oadest generalization
of all is one to which the very discordance of the critics bears
the best possible witness. Of a scheme of re vision against which
is pressed, in Virginia,[50] the charge of Mariolatry; in Ohio,[51]
the charge of Latitudinarianism; and in Wisconsin[52] the charge of
Puritanic pravity, this much may at least be said, that it possesses
the note of fairness. From henceforth suggestions of partisan bias
are clearly out of order.

The Anglo-Catholic censures of _The Book Annexed_ are substantially
summed up in the assertion that due regard is not had, in the
changes proposed, to the structural principles of liturgical
science. In the exceedingly well written, if somewhat one-sided
document, already referred to as the Wisconsin Report, this is,
throughout, the burden of the complaint. The accomplished author
of the Report, than whom no one of the critics at home or abroad
has shown a keener or a better cultivated liturgical instinct, is
afraid that a free use of all the liberties permitted by the new
rubrics of the daily offices would so revolutionize Morning and
Evening Prayer as practically to obliterate the line of their
descent from the old monastic forms. If there were valid ground
for such an expectation the alarm might be justifiable; but
is there? The practical effect of the rubrics that make for
abbreviation will be to give us back, on weekdays almost exactly,
and with measurable precision on Sundays also, the Matins and
Evensong of the First Book of Edward VI. Surely this is not the
destruction of continuity with the pre-Reformation Church.

In his dislike of the provision for grafting the Beatitudes upon
the Evening Prayer, the author of the Wisconsin Report will have
many sympathizers, the present writer among them; but in his fear
that in the introduction of the Proem to the Song of the Three
Children, as a possible respond to the First Lesson,[53] there
lurks a covert design to dethrone the _Te Deum_, he is likely to
find few to agree with him.

But after all, may not this scrupulous regard for the precedents
set us in the old service-books be carried too far? It is wholesome,
but there is a limit to the wholesomeness of it. We remember who
it was that made war for the sake of "a scientific frontier." Some
of the scientific frontiers in the region of liturgies are as
illusory as his was. For example, _The Book Annexed_ may be
"unscientific" in drawing as largely as it does on the langu