Vindication of the revised liturgy historical and theological

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VINDICATION

REVISE1> I^ITURGY,

HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL,

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REV. ,T. W. NEVIN, 1). J).

JA,". W. KOiHtKRS.

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1867

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PRINCETON . NEW JERSEY

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PRESENTED BY

Dr. Henry S. Gehman

BX 9573 .N5 1867

Nevin, John Williamson, 1803

-1886.
Vindication of the revised

liturgy historical and

VINDICATION

REVISED EITURGY.

HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL

REY. J. W. feviN, D.

PHILADELPHIA;

JA8. B. ROIKIERS, PRINTER, 62 A 64 NORTH SIXTH STREET.
1867,

ELDERS' REQUEST.

Dayton, December 1, 1866.

Rev. J. W. Nevin, D.D.

Rev. 'AND Dear Bro.: —

We, tho undersigned, Elders of the General Synod, being impressed with the con-
viction, that the exhibition of the history, doctrines, and ruling spirit of the Revised
Liturgy, presented in a tract entitled, "A History and Criticism of the Ritualistic
Movement in the German Reformed Church, by Rev. J. H. A. Bombergcr, D.D.,"
must be one-sided and unfair, and, therefore, calculated to do much harm in the
Church; and desiring to have an expression of the views held by the other members
of the Committee who prepared the Liturgy, would unite in earnestly requesting
you to furnish us with a history of its preparation and a critical review of its merits,

for publication.

Very respectfully yours,

A. B. Wingerd, Mercersburg Classis.

D. S. Diefifenbacher, St. Paul's "

J, Troxel, Westmoreland "

John Zollinger, Illinois "

Wm. A. Wilt, Zion's "

T. J. Craig, Westmoreland "

Geo. P. Wiestling, Lancaster "

W. G. King, Clarion ' "

N. D. Hauer, Maryland "

D. C. Hammond, Maryland "

Daniel Cort, Iowa "

Jacob Bausman, Lancaster "

D. B. Martin, Mercersburg "

John Bowman, Mercersburg "

Geo. Hill, East Susquehannah "
Michael Brown, West Susquehanna "

R. E. Addams, Lebanon "
Samuel Zacharias, Zion's
D. Lupfer, Zion's

John W. Bachman, East Pennsylvania "

John Meily, Lebanon ''

INTRODUCTION.

The Request prefixed to this pamphlet sufficiently explains
its occasion and object; while it is of a character also not onlj
to justify, but even to demand and require its appearance. It
is most true, that Dr. Bomberger's tract is "one-sided and un-
fair, and therefore calculated to do much harm in the Church."
It was brought out hastily, just before the meeting of the late
General Synod at Dayton, to serve a party purpose, and as part
of a plan to pre-occupy the members of that body (particularly
in the West), with a prejudice against the Revised Liturgy,
which, it was hoped, might be sufficient to overwhelm and crush
it before it could have a chance of coming before the people.
It was, in this respect, like a political campaign document, let
off on the eve of an election for effect ; and it is characterized
throughout by the spirit of reckless misrepresentation we usually
meet with, and expect to meet with, in publications of this sort.
Its criticisms on the Liturgy itself do not amount to much.
They are vague, indefinite, and loose; turning, for the most part,
on the use of invidious terms of reproach, and appeals to popu-
lar prejudice. But this is only a small part of its offence. By
far the greater part of the tract is devoted to another object
altogether- Under the pretence of giving a history of the Lit-
urgy, it seeks to make capital against it by trying to show that
it is a grand fraud, which has been practised upon the Church
by the Committee intrusted with the work of its preparation.

6 INTRODUCTION,

In this view, it is an atrocious libel throughout upon the charac-
ter of the Committee, as well as an insult to the Church at large,
in whose service they have been working for so many years. All
this was brought out clearly enough in the Synod at Dayton ;
and the political bomb-shell went off there without much execu-
tion. But the matter deserves unquestionably a still more pub-
lic exposure. The voice of so large a portion of our Eastern
lay delegation in attendance at Dayton deserves to be heard.
I proceed, therefore, to the task of vindicating the Liturgy from
the wrong that is done to it in this tract, both historically and
theologically. The personalities which this must involve, to a
certain extent, I should have preferred having nothing to do
with; but I do not see how they are to be avoided.

As just intimated, what I have to say will fall naturally into
two general parts ; a defence of the Liturgy, or say rather of
the movement leading to it, historically considered ; secondly, a
defence of the Liturgy, considered in its actual theological cha-
racter. For the second part, I will take the liberty of using an
article I have written on this subject for the resuscitated Mer-
cersburg Review.

PART I

HISTORICAL VINDICATION OF THE NEW LITURGY.

Worship, in the use of prescribed forms, is not a new thing
in the Reformed Church. Liturgies, of some sort, have had
place within it from the beginning. They belonged to its church
life in Europe, and they came over with the same church life
to this country. At the same time, they were held to be a fair
subject all along for change and improvement. No Liturgy was
considered to be of perpetual force, even for the particular coun-
try or province in which it was used ; much less for other coun-
tries. The liberty of primitive times here was practically asserted,
as the proper liberty of the Protestant Church. The old Swiss
Liturgies in this way changed. The old Liturgy of the Palatinate
became antiquated, even in the Palatinate itself. There was a
movement all along, in other words, towards the realization of
something in worship, which it was felt had not been fully reached
in existing forms. The grossly unliturgical tendencies of later
times (Rationalistic in Germany, Methodistic in this country),
belonged themselves to this movement. But they had no power
to bring it to rest. They only served to urge it onward in its
course, by deepening the sense of a want which they had no
power to satisfy, and by causing it to be felt, that the true satis-
faction for this want must be sought in some other way. Hence,
among the "pious desires" of the Reformed Church in America,
we find at work all along, very sensibly felt, the wish for a satis-
factory Liturgy. The old Palatinate service was not satisfac-

8 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

torj; and none of the services brought over from Europe, during
the last century, were satisfactory. At the same time, the deeper
consciousness of the Church refused to settle into contentment
with the modern innovation of totally free prayer. Such wor-
ship had, indeed, forced itself into use on all sides; but the true
genius of the Church, at bottom, resented it as something foreign
and strange; and its voice was still heard, though in more or
less smothered accents, calling out for a Liturgy that might be
worthy of the name.

It was in response to this call, that the Mayer Liturgy^ as it
is called, made its appearance in 1837; the respectable work of
a truly respectable man. But, as all know, it failed to satisfy
the Church. Full opportunity Avas given for the trial of it. No-
body thought of opposing any bar to its use. No popular pre-
judice lay in its way; no outside jealousy stood ready to shout
Ritualism in its face. But still it found almost no favor. Minis-
ters and people consented in allowing it to fall well-nigh dead
from the press. Why? "Because," says Dr. Bomberger, "it
was unhappily not constructed after the pattern of our older
Liturgies," and was "too much of an accommodation to the
spirit of the times." That is, it did not please the times, be-
cause it went too much with the times, and refused to go full
against them, as was done soon after, Dr. B. tells us, by the re-
actionary movement which was led oif by the publication of the
Anxious Bench in 1842. What the Doctor says, moreover, of
its unhappy variation from our older Liturgies, is mere moon-
shine. No following of that pattern would have helped the
matter a particle. There the older Liturgies were; it was an
easy thing to bring any of them into use, if the wants of the
Church could have been satisfied in that way. But they were
not satisfactory; the Church was all the time feeling and reach-
ing after something better ; and the Mayer Liturgy proved a
flat failure, just because it was not something better, but the
same thing in fact — the continuation of a mode or manner of
worship, which it was felt the life of the Church had outgrown,
so as to need now a different style of worship altogether.

I well remember how Dr. Ranch used to speak of this Liturgy.

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 9

He had no patience "with its external, mechanical character;
especially after the various tinkerings it had to undergo before
its final adoption. A Liturgy, he used to say, in his earnest,
genial way, should be of one cast, a single creation, ruled through-
out by the presence of one central idea; in this respect, like a
poem, or other true work of art. But what had we here ? Dead
forms only, bound together in a dead way ; from which it was
vain to expect, therefore, that the breath of life should be kin-
dled in the devotions of the sanctuary. Such a Liturgy, he
thought, could do the Church harm only, and not good.

Some years passed after this, before any serious movement
was made toward getting out a better Liturgy. In the view of
many, the matter was not held to be of any very great account.
They were willing to abide by the system of free prayer, as it *
had place in the Presbyterian Church, That, I may say, was
prevailingly my own position. I was not liturgical in those days,
though not opposed to forms of prayer. But there was in the
German Reformed Church somehow the power of a different
spirit, that would not be kept down, but still cried, " Give us a
Liturgy, whereby Ave may be able to worship God, like our fa-
thers, with one mouth, as well as with one heart." Thus the
Classis of East Pennsylvania urged the subject upon the atten-
tion of the Synod, which met at Lancaster in 1847 ; stating its
dissatisfaction with the Mayer Liturgy, and asking that either
the Old Palatinate Liturgy, or some other, should be adopted,
and made of general use in its place. The whole subject was
hereupon referred to the several Classes for their consideration.
They reported favorably to the object the following year; and
the Synod of Hagerstown accordingly (1848), after a long and
earnest discussion, placed the matter in the hands of a special
Committee (Dr. J. H. A. Bomberger, Chairman), with instruc-
tions to report at the next annual meeting of Synod. This re-
port was presented to the Synod of Norristown in 1849, vindi-
cating at large the use of liturgical forms, and recommending
the appointment of a Committee to present at the next meeting
of Synod a plan or schedule for a Liturgy, such as the wishes
of the Church were supposed to require. The report was

10 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

adopted ; and a Liturgical Committee, as it came to be called
after ^Yards, was constituted, for the purpose of carrying its re-
commendation into effect.

The Committee consisted of the following persons : Ministers^
J. W. Nevin, Philip Schaff, Ellas Heiner, B. 0. Wolff, J. H. A.
Bomberger, H. Harbaugh, J. F. Berg; Elders, William Heyser,
J. C. Bucher, Dr. C. Schaeffer, and G. C. Welker.

Here properly starts, at the Synod of Norristown in 1849,
the particular Liturgical Moveijient, which, running through a
series of seventeen years, has issued finally in the Revised Lit-
urgy as it now stands, and the history of which Dr. Bomberger
has contrived so strangely to fabricate into a wholesale slander,
of the vilest sort, against the Committee by whom it has been
produced.

Let no one imagine, however, that I propose to follow him in
^he details of his pretended historical argument, with the view
of showing them untenable and false. That would be, indeed,
both time and labor thrown away. He abounds in special plead-
ing, and wastes page after page on points, that are, when all is
done, of no account for the main issue in hand. He lays him-
self out largely to show that the Synod from time to time clearly
and plainly had one object in view, while the Committee was
just as clearly and plainly bent on carrying out another object;
and it is wonderful what an amount of petty, quibbling inter-
pretation he employs to make the case appear in this false light.
There is a great parade of trying to bring out in this small way
the sense of particular documents and facts, as though this must
necessarily sliow historical veracity and candor. But who does
not know, how easy it is to make this sort of exactness in par.
ticulars the medium of wholesale misrepresentation in regard to
what is general ? This is just what Dr. Bomberger has done ; and
what is required, therefore, is not a rectification of his histori-
cal positions and points in detail, but a broad exposition rather
of the universal falsehood that runs through his tract. This
can be done, happily, v.'ith-out much trouble.

A simple statement of the theory, on which the Doctor con-
structs what he calls his History of the Ritualistic Movement

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 11

in the German Reformed Church, is enough to overthrow, for
any reflecting mind, the credit of the whole thing. It is too
monstrously absurd for any sober belief. It bears the stamp of
wholesale falsification on its very face.

The theory runs as follows : — The Synod of the German Re-
formed Church proposed to have a new Liturgy, and appointed a
Committee of suppf^sed reliable men (Dr. Bomberger and Dr. Berg
among them), to bring out the work. The Synod had, at the same
time, a very clear conception of what it wanted and wished in this
movement, and took pains, from year to year, to make the Com-
mittee understand exactly the character of the service they were
expected to perform. Strangely enough, however, this Com-
mittee seemed to be possessed, from the beginning, with a deter-
mination not to do the very thing they were charged to do in this
solemn Avay. Nay, worse than this; it soon became only too
evident, that the Committee had deliberately made up their
mind (Drs. Berg and Bomberger still among them), to do the
very opposite of the thing they were thus charged to do; that
they had, in other words, conceived the plan of another order
of worship, a liturgical service altogether different from what
the Synod was thinking and resolving about, and now set them-
selves systematically to the task of bringing the Synod to ac-
cept their scheme, instead of its own. It was a bold purpose,
assuredly; but the men also were bold, who had it in hand; their
position in the Church gave them mighty advantage; and the
event has shown that their policy was at once far reaching and
profound. They knew it was in vain to think of carrying their
point with the Synod openly and directly. So they went to
work stealthily, and with circuitous management and stratagem,
to accomplish their object; content to wait through years, if
only they might be sure of reaching it in the end. With this
view, it became necessary, first of all, to stave off action in regard
to the Liturgy; in order that time might be gained in this way
for working the mind of the Church round, by skilful manipu-
lation, to a new way of looking at the subject, and so room be
made for palming off upon it at last what the Committee wished
to give it, in place of what the Church itself wanted to have.

12 ■ HISTORICAL VINDICATION

Such was the situation of things from the very bei^inning of this
Liturgical Movement; and here it is we have the key, Avhich,
properly applied, is sufficient to unlock the secret sense of all
its historical intricacies, as regards both the Committee and the
Syno:L The history of the movement is simply the progress of
a curious game between these two bodies — all simplicity on the
one side, and all duplicity (diabolically astutft) on the other — in
which the Committee succeeds in out-witting and out-generalling
the Synod through seventeen weary, mortal years; so as to
bring things to the melancholy pass they have now reached in
the Revised Liturgy. Whether the Committee acted, or refused
to act, it all meant the same thing. Their one grand object
throughout, was to baffle and defeat the wishes of the Synod;
and this they did with a vengeance. Never, surely, was Govern-
ment, political or religious, so impudently bamboozled before*
The Synod had the power all in its own hands; might have had
things at any time its own way: could have said whenever it
pleased: "Gentlemen of the Liturgical Committee, you have
been appointed to do the work we want, in the way we want,
and not in any other way; and if you do not choose to do it in
this way, go about your business ; we will appoint another Com-
mittee to do the work in your place." This the Synod could
have said and done at any time; but just this the Synod never
did say, and never would do. On the contrary, it persisted all
alon<x in holdinof this same refractory Committee to its task.
Year after year, the Committee reported, according to Dr. Bora-
berger, that it was not doing what the Synod wanted ; year after
year, the Synod accepted the report, and continued the Com-
mittee in service — all the while reiterating, according to Dr.
Bomberger, in spirit, at least, if not in form, its original in-
structions. No other Committee could serve its turn but this.
No other, it was supposed, could produce a Liturgy to its satis-
faction. In spite of all its miserable contumacy, tergiversation,
and treasonable malpractice, no other was to be thought of for
a moment as worthy of the same confidence. It must be either
this Lituro-ical Committee or none. 0 marvellous Committee!
No wonder there should be to Dr. Bomberger's vision "a ser-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 13

pent" in the Liturgy itself, when the magicians that produced
it could exercise such basilisk enchantment over the senses of
the venerable body they thus played fast and loose with, through
a period of seventeen years.

The mere statement of such a theory as this, I repeat, is
enough to cover it Avith confusion. It is outrageously prepos-
terous. No man in his senses can believe it. Yet this is just
what all comes to, in Dr. Bomberger's professed history of what
he calls the ritualistic movement in the German Reformed
Church. There is no true history in it. With all its talk about
fairness and candor, documents and facts, it is nothing more
than a caricature of history from beginning to end.

The movement inaugurated at Norristown in 1849, he says,
contemplated no such Liturgy as we have now offered for our
use. This is very true, and needs no argument whatever. The
Committee was instructed to "examine the various Liturgies of
the Reformed Churches, and other works published on this sub-
ject in later times, and specify, as far as this may be done, the
particular forms that are believed to be needed, and furnish
specimens also, such as may be regarded as called for in the
circumstances of the Church in this country." All this, evi-
dently, looks only to the conception of a book of forms for the
pulpit; and falls far short of Avhat the idea of a liturgical set-
vice has come to mean among us since that time. It is worthy
of being noted, however, that even at this early stage of the
movement, it was held that there should be no mere following
of European examples in what was done, but a proper regard,
also, to the circumstances of the Church in this country.

At the Synod of Martinsburg, the following year, 1850, the
Liturgical Committee was heard from, as follows: "The Com-
mittee appointed to commence the preparation of a new Liturgy,
respectfully report, that after such attention as they have been
able to give to the subject, and in view of the general posture
of the Church at the present time, they have not considered it
expedient, as yet, to go forward with the work. Should it be
felt necessary on the part of the Synod to bring out at
once a new formulary for public use, it is believed that the

14 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

most advisable course for ''the present would be to give a trans-
lation simply of the old Liturgy of the Palatinate; although
the Committee are, by no means, of the mind, that this would
be the best ultimate form in which to provide for the great in-
terest here in question. Altogether, it is felt, however, that
other questions now before the Church need first to be settled,
in order that it may become important really to bestow any full
and final care on this question of a new Liturgy."

All this, certainly, looks innocent enough. The Committee
felt that nothing they could make, in the way of compilation,
out of the Palatinate Liturgy and others, would prove satisfac-
tory ; and they gave this as a reason for their not having gone
forward with the work assigned them; while they say, at the
same time, that if Synod thought otherwise, and must have a
formulary of the sort proposed without farther delay, then the
Committee recommend simply the Old Palatinate Liturgy itself
as the best present provision for the case.

But see, now, how Dr. Bomberger manages to look at so
plain and simple a matter through his green, historical specta-
cles. Here, at the very outset, he tells us, we are met with
that diplomatic duplicity, which is found to characterize the
relations of the Committee to the Synod all along afterwards.
He has the impudence to say, without a particle of proof, that
"the real import of the reasons" assigned by the Committee,
"for not at once proceeding with their work," was not what
these seemed to mean at the time on their face. There was no
honesty in their report. " The Synod had not asked the Com-
mittee to investigate anew the subject of ecclesiastical ritualism;
to take into consideration the expediency or the advisableness
of going forward with the preparation of suitable forms; to
inquire into the present posture of the Church ; or to raise other
similar side issues." What they did now, in doing nothing,
was the beginning of their refractoriness, and ominous of trou-
ble. "This was the first instance in the history of this liturgi-
cal movement, in which the Committee, through the influence
of its leading members, set up its own opinions and wishes, in

OF THE NEW LITUKGY. 15

opposition to those of the Synod and the Church; unhappily, it
was not the last."

Is not this the sublimity of nonsense? Did not the Com-
mittee recommend the Palatinate Liturgy, if one must be had
at once, as the best thing they felt themselves prepared to bring
forward at that time? What was there, then, to hinder the
Synod from adopting it, and urging the use of it upon the
churches? The Committee stated frankly their own opinion,
that this would not prove ultimately satisfactory ; but the Synod
was not bound, in any way, to have the same judgment. Why
did it not go on, then, to have the Palatinate Liturgy trans-
lated and published? Plainly, because it thought, with the
Committee, that the circumstances of the Church called for
something different. No censure was passed on the Commit-
tee. They were continued in office and trust, as before.

