iturgy, or adoptable and generally adopted Set of Prayers and
Prayer-Method, was what we can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select
Beauties' well edited (by [OE]cumenic Councils and other
Useful-Knowledge Societies) from that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers
already extant and accumulated, good and bad. The good were found
adoptable by men; were gradually got together, well-edited,
accredited: the bad, found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually
forgotten, disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The
first man who, looking with opened soul on this august Heaven and
Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe and
suchlike, the essence of which remains for ever Unnameable; he who
first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in silence as is
likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the 'audacious original'
that he was, had done a thing, too, which all thoughtful hearts saw
straightway to be an expressive, altogether adoptable thing! To bow
the knee was ever since the attitude of supplication. Earlier than any
spoken Prayers, _Litanias_, or _Leitourgias_; the beginning of all
Worship,--which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a
poet he! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The
wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances, from
whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--such a
Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of Worship
sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism, Rotatory
Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and perhaps lower!

Things rise, I say, in that way. The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed most
other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the Liturgy did.
The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin Hood's Garland_ in
England, are each, as I understand, the well-edited 'Select Beauties'
of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their
respective centuries and countries. Think what strumming of the
seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing of the less heroic
fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and English wayside Public
Houses; and beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too
in the semi-articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a
Divine Achilles, the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pindar,
could be adequately sung! Honour to you, ye nameless great and
greatest ones, ye long-forgotten brave!

Nor was the Statu