It was a singular providence that this continent, laden with the bounty
of God, was unoccupied by civilization for thousands of years. America
was discovered by a devout son of the Latin Church, whose name--
Christopher, Christ-bearer, and Columbus, the dove--ought to have been
the prophecy that he would bear the Gospel to the New World. It was at
a time when Savonarola, with the zeal of a prophet of God and the
eloquence of a Chrysostom, was laboring to awaken the Church to a new
life. No nation ever had a nobler mission than Spain. That mission was
forfeited by unholy greed and untold cruelty. It was lost forever.
Other nations claimed the continent for their own. In the providence of
God; this last of the nations was founded by the English-speaking race.
I reverently believe that it was because they recognize as no other
people the two truths which underlie the possibility of constitutional
government, i.e., the inalienable rights of the individual citizen, and
loyalty to government as a delegated trust from God, who alone has the
right to govern. These lessons are intertwined with two thousand years
of history. They reach back to the days when the savage Briton came in
contact with Roman civilization and Roman law, and have been deepened by
centuries of Christian influences which have changed our savage fathers
into truth-speaking, liberty-loving Christian men.
More marvellous are the providences intertwined with the history of the
Church. It was planted by apostolic men, and numbered heroes like St.
Patrick and St. Alban before the missionary Augustine came to
Canterbury. Through all of its history it has been the Church of the
English-speaking race. The liturgy contains the purest English of any
book, except the English Bible, which was translated by her sons. The
ritual which Augustine found in England came from the East; and the
liturgy which he introduced was, by the advice of Gregory, taken from
many national Churches. The Venerable Hooker said: "Our liturgy was
must be acknowledged as the singular work of the providence of God." In
its services it represents the Church of the English-speaking race. The
exhortation to pray for the child to be baptized, the direction to put
pure water into the font at each baptism, the sign of the cross, the
words of the reception of the baptized, the joining of hands in holy
matrimony, the "dust to dust" of the burial,--are peculiar to the offices
of the English-speaking people. In the Holy Communion, the rubric found
in all western Churches, commanding the priest, after consecration, to
kneel and worship the elements, never found a place in any service-book
of the Church of England. The Book of Common Prayer has preserved for
us Catholic faith and Catholic worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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