Christian liturgy

“ That the practice of praying for the dead has descended from apostolic times is also evident from the Liturgus of the Church. A Liturgy is the established form of public worship, containing the authorized prayers of the Church. The Missal, or Mass-book, for instance, which you see on our altars, contains a portion of the Liturgy of the Catholic Church. ”

“ I do frankly acknowledge Liturgy to be no more than an art—and therefore not in the least generally necessary to salvation; and I do not in the least 'condemn' people who do not appreciate it. It is only a way of presenting facts—and, in the case of Holy Week Ceremonies, these facts are such as those of the Passion of Christ, the sins of men, the Resurrection and the Sovereignty of Christ. ”

“ In a generous eclecticism, within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power within her, she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various sources—Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan—to adorn and beautify the greatest act of worship the world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church came to be—full of consolations for the human soul, and destined, surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness. ”

“ I certainly admire much of our Liturgy, and think that the men who drew up some of the prayers, though not inspired, in the sense in which apostles and prophets were inspired, yet they must have been greatly assisted by the Spirit of the Lord when composing them. ”

“ Now, almost all the ancient liturgies, both Eastern and Western, are so constructed that the point upon which each service converges is the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. That is the point up to which they climb. That is their central act; because the highest thing in the way of worship that the Christian can do is to say Christ’s own prayer in the freedom of that approach to God once won for him by the Son of Man. ”

“ I would remind you, however, that greatly as many of us love our liturgy, and helpful as we find it, God may be worshipped by us all in spirit and in truth, though our prayers be but halting and imperfect. ”

“ In place of the pleasing variety of the old exercises of prayer—from the Office recited by the clergy with its daily commemoration of the Saints down to the multifarious devotions of the people, to say nothing of the great Sacrifice of the Altar, the very heart’s pulse of the Church—he recommends as a rule only the Our Father, the Creed and the Psalms—prayers indeed rich beyond all others and which will ever hold the first place among Christian devotions. ”

“ For while I am as much satisfied as ever of the great utility of a Liturgy, I have become equally convinced that original, spontaneous prayer is likely to open the preacher's heart, or to stir up the gift in him in a way very important to his own ministration and to the edification of his people. ”

“ As we use these sacred gifts in our highest act of worship and nearest approach to God, we shall ever rejoice in the consciousness of your love toward us in the communion of saints, and that you share with us in the precious heritage of the great liturgy bequeathed to us by our fathers in the faith. ”

“ The Epiklesis of the liturgy of the Apostles is vague: "And may there come, O my Lord, thine Holy Spirit and rest upon this offering of thy servants and bless it and hallow it, that it be to us, O my Lord, for the pardon of offences and the remission of sins, and for the great hope of resurrection from the dead, and for new life in the kingdom of heaven, with all those who have been well-pleasing in thy sight." Certainly, if we look for a categorical "form" of the Sacrament, we shall have difficulty in finding it in this liturgy. ”

“ What the body is for the soul, such is the liturgy for religion. Everything in the uses of the Church, from the mysterious ceremonies of the Mass and of Good Friday, to the summons of the evening bell to prayer, is nothing else than the eloquent expression of the content of the redemption of the Son of God.” [46]
Since the ritual is prayer, the offering of the Church to God through commemoration and representation as well as through direct appeal, so the whole ceremonial, act as well as word, blends with this conception of prayer, not as embellishment merely but as constituent factor. ”

“ We praise Thee, we sing hymns to Thee, we bless Thee, we glorify Thee, we worship Thee by Thy great High Priest; Thee who art the true God, who art the One Unbegotten, the only inaccessible Being. For Thy great glory, O Lord and heavenly King, O God the Father Almighty, O Lord God, the Father of Christ the immaculate Lamb, who taketh away the sin of the world, receive our prayer, Thou that sittest upon the cherubim. For Thou only art holy, Thou only art the Lord Jesus, the Christ of the God of all created nature, and our King, by whom glory, honour, and worship be to Thee. ”

“ The result of a faithful reception of the Holy Communion should be holiness in the common, everyday life, from which an incident, the family meal, is borrowed and transformed as the symbol and means by which all other incidents may be transformed. So great a mystery demands all the majesty of a liturgy and the accompaniment of [Pg 106] stately worship; and a dignified ritual attached to this representative, this common act of our human life, is most valuable as indicating the majesty of all that is commonplace when it is touched by God. ”

“ They seem not like prayers made with hands, to be printed in a book, but real praying, full of spirit and life.... So remarkable is their tone of reality and genuineness, that we cannot bring ourselves to regard them as compositions written for a purpose, but rather as the actual utterances of a pure and elevated soul in reverent and immediate communion with the Infinite Father."—Christian Examiner. ”

“ For the origin of liturgy thus broadly defined we have to go a long way back; beyond the Prayer Book, beyond the Mass-book, beyond the ancient Sacramentaries, yes, beyond the synagogue worship, beyond the temple worship, beyond the tabernacle worship; in fact I am disposed to think that, logically, we should be unable to stop short until we had reached the very heart of man itself, that dimly discerned groundwork we call human nature, and had discovered there those two instincts, the one of worship and the other of gregariousness, from whence all forms of common prayer have sprung. ”

“ Here is a supreme priest who believes God to be—what, in the name of God, does he believe God to be?—and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax candles, organ blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, to save the ignorant from worse.... ”

“ And may Christ fill you with the joy of His resurrection, most holy flock of Christ, Christian people, chosen race, body of the Church, and make you worthy to walk in the footsteps of the saints, of the shepherds and teachers of the Church, leading you to enjoy His glory in the brightness of the saints. ”