One year after this, at the Synod of Lancaster, 1851, the
Liturgical Committee again present themselves, and report no
progress. They had not found the way open to do anything
they could be satisfied with, in the work placed in their hands;
and they had come to despair very much of their being able to
produce any Liturgy, that would prove generally and perma-
nently satisfactory to the Church. This was especially my own
feeling, I had not led the way at all in the movement; my
heart was not in it with any special zeal ; I was concerned with
it only in obedience to the appointment of Synod; other in-
terests appeared to me at the time to be of more serious ac-
count; and I had no faith in our being able to bring the work
to any ultimate success. In these circumstances, I was not
willing to stand charged with the responsibility of continuing
Chairman of the Committee; and I asked the Synod, accor-
dingly, to relieve me from this position; with the understand-
ing that I would be willing to act with it still in a subordinate
character. The request was granted, and Dr. Schaff was made
Chairman in my place. The name of Prof. T. C. Porter, at
the same time, was added to the Committee.

All this again looks innocent enough; for common eyes, there
would seem to be no mystery about it whatever. But only see

16 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

once more, what becomes of it, Avhen subjected to the disordered
vision of Dr. Bomberger. I get no credit for giving up the leader-
ship of the Committee; on the contrary, it seems to be regarded
rather as a stroke of policy, which was designed to help on the
general object of obstructing the Avork the Synod was vainly
struggling to get done; although happily, in this case, it seems
again, the Synod saw through the ruse, and waved it handsomely
to the one side. "It was probably understood," we are told, "by
most of the clergymen at least of the Synod, why Dr. Nevin
had been unable to carry out the Avishes of the Church in the
work of the Liturgy, and why he desired to be relieved from all
responsibility as Chairman of the Committee. But the Synod
showed no disposition to modify its views, in order to accommo-
date them to his opinions in the case. Had there been any
thought of departing from the purpose and principles at first
laid down by the Synod of Norristown, this would have been a
fitting time to bring out such a thought. Instead, however, of
betraying any tendency in this direction, the Synod held fast
to its original design, accepted Dr. Nevin's resignation, ap-
pointed Dr. Schaif in his place, and impliedly, said: Now,
brethren, we hope you will have no farther difiiculty in pressing
forward rapidly Avith the Avork, according to instructions previ-
ously given, but be able to report its early completion." How
the plot thickens ! How the history becomes clear as mud!

The hypothesis is, that the Committee have joined hands to
thwart the Synod in its design to have a certain kind of Liturgy.
Dr. Schaff and myself are at the bottom of the conspiracy; we
have conceived the idea of reaching, at last, another order of
worship altogether, and are doing all we can, theologically, to
bring about such a result; we have engaged the Committee to
hold back the liturgical movement ; and my giving up the helm
is only part of the play, intended to bring matters to a dead-
lock, and thus force the Synod to come into our vieAvs. The
Synod has some dim sense, however, of the way things are
going ; winks significantly at the last sly trick in particular ;
places the rudder in the trustworthy hands of Dr. Schaff; leaves
the impracticable Committee constituted, in all other respects,

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 17

as before ; and bids a hearty God-speed to their labors, with in-
struction to "report as soon as possible." Is not that rich?

Dr. Schaff now went to work in earnest, and set the rest of
us to work also, in preparing forms. He had faith in the
movement ; as for myself, I had, I confess, almost none. Still,
I tried to do my share of service, and spent hours in what was
found to be generally a tedious and irksome task. The work
involved, necessarily, liturgical studies; and these brought
with them a growing liturgical culture, which required an en-
largement of the range, within which it was proposed, origi-
nally, to confine the course of the movement.

In the report of the Committee, made to the Synod of Balti-
more in 1852, through Dr. Schaff, all this is brought fairly and
fully into view. It gave a plan of such a Liturgy as was pro-
posed ; set forth the principles on which it should be constructed,
and offered some specimens of what it was expected to contain.
In this report, the ground is taken distinctly, that the new
Liturgy ought not to be shaped simply after modern models,
reaching back no farther than the Reformation; that among
these later schemes of worship, " special reference ought to be
had to the Old Palatinate and other Reformed Liturgies of the
sixteenth century"; but that the general basis of the work
should be " the liturgical worship of the Primitive Church, as
far as this can be ascertained from the Holy Scriptures, the
oldest ecclesiastical writers, and the Liturgies of the Greek and-
Latin Churches of the third and fourth centuries." Should
the principles proposed be conscientiously and wisely carried
out, the report, in conclusion, adds, "it is hoped that, by the
blessing of God, a Liturgy might be produced at last, which,
will be a bond of union, both with the ancient Catholic Church,
and the Reformation, and yet be the product of the religious
life of our denomination in its present state."

Dr. Bomberger troubles himself sorely with this famous Bal-
timore report. The Synod, he thinks, hardly knew what it
was about, when it was induced to adopt it. " There was no
time taken," he tells us, "to weigh its import. There was no
dissection of its several parts, no discussion of its pregnant pro-.
2

18 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

positions. With all the saving, modifying clauses, which -we
shall show it contains, it cannot be denied, that it proposes great
departures from the original design and purpose of the Synod."
This is a great confession, coming from Dr. Bomberger. But
he tries bravely again to do away with its damaging effect ; by-
catching at all the "saving, modifying clauses " he can find in
the case, and making use of them in the way of very small chi-
canery and special pleading, to show that after all the action of
Synod here, does not mean as much as it seems to mean. Mat-
ters might have been worse. There is room for praise in what
was done, as well as blame. The wisdom of the Synod shines
beautifully through its folly ; its unseemly haste is charac-
terized, after all, by great caution. " It is very significant,"
our ecclesiastical Philadelphia lawyer tells us, "that its action
is expressed in such cautious terms." "Hastily as this im-
portant report was disposed of, there is no such endorsement of
its peculiar sentiments, no such committal even to the general
basis and plan of liturgy now proposed, or to the proposed de-
partures from the first purpose and aim of Synod in this whole
movement, as should be considered sufficient to bind the Synod
and the Church to all the details of the report, or to debar
all modifications and objections which subsequent reflection
misrht sugrgest." Precious crumbs of comfort for the chickens
of the covenant, truly, in so hard a case! "It proves the
wisdom of the body," it is added, "that it spoke with so
much ofl5cial reserve upon the subject. The report was
simply adopted, without any expression on its merits." Only
this, and nothing more; saving merely a resolution, bidding the
Committee to go ahead with their work, and "to carry out the
suggestions made at the close of their report." Only this;
" even suppose the pound of flesh is rigorously exacted, and the
Synod held relentlessly to the letter of the bond." Only this, 0
Shylock ; and nothing more.

A truce, however, to this pleasantry. I have no mind to
stand strictly upon the pound of flesh; and do not care at all
to run a race of special pleading with Dr. Bomberger for the
exact letter of this Baltimore bond. It may not mean, in the
circumstances, all that it has been logically made to mean since.

OP THE NEW LITURGY. W

It is very likely, the Synod did not closely weigh terms, and
that, for a large part of it at least, the full import of its action
Was not, at the time, distinctly considered. But what then ?
Are we to suppose, that it had not at least a general sense of
what it was about ? This general sense, in the case, is all we
care for; and it is, in fact, also all that is needed, to take the
wind out of Dr. Bomberger's historical hobby, and to place the
liturgical movement before us in its true light.

Movement there was in the matter, beyond all controversy or
question. The Committee had moved; they make no secret of
the fact; they come before the Synod, asking an enlargement
of the terms of their commission. And now it appears that
there has been movement also in the Synod. The confession
the Committee make of their troubles is taken in good part.
It ought not to have been so, according to Dr. Bomberger.
"'Who had directed them," he asks, "to make the study of
medieval or still earlier liturgies and litanies an essential part
of their work ? Who had requested them to make selections of
services from works issued before the Reformation? Not the
Synod. On the contrary, not trusting to what might be taken
for granted, the Synod, as we have seen, from the first, used
the precaution of naming, definitely, the sources from which it
expected the matter of the new Liturgy to be substantially
drawn. These were genuine Reformed Liturgies from that of
the Palatinate (1663) onwards." What business had the Com-
mittee, then, to be bewildering and befogging themselves, like
wayward, truant children, with studies outside of these whole-
some limits. "Above all, what propriety was there in seeking
to involve the Synod and the Church in perplexities, by which,
through their disregard of very definite instructions, they had
become embarrassed ? Neglecting to use the chart and com-
pass put into their hands by the Church, they had become en-
tangled in the wilderness. Why seek to entice the Church into
that same wilderness, not to help them out, but to lodge or
wander there with them?" The case is well put. All can see
that. But, unfortunately, this Baltimore Synod would not
look at the matter in that way. It did not get angry with the

20 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

Committee; did not scold it; did not bid it back, like a set of
naughty cliildren, to the bounds from which it had wilfully
strayed. On the contrary, the Synod professed to be well
pleased with the Committee ; approved its wandering studies ;
had compassion on its perplexities ; and generously granted all
it asked in the way of enlarged powers. The Church, in other
words, followed the Committee into the wilderness. Was there
no movement in all this? Did the Synod of Baltimore stand,
in regard to the liturgical question, just where the Synod of
Norristown stood three years before ? Could it possibly dream
that it did so, in the surroundings of its action ? No amount
of pettifoggery can set aside, what all the world may so easily
see to be the plain meaning of so plain a case.

The matter, however, admits and requires a still broader
view than this. Whatever the Baltimore Synod meant by its
action, that action was not final. It could not bind the Church,
says Dr. Bomberger, against the reaction of better subsequent
thought rearward. Just as little, say we, could it bind the
Church against the movement of better subsequent thought for-
ward. Our concern, in the case of these Baltimore principles
and instructions, is, after all, not so much with what they
meant for the Baltimore Synod itself, as with the sense in
which they have been actually carried out since by the Liturgi-
cal Committee, under the eye and open sanction of more than
a dozen later Synods. With regard to this, at all events, there
can be no mistake. The liturgical movement, the true inward
history of the new Liturgy, did not begin in 1852 ; and it was
very far from having come to its end there.

The names of the Rev. Dr. D. Zacharias, and Elders G.
Schseffer and J. E,odenmayer, were now substituted, in the
Committee, for those of the Rev. Dr. Berg (who had gone into
the Reformed Dutch Church), and the Elders, J. C. Bucher
and Dr. C. Schseffer (deceased). There was added to it, also,
the name of the Rev. Dr. Samuel R. Fisher.

Three years now passed, before we hear of another report
from the Liturgical Committee. It was working to some ex-
tent ; but not with any comfortable feeling of success. During

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 21

part of the time, Dr. SchafF was in Europe. Much that was
done was felt to be afterwards unsatisfactory. There was an
accumulation of material, which brought with it no light or
order in the work of construction. The more the Committee
read and studied, and talked together, on the subject, the
more they found that it was no small thing to make a Liturgy ;
and could only smile at the easy credulity with which it had
been imagined at the first, that such a work might be carried
through in the course of a single year. One great difficulty
was, that the work seemed continually to unsettle and destroy
itself. 'What was done, would not stay done; but had all the
time to be done over again. In knowing the wreck of matter,
and the crush of forms, through which the hard way of the
Committee thus led them, one is tempted to think Dr. Bomber-
gcr half right; and to ask what business they had then to be
troubling themselves with out of the way studies, which nobody
required at their hands. Why should they have left the green
pastures of ignorance, and the quiet waters of tradition, where
they were first put to the working out of their task? Why,
indeed, 0 foolish, straying, and now much-bewildered Liturgi-
cal Committee.

At the Synod of Chambersburg, however, in 1855, we meet
them again ; and are pleased to learn, from their report, that
they have made progress, and are in a fair way to get their
work before the Church in the course of the coming year. But
the tone in which they speak of it is anything but sanguine.
^'A growing sense," they say, "of the great difficulty and re-
sponsibility of the task intrusted to their care, and of their in-
sufficiency satisfactorily to perform it, has brought them to the
conclusion strongly to dis-advise any final action of Synod, for
Bome time to come, on this subject; which is so intimately in-
terwoven with the most vital and sacred interests of the Church,
and which is just now beginning to be seriously agitated also
in various other Protestant denominations of our country.
Their intention is simply to furnish, according to the best of
their ability, -d provisional liturgy, including a sufficient variety
of forms for examination and optional use, until the Church be

22 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

fully prepared, by practical experience, to bring it into such a
shape and form as will best suit the wants of our ministers and
congregations, and make it, under the blessing of God, a rich
fountain of sound piety and fervent devotion for many genera-
tions."

The Synod, as usual, made the action of the Committee its
own. The report was adopted ; the proposition in regard to a
provisional liturgy was approved ; and order was taken to pro-
vide for its publication. At the same time, the Rev. Dr. E. V.
Gerhart was added to the Committee.

The Committee went on working; but found it impossible
still to bring their work to a close so soon as they had expected.
Meeting after meeting was called; and session after session
was devoted to the task of reviewing preparations, discussing
principles, weighing thoughts, and measuring the proper sense
of words. A most important educational discipline, all felt it
to be who took part in it, not only in a liturgical but also in a
theological view. But the discipline was laborious and dis-
couraging. As before, it was hard to get things finally fixed.
Reconstruction and reorganization seemed to have no end. At
last, however, though not until another meeting of Synod had
passed, the end did come; and the Committee met, for the last
time as they trusted, in October, 1857, to subject their work to
a final joint revision, and to superintend its rapid progress
through the press.

This was an interesting occasion. The entire work, previ-
ously examined and agreed upon in parts, was now, after a
new general review, adopted unanimously as a whole, in the
form in which it became known afterwards as the Provisional
Liturgy. It is a little curious, that the only notice we have of
this meeting, and of the merits of the new Liturgy, published
at the time, is from the pen of the same Dr. J. H. A. Bomber-
ger, who sees in the whole Liturgical Movement now nothing
less than a foul conspiracy against the dearest interests of the
German Reformed Church. It is to be found in a long article
which he published in the German Reformed Messenger of
November 18, 1857, devoted wholly to the purpose of recom-

OP THE NEW LITURGY. 23

mendinT the work. It can do no harm, to borrow here a few
touches from thi:^ fine okl historiographical sketch. They be-
long properly to our subject.

The Committee, it should have been stated, met in Philadel-
phia. The occasion was metropolitan. "Its final sessions," we
are informed, "were held in the old consistory room of the Race
street German Reformed Church, and around the same old walnut
table, at which Schlatter, Wynckhaus, Ilendel, Ilelffenstein, and
Weiberg, all of blessed memory, had so often been seated, when
presiding over the council of the congregation, or instructing
the youth of their charge in the holy doctrines of our religion,
as set forth in the Heidelberg Catechism. The sessions of the
Committee were closed Avith a fervent thanksgiving prayer, and
the singing of the doxology."

Now for the character of the work. " The Plan and Prin-
ciples reported to the Synod of Baltimore in 1852, and then
approved of " — it is thus the Dr. Bombcrger of 1857 can talk —
"have been faithfully adhered to in the execution of the work.
Accordingly, while everything has been made to yield to the
true standard and spirit of genuine Evangelical Protestantism,
and especially to the Reformed type thereof, scope has been
given to that liberal, catholic spirit, which constitutes one of
the most glorious characteristics of an elevated Christian free-
dom, and is the beautiful contrast of every sort of bigotry and
exclusiveness. 'AH things are yours,' is the assurance of the
Apostle. The Evangelical Catholic Christian, therefore, may
appreciate every thing that is good, and make it auxiliary to
his faith, his piety, and his love. He need despise, or reject,
no age, no nation, no Church, no body of Christians wdio hold
the truth in righteousness, but regard all with charity, and
learn from all, with meek wisdom, whatever they may ofier for
his improvement. In this spirit, according to the Plan and
Principles referred to, the Committee, like the prudent scribe
(Matt, xiii: 52), seems to have endeavored to bring forth, out
of the rich treasures of the Church, things old and new, that
by all combined, the edification of Christ's flock may be se-
cured. But the Christian liberality of spirit thus exercised

24 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

has been, we believe, limited at all points by ultimate reference
to our old standard Palatinate Liturgy. So that while such
modifications (in the general plan, in the specific forms, and in
the pervading style), as were felt to be expedient and neces-
sary, have been freely allowed, the new work will be found to
be in essential agreement with the old. It may be said io be
what the original framers of the Palatinate Liturgy would have
made it, had they lived and labored in such a period as ours." —
"The book, like every thing else new, will have to be tried, be-
fore any right judgment Can be passed upon it. If only it be
tried in candor!" — "If only the sacramental, festival, and special
forms of the new work should come into general public use in
our Church, a greatly beneficial influence must be exerted. We
have seen and read these forms, and feel confident that they
will commend themselves to the warmest approval of all who
will seriously and candidly study them." — "Although the forms
for the administration of the sacraments are intended to be
used chiefly by pastors and people collectively on the appro-
priate occasions, they will be found no less instructive for pri-
vate i^erusal. Parents, who have been blessed with children,
whom they have given to the Lord in baptism, would find much
admonition and profit in the baptismal service. The reading
of it at intervals, in their homes, and to their children, would
keep all concerned in beneficial remembrance of what had been
promised and done. And nothing, in the way of outward help,
would be so well calculated (in the writer's full conviction) to
promote the worthy and comfortable observance of the Holy
Supper, as the devout perusal of the communion service on the
evening, or several times during the week, before the sacra-
mental Sunday."

Who would imagine this to be the very same Dr. J. H. A.
Bomberger, that now breathes out threatenings and slaughter
against the Liturgy in its revised form ; who sees in it all manner
of "Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire;" and who espe-
cially denounces its baptismal and communion services (in no
material point changed from what they were in 1857), as being
Burcharged with theological poison of the very worst kind!

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 2i)

At the Synod of Allentown in 1857, the Committee reported
what was now done. The Provisional Liturgy was complete,
and in the printer's hands. The report was adopted ; and the
following vote of thanks was passed at the same time, showing
the light in which the services of the Committee were regarded.
It does not sound much like alienation of confidence, or soured
humor. The whole runs: "Resolved, That our most devout
thanks are due to the Great Head of the Church, for having
sustained the brethren of the Committee in their weighty labors,
and for having gifted them with that spirit of cordial harmony
essential to the success of such an undertaking. Resolved,
That the thanks of this Synod are due, and are hereby tendered,
to the brethren of the Committee, for the strict attention, the
untiring perseverance, the self-denying labors, and the unwa-
vering fidelity, which they have devoted to the work assigned
to them, and that this Synod heartily commend them to the
blessing of Almighty God, and to the warmest regard and love
of the German Reformed Church." And yet, according to Dr.
Bomberger, this same Committee (himself among them) had been
fooling the Synod for eight long years ; not doing all the time
what the Synod wanted done; and now at last stood there in-
sulting the Synod to its very face, with the offer of a Liturgy,
the like of which nobody had dreamed of in 1849 at Norris-
town!

The Provisional Liturgy, of course, carried with it no binding
authority of any kind for the churches. They were merely al-
lowed to make use of it, in whole or in part, if they saw proper.
It was put forth professedly as an experiment. By an under-
standing with the publishers, this arrangement was to run on
for at least ten years.

I had no expectation myself, that the work would be generally
adopted. It was not fitted for easy and smooth practice ; it
seemed to be too great a change for our churches ; the very fact
of its being an experiment, stood in the way of any general se-
rious effort to bring it into use. Still I did not feel that the
labors of the Committee had been thrown av/ay. The work had
its literary value. It might do good service educationally. It

26 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

was a relief to feel, at all events, that with it we had reached a
decent end for our long, weary pilgrimage in search of a Litur-
gy ; for there was no reason to think we could now reach our
object in any other way. The Church might not be prepared
at all for this new order of worship; but it was just as clear,
that she could not now be satisfied with any such book of forms
as was thought of in the beginning. We were beyond that. We
had got into the wilderness together; and the best we could do
was to make up our minds now to stay there for forty years at
least, leaving it for the next generation to get up their own
Liturgy, should they think proper, in a way to please them-
selves. That was about the feeling in which I had come to settle
down comfortably in regard to the whole matter; and it gave
me any thing but pleasure to be rudely jostled out of it, a few
years later, by the cry that was raised for a Revision.

