home here and know our own
wants and wishes, our own liabilities and opportunities, far better
than we can possibly know those of other people. As a Church we
have always tied ourselves too slavishly to English precedent. Our
vine is greatly in danger of continuing merely a potted ivy, an
indoor exotic. The past of the Common Prayer we cannot disconnect
from England, but its present and its future belong in part at
least to us, and it is in this light that we are bound as American
Churchmen to study them. Let us agree, then, that the usefulness
of the book here and now lies largely in the moulding and formative
influence which it is quietly exerting, not only on the religion
of those who use it, but also largely on the religion of the far
greater number who publicly use it not. It has interested me, as
it would interest almost anyone, to learn how many prayer books
our booksellers supply to Christian people who are not Churchmen.
Evidently the book is in use as a private manual with thousands,
who own no open allegiance to the Protestant Episcopal Church. They
keep it on the devotional shelf midway between Thomas a Kempis and
the Pilgrim's Progress, finding it a sort of interpreter of the
one to the other, and possessed of a certain flavor differencing
it from both. This is a happy augury for the future. Much latent
heat is generating which shall yet warm up the dullness of the land.
The seed-grain of the Common Prayer will not lie unproductive in
those forgotten furrows. The fitness of such a system of worship
as this to counteract some of the flagrant evils of our popular
religion can scarcely fail to commend it to the minds of those who
thus unobserved and, "as it were in secret," read and ponder.
Much of our American piety, fervid as it is, shows confessedly
a feverish, intermittent character which needs just such a tonic
as the Prayer Book provides in what Keble happily called its "sober
standard of feeling in matters of practical religion."

Then, too, there is the constantly increasing interest which it
is such a pleasure to observe among Christians of all names in
the order of the ritual year, in Christmas and Easter, Lent and
Good-Friday--who can tell how much of this may not be due to the
leavening influence of the Prayer Book, over and above what is
effected by the public services of the Church? "I wonder," said
a famous revivalist to a friend, a clergyman of our Church, "I
wonder if you Episcopalians know