first took up community
life; the Offices from periods of uncertain date all along the
track of previous Church history. But what advantage, asks someone
full of the modern spirit, what advantage has the Common Prayer
in that it can trace a genealogy running up through ages of such
uncertain reputation? Have we not been accustomed to regard those
times as hopelessly corrupt, impenetrably dark, universally
superstitious? Ought we not to be mortified, rather than gratified,
to learn that from the pit of so mouldy a past our book of prayer
was digged? Would not a brand-new liturgy, modernized expressly
to meet the needs of nineteenth century culture, with all the old
English idioms displaced, every rough corner smoothed and every
crooked place made straight--would not that be something far
worthier our respect, better entitled to our allegiance, than
this book full of far-away echoes, and faint bell-notes from a
half-forgotten past?

Yes, if modern man were only modern man and nothing more, such
reasoning would be extremely cogent. But what if modern man be
really, not the mere creature of the century in which he lives,
but the gathered sum and product of all that has preceded him in
history? What if you and I, from the very fact that we are living
now, have in the dim groundwork of our nature something that would
not have been there had we lived one, three, twelve hundred years
ago? What if there be such a thing as cumulative acquirement for
the race of men, so that a new generation starts with an available
capital of associations and ideas of which the generation last
preceding it owned but a part? Take such words as "feudalism," "the
Crusades," "the Renaissance," "the printing press," consider how
much they mean to us, and then remember that to a man of the third
century they would have been empty sounds conveying absolutely no
meaning. What all this goes to show is that human nature is a map
which is continually unrolling. To say that the entirety of it lies
between the two meridians that bound the particular tract in which
our own little life happens to be cast is stupid. The whole great
past belongs to us--river and island, ocean, forest, continent, all
are ours. You and the man in armor, you and the Venetian merchant,
you and the cowled monk have something, be it ever so little,
something in common. That which was in the foreground of their life
is now in the background or in the middle distance of yours. It has