Introduction

Worship is not a secondary aspect of the Christian life: it is that for which man was created. "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever" (Shorter Catechism, Q. 1). That is why God has never left to human invention the manner in which he is to be worshipped: "What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it" (Deut. 12:32).

It is no accident that the Directory for the Publick Worship of God was the first document the Westminster Assembly brought to completion. It finished it at the end of 1644, before the Confession of Faith and before the Catechisms, and when the Parliament of England established it, it abolished the Book of Common Prayer. The divines understood that the reformation of the Church begins with the reformation of its worship.

The history of the Church confirms this again and again. When Israel turned away from God, it did not do so first by denying his name, but by worshipping him in its own way: Jeroboam's calves were presented as the gods that had brought Israel up out of Egypt (1 Kings 12:28), and the fire of Nadab and Abihu was "strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not" (Lev. 10:1). The same thing happened in the medieval Church: ceremonies, images and rites of human invention were added to worship one after another, until it ended in open idolatry.

Today the temptation has changed its form, but not its nature. Where once altars and images were set up, now stages, lights and spectacle are set up; worship is judged by its power to attract and to stir the emotions, and not by its faithfulness to what God has commanded. Then as now, the first thing to be corrupted is worship, and after it doctrine falls.

Against both deviations, the Directory applies what the Confession would later set forth as the regulative principle of worship: "the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture" (WCF 21.1; cf. Larger Catechism, Q. 108-109).

In the pages that follow, the reader will find how the Assembly ordered the parts of public worship: the reading of the Word, prayer, preaching, the sacraments and the singing of psalms. It is not a book of prayers to be recited, but the sober and reverent application of what Scripture commands. The Directory is preceded by the act with which the Church and the Parliament of Scotland approved it in 1645.