become a part of you.[92]

So, then, if we would have a liturgy that shall speak to our whole
nature, and not to a mere fraction of it, it must be a liturgy full
of voices sounding out of the past. There must be reminders and
suggestions in it of all the great epochs of the Church's story.
Yes, echoes even from those very ages which we call dark (perhaps
as much because we are in the dark about them as on account of any
special blackness attaching to the times themselves), some echoes
even from them may have a rightful place in the worship which is to
call out responsively all that is in the heart of the most modern
of modern men.

As there were heroes before Agamemnon, so were there holy and humble
men of heart before Cranmer and Luther, yes, and before Jerome and
Augustine. If any cry that ever went up from any one of them out of
the depths of that nature which they share with us and we with them,
if any breath of supplication, any moan of penitence, any shout of
victory that issued from their lips has made out to survive the
noise and tumult of intervening times, it has earned by its very
persistency of tone a _prima facie_ title to be put into the Prayer
Book of to-day.[93] And this is why a prayer book may survive the
wreck of many systems of theology. A prayer book holds the utterance
of our needs; a theological system is the embodiment of our thoughts.

Now our thoughts about things divine are painfully fallible and
liable to change with change of times; but a want which is genuinely
and entirely human is a permanent fact; the great needs of the soul
never grow obsolete, and though the language in which the lips shall
clothe the heart's desire may alter, as tastes alter, yet the
substance of the prayer abides, and in some happy instances the
form also abides.

To an eye that looks wisely and lovingly on such sights, there is
the same keen sense of enjoyment in finding here and there in the
Prayer Book suggestions of forgotten customs, reminders of famous
persons and events, that there is in detecting in the masonry of
an old castle or minster tell-tale stones which betray the different
ages, the "sundry times and divers manners" which the fabric
represents. Who, for instance, that has traced the history of
that apostolic ordinance, "the kiss of peace," down through the
liturgical changes and revolutions of eighteen hundred years, can
fail to be interested in finding in a single clause of one of the
exhorta