PRAYER

A work purporting to deal with old English customs on the broad
representative lines of the present volume naturally sets out with a
choice of those pertaining to the most ancient and venerable institution
of the land--the Church; and, almost as naturally it culls its first
flower from a life with which our ancestors were in intimate touch, and
which was known to them, in a special and excellent sense, as religious.

The custom to which has been assigned the post of honour is of
remarkable and various interest. It takes us back to a remote past, when
the English, actuated by new-born fervour, sent the torch of faith to
their German kinsmen, still plunged in the gloom of traditional
paganism; and it was fated to end when the example of those same German
kinsmen stimulated our countrymen to throw off a yoke which had long
been irksome, and was then in sharp conflict with their patriotic
ideals. It is foreign to the aim of these antiquarian studies to sound
any note of controversy, but it will be rather surprising if the beauty
and pathos of the custom, which is to engage our attention, does not
appeal to many who would not have desired its revival in our age and
country.[1] Typical of the thoughts and habits of our ancestors, it is
no less typical of their place and share of the general system of
Western Christendom, and in the heritage of human sentiment, since
reverence for the dead is common to all but the most degraded races of
mankind. That mutual commemoration of departed, and also of living,
worth was not exclusive to this country is brought home to us by the
fact that the most learned and comprehensive work on the subject, in its
Christian and mediaeval aspects, is Ebner's "Die Klosterlichen
Gebets-Verbruederungen" (Regensburg and New York, 1890). This
circumstance, however, by no means diminishes--it rather heightens-the
interest of a custom for centuries embedded in the consciousness and
culture of the English people.

First, it may be well to devote a paragraph to the phrases applied to
the institution. The title of the chapter is "Leagues of Prayer," but it
would have been simple to substitute for it any one of half a dozen
others--less definite, it is true--sanctioned by the precedents of
ecclesiastical writers. One term is "friendship"; and St. Boniface, in
his letters referring to the topic, employs indifferently the cognate
expressions "familiarity," "charity" (or "love"). Sometimes he speaks o