to credit it with, at least, this one good
result, the rescue of the usages of worship from slovenliness and
torpor, and the establishment of a better standard of what is
seemly, reverent, and beautiful in the public service of Almighty
God. Not that there have not been, even in this respect, grave
errors in the direction of excess; the statement ventured is simply
this, that, up to a certain point, all Churchmen agree in admitting
a genuine and wholesome improvement in the popular estimate of what
public worship, as such, ought to be. An immense amount of devout
study has been given, during the period mentioned, by many able men
to liturgical subjects, and it would be strange indeed if fifty
years of searching criticism had not resulted in the detection of
some few points in which formularies originally compiled to meet
the needs of the sixteenth century might be better adapted to the
requirements of the twentieth. Or, to put the same point in another
way, has not all this searching into the mines of buried treasure,
all this getting together of quarried stone (with possibly a certain
surplusage of stubble) been so much labor lost, if there is never to
come the recognition of a ripe moment for the Church to avail itself
of the results achieved? Are the studious toils of a Palmer, a
Maskell, a Neale, a Scudamore, and a Bright to go for nothing
except in so far as they have been contributory to our fund of
ecclesiological lore? If so, the contempt often expressed for ritual
and liturgical studies by students busy with other lines of research
would seem to be not wholly undeserved.

A good opportunity is now before the Church to give answer as to
whether this form of investigation is or is not anything better
than a species of sacred antiquarianism. Liturgiology as an aspirant
for recognition among the useful sciences may be said at the present
moment to be waiting for the verdict. To be sure, it can be asserted
for liturgiology that to those who love it it is a study that proves
itself, like poetry, "its own exceeding great reward." It is not
worth while to dispute this point. Liturgiology pursued for its own
sake may not be the loftiest of studies, but this, at least, can be
said for it, that it is a not less respectable object of pursuit
than many another specialty the devotees of which look down upon the
liturgiologist with self-complacent scorn as a mere chiffonier. The
forms which Christian worship has taken on in