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Thanksgiving Service 369
other prayers in the Gowrie service to any earlier source, but
their style and composition are of much the same character as
those of all the long and wearisome prayers set forth for special
occasions in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign. The original
collects in the service for Powder Treason were of similar
character. They were very wisely shortened after the Restoration,
and the most violent and unchristian passages omitted.
The forms of prayer of this period were fortunately short-lived.
They form a not very creditable chapter in the history of English
rites. Their length is inordinate, their sentences involved and
their style bad. As literary compositions they are unworthy of
the period in which they were written. They make no pretensions
to
liturgical form. Crowded with ingenious quotations
from the Old Testament, they breathe the spirit of childhood of
the race, and they are full of extraordinarily
fierce and bloodthirsty
allusions to enemies and conspirators. Perhaps none in
this Gowrie form are
quite
so violent in their language as one in
the Powder Treason service, and none descend to the lo \vest
point of all, which seems to be reached in the last prayer in the
Elizabethan form of 1598, which includes the following passages :
' Eternal God, which createdst all men after thy likeness, but hast
advanced Kings more like thyself in places of government, and to that end
hast both anointed them with thy Holy Oil above others, and also laid a
curse upon them which touch thine anointed. . . . But those priests of Baal,
the hellish Chaplains of Antichrist, accursed runagates from their God and
Prince, the bellows and fuel of these flagrant conspiracies, confound them
in thy wrath, since thy Grace will not convert them, and that which thy
power cannot work on them in defeating their enterprizes, let thy fury perform
in revenge upon their persons. . . . But let our gracious Queen
still reign and rule in despite of Rome, and Rheims, and Spain and
Hell
'
The first part of this amazing composition contains the key to
much of the violence of the language of this and cognate forms.
It was the sacredness of the Royal person in virtue of the
consecration and anointing administered at the time of the
Coronation or '
Sacring,' which, as in pre-Reformation times, was
held to involve all treasonable attempts upon the sovereign in the
added guilt of sacrilege. And to the men of those days the
sacrilege was made all the worse because of the religious motive
underlying it, in virtue of the bull in excelsis Regnans
which had
been issued by the Pope as recently as 1570. Hence the un-
paralleled ferocity of language, the effect of which is heightened by