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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2009
Till within recent years, when a modern growth of church music, of responsive readings, and of other so-called “enrichments,” has affected their services, the non-liturgical churches of America have followed an essentially rigid form of public worship. That form still constitutes the underlying framework of their services, whatever modifications in its proportion and arrangement have been introduced. Strongly repudiating any liturgical forms throughout most of their American history, these churches have been tenacious as to the sequence and the general proportion of the elements of public worship. Their much-prized freedom has not been a freedom in practice in this regard. As constituted within the recollection of all here present, and as to be found widely in contemporary experience, the substantially unvarying service of the House of God began with a brief invocation, followed by the reading of the Bible, to which a hymn succeeded, to be followed by the “long prayer” of general supplication and thanksgiving. At its conclusion the sermon was preached. That ended, a brief prayer was offered, a second hymn was sung, and the congregation was dismissed with the benediction. Not infrequently the order of the prayer and hymn following the sermon was reversed; but the essential sequence and proportion of the service were seldom otherwise varied. Such rigidity and uniformity must have its historic reasons; and the purpose of this brief paper is to set forth the more important steps by which our typical form of public worship came to be what it is.
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