CHAPTER XXXI.

EASTER EVEN. (1)

Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection ; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. [A. D. 1661.]

OUR Prayer Book is not only a treasury of devotion, but also an interesting historical monument. It recalls those early times of the Church when, amid the breaking up of the Western Roman Empire, the three great Sacramentaries were compiled; it recalls the meek and learned Cranmer, and his labours in drawing up a Service Book in the vernacular for the English Church; it recalls Bishop Cosin, and the revision which he and his committee so successfully accomplished, and which was the great result of the Savoy Conference. The Collect before us has another great historical memory clinging to it, besides that of Cosin. Singularly enough the Divines of the Reformation provided no Collect for Easter Even, perhaps because they thought that the Collect for the Sunday next before Easter was sufficiently apposite. This is the more to be wondered at, because to the Epistle and Gospel for Easter Even they paid particular attention, giving us as the Epistle St. Peter's notice of Christ's preaching to the spirits in prison, and as the Gospel the

account of the burial and the sealing of the stone,passages much more appropriate to the day than the Epistle and Gospel which are found in the Sarum Missal.1 Why they rejected the Sarum Collect, it is not easy to say; for it is entirely free from everything objectionable in point of doctrine, and contains, as our present Collect does, a pointed allusion to the Sacrament of Baptism, which in the early Church it was customary to administer on Easter Even. But, whatever may have been their reasons for a step so new and unprecedented as that of furnishing an Epistle and Gospel without a Collect, thus matters stood for a period of eighty-eight years from the date of the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. The expiration of that period found the unhappy Charles I. upon the throne of this realm. He and Archbishop Laud, who had been raised to the Primacy in 1633, wished to introduce the English Book of Common Prayer into Scotland. But the Scottish Bishops pleading that the jealousies of the Scotch would set them against

1 The Sarum Epistle (like the present Roman one) was the four first verses of Col. iii. ("If ye then be risen with Christ then shall ye also appear with him in glory.") The Gospel was the seven first verses of St. Matt. xxviii.,-the account of the interview of "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary" with the angel at the Sepulchre.

2 The Collect is as follows:Deus, qui hanc sacratissimam noctem gloriâ Dominicæ resurrectionis illustras, conserva in nova familiæ tuæ progenie adoptionis spiritum quem dedisti; ut corpore et mente renovati, puram tibi exhibeant servitutem. Per eundem. In unitate ejusdem.

O God, who lightenest the darkness of this most holy night with the glory of our Lord's resurrection; keep alive in the new race of children, born into thy family, the Spirit of adoption whom thou hast given them, that they, being renewed both in body and mind, may present unto thee a pure service. Through the same, our Lord. In the unity of the same Spirit.

the Book, unless it received certain alterations which might entitle it to be regarded as a new work, a committee was formed for the purpose of revising the English Liturgy, and adapting it to the Scotch Church. Among the proposed alterations was the provision of a Collect for Easter Even; and, as Laud admitted that by the King's express injunction he had assisted in preparing the new Service Book, and as both his character and his position would naturally give him a leading part in any enterprise which he might join, we may believe that in this Collect we have some trace of his hand, not altogether inexpert in forms of devotion. The Collect, however, as it stands in our own Prayer Book, is not worded. as its writer worded it. Bishop Cosin in 1661 re-wrote the Scotch Collect for the English Prayer Book, still retaining its main features, but pruning its redundancies, and reducing it more to the usual compass of a Collect.

1 The most material alteration was in the Office for the Holy Communion. I give it in the words of the late Dean Hook (Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. vi. New Series, London, 1875, pp. 265, 266): "The Office for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist was considerably altered; an addition was made to the prayer for the church militant; the Collect of humble access was placed after the prayer of oblation, the latter of which began, 'Wherefore, O Lord and heavenly Father, according to the institution of thy dearly beloved Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, we thy humble servants do celebrate and make here before thy Divine Majesty, with these thy holy gifts, the memorial which thy Son hath willed us to make, having in remembrance his blessed passion, mighty resurrection, and glorious ascension, rendering unto thee most hearty thanks for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same;' and ended with the words of the first collect in the post-communion of the Common Prayer Book." The above prayer of oblation, and the arrangement that the prayer of humble access should come after it, was taken from the First Prayer Book of King Edward VI. (A.D. 1549). The American Church has retained this beautiful prayer of oblation as the latter section of the prayer of consecration; but with them, as with us, the prayer of humble access precedes (not succeeds) the consecration.

Before giving it at length, let me, having spoken of the Book of Common Prayer as an historical monument, just glance at the failure of the attempt to thrust the Scottish Prayer Book upon the people. The new Liturgy was appointed by royal proclamation to be read for the first time in the Scotch Churches in July 1637. But the attempt to comply with the proclamation in Edinburgh was the signal for a burst of popular fury which had long been pent up in the minds of the Scotch, who perhaps may be said without disparagement to be the most polemical nation in Europe. The Seventh Sunday after Trinity, on which the new form of Prayer was to be first read, was known long after as "the stony Sabbath," or "the casting of the stools," because stones and stools were hurled at the heads of such of the clergy as ventured to read it. This opposition to the royal mandate ought to have convinced Charles and his advisers that the point should be no further pressed. The object of establishing a Liturgy must have been the edification of the people, among whom it was proposed to establish it; and how could they be edified by that which excited in them such a frenzy of indignation as made them forgetful of the reverence due to holy places and holy seasons? Most injudiciously, however, the King sent orders to the Council to insist on the Liturgy; and the result was the overthrow of Episcopacy in Scotland, and the setting up of the solemn League and Covenant, which, after being read aloud to an enthusiastic multitude, was solemnly subscribed in the Greyfriars' Church at Edinburgh, in March 1638. With such historical memories as these is the Collect for Easter Even charged. And yet, looked at in itself, it is as scriptural, as devout, as practical as any prayer has need to be. The following is the original draught of it in the Laudian Book of Common

Prayer, which it is interesting to compare with the more terse version given by Cosin to the English Church :"O most gracious God, look upon us in mercy, and grant that as we are baptized into the death of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ; so by our true and hearty repentance all our sins may be buried with him, and we not fear the grave; that as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of thee, O Father, so we also may walk in newness of life, but our sins never be able to rise up in judgment against us; and that for the merit of Jesus Christ, that died, was buried, and rose again for us. Amen." The meaning of both the Scotch and English Collects is the same, but the mode in which it is expressed is different. In the English Collect the petition is that we ourselves may be buried with Christ ("so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we, etc., etc."); in the Scotch, it is that our sins may be buried by our true and hearty repentance, and so buried as never to rise up again to haunt and disquiet us, as Samuel's ghost rose under the witch's incantation to disquiet King Saul and plunge him into despair.1 The image is Scriptural and forcible. We read of the "body of sin," meaning the sinful nature of man; and we are bidden to "mortify our members which are upon the earth," these members being not the members of the literal body, but the members of "the body of sin," 2 in other words, the various actings of

See 1 Sam. xxviii. 20.

2 See Rom. vi. 6, and Col. ii. 1, iii. 5; and the Post-Baptismal Prayer, which is founded on this Scriptural phraseology; "Humbly we beseech thee to grant that we, being dead unto sin, and living unto righteousness, and being buried with Christ in his death, may crucify the old man, and utterly abolish the whole body of sin,"-where the word "body" cannot mean the natural or literal body, which, so far from being "abolished,” is to be raised again in incorruption, as the instrument of praise and of service in a better world.