with immobility as well as the drawbacks. We must
consider how large a proportion of the reverence which the great
institutes of human life exact from us is due to the fixity of the
things themselves. Mont Blanc loses nothing of its hold upon our
admiration because we always find it in the same place.

Men like to feel that there is something in the world stronger
than the individual will, stronger simply because it expresses
the settled common-sense of many as to what is fitting and right
in contrast with the whim of one. Lawyers, as a class, are almost
as conservative as ecclesiastics, and for the very reason that
they also are charged with the custody of established forms which
it is important that men should reverence. Laws affecting the tenure
of property, the binding force of contracts, the stability of the
marriage relation, not only cannot be lightly altered, the very
phraseology in which they are couched must be carefully handled,
for fear lest with the passing away of the form something of the
substance go also.

Moreover, the affections of men fasten themselves very tenaciously
to such a trellis as a liturgy affords. The love for "the old words
and the old tunes" against which all innovators in hymnody, however
deserving, have to do battle, asserts itself under the form of
love for the old prayers with ten-fold vehemence. An immense fund
of latent heat smoulders beneath the maxim, "Let the ancient customs
prevail"; and few of the victories achieved by the papacy are so
startling as those that have resulted in the displacement of the
liturgical uses of local Churches, that of Paris, for example, by
the Roman rite.

But true principles, as we are often reminded, become falsehoods
when shoved across the line of proper measure. The very cycles of
the astronomers have an end, and the clock-work of the most ancient
heavens, or at least our reading of it, calls, from time to time,
for readjustment. So long as man continues fallible his best
intended workmanship will occasionally demand such alteration for
the better as, within the limits already pointed out, may be
possible.

Many signs of the times suggest that the hour for a fresh review
of the Anglican formularies of worship is nigh at hand. Some of
these tokens are written on a sky broad enough to cover the whole
English-speaking race, others of them are visible chiefly within
our own national horizon. With respect to the English book, Cardwell
[3] writi