n
the teeth and eyes of the black rubric the practice known as
Eucharistical adoration has become widely prevalent in the Church
of England, only shows how little dependence can be placed on forms
of words to keep even excellent and religious people from doing
the things they have a mind to do.

In taking leave of the Caroline revision, it may be permitted to
dwell for a moment upon the serious character of the conclusion
reached by the ecclesiastical leaders of that day. An opportunity
was given them to conciliate dissent. Without going all lengths,
without in any measure imperilling the great foundation principles
of Anglican religion, they might, it would seem, have won back to
the national church thousands of those whom their sternness not
only repelled but permanently embittered. But it was the hour of
victory with the Churchmen, and "Woe to the conquered" seems to
have been their cry. They set their faces as a flint against
concession; they passed their iron-clad act of uniformity, and
now for more than two hundred years religion in Great Britain has
been a household divided against itself. Perhaps nothing that the
men of the Restoration could have done would have made it otherwise.
Perhaps the familiar question of the cynical Dean of St. Patrick's,
"What imports it how large a gate you open, if there be always left
a number who place a pride and a merit in refusing to enter?" was
a fair question, and fatal to any dream of unity. And yet one may
be pardoned for believing that had a little of the oil of brotherly
kindness been poured upon those troubled waters we whom the waves
still buffet might to-day be sailing a smoother sea.

As stated above, the Convocation of 1662 gave to the Prayer Book of
the Church of England the form it has ever since retained. But it
must not be supposed that no efforts have been made meanwhile to
bring changes to pass. The books written upon the subject form a
literature by themselves.

The one really serious attempt to reconstruct the Liturgy in
post-Caroline times was that which grew naturally enough out of the
Revolution of 1688. In every previous crisis of political change,
the Prayer Book had felt the tremor along with the statute-book.

Church and State, like heart and brain, are sympathetically
responsive to one another; revisions of rubrics go naturally
along with revisions of codes. It was only what might have been
anticipated, therefore, that when William and Mary came