gregation who strives for liturgical accuracy is thereby striving for and attaining a deeper spiritual experience. The Holy Spirit, in this too, is guiding them into all truth, teaching them how to pray, blessing them with answer to the prayers He has put into their hearts and upon their lips; thus are they made "lively stones, built up into a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that show forth the praise of Him Who hath called them out of darkness into His marvellous light." H. DOUGLAS Spaeth. Albany, N. Y. CONTRIBUTIVE INFLUENCES NOTED IN THE HISTORY AND STRUCTURE OF THE LITURGY. ANY attempt to trace in a brief paper the influences which have contributed to the formation of our Common Service, and which have left their mark upon it, must of necessity be imperfect. Influences are extremely subtle and might be discovered where least expected, perhaps in an innocent rubric. Then too the influences are so varied in character that it becomes difficult to classify them: some belong to a school, some to an age, some to a person; some arise from doctrinal questions, others from practical or purely æsthetic needs. A further difficulty is met in the possibility that what might seem to be the working out of an old influence may be an independent return to an old form. Imperfect as the attempt may be, it may yet be of interest, and perhaps not without value. Our Common Service, it need hardly be mentioned here, is not a modern invention, but the result of a historic development. Into this development have entered many elements from the days of the Apostles-or even earlier-until the present day. Even now modifications in rubrics and rendering, if not in text, are suggested and made, the tracing of which to their sources is most interesting. In such a long period of development we cannot expect to find one direct line of evolution. In a certain sense of course the line is easily traced from the Liturgy of the Apostolic Constitutions through the Roman Mass, Luther's Formula Missa and Deutsche Messe, the Kirchenordnungen of the Sixteenth Century to the Common Service. But a glance at comparative tables such as are given in Köstlin's Geschichte des christlichen Gottesdienstes will convince any one that these have not evolved one from the other without undergoing many modifications due to local, doctrinal or practical influences. Yet since there is a development of one from the other it would be marvellous indeed if traces were not left of the |