A Short History of the Book of Common PrayerHuntington, William Reed
Religion
A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer
Huntington, William Reed
Episcopal Church. Book of common prayer
In that memorable building to which reference was just made,
influential over the destinies of our race as no other house of
man's making ever was, there went on from day to day these two
things, psalmody and sacrifice. Peace-offering, burnt-offering,
sin-offering, the morning oblation, and the evening oblation--these
with other ceremonies of a like character went to make what we
know as the sacrificial ritual of the temple.
But this was not all. It would appear that there were other
services in the temple over and above those that could strictly
be called sacrificial. The Hebrew Psalter, the hymn-book of that
early day, contains much that was evidently intended by the
writers for temple use, and even more that could be easily
adapted to such use. And although there is no direct evidence
that in Solomon's time forms of prayer other than those associated
with sacrificial rites were in use, yet when we find mention in
the New Testament of people going up to the temple of those later
days "at the hour of prayer," it seems reasonable to infer that
the custom was an ancient one, and that from the beginning of the
temple's history forms of worship not strictly speaking sacrificial
had been a stated feature of the ritual. But whether in the temple
or not, certainly in the synagogues, which after the return from
the captivity sprang up all over the Jewish world, services
composed of prayers, of psalms, and of readings from the law and
the prophets were of continual occurrence. Therefore we may safely
say that with these two forms of divine service, the sacrificial
and the simply devotional and didactic, the apostles, the founders
of the Christian Church, had been familiar from their childhood.
They were at home in both synagogue and temple. They knew by sight
the ritual of the altar, and by ear the ritual of the choir. They
were accustomed to the spectacle of the priest offering the victim;
they were used to hearing the singers chant the psalms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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