ide
the readers and others not fully admitted to the ministry of the Word,
through whose special aid alone they were able, in a time of so great
dearth of qualified ministers, to supply in part the spiritual
destitution of their countrymen. Nor in granting such an amount of
liberty, at least to their ordained ministers, did they follow a course
which was, as has been so confidently asserted, altogether novel, but
rather, as in several other things, carried out more thoroughly and
consistently[176] what others of the Reformed churches had adopted at
least partially. In almost all the Reformed or Calvinistic liturgies the
prayers are left partly free, and in several of them no form is
furnished even as a guide or model for the prayer immediately preceding
the sermon (and the same might be said of some of the earlier Lutheran
_Agend-buecher_). In the churches of Basle, which probably in this
respect only followed the general practice of the churches of East
Switzerland, Hagenbach informs us that there was for fifty years after
the Reformation no form of prayer, before or after sermon, imposed by
public authority, and for fifty years longer only the prayer after
sermon for all estates and conditions of men.[177] What, therefore,
distinguished our reformers from their successors, and from the English
Puritans of the seventeenth century, was not that the former disapproved
of or curtailed free prayer while the latter advocated and encouraged
it, but that the former retained in their Book of Common Order a variety
of forms, not only as models, but also as aids to the officiating
minister, while the latter put their Directory into such a shape that
even the "help and furniture" it provided required the exercise of
thought and care on the part of the minister to adapt it for use. This
certainly was no great divergence, considering how thoroughly both
parties were agreed, on the one hand, as to the liberty which should be
left to ordained ministers, and, on the other, as to the limitations
within which it should be confined.

[Sidenote: Prayers of the Readers.]

From the notices given in his 'Order and Government of the Church of
Scotland,' and from the specimens of Henderson's prayers which accompany
his printed discourses, it is further evident that he, like Calderwood,
habitually used free prayer both before and after sermon. There seems
reason to suppose that in not a few cases the readers also before 1638
took the liberty