Presbyterian Worship: Its Spirit, Method and History

by Robert Johnston

This deliverance may be taken as representing the spirit of all legislation of the Church respecting worship up to the middle of the present century. Whenever, in response to overtures from subordinate courts, or inspired by special requirements of the times, deliverances concerning any part of worship were prepared by the Assembly, they uniformly directed the Church to the observance of the regulation of this department of Divine service as provided for in the Westminster Directory.

It cannot be claimed, however, that due regard was accorded the Directory throughout the whole Church. The last half of the eighteenth century was a time of spiritual coldness in Scotland; not only did evangelical piety languish but there existed at the same time a corresponding want of interest in the worship of the Church. Praise was neglected, and little effort was made to secure suitable singing of the Psalms; at times the reading of Scripture was entirely omitted, prayers were brief and meagre, the sermon was regarded as in itself sufficient for the whole service, and all other parts of public worship were looked upon either as preliminaries or subordinate exercises, not calling for any particular preparation or attention. It was a time when spiritual life was low, and the outward expression of that life exhibited a corresponding want of vigor. The evil, therefore, from which the Church suffered at this period was not an excess of attention to worship, but a neglect of it; not a too great elaboration of forms, but an almost total disregard of them, even of such as are helpful to the development of the spiritual life of the worshipper. And thus it came to pass that the struggle of more than a century against the use of prescribed forms of worship resulted in a condition more extreme than had been either anticipated or desired, for not only were such forms abandoned, but worship itself was neglected and disregarded.

In reviewing the period subsequent to the rejection of Laud's Liturgy and up to the time of the First Secession within the Church of Scotland, some features that mark the general trend of the spirit of Presbyterianism with regard to worship are clearly manifest.

First, in the rapid growth of the sect of the Brownists and their sympathizers, a growth that had been rendered the easier by the arbitrary acts of Charles and Laud in a preceding period, we find a clear indication of the spread of opinions strongly opposed to the use of prescribed forms of prayer and, indeed, of any ritual in the exercises of public worship. It may be urged, as has already been remarked, that this opposition was not the result of an unprejudiced consideration of the subject on its merits, but that it was rather an outcome of the spirit which had been aroused by the persecutions through which the Stuarts had endeavored to force a ritual upon the Church of Scotland. This may be granted, and yet it is not to be forgotten that many of those who held these views were among the excellent of their age, men who did not hesitate to bear persecution and to endure hardness as good soldiers of Christ for conscience' sake, and who, while doubtless influenced by the sentiments of those who stood to them either in the relation of friends or foes, were not men to allow prejudice to blind both reason and conscience alike. They had found a ritualistic worship associated with practices which they could not but judge to be ungodly and unjust, and engaged in by men who made much of form, but little of truth and charity and justice. It is not surprising, therefore, that in their desire for a revived spiritual life in the Church they should consider such a life to be most effectively forwarded by a departure from those forms that had been associated with the decay of true religion in their midst.

But, in the second place, this sentiment in favor of absolute freedom from form was not confined to sectaries or their sympathizers in the Church, it made itself manifest among the leaders of religion in the land and in the Church courts. The proposal of the General Assembly of 1643 to prepare a Directory of Worship, and the subsequent action of the Scottish Church in uniting with the Westminster Divines in the preparation of that Directory, clearly indicate that the Church had changed its attitude since the day in which the Assembly refused to alter any of the prayers in the Book of Common Order. The adoption of the Directory by the Scottish Church was in a measure an endorsation of the views of those who were opposed to the use of prescribed forms, and while it is true that the Scotch Commissioners would have preferred the retention of parts of the Book of Common Order, it is surely instructive that even these men were prepared to abandon all forms for worship and to accept simply a regulative Directory. The enthusiastic endorsation accorded the Directory, both by Parliament and by the Assembly, is a further indication that the spirit of the Church of Scotland had undergone whatever slight change was necessary to make it favorable to a simple regulation of public worship, unhampered by anything that had even the appearance of a ritual.

The introduction of the Directory into Scotland, it is true, effected a very slight change in the method of conducting public worship. Indeed, a comparison of the order of service as laid down in the Directory with that prescribed by the Book of Common Order shows the order of Worship to be the same in both. And thus it was that Baillie, in addressing the Assembly, and expressing his satisfaction at what had been accomplished, declared it to be a most remarkable distinction "that the practice of the Church of Scotland set down in a most wholesome, pious and prudent Directory, should come in the place of a Liturgy in all the three Dominions." By the adoption of the Directory all the substance of the worship of the Church of Scotland was retained with the order likewise of its different parts, but the suggested forms were surrendered, and even prayers, which owing to the circumstances of an earlier age had been retained and submitted for discretional use, were laid aside. No mention was made in the Directory of the use of the Gloria, nor did the creed find a place either in public worship or in the administration of the Sacraments, but the Lord's Prayer was mentioned as being "not only a pattern of prayer, but itself a comprehensive prayer," and a recommendation was accordingly made that it should be "used in the prayers of the Church."

It is evident, therefore, that the spirit of the Presbyterian Church was still strongly in favor of worship regulated in its order and providing for all the different spiritual exercises authorized by Scripture, but which at the same time should be free from any imposed forms from which worshippers should not be allowed to deviate. Of the opinion of the Church of Scotland at this time on the dire effects produced by the use of a ritual in the cultivation of formality among the people, and in the encouragement of a lifeless ministry in the Church, there can be no question, as the adoption of the terms of the preface to the Directory clearly shows. With the experience of the English Church of that age before them as an object lesson of the evil effects of ritualistic worship, the Presbyterian Church was not unwilling to abandon the use of all imposed forms, and to give itself rather to the cultivation and development of a truly spiritual worship.

And finally, the spirit thus planted and fostered in Scotland, was intensified during the persecutions which followed the restoration of Charles the Second. So firmly was this opposition to an imposed form of worship implanted in the hearts of Presbyterians that, alike at the Revolution and again at the time when the terms from the "Act of Union" between England and Scotland were under consideration the most earnest representations were made, to the end that there should be no change in the worship of the Scottish Church, but that the freedom in this matter, so prized and so dearly won, should be secured to the people of Scotland.

The Church of Scotland then, it may safely be said, moved ever in the direction of securing greater liberty in worship, rather than towards an increase of ritual and an imposition of form. Every succeeding period in her history, whether we judge from the general spirit characterizing the people or from the official acts of the Parliament and the Church, shows a growing distaste for a liturgical worship and an increasing appreciation of liberty in all matters pertaining to the approach of the soul to God. The Church of Scotland rejected, on the one hand, the extreme positions of sectaries who condemned alike a combined system of Church government, the celebration of marriage in the Church, the use in worship of the Lord's Prayer and all regulations even of the order of Divine worship, and on the other hand it resisted successfully the strongest Anglican influences which would have deprived it of the liberty it prized and would have circumscribed that liberty by a ritual. It retained dignity and order, while it rejected both the license of extravagance and the bondage of form.