age
of the Apocalypse for versicles and responses. There has certainly
been a departure from Anglican precedent in this regard. And yet
it would scarcely seem that we could go far astray in borrowing
from the liturgy of heaven, whether there be earthly precedent or
not.

Cranmer and his associates made a far bolder break with the old
office-books than _The Book Annexed_ makes with the Standard Common
Prayer. The statement of the Wisconsin Report, that "The Reformers
of the English Church did not venture to write new Offices of
Prayer," must be taken with qualifications. They did not make
offices absolutely _de novo_, but they did condense and combine
old offices in a manner that practically made a new thing of them.
They took the monastic services and courageously remoulded them
into a form suitable for the new era in which monasteries were to
exist no longer.

Happily they were so thorough in their work that comparatively
little change is called for in adapting what they fitted to the
needs of the sixteenth century to the more varied requirements of
the nineteenth. Still, when they are quoted as conservatives, and
we are referred for evidence of their dislike of change to that
particular paragraph of the Preface to the English Prayer Book
entitled, _Concerning the Service of the Church_[54] it is worth
our while to follow up the reference and see what is actually
there said. The Wisconsin Committee use very soft words in
speaking of the mediaeval perversions and corruptions of Divine
Service. "It was in the monasteries chiefly," they tell us,
"that these services received the embellishments and wonderful
variety which we find in the later centuries." But the following
is the cruel manner in which, in the English Preface cited as
authority, the "embellishments" and "wonderful variety" are
characterized:

But these many years past, this godly and ancient order of the
ancient fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected,
by planting in uncertain stories and legends, with multitudes
of responds, verses, vain repetitions, commemorations, and
synodals, that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun,
after three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were
unread.

. . . And furthermore, notwithstanding that the ancient fathers
have divided the Psalms into seven portions, whereof every one was
called a Nocturn, now of late time a few of them have been daily
said and the rest utterly omitted . . . So t