Sensible men not a few are to be found who hold that the incoming
tide of host-worship with which, as they conceive, our reformed
Church is threatened can never be stayed unless some carefully
contrived definition inserted in the Prayer Book shall make
impossible this subtile and refined species of idolatry. But
men no whit less sensible laugh them in the face, pointing to
the "black rubric" and its history as evidence that between the
admitted doctrine of the real presence and the disallowed tenet
of transubstantiation no impervious barrier of words can possibly
be run.

These illustrations of probable divergence in opinion, in case
the field of doctrine were once entered, might be multiplied. The
retranslation of the Nicene Creed and the more accurate punctuation
of its sentences; the rendering of the word Sabbath in the Fourth
Commandment into its English equivalent of Rest; the abolition of
the curious misnomer under which we go on calling XXXVIII Articles
XXXIX; the removal from the Catechism, or else the conversion into
mother English of that sad _crux infantum_, the answer to the
question, "What desirest thou of God in this prayer?" are a few
examples of less importance than those previously cited; and yet,
in the case of the least of them, it is most unlikely that the
advocates of change would have the show of hands in their favor,
so sensitive is the mind of the Church to anything that looks in
the least degree like tampering with the standards of weight and
measure, the shekels of the sanctuary.

On the other hand, there are certain manifest and palpable instances
of inaccuracy and, more rarely, infelicity of diction which the
reviewers might very properly take occasion to amend even though
such alterations could not be classified by a strict constructionist
under either of the two heads "enrichment" and "flexibility." In the
masterly Report of the Rev. Dr. T. W. Coit to the Joint Committee
appointed by the Convention of 1841 to prepare a Standard Prayer
Book,[10] a document of classical rank, there is more than one
intimation of the hope that future reviewers would be given a larger
liberty in this direction than he had himself enjoyed. He chafed,
and naturally enough, under the necessity of reprinting in a
"standard" book, evident and acknowledged solecisms and blunders.
"We wanted," he says, "to correct one ungrammatical clause in the
Consecration Prayer of the Communion Service. It is in the last
sen