Five Sermons | Page 2

liturgy contains the purest English of any
book, except the English Bible, which was translated by her sons. The
ritual which Augustine found in England came from the East; and the

liturgy which he introduced was, by the advice of Gregory, taken from
many national Churches. The Venerable Hooker said: "Our liturgy was
must be acknowledged as the singular work of the providence of God."
In its services it represents the Church of the English-speaking race.
The exhortation to pray for the child to be baptized, the direction to put
pure water into the font at each baptism, the sign of the cross, the words
of the reception of the baptized, the joining of hands in holy matrimony,
the "dust to dust" of the burial,--are peculiar to the offices of the
English-speaking people. In the Holy Communion, the rubric found in
all western Churches, commanding the priest, after consecration, to
kneel and worship the elements, never found a place in any
service-book of the Church of England. The Book of Common Prayer
has preserved for us Catholic faith and Catholic worship.
The first English missionary priest in America of whose services we
have record was Master Wolfall, who celebrated the Holy Communion
in 1578 for the crews of Martin Forbisher on the shores of Hudson Bay,
amid whose solitudes Bishop Horden has won whole heathen tribes to
Jesus Christ. At about the same time the Rev. Martin Fletcher, the
chaplain of Sir Francis Drake, celebrated the Holy Communion in the
bay of San Francisco, a prophecy that these distant shores should
become our inheritance. A few years later (1583), divine service was
held in the bay of St. John's, Newfoundland, for Sir Humphrey Gilbert,
and when his ill-fated ship foundered at sea, the last words of the
hero-admiral were, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land." The
mantle of Gilbert fell on Sir Walter Raleigh, who was commissioned by
Queen Elizabeth to bear the evangel of God's love to the New World.
The faith behind the adventures of these men is seen in a woodcut of
Raleigh's vessels at anchor; a pinnace, with a man at the mast-head
bearing a cross, approaching the shore with the message of the Gospel.
To some of us whose hearts have been touched with pity for the red
men, its is a beautiful incident that the first baptism on these shores was
that of an Indian chief, Mateo, on the banks of the Roanoke. In May,
1607, the first services on the shore of New England were held by the
Rev. Richard Seymour. Missionary services in the wilderness were not
unlike those of our pioneer bishops. "We did hang an awning to the
trees to shield us from the sun, our walls were rails of wood, our seats
unhewed trees, our pulpit a bar of wood--this was our 'church.'" It was

in this church that the Rev. Robert Hunt celebrated the first communion
in Virginia, June 21, 1607. The missionary spirit of the times is seen
when Lord De la Warr and his companions went in procession to the
Temple Church in London to receive the Holy Communion. The Rev.
Richard Crashaw said in his sermon: "Go forward in the strength of the
Lord, look not for wealth, look only for the things of the kingdom of
God--you go to win the heathen to the Gospel. Practise it yourselves.
Make the name of Christ honorable. What blessings any nation has had
by Christ must be given to all the nations of the earth." The first act of
Governor De la Warr, on landing in Virginia, was to kneel in silent
prayer, and then, with the whole people, they went to church, where the
services were conducted by the Rev. Richard Burke. In 1611 the saintly
Alexander Whittaker baptized Pocahontas. Disease and death often
blighted the colonies, and yet the old battle cry rang out--"God will
found the State and build the Church." The work was marred by
immoral adventurers, and it was not until these were repressed with a
strong hand by Sir Thomas Dale that a new life dawned in Virginia.
The first elective assembly of the New World met in 1619. It was
opened by prayer. Its first enactment was to protect the Indians from
oppression. Its next was to found a university. In the first legislative
assembly which met in the choir of the Church in Jamestown, more
than one year before the Mayflower left the shores of England, was the
foundation of popular government in America. Time would fail me to
tell the story inwrought in the lives of men like Rev. William Clayton
of Philadelphia, the Rev. Atkin Williamson of South Carolina, and the
Rev. John Wesley and the Rev. George Whitefield, also sons of the
Church in