o the
fact of its not having been the composition or compilation of any
one man. So much is evident enough upon the face of it: for a form
of worship devised off-hand by an individual, or even put together
by a committee sitting around a table, could scarcely be wholly
satisfactory to any save the maker or the makers of it. But it is
more to the purpose to observe that not only is the Prayer Book
not the result of any one man's or any one committee's labors; it
is not the work even of any one generation, or of any one age.

The men who gradually put the Prayer Book into what is substantially
its present shape, in the days of Edward VI. and of Elizabeth, were
no more the makers of the Prayer Book than were the men who, in a
later reign, set forth what we call "the authorized version" of the
Holy Scriptures, the first translators of the Bible. In both cases
the work done was a work of review and revision. A much more severe
review, a vastly more sweeping revision in the case of the Prayer
Book than in the case of the Bible, I grant; but still, mainly
a work of review and revision after all. "Continuity," that
characteristic so precious in the eye of modern science, continuity
marked the whole process.

The first Prayer Book of the Reformed Church of England was a
condensed, simplified, and purified combination of formularies
of worship already in use in the National Church. A certain
amount of new material, some of it home-made, some of it drawn
from foreign sources, was added; but the great bulk of the
new service-book had been contained in one or other of the
older manuals. The Reformers did but clip and prune, with that
exquisite taste and judgment which belong by tradition to English
gardeners, the overgrowth and rank luxuriance of a too long
neglected, "careless-ordered" garden. But whence came the earlier
formularies themselves, from which Cranmer and the rest quarried
the stone for the new building?--to change the metaphor as Paul,
you remember, does so suddenly from husbandry to architecture.[91]
Whence came Missal, and Breviary, and Book of Offices--the best
portions of which were merged in the English Common Prayer?
From the far past; the Missal from those primitive liturgies or
communion services, some of which we trace back with certainty
to the later portion of the ante-Niceneage, and by not unreasonable
conjecture to the edge of apostolic days; the Breviary or daily
prayers from the times when Christians