instances of strictly Scriptural metaphor, and moreover
it is to be kept in mind that they are designed for occasional, not
constant use. In the orders for daily Morning and Evening Prayer,
the "lost sheep" of the General Confession and the "dew" of God's
blessing in the Collect for Clergy and People are almost the sole,
if not the sole cases of evident metaphor, and these again are
Scriptural. When in Jeremy Taylor's prayer, introduced by the
American revisers into the Order for the Visitation of the Sick,
we come upon the comparison of human life to a "vale of misery" we
feel that somehow we have struck a new current in the atmosphere;
for the moment it is the rhetorician who speaks, and no longer the
earnest seeker after God.

Besides this freedom from figures of speech, we notice in the
style of Prayer Book English a careful avoidance of whatever looks
like a metaphysical abstraction. The aim is ever to present God
and divine things as realities rather than as mere concepts or
notions of the mind. So far as the writer remembers, not a single
prayer in the whole book begins with that formula so dear to the
makers of extemporary forms of devotion, "O Thou." On the contrary,
the approach to the Divine Majesty is almost always made with a
reference to some attribute or characteristic that links Deity to
man and man's affairs; it is "O God, the Protector of all that
trust in thee," or "Almighty and everlasting God who of thy tender
love toward mankind," or "Lord of all power