A Devout Prayer

What a devout prayer this is, and what blessedness is intended in the discovery.  Observe what the object of the petition is – not to know the hour of death or the place of departure or the means God, in wisdom, might appoint to produce the termination of life.  These were not the subjects the psalmist had in view, but that grace might so impress his mind with a sense of the frailty of life’s tenure that an habitual preparation, like a pilgrim on his journey, might make him always ready for the call.  How sweetly and affectionately Jesus enforceth this, when He saith, be ye also ready, for in such hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh (Matthew 24:44).

From: The Poor Man’s Commentary on the Book of Psalms by Robert Hawker; reprint (London: Thomas Allman, 1838), pp. 157-158.  Comment on Psalm 39:4-5.

Robert Hawker (1753-1827) trained as a surgeon, a profession he pursued for six years (1772-1778) before his ordination into the Anglican clergy.  After three months as curate of St. Martin’s, near Looe, England, he became curate of Charles, near Plymouth, in December, 1778.  When the vicar, John Bedford, died in 1784, Hawker became vicar in his own right, and ministered at this church for the remaining 43 years of his life, until his death, in Plymouth, on April 6, 1827, at the age of 73 (exactly one week before his 74th birthday).  He is remembered today for his Poor Man’s daily devotionals, and his Poor Man’s Bible commentaries, so called because he deliberately wrote for, and priced their sale for, the poor of his parish.

On the Lord’s Supper

I turn from the positive to the negative side of the subject with real pain and reluctance.  But it is a plain duty to do so.  Ministers, like physicians, must study disease as well as health, and exhibit error as well as truth.  Let me, then, try to show what are not the intentions of the Lord’s Supper.

It was never meant to be regarded as a sacrifice.  We were not intended to believe that there is any change in the elements of bread and wine or any corporeal presence of Christ in the sacrament.  These things can never be fairly or honestly got out of Scripture.  Let the three accounts of the institution, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the one given by St. Paul to the Corinthians, be weighed and examined impartially, and I have no doubt as to the result.  They teach that there is no sacrifice, no altar, no change in the substance of the elements; that the bread, after consecration, is still literally and truly bread, and the wine, after consecration, is literally and truly wine.  In no part of the New Testament do we find the Christian minister called a priest and, in no part, do we find any mention of a sacrifice, except that of prayer and praise and good works.  The last literal sacrifice, we are repeatedly told in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is the once for all finished sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

No doubt it may satisfy such controversialists are the late Cardinal Wiseman to adduce such texts as “This is My body” and “This is My blood” as proofs that the Lord’s Supper is a sacrifice.  But a man must be easily satisfied if such texts content him.  The quotation of a single isolated phrase is a mode of arguing that would establish Arianism or Socinianism.  The context of these famous expressions shows clearly that those who heard the words used understood them to mean “This represents My body” and “This represents My blood.”  The analogy of other places proves that “is” and “are” frequently mean “represent” in Scripture.  St. Paul, in writing on the sacrament, expressly calls the consecrated bread “bread,” and not the body of Christ, no less than three times (1 Corinthians 11:26-28).  Above all, there remains the unanswerable argument that, if our Lord were actually holding His own body in His hands when He said, of the bread, “This is My body,” His body must have been a different body to that of ordinary men.  Of course, if His body was not a body like ours, His real and proper humanity is at an end.  At this rate, the blessed and comfortable doctrine of Christ’s entire sympathy with His people, as very man, would be completely overthrown and fall to the ground.

From: Knots Untied: Being Plain Statements on Disputed Points in Religion, From the Standpoint of an Evangelical Churchman by John Charles Ryle; reprint (London: Chas. J. Thynne, 1900 [1877]), pp. 166-167.

The Roman Catholic Mass

Any service, therefore, which purports to renew the sacrifice of Calvary is a plain denial of the overwhelming testimony of Scripture to the perfection of the Lord’s one offering.  The doctrine of the mass implies the imperfection and insufficiency of the sacrifice of Calvary, for the latter needs now to be supplemented by the daily offering at the altars of the Church of Rome.  But what need is there of any attempt to present a sacrifice to God?  The Lord has already presented it and has been accepted.  The ransom has been paid, and that payment is no mere event of past history, for, says Hebrews, “the ransom He has won lasts forever” (Hebrews 9:12, in Knox’s translation).  Let our blessed Lord speak the last word on this whole matter of the completeness, finality, and once-for-all character of His sacrifice.  That word comes in the shout of triumph which rang out from His lips in His closing moments on the cross: “It is finished” (John 19:30).  Such a consummation, accomplished by the great High Priest Himself, leaves no place for the sacrifice of the mass.

