without breaking with the visible Church, and therefore sought a formula which both Romanists and Reformers could subscribe,— urged many theories of sacrifice. It is noteworthy that in the earlier period these are more liberal, more Lutheran; while in the later they become more uncompromising. Even in the Council of Trent a few voices urged the vanishing criticism, arguing that if the Lord offered Himself in the Supper, there was nothing left to do upon the Cross. But the Council cut away the more moderate views and established the fundamental principle of the Roman Service, namely, that the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice for the quick and the dead, and may be offered to God to obtain various temporal blessings.

The period of the Reformation, therefore, is a period of development of the Roman liturgy. It issued in the extrusion of various forms and doctrines of the Mass; in a vigorous uniformity; and in the fixation of the sacrificial theory.

The Protestants were at one in rejection of this theory. Pope Leo XIII touches the very nerve of Protestantism when (from his standpoint) he denies the validity of the Orders of the English Church, because no one of its priests has been ordained. to be a sacrificing priest. The result of this rejection of the doctrine that the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice, is a new conception of the Divine Service, a conception practically new to the Church after a mistaken theory had obtained for many centuries. The worship of the Church no longer was regarded as something done for the people by a priesthood; and which even might be done for them in their absence. But here a new division arose among the Protestants themselves. On the one hand, Christian worship was regarded as something done simply by the people. Freed from the compulsion of the Church, these accepted the Scriptures as a new law. The Church was held to be bound by the example of the Church in the New Testament time. As the New Testament Church did, so must the Churches do forever, no more, no less. And of consequence, there grew up (just as had been the case in the post-Apostolic period) a notion of the binding authority of the Old Testament law. The people had part in the Service. In some places a ministry was superfluous. Sermons were demanded. And no songs were admitted but those of Holy Scripture itself. Hymns of human composition were forbidden. The Church was thrown back upon Holy Writ itself for all the

material of worship. (See Encyclopædia Britannica on Hymns.)

But there was another line of development. The use of the vernacular was insisted on, of course. But, besides, the other tongues were employed which were representative of the history of the Church. While the Gospels and Epistles were read in German, they might be first read in Latin too; and if the Creed and the sacred songs were translated and versified for the people's use, they were also sung in Latin; the Greek Kyrie could not be taken from the people; and Amen and Hosanna were sacred legacies from the Hebrews. This was not through impotence, or for music's sake only, but it was a recognition of the Divine element in the historical development of the Church. The same principle rescued the framework and purer constituents of the Western liturgy, to which, not the first century only, but all Christian. centuries, had contributed. The people had their part in the Service. To give them this the Old Testament Psalms were rejuvenated in German versions; which were not translations either prose or in verse, but fresh outpourings of Christian faith, as, for example, the version of the forty-sixth Psalm in Ein' feste Burg. So the Liturgical Songs were turned into rhymed German hymns. Some of these were happy, some were not. But they answered to a principle. Not only were they in rhyme, instead of in the parallelisms of Hebrew poetry, so that the people could remember and sing them more easily; but the necessary Christianization of the Old Testament Psalms, which all of us attempt by ignoring some things they say and injecting a fuller meaning than their inspired authors could conceive, and which the Church attempted in former ages by means of Antiphons before and after, and which other Protestants helplessly resigned, the Lutheran Reformation successfully accomplished by means of a new and Christian psalmody, in native German forms, fresh, and of inexhaustible volume. Here the people found their part in the Service. But the Service was not merely sacrificial; before all things it was sacramental. This was its fundamental character, and the songs of the people only answered to the gift of God it brought. The ministry instituted by God were stewards of His mysteries. They absolved. They ministered His saving Word. They are the hands and lips whereby Christ gives His Body and Blood, His forgiveness, Himself.

