Corporate Worship In The Reformed Tradition by James Hastings Nichols - 1968

This book is in very good condition.There is almost no wear on the front, back, edges, and spine of the cover boards. The book was signed and an emblem affixed to the first page by the previous owner. There is no bumping or fraying on the cover boards. The pages are beginning to yellow, but the pages are clear of any markings.

"In the long history of the worshiping Christian community, or at least of the Latin-speaking section of it, the sixteenth century witnessed the most momentous changes since the days of Gregory the Great in the sixth century. The intervening millennium, in fact, may be regarded in the perspectives set by the Second Vatican Council as a liturgical parenthesis, defined by the delayed indigenization of worship on the north European mission field. There were understandable reasons for this delayed indigenization which need not concern us here. Some of these reasons also help to explain the suppression of regional rites, such as the Gallican and Mozarabic, and the enforced standardization on the Roman pattern. The effect, in any case, was that a form of worship, essentially crystallized for Latin-speaking peoples by the time of Gregory, was imposed unchanged on the northern European peoples. For a thousand years they must worship through a liturgy unintelligible to most of them. The form of this service, deprived of inner coherence and meaning, suffered over the centuries various distortions, omissions, telescoping's, and adventitious additions. Finally, in the religious and moral explosion of the sixteenth century, a major section of the mission churches of northern Europe rebelled. They translated and adapted the Latin liturgy for their own worship in defiance of the Roman hierarchy...." - Chapter One from Corporate Worship in The Reformed Tradition