rsuasive argument against attempting to amend
the Prayer Book, either in text or rubrics, might have been based
upon the lack of hands competent to undertake so delicate a task.
Raw material, well adapted to edification, was lying about in
blocks, but skilled workmen were scarce. This can hardly be said
to-day. Simultaneously with the beginning of the Oxford movement,
there naturally sprang up a fresh interest in liturgical studies,
an interest which has gone on deepening and widening until in volume
and momentum the stream has now probably reached its outer limit.
The convincing citation, "There were giants in those days," with
which a late bishop of one of the New England dioceses used to
enforce his major premise that wisdom died with Cranmer and his
colleagues, no longer satisfies. Probably no period of corresponding
length in the whole range of English Church history has shown itself
so rich in the fruits of liturgical study as the fifty years that
have elapsed since the introduction into the English Parliament of
the first Reform Bill.[13] This particular historical landmark is
mentioned on account of the close connection of cause and effect
between it and the remarkable movement set on foot by Newman, Pusey,
Keble, and Froude. To be sure, one of the earliest utterances in
the Tracts ran in these words: "Attempts are making to get the
Liturgy altered. My dear brethren, I beseech you consider with me
whether you ought not resist the alteration of even one jot or
tittle of it."[14]

And yet, notwithstanding this disclaimer, one of the main impulses
that lay behind the whole movement represented by the Tracts was an
earnest desire to quicken the life of the Church of England in the
region of worship. In the _Table of the Tracts, showing their
arrangement according to Subjects_, the "Liturgical" section comes
first.

The present writer acknowledges but a very limited sympathy with
the doctrinal motives and aims of either the earlier or the later
Tractarians. But let us, above all things, be fair. With whatever
prepossessions one looks back upon it, the ground traversed by the
Church of England during the past fifty years cannot be otherwise
regarded than as a field sown with mingled tares and wheat.
Individuals will differ in judgment as to the proportion in which
these two products of a common soil have coexisted, but even those
who have most stoutly opposed themselves to the Oxford movement,
as a whole, are fain