From: Dawn or Twilight?  A Study of Contemporary Roman Catholicism by H. M. Carson; 2nd edition (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1976), p. 119.  The first edition was published under the title Roman Catholicism Today in 1964.

Herbert M. Carson (died in 2004) was a pastor and the author of several books.  He also served as editor of The Gospel Magazine (1964-1975).

For the Lord’s Day (108)

But it is not as though the Word of God has failed.  For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are His offspring, but “through Isaac shall your offspring be named.”  This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.  For this is what the promise said: “About this time next year, I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.”  And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather, Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad – in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of Him who calls – she was told, “The older will serve the younger.”  As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”  (Romans 9:6-13)

Luther, Bach, and Music in the Church

According to Luther, worship was not exclusively a matter of forms.  He regarded ceremonies as matters of indifference theologically, but he was not indifferent to ceremonies.  Therefore, he not only composed the hymns that we have been examining, in his versions and Bach’s revisions, but he also published two orders of worship for the revised “evangelical” form of the Mass: the Latin Formula missae et communionis in 1523 and the German Deutsche Messe und Ordnung des Gottesdiensts of 1526.  We shall be analyzing these two orders in more detail in Chapter 9 because of their bearing on the composite work of Bach now called the Mass in B Minor, but, for our purposes here, they stand as part of the musical heritage of the Reformation because of the limitations that Luther’s liturgical work placed on the church musician as both composer and performer, as well as because of the opportunities that it provided for the church musician.

From: Bach Among the Theologians by Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), p. 27.

Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006) taught both history and ecclesiastical history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1962-1996) and was a prolific author.

Music and the Church

The late conflict between the Bishop of London and the Rev. Stewart Headlam as to the godliness of dancing ended practically in the excommunication of the dancers and the inhibition of the popular clergyman, whose version of the Thirty-Nine Articles includes Land Nationalization, Free Speech, Communion for Stage Players, and a Democratic Constitution for the Church.  Mr. Headlam’s teaching, nevertheless, seems to have travelled further than the Bishop’s, for we hear, from Georgia, of a troop of factory hands removing the benches from their church on a Friday evening, and having a hearty dance.  At a church in North Carolina, a brass band was allowed to perform some stirring rhythmical hymn tunes for the edification of a Negro congregation.  These pious colored persons, we are told, “began to grow a little nervous and restless about the feet and, in a short time, the whole crowd was indulging in a regular old breakdown.”  This is shocking, no doubt, to our insular conception of a church as a place where we must, on no account, enjoy ourselves, and where ladies are trained in the English art of sitting in rows for hours, dumb, expressionless, and with the elbows uncomfortably turned in.  But, since people must enjoy themselves sometimes, why not in their own churches as well as in places where drinking bars, gambling tables, and other temptations to enjoy themselves unhealthily and indecently are deliberately put in their way?  “Dancing is an art,” says Mr. Headlam.  “All art is praise,” says Mr. Ruskin.  Praise is, surely, not out of place in a church.  We sing there; why should we not dance?

The Puritans, from whom we inherit our prejudice against such a proposal, objected to dancing and singing in all places and at all seasons.  Merry England never shared that objection.  We admit it in church only because we can afford to dance elsewhere.  But, how about the people who have no such opportunities: no drawing rooms, no money, no self-control in the presence of temptation and license?  We do not want to see Westminster Abbey turned into a ballroom.  But, if some enterprising clergyman with a cure of souls in the slums were to hoist a board over his church door with the inscription, “Here men and women, after working hours, may dance without getting drunk on Fridays, hear good music on Saturdays, pray on Sundays, discuss public affairs without molestation from the police on Mondays, have the building for any honest purpose they please – theatricals, if desired, on Tuesdays, bring the children for games, amusing drill, and romps on Wednesdays, and volunteer for a thorough scrubbing down of the place on Thursdays” – well, it would be all very shocking, no doubt.  But, after all, it would not interfere with the Bishop of London’s salary.

A music review by George Bernard Shaw, originally published in The Star, a London newspaper, on May 14, 1888; reprinted in London Music in 1888-89 as Heard by Corni di Bassetto (Later Known as Bernard Shaw) with Some Further Autobiographical Particulars by George Bernard Shaw; reprint (New York: Vienna House, 1973), pp. 34-35.  The reprint volume was originally published in 1937.

