this sufficiently shews that forms of devotion are not evil in themselves.
But some think, that though they were not evil under the Jewish dispensation, which consisted alto- gether of rites and carnal ordinances, they are evil under the more spiritual dispensation of the Gospel. This however cannot be ; because our blessed Lord taught his disciples a form of prayer, and not only told them to pray after that manner, as one Evangelist mentions, but to use the very words, as another Evan- gelist declares. Indeed the word ovrcos, by which St. Matthew expresses it, is not of necessity to be confined to manner11; it might be taken as referring to the very words : but, granting that he speaks of the manner only, and prescribes it as a model ; yet St. Luke certainly requires us to use it as a form : " Jesus said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven1." Accordingly we find, from the testimonies of some of the earliest and most eminent Fathers of the Church k, that it was con- stantly regarded and used in the Church as a form from the very times of the Apostles. As for the objection, that we do not read in the New Testa- ment that it was so used, it is of no weight at all ; for we are not told that the Apostles ever baptized persons in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; but can we therefore doubt whe- ther they did use this form of baptism ? Assuredly not ; and therefore the circumstance of such an use of the Lord's Prayer not being recorded, especially in so short a history as that of the Apostles, is no argument at all that it was not so used.
Nor was this the only form used in the apostolic age. Lucian, speaking of the first Christians, says, " They spend whole nights in singing of Psalms :" and Pliny, in his famous Letter to Trajan, which was written not much above ten years after the death of John the Evangelist, says of them, " It is their manner
h Matt. vi. 9. « Luke xi. 2.
k Tertullian — Cyprian — Cyril — Jerom — Augustine — Chrysostom ■ — Gregory. See Bennet's London Cases, p. 52.