FORMULARY

(See Common Prayer , Liturgy .) A book containing the rites, ceremonies, and prescribed forms of the Church. The formulary of the Church of England is the Book of Common Prayer. This may be a convenient place to treat of forms of prayer generally. To the illustrious divines who conducted the reformation of our Church, in the reigns of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, any abstract objections to a prescribed form of prayer seem never to have occurred, for these were all the inventions of a later period. Ridiculous it would be, if we were going to addre a human sovereign, to permit one of our number to utter in the royal presence any unpremeditated words, which might chance at the time to come into his head; and not le ridiculous,—if it be allowable to use such an expre ion under such circumstances,—would they have thought it to permit the priest to offer at the footstool of the King of kings, a petition in the name of the Church, of which the Church had no previous cognizance; to require the people to say “Amen” to prayers they had never considered, or to offer as joint prayers what they had never agreed to offer. But, as has been observed, it was not upon the abstract question that they were called to decide. In their Church, the Church of England, when they were appointed to preside over it, they found prescribed forms of prayer in use. They were not rash innovators, who thought that whatever is must be wrong; but, on the contrary, they regarded the fact that a thing was already established as an argument a prior i in its favour; and therefore they would only have inquired, whether prescribed forms of prayer were contrary to Scripture, if such an inquiry had been nece ary. We say, if such an inquiry had been nece ary, because the slightest acquaintance with Scripture must at once have convinced them that contrary to Scripture could not be that practice, for which we can plead the precedent of Moses and Miriam, and the daughters of Israel, of Aaron and his sons when they ble ed the people, of Deborah and Barak; when the practice was even more directly sanctioned by the Holy Ghost at the time he inspired David and the psalmists; for what are the psalms but an inspired form of prayer for the use of the Church under the gospel, as well as under the law? The services of the synagogue, too, it is well known, were conducted according to a prescript form. To those services our ble ed Lord did himself conform: and severely as he reproved the Jews for their departure, in various particulars, from the principles of their fathers, against their practice in this particular never did he utter one word of censure; nay, he confirmed the practice, when he himself gave to his disciples a form of prayer, and framed that prayer too on the model, and in some degree in the very words, of prayers then in use. Our Lord , moreover, when giving his directions to the rulers of his Church, at the same time that he conferred on them authority to bind and to loose, directed them to agree touching what they should ask for, which seems almost to convey an injunction to the rulers of every particular Church to provide their people with a form of prayer. The fact that we find this injunction in Scripture, renders probable the universal tradition of the universal Church, which traces to the apostles, or apostolic men, the four great liturgies, (which have, in all parts of the Church, afforded the model according to which all others have been framed,) and which affirms that the apostles instituted a form of worship wherever they established a Church. It would be easy, if the occasion required it, to show, from a variety of pa ages in holy writ, that while much can be adduced in corroboration of this tradition, nothing but conjecture can be cited against it. With respect to those pa ages which, referring prayer to the influence of the Holy Spirit upon the soul of man, are sometimes brought forward as militating against the adoption of a form, they cannot have fallen under the notice of our reformers, since the application of them to this purpose was never dreamt of till about 200 years ago, when men, having determined in their wilfulne to reject the liturgy, searched for every po ible authority which might, by constructions the most forced, support their determination; and the new interpretation they thus put upon Scripture, may be considered as rather the plea of their wishes than the verdict of their conviction. The adduction, indeed, of such pa ages for such a purpose is a gratuitous a umption of the question in dispute, and will not for a moment hold weight in the balance of the sanctuary. According to the interpretation of those ancients, whose judgment is the more valuable because (living before any controversy was raised on the subject) they were little likely to be warped, or their opinions determined, by the prejudices of sect, or the subtleties of system, what these pa ages of Scripture mean is this , and simply this: that the Holy Ghost , who is the author and giver of every good and perfect gift, must stir up in our hearts that spirit of devotion and holine of temper, without which the service we render is but the service of the lips, and is usele , if not profane. It is, then, to the mind with which we pray , not to the words which we adopt, that those pa ages of Scripture refer, in which we are exhorted to pray in the Spirit. But admitting, for the sake of argument, that where we are told that the Spirit will teach us to pray, the promise is applicable to the very expre ions, even this cannot be produced as an argument against a form of