"How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!"

     "This is an instructive example. Although 'revolutionary legality' won a partial victory, how enormous an effort it required on the part of the presiding judge! How much disorganization, lack of discipline, lack of political consciousness there still was! The prosecution stood firmly with the defense. The convoy guards stuck their noses into something that wasn’t their business in order to send off a protest. Whew, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the new kind of court were not having things easy by any means! Of course, not all the sessions were anything like so turbulent, but this wasn’t the only one of its kind. How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!
     "To pursue this enterprise of many years’ duration is the rewarding task of the historian. As for us—how are we to make our way through that rosy mist? Whom are we to ask about it? Those who were shot aren’t talking, and neither are those who have been scattered to the four winds. Even if the defendants, and the lawyers, and the guards, and the spectators have survived, no one will allow us to seek them out.
     "Evidently, the only help we will get is from the prosecution.
     "In this connection, I was given by well-wishers an intact copy of a collection of speeches for the prosecution delivered by that fierce revolutionary, the first People’s Commissar of Military Affairs in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, the Commander in Chief, and later the organizer of the Department of Exceptional Courts of the People’s Commissariat of Justice—where the personal rank of tribune was being readied for him, until Lenin vetoed the title—the glorious accuser in the greatest trials, subsequently exposed as the ferocious enemy of the people, N. V. Krylenko. And if, despite everything, we want to attempt a brief review of the public trials, if we are determined to try to get a feeling for the judicial atmosphere of the first post-revolutionary years, then we have to learn to read this Krylenko text. We have no other. And using it as a basis, we must try to picture to ourselves everything that is missing from it and everything that happened in the provinces too.
     "Of course, we would prefer to see the stenographic record of those trials, to listen to the dramatic voices from beyond the grave of those first defendants and those first lawyers, speaking at a time when no one could have foreseen in what implacable sequence all of it would be swallowed up—together with those Revtribunal members as well.
     "However, as Krylenko has explained, for a whole series of technical reasons, 'it was inconvenient to publish the stenographic records[.] It was convenient only to publish his speeches for the prosecution and the sentences handed down by the tribunals, which by that time had already come to jibe completely with the demands of the accuser-prosecutor."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  An experiement in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973, Part I, chap. 8 ("The law as a child"), p. 305-306.

The liturgy "composed on his own by, say, some Pentecostal pastor in Houston for next Sunday's service in his church"

     ". . . the traditional liturgies have stood the test of time across many centuries by billions of Christians. For that reason, the understanding of God implicit and explicit in ['the points of convergence of'] those liturgies has more authority, carries more weight (gravitas), than one composed on his own by, say, some Pentecostal pastor in Houston for next Sunday’s service in his church; the theology implicit and explicit in the latter is more likely to be quirky, distorted, out of the mainstream. . . .
     ". . . the traditional liturgies have a depth, a richness, a beauty that, in my experience, these contemporary alternative liturgies lack. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the latter liturgies strip elements out of the traditional liturgies, reduce the imagery, make the language chatty and prosaic so that everyone can understand immediately what is being said. There remains only a faint echo of the enormous devotion and creativity that the early church poured into its liturgies. The most radical example of this reductive flattening-out that I have encountered was a Sunday morning service that consisted of nothing more than a praise band performing for about half an hour, followed by a perfunctory prayer spoken by the leader of the band and what was described as a 'talk' by the minister — nothing more.
     "If the alternative contemporary liturgies that I have experienced are typical of these liturgies as a whole, then these liturgies do not represent a fresh burst of liturgical creativity but represent instead the stripping out from the traditional liturgies of almost all their components. Accordingly, in discussing the theological implications of the acts to be found in the traditional liturgies we are also discussing the acts to be found in these alternative contemporary liturgies, since there are none to be found in the latter that are not to be found in the former.
     "My focus on the traditional liturgies does, of course, pose a question to the alternative contemporary liturgies, namely, why have they stripped so many things out? Why was there no confession of sins in that service I mentioned? Why no intercessions? Why no reading of Scripture? And why was there almost no sense of the majesty and awesomeness of God? Is there an understanding of God implicit in this radical stripping out that is different from the understanding to be found in the traditional liturgies? If so, what is that different understanding? . . ."

     Nicholas Wolterstorff, The God we worship:  an exploration of liturgical theology (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2015), 19-20.  "I should add here that the revisions of their traditional liturgies that all denominations, with the exception of the Orthodox, undertook in the twentieth century also amounted to the stripping out of a fair number of traditional elements and theological principles" (20n11).  Agreed!  But granted that the Novus Ordo was itself a comparatively free-wheeling and parochial hatchet job, why is it necessary, leaving that aside, to focus on "the points of convergence" of the traditional liturgies if not because the Reformers, say, did the same (if to a much lesser degree than that "Pentecostal pastor in Houston")?