The Liturgy, in fact, did not get into any general use. In
that respect it proved a failure. Yet it was wonderful to see,
how it worked notwithstanding as a silent influence among us,
in favor of sound ideas on the subject of Christian worship. It
wrought a change, far and wide, in the spirit and form of our
sanctuary services. It served to deepen among us the power of
the liturgical movement, which had given it birth. It became
more and more apparent, that this movement could not be turned
back; could not be arrested, and made to stand still. Its only
redemption and deliverance lay in going forward.

Three years later, at the Synod of Lebanon, in 1860, the
Liturgical Committee faiade their final report, and were dis-
charged. The subject of revision had now come to engage con-
siderable attention ; and this same Synod, accordingly, passed
an act referring the work to the examination of the Classes,
for the purpose of obtaining their judgment of what was desira-
ble with regard to it in this view.

Meanwhile, however, the old treasonable practising of the
Committee against the Church was kept up, according to Dr.
Bomberger, even worse than before. The Committee, as such,
indeed, was discharged, and had no longer any existence ; but
its members were as badly alive and awake as ever ; and their

OF TUE NEW LITURGY. 27

plan was now to have the work of revision deferred (as they
had held back the work of preparation before, with masterly in-
activity, through so many years), in the hope that the Provi-
sional Liturgy, every where unpopular, might still go on never-
theless to infect the popular mind with its deleterious poison;
so that the way should be open finally for revising it at last into
the full-blown ritualism, which it had been in the heart of this
conspiracy all along to compass and reach. And now let the
world take note of "a remarkable phenomenon, having relation
to the general movement, which appeared during the year
1861" — a sort of prodigy in the heavens, that might well cause
children at least to stand aghast. The Liturgy would not take
with the grown membership of the Church; the people refused
to be educated by it out of their old notions and customs. So
the defunct Committee, it would seem, said somehow among
themselves : " Go to now ; we will send forth a lying spirit among
the children, whereby they can be reached and trained into the
new ways. Children and youth are pliant and unsuspicious;
they can be taught and moulded to any thing." A new Sun-
day-school Hymn Book, for which, unfortunately, there was
only too much need at the time, with proper ritualistic appara-
tus, suggested itself as a proper medium for the end proposed;
and a suitable organ to produce it was not long wanting. The
plot, accordingly, was carried into effect. " Such a Hymn
Book," we are solemnly informed, "was prepared by the Rev.
Dr. Harbaugh, a member of the Liturgical Committee, and was
sent forth on its Jesuitical mission." Was it not, then, by the
instigation of the Committee? If not, pray, by whose insti-
gation?

At the Synod of Easton, in 1861, the action of the several
Classes on the question of revision, was reported at large. It
did not amount to much. The Classes were greatly divided in
their judgment; and so far as any suggestions were made in re-
gard to what should be modified or changed, they were of too
loose and indeterminate a character altogether to be of any prac-
tical account. The whole subject, in truth, was exceedingly
confused. Nobody doubted the necessity of having the Liturgy

28 ^ HISTORICAL VINDICATION

revised sooner or later, if it was ever to come into general use;
the only question was, whether the revision should go on imme-
diat«lj, or be postponed, for years at least, if not indefinitely.
For reasons already given, I was myself in favor of indefinite
postponement.

The proposition to take the work in hand at once, however,
prevailed. After considerable discussion, the Synod took action
as follows: "Resolved, That the Provisional Liturgy be placed
in the hands of the original Committee for final revision ; and
that the Committee be instructed to consider the suggestions of
the Classes as given in the minutes of their late meetings, and
use them in the revision of their work, as far as the general va-
riety of the work will allow, and in a way that shall not be in-
consistent either with established liturgical principles and usages,
or with the devotional or doctrinal genius of the German Re-
formed Church. That the Committee be requested to report at
the next annual meeting of the Synod, if possible, with a view
of bringing this devotional work to a consummation desired by
the Church, during the Tricentennial commemoration of the
Heidelberg Catechism."

To any unsophisticated mind, the sense of this proceeding is
abundantly plain. It did not mean, that the Committee must
fall back on the old Norristown instructions of 1849; that the
Synod had not changed at all its views of what a Liturgy should
be since that time; and that the course of the Committee, in not
carrying them out heretofore, had been refractory and contu-
macious. Nothing of this sort. It meant plainly a reiteration
of the Baltimore instructions of 1852; in the sense in which
these had been distinctly understood and acted upon by the
Committee afterwards ; in the sense in which every body could
see that they had been actually wrought into the constitution of
the Provisional Liturgy. That was, in fact, an attempt to bring
the liturgical life of the first ages into harmonious union with
the devotional and doctrinal genius of the Reformed Church in
modern times. And now the order of Synod is, not that it
should be pulled to pieces under pretence of amendment, but
that its organic unity should be preserved; so that, through all

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 29

changes, it should remain substantially what it now was, and
not be metamorphosed into something else of wholly different
nature. This, unquestionably, is what the action of that Eastori
Synod means, and was intended to mean. And in token of it
still farther, we have the old Committee called into existence
again, to carry out the work ; the very last agency, if Dr. Bom-
berger's misrepresentations were correct, that should have been
thought of for any such purpose. It would have been easy to
appoint a new Committee. But no; that would not do. Only
the old Committee, it was supposed, could do proper justice to
their own work. Let them have full power, therefore, to man-
age this liturgical question, as before. The Synod will have no
other Committee.

Many will remember how earnestly I tried, at this time, to
have my own name, at least, dropped from this new commission.
I told the Synod, that I had no faith in the undertaking; that
I did not think the Church was prepared to receive the Liturgy
in any form we could give it; that I knew the proposed work
would involve far more than the slight changes some talked of;
that I was sure the Committee would not be able to get forward
now with full agreement; that there was no reason then to ex-
pect that the Church generally would be satisfied with what was
done; that in these circumstances the service appeared to me a
thankless waste of labor and time ; that I had no heart for it,
and could not take part in it with any animation or zeal; and
that my want of spirit in this way would make me a dead weight
only on the cause I was expected to serve. All this I urged;
and fairly begged, over and over again, to be excused from the
appointment. But the Synod would not hearken to my prayer.
The old Committee must serve; and I mmt serve Avith it — in
spite of all I had done, according to Dr. Bomberger, to upset
the order and change the life of the German Reformed Church,
by this very liturgical movement, in previous years.

In the face of these broad facts, what becomes of the special
pleading of such a man, put forward heye again, as in the case
of the Synod of Baltimore, to torture words and phrases into

30 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

the service of his own fancies? Is it any thing better than so
much idle wind?

When the Committee came together again, it turned out as I
expected. There was a difference of opinion among them, in re-
gard to the principles by which they were to be governed in
their revision. Dr. Bomberger took one view of the subject,
while the rest of the Committee in attendance took another.
Three days, at least, were consumed in friendly discussion, and
abortive attempts to get forward. Finally, it was felt necessary
to refer the difficulty to Synod for settlement; whereupon the
following action was unanimously adopted:

" Whereas, In the endeavor to revise the Provisional Liturgy,
the Committee discover, after a long discussion, protracted
through several days, that there is a radical difference of opinion
among its members concerning the import of the resolutions of
Synod ; therefore. Resolved^ That the Rev. Dr. J. W. Nevin pre-
pare a report to Synod, setting forth a clear, definite, and full idea
of both schemes of worship advocated in Committee, in order
that Synod may understand the real question at issue, and state
in explicit terms what it requires at our hands."

This took place in Lancaster. A meeting of the Committee
was held subsequently in Lebanon, when the report thus called
for was received, adopted, and ordered to be published for the
consideration of the Church. Dr. Bomberger voted against this
action. The report was presented to the next Synod, which met
at Chambersburg in 1862, in the form of a tract, bearing the
title: "The Liturgical Question, with reference to the Pro-
visional Liturgy of the German Reformed Church."

Much ado has been made about this tract. The object of it,
however, is sufficiently plain. The liturgical interest among us
had become cmbarassed by its own movement. There were
mixed up in it two different conceptions of what a liturgy ought
to be. We had started in 1849 with one; all of us, Committee
and Synod, having in our mind at that time, almost entirely, the
notion simply of a book of forms for the pulpit. But we were
carried gradually beyond this, and came to feel more and more
the meaning of worship in its proper congregational view; which

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 31

brought with it, of course, the idea of a liturgy directed and
adapted more particularly to this end; the idea, in other words,
of a liturgy belonging, not properly to the pulpit, but to the
altar. Not that these two conceptions were consciously distin-
guished in this way. On the contrary, they ran more or less
into one another; only with a growing preponderance of favor
toward the idea of altar worship — even where the meaning of it
was not yet fully understood. Under the plastic force of this
sentiment it was, that the Provisional Liturgy had finally taken
form and shape. It was prevailingly an order of worship for
the altar. It became this mainly through its communion ser-
vice, which was made to rule and control the movement of all
its other services. There were come few forms in it, indeed,
and parts of forms, which were not strictly coherent with this
scheme, but might be said to be of the character rather of mere
pulpit services ; and so far it may be admitted that Dr. Bom-
berger is right in ascribing what he calls a duplex character to the
work. But he is egregiously wide of the mark, when he speaks
of by far the greatest portion of it as being of the type now re-
ferred to; to such extent, he says, as "greatly to overshadow,
and almost exclude the other;" and nothing could well be more
ridiculous, than his notion of converting the whole into a good
and acceptable form book for the pulpit, by simply doing away
with the responses, and striking out or changing a few passages
here and there, supposed to be of objectionable sound. It is all
the other way ; the reigning character of the Provisional Liturgy
is that of an altar service, and what there is in it that does not
fall in with this conception, is there only by exception, and in
the way of compromise, as it were, with the opposite scheme.
So at least the Committee felt, which had produced it, all ex-
cept Dr. Bomberger; and so they understood the Synod to feel,
in the direction it had given them to be governed in their revi-
sion by a proper regard to "the general unity of the work."
It was felt, at the same tim.e, however, that there might be, and
probably was, a measure of confusion still in the mind of the
Church with regard to the subject; and when Dr. Bomberger
now joined issue with the rest of us on this fundamental ques-

32 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

tion at the very threshold of our new work, there seenied to be
but one course for us honestly and honorably to pursue. We
would refer the question to Synod; and we would try to do this
in such a way, as to cut oif, if possible, all room for mistake,
and to bring out the mind of the Synod in such sort that there
should be no room to dispute about it afterwards. This was
the object of the tract now under consideration; and it was pur-
posely written in the form which seemed best suited to reach
that object.

To Dr. Bomberger's jaundiced vision, this tract, like every-
thing else done or left undone by the Committee, was part of
our plan, either to cajole or dragoon the Church into the scheme
of ritualism we were forging for its neck. But in that view,
never surely did a band of conspirators play a more stupid
game. For what course could the Committee have taken, that
Avas more likely than just the publication of this tract, to rouse
against them and their work all the anti-liturgical, or merely
semi-liturgical spirit there was in the Church? Was it not a
perfect godsend, in this respect, to Dr. Bomberger himself?
Has it not been the armory, from which he has stolen his best
thunder against the Liturgy ever since? Have not its "con-
cessions " been held up, on all sides, to the people, as enough
to damage and damn the work before all examination? Were
we not gravely told at Dayton, by more than one respectable
declaimer, that the Liturgical Committee had in this tract
charged themselves with a design to revolutionize, radically, the
ecclesiastical life of the German Reformed Church, and madly
asked the Synod of Chambersburg, at the same time, to co-
operate with them in carrying out their nefarious purpose?
What truly magnificent cunning ! What marvellous profundity
of art !

Any honest person can see that the tract, instead of being an
attempt to seduce the Synod into the views of the Committee,
was, in fact, a most honest effort to place the whole subject in a
light, which might preclude all blind judgment in regard to
it, and bring the Synod to act upon it in the most free and in-
dependent way. Speaking for myself again, I may say that I

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 33

hardly expected or wished the Synod to fall in with the high
view of altar worship presented in the tract. Had that body
been prepared to say, "We want no such worship as that," I
would have been content, and more than content, to be dis-
charo-ed from all further concern in the case. As it was, I was
determined, at all events, that there should be no farther mis-
understanding, if there had been any before, of what the Commit-
tee had been doing thus far, and of what they intended to do
still, if they were required to go on with this work. With this
view, the case was put in the most extreme light. The dis-
tinction between the two orders of worship (pulpit liturgy and
altar liturgy) was drawn in clear lines; and in a way which
has caused it to be understood since, and practically laid to
heart, as it had not been before. The idea of an altar
liturgy was declared to be alone worthy of respect. Then it
was openly said, in substance: "This idea has governed the
work of the Committee thus far, in conformity, as they have
supposed, with the instructions of the Synod of Baltimore, in
1852; the Provisional Liturgy is an altar liturgy, in the sense
of this tract ; and it cannot be made to be any thing else, with-
out destruction of its organic unity and wholeness. That, at
least, is the judgment of the Liturgical Committee. It is for
the Synod, then, to know and to say, what its real wishes are
in this posture of the case. Shall the liturgical movement go
on still in the line of this Provisional Liturgy, as thus deter-
mined by the sense of the Committee that framed it; or shall
it be now stopped here, and turned into another and wholly
diifercnt course?"

Dr. Bomberger, in the meantime, had been at work, in his
own way, to out-plot the Committee. He had taken it into his
head, that he could, himself, do up in short order what the
Church wanted in this business of revision ; and came, accord-
ingly, prepared with a scheme of alterations and amendments,
which he fondly hoped the Synod might be ready at once to
adopt, and so end the whole matter. Of all this, he said not a
word to the Committee, when he met with them previously in
regular session, at Chambersburg; but sprung the whole sud-
3

34 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

denly upon Synod itself, in most unparliamentary style, by
means of what he was pleased to call a minority report, in op-
position to the report of the Committee. His proposed revision,
however, found no favor ! It only served to show how absurd
it was to think of manufacturing the Provisional Liturgy into
different shape in that mechanical way. There were not proba-
bly three members of the Synod who would have been willing
to vote for the piebald affair. No vote, however, was taken
upon it. There was an animated debate on the general subject
of the Liturgy, continuing through three days ; at the end of
which it was decided, with overwhelming voice, that the way
was not open for taking any further action in regard to the
Provisional Liturgy at that time; that the optional use of it,
as previously allowed, should be continued till the end of ten
years from the time of its first publication ; and that the whole
question of its revision should be indefinitely postponed. The
Liturgical Committee was thus dissolved a second time.

This took place in 1862. In the fall of 1863, the General
Synod of the Reformed Church held its first meeting in Pitts-
burg. Here the subject was again called up, in connection
with a request in regard to it from the Western Synod. Liberty
was granted to this Synod to go on and prepare a new Liturgy,
such as, in their view, might suit the wants of the Church;
while it was recommended, at the same time, that the Eastern
Synod also should go forward with the revision of its Liturgy
according to its own judgment, so that it might come before
the General Synod in complete form, with a view to final action
upon the whole subject.

In conformity with this recommendation, the Eastern Synod,
which met at Lancaster the following year, 1864, resolved that
a Committee should be appointed to revise the Provisional
Liturgy, so as to have it in readiness for being presented in the
way required, to the next General Synod.

But only see now what a mess is made of all this by Dr.
Bomberger, in his morbid desire to criminate the Liturgical
Committee. Their relation to the Synod throughout, in his
view, was one of disobedience and perverse unfaithfulness.

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 35

The work which Synod had expressly put upon them, tlirce
years before, they had failed to perform. Nay, they had even
succeeded at Chambersburg, in 1862, in getting it indefinitely
postponed; thus "gaining their point," we are told, which was
time, in the interest of their " extreme ritualistic views." How
the Synod could stand such treatment, was wonderful; yet
stand it the Synod did, even to the extent of itself doing, un-
asked, in this last case, all the Committee secretly wished :
wearied and worried out of all patience, it would seem, by the
contradiction it was called to endure, and ready, at last, to do
any thing, just for the privilege of being allowed to adjourn.
Now, however, in 1864, one is pleased to find a much-abused
Church freeing herself at long last from the badgering and brow-
beating to which she has been subjected, by her public servants,
for so many years. In all conscience, the tragi-comic drama
has been carried far enough; let it, then, come to an end.
"It was evident," says Dr. Bomberger, speaking of the crisis
to which things had come, "that no farther delay would be
tolerated. Patient as the Church had always shown itself,
even almost to weakness, toward the private views and de-
sires of some of her leading men, and tolerant of what often
wore the semblance of disobedience and dictation — tolerant as
scarcely any other Church had ever been in similar circum-
stances—it was manifest that the action of the last two Synods
(the General and the Eastern), plainly meant that the work
must now be done." All praise, especially to the Lancaster
Synod of 1864 ; it knows wha* it means in this business ; and
it means noAv to have it done.

Now then, first of all, for the agency to be employed in the
resumption of the work. The old Committee is officially dead,
and out of the way; Uvice plucked up by the roots; and after
all its past oifences, Ave might imagine, not to be thought of
awain in the present case. Let there be at least a wholesome
reconstruction, leaving out a part of the old membership, and
bringing into the room of it a new membership in sympathy with
Dr. Bombero-er. But can we believe our senses? This Lan-
caster Synod reiterates the madness of the Easton Synod. It

36 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

is the old Liturgical Committee, whicli is once more summoned
to go forward with their old work. Not a man of them is ex-
cused; and strangest of all, to fill the places of the Rev. Dr.
Heiner and Elder Heyser (deceased), we find now added to the
Committee the names of the Rev. Thomas G. Apple and Dr. L.
H. Steiner; men known by every body to be in no sympathy
whatever with Dr. Bomberger in his late minority stand-point,
but, on the contrary, in full sympathy with the majority stand-
point opposed by him — and for that very reason also dignified
with this appointment !

In this new commission, says Dr. Bomberger, "no instruc-
tions are given for the guidance and government of the Com-
mittee; but it is presumed, that no one will call in question the
continued force of previous directions." That is (according to
his monstrous hypothesis), after all that had gone before; after
the Baltimore instructions, and the sense put upon them by the
Committee; after the preparation of the Provisional Liturgy
openly on this scheme; after the Easton instructions in regard
to a revision, and the way in which these also were openly taken
by the Committee; and above all, after the strong, not to say
extreme statement they had made of their views in the tract
offered to the Synod of Chambersburg: after all this, we say,
the Synod of Lancaster, now in 1864, having re-constituted the
same Committee, and filled out its vacancies with men known to
be of one mind with it in all it had been doing and trying to do
thus far; and now saying to it, without farther direction, "Go
on, and complete your work;" did not mean at all that they
should follow out their past profession of principles aiid views,
but intended just the opposite of this — namely, that they had
been wrong all along, and were now expected to take up and
perfect their unfinished work, in what Dr. Bomberger held to be
the way the Church had wanted it from the beginning. Sim-
ply to state the case, is to make it ridiculous.

It is, in truth, sheer nonsense. The Synod knew perfectly
well where the Committee stood in regard to the whole subject,
and with this knowledge re-appointed them, and bid them re-
sume their work, Avithout one syllable of qualifying direction.

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 37

How was it possible, in these circumstances, that the Committee
should not take this for a full and formal authorization to go
on as they had been doing before, and to perfect their work in
its own order and kind, not by pulling it to pieces, but by bring-
ing it into round unity and harmony within itself as an altar
liturgy? They did so understand the Synod, and addressed
themselves now vigorously to the task assigned them, with full
determination to carry it out in this way.

Dr. Bomberger, however, was still obstinate. When the Com-
mittee met, he took his old ground again; maintained that wo
were utterly mistaken in supposing our scheme of revision to be
approved by the Church; contended that Synod had, in fact
(God knows when or where), endorsed Ids scheme, as the only
one to be thought of in the case; and wondered now, that all
the rest of us should not give up at once to his single judgment,
where we were so clearly wrong, and he himself so clearly right.
We could not, of course, yield to this ; and after some friendly
- talk on the subject, it was concluded that we, who were the ma-
" jority, and the next thing to the whole of the Committee, should
go on with the work of revision in our own way; while Dr. Bom-
berger would simply co-operate with us as far as he could, with-
out being understood to recede at all from his protest against
what seemed to him wrong. He himself urged us to go forward
in this way ; and for a time continued to work with us, as plea-
santly as could be desired.

But this did not last. As the revision advanced, and gave
promise of being successfully carried through in its own line.
Dr. Bomberger found it more than he could stomach. His dis-
content appears to have reached its climax, when the Committee
reported progress to the Synod of Lewisburg, in 18G5, and sub-
mitted their new forms for common Sunday Service and for the
Holy Communion, as specimens of the manner in which they
were carrying on their work. " No opinion upon the merits of
these forms," he says, "was expressed by Synod."" This is
very true. But this silence, in the circumstances, amounted to
a great deal. Dr. Bomberger was there, and made a violent
speech against the course the Committee were pursuing; so elo-

38 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

(juently depicting the mischief which was to come of it, that
one good brother, at least (innocent of much previous knowledge
on the subject), was led to cry out, it is said, in a sort of panic
fright, "Mr. President, can't we stop the Liturgy?" He tells
us now, moreover, in his historical tract, that these very speci-
men forms are the worst part of what he considers worthy of
condemnation in the Revised Liturgy. The Lord's day service
is, in his view, "intensely ritualistic;" and the Communion ser-
vice is denounced as "essentially inconsistent with the devo-
tional genius of the Reformed Church, and utterly irreconcilable
with the apostolic and primitive conception of the ordinance;"
although it is, in fact, in no particular point different from the
form in the Provisional Liturgy, which this same Dr. Bomberger
consented to in 1857, and publicly commended to the Church as
being not only good, but very good — ^'■nothing in the way of
outward help being so well calculated indeed (in his full con-
viction), to promote the worthy and comfortable observance of
the Holy Supper, as the devout perusal" of just this service.
These two pattern services, we say, the Synod had before it in
1865 at Lewisburg, with the benefit of Dr. Bomberger's damna-
tory criticism. And what now did the Synod do ? "Expressed
no opinion!" we are told. Oh, no, nothing of that sort; only
paid no attention to Dr. Bomberger's damnatory criticism ; and
instead of stopping the Liturgy, ordered it on to completion.
That was all the Synod did.

That was enough, however, for Dr. Bomberger. He sent us
word by letter afterwards, that he could take no farther part
with us in our work ; we were not doing, he would still have it,
what Synod wanted us to do; and so he would appeal to Synod
against us when it next met. A sort of appellation, one might
say, from Philip drunk, to the same Phihp when it was hoped
he might be sober.

The Committee went on, and finished their work ; finished it
greatly to their own satisfaction ; not simply because they were
through with it, but because they felt that they had been suc-
cessful in bringing the book into a form suitable to the wants of
the Church, and likely now to come at last into general use.

OF TUE NEW LITURGY. 39

In this respect, my own feeling with regard to the Revised
Litur<^y was altogether different, from what it had ever been with
regard to the Provisional Liturgy.

Thus completed, the work was presented, with a very brief
report, to the Synod, which met last October at York, under
the title: An Order of Worship for the Reformed Church.
No sooner was this done, than Dr. Bomberger was on his feet
ao-ain, to spring upon the house another of his unparliamentary
interruptions, in the form of a long, elaborate, minority coun-
ter-report ; which was offered as an apology for his not having
acted with the Committee, but amounted, in fact, to a wholesale
onslaught upon the work itself, and a most libellous defamation
of the views and motives of all, who had been concerned in
bringing it out. A libel, which has since been repeated de-
liberately and at large, in his history of what he calls the
Ritualistic Movement in the German Reformed Church. It is
wonderful with what effrontery, in this counter-report of his at
York, he charges the entire Liturgical Committee (all except
himself), as having been engaged, throughout, in a course of
clear disobedience to the will and command of Synod, while he,
singly and alone, had been laboring all along to set our re-
fractory skulls right — but laboring, alas, in vain. He could
not work with the Committee, it seems, because the Committee,
ten against one, would not think as he did, but stubbornly in-
sisted on thinking for themselves. Hence, these tears. "In
this spirit, and for such reasons," he whines, "I come back to
this Synod to-day from the mission upon which you sent me.
I could not perform the duties of that mission in what I am
most fully persuaded is the spirit and letter of your instructions,
because my associates in the work" — thick-headed, stiff-necked
jurymen as they all are — "would not aid me in such an execu-
tion of our trust. I would not perform them in any other way,
not even to gratify any most favorite, subjective, personal
views and tastes, because I believed that to do so involved diso-
bedience to my ecclesiastical superior," — the Synod, namely,
which had been, all along, backing the Committee in their course —

40 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

"disloyalty to my Church, and infinite hazard to our spiritual
peace and edification."

The action of the Synod of York, on the Revised Liturgy, is
comprehended in a special report, adopted in regard to it, which
may be allowed to speak for itself. After a brief general re-
view of the liturgical movement, and the instructions of Synod
with reference to it from time to time, the report goes on to
say of the Committee and their woi'k, as follows :

"These instructions, after much diligent labor, have been
faithfully carried out, and, as the result of their labors, con-
tinued for the last three years, embracing forty-five sessions in
all, we have now before us the Revised Liturgy, printed and
prepared for the examination of Synod. The work bears on
its face the indications of unwearied patience and perseverance,
of self-denying toil, of an elevated and devotional taste, of much
study and reflection, and an undeniably purpose to serve the
Church and the cause of Christ. It is questionable, whether
more labor and earnestness of purpose have ever been bestowed
on any similar work, in Europe or in this country." — "The
Liturgy, now presented to the Church, is fully as much the
work of the Synod as of the Committee. It must be conceded,
that the Committee have acted with prudence and respect for
the instructions of Synod, at each step they have undertaken
in the prosecution of their labors, and that all along they have
been prompted and urged forward in their work by the special
action of the Synod. It is, therefore, the legitimate child of
this Synod. Whether it will ever come into general use among
our congregations or not, it is evident that for all time to come,
it will be a monument to the learning, ability, piety, and devo-
tion of its authors to the liturgical idea, which they have so
well comprehended."

Then follow these three resolutions :

"1. Resolved, That our thanks are due, and are hereby ren-
dered, to the great Head of the Church, that this work, so far
as Synod is concerned with it, has been brought to a termina-
tion."

"2. Resolved, That the thanks of the Synod are hereby ten-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 41

dered to the Committee, for the zeal, ability, and unrequited
toil, which thej have displayed in the prosecution of their work,
from the beginning to the end.

" 3. Resolved, That the Revised Liturgy be referred to the
General Synod for action, and that, in the meantime, the op-
tional use of the Revised Liturgy be authorized, in the place of
the Provisional Liturgy, within the limits of the Eastern Sj^nod,
until the whole question be finally settled by the various Classes
and the General Synod, according to the Constitution of our
Church."

By this action, the new Liturgy came into the hands of the
late General Synod at Dayton, in conformity with the order
issued three years before, by the General Synod of Pittsburg;
and now it was, that its friends were brought first fully to see,
what manner of spirit it was that actuated and ruled the oppo-
sition, which had begun to work against it. This opposition
sought nothing less than the destruction of the young child's
life. Although it had been declared all along, that it was such
an order of worship as the people did not want, and never could
be brought to receive with any sort of favor, yet, now that it
stood there asking barely permission to live, and nothing more,
it was felt that this would be unsafe. Who could tell what
power might be slumbering in that gentle, peaceful form, after
all? "Herod, and all Jerusalem with him, was troubled;" and
so the fiat went forth, not openly altogether, but, as it were, in
secret: "Let the Liturgy die, before it is well born; let it pass
away as a hidden, untimely birth, and become thus as though it
had never been."

We have seen before, that permission had. been granted to
the Western Synod, to form a Liturgy of their own. They had
not liked the Provisional Liturgy of the East ; let them get up,
then, a different order of worship to suit themselves, and have
it ready to present, also, to the next General Synod. They did
put their hand to this task. A Liturgical Committee was ap-
pointed to carry it forward; Avhich also went bravely to work,
and in due time got forth some interesting specimens of what
they were able to do in this line. But there the movement

42 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

came to an inglorious end. The specimen forms did not prove
satisfactory, either to the public at large or to the Committee
themselves. The Complete Manual, as it was christened before-
hand, got no farther toward completeness; and so, when we
came together in General Synod at Dayton, we found no such
work of the Western Synod there, but only an official act on
their minutes, asking for more time to get it ready.

What we did find there very soon, however, was a pretty
general determination on the part of these Western brethren to
put out of the way the Revised Liturgy of the Eastern Church,
now happily brought within their clutches, as it might seem,
for this very purpose.

Whence, we may well ask, such unbecoming animosity in
breasts otherwise generous and good? Partly, of course, from
what we may call the natural opposition of the Western reli-
gious spirit to the whole idea of worship, under a liturgical
form. But partly, also, beyond all doubt, from the factious in-
dustry and zeal of Dr. Bomberger and his clique in the East;
who all along, but more especially of late, had been working upon
this prejudice, and trying to persuade the Church in the West,
that all things were going wrong in the Eastern Synod, both
theologically and ecclesiastically; and that the salvation of the
German Reformed Church, in America, now depended on the
rising star of empire in the Synod of Ohio and the Adjacent
States. This factious element had claimed, indeed, as we have
seen, to be the reigning power in the Eastern Synod itself; but
it had an uncomfortable sense still, of having been always, more
or less, worsted there in its anti-liturgical conflicts ; and it was
a great satisfaction for it now, therefore, to think of joining
hands with this ultramontane jealousy at Dayton, so as to roll
off from the German Reformed Church, at once and forever,
the reproach now resting upon it from the liturgical movement.
No pains, accordingly, were spared, to win the political game.
Dr. Bomberger's tract, on the "Ritualistic Movement," was
got out hastily, and circulated far and wide. The Western
Missionary was set to sounding a continuous alarm on the same
theme. Ominous, bad-sounding words, were made to fall on all

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 43

sides upon the ears of the people. Appeals were addressed to
their prejudices and their fears. All was done that could be
done, to have the Liturgy prejudged and condemned, before it
was either seen or read.

We all felt this when we got to Dayton. There was an ele-
ment at work around us, that boded no good, but harm only,
to the new Order of Worship. The opposition to it was strong ;
and it was called to give account of itself at what was, in one
sense, a foreign bar. The Western delegation was full; the
delegation from the East, especially in the case of the Elders,
was only partially present. It was painfully evident, moreover,
that the Western delegation itself had no power, as things stood
in the West, to be entirely independent and free. Men could
not vote in all cases as they might wish ; but had to do it, in
some cases at least, as they must.

Still would the brethren of the Western Synod seriously join
hands with a miserable faction of the Eastern Synod, to subvert
at one blow, in such a case as this, a work which had cost this
last so many years of care and labor? That was hardly to be
imagined beforehand ; and I must confess it filled me with sur-
prise, when I found that this, and nothing less than this, was
what these Western brethren really proposed to do. We had
it all brought out at last in the minority report, as it was called,
on the subject of the Revised Liturgy, which every effort was
made to have substituted for the majority report allowing its
optional use. In this minority paper, drawn up by Professor
Good of Tiffin, a long show of reasons was offered to prove that
the Liturgy would not answer for the use of the Church; and
on the ground of these reasons, preferred without any real exa-
mination of the book, the Synod was now asked to give judg-
ment against it, without farther knowledge or inquiry ; and to
put it, along with the unfinished and abortive material of the
Western Synod, into the hands of a new Committee ; who should
tlicn go on to cut and patch all, at their pleasure, into some un-
known shape, which, it was hoped, might satisfy at last the litur-
gical necessities of the German Reformed Church.

Could any thing well be more ironically absurd ? It was more

44 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

than absurd, however; it was monstrous. Only look at the
case. Here was the Eastern Synod, which had been working
now through seventeen years to make a Liturgy. Its best
strength, talent, learning, piety, patience, and perseverance, had
been expended upon the object. Finally, after so long a time,
the movement was felt to be crowned with success. It had
issued the Revised Liturgy, which was now submitted to
the General Synod, according to previous order, with the
proud feeling of a duty well performed. For no one presumed
to call in question the general merits of the book. It was al-
lowed on all hands to be of the first order in its kind. It was,
in this respect, an ornament and honor to the Church to which
it owed its being. And Jiow, now, was it proposed to receive
the work in the General Synod? The proposition, in plain
English, was nothing more nor less than this; that the General
Synod should take the work out of the hands of the Eastern
Synod, and just then and there, without farther ceremony, crush
it ignominiously out of existence. What ! without ever looking
at it in the way of examination ? without giving it so much as a
chance to be known and judged on its own merits? Exactly
so ; let it perish without any troublesome and useless formality
of this sort. But how is it expected that this can be done?
Will the brethren of the Eastern Synod consent to be robbed of
what has cost them so much, in such summary and ruthless
style? It matters not; the book is now in the hands of the
General Synod; only let the brethren of the West, by a sec-
tional vote, join hand in hand with Dr. Bomberger and his com-
pany, and they will be able, it is to be hoped, to do with it what
they please. Still, on what plea is all this violence to be done?
What crime is charged upon the Liturgy ? What evil has it
wrought, to justify such wholesale rejection? How are those
who are asked to join in this vote (ministers and elders), to
know that it deserves such merciless treatment at their hands ?
Their knowledge is not needed; their ignorance will answer just
as well ; nay, the less they know of the matter, the better. They
will be the more sure to vote then, as they are wanted to vote.
Not one Western minister in ten, it is true, has examined the

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 45

book ; not one Western elder in ten, probably, has so much as
even looked into it. But wliat of all that? Have thej not Dr.
Bomberger's word for it, that it is full of all sorts of mischief?
Has he not published a tract to put it down ? Has not this been
echoed bj the "Western Missionary ?" Are not Professors Good
and Rust, and Williard, all here to make speeches against it ?
What need have we farther for witnesses? The power seems to
be providentially in our hands. No time so favorable for the deed
we meditate may ever occur again. Let the Revised Liturgy of
the Eastern Synod die !

A beautiful spectacle truly, was it not, this attempt to turn
the General Synod, at its second meeting, into an organ, throuo-h
which the Synod of the West might be able to rule, as with a
rod of iron, the mother Synod of the East !

One cannot help wondering and asking, what would have
come of the radical proceeding, if it had been crowned with suc-
cess. How would the brethren have disposed of the Liturfry,
once fairly in their hands? It was to have gone into the hands
of a new Committee, to be taken to pieces and reconstructed at
their pleasure. But where was the Committee to be found for
such work ? The old Committee, of course, could not have been
thought of in the case ; neither was it to be imagined that any
member of it would consent to take part in the service, unless
it were Dr. Bomberger. Still farther, no friend of the Liturgy
in the Eastern Synod could have had any thing to do with it.
It must have been, then, mainly a Western Committee, com-
posed of such men as the Brethren Williard, J. H. Good, Rust, and
M. Stern, in conjunction with Dr. Bomberger, and one or two
others that may be imagined, from the East. The respectability
of such a Committee, in itself considered, need not be called in
question. But the idea of placing the finished work of the East-
ern Synod in its hands, as so much material simply, along with
the botched stuff previously prepared in the West, to be extem-
porized now into new and better form ! SpectaUim admissi vi-
sum teneatis, amici?

Our good Western brethren have reason to be thankful, that
the farce was not allowed to play itself out to this ridiculous

46 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

lengtli. Some of them, no doubt, are already ashamed of what
they tried to do at Dayton, and pleased with their own defeat ;
and it will not be strange at all, if before the meeting of the
next General Synod in Philadelphia, the cause of the Liturgy
shall be found to be quite as strong in the West, as it has now
shown itself to be in the East,

In the circumstances which have been described, it was a
great victory that was wrought in favor of this cause at Dayton ;
far beyond all it might appear to be to superficial observation.
The friends of the Liturgy knew then, and know now, that the
vote in its favor meant a great deal more than the difference
simply of the yeas and nays recorded in it; and the enemies of
the Liturgy know the same thing. The true significance of the
vote lies in the fact, that it was a struggle of the East to save
its own cause here, against a faction which sought, by help of
the West, to destroy it — a struggle, at the same time, which had
to be maintained on Western ground. In this character, the
stand made in favor of the Liturgy was powerfully felt in the
West itself. There was a moral superiority gained by the argu-
ment in its behalf, which told upon the General Synod, and upon
the outside community, with far wider and deeper effect than
any counting of votes; which has been w^orking for good since,
and which will continue to work for good still through a long
time to come. But more important than all this, was the way
the conflict served to bring out the thought and feeling of the
Eastern Synod in regard to the great interest which was here
at stake, and to show clearly where it stood, and intended to
stand, on the issue which had been raised concerning it. The
only vote that could be considered of material account in the case
was the vote of the East, including the Westmoreland Classis.
It was properly an Eastern question that was to be decided.
The voice of the West in regard to it meant nothing; because
it was uttered, to a large extent, in profound ignorance of the
subject, and under tlie power of blind, unreasoning prejudice.
The Liturgy belonged properly to the Eastern Synod ; was the
child of the Eastern Synod; had its native home in the Eastern
Synod; and by the judgment of the Eastern Synod was destined

OF THE NEW LIEURGY. 4T

finally to stand or fall. In this view, as all may easily sec, the
vote of the Eastern delegation at Dayton was an overwhelming
decision in its favor. What an extinguisher on Dr. Bomberger's
slanderous tract; the burden of which is throughout, that the
Liturgical Committee had obstinately refused all along to do
what the Synod wanted them to do, and had now finally, with
this Revised Liturgy of theirs, capped the climax of their dis-
obedience, in a way which the Synod could no longer possibly
endure. We have seen before how the action of one Synod
after another, on to the very last one at York, had given
the lie practically to this monstrous ftnagination. But never
was this done to greater purpose than by the Eastern vote in
favor of the new Liturgy at Dayton. Had the entire Eastern
delegation been at hand, the vote would have l?een a great deal
stronger. As it was, we all know in how meagre a minority it
left Dr. Bomberger and his colleagues. Two of these colleagues,
besides, were the delegates from the Classis of North Carolina ;
which has been in a state of ecclesiastical secession from the
Synod, ever since the present liturgical movement commenced ;
and whose representatives, therefore, allowed themselves, with
very bad grace certainly, to be brought North at this time, for
the purpose of meddling with it in any such factious way. Aside
from these ciphers, the clerical vote on that side stood next
thing to nothing. And it was little, if any thing better, with
the lay vote. Our Eastern Eldership, after all the attempts
which had been made to alarm their fears, and set them in array
against their Ministers, went almost in a body in favor of the
Liturgy. Shall we hear any thing more of a want of sympathy
and good understanding between the Synod and its Committee,
on this subject?

What has just been said, does not mean, of course, that the
Revised Liturgy has been endorsed and ratified, in form, by
what was done in its favor at Dayton. The vote there, we all
know, was not intended to do any thing of that sort. The time
for any thing of that sort had not yet come. The vote meant
simply, that the Liturgy should have fair play ; that, as a work
of art, it should not be subjected to the vandalism of being

48 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

made so much raw material merely, for the manufacture of
another work (not of art), in the hands of Messrs. Good, Rust,
Bomberger & Co. ; that the Eastern Synod should not be re-
quired to stultify itself, by abandoning both the work and the
Committee that made it, to the tender mercies of a fanatical
crusade, got up to lynch it out of existence, without judge or
jury; that after having been brought, through long years of
learned and laborious preparation, under the eye and ordering
hand of the Synod, to the perfect working form it had now
reached, it should not be kicked to the one side by the ignorant
prejudice of such as knew nothing about it, but should have, at
least, the opportunity of coming before the people, to be tried
by them on its own merits. This is what the action, at Dayton,
meant; nothing more. But this, in the circumstances, was
much. Nobly has it served to redeem the honor of the Eastern
Synod, and to vindicate the good name of its grossly calum-
niated Liturgical Committee.