It may be asked whether the liturgical development of the

Reformation period was complete. No development of a living organism can have been complete long ago. The Roman Catholic Church has adhered to its rule of uniformity and to the principle of a propitiatory sacrifice; but there have been attempts to render the Service in the vernacular, to read the Gospels and Epistles in it, and to admit songs of the people. It must be admitted also that the Lutheran development of the liturgy was not complete in the sixteenth century. The relegation to a second place of the principle of uniformity, the assertion of the sacramental principle and the rejection of the propitiatory, and the claim of the people to spontaneous utterance, were established. But external events arrested the free criticism of the forms of worship. Certain temporary elements of expression hardened and were made a fetish. This was seen when, in the next century, after the devastations of war and the excitement of controversy, old forms out of which the life had departed, were restored. It would not be true to the spirit of the Reformation to reinstall the exact Service of the German Churches of the sixteenth century. The Common Service of our Churches is as Lutheran as it was and more Lutheran than it would be to-day.

EDWARD T. HORN.

Reading, Pa.

THE LITURGICAL DETERIORATION OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.

"FOR all the destructive processes which later on made themselves felt in the Lutheran churches of Germany the historic beginnings and elucidation must be sought in the period of restoration which followed the Thirty Years' War and extended into the first decades of the eighteenth century." With these words Kliefoth begins his dissertation on the Destruction of the Lutheran Orders of Service. That prolonged contest had brought disaster not only to the national, but also to the religious life of Germany. "The whole land had been tortured, torn to pieces, wrecked and brayed as in a mortar."* The war had not been carried on by disciplined armies, but by adventurous hordes, which swept over the country in search of plunder, burnt its towns and villages, and turned entire provinces into deserts. Hundreds of churches and schools were closed. Two-thirds of the native population disappeared, only to give place by degrees to a new vagabond element brutalized by warfare, unaccustomed to work, and with no bond of blood and traditional customs to hold it together. The princes too, lost their German sympathies and habits, and by frequent contact with the court of France during the reign of Louis XIV rapidly imbibed that monarch's autocratic and extravagant ideas. "Instead of studying the general welfare, they cruelly wrang from exhausted states the largest possible revenue to support a lavish and ridiculous expenditure. The pettiest princeling had his army, his palaces, his multitudes of household officers; and most of them pampered every vulgar appetite without respect either to morality or decency."†

Such were the conditions that succeeded the Thirty Years'
Carlyle.

+ Encyclopædia Britannica.

(lxvii)

War,-conditions that gave rise to a problem far more difficult of solution than that which confronted the Reformers of the preceding century. The latter entered upon their work at a time of real hunger and thirst for the Gospel. The masses, together with many of the princes, were therefore responsive; they received the Gospel with grateful hearts; in the purified Orders of Service which came with the restored Gospel, these vitalized hearts found the appropriate vehicle for the expression of their faith and love; and thus the form itself became a thing of life because life was breathed into it.

Altogether different was the problem at the middle of the seventeenth century. It was not the problem of renovation but of restoration; not the work of purifying the Church's faith and practice, which had already been done, but the much more difficult task of again bringing the purified faith and practice into the consciousness and life of a people demoralized by war, having no real hunger and thirst for the Gospel, and therefore not responsive to it as the masses of the preceding century had been.

The first step in the process of restoration was the reissue and fresh promulgation of the KOO (Church Orders), many of which had been destroyed by the war, and none of which were operative. These, with numerous additions and new provisions, were meant to reestablish order in the churches. But the fatal defect of these revised Orders was their bureaucratic character. The conceptions underlying many of their new provisions were legalistic and often dogmatically unsound; obedience was to be effected not solely by the power of evangelical truth as in the sixteenth century, but rather by threats of punishment for disobedience; and the result was that the very idea of the Church and its purpose became externalized, grades and hierarchical tendencies began to manifest themselves in its ministry, and, when at last the Church became a mere department of the civil government, the latter not only undertook to regulate the more external parochial affairs, but even to prescribe what liturgies, hymn-books and doctrinal standards should be used.

It is not difficult to understand how all this affected the Church's worship. The disciplinary measures in force indeed filled the churches; but those who gathered in them came rather in obedience to custom and external requirement than to satisfy an internal need. The conception of the healthful relation that