the best poetry is a tempting question, but one that must be left,
for the present, on one side. Perhaps, if the inquiry were to be
pushed, we might find ourselves shut up to the curious conclusion
that the framers of the very earliest liturgies, the authors of
the old sacramentaries, were either verbally inspired or else were
lacking in the qualifications which alone could fit them to do
worthily the work they worthily did, for clearly "experts" they
were not.

But the question that immediately concerns us is one of simple
fact. Assuming the present laborious effort at betterment to have
been proved a "fiasco," how is the General Convention to set in
motion any more promising enginery of revision? "Summon in," say
our English advisers, "competent scholars, and give them _carte
blanche_ to do what they will." But the Convention, which is by
law the final arbiter, has no power to invite to a share in its
councils men who have no constitutional right to a seat upon its
floor. How thankfully should we welcome as participants in our
debates and as allies in our legislation the eminent liturgical
scholars who give lustre to the clergy list of the Church of
England; but we are as powerless to make them members of the
General Convention as we should be to force them into the House
of Commons. The same holds true at home. If the several dioceses
fail to discover their own "inglorious Miltons," and will not send
them up to General Convention, General Convention may, and doubtless
does, lament the blindness of the constituencies, but it cannot
correct their blunder. The dioceses in which the "experts"
canonically reside had had full warning that important liturgical
interests were to be discussed and acted upon in the General
Convention of 1883; why were the "experts" left at home? And if
they were not returned in 1883, is there sufficient reason to
believe that they will ever be returned in any coming year of
grace? It must be either that the American Church is bereft of
"experts," or else that the constituencies, influenced possibly
by the hard sense of the laity, have learned hopelessly to confound
the "expert" with the doctrinaire.

Of "expert testimony," in the shape of the liturgical material
gathered, mainly by English writers, during the last fifty years,
the Joint Committee had no lack. That this material was carefully
sifted and conscientiously used, _The Book Annexed_ will itself one
day be acknowledged to be the