I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present, to accompany me with a pure heart, and humble voice, unto the throne of the heavenly grace, saying after me; A general Confession to be said of the whole Congregation after the Minister, all kneeling. ALMIGHTY and most merci ful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offend ed against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen. The Absolution, or Remission of sins, to be pronounced by the Priest alone, standing; the people still kneeling. that those things may please him, which we do at this present; and that the rest of our life hereafter may be pure, and holy; so that at the last we may come to his eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. The people shall answer here, and at the end of all other prayers, Amen. Then the Minister shall kneel, and say the Lord's Prayer with an audible voice; the people also kneeling, and repeating it with him, both here, and wheresoever else it is used in Divine Service. OUR Father, which art in hea ven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen. Then likewise he shall say, O Lord, open thou our lips. Answer. And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise. Priest. O God, make speed to save us. Answer. O Lord, make haste to help us. ALMIGHTY God, the Father of Here all standing up, the Priest shall our Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness, and live; and hath given power, and commandment, to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins: He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent, and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel. Wherefore let us beseech hinto grant us true repentance, and his Holy Spirit, say, Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; Answer. As it was in the be ginning, is now, and ever shall be world without end. Amen. Priest. Praise ye the Lord. Answer. The Lord's Name be praised. Then shall be said or sung this Psalm following: except on Easter-Day, upon which another Anthem is appointed; and on the Nineteenth day of every Month it is not to be read here, but in the ordinary Course of the Psalms. II. THE SERVICE OF PRAISE AND THANKSGIVING interwoven with III. THE HEARING OF THE WORD OF GOD. This, like the other chief element of the Service, opens with the LORD'S PRAYER (for which see below, p. 41); but it should be noticed that here (as in the Post-Communion Service), since it opens the Service of Praise, it has appended to it the Doxology, "Thine is....ever." This Doxology is not found in St. Luke (xi. 2-4), nor in the best MSS. of St. Matthew (vi. 9-13); and it has been thought that it was not originally a part of the Lord's Prayer, but was added in ancient Liturgical use. The VERSICLES (Preces) which follow are the first specimen of the short ejaculatory prayers of our Service, contrasted with the Collects (Orationes) which are the longer and more thoughtful prayers. The first four are taken, as usual, from the Psalms (li. 15; lxx. 1), and pray for God's help to praise Him aright. Then follows the GLORIA PATRI, the utterance of special Christian Praise to the Holy Trinity, in substance at least as old as the 4th century, and now used both in the East and the West in this position. To this succeeds mutual exhortation to the praise of God between Minister and people (the latter clause added in 1604). The Psalm VENITE EXULTEMUS is found (with interspersed In vitatories) in the Sarum Breviary, used certainly in the time of St. Athanasius, and probably from time immemorial, as the "Invitatory Psalm," opening the Service of Praise. In the Eastern Church a condensed form of it is used. After the invitation itself (vs. 1, 2), it gives a two-fold reason for praising God: first (vs. 3-5), because He is the Creator and Ruler of the great universe; and next (vs. 6, 7), the "Lord our God," caring for individually as the Good Shepherd for His sheep (cp. Ps. viii. 3-9); lastly, it passes to a warning to us His people, drawn from the history of Israel, not to harden our hearts, and, like Israel in the wilderness, lose the promise of His rest (cp. Heb. iii. 7-iv. 11). The version (as for the Psalter generally) is from the Great Bible of Henry VIII. us 66 For the use of the Psalms, see notes on the PSALTER. The use of the GLORIA at the end of each Psalm may be taken as a symbol of the duty of Christianizing the Psalms, by interpreting them-doctrinally, morally, and spiritually-in the light of our Lord's life and teaching, which brings out into perfection what under the Old Covenant was in all points necessarily imperfect. See Heb. vii. 19. The TE DEUM, by a tradition, expressed in the title in some of the later MSS., was commonly ascribed to St. Ambrose, or St. Ambrose and St. Augustine. Its origin is not certainly known. In some places it bears a marked likeness to the Morning Hymn of the Eastern Church (found in the Alexandrine MS. of the New Testament); in others to some passages of St. Cyprian. It is found also with much variety of reading in various MSS. The Venite, exultemus Domino. Psalm xcv. COME, let us sing unto the Lord let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving: and shew ourselves glad in him with Psalms. For the Lord is a great God: and a great King above all gods. In his hand are all the corners of the earth: and the strength of the hills is his also. The sea is his, and he made it : and his hands prepared the dry land. ginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. Then shall be read distinctly with an audible voice the First Lesson, taken out of the Old Testament, as is appointed in the Calendar, except there be proper Lessons assigned for that day: He that readeth so standing and turning himself, as he may best be heard of all such as are present. And after that, shall be said or sung, in English, the Hymn called Te Deum Laudamus, daily throughout the Year. Note, That before every Lesson the Minister shall say, Here beginneth such a Chapter, or Verse of such a Chapter, of such a Book: And after every Lesson, Here endeth the First, or the Second Lesson. Te Deum Laudamus. O come, let us worship, and fall WE praise thee, O God: we down and kneel before the Lord our Maker. For he is the Lord our God: and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness; When your fathers tempted me: proved me, and saw my works. