Book? Homiletical as the question sounds, it is worth asking.

We have reviewed rapidly, but not carelessly, the vicissitudes of
the book's wonderful career, and we ought to be in a position to
draw some sort of instructive inference from it all. Well, one
thing taught us is this, the singular power of survival that lives
in gracious words. They wondered at the "gracious words which
proceeded out of His mouth," and because they wondered at them
they treasured them up.

Kind words, says the child's hymn, can never die; neither can
kindly words, and kindly in the deepest sense are many, many of
the words of the Common Prayer; they touch that which is most
catholic in us, that which strongly links us to our kind. There
is that in some of the Collects which as it has lasted since the
days when Roman emperors were sitting on their thrones, so will
it last while man continues what he is, a praying creature.

Another thing taught us by the Prayer Book's history is the duty
of being forever on our guard in the religious life against "the
falsehood of extremes."

The emancipated thinkers who account all standards of belief to
be no better than dungeon walls, scoff at this feature of the
Anglican character with much bitterness. "Your Church is a Church
of compromises," they say, "and your boasted _Via media_ only a
coward's path, the poor refuge of the man who dares not walk in
the open." But when we see this Prayer Book condemned for being
what it is by Bloody Mary, and then again condemned for being what
it is by the Long Parliament, the thought occurs to us that
possibly there is enshrined in this much-persecuted volume a truth
larger than the Romanist is willing to tolerate, or the Puritan
generous enough to apprehend.

A third important lesson is that we are not to confound revision
with ruin, or to suppose that because a book is marvellously good
it cannot conceivably be bettered. Each accomplished revision of
the Book of Common Prayer has been a distinct step in advance. If
God in his wise providence suffered an excellent growth of devotion
to spring up out of the soil of England in the days of Edward
the Sixth, and, after many years, determined that like a vine
out of Egypt it should be brought across the sea and given root
on these shores, we need not fear that we are about to lose
utterly our pleasant plant if we notice that the twigs and leaves
are adapting themselves to the climate and the atmosphere of the