own church. I cannot say what the law of divorce is, but it appears to offer far greater facilities than would be approved of in England. A gentleman mentioned two cases to me, in one of which the divorce was obtained by the wife without the husband being aware of it, although living in the same State; in the other, the wife returned to the State from which her husband had taken her, and there obtained a divorce without his knowledge.—To return from this digression. In the Visitation of the Sick they have removed that individual absolution of the minister, the wording of which is so objectionable that, if I am rightly informed, it is rarely used by ministers in England. In the Burial of the Dead, they have changed the two concluding prayers in those sentences which refer to the deceased. The Commination they have entirely expunged. They have added a full service for Visitation of Prisoners, and a Harvest Thanksgiving; and they have provided a form of morning and evening prayer for families.
The foregoing constitute the leading points of difference. Of course there are many minor ones which are merely verbal, such, for instance, as their expunging the scriptural quotation of "King of kings, Lord of lords," from the prayer for the President, probably out of deference to the prejudices of the Republicans, for which omission they have partially atoned by the substitution of the grander expression of "only Ruler of the Universe," in lieu of the more limited term "only Ruler of Princes." To enter into all these verbal changes would be alike tedious and useless. Enough, I trust, has been written to convey a general idea of the most striking and interesting points of difference.
Other churches transplanted to this hemisphere seem to differ from the parent stock most essentially. Thus I find in the almanack for 1853, "Methodist Episcopal Church (North) 3984 ministers, and 662,315 communicants," and below them "Methodist Episcopal Church (South)" without any return of statistics. I regret not being able to give the reader any history of this occidental hierarchy. I do not even know the Episcopacizing process they go through, whether it is entirely lay or entirely clerical, or whether it is a fusion of the two. At first I imagined it was a Wesleyan offshoot, but I can find no indication of that fact; and, moreover, the Wesleyan is a very small body, numbering 600 ministers and 20,000 communicants. I only allude to it because it appears to me a totally novel feature in Dissenting bodies—as understood in England. Another curious change produced by this Western climate is, that it turns all my Presbyterian friends instrumentally musical. I do not remember entering any of their churches without finding an organ, and in many instances a very good choir. Although I approve highly of the euphonious improvement, I feel sure that many of my countrymen in the extreme north would rather see a picture representing Satan in Abraham's bosom inside their kirk than any musical instrument. Such is the force of habit and prejudice.
The extent to which the churches in America have increased is doubtless most creditable to the community, when it is remembered that all the various denominations are supported voluntarily. Nor is their number the only point worthy of notice: the buildings themselves have all, some ecclesiastical appearance, and many of them are fine specimens of architecture. Besides which, they are always kept clean and in good order; you will never find those unsightly barns, and still less the dilapidation which is often met with in the mother land. I have myself been in a church at home where the flooring was all worn away, and gravel from the outside substituted, and where the seats were so rickety that a fall might be anticipated at any moment. The parishioners were poor Highlanders, it is true, but the owner of the soil was a man of considerable wealth.