As a young man, the famous playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) worked for six years (1888-1894) as a music critic in London.  His complete music reviews were collected and published in four volumes in the 1930s.

Challenges to Prayer

But the most serious challenge to the honesty of our prayers comes from the sin that doth so easily beset us.  And it is not so easily countered.  Suppose that we have a quick temper, or are naturally self-indulgent.  We go to God in prayer about it, and we think we mean every word we say.  And yet, perhaps, only minutes later, we have blundered into the accustomed fault, have again spoken sharply, or again chosen selfishly, and this over and over, till what we thought was faith seems sheer presumption, and we hesitate to draw near to God again.  Can it be seemly to come, still wearing the rebel uniform, and swear oaths of allegiance that we cannot or, at least, will not keep?  Better, surely, to wait till the taint of our iniquity has, in part, been blown away, and it is less of an audacity and an impertinence for us to approach the God whom we have no right to expect can trust us any longer.

From: In the Secret Place of the Most High: Being Some Studies in Prayer by Arthur John Gossip (London: Independent Press, Ltd., 1946), p. 38.

Arthur John Gossip (1873-1954) was a Scottish Presbyterian pastor and author.  He was Professor of Practical Theology and Ethics at Trinity College in Glasgow (1928-1945).  Of his many books, The Galilean Accent (1926), The Hero in My Soul (1928), and the book quoted from here are probably the best known.

Theology Books

In every library of any considerable age, there is to be found, in dusty corners, an immense mass of books, classified under “theology,” seldom, if ever, read or even “consulted,” the despair at once of the librarian and of the caretakers.  To modern minds, it seems all but inconceivable that anyone could ever have had the slightest interest in them – yet, publishers tell us even today that “religious books” are no bad publishing proposition, so that, presumably, these now neglected shelves will be steadily recruited till later generations will, doubtless, wonder even more at the phenomenon.

From: William C. Abbott in The American Historical Review, Volume 33, Number 4 (July, 1928), p. 866.

Under Christ’s Control

There is encouragement here for all true Christians.  Let them know that there is nothing created which is not under Christ’s control.  “All things serve Him.”  He may allow His people to be tried for a season and tossed to and fro by storms of trouble.  He may be later than they wish in coming to their aid, and not draw near till the “fourth watch of the night.”  But, never let them forget that winds and waves and storms are all Christ’s servants.  They cannot move without Christ’s permission.  “The Lord on high is mightier than the voice of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea” (Psalm 93:4).  Are we ever tempted to cry, with Jonah, “the floods compassed me about; all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me” (Jonah 2:8)?  Let us remember that they are His billows.  Let us wait patiently.  We may yet see Jesus coming to us, “walking on the sea.”

From: Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: Matthew by J. C. Ryle; reprint; 7 volumes in 4 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2007), 1:167.  Comment on Matthew 14:22-36.  The volume on Matthew was originally published in 1856.  The original 7 volumes were published from 1856 to 1873.

John Charles Ryle (1816-1900) was the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool from 1880 until shortly before his death.

Funeral Sermons

John Owen preached the funeral sermon of Henry Ireton.  It is an admiring character study, and is dedicated to Colonel Henry Cromwell, who was the dead man’s brother-in-law.  For Cromwell, the Protector, no funeral sermon was preached at his burial because of quarrels in the Corps Diplomatique about precedence, and “there was not a single candle in Westminster Abbey…there were…neither prayers, nor sermon, nor funeral oration.”  When Thomas Manton delivered the funeral sermon for Christopher Love (August 25, 1651), he was showing respect to a man who had just been hanged for treason.  The situation, for the preacher, was delicate, even dangerous, but the minister met it cleverly, knowing that Love’s dramatic death would give advertising to the sermon which would appear in print legitimately, or otherwise, almost as soon as it was spoken.  The published sermon is thirty-three pages in length; on the thirtieth is the first mention of Christopher Love, but the preacher explains that whatever he had advised as proper conduct had been lived by Mr. Love, and “I shall not make any particular rehearsall of the passages of his exemplary life; I judge it not convenient.”  Calamy’s sermon for Love, preached the Sunday after his execution, does not refer to Love, except by implication, the topic being the death of St. Stephen.  There is, too, a suggestive observation on the first page: “the best of men are subject to violent and unnatural deaths.”

From: English Preachers and Preaching, 1640-1670 by Caroline Francis Richardson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928), pp. 102-103.

Caroline Francis Richardson was Associate Professor of English at Newcomb College of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1906 until within a week before her death in 1932.