So much for the historical defence of the Liturgy. How far
the work itself, in the form in which it is now before the pub-
lic, may prove satisfactory to the Church, remains yet to be
seen. The Committee, with its friends generally, are quite
willing to leave the settlement of that question where it properly
belongs, with the people. They have no wish to force it into
use in a single congregation. It is not felt that the honor,
either of the Committee or of the Synod, depends, in the case,
on what may become of the book, finally, in this way. Our ap-
pointed service is done ; done faithfully, and to the best of our
ability. We have got out at last, what we believe to be a good
Liturgy, in good working order; and room is now made for its
being put to practical experiment among our churches. If they
find it to be what they want, and are willing to make use of it,
cither in whole or in part, it will be well. If they find it other-
wise, and do not choose to adopt it, that will be all well too ;
nobody will have any reason to complain ; the thing will have
taken its right course, and come to its conclusion in a fair and
rio^ht way. That is all that is wanted or wished.

Neither let it be imagined, that w^ object at all to having the

OF TUE NEW LITURGY. 49

Liturgy subjected to examination and criticism, ftif it cannot
bear to have its merits fairly and honestly inves^^tcd in this
way, it ought not to expect favor. What its friends complain
of is, not that it should be put upon trial, but that it should be
attempted to put it down without trial. Not that judgment
should be exercised upon its merits, but that without any re-
gard to its merits, it should be proposed to have it condemned
and set aside on other grounds altogether. The Liturgy courts
enlightened criticism; it deprecates only falling into the hands
of ignorant prejudice or dishonest passion.^

The way is now open to pass on to the consideration of its
theological character.
4

50 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

PART II.

THEOLOGICAL VI^^DICATION OF THE NEW LITURGY.

The discussion on tlie Revised Liturgy, at the meeting of the
late General Synod in Dayton, brought out clearly two things.
It showed that the liturgical question, as it now has place among
us in the Reformed Church, is in truth a doctrinal question of
the deepest significance; and it showed also that as a doctrinal
question it has to do, not with one or two points of theological
opinion simply, but with theology in its universal view.

This accounts for the earnestness with which the Liturgy is
opposed by those who have set themselves against it. To some
it has no doubt appeared strange, that the book should have
become an object of such strong jealousy and dislike. For by
general confession now, we are a liturgical branch of the
Church ; we allow the propriety of prescribed forms of worship ;
we hold it part of our Reformed right to use them, or not to
use them, as to our congregations severally may seem best.
In conformity with this freedom, we have been willing to let
liturgies take their course among us heretofore, with little or
no attempt at anything like ecclesiastical supervision or re-
straint. Our ministers might use the old Palatinate Liturgy,
or some irresponsible compilation handed down from the last
century, or the Mayer Liturgy, or any other Liturgy they
pleased ; nobody felt called upon to interfere; all w^ere willing
to let ministers and people judge for themselves what sort of
service might best answer their wants. But in the case of our
new Liturgy, all this tolerant indifference has suddenly come

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 51

to an end. Even in its first imperfect form, as the Provisional
Liturgy, the broad sanction of the Church, under which it ap-
peared, was not sufiicient to protect it from violent obloquy
and assault. Pains were taken to create prejudice against it
on all sides ; it could not be introduced, it was said, among
our people ; and yet, strangely enough, its influence was depre-
cated with ominous apprehension, as likely to work mischief
far and wide. As the Revised Liturgy, it is now relieved of
its first defects, and brought into easy working form. But
this has only drawn upon it more apprekensive jealousy, and
more active opposition, than Avhat it had to encounter before.
Hence the onset made upon it at Dayton. That was the cul-
mination of a movement, which looked to nothing less than the
violent suppression of the new Order of Worship before it was
fairly presented to the churches. The churches, it was still
said, could never be brought to receive it ; but it was held dan-
gerous, now more than before, to give them the opportunity of
deciding that point for themselves. Not only must the book
not be formally allowed ; it must be formally condemned and
prohibited from use. The usual congregational liberty of the
Reformed Church must here come to an end. For this Liturgy
there could be no toleration. The opposition to it had grown
virulent. It amounted to fanatical hatred.

To some, we say, all this may have seemed strange. But it
is accounted for by the theological life of the new Order of
Worship. Had the book been a mere pulpit Liturgy, a collec-
tion of dry forms for the use of the minister in the usual style
of such mechanical helps, it would have called forth no such
virulent opposition. But it was something altogether different
from that. It carried with it the spirit and power of a true
altar Liturgy ; and in this character it was felt to involve, not
simply a scheme of religious service, but a scheme also of reli-
gious thought and belief, materially at variance with precon-
ceived opinion in certain quarters ; the sense of which then
became instinctively, whore such opinion prevailed, a feeling of
antagonism to the whole work. Thus at our late General
Synod, the liturgical discussion proved to be, in fact, an earnest

52 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

theological discussion, the interest of which extended far
beyond the particular denominational occasion that gave rise
to it. It was remarkable, indeed, that the opponents of the
new Liturgy seemed to lay comparatively little stress on the
mere ritual points, to which at other times they have taken
exception. The question of responses, for example, hardly
came into the argument at all. Every other consideration was
for the time swallowed up by the question of doctrine. And
here, again, the special Avas evidently ruled by the general. It
was not so much dissatisfaction with single doctrinal state-
ments here and there in the Liturgy, as hostility rather to its
whole doctrinal basis, that roused and led on the war for its
destruction. The Liturgy represented one system of religious
thought ; the opposition to it represented another ; the two con-
stitutionally different, and mutually repellent. Hence the con-
troversy.

On the floor of the Synod, this controversy was met by the
friends of the Liturgy with overwhelming success. The
charges brought against it were shown to be untenable and
false. Its doctrinal orthodoxy was triumphantly sustained.
In the nature of the case, at the same time, this defence
rebounded into the form of an attack upon the orthodoxy of
the opposite side. It was shown that the offence taken with
the Liturgy resulted from want of sympathy with the true idea
of the Gospel, as this is owned and set forth in the forms of
the Liturgy; and that the party opposing it was itself, there-
fore, theologically unsound, as standing in the bosom of a sys-
tem which, as far as it prevails, draws after it the rationalistic
subversion of the Christian faith altogether. The real charac-
ter of the system in this view, it may be added, cropped out
actually, from time to time, in the speeches which were made
from that side of the house; in a way that served, if not actu-
ally to horrify, at least very seriously to startle, the better
sensibilities of many, who had been brought up to believe dif-
ferent things.

What we propose now, is to bring this momentous issue
between the Liturgy and its enemies into wider public view.

OP THE NEW LITURGY. 5-3

Vast pains have been taken all along to disseminate doubts of
its orthodoxy, and to create in this way a prejudice against it
in the mind of the Church. Heretofore the way has not
been open properly for meeting the loose, and always more or
less indefinite charge. Now, however, the time seems to have
come for laying aside all silence and reserve in regard to the
subject. The theological character of the Liturgy has been
challenged, in a style which makes it proper and necessary to
confront the challenge. Our object in this article is immedi-
ately and primarily its defence ; but all such defence, as we
have just seen, is necessarily at the same time a polemical
assault on the system of theological thinking, from which the
challenge in question proceeds. Such is the nature of the
issue here joined. If the opponents of the Liturgy are sound
in their theological premises, the Liturgy of course must be
considered theologically unsound ; but if it should appear, that
it is the Liturgy in fact which rests in sound premises, then we
shall know with equal certainty, that the charge of unsoundness
falls upon the other side. Our vindication in one direction,
becomes thus, as a matter of course, crimination in another
direction. We turn upon the theological enemies of the
Liturgy their own charge. In the prosecution of our argu-
ment, we shall cause it to appear that they are themselves une-
vangelical, just where they call in question the evangelical
character of the Liturgy. We shall be under the painful
necessity of showing, that by their own concession, or in the
way of unavoidable inference from their premises, they stand
committed to views that are heretical in the worst sense of the
term. ,

Let it be understood, however, that this accusation is not
preferred against the adversaries of the Liturgy indiscrimi-
nately. We have limited the charge purposely to its theologi-
cal enemies; that is, to those who, consciously or unconsciously,
hate and oppose the system of theological belief, in whose
bosom it stands, and from whose inspiration it draws its life
and power. We would fain hope, that even among these there
may be some, whose minds are not closed absolutely against

54 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

the truth, and who need only the help of some candid and dis-
passionate inquiry to be made sensible of the danger of follow-
ing blindly the prejudices by which they are now led. Beyond
the range of all such theological opposition, however, there is
a large amount of disaffection felt toward the Liturgy at pre-
sent, which rests upon other grounds altogether. It is the
result of misrepresentations industriously circulated, of fears
blindly awakened, of prejudices adroitly played upon by party
address — all in profound ignorance, for the most part, of what
the Liturgy actually is, and of what it proposes to do. With
better information, much of this disaffection may be expected
to disappear. The friends of the Liturgy, at all events, are very
willing to have it put as widely as possible to this test. They
only ask that it should be allowed to face all such popular pre-
judice on its own merits. Let the people have an opportunity
to judge for themselves, whether it be suitable to their wants
or not. We do not shrink from this tribunal, even in our pre-
sent theological argument. On the contrary, we appeal to it
without fear. It was said on the floor of Synod, indeed, by
one who opposed the Liturgy, that its theology was of too deep
a character to be intelligible to the people. As if the people,
forsooth, could not find themselves properly in the Creed, the
Te Deum, the Lord's Prayer, the Litany, the Ten Command-
ments, the Church Lessons and Collects, but only in the crea-
tions, extemporaneous or otherwise, let down upon them in the
usual style from the modern pulpit. We have no such low
opinion of the capacity of our laity. In the case before us,
many of them at least have theological instincts, which are
better and safer than all scholastic speculations ; to say nothing
of traditional beliefs, which no logic can set aside. To these
instincts and beliefs we now make our confident appeal.

As already said, the doctrinal objections made to the Liturgy
at particular points, refer themselves throughout to its general
theology, the scheme or theory of Christianity, taken as a
whole, in which its different parts are comprehended. A proper
regard to order requires then, that we should direct our atten-
tion first to this general scheme. Only after the theology of

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 55

the Liturgy in such broad view has been vindicated, will the
way be open for considering briefly the errors charged upon it
in special instances.

What, now, is the reigning theology of the Liturgy? It is
sometimes spoken of in this country as the Mercersburg The-
ology. But the system is far wider in fact than any such name ;
and no name of this sort besides can give us any true insight into
its interior character and constitution. What we need here, is not
a distinctive title for the theology in question, but a distinguish-
ing apprehension of its nature. For our present purpose it may
answer to characterize it descriptively, (without pretending to
exhaust the subject), under a threefold view* In the first
place, it is Christological, or more properly perhaps Christo-
centric; in the second place, it moves in the bosom of the
Apostles' Creed; in the third place, it is Objective and Histori-
cal, involving thus the idea of the Church as a perennial article
of faith. These three conceptions are closely intertwined ; but
they admit and deserve separate consideration.

CHRISTOCENTRIC THEOLOGY.

The term is sufficiently clear. It explains itself. We mean
by it, of course, that the theology before us centres in Christ.
He is not simply the author of its contents: these contents
gather themselves up into Him ultimately as their root. As
an object of faith and knowledge, and in the only form in
which it can be regarded as having reality in the world, Chris-
tianity has been brought to pass through the mystery of the
Incarnation, and stands perpetually in the presence and power
of that fact. All its verities, all its doctries, all its promises, all
its life-giving forces, root themselves continually in the undy-
ing life of Him, who thus became man for us men and for our
salvation. And such being the actual objective constitution of
Christianity, it would seem to be at once plain that our appre-
hension of it, to be either right or safe, must move in the same
order. It must plant itself boldly and broadly on the propo-
sition, that Jesus Christ is the principle of Christianity, and
that the full sense of the Gospel is to be reached only in and

56 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

through the revelation which is comprehended in His glorious
Person. In doing this it will become necessarily such a
theology, such a way of looking at the Christian salvation, as
we are now trying to describe. Learned or unlearned, it will
be a theology that revolves around Christ as a centre, and is
irradiated at all points by the light that flows upon it from his
presence.

For the right knowledge of things everywhere, all depends
on their being surveyed from the right point of view. Facts
and forms are not enough ; they must be apprehended in their
true relations; and this requires that the beholder should
occupy, in regard to them, such a centre of observation as may
enable him to see them in this way. Even an outward land-
scape, to be seen to advantage, must be seen from the proper
position. So as regards any field or range of science. The
astronomy of the old world, for example, abounded in obser-
vation and study; was furnished with vast material of phe-
nomena and facts ; accomplished much in the way of scientific
comparison, induction, and generalization. But it labored
throuo-hout with embarrassment and confusion, because its
scheme of the heavens was projected from a wrong standpoint.
It made the earth to be the centre of the system to which it
belongs, and studied the motions of the heavenly bodies exclu-
sively from this false assumption. It was geocentric, as we
say, in its contemplations, and therefore every where at fault.
The Copernican system, in the fulness of time, redeemed the
science, and made room for its modern triumphs ; not primarily
by the revelation of new facts, but by finding the true centre
of observation for the apprehension of old facts. It planted
its scientific lever in the sun, instead of the earth, bringing its
studies thus into harmony with the objective order of the world it
sought to understand and expound. Astronomy, in other
words, ceased to be geocentric, and became heliocentric. Hence
all its later enlargement and success.

Now what this heliocentric (sun-centre) standpoint is for the
right study of the heavens in the science of astronomy, we
affirm the Christocentric (Christ-centre) standpoint to be, for

OF THE NEW LITURGY.

the right study of heavenly and eternal things in the science
of theology. No other standpoint can be substituted for it
without boundless error and confusion. It is possible to bring
in here a diJQferent centre of observation ; nay, it is the natural
vice of our fallen reason, that it tends continually to throw
itself upon a different centre; for the full practical sense of
what Christ is in this respect, belongs only to the world of
faith, which as such is at the same time the world of Avhat
transcends all natural reason. We may have a simply anthro-
pological divinity — a mere humanitarian theology ; all centering
in the idea of man (anthropoccntric); the earth again ruling
the heavens, and the merely moral or ethical, at best, playing
itself off as the divine. Or we may have, on the other hand,
a simply theological divinity — a construction of theology start-
ing from the idea of God, considered absolutely and outside of
Christ (theocentric); in which the relations of God to the
world, then, will become pantheistic, fantastic, visionary, and
unreal; and all religion will be made to resolve itself at last
into metaphysical speculations or theosophic dreams. How far
these false projections of Christian doctrine, in one view antago-
nistic, and yet in another everlastingly intermarried, have made
themselves mischievously felt in the Christian Avorld, through all
Protean forms and shapes, from their first bad birth as Ebion-
ism and Gnosticism, down to the Socinianism, Anabaptism,
and metaphysical Calvinism of the sixteenth century, and
down still farther to corresponding forms of religious thought
in our own time — this is not the proper place to inquire. Our
object is simply to fix attention on the possibility of such
wrong constructions of Christianity, for the purpose of insist-
ing with more effect on the necessity of a construction that
shall start from the right point of observation ; and to make
fully apparent, moreover, how much is comprehended in what
we say, when we affirm that this right point of observation is
the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that no theology,
therefore, can be either safe or sound, or truly Christian, which
does not show itself to be in this view a truly Christocentric
theology.

58 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

The proposition needs no proof. It is a first principle, a
self-evident axiom, in Christianity. To doubt it, is to call
Christ Himself into donbt. Has He not said: "I am the Light
of the world"? Is it not His own voice that still rings through
the ages from the isle of Patmos: "I am alpha and omega, the
first and the last"? The natural world begins and ends in
Him; for "all things were made by Him, and without Him
was not anything made that was made" (John i. 3); and again
we are told, " by Him were all things created that are in
heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether
they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers; all
things were created by Him, and for Him; and He is before
all things, and by Him all things consist" (Col. i. 16, 17). The
ethical world, the movement of humanity, the world of history
as it may be called, begins and ends in Him ; it is not chaotic,
the sport of blind chance or iron fate ; Christ is in it, causing
all its powers and forces to converge throughout to what shall
be found to be at last the world's last sense in the finished
work of redemption. Finally, the world of revelation begins
and ends in Him; it is not a number of independent utter-
ances, properly speaking, given forth from God, but a single
economy or system, through which Grod has made Himself
known among men, with progressive manifestation, in the way,
not of doctrine primarily and immediately, but of act and
deed ; the entire movement having its principle or root in
Christ from the first, centering at last in the historical fact of
the Incarnation, and running its course thence onward to the
hour of His second appearing, when He shall come to be glo-
rified in His saints, and admired in all them that believe.
Jesus Christ is the alpha and omega of all these worlds
(nature, history and grace), and as such the principle, centre
and end, therefore, in which they all meet, and gather them-
selves together finally, as one (Eph. i. 10). This being so,
where shall we find the key to a correct knowledge of the
world, or of man, or of God, if not in that which is set before
us as the first object of the Christian faith, the mysterious con-
stitution of His blessed Person? Above all, what can we ex-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 59

pect to know rightly in the sphere of revelation (among the
facts of the Bible, and amid the "powers of the world to
come" that are lodged in the Church), without the help of this
key? The Old Testament throughout has no sure sense or
force, except in the Christological view of its being a subordinate,
relatively imperfect discipline or pedagogy, whereby the way
was prepared for the coming of Christ in the flesh. It has no
power to explain or interpret Christ, save only so far as it is
itself made intelligible first in and through Christ. Then, as
regards Christianity itself, strictly taken, what is it, we may
well ask, in difference from all else pretending to call itself
religion, if it be not the product and outgrowth of the new
order of life, which first became actual in the world by the
assumption of our human nature into union with the Divine
Word (John i. 14, 17), having in this view its beginning, mid-
dle, and end in Christ, and in Christ only?

And how then, having such objective constitution, and standing
thus actually and entirely in the historical being of Christ, beyond
which it must necessarily resolve itself into nothing, as having no
basis of faith whereon to rest; being in such sort bound to Christ,
we repeat, as the alpha and omega, sum and substance of its whole
existence, how possibly shall Christianity be studied and under-
stood aright, either practically or doctrinally, either as a sys-
tem of life, or as a system of theology, if it be not in the
Christocentric way of which we are now speaking? To com-
prehend the "world which grace has made," we must take our
position by faith in the great primordial centre, from which all
has been evolved, and there fixing our spiritual telescope^
endeavor, as best we may, to scan the wonders thus oifered to
our contemplation; being well assured that from any other
centre, they will either not be seen at all, or else will be seen
only under more or less distorted forms, and in more or less
false relations and proportions. This centrality of Christ, in
the Christian system, reaches forth to all parts of the system.
Practically, all righteousness, all morality, all virtue, in the
Christian sense, grow forth from the "law of the spirit of life
in Christ Jesus." All sound Christian feeling and experience,

60 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

flow from the sense of Christ formed in us as the hope of
glory. And so intellectually also, Christ is our wisdom, the
principle of all true Christian illumination and knowledge.
Through Him only we are made to know man, his original
destination, and the full extent of his fall. Through Him only,
we come to have an insight into the true nature of sin, the
power of the devil, the meaning of death, the idea of redemp-
tion, and the progress of the Christian salvation out to the
resurrection of the last day. Through Him only, do we ever
come to the true understanding of God, "in the knowledge of
whom standeth our eternal life."

The theology now under consideration is decidedly of this
character. It revolves around Christ. It has been strangely
enough charged at times with subordinating the idea of Christ
to the idea of the Church. But this is a gross mistake, if not
a perverse slander. The theology in question does, indeed, lay
stress on the doctrine of the Church, as stress is laid on it also
in the Apostles' Creed; but only as the Church is held to be
the necessary consequence of Christ (following the Creed in
this also), and never as putting the Church in Christ's place.
No theology in the country certainly has made more of Christ
as the centre of its thinking and teaching. No theology has
insisted more earnestly on the great cardinal truths of the
Trinity, the Eternal Generation, the Divinity of the Son, the
Incarnation, the Mediatorial Work and Reign of Christ; and
no theology, it may be safely asserted, has done more, within
the same time, to awaken and enforce attention to the practical
significance of these truths in the American religious world.

