Journals

In his Presidential Address to the Society (May 1932) Dr Millar Patrick, with the professed aim of achieving an equal emphasis on Word and Sacrament, seeks (questionably?) to lay blame for the imbalance on certain aspects of the character of John Knox, as well as on other factors in Scottish history which led to an “excessive intellectualising of Scottish religion”.  That, it is argued, led to an undervaluing of imagination and symbolism and a turning “back to the legalism of Judaism”.  By way of redress he makes suggestions as to the prominent setting and suitable adornment of the Table (and to the establishing of an [advisory] Assembly Committee).

Noting that “private prayer can dispense with the arts, public prayer cannot”, Dr A L Drummond calls for a creative attitude to architecture and the arts in the building of churches.  Tracing developments from Colonial times in the USA, and in post-Reformation Germany, he notes that while in the former there were, under the influence of Dr Ralph Adams Cram, many excellent medieval-inspired buildings of the 20th century “there is but little radical modernism”, in Germany there had emerged a tradition-denying Functionalism that reduces architecture to machinery.   He concludes that “not engineering but biology should be the root idea of religious architecture” and suggests that change should be governed by a law of growth not by architectural revivalism.

Manual of Church Praise, According to the Use of the Church of Scotland
Church of Scotland Committee on Publications, reviewed by David S Merrow

The Book of Common Order of the United Church of Canada            
The United Church Publishing House, Toronto, reviewed by William Maxwell

Liturgy and Worship, ed. Dr W K Lowther Clark, London, SPCK

Ecclesia Anglicana, by G F Pollard, London

The Book of Common Worship (Revised) approved by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America;   Philadelphia

The Protestant Dictionary, new edition;   London:  The Harrison Trust

The Books of the Latin Liturgy, by Abbot Cabrol, OSB;   London:  Sands & Co.

The Oxford Movement in Scotland, by W Perry;   Cambridge University Press

Worship in Other Lands, by H P Thomson;   London:  Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

Private Prayers for a Week, Compiled by William Bright;   London: SPCK

Le Culte:  Étude d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, by Professor Robert Will, University of Strasbourg:  Paris.  Felix Alcan.

Starting from the observation that the churches of Jerusalem provide a microcosm of Church History,Ninian Hill celebrates the latest addition to their variety, the Church and Hospice erected as a Memorial to the Scots who lost their lives in the Holy Land in the Great War, but given by its local architect, A C Holliday, a character, described in some detail, appropriate to its setting and also to the “simplicity and dignity” of the style of worship to be offered there. 
 

Professor H R  Mackintosh describes proposals for liturgical reform in the Lutheran Church made by Rudolph Otto on the basis of ideas explored in his “original and provocative book”.   The Idea of the Holy, noting that “Otto is not primarily keen to make Church services interesting or attractive”, but to foster inwardness and recollectedness.  Otto’s ideas for regular Sunday morning services on the basis of  developing the Christian year with the assigning of a theme to each Sunday after Trinity are then explored and a quotation from Otto covering two pages is given.  Finally his ideas for the Communion service, not closely related to regular Sunday morning worship, are described.

Dr William Perry, Dean of the Scottish Episcopal diocese of Edinburgh, writes to suggest some means of improvement in public intercession, and draws, inter alia, upon examples from early Christian worship, from the Eucharistic intercession of the Eastern Church, from the “Biddings” in  medieval Western practice and from the “English Prayer Book” of 1928.

R M Adamson makes some suggestions to help ensure that everything is done “decently and in order” in the conduct of a variety of services.