PREFACE. To any one who watches the signs of the times, it must be obvious that an increasing number of persons, even in Churches of the freest ritual, are coming to the conclusion that it is an advantage in public worship to have a Book of Common Prayer. Doubtless the extempore outpouring of the minister will still be preferred by many, partly from the force of long custom, and partly from a conviction that words fresh from the heart are better adapted, both to call forth and to express genuine fervour, than prayers read from a book: but others will care more for the fitness than the newness of the language; and, instead of becoming weary of the familiar phrase, will find endearing associations cluster round it, and will feel a warmer glow of devotion from the thought, that they are uniting, not only with their fellow-worshippers immediately around them, but with many Christian assemblies far and near. Nor will forms of expression which evidently belong to a bygone time be without a peculiar sacredness, if we think of them as having served to clothe the homage and desires of devout men who have long passed from this world. The Reformation, as an insurrection of individual faith and the inward spirit against ecclesiastical method and tradition, favoured the habit of "free prayer," and made it almost co-extensive with Protestantism. In this country, however, the grand exception presented by the National Church was not without effect upon the taste and feeling of the less extreme Puritans themselves; especially of those among them who hoped, by some enlargement of her latitude, to be reinstated within her pale. Baxter and Calamy, it is well known, stood near enough to the Church to be drawn into negociations with her for the admission of their people: and, had reasonable concessions been made to them with regard to particular parts of the Book of Common Prayer, their nonconformity would have ceased. They pressed no scruple against a stated form of worship; and, had not the exclusive clerical party defeated all proposals for a "comprehen sion," were ready to exchange the usages of the conventicle for those of the parish church. From that time, the use of free prayer among the English Presbyterians is due to the necessity of external position rather than of internal conviction. Shut out from the National Communion, they fell back upon the modes of worship most congenial to their scattered, unorganised, and (as they still hoped) merely provisional life. But from time to time local experiments were made of Liturgical Forms, betraying the old tendency to qualify individual fervour by regulated order. It is quite in harmony therefore with the history of the English Presbyterians, that a body of London Ministers, inheriting their traditions and their name, their protest against creeds which divide Christians, their longing for a worship which unites, should have conceived the design of a new Liturgical compilation, to be gathered, in a catholic spirit, from the devotional writings of every Christian age. To one of their members they accordingly gave the commission, with promises of help which have been more than fulfilled,-to revise the Services in use. in the Church of England, and to make additions from other sources, after having carried out more fully a course of reading which has always been |