XXVI. No man hath hitherto been so impious as plainly and directly to condemn prayer. The best stratagem that Satan hath, who knoweth his kingdom to be no one way more shaken than by the public devout prayers of God’s Church, is by traducing the form and manner of them to bring them into contempt, and so to shake the force of all men’s devotion towards them. From this and from no other forge hath proceeded a strange conceit, that to serve God with any set form of common prayer is superstitious1.
As though God himself did not frame to his Priests the very speech wherewith they were charged to bless the people2; or as if our Lord, even of purpose to prevent this fancy of extemporal and voluntary prayers, had not left us of his own framing one, which might both remain as a part of the church liturgy, and serve as a pattern whereby to frame all other prayers with efficacy, yet without superfluity of words. If prayers were no otherwise accepted of God than being conceived always new, according to the exigence of present occasions; if it be right to judge him by our own bellies, and to imagine that he doth loathe to have the selfsame supplications often iterated, even as we do to be every day fed without alteration or change of diet; if prayers be actions which ought to waste away themselves in the making; if being made to remain that they may be resumed and used again as prayers, they be but instruments of superstition: surely we cannot excuse Moses, who gave such occasion of scandal to the world, by not being contented to praise the name of Almighty God according to the usual naked simplicity of God’s Spirit for that admirable victory given them against Pharao, unless so dangerous a precedent were left for the casting of prayers into certain poetical moulds, and for the framing of prayers which might be repeated often, although they never had again the same occasions which brought them forth at the first. For that very hymn of Moses grew afterwards to be a part of the ordinary Jewish liturgy3; nor only that, but sundry other sithence invented. Their books of common prayer contained partly hymns taken out of the holy Scripture, partly benedictions, thanksgivings, supplications, penned by such as have been from time to time the governors of that synagogue. These they sorted into their several times and places, some to begin the service of God with, and some to end, some to go before, and some to follow, and some to be interlaced between the divine readings of the Law and Prophets. Unto their custom of finishing the Passover with certain Psalms, there is not any thing more probable, than that the Holy Evangelist doth evidently allude saying, That after the cup delivered by our Saviour unto his apostles, “they sung4,” and went forth to the mount of Olives.
As the Jews had their songs of Moses and David and the rest, so the Church of Christ from the very beginning hath both used the same, and besides them other also of like nature, the song of the Virgin Mary, the song of Zachary, the song of Simeon, such hymns as the Apostle doth often speak of saying, “I will pray and sing with the Spirit5:” again, “in psalms, hymns, and songs, making melody unto the Lord, and that heartily6.” Hymns and psalms are such kinds of prayer as are not wont to be conceived upon a sudden, but are framed by meditation beforehand, or else by prophetical illumination are inspired, as at that time it appeareth they were when God by extraordinary gifts of the Spirit enabled men to all parts of service necessary for the edifying of his Church7.
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Footnotes
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[2d. Adm. 38. “If it were praying, and that there were never an ill woorde nor sentence in all the prayers, yet to appoynt it to be used, or so to use it as Papistes did their mattens and evensong, for a set service to God, though the woordes be good, the use is naught.”] ↩
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Num. vi. 23. ↩
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[“At the evening sacrifice (on the Sabbaths) they sung the Song of Moses, I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously,” &c. Lewis’s Hebrew Republic, b. ii. c. 12. The Song of Moses occurs in the Jewish morning service both of Rome, Germany, and Spain: and is found, as the editor is informed, in several of the old liturgies of the Arabic Christians: who may be supposed to have retained it out of the Jewish service.] ↩
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Matt. xxvi. 30. Ὑμνήσαντες having sung the Psalms which were usual at that Feast, those Psalms which the Jews call the great Hallelujah, beginning at the 113th and continuing to the end of the 118th. See Paul Burgens. (Paul of Burgos, a Jewish convert (1390), became Bishop of Carthagena and Burgos, and Chancellor of Castile—added to the Postils of Nic. de Lyra.) 1886. in Psal. cxii. [Heb. 113.] addit. 1. [“Iste psalmus cum quinque sequentibus, usque ad psalmum, Beati immaculati, exclusive vocatur ab Hebræis Hallelujah magnum, i. e. Hymnus magnus; de quo singularem faciunt solennitatem; nam in tribus præcipuis festis et in neomeniis stantes istum hymnum cum majori cantant solennitate quam cæteros psalmos totius psalterii. Insuper in nocte paschæ quando agnus paschalis comedebatur, post ejus comestionem recumbentes ad mensam ipsum hymnum solenniter dicebant. Unde de hoc hymno ex istis sex psalmis composito intelligi debet illud quod imminente passione, Matt. 26. cap. legitur. . quod etiam Hebræi hodie agno paschali carentes in illa nocte scil. paschæ istum hymnum cum azymis solenniter prout possunt cantant; in quo videntur prophetizare nescientes, sicut legitur de Caiapha.” Bibl. cum Glossa Ordin. et Lyrani. iii. 1307. Lugd. 1589. The Jewish origin of Paul of Burgos, who died ad 1435, made his testimony particularly apposite.] And Scaliger de Emendat. Tempor. (Paris 1583.) [536, 537. Scaliger however explains the word ὑμνήσαντες not of the Hallelujah Psalms, but of a short parting hymn, of which he gives the form from the Talmud. But he subjoins this testimony, not without its value in Hooker’s argument, proceeding as it does from a great favourite of the Puritans. “Si Christus, ut quidam hostes bonarum literarum pertendunt, non obstrinxit se ritibus Judæorum; quare igitur omnia hic fiunt, quæ in Rituali Judaico extant? Quare omnia simillima sunt? Et tamen illis Criticis videtur impium, Christum illis legibus obnoxium facere,” &c. Compare also Lightf. ii. 258.] ↩
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1 Cor. xiv. 15. ↩
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Ephes. v. 19. ↩
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[Compare Mede’s Works, i. 59. ed. 1672, in which “prophesying” in the first Epistle to the Corinthians is explained to “mean praising God in Psalms and Hymns.”] ↩