“ The Church’s insistence upon some vocal prayer, upon some definite, differentiated, specific acts of the various moral and theological virtues, upon Sacramental practice throughout all the states and stages of the Christian life, is but a living commentary upon the difficulty and importance of the point under discussion. ”

“ If people are taught to use the Liturgy rightly and reverently, it will bring them all good; and for some thirty years of my life I used to read it always through to my servant and myself, if we had no Protestant church to go to, in Alpine or Italian villages. One can always tacitly pray of it what one wants, and let the rest pass. ”

“ A liturgy comes in as a corrective of these constitutional failings; it confronts us with all that is vast in the realm of truth; it calls us away from the consideration [Pg 94] of those things over which we have pondered until morbidness has seized upon us; it ministers that grateful rest which comes from the mind being freed from the contemplation of one set of interests, by being caught away by and absorbed in new and wider interests; it rounds out the devotional life; it invites us to lean upon the prayers of others as we desire them to lean on ours. ”

“ The theory of worship which prevailed through mediæval Christendom—the belief that the worshipper assisted only at rites wrought for him by priestly hands, at a sacrifice wrought through priestly intervention, at the offering of prayer and praise by priestly lips—was now set at naught. The laity, it has been picturesquely said, were called up into the chancel. The act of devotion became a common prayer of the whole body of worshippers. The Mass became a Communion of the whole Christian fellowship. ”

“ Hear the prayer of Thy holy Church invoking Thy divine Majesty in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to come to the aid of Thy children in all their needs. Turn not from us Thy gracious eyes, but deliver us from all evil, so that we may live to please Thee, die in Thy love, and enter the kingdom of glory. ”

“ This he seems to have done as “Liturge” and “Hierurge,” or evangelical priest, [23] “ministering in sacrifice [24] the Gospel of God,” etc.
Compare, then, with the Scriptures, Justin Martyr’s account of the early worship of Christians; and after consulting the (so-called) “Clementine Liturgy,” [25] the student will be qualified to form an enlightened judgment upon the primitive and the interpolated elements of the following liturgies. ”

“ I still admire the Liturgy, and I still believe the Articles of the church; I still retain that religion which you say is venerable for its antiquity; but, then, I believe it is not to remain a religion of mere forms and ceremonies, but that it is to operate on my heart, and produce within me the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The new religion, as you and others are pleased to term it, is not a corruption of the old; but it is the old religion of our venerable Reformers, and the good old bishops and pastors of our church, revived in its primitive simplicity, and life, and power. ”

“ The liturgy is inseparably bound up with the central act of consecration and oblation, and is conceived as itself possessing a divine sanction. The liturgy is not in any sense the creation of the people, but comes [241] down to them from a higher source, the gradual production of men believed to have been inspired by the Holy Spirit, and is accepted by the laity as a divinely authorized means in the accomplishment of the supreme sacerdotal function. ”

“ A liturgy, for example, is intolerable, because it is a slur upon the extemporary effusions of ministers of the Gospel. "Well may men of eminent gifts set forth as many forms and helps to prayer as they please ”

“ Just as reasonably would a pagan justify his worship of the sun, the moon, and the stars, by this passage of Scripture, as our Roman Catholic brethren would justify themselves by the former passage in their ascription of praise and glory to the holy angels, and saints, and the blessed Virgin. We honour the holy angels, we praise God for the glory which He has imparted to them, and for the share which He has been pleased to assign to them in executing his decrees of mercy in the heavenly work of our salvation ”

“ Father Almighty, eternal, unchanging, invisible, and infinite in all Thy perfections, all the choirs of angels are incessantly singing before Thee, "Holy, holy, holy," and we on the earth, by Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ, by offering Thee this great sacrifice of the Mass, are rendering Thee all the glory and honor due to Thine infinite majesty. We pray Thee for the deliverance of the souls in purgatory. ”

“ What cunning artificer devised the harmony of a composition so complete? Who breathed into all those prayers and anthems, hymns and psalms, Epistles and Gospels from Holy Writ, that spirit of devotion and piety, and informed them with those lessons of the purest morality and professions of the universal faith of Christendom? What more than angelic Artist knew how to dye the martyr's chasuble in blood, and transfer the spotless purity of the lily to the stole of the confessor and the virgin ”

“ The favor demanded is a great one, and therefore we have chosen all that Christian piety, the church, God himself, offers us as having most power to prevail with him. Rather than depend alone on disseminating leaflets of prayers, or engaging pious souls to remember Russia, thus giving to these associations a form which, in one way or another, might injure their character of universality, we have endeavored to obtain the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. For this intention we have asked for Masses. [12] In the Holy Mass it is Jesus Christ himself who prays, and he is always heard. ”

“ The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; ”

“ MOST sacred Heart of Jesus, shower copiously Thy blessings on Thy Holy Church, on the Supreme Pontiff, and on all the clergy; grant perseverance to the just, convert sinners, enlighten infidels, bless our parents, friends, and benefactors, assist the dying, liberate the souls in purgatory, and extend over all hearts the sweet empire of Thy love. ”

“ What more biblical, as far as the Old Testament is concerned, than the idea that worship and prayer are more acceptable to the Almighty when offered on certain spots, holy ground, remote, perhaps, from the usual haunts of the worshipper! ”

“ Liturgies have been different at different times and in different countries. We have the liturgy of St. Chrysostom, of St. Peter, the Armenian liturgy, Gallican liturgy, &c. The properties required in a public liturgy,” says Paley, are these: it must be compendious; express just conceptions of the divine attributes; recite such wants as a congregation are likely to feel, and no other ”