Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/322

292 its rituals you follow, the Oriental, the Alexandrian, the Latin, or the Anglican. The latter, that of an Episcopal Prayer-Book, is a version familiar to you of what seems to me the most wonderful symphonic idealization of human faith,—certainly the most inclusive, blending in harmonic succession all the cries and longings and laudations of the universal human heart invoking a paternal Creator.

I am not considering here this Liturgy as divine, Its universal quality. though much of it is derived from what multitudes accept for revelation. I have in mind its human quality; the mystic tide of human hope, imagination, prayer, sorrows, and passionate expression, upon which it bears the worshipper along, and wherewith it has sustained men's souls with conceptions of deity and immortality, throughout hundreds, yes, thousands, of undoubting years. The Orient and Occident have enriched it with their finest and strongest utterances, have worked it over and over, have stricken from it what was against the consistency of its import and beauty. It has been a growth, an exhalation, an apocalyptic cloud arisen "with the prayers of the saints" from climes of the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman, the Goth, to spread in time over half the world. It is The voice of human brotherhood. the voice of human brotherhood, the blended voice of rich and poor, old and young, the wise and the simple, the statesman and the clown; the brotherhood of an age which, knowing little, comprehending little, could have no refuge