The Need for Personal Prayer
It is too bad, when people want to pray, that they should be prevented because the spiritual authorities have not published a special form to fit the occasion. Moreover, why should a set of men assume the responsibility of forming prayers for the people, who have not sufficient acumen to foresee all the possible emergencies that may arise? A member of the British Parliament wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to ask if a special prayer could not be ordered for a day to be set apart for prayer for deliverance from the evils of the proposed Irish Home Rule Bill. The following is the reply of the Archbishop:— Lambeth Palace, Feb. 27, 1893.
My Dear Sir: There are difficulties, as you are aware, in the way of enacting a new form of prayer such as you suggest should now be put for use at the present crisis, but there could be no objections, I think, to the clergy who were so disposed using a special collect, as that for the fifth Sunday after Trinity, or those for the sixteenth Sunday and the twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, with particular reference to the present anxiety. We hear much about this "enlightened age," but it is doubtful if history can point to an age of more general credulity. We fancy poor Peter, when sinking in the water, being obliged to wait for the archbishop to form a "collect" for the occasion.