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said: It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known Lord. acknowledge thee to be the All the earth doth worship thee: the Father everlasting. To thee all Angels cry aloud: the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubin, and Seraphin continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God of Sabaoth; Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of thy Glory. The glorious company of the Apostles: praise thee. The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee. The noble army of Martyrs: praise thee. The holy Church throughout all the world: doth acknowledge thee; The Father of an infinite Majesty; Thine honourable, true and only Son; Also the Holy Ghost the Comforter. Thou art the King of Glory: 0 Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son: of the Father. When thou tookest upon thee earliest liturgical notice of it is in the 6th century, but it is obviously of much earlier date, at least as old as St. Augustine. It is the great hymn of triumphant Praise in the Western Church, as the Gloria in Excelsis in the Eastern. It may be described as at once (a) A Hymn of Praise (vs. 1-13), first, the universal praise to the One God, the Father everlasting, from earth and heaven, ending in the seraphic song of the vision of Isaiah offered to the Thrice-Holy, as "the Lord of hosts," that is, of all rational beings (Isa. vi. 2, 3); next, the Christian song of praise from apostles, prophets, martyrs, and the whole Church to the Three blessed Persons of the Holy Trinity; (b) A Creed of the Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 14-19), under form of address to Him, dwelling on His eternal Royalty and Sonship, His Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, and future Judgment, traversing, in fact, almost exactly the ground of the second paragraph of the Apostles' Creed; lastly (c) A Prayer to God in Christ (vs. 2029), broken by a burst of thanksgiving, "Day by day....end;" much as the series of Collects is broken by the Anthem. The prayer is first for the whole Church of the Redeemed, as His people and heritage, that He will keep and bless, govern and lift them up for ever; and then for ourselves, that God will keep us from sin, and have mercy upon us. The whole ends with an utterance of confidence, "O God, in thee have I trusted; I shall never be confounded." There are a few mistranslations, which slightly detract from the beauty of the original; (1) v. 1 should begin, "We praise Thee as God; (2) in v. 9, "the noble army" should be "the whiterobed army" (see Rev. vi. 9-11); (3) v. 16 should "When for our deliverance Thou tookest on Thee the nature of man," a clear declaration of the Incarnation; (4) in v. 21 numbered " should probably be "rewarded;" and (5) in v. 29 we should read, "I shall never be confounded (non confundar in æternum). run, This grand Canticle, by its whole tenour, shows itself peculiarly appropriate as a link between the Lessons of the Old Testament and the New; but it has naturally been used at all times as the great festal expression of Christian Thanksgiving and Praise. The musical setting, called the Ambrosian Te Deum, dates from the end of the 5th century. all The BENEDICITE, originally directed to be used in Lent (although it has no special Lenten character), has no such peculiar appropriateness. It is one of the Apocryphal additions to the Book of Daniel, inserted (with a prefatory Prayer of Azarias) between vs. 23 and 24 of ch. iii.; and looks like an expansion of Ps. cxlviii. The idea is simple in the extreme, though worked out with great detailcalling again and again on all Creation to sing the Creator's praise. But we may trace an order and method in it; first, (a) the call is given (vs. 1-10) to all the great Natural Powers and Forces-the "Angels" being looked upon as God's ministers therein (see Ps. civ. 4; Heb. i. 7). Next (b) in vs. 11-17, the hymn addresses itself to the phenomena and changes through which Nature passes, manifesting her special beauty in each. Then (c), in vs. 18-25, the Earth, with all its wealth of vegetable and animal life, is called to join the hymn of Praise; and lastly, (d) in vs. 26 -32. the crowning sacrifice of thanksgiving is demanded from man generally, from God's people, living and dead, and His priests and servants, and from the "Three Children" in particular, in the hour of their miraculous deliverance. The whole is (like Job xxxviii., xxxix., or Ps. civ.) an eucharistic commentary on the history of Creation (in Gen. i., ii.). Except when this has been read in the First Lesson-on Septuagesima and Trinity Sundays-the Benedicite has no special appropriateness to this place in the Service, and to deliver man: thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb. When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death: thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers. Thou sittest at the right hand of God: in the Glory of the Father. We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge. We therefore pray thee, help thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood. Make them to be numbered with thy Saints: in glory everlasting. O Lord, save thy people and bless thine heritage. Govern them: and lift them up for ever. Day by day we magnify thee; And we worship thy Name: ever world without end. Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin. O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us. O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us as our trust is in thee. O Lord, in thee have I trusted: let me never be confounded. Or this Canticle, Benedicite, omnia Opera. ALL ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Angels of the Lord, bless ye the Lord praise him, and magnify him for ever. 0 ye Heavens, bless ye the Lord praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Waters that be above the Firmament, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever. O all ye Powers of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Nights and Days, bless ye the Lord praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Light and Darkness, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Lightnings and Clouds, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever. O let the Earth bless the Lord: yea, let it praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Mountains and Hills, bless ye the Lord praise him, and magnify him for ever. O all ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Wells, bless ye the Lord : praise him, and magnify him for ever. O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye |