re to
have but the tenths from the priest, for the tenths he had received from
them.'[1134] No doubt the expectation of immediate changes in the
liturgy, and the knowledge that some of the bishops were leaders in that
movement, had an unsettling effect, adapted to encourage irregularities.
At all events we hear little more of it, when the agitation in favour of
comprehension had ceased. There was often a lax observance of the
rubrics;[1135] but there appear to be no complaints of any serious
omissions, until three or four of the Arian and semi-Arian clergy
ventured, not only to leave out the Athanasian Creed, but to alter the
doxologies,[1136] and to pass over the second and third petitions of the
Litany.[1137]

The Athanasian Creed, however, might fairly be said to stand on a
somewhat different footing. If it had been a pain and a stumbling block
only to those who had adopted Whiston's opinions about the Trinity, men
to whom the ordinary prayers could not fail to give offence, it would
have been clear that such persons had no standing-ground in the ministry
of the Church of England. But the case was notoriously otherwise.
Persons who have not the least inclination to adopt heterodox opinions,
may most reasonably object to the use in public worship of elaborate
scholastic definitions on questions of acknowledged mystery. Those
clergymen, therefore, whether in the eighteenth or in the nineteenth
century, who have been accustomed to neglect the rubric which prescribes
the use of this Creed on certain days, might feel reasonably justified
in so doing, on the tacit understanding that, at the demand of the
bishop they should either read the formula, notwithstanding their
general dislike to it, or give up their office in the Church. No doubt
it was quite as often omitted in the last century as in our own;[1138]
and in George III.'s time, even if a desire had existed to enforce its
use, there would have been the more difficulty in doing so from its
having been forbidden in the King's Chapel.[1139]

The habit of reading continuously, as parts of one service, Morning
Prayer, the Litany, and part of the office for the Communion, had hardly
become fixed at the commencement of the century. John Johnson,[1140]
writing in 1709, said it was an innovation. The old custom had been to
have, on Sundays and holy days, prayers at six, and the Litany at nine,
followed after a few minutes' interval by the Communion service. Even in
Charles