Church service having been set aside by Bishop White and
his compeers in the American Revision of 1789, it was felt that
further improvements were still possible, and that the time had
fully come for making them. Since the beginning of the so-called
"tractarian movement" in the Church of England a great deal of
valuable liturgical material had been accumulating, and it was
discerned that if ever the fruits of the scholarship of such men
as Palmer and Neale and Maskell and Bright were to be garnered
the harvest-day had arrived. To the question often asked why
it would not have been wiser to wait until the Church of England
had led the way and set the pattern, the answer is that the
hands of the Church of England were tied, as they have been
tied these many years past, and as they may continue to be tied,
for aught we know to the contrary, for many years to come. The
Church of England cannot touch her own Prayer Book, whether to
mend or to mar it, except with the consent of that very mixed
body, the House of Commons--a consent she is naturally and properly
most loth to ask. Immersed in a veritable ocean of accumulated
liturgical material, she is as helpless as Tantalus to moisten
her lips with so much as a single drop. It was seen that this
fact laid upon us American Churchmen a responsibility as urgent
as it was unique, viz., the responsibility of doing what we could
to meet the devotional needs of present-day Christendom, not only
for our own advantage, but with a view to being ultimately of
service to our Anglican brethren across the sea. An experiment
of the greatest interest, which for them was a sheer impossibility,
it lay open to us to try. After various abortive attempts had
come to nought, a beginning was at length made in the General
Convention of 1880, a joint committee of bishops and deputies
being then appointed to consider whether, in view of the fact
that this Church was soon to enter upon the second century of
its organized existence in America, the changed condition of
the national life did not demand certain alterations in the Book
of Common Prayer in the direction of liturgical enrichment and
increased flexibility of use.

Few were of the opinion at the time that anything definite would
come of the deliberations of this committee, and the fact, never
before publicly stated till this moment, that of the deputies
appointed to serve upon it the greater number were men who had
not voted in favor of the m