prayer. For, whatever may be a man’s imaginary gift of prayer, this is quite certain, that his thoughts must precede his tongue; that before he speaks he must think. And not le clear is it, that after he has conceived a thought, he may, for a moment, restrain his tongue, and set down that thought upon paper. To suppose that the intervention of the materials for committing his thoughts to writing must, of nece ity, drive away the Holy Spirit , would not only in itself be absurd, but it would be tantamount to a denial of the inspiration of the written Scriptures. If the first conceptions were of God and God’s Spirit, then, of course, they are so still, even after they have been written;—the mere writing of them, the mere committing of them to paper, can have nothing whatever to do with the question of inspiration, either one way or the other. If a man, therefore, a erts that his extemporary prayers are to be attributed to the inspiration of the Holy Ghost , we can at once reply that our prayers, in our Prayer Book, are, on his own principles, quite as much so, with this further advantage, that they have been carefully compared with Scripture, and tested thereby. No Scriptural Christian, no one not mad with folly, will contend that, on that account, they are le spiritual; though, on the other hand, we may fairly doubt whether an extemporiser is not acting in direct opposition to Scripture, for Scripture says, (Eccles. v. 2,) “Be not rash with thy mouth to utter anything before God , for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth:” and who in the world is hasty to utter anything before God , if it be not the man who prays to him extemporally? Again, the bishops and divines, by whom our Church was reformed, recognised it as the duty of the Church to excite emotions of solemnity rather than of enthusiasm, when she leads her children to the footstool of that throne which, if a throne of grace, is also a throne of glory. And, therefore, when discarding those ceremonies which, not of primitive usage, had been abused, and might be abused again, to the purposes of superstition, they still made ample provision that the services of the sanctuary should be conducted with decent ceremony, and orderly form, and impre ive solemnity, and in our cathedrals and the royal chapels with magnificence and grandeur. They sought not to annihilate; they received with the profoundest respect those ancient ceremonials and forms of prayer which had been used in their Church from the first planting of Christianity in this island. These ancient forms, however, had been used in many respects, though gradually corrupted. In every age, men had made the attempt to render them more and more conformable to the spirit of the age, and (in ages of darkne ) superstitions in practice , and novelties, and therefore errors, in doctrine , had crept in. Our wise-hearted reformers, intent, not on pleasing the people, nor regaining popularity, nor on consulting the spirit of the age, but simply and solely on ascertaining and maintaining the truth as it is in Jesus , having obtained a commi ion from the Crown, first of all compared the existing forms of worship with the inspired word of God , being determined at once to reject what was plainly and palpably at variance therewith. For example, the prayers before the Reformation had been offered in the Latin language, a language no longer intelligible to the ma of the people; but to pray in a tongue not understood by the people, is plainly and palpably at variance with Scripture; and, consequently, the first thing they did was to have the liturgy translated into English. Having taken care that nothing should remain in the forms of worship contrary to Scripture, they proceeded (by comparing them with the most ancient rituals) to renounce all usages not clearly primitive; and, diligently consulting the works of the Fathers, they embodied the doctrines universally received by the early Church in that book which was the result and glory of their labours, the Book of Common Prayer. The work of these commi ioned divines was submitted to the convocation of the other bishops and clergy, and being approved by them, and authorized by the Crown, was laid before the two houses of parliament, and was accepted by the laity, who respectfully thanked the bishops for their labour. And thus it is seen, that the English Prayer Book was not composed in a few years, or by a few men; it has descended to us from the first ages of Christianity. It has been shown by Palmer, that there is scarcely a portion of our Prayer Book which cannot, in some way, be traced to ancient offices. And this it is important to note; first, because it shows that as the Papist in England is not justified in calling his the old Church, since ours is the old Church reformed, his a sect, in this country, comparatively new; so neither may he produce his in opposition to ours as the old liturgy. All that is really ancient we retained, when the bishops and divines who reformed our old Church corrected, from Scripture and antiquity, our old liturgy. What they rejected, and the Papists adhered to, were innovations and novelties introduced during the middle ages. And it is important to observe this, in the next place, since it is this fact which constitutes the value of the Prayer Book, regarded, as we do regard it, not only as a manual of devotion, but also as an interpreter of Scripture. It embodies the doctrines and observances which the early Christians (having received them from the apostles themselves) preserved with reverential care, and handed down as a sacred deposit to their posterity.