to the
throne a Commission should issue for a new review. If Elizabeth
had found it necessary to revise the book, if James had found it
necessary, if Charles had found it necessary, why should not the
strong hand of William of Orange be laid upon the pages? But this
time the rule was destined to find its exception. The work of review
was, indeed, undertaken by a Royal Commission, including among its
members the great names of Stillingfleet, Tillotson, and Beveridge,
but nothing came of their work. Convocation again showed itself
unfriendly to anything like concessive measures, and so complete
was the obscurity into which the doings of the Commission fell,
that even as late as 1849, Cardwell, in the third edition of
his _History of Conferences_, speaks as if he knew nothing of
the whereabouts of the record. In 1854 the manuscript minutes
of the Commission's proceedings were discovered in the Library
of Lambeth Palace, and by order of Parliament printed as a
Blue-book. The same document has also been published in a more
readable form by Bagster. One rises from the perusal of this Broad
Church Prayer Book--for such, perhaps, Tillotson's attempt may not
unfairly be called--profoundly thankful that the promoters of it
were not suffered to succeed. The Preface to our American Book of
Common Prayer refers to this attempted review of 1689 "as a great
and good work." But the greatness and the goodness must have lain
in the motive, for one fails to discern them either in the matter
or in the manner of what was recommended.

Even Macaulay, Whig that he is, fails not to put on record his
condemnation of the literary violence which the Prayer Book so
narrowly escaped at the hands of the Royal Commission of 1689.
Terseness was not the special excellency of Macaulay's own style,
yet even he resented Bishop Patrick's notion that the Collects
could be improved by amplification. One of the few really good
suggestions made by the Commissioners was that of using the
Beatitudes in the Office of the Holy Communion as an alternate
for the Decalogue. There are certain festivals of the Christian
year when such a substitution would be most timely and refreshing.

We make a leap now of just a hundred years. From 1689 we pass to
1789, and find ourselves in the city of Philadelphia, at a
convention assembled for the purpose of framing a constitution
and setting forth a liturgy for a body of Christians destined to
be known as the Protestant Epis