nce. There is a striking parallelism between the
argument for liturgical worship and the argument for episcopacy.
In both cases we take the ground that continuity existed between
the life of the Church as we find it a hundred years after the
last of the apostles had gone to his rest and the life of the
Church as it is pictured in the New Testament.

That there were many changes during the interval must no doubt be
granted, but we say that if those changes were serious ones
affecting great principles of belief or order, those who maintain
that such a hidden revolution took place are bound to bring
positive evidence to the fact. This history of the Church during
the second century has been likened with more of ingenuity than
of poetical beauty to the passing of a train through a railway
tunnel.

We see the train enter, we see it emerge, but its movement while
inside the tunnel is concealed from us. Similarly we may say that
we see with comparative distinctness the Christian Church of the
Apostolic Age, and we see with comparative distinctness the Church
of the Age of Cyprian and Origen, but with respect to the interval
separating the two periods we are not indeed wholly, but, we are,
it must be confessed, very largely ignorant. And yet as in the
case of the tunnel we confidently affirm an identity between what
we saw go in and what we see coming out, so with the doctrine,
discipline, and worship of the Church, the usages of the third
century, we argue, are probably in their leading features what the
usages of the first century were. If reason to the contrary can
be given, well and good; but in the absence of countervailing
testimony we abide by our inference, holding it to be sound.

I am far from wishing to maintain that these considerations bind
liturgical worship upon the Christian Church as a matter of
obligation for all time. It might be argued, and I think with
great force, that liturgical worship having been universal
throughout the ancient world, heathen as well as Jewish, the
apostles and fathers of the Christian Church judged it unwise
to make any departure at the outset from a custom so invariable,
trusting it to the spirit of the new religion to work out freer and
less formal methods of approaching God through Christ in the times
to come. This, I confess, strikes me as a perfectly legitimate line
of reasoning and one which is strengthened rather than weakened by
what we have seen happen in Christendom sin