ng for the Fourth of July. There were Churchmen
doubtless at that day who failed duly to appreciate what were called
in the title of the office, "the inestimable blessings of Religious
and Civil Liberty." Others again may have been offended by the
treatment measured out to the Psalter, which was portioned into
thirty selections of two parts each, with the _Benedicite_ added
at the end, to be used, if desired, on the thirty-first day of any
month. Another somewhat crude and unliturgical device was the
running together without break of the Morning Prayer and the
Litany.

I speak of blemishes, but _The Proposed Book_ had its excellences
also. Just at present it is the fashion in Anglican circles to heap
ridicule and contempt on _The Proposed Book_ out of all proportion
to its real demerits. Somehow it is thought to compromise us with
the English by showing up our ecclesiastical ancestors in an
unfavorable light as unlearned and ignorant men. It is treated
as people will sometimes treat an old family portrait of a forebear,
who in his day was under a cloud, mismanaged trust funds, or made
money in the slave trade. Thus a grave historiographer by way of
speaking comfortably on this score, assures us that the volume
"speedily sunk into obscurity," becoming one of the rarest of the
books illustrative of our ecclesiastical annals.

And yet, curiously enough, _The Proposed Book_ was in some points
more "churchly," using the word in a sense expressive of liturgical
accuracy, than the book finally adopted. In the Morning Prayer it
has the _Venite_ in full and not abridged. The _Benedictus_ it also
gives entire. A single form of Absolution is supplied. The versicles
following upon the Creed are more numerous than ours. In the Evening
Prayer the great Gospel Hymns, _the Magnificat_ and the _Nunc
dimittis_, stand in the places to which we with tardy justice have
only just restored them.

Again, if we consider those features of _The Proposed Book_ that
were retained and made part of the Liturgy in 1789, we shall have
further reason to refrain from wholesale condemnation of this
tentative work. For example, we owe the two opening sentences of
Morning Prayer, "The Lord is in his holy temple" and "From the
rising of the sun," to _The Proposed Book_, and also the special
form for Thanksgiving Day. And yet, on the whole, the Convention
of 1789 acted most wisely in determining that it would make the
Prayer Book of the Church of England