ry of the Eternal Trinity,
and in the power of Majesty to pray to the Unity; we ask that by the
firmness of that faith we may be always defended from all adverse
things, who livest and reignest God through all ages. Amen."

256. Turning to our Collect, we find we have first slipped in the word
"us" before "Thy servants," and by that little insertion have slipped in
the squire and his jockey, and the public-house landlord--and anyone
else who may chance to have been coaxed, swept, or threatened into
Church on Trinity Sunday, and required the entire company of them to
profess themselves servants of God, and believers in the mystery of the
Trinity. And we think we have done God a service!

"Grace." Not a word about grace in the original. You don't believe by
having grace, but by having wit.

"To acknowledge." "Agnosco" is to recognize, not to acknowledge. To
_see_ that there are three lights in a chandelier is a great deal more
than to acknowledge that they are there.

"To worship." "Adorare" is to pray to, not to worship. You may worship a
mere magistrate; but you _pray_ to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The last sentence in the English is too horribly mutilated to be dealt
with in any patience. The meaning of the great old collect is that by
the shield of that faith we may quench all the fiery darts of the devil.
The English prayer means, if it means anything, "Please keep us in our
faith without our taking any trouble; and, besides, please don't let us
lose our money, nor catch cold."

"Who livest and reignest." Right; but how many of any extant or instant
congregations understand what the two words mean? That God is a living
God, not a dead Law; and that He is a reigning God, putting wrong things
to rights, and that, sooner or later, with a strong hand and a rod of
iron; and not at all with a soft sponge and warm water, washing
everybody as clean as a baby every Sunday morning, whatever dirty work
they may have been about all the week.

257. On which latter supposition your modern Liturgy, in so far as it
has supplemented instead of corrected the old one, has entirely modeled
itself,--producing in its first address to the congregation before the
Almighty precisely the faultfulest and foolishest piece of English
language that I know in the whole compass of English or American
literature. In the seventeen lines of it (as printed in my
old-fashioned, large-print Prayer-Book), there are seven times over two
word