This brings us to the consideration of what we have already
named as its second distinguishing characteristic, namely; the
fact, that it moves throughout in the bosom of the old Creeds,
the original regula fidei of the Christian world.

RULED BY THE APOSTLES' CREED.

It is not necessary to waste time here on the half-learned
criticisms, we hear made continually, in certain quarters, on the
title and origin of this svuibol. We know that it was not com-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 61

posed strictly by the Apostles ; that it took form gradually ;
that there were different Greeds in the first centuries ; and that
among these, the formula used at Rome finally gained general
credit in the fifth and sixth centuries, so as to become, for sub-
sequent times, what is now denominated the Apostles' Creed.
All this we know; but we know also, at the same time, that
this final settlement upon the Roman form, involved no giving
up or changing any where of a single point of faith ; that the
different Creeds previously, were only variations of one and the
same confessional theme ; that what was added to its utterance
in any case, came in only as the explicit enunciation of what
was included in it implicitly before ; and that all in this way
resolved itself into a common rule of faith, or canon of truth,
which the universal Church held from the beginning as of
Apostolic origin and Apostolic authority. In this character,
the symbol has been received through all ages, by all branches
of the Church, both Oriental and Occidental, as the primary
and most fundamental expression of the Christian faith. Pro-
testantism has claimed, from the beginning, to stand here on
the same ground with Roman Catholicism. The Reformed
Church, no less than the Lutheran, starts confessionally with
the Apostles' Creed. Our own admirable Heidelberg Catechism,
in particular, makes it, in form, the ground and rule of all it
professes to teach in the way of faith.

The Apostles' Creed thus is the deepest, and for that reason most
comprehensive of all Christian symbols. It lies at the founda-
tion of all evangelical unity ; it is the last basis and bond of
comprehension in the conception of the Church. No sect
refusing to stand on this basis, can have any right to claim
footing in the Gospel, or fellowship with the Apostles.

All right theological thinking then, as well as all true evan-
gelical believing, must start where this fundamental form of
faith starts, and keep step with it at every point as f\ir as it
goes. The reason of this is plain. It lies in the constitution
of the Creed; which is no summary of Christian doctrine pri-
marily for the understanding, but the necessary form of the
Gospel, as this is first apprehended by faith; a direct transcript,

62 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

we may say, of what the Gospel is to the contemplation of
the believer, turned wholly upon the Person of Christ. Such
faith is necessarily ruled by its object; the Creed, in other
words, must be Christological, must unfold itself, first of all,
in the order of what are to be regarded as the fundamental
facts of Christianity, growing forth from the mystery of the
Incarnation. In such view, there is no room to speak of two
or more difiFerent methods of faith for taking in the sense of
the Gospel. As there is but one method of the objective move-
ment of the Gospel in Christ Himself, so can there be only one
method for the apprehension of it on the part of believers.
That method we have in the Apostles' Creed ; and any attempt
to set this aside, to substitute for it some different construction
of first principles, or to subordinate its proper normative
authority and signification to any later type of belief, must be
looked upon at once as a serious falling away from the Gospel,
and may be expected to result at last in the confusion and
eclipse of faith altogether.

All this the theology before us owns and holds steadily in
view. Starting in Christ, it follows the order in which the
facts of religion unfold themselves with necessary connection
from His Person. This order is for it not optional simply, but
is felt to be inwardly bound to its own principle. It is the im-
manent logic of faith, determined by Him who is the central
object of faith. It makes all the difference in the world in
this view, whether a system of theological thought be cast in
the type of doctrine that is set forth in the Creed, or con-
structed in some other way. To some it may seem compara-
tively indifferent, how the topics of religion are put together, if
only the same topics nominally are made use of in the work ;
the form is of no account, they fancy ; all depends upon the
matter. But this imagination itself shows at once the wrong
position of those who hold it, and is really nothing less than
a vast theological blunder. The form here is in fact every-
thing; the matter nothing, we may say, except as embraced in
this form. It is a vain pretence, therefore, to say, that the
authority of the Creed is sufficiently acknowledged, by allowing

OF THE NEW LITUIIGV. 63

it to be in substance a true, tliougli defective, representation
of the Gospel, and then going on to work up the material
of it into some supposed better scheme of doctrine, project-
ed from another standpoint altogether, and moving through-
out in a totally different line of thought. No confession, no
catechism, no preaching, no worship, no system of divinity,
carried forward in this way, can ever breathe the spirit of the
Creed, or have in it the true life of the Creed; however much
it may try to make the world believe that it is at the bottom
in harmony with the "undoubted articles of our Christian
faith," as we have them set forth in this radical symbol.

Hence it is, that where such pretended reconstructions of the
material of faith prevail, the honor shown to the Creed is in
fact nominal only, and theoretic at best, and never practically
real. We all know how completely the symbol has fallen out
of use, in all those portions of the Church, in which sucli
reconstructed divinity has come to have the upper hand. Evi-
dence enough, what a difference it makes, Avhether our religion
grow forth, or not, from this "form of sound words," delivered
unto us from the Apostles. The difference reaches into all
spheres of practical Christianity; into family religious train-
ing; into the Sunday-school; into the work of catechetical
instruction; into the character of preaching; into all sanctua-
ry services; into all devotional offices. In the same way it
reaches to every point of doctrinal Christianity. There is not
a Christian dogma, that is not affected by it in the most serious
manner.

The theology of the Creed does not stop short, of course,
with the few, primordial articles of that first, immediate pa-
noramic vision of faith. Within the range of this regulative
scheme, it finds room for any amount of scientific study and
enlargement, through the use of what matter is offered to it for
this end in God's Revelation, and in the exercise of a reason
that is now purified for its office by the inspiration of God's
Holy Spirit; the very element, as it were, of the world of faith
in which the Gospel is here felt to mo,ve. But througli all such
enlargement, the organization of doctrine remains rooted and

64 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

grounded in the objective mystery of the new creation in Christ
Jesus, as this has been first apprehended in the form of the
Creed ; and every doctrine is an outgrowth from this, having
thus its position, complexion and quality in the system, both
for faith and for knowledge, as it could not possibly have them
in any other way. Every doctrine, in this way, becomes
Christological, and serves to express a truth which is true only
within the orbit of the Creed, and not at all on the outside of it.

It would be interesting to verify this in particular cases, by
showing how the doctrine of the atonement, for example, the
article of justification by faith, the idea of regeneration, the
conception of sacramental grace, are found to be always some-
thing materially different in the theology of the Creed from
what they are made to be in any other theology; but it would
carry us too far for our present purpose, to pursue the subject
in this way. We have said enough to show of what immense
account the characteristic is, by which the theological system
we are now defending is distinguished a^ being the theology of
the Creed ; and what a gulph of separation this necessarily
involves, between it and all antagonistic theologies; which,
however loud mouthed they may be in the use of cant evangeli-
cal shibboleths, stand convicted, nevertheless, of being pro-
foundly unevangelical, just because they show themselves want-
ing in every sort of genuine sympathy and loyalty for the
Apostles' Creed, through which the original voice of the Grospel
has come sounding down upon us from the earliest times.

The theology we are defending may be said to be specially
identified with the honor of the Apostles' Creed, in the religious
history of this country. In our Reformed Zion, twenty-five
years ago, the Creed had become almost a dead letter. It still
kept its place in the Heidelberg Catechism ; but that itself was
in a fair way to have its life smothered out of it, by the incubus
which had come to settle upon it in the form of Methodistic
Puritanism; and for the fundamental significance of the gem it
here held enshrined in its bosom, there appeared to be but small
sense anywhere. The C]»eed was not heard commonly in our
pulpits, and had fallen into neglect largely in our families.

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 65

Now, however, all is changed. The voice of the old symbol is
once more restored. Our children are familiar with it. Alonjj
with the Lord's Prayer, it has forced itself into general liturgi-
cal use among us, even where the new Liturgy is still feared
for the theological spirit that has wrought such auspicious
change.

For can there be any doubt of the source from which this
great change has sprung? Do we not owe it entirely to the
Christological tendency, that has been at work among us for
the last twenty years ; which was so much assisted in its own
development by the study of the Creed; and which at the same
time wrought eflfectually to restore this to popular confidence and
use?

And no one, who has observed attentively the course of things,
can doubt, but that the power of this testimony has been felt,
also, far beyond the narrow limits of our Reformed Church.
There is a deplorable want of real sympathy still with this
archetypal form of sound words, on all sides; but, a reactionary
feeling has begun to set in evidently in its favor. It would
be hard probably to find now, even in Puritan New England
itself, any respectable so called Orthodox voice, prepared to
say, as the pious " Puritan Recorder" could venture to do in 1849,
that the Apostles' Creed has become, for the orthodoxy of New
England, a "fossil relic of by gone ages" — a dead formulary,
which "teaches in several respects anti-scriptural doctrines," so
that it must be pitiful, therefore, to think of "infusing life into
it, and setting it up again as a living ruler in the Church." A
change, we say, has begun to come over the spirit of that
dream; and our theology unquestionably has had something at
least to do with bringing it about. No other theology in the
country, certainly, has labored more to re-animate the symbol
with its pristine life. No other has so borne it on high as the
chosen banner of its faith. And we will add also in good trust,
of no other is there more room to say. In hoc signo vinces.

66 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

OBJECTIVE AND HISTORICAL.

Starting in the great fact of the Incarnation, and following
its movement, our theology has finally the third general charac-
ter of being Objective and Historical. In other words, it is not
a system simply of subjective notions, a metaphysical theory of
God and religion born only of the human mind, a supposed ap-
prehension of supernatural verities brought into the mind in
the way of abstract thought; but it is the apprehension of the
supernatural by faith under the form of an actual Divine mani-
festation in and through Christ, which, as such, rules and
governs the power that perceives it, while it is felt also to be
joined in its own order to the natural history of the world on-
ward through all time. So much lies at once in the Apostles'
Creed.

All revelation is primarily something that God does — an ob-
jective, supernatural manifestation, which causes His presence
to be felt in the world. The right apprehension of what is thus
exhibited, which can be only through the inspiration of His
Spirit, becomes then the power of His word in the souls of
those to whom it is addressed. Universally, it would seem, the
inward illumination is bound to the outward manifestation in
this way. God does not speak to the souls of men immediately
and abruptly, as enthusiasts and fanatics fondly dream; that
would be magic, and gives us the Pagan idea of religion, not
the Christian. The order of all true supernatural teaching is,
the objective first, and the subjective or experimental after-
wards, as something brought to pass only by its means. Most
of all, we may say, is this true of Christianity, the absolute
end of all God's acts of revelation. Its whole significance is
comprehended, first of ail, in the Divine deed, whereby God
manifested Himself in the flesh, through the mystery of the In-
carnation. This objective act is itself the Gospel, in the pro-
foundest sense of the term. In the very nature of the case, it
must underlie and condition all that the Gospel can ever be-
come for men, in the way of inward experience. True, it can-
not save men without their being brought to experience its
power; on. which account it is, that we need to be placed in

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 67

communication with it through faith ; but the power that saves
is not, for this reason, in our experience or faith ; it is wholly
in the object with which our faith is concerned. The subjec-
tive here, sundered from the objective, can give us at best only
a spurious evangelicalism, which will always be found, in the
end, to be more nearly allied to the flesh than to God's Spirit.

Apprehended under such objective view, the revelation which
God has been pleased to make of Himself through Jesus Christ
(not in the way of oracle but of act), becomes necessarily, for our
faith, at the same time historical. Only so can it be felt to be
real, and not simply notional and visionary. Its objectivity it-
self implies, that it has entered permanently into the stream of
the world's life, not just as the memory of a past wonder, but
as the continued working of the power it carried with it in the
beginning. The Gospel is supernatural; but it is the super-
natural joined in a new order of existence to the natural; and
this, it can be only in the form of history. In any other form, it
becomes shadowy and unreal. Sense for the objective in Chris-
tiariity, leads thus universally to sense for the historical; while
those who make all of subjectivity are sure to be unhistorical.

The historical character of the Gospel, objectively considered,
meets us, first of all, in the Person and Work of Christ Him-
self, as they are exhibited to us in the Creed. Its articles are
not so many theological propositions loosely thrown together,
but phases that mark the progress of what may be considered
the dramatic development of His Mediatorial Life, out to its
last consequence in the full salvation of His people. This, of
itself, however, involves then, in the next place, as we may at
once see, the historical character of Christianity also, regarded
as the carrying out of this mystery of godliness among men to
the end of time. Not only the subjective religious experiences
and opinions of men here are to be regarded as entering into
the general flow of history, like their political or scientific
judgments, but the objective reality, from which Christianity
springs, the new order of existence which was constituted for
the world by the great fact of the Incarnation, must be allowed
also to be historical. Only in such view can we possibly retain

68 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

our hold on the objectively supernatural, as it entered into the
original constitution of the Gospel. It is not enough for this
purpose, to have memories only of what vras once such a real
presence in the world. It lies in the very conception of the
Gospel, in this objective view, that its supernatural economy
should be of perennial force, that its resources and powers of
salvation should be "once for all;" not in the sense of some-
thing concluded and left behind, as many seem to imagine, but
in the sense of what, having once entered into the life of the
world, has become so incorporated with it as to be part of its
historical being to the end of time.

But this conception of a supernatural economy having place
among men under an objective, historical form, an order of
grace flowing from Christ, and altogether different from the
order of nature, is nothing more nor less than the idea of the
Holy Catholic Church as we have it in the Creed. We can see
thus how it is, that this article holds the place assigned to it in
that symbol. It is not there by accident or caprice. It is
there as part of the faith, which is required to take in the ob-
jective, historical movement of the grace that is comprehended
in our Lord Jesus Christ ; and it meets us exactly at the right
point, as setting forth the form and manner in which Christ, by
the Holy Ghost, carries forward His work of salvation in the
world. If we are to hold fast the objective, historical character
of what this work was first, and still continues to be, in His
own Person, it cannot be allowed to lose itself in the agency of
the Spirit under a general view; it must, necessarily, involve
for us the conception of a special sphere; this likewise objective
and historical; within which only (and not in the world at
large), the Holy Ghost of the Gospel is to be regarded as work-
ing. This is the Church. It comes in just here as a necessary
postulate of the Christian faith. Standing in the bosom of the
Creed, we cannot get round it. It is a mystery, like all the
other articles of the symbol, which we are required to believe,
because it flows with necessary derivation from the coming of
Christ in the flesh. Our belief in it is not founded in our em-
pirical knowledge of it, our having come to be sure of its ex-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 69

istence and attributes in some other way. In that case it would
not be faith at all in the sense of the Creed. What faith has to
do with properly, here as elsewhere, is the supernatural belonging
to its object; and that comes to us, not in the way of natural
experience and observation, but only in the way of a priori
challenge and demand addressed to us directly from its own
sphere. We do not believe, as the old adage has it, because
we understand, but we believe in order that we may understand.
Where there is no faith of this sort in the Church, eroinjj before
all inquiries in regard to what it is and where it is for outward
view, it is not to be expected that these inquiries can be carried
forward with much earnestness or effect. We may not be able
to explain fully the meaning of our Saviour's descent to hades,
or the time and manner of His second advent; but that is no
reason why these articles should not be firm objects of our
faith; we believe them, because they are felt to be involved in
the objective movement of the Gospel itself in Christ's Person.
And just so we believe the Church. We cannot get along
without it, in our conception of the real, objective, historical
working of Christ's Mediatorial Life in the world. This must,
to be real at all, have a sphere of its own ; which, as such, be-
comes, then, an order or constitution of grace, in distinction
from the world in its simply natural constitution ; exactly what
we mean by the Church as an article of faith, back of all ques-
tions in regard to its outward ora;anization and form. We
cannot get along without it, we say, in the objective movement
of the Creed. Do away with it, as modern spiritualists require,
and this movement is, for our faith, brought suddenly to an
end. It is either sublimated into magic, or precipitated at
once into the order of mere nature.

The theology we are speaking of, then, is churchly. It be-
lieves in the Church, as we have the article in the Apostles'
Creed ; believes in it as a mystery, which comes in necessarily
just where it stands in the Creed, as part of the ongoing move-
ment of the general mystery of salvation, that starts in the In-
carnation. It believes in an economy of grace, a sphere of su-
pernatural powers and forces flowing from the historical fact of

70 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

Christ's birth, death, and glorification, Avhich are themselves
present in the world historically (not magically), in broad dis-
tinction from the economy of nature ; and in the bosom of
which only, not on the outside of it, the Gospel can be expected
to work as the wisdom of God and the power of God unto sal-
vation. So far as this goes, of course, it owns and confesses
that the Church is a medium of communication between Christ
and His people. They must be in the order of His grace, in
the sphere where this objective working of His grace is actually
going forward, and not in the order of nature, where it is not
going forward at all (but where Satan reigns and has his own
way), if the work of redemption and sanctification is to be car-
ried forward in them with full effect. In this sense, most as-
suredly, salvation is of the Church, and not of the world ; and
to look for it in the world, by private spiritualistic negotiations
with God, professedly and purposely pouring contempt on the idea
of all church intervention, is to look for it where it is not to be
found.

This, of course, means a great deal ; and draws after it, in
the way of necessary consequence, much that we cannot now
think of noticing in detail. A churchly theology can never
run in the same direction with a theology that is unchurchly;
and can never breathe the same spirit. Not because it makes
less of Christ, as this last is ever ready to charge ; but because
it makes more of Christ, and cannot consent to have Him turned
into a Gnostic phantom. Not because it is less evangelical, as the
unchurchly spirit, with great self-complacency, is forever prompt
to assume ; but because it rests in a more profound and com-
prehensive apprehension of the Gospel.

Such a churchly theology, we feel at once, can never be
otherwise than sacramental. Where the idea of the Church
has come to make itself felt in the way now described, as in-
volving the conjunction of the supernatural and the natural
continuously in one and the same abiding economy of grace,
its sacraments cannot possibly be regarded as outward signs
only of what they represent. They become, for faith, seals
also of the actual realities themselves, which they exhibit ; mys-
teries, in which the visible and the invisible are bound together

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 71

by the power of the Holy Ghost (not physically or locally, as
vain talkers will forever have it), in such sort, that the presence
of the one is, in truth, the presence of the other.

In the end, also, unquestionably, the sacramental feeling
here cannot fail to show itself a liturgical feeling. There is an
inward connection between all the forms of religious thinking
we have had thus far under consideration. They run into one
another, and require one another to be in any sense, complete.
A theology which is truly Christocentric, must follow the
Creed, must be objective, must be historical ; with this, must
be churchly; and with this again, must be sacramental and
liturgical. It must be liturgical, moreover, in a sense agreeing
with these affinities throughout — the only sense, in fact, in
-which it is not absurd to talk of worship in this form. It can
never be satisfied with anything less than an altar liturgy. A
mere pulpit liturgy, a hand-book of forms for the exclusive use
of the minister, must ever seem to it, in comparison, something
very unrefreshing, not to say miserably cold and dry.

The enemies of the new Liturgy are right, then, in saying,
that it is the product of the general scheme of theology we have
now tried to characterize and describe, and that the spirit of
this theology pervades, more or less, all its offices and forms.
For this reason it is, in truth, that they dislike it, and would
be glad to get it out of the way. Standing, as they do, in
another order of religious thought altogether, they feel tliat the
Liturgy is against them, and their instinct of self-preservation,
as it were, impels them to seek its destruction. In this way,
our liturgical controversy is, in reality, a great theological con-
troversy; one that should be of interest to other Protestant
Churches, no less than to our own. We see in it two general
schemes of theology; two different versions, we may say, of the
meaning of Christianity; two Gospels, in fact, arrayed against
one another, with the feeling on both sides, that if one be true
the other must necessarily be wrong and false. One of tliese
schemes is the theology we have been thus far trying to de-
scribe; the other is the opposite of this, the Puritanic un-

72 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

cliurchly scheme, we may call it, in which the enemies of the
Liturgy now openly stand.

