Hammond called him, there occurs a sentence which, both
on account of its embodying in a few words the whole philosophy of
liturgical revision and because of a certain practical bearing
presently to be pointed out, it is worth while, in spite of its
familiarity, to quote:

"The particular forms of Divine worship, and the rites and ceremonies
appointed to be used therein, being things in their own nature
indifferent and alterable and so acknowledged, it is but reasonable,
that upon weighty and important considerations, according to the
various exigency of times and occasions, such changes and alterations
should be made therein, as to those that are in place of authority
should from time to time seem either necessary or expedient."

Contemporaneously with this utterance there came into the Prayer
Book, as a direct consequence of the enormous enlargement of the
naval and commercial marine that had taken place under the
Commonwealth, the "Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea." Here was a
wise and right-minded recognition of a new want that had sprung up
with a new time, a want which jealousy of the Puritans who had built
up the naval supremacy did not prevent the Caroline bishops from
meeting. But the change that passed on England during five years of
Cromwell was as nothing compared with the transformation of America
under ninety-five years of the federal constitution. Take a single
illustration. The year 1789, the date of the Ratification of the
American Prayer Book, saw sea-island cotton first planted in the
United States, and it was about that time that upland cotton also
began to be cultivated for home and foreign use. As the effect of
this scarcely noticed experiment there straightway sprang up an
industry, North and South, which has been to our country almost
what her shipping interest is to Great Britain. Bishop White and
his associates were not to blame for failure to provide bread that
all this unanticipated multitude of toilers should eat. And yet a
failure there has been. No one who has not labored at the task of
trying to commend the Church of the Prayer Book to the working
class, as it is represented in our large manufacturing towns, can
know how lamentable that failure is. We gather in the rich and the
poor, but the great middle class that makes the staple and the
strength of American society stands aloof.

Nowhere in this country, for instance, has the Church had a better
opportunity to show what it could