hand, thread his way
among its intricacies.

But when we consider how many exquisite gems of devotional speech
there are still left outside the covers of the Prayer Book; when we
consider how delightful it would be to have back again the
_Magnificat _, and the _Nunc Dimittis _, and some of the sweet
versicles of the Evensong of the Church of England; when we consider
the lamentable mistake already made in our existing formularies of
introducing into Morning and Evening Prayer identically the same
opening sentences, the same General Exhortation, the same General
Confession, the same Declaration of Absolution, the same Prayer for
the President, and the same General Thanksgiving--is it not evident
that an additional, or, if you please, an alternative service,
composed of material not elsewhere employed, would be for the
worshippers a very great gain? The repetition which wearies is
only the repetition which we feel need not have been. We never
tire of the Collect for Peace any more than we tire of the sunset.
It is in its place, and we always welcome it. In a perfect liturgy
no form of words, except the Creed, the Doxology, and the Lord's
Prayer, would at any time reappear, but as in arabesque work every
square inch of space differs from every other square, so each clause
and sentence of the manual of worship would have a distinctive
beauty of its own, to be looked for precisely there and nowhere
else.

This is but one illustration of what may be called a possible
enrichment of our Book of Common Prayer. Impoverishment under
the name of revision may very justly be deprecated, but who shall
find any just fault with an enrichment that is really such?

We must remember that the men who gave us what we now have were, in
their day and generation, the innovators, advocates of what the
more timid spirits accounted dangerous change. We cannot, I think,
sufficiently admire the courageous foresight of those Reformers
who, at a time when public worship was mainly associated in men's
minds with what went on among a number of ecclesiastics gathered
together at one end of a church, dared to plant themselves firmly
on the principle of "common" prayer, and to say, Henceforth the
worship of the National Church shall be the worship not of priests
alone, but of priests and people too. What a bold act it was! The
printing-press, remember, although it had given the impulse to the
Reformation, was far from being at that time the omniprese