ANTI-LITURGICAL THEOLOGY.

And what, now, is this Puritanic scheme ? It admits within
it different constructions, Calvinistic, Arminian, Methodist,
Baptistic, and so on in all manner of sect forms ; but what we
are concerned with here is only its general character, the under-
lying common basis of these distinctions, as this presents itself
to our view in broad contrast with the general character of the
scheme we have just been considering. And even this general
view must be taken at present in a very cursory, wholesale way.
It will be sufficient, however, we trust, to show all unprejudiced
persons, whose image and superscription the system in question
bears, and in the service of what cause it works.

What, we ask again, is this Puritanic scheme, which finds a
"serpent" in the new Liturgy, and sees in it only a poisoned
chalice offered to the lips of the people ? We will now answer.

It is a scheme, which betrays itself at once by its apostacy
from the primitive regula fidei of the Christian Church, the
Apostles' Creed. We know how it is ready at times, especially
in our German Churches, to squirm under this charge, and how,
like some slimy eel, it tries to slip from beneath it with every
sort of disingenuous evasion. But we mean now to hold it
tightly to the accusation; and to do this before the people (the
elders especially and laity in general of the Reformed Church),
so that all may be able to see and know just what this false
popular evangelicalism means, and in what direction it leads.
It is constitutionally and inwardly at war with the Creed. It
cannot frame its mouth to pronounce the symbol in its true
original sense ; but claims the right of putting into its articles,
where it may please, a better modern sense of its own.

Hear, on this point, the "Puritan Recorder," in 1849. The
Puritans, it says, receive the Creed "in a sense consonant with
their theology," either leaving out altogether, for example, the
article of the descent to hades, or putting upon it a constrained
meaning to suit themselves. "But it is neither safe nor expe-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 73

dient," the Recorder honestly adds, "to receive such a docu-
ment in such a perverted sense; for the document once being
admitted, and its authority being made to bind the conscience,
then the way is open for those who hold the errors held by its
authors, to plead that we are bound to receive it in the sense
which its authors gave to it, and this makes it an instrument of
corrupting the faith of the Gospel." Honest confession ! True
divination ! The voice of the Creed allowed to proclaim itself
from week to week, without note or comment, in the churches
of New England, would, in the course of a few years, we verily
believe, sap the foundations of their existing orthodoxy, and
turn the stream of their church life into a wholly new channel.
But any such use of the Creed among them now would be cried
down as a Romanizing tendency or a hankering after ritualism;
as it would be also still, in spite of the little reactionary move-
ment we see working here and there the other way, in all
branches of American Presbyterianism. In these ecclesiastical
regions, Puritanism has killed the Apostles' Creed out of all
practical and theological use. It has become for them a dead
letter, in family and school, in the pulpit and in the divinity
hall. Let the thoughtful, everywhere, consider well what this
means. We speak plainly, because the fact is plain.

In our Reformed Church, especially since the theological re-
vival we have had among us these last years, no tongue would
dare to wag itself against the Creed in the fashion of the "Puri-
tan Recorder." With us now at least, the symbol is no dead
letter, but a living witness of Apostolical truth. So our people
are coming to regard it more and more. But the Puritanic
spirit is still among us to a certain extent; and as far as it is
so, it remains true still, in Jesuitical disguise, to the outspoken
confession of the Recorder, that the Creed can be mouthed by
modern evangelicalism only in a galvanized, so-called non-
natural sense.

Were we not told as much as this, to all intents and pur-
poses, on the floor of the late General Synod, at Dayton? Was
not the ground there taken by the enemies of the Liturgy, that
we had nothing to do with the faith of the third and fourth

T4 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

centuries, tlie birth-period of the Creed in its full development,
as we now have it ; that the faith of that time is not to be con-
sidered normative or regulative, in any sense, for the faith of
the modern Christian world ; that the only primitive faith we
are to follow, is what we can get out of the Bible directly for
ourselves (every man thus following his own nose), without re-
gard at all to any such objective form of sound words as we
find employed to set forth the fundamental belief of Christen-
dom in the first ages ? This, of course, was a blow struck at
all confessionalism ; bringing down our Reformed platform, at
one stroke, to a flat level with the lowest forms of sectarian
subjectivity, and involving us with general confusion in the
brotherhood of Anabaptists, Socinians, Quakers, Muggleto-
nians, United Brethren, Winebrennerians, Mormons (for these,
too, prate of the Bible in the same Cambyses vein), and others,
out to the end of the chapter. Hence, we had, in part, a
change of base; the authority of the Creed insidiously assailed
from the authority of the Heidelberg Catechism; the faith of
the Primitive Church required to shape itself here into con-
formity with what was represented to be the faith of the six-
teenth century. A modern confessionalism in this way made
to rule out the sense of the older confessionalism, in which,
nevertheless, it professed to have its own root and ground!
Did we not hear this nonsense gravely held forth at Synod?
Were we not told there, that we are to take the Creed only in
the sense of the fathers of the sixteenth century, and not in the
sense of the fathers who first used it in the second and third
centuries, if this last sense should be found not to square ex-
actly with the sixteenth-century sense, as it was quietly granted
might' be the case? On the supposition, in other words, of
even a casual discrepancy anywhere between the Creed and the
Heidelberg Catechism, it was held that the sense of the Cate-
chism must rule, that is, literally coerce, the sense of the
Creed ; in such way, that .the modern symbol shall be held to
be of primary normative force, and the primitive oecumenical
symbol of only secondary derivative force as taken up into its
bosom. How superlatively absurd ! What plainer proof could

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 75

we have of hostility to the Creed, than the cloven foot thus un-
ceremoniously thrust upon our view? Cannot the people see
it everywhere with their own eyes? The matter may he put
into a nutshell. Either the Creed, in its original unsophisti-
cated sense, is what the Universal Church in past ages held it
to be, the one only true radix and ground type of Christian
faith and doctrine; or else it is not tliis, but a bastard cor-
ruption of the Gospel, requiring to be tinkered into new sense
at learst, if not new form, before it can pass muster as fairly
evangelical, in the modern party sense of this much-abused
term. These are the two alternatives, without the possibility
of any middle ground for even a rope-dancer to stand upon.
Where they stand, whose acrobatic performances with the sub-
ject at Synod have just been noticed, needs no demonstration.
They do not own the Creed, in its own proper historical sense,
for the original, necessary, and radically sure norm of our Re-
formed faith; but take it only, in the way the " Puritan Re-
corder" took it in 1849, as being, " most of it, capable of a sense
Avhich harmonizes with the Scriptures," going on then to rectify it
to their taste, by distilling into it their own fancies, or what they
are pleased to consider the elixir of sound thinking drawn from
some other quarter. That is, in plain English, the Creed is
not for them the ultimate symbolical authority of the Reformed
Church ; and the fathers of the sixteenth century must be re-
garded as saying what was not true, when they pretended to
look upon it in that light. These modern sons of theirs know
better now, and have changed all that.

But what now have our people, as a body, to say to the issue,
thus fairly made up and brought before them? Will they allow
their first symbol, the marroAV and kernel of their confessional
faith, to be ruthlessly torn from their grasp by this Puritanic
enemy, which has stolen in upon us Avhile men slept, and now
threatens to rob us of all that is fairest in our theology or
church life? Are we to hold on to the Apostles' Creed with
good faith, taking it in its own true sense; or shall we have in
place of it only a dead corpse of the Creed, eviscerated of its
own true sense, and hypocritically hold this up as an argument

76 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

^ of our fealty to the ancient symbol? Are these old primeval
articles, this grand architectonic scheme of the everlasting Gos-
pel, to be for us no longer of undoubted catholic or universal
authority, as the whole is declared to be in the Heidelberg
Catechism ? Will the Reformed Church recognize the voice of
her true teachers, in those who counsel, directly or indirectly,
any such falling away from the faith of the fathers ? The ap-
peal is to the people. Let the people answer.

But we are not done yet with this anti-liturgical theology.
Its opposition to the Creed shows, of course, a constitutional dif-
ference between it and the whole conception of the Gospel con-
tained in this ancient symbol; and from what we have seen
already of this, we need have no difficulty in apprehending
wherein the difference consists, and to what it amounts. The
difference lies just here, and we wish all to ponder and consider
it well : The Gospel of the Creed is, throughout, Christologi-
cal, concentrates itself in Christ, throws itself, in full, upon the
Incarnation, and sees in the objective movement of this Mys-
tery of Godliness, as St. Paul calls it, the whole process of
grace and salvation on to the resurrection of the dead and the
life everlasting ; while this other scheme, which we now call,
for distinction's sake, the Gospel of Puritanism, substitutes for
all this a construction of Christianity that is purely subjective,
centering in the human mind, and that gives us then notions
for facts, causing metaphysical abstractions to stand for the
proper objects of faith, and thus resolves all religion finally into
sheer spiritualism ; in which no account is made of any objective
mediation of grace outside of men, but every man is supposed
to come directly, face to face, with God, having, in his evan-
gelical notions simply, whatever is necessary to give him free
access to the Divine presence.

The charge of not preaching Christ, we know, is one which
this theology will be ready to resent on all sides, as the last
that should be seriously preferred against it. It is accustomed
to please itself with the imagination of being evangelical, for
the very reason that it pretends to make everything of Christ
and Him crucified, and in certain of its phases at least is for-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 77

ever ringing changes on the themes of righteousness and free
redemption through His name. Is not this the very boast of
our unchurchly sects, all the land over, that they preach Christ,
and Christianity, in opposition to such as lay stress on the idea
of the Church, on the sacraments, on outward forms in any
view; denouncing every intervention of this sort, as exter-
nalism, ecclesiasticism, sacerdotalism, ritualism, or something
equally bad, that serves only to obscure the Saviour's glory,
and to block up the way to His presence ? Who in the world
do preach Chris^, it may be asked, if it be not these sects, for
whom Christ is thus, nominally, all in all ?

This we understand. It is an old song ; as old as the Gnos-
tics and the Phrygian Montanists, in the days of Tertullian.
But we are not to be deceived by it for a moment. Try the
spirits, says St. John ; do not take them at their own word ;
try them whether they be of God. And he gives us a simple cri-
terion for the purpose, applicable to all times (1 John iv : 1-3).
They come preaching Christ of course. How else could they
claim to be Christian ? But what sort of a Christ is it that they
preach? Is it the historical Christ of the Incarnation. Do
they confess that "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," not in
appearance only, and not for a season only, but in full reality
and for all time ? Or is their confession of that spiritualistic
sort, that resolves His coming in the flesh into a mere specula-
tive dream, long since subUmated in the clouds ? In this last
case, St. John tells us, its boasting of Christ cannot save it. It
is not of God, but is the very spirit of Anti-Christ, just because
it sets up a Christ which is tbe creature of its own subjective
thinking, over against and in place of the only true objective
and historical Christ of the Gospel, "who is over all, God
blessed forever. Amen."

We are not to be put oif here Avith words. Neither can we
mince matters in so momentous a case. We reiterate our
charge. The theology we are dragging into the light docs not
preach Christ, as the alpha and omega of the new creation, the
beginning, middle, and end of the Gospel. It cannot stand the
searching test of St. John. The Christ it talks about is not

io THEOLOaiCAL VINDICATION

the Christ of the Incarnation, as He is made to pass before us
in the sublime vision of the old Apostles' Creed ; as we hear
Him proclaimed (Jesus and the Resurrection and the Second
Advent), by St. Peter and St. Paul, in the Acts of the Apos-
tles ; as we seem to see Him in the midst of the golden candle-
sticks, looking forth upon us serenely and grandly from the ec-
clesiastical literature of the first Christian ages. Not this,
verily; as too many of us, alas, have been made painfully to
feel; but another form and visage altogether; an object of
thought rather than of faith, in looking to which we find that
we have at last little more than our own thought to work with ;
and become like those that feed on wind, in trying to replenish
our souls with spirituahties which our souls have themselves
produced, instead of the true bread which cometh down from
heaven and alone giveth life unto the world.

This is the great constitutional defect of the theology we are
sitting in judgment upon ; a defect which any jury of plain
Christian men can understand; and it is easy to see, to what
consequences, in the end, it must necessarily lead. Where the
Gospel is not apprehended as the historical, enduring, objective
Manifestation of God in the flesh, there can be no steady ap-
prehension of that which constitutes the proper mystery of it in
this view, namely, the union there is in it of the supernatu-
ral with the natural in an abiding, historical (not magical)
form. This precisely is the true object of all evangelical faith,
in the New Testament sense ; the objective power of salvation,
through the apprehension of which only, faith becomes justify-
ing and saving faith. Instead of this, we shall have the su-
pernatural resolved into a spiritualistic presence, seated in the
Holy Ghost, and made to reach into the minds of men directly
from heaven, in no organic conjunction whatever with the In-
carnation; this being considered as, at best, the outward occa-
sion only, and in no sense the inward medium, of the commu-
nication. In which case again, what is called justifying faith
is no longer tied to the objective Gospel (without which, how-
ever, it cannot be faith at all), but hugs simply the Gospel of
this subjective assurance a man may have of God's mercy in

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 79

his own mind, becoming thus, in fact, justification by fancy or
feeling. But with the real supernatural of the Gospel meta-
morphosed in this way into the general notion of the super-
natural in a metaphysical view, the whole conception of Chris-
tianity, in fact, sinks into the order of nature. The sense of
what it is as a continuous constitution of grace, the historical
presence of new heavenly powers, through the Spirit in the
world, is gone. As with the Gnostics of old, the spiritual has
lost all concrete, objective union with the natural. The bond
between them has thinned itself into airy speculation. The
system has become, in one word, essentially rationalistic. The
virus of unbelief is in its veins; and it has no longer power to
understand or appreciate fully, at a single point, the Mystery
of Godliness, as it was seen of angels, preached to the nations,
and believed on in the world, at the beginning.

Hence, the trouble this unhistorical Christianity has every-
where, with whatever comes before it as an assertion of ob-
jective grace in the institutions of the Gospel. What is ex-
hibited as thus transcending the order of life in its natural
character, is set down at once for superstition. It is, of course,
then, unchurchly. A Church in the sense of the Creed — the
organ through which Christ works in the world (His body),
the medium of His presence among men, the home of His Spirit,
the sphere of His grace — is for it no object of faith what-
ever, but an object rather of instinctive abhorrence and scorn.
The office of the ministry flows in its view, not really, but only
metaphorically, from Christ's Ascension Gift (Eph. iv: 8-12).
Ordination is no investiture with a supernatural commission,
proceeding from the Holy Ghost. Apostolical succession, in
the case, is an idle dream. Sacraments, as such, are held to
be a Romanizing abomination. For the spirit in question, the
sacramental in truth, wherever it comes in its way, is a very
Ithuriel's spear, the bare touch of which is enough to start it
into its real shape, and make it appear the low rationalistic
spirit which it is in fact. Sacraments are for it signs only of
grace absent, and in no proper sense seals of grace present.

That such a theology as this should have no sympathy with

80 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

the true idea of worship in its liturgical form, results, as all can
see, from its very constitution ; and that it should be found ar-
rayed now against our new Liturgy, is nothing more than what
was to be expected. The conflict in the case, as already said,
is a conflict of theological systems; not a controversy about a
few responses, and a few outward forms (as the ridiculous fuss
made in certain quarters about Ritualism in the German Re-
formed Church might seem to imply), but a controversy about
doctrines and articles of faith, that strikes far beyond the Ger-
man Reformed Church into the life of the entire Evangelical
Protestantism of this land.

So much for the subject in its general view. The two oppos-
ing schemes of divinity are before us in a contrasted form,
which even plain people, it is trusted, may be able to under-
stand ; if not with full scientific insight always at every point,
yet with the insight, at least, of sound theological feeling, which
is something far better. It remains now to notice briefly the
theological objections made to the Liturgy at certain particular
points. They will be found to resolve themselves at once into
the general issue, between the two systems which have been
thus far compared ; and with this in view, it will be very easy
to see to what they amount.

PARTICULAR OBJECTIONS.

I. It has been objected at times to the Ordination Service
(though we heard little of this at Dayton), that it makes too
much of the derivation of the ofiice of the Ministry, by histori-
cal succession from Christ, and goes too far especially in say-
ing, as it does p. 220, that the gift and grace of the Holy
Ghost are to be looked for through the laying on of hands, for
the fulfilment of its heavenly commission.

But here the question at bottom is simply, whether the
Church is to be regarded at all, or not, as an objective, histori-
cal, more than merely natural constitution, carrying in itself
powers and functions for its own ends, which are peculiar to
itself, and not to be found anywhere else. Is it after all only

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 81

like a Temperance Society or a Political Party ? What
business lias it then among the faith mysteries of the Creed ?

In the view of the Liturgy, the Church is an organization, as
the Creed makes it to be, which is not simply human, but is, at
the same time, also, superhuman, in virtue of its organic out-
flow from the fountain head of all grace and truth in the world,
the union of the divine and human in the Person of our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the mystery of the Incar-
nation. The organization being such, must not its organs and
functions be of a corresponding character? Is the Liturgy
wrong in declaring the office of the ministry to be "of divine
origin, and of truly supernatural character and force, flowing
directly from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as the fruit of
His resurrection and triumphant ascension into heaven?" Is
not this precisely what St. Paul teaches us, in the notable
fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Ephesians? May the office
come to any one, then, except from Christ, and through the
order He has Himself established for handing it down in the
Church? "The solemnity of ordination, then, through which
this transmission flows, " we are justified surely in saying wjith the
Liturgy, " is not merely an impressive ceremony, by which the
right of such as are called of God to the ministry, is owned
and confessed by the Church ; but it is to be considered rather
as their actual investiture with the very power of the office
itself, the sacramental seal of their heavenly commission, and
a symbolical assurance from on high, that their consecration to
the service of Christ is accepted, and that the Holy Ghost will
most certainly be with them in the faithful discharge of their
official duties."

Do we doubt this? Does it come as a strange, mystical,
dangerously hierarchical doctrine to our ears ? Then must we
question, to the same extent, the reality of any such order of
grace in the world, as we profess to believe every time we re-
peat the Creed. Ordination is a mere sham, indeed, if it be
not the conveyance of power and right to exercise functions
appertaining to the realm or jurisdiction in which it has place,
as really as the commission of the civil magistrate is for him

82 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

an investiture witli qualification he would not otherwise possess,
to act in the name of the government he represents. The com-
mission in either case must have quality and force answerable
to the order of authority it proceeds from; and this being more
than simply human and terrestrial in the case of the Gospel, it
follows that the commission here must carry with it correspond-
ing celestial character. Such being the case, it is only part of
the faith which properly belongs to the transaction, when
ordination is held to be the channel of supernatural official en-
dowment for the work of the ministry ; and nothing can be
more proper than that the candidate, having made good con-
fession of his general faith previously, should have the ques-
tion put to him finally: "Are you truly persuaded in your
heart, that you are called of God to the office of the holy minis-
try, and do you desire and expect to receive, through the lay-
ing on of our hands, the gift and grace of the Holy Ghost,
which shall enable you to fulfil this heavenly commission and
trust?"

