instead of ending where it was expected to
end, brings up against an intractable brick wall. Just such perils
as these will beset anybody who ventures to disturb the adjustments
of the "Prayer Book as it is" and to introduce desirable additions.
But domestic architecture is not given up on account of the patient
carefulness the practice of it demands, neither need Liturgical
Revision be despaired of because it requires of the men who
undertake it a like wisdom in looking before and after.

The really formidable barrier to revision, so far as what have been
called the "inherent difficulties" are concerned, is reached when
we touch style. How to handle without harming the sentences in which
English religion phrased itself when English language was fresher
and more fluent than it can ever be again is a serious question.
The hands that seek to "enrich" may well be cautioned to take heed
lest they despoil. It is to be remembered, however, in the way of
reassurance that the alterations most likely to find favor with the
reviewers are such as will enrich by restoring lost excellencies,
rather than by introducing forms fashioned on a modern anvil.

The most sensitive critic could not, on the score of taste, find
fault with the replacement in the Evening Prayer of the _Magnificat_
and the _Nunc dimittis_, nor of bringing back a few of the Versicles
that in the English book follow the Lord's Prayer, nor yet of our
being allowed to say, "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, Lord,"
rather than "O Lord, our Heavenly Father, by whose Almighty power
we have been preserved this day." Objections to these alterations
may be readily imagined, but it would be necessary to base them on
other grounds than those of literary fastidiousness. In the case of
enrichments like these no one could raise the cry that the faultless
English of the Prayer Book had been marred.

But what shall be said of the composition of entirely new services
and offices, if it should be judged expedient to give admission to
any such? How can we be sure that such modern additions to the
edifice would be sufficiently in keeping with the general tone of
the elder architecture? It might be held to be an adequate answer
to these questions to reply that if the living Church cannot now
trust herself to speak out through her formularies in her natural
voice as she did venture to do in the seventeenth century and the
eighteenth, it must be that she has fallen into that sta