gle month. It is consoling to those who within our
own memory have been charged with indecent haste for seeking to
effect a revision of the American Book of Common Prayer within a
period of nine years, to find this precedent in ecclesiastical
history for their so great rashness.

Since Charles the Second's day there has been no formal revision of
the Prayer Book of the Church of England by the Church of England.

Some slight relaxations of liturgical use on Sundays have been made
legal by Act of Parliament, but in all important respects the Prayer
Book of Victoria is identical with the book set forth by Convocation
and sanctioned by Parliament shortly after the collapse of the Savoy
Conference. Under no previous lease of life did the book enjoy
anything like so long a period of continued existence. Elizabeth's
book was the longest lived of all that preceded the Restoration,
but that only continued in use five-and-forty years. But the Prayer
Book of 1661 has now held its own in England for two centuries and
a quarter. When, therefore, we are asked to accept the first
Edwardian Book as the only just exponent of the religious mind of
England, it is open to us to reply, "Why should we, seeing that
the Caroline Book has served as the vehicle of English devotion for
a period seventy-five times as long?" The most voluminous of the
additions made to the Prayer Book, in 1661, were the Office for the
Baptism of Adults and the Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea. The
wide diffusion, under the Commonwealth, of what were then called
Anabaptist opinions, had brought it to pass that throughout the
kingdom there were thousands of men and women who had grown up
unbaptized. At the time of the Reformation such a thing as an
unchristened Christendom seems not to have been thought possible.
At any rate no provision was made for the contingency. But upon
the spread of liberty of religious thought there followed, logically
enough, the spread of liberty of religious action, and it was not
strange that after a whole generation had spent its life in
controversy of the warmest sort over this very point of Baptism,
there were found to be in England multitudes of the unbaptized.

Another reason assigned in the Preface of the English Prayer Book
for the addition of this office was that it might be used for the
baptizing of "natives in the plantations and other converts." This
is the first hint of any awakening of the conscience of the English
Chur