"prepared" and "established,” the "title-page" of the latter was a subject of distinct and specific legislation.

2

On the last day of the session (October 16th, 1789) provision was made to unite the several offices, which had been separately adopted, in one volume, and to 'ratify' and set this forth as "The Liturgy" of the Church in the United States. The House of Bishops, in view of this, had on the preceding afternoon1 (October 15th) "ORIGINATED and proposed to the House "of Deputies alterations of the title-page, a form of "ratification of the Book of Common Prayer," etc. And on the following day the Journal of the House of Deputies states, "The House of Bishops proposed a "title-page to the Book of Common Prayer, which was "read and passed." And later in this same session "the form of ratification was agreed to," of course including in this the title which had previously been adopted by both Houses as the name of the book. Thus, while the American title-page is in its form the same as the English, it was not an unconsidered transfer of this to our work, but has the significance of a deliberate expression by the General Convention of the terms by which it intended the Prayer Book of the Church in the United States should be described and known.

As such we will consider some of its more important features.

First. It states that the Sacraments and other Di

1 "Journals of General Conventions," etc., by Wm. Stevens Perry, D.D. 3 vols. 1879. Vol. I, 121.

2 Journals, etc. Vol. I, 110.

vine services which it provides for are those of "THE CHURCH." The Prayer Book thus, at the outset, defines its own position, and the source and authority of its offices and ministrations. It is "The Book of Common Prayer, and administration of the Sacraments; and other Rites and Ceremonies of The Church."

It is not a collection of ordinances and rules for the use of some local institution or temporary society. It is no mere arrangement of devout and proper forms for public worship and service. Its Sacraments, ministry and services did not originate with the founders of the American Church in 1789. They are not the product of the Reformation era, nor do we receive them solely as belonging to our honored mother, the great Church of England. On the contrary, they come to us on the authority of the one Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, and we have and use them because our Church is a living member of this same universal body of the Lord. Hence it is from the Church that they derive their origin; it is to the Church we owe their preservation. They were ordained under the commission Christ gave His Church at its foundation, and through and by the Church they have been ministered to all the ages. As such they are received by us and truly named in our Prayer Book, "The Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies of THE CHURCH."

The immediate source whence we derived these holy ordinances, and the general forms in which they are administered, is the same from which came also our organic unity with the Catholic and Apostolic Church, that is, the Church of England, for through her we trace back in a valid and unbroken line our continuity

of Orders, Sacraments, Worship and Holy Scriptures to the age and authority of the Apostles.

But while the chief features of our sacramental and other offices are those of the English Church, we have adapted these to our needs by such modifications as seemed to be required, and which, in our rightful authority as a branch of the universal Church, we were fully qualified to make.

In the primitive Constitution of the Church (and until the dominance of Rome had overthrown the apostolic organization of the Church throughout the most of Western Europe), each organic portion of the Church had and exercised, what England and all the Eastern Churches still retain, full and complete power over all the services they employed; and each in the way provided by its special usages or laws, modified and directed its own offices, as it thought best or its peculiar needs demanded.

In Western Europe the liturgies were translated from the Greek, which was the original language of all of them, into the Latin tongue, while certain portions of the Eastern Church also rendered theirs into their own vernacular.

Besides these adaptations of the language to the different sections of the Church, there were many other changes, as the theology and other tendencies of succeeding centuries changed, in various particulars of nearly every service, both in form and contents. These were especially numerous and marked in the offices and teaching of the Western portion of the Church. But while the alterations thus made had certain traits in common, as being in each age the expression of "the

spirit of the time," yet for many centuries each organic portion of the Church was wholly free to make whatever changes it deemed needful, and only such as it desired, by its own act and on its own uncontrolled authority.

The Church of England, in especial, maintained with jealous care this right of ordering her own services in the way of her own appointment, and through all the varied phases of her history, Briton, Saxon, Norman, English, down to the Reformation, she never allowed any other authority to interfere with her offices of public service, than that which from her foundation had been charged with this high duty. It had belonged of inherent right to her own bishops and her own convocations from the apostolic days, and it was so preserved by her through all the ages after.

The supremacy of Rome attained gradually during the Middle Ages to the control of the forms of worship in most of the Western Continental Churches, but all her efforts to induce or compel the English people to conform their liturgies to her order were unsuccessful until the reign of Mary, and even then were yielded to but partially and under protest.

The English Church and people have thus always had and exercised the full right to mould their services as they willed, and in entire independence on the Roman Bishop, or any other authority whatsoever outside themselves. "So wide, indeed, was the discrepancy" between their uses and the other Churches of the West that Archdeacon Freeman says, "It may safely "be affirmed that no Roman or Continental priest can "possibly, for many ages before the Reformation, have

"officiated at an English altar." (Principles of Divine Worship. Vol. 2. Introduction, p. 84.)

When the Church was first planted in this island its inhabitants were the Britons, a Celtic people akin in race to the Irish, the Scotch and some of the tribes in Gaul. The precise date of its founding is not certain, but it was very early. And it was known all over Christian Europe, for many generations before a Saxon or an Engle had set foot in Britain, as "a Church distinguished by its missions and with a long roll of saints."

The Church of the Britons had relations with all the other Celtic communities, and they formed together a group or family of churches which were alike among themselves, but differed in several matters concerning forms of worship, ceremonies and some questions of polity very considerably from the usages of Rome. Considered as a distinct body this Celtic Church was "Catholic in doctrine and practice," "having, as Warren 'says, a liturgy of its own, its own translation of the "Bible, its own monastic rule, its own cycle for the "calculating of Easter, and presenting both internal "and external evidence of a complete autonomy. When "it did come in contact, which, however, rarely hap'pened in those early ages, with the Bishop of Rome, "it 'allowed him a high post of honor, though second "to that of Jerusalem, the place of our Lord's Resurrec"tion,' but claimed to deal with him from the inde"pendent standpoint of an equal.”

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1 "The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church," by F. E. Warren, B.D., 1881, pp. 45, 46, 38.