It goes hard with the spiritualistic system, we know, to
admi^, anything that looks to the real presence of the supernatural
in this matter of fact way. The idea of grace tied to any
outward occasion as such, the Holy Ghost bound to ordinances,
is for it something heterogeneous with its ordinary conception of
religion as an afi"air of purely subjective experience. It is felt
to smack of mummery and superstition. Here, especially,
corbes in the bugbear of priestly manipulation and tactual suc-
cession, so easy to be sneered at by the frivolous. But what
mummery must it not be, in fact, to go through a form of this
sort, without any belief in the reality of what it pretends to be ?
To insist, that, while it seems to mean much, it means in truth
in itself just nothing, and is only the sign of something alto-
gether out of and beyond itself? If ordination be more than
the powwowing of Pagan superstition, it must involve a real
clothing with office in Christ's kingdom; and this can come
only from Himself through the Holy Ghost. Does the candi-
date believe that, and look for it, in the transaction ? Do those
who lay hands on Him expect it, and mean it in their own

OF THE NEW LiTURGY. 83

minds? If not, what business have they to be mocking high
heaven with their dumb show in this way ?

II. Confession and Absolution. Exception is taken to the
form in the Liturgy, by which the minister is directed, after
the General Confession, to assure such as are truly penitent,
that their sins are pardoned for Christ's sake (p. 10). It
breathes, we are told, an odor of sacerdotalism; and serves to
break the direct, immediate relation that should hold in the
ease between the believer and his Lord.

Now, looking at the form itself, its terms certainly would
seem to be safe enough in this view even for the most fastidi-
ous Puritanic judgment. For they only say, in fact, what any
one may say, and what all are bound to believe, of God's grace
toward the penitent through the Gospel. "Unto as many of
you, beloved brethren," the form runs, " as truly repent of
your sins, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, with full pur-
pose of new obedience," — to such and no others — " I announce
and declare, by the authority and in the name of Christ" — not
by my own or any other authority — "that your sins are for-
given in heaven, according to His Gospel, through the perfect
merit of Jesus Christ our Lord." Is there more in this at any
time, than the declaration of what is at all times and in all
places true ? Does it imply that the minister himself pretends
to forgive sins? Does it not, in the strongest manner, say just
the opposite? What better is it then than spiritualistic pru-
dery of the most captious sort, to put on a show of being
scandalized with it in any such view?

But there is more in the matter than this. The oifence
taken is, after all, with what lies deeper than the form. It is
the instinctive working as before of the unchurchly spirit,
against what is felt to come in its way here as the mediation
of Divine favor through the Church. God only can forgive
sins, it saj^s with the Pharisees of old ; from Him only, there-
fore, can we have the blessing in a direct spiritual way — His
spirit touching our spirit, without any intervening medium; to
conceive of any such instrumentation of His grace on the earth,
is blasphemy and superstition. In other words, this Gnostic,

84 THELOGICAL VINDICATION

rationalistic spirit eschews here, as at all other points, the mys-
tery of an organic, objective, historical connection between
the Cliurch of Christ and the Holy Ghost; and refuses to ac-
knowledge the Holy Ghost, the Divine in Christianity, unless
in the form only of an intellectual abstraction, bound to the
outward organization and order of the Church in no way what-
ever. Of the "forgiveness of sins," in the sense of the Creed,
where it is made to be a mystery for faith holding only in the
bosom of the Holy Catholic Church, the spirit in question
knows nothing. How should it? Have we not seen already
that it is at war with the whole Creed?

The acts of the Church, we have good reason to say, in the
exercise of her proper functions, and through her proper organs,
are never just the same thing with what might be done by a mere
civil corporation presuming to act in the same way. To think or
say so, would, indeed, be to blaspheme the Gospel. As official
acts, they have in their own sphere a real force, answering to
the character of the sphere, and being in fact the form in which
its powers reach forward to their proposed end. Who will
deny this? No one, it might seem, but an infidel.

Shall we be afraid then to say, that the official act of the min-
ister, the organ of the Church, in blessing the people, or in
pronouncing to the penitent the pardon of their sins, means
something more than the same declarations Avould mean, made
by some one else in an unofficial and common way? The minis-
ter does not originate the pardon he pronounces ; neither does
the Church ; but the voice of the Church, nevertheless, uttered
by him and through him, there where he stands in the objective
bosom of this grace, may be and is of immense account for
bearins: the sense of it with full comfort into the believer's heart.
If there are any who cannot see this, sustained as it is by the
known relation of thought and word universally, and by analo-
gies to be met with everywhere in common life, they are to be
pitied for the narrowness of their thinking, rather than
argued with seriously in so plain a case.

III. We turn our attention next to the doctrine of the Lit-
urgy in regard to Baptism. Exception is taken to it, as teach-

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 85

ing baptismal regeneration, substituting a mechanical ceremony
for the righteousness of faith, and making a mere outwar<l
form to stand for the work of the Holy Spirit. Let us see how
the matter really stands.

In somewhat bewildering contrast with this, the same service,
which is thus charged with making too little of the sinner's
justification, has been reproached for making a great deal too
much of his original guilt and condemnation. Many at least, at
the Synod at Dayton, could hardly trust their ears, when they
heard a Professor of Theology, in the Reformed Church, say
there, openly, that he, for his part, could not go with the Lit-
urgy, where it speaks of deliverance of our children through
baptism "from the power of the Devil;" he did not believe it
to be so bad with the children of Christians naturally as that;
it was enough to appeal to the common sensibilities of parents
(mothers in particular), to prove the contrary! This sounds
strange certainly; but it needs only a little reflection to per-
ceive, that it is, after all, only the Avorking out at a new point
of the same false spiritualism, which finds it so hard to under-
stand or acknowledge, on the other side, the presence of any
real objective grace in baptism.

The Professor of Theology referred to taught in this case,
of course, blank Pelagiansism. Here precisely lay the old
theological quarrel between Pelagius and St. Augustine. Pela-
gius, appealing to the common sensibilities of human nature,
would not allow that children are born into the world under the
curse of original sin, which is the power of the Devil. St. Au-
gustine maintained the contrary, and what is especially notice-
able, confounded Pelagius most of all, by appealing to infant
baptism, which could have no meaning, he said, except in the
Ijo-ht of a deliverance from the curse of sin conceived of in this
real way. So, we know, the Church, also, decided against the
heresiarch and his followers; and the decision has been echoed
by the orthodoxy of the Christian world, from that day down
to the present. We content ourselves with quoting now simply
the plain words of the Heidelberg Catechism, the symbol this
Professor of Theology has bound himself as with the solemnity

86 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

of an oath to teach. " By the fall and disobedience of our
first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise," the Catechism tells
us, Question 7, "our nature became so corrupt, that we are
all conceived and born in sin." On this then follows the ques-
tion: "But are we so far depraved, that we are wholly unapt
to any good [gam und gar untiiclitig zu einigem Guteji), and
prone to all evil?" to which is thundered forth, as from Mount
Sinai, the soul-shaking answer: "Yes; unless we are born
again by the Spirit of God." JIozv this new birth by the
Spirit is brought to pass, is not here of any account ; what we
have to do with now is simply the witness of the Catechism to
the total depravity of infants. It is plain, direct, overwhelm-
ing.

And is not this what we are taught no less plainly in the
New Testament? "That which is born of the flesh," our
Saviour says to Nicodemus (John iii. 6.) "is flesh" — that is,
mere human nature in its fallen character, which as such can-
not enter the kingdom of God, but is hopelessly on the out-
side of that kingdom, and so under the power of the Devil ;
only "that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit;" and for this
reason it is, that a man must be born again, "born of water
and the Spirit," in order that he may have part in this salvation.
But why pursue the argument in this way? Must we go about
proving at length for elders and deacons, or for the people at
large, in the German Reformed Church, that the Scriptures
teach the doctrine of Original Sin? The very children in our
Sunday-schools have a sounder theology on this subject, than
the Divinity Professor, who so exposed himself in regard to it
at the Synod in Dayton.

A Pelagian anthropology leads over naturally to a spiritual-
istic construction of the whole Christian salvation; in which,
as there is no organic power of the Devil or kingdom of dark-
ness, for men to be delivered from, so there will be no organic
redemption either, no objective, historical order of grace, in
the bosom and through the power of which, this salvation is
to go forward ; but all will be made to resolve itself into work-
ings of God's Spirit that are of a general character, and into

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 87

processes of thought and feeling, on the part of men, -with
no other basis than the relations of God to man in the most com-
mon, simply humanitarian view. Is there then no organic re-
demption needed for men, into the sphere of which they must
come first of all, in order that they may have power to become
personally righteous, and so be able to work out their salva-
tion with fear and trembling, as knowing it to be God that
worketh in them both to will and to do of His own good pleas-
sure? Has the Church been wrono- in believino; throufrh all
ages, that "we must be delivered from the power of darkness,
and translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son" (Col. i.
13), not as the end of our personal goodness and piety, but the
beginning of it, and the one necessary condition first of all,
without which we can make no progress in goodness or piety
whatever? Has the Church been wrong in believing, that such
change of state, such transplantation from the kingdom of the
Devil over into the kingdom of Christ, must in the nature of
the case be a Divine act ; and that as such a Divine act, it must
be something more than any human thought or volition sim-
ply, stimulated into action by God's Spirit? Has the Church
been wrong in believing, finally, that the Sacrament of Holy Bap-
tism, the sacrament of initiation into the Church, was insti-
tuted, not only to signify this truth in a general way, but to
seal it as a present actuality for all who are willing to accept
the boon thus offered to them in the transaction ?

Baptismal regeneration ! our evangelical spiritualists are at
once ready to exclaim. Bufwe will not allow ourselves to be put
out of course in so solemn an argument, by any catchword of
this sort addressed to popular prejudice. The Liturgy avoids
the ambiguous phrase; and we will do so too; for the word re-
generation is made to mean, sometimes one thing, and some-
times another, and it does not come in our way at all at pre-
sent to discus^ these meanings. We are only concerned, that
no miserable logomachy of this sort shall be allowed to cheat
us out of what the sacrament has been held to be in past ages;
God's act, setting apart those who are the subjects of it to His
service, and bringing them within the sphere of His grace in

«» THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

order that they may be saved. We do not ask any one to call
this regeneration ; it may not suit at all his sense of the term ;
but we do most earnestly conjure all to hold fast to the thing,
call it by what term they may. The question is simply,
Doth baptism in any sense save us ? That is, does it put us
in the way of salvation? Has it anything to do at all with
our deliverance from original sin, and our being set down in
the new world of righteousness and grace, which has been
brought to pass, in the midst of Satan's kingdom all around
it, by our Lord Jesus Christ?

For the defence of the Liturgy it will be enough to place
the matter now on the lowest ground. Our spiritualists ad-
mit that God may make baptism the channel of His grace —
may cause the thing signified to go along with the outward
sign, when He is pleased to do so ; only they will not have it
that His grace is in any way bound to the ordinance. Will
they not admit then also, that the sacrament ought to be so used
as to carry with it the benefit it represents ; that God designed
it to be in this way more than an empty form ; and that it is
the duty of all, therefore, to desire and expect through it what
it thus, by Divine appointment, holds out to expectation? Who
will be so bold as to say, in so many words, that baptism means
no deliverance whatever from the power of sin, and that it is
superstition to come looking for anything of this sort from it?
Why then quarrel with the Liturgy for making earnest with
the objective force of the sacrament in this view?

"You present this child here," it is said, "and do seek for
him deliverance from the power of the Devil, the remission of
sin, and the gift of a new and spiritual life by the Holy Ghost,
through the Sacrament of Baptism, which Christ hath ordained
for the communication of such great grace." Is it not true,
that the sacrament has been ordained for that purpose, even if
this be not exclusively or necessarily bound to its administra-
tion? If not, for what other purpose under heaven was it
ordained? And if for this purpose, why should those who
come to the ordinance, not come seeking what it holds out in
this way to the view of faith? Are they to come seeking

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 89

nothing, expecting nothing, believing nothing? Or if other-
wise, in the name of all common sense, tell us, 0 ye Gnostic
dreamers, ye zealous contenders against formalities and forms,
what then a)'e they to seek ?

The Liturgy, we allow, however, goes beyond this low view
of the mere possibility of grace through the sacrament; it
affirms that God, on His part, makes it to be always objectively
just what it means. In other works, it teaches the reality of
sacramental grace; and sees in it a birth-right title to all the
blessings of the new covenant. This does not mean, that it
regenerates or converts any one in the modern Methodistic
sense of these terms; that it saves people by magic; or that it
makes their final salvation sure in any way. Like Esau's
birthright, it may be neglected, despised, parted with for a
mess of pottage. But all this does not touch the question of
its intrinsic value, in its own order ; as being a real Divine gift
and power of Sonship, nevertheless, in the family of God, for
which all the treasures of the earth should be counted a poor
and mean exchange.

On this subject of baptismal grace, then, we will enter into
no compromise with the anti-liturgical theology we have now
in hand. In seeking to make the Liturgy wrong, it has only
shown itself wrong; and the more its errors are probed, the
more are they found to be indeed, "wounds, and bruises, and
putrefying sores." Starting with Pelagianism on one side, it
lands us swiftly'in dovrnright Rationalism on the other. "It
is impossible," says the distinguished French Reformed divine,
Pressens6, in a late article, "to establish the necessity of in-
fant baptism, except upon the ground that baptism imparts a
special grace." We are most decidedly of the same opinion;
and for this reason we denounce this theology as in reality,
whatever it may be in profession, hostile to infant baptism, and
unfriendly, therefore, to the whole idea of educational religion
as this has been based upon it in the Reformed Church from
the beginning. Without the conception of baptismal grace
going along with the baptism of infants, there can be no room
properly for confirmation ; and the catechetical training which

90 HISTORICAL VINDICATION

is employed to prepare the way for this, raay easily come then
to seem a hinderance rather than a help, to the true conversion
of the young to God. Then it will be well, if baptism fall not
into general contempt, and so be brought to sink finally more
and more into neglect altogether. To what a pass things have
already come in this respect throughout our country, by rea-
son of the baptistic spirit which is among us, and the general
theological tendency we are now considering, we will not now
take time to decide. Those who have eyes to see, can see for
themselves.

IV. Office for the Holy Communion. The central char-
acter of this service, ruling as it ought to do the whole
Order of worship to which it belongs, must make it of course
specially objectionable to the anti-liturgical spirit with which
we are now dealing.

Particular fault has sometimes been found with the con-
secratory prayer in the service, as teaching a real union be-
tween Christ and the elements representing His body and
blood, differing altogether from the proper Reformed doctrine
on this mysterious subject. A certain Doctor of Divmity went
so far at Dayton as to say, that it amounted in full to the Ro-
man Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. But in this the
Doctor of Divinity was egregiously mistaken, as in many
things besides. The doctrine of the Liturgy in that prayer
is not Popish, and not Lutheran, but strictly Reformed. Not
to be sure Reformed in the modern Puritan sense, in which too
plainly this unliturgical spirit finds its familiar home ; but Re-
formed in the old Cfi.lvinistic sense, as this entered into the sym-
bols of the Reformed Church generally in the sixteenth century.

It is not true that this proper Reformed doctrine made the
Lord's Supper to be only a commemorative ordinance, call-
ing to mind the fact of His death. It made it to be this ; but
it made it to be also the medium of a realmystical communion
with this glorified life. It saw in it, not a sign only, but a sac-
rament; the conjunction of visible elements with the invisible
represented by them, in such sort that the presence of the one
could be said to involve the presence also of the other — not

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 01

locally of course, but dynamically and with full virtue and effect
— through the wonder-working power of the Holy Ghost. This
we have abundantly shown years ago in our tract against Dr.
Ilodge, entitled, ''The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on
the Presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper;" an argument,
which no one has ever yet pretended to meet, and whose historical
force at least never can be overthrown; however convenient it
may be for Puritanic divinity to go on repeating its tradition-
ary song on this subject, as though history had nothing do with
the matter whatever.

Now it is this old Reformed doctrine, we affirm, and no •
other, which is involved in the consecratory prayer of the Lit-
urgy. Any one at all familiar with the Calvinistic terminol-
ogy in regard to it, can see that it is faithfully followed at every
point. It would be hard, indeed, to give the doctrine more
succinctly or exactly in the same compass. God is called upon
to "send down the powerful benediction of His Holy Spirit"
upon the elements, '' that being set apart now from a common
to a sacred and mystical use, they may exhibit and represent"
— these being the very terms made use of by Calvin to distin-
guish the Reformed doctrine from the Lutheran ; may exhibit
and represent ''to us with true eff'ect" — that is, not corporeally,
and yet not simply in sign or shadow either, but witli the
energy of actual presence — " the Body and Blood of His Son,
Jesus Christ; so that in the use of them" — mark again the
distinction ; not in the elements themselves outwardly con-
sidered, but in the use of them, that is, in the sacramental
transaction, "we may be made, through the power of the Holy
Ghost " — again the Calvinistic or Reformed qualification —
" to partake really and truly of His blessed life, whereby only
we can be saved from death, and raised to immortality at the
last day."

In the face of all this, what are we to think of a Doctor of
Divinity, who could stand up and say, that the Liturgy in this
prayer teaches the doctrine of transubstantiation ? "'

What are we to think of the same Doctor of Divinity, when
wc find him thrumming on the expression, " this memorial of

92 THEOLOGICAL VINDICATION

the blessed sacrifice of Thy Son," in the next following prayer;
as though it said memorial sacrifice, and meant all that is held
offensive in the Roman Catholic so called sacrifice of the mass !
Alas, alas, for the Liturgy, in the hands of theological criticism
so utterly untheological as this !

A truce, however, to these quibbles about particular terms.
The real controversy here is with the Communion service as a
whole ; and it turns upon the sacramental doctrine which un-
derlies it throughout, and which in this way conditions the
universal sense of the Liturgy. This anti-liturgical theology,
not centering in the Incarnation, not dAvelling in the bosom of
the Creed, having no sense for objective historical Christianity,
and no sense for the Church, can have at the same time of
course no sense for the sacramental in its true form. For what
is a sacrament ? The visible exhibition of an invisible grace —
a mystery in this view, where the visible and invisible are
brought together, and held together, not simply in man's
thought, but in God's power, by a bond holding beyond nature
altogether in the supernatural order of grace. Does Puritan-
ism believe this? Not at all. It will know no sacrament, save
in the intelligible form of a sign, which simply represents and
calls to mind what God does for men spiritually, and on the
outside of the sacrament altogether. We have just seen what
becomes of the Sacrament of Baptism in the hands of this
spiritualistic scheme. And noAv it is only what might be ex-
pected, to find it bent on taking away our Lord from us after
the same fashion, in the Holy Eucharist.

The Liturgy stands as a protest and defence against this
j sacrilege. It gives us the true Reformed view of Christ's pres-
ence in the Lord's Supper, in a form answering at the same
time to the faith and worship of the Primitive Church. It
teaches, that the Lord's Supper is more than an outward sign,
and more than a mere calling to mind of our Saviour's death
as something past and gone. It teaches, that the value of
Christ's sacrifice never dies, but is perennially continued in the
power of His life. It teaches, that the outward side of the
sacrament is mystically bound by the Holy Ghost to its inward

OF THE NEW LITURGY. 93

invisible side ; not fancifully, but really and truly ; so that the
undying power of Christ's life and sacrifice are there, in the
transaction, for all who take part in it with faith. It teaches,
that it is our duty to appropriate this grace, and to bring it be-
fore God (the "memorial of the blessed sacrifice of His Son"),
as the only ground of our trust and confidence in His presence.
All this the Liturgy teaches. Who will say that it wrongs, in
doing so, the sacramental doctrine of the Reformed Church?
x\.re we then to have no sacraments ? Must we plunge into /
the full abyss of Rationalism?

We now stop. Our general task is done. Enough has been
said, to show how things stand between the New Liturgy and
its theological opposers. We are willing to submit the case to
the common intelligence of our churches. Even the West must
yet come, we think, to see eye to eye here with the East.
To the people at large we say: Look now on this picture, and
now on that; and judge ye for your own selves, which of these
theological schemes may be safest and best for the German Re-
formed Church to take to her bosom at the present time.

Pnnceton Theological Semiciary-Spei

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