tion was under
discussion.

Up to the present time the Episcopal Church of this country has
stood easily at the head in the matter of providing for the people
a dignified and beautiful order of divine service. In fact, there
has been, until lately, no one to compete. But all this is changing.
Ours are no longer the only congregations in which common prayer is
to be found. It is true that thus far the attempts at imitation
have been rather grotesque than formidable, but such, until
recently, have also been, in the judgment of foreign critics,
all of our American endeavors after art. We are to consider what
apt learners our quick-witted countrymen have shown themselves to
be, in so much that even Christmas Day, once the _bete noire_ of
Puritan legislators, has come to be accounted almost a national
festival, and we shall be convinced that our primacy in the field
of liturgies is not an absolutely assured position. This argument
is open to the criticism that it seems to lower and cheapen the
whole subject by representing Anglican religion in a mendicant
attitude bidding for the favor of the great American public,
and vexed that others, fellow-suppliants, have stolen a good
formula of appeal. Nevertheless there is a certain amount of
reasonableness in this way of putting the thing. Certainly with
those who reckon the liturgical mode of worship among the notes
of the Church, the argument is one that ought to have marked
influence; while with those who, not so persuaded, nevertheless
view with pleased interest the general spread of a liturgical
taste among the people of this country, seeing in it a token
of better things to come, a harbinger of larger agreements
than we have yet attained to, and of an approaching "consolation
of Israel" once not thought possible--even with such the argument
ought not to be wholly powerless.[15]

The fact that the Convocations of Canterbury and York have taken
in hand and carried through a revision of the rubrics of the Prayer
Book will seem to those who hold that our Church ought to advance
_pari passu_ with the Church of England, and no faster, another
evidence of the timeliness of the American movement. Under the
title of _The Convocation Prayer Book_ there has lately appeared
in England an edition of the Prayer Book so printed as to show how
the book would read were the recommendations of York and Canterbury
to go into effect. It is true that the consent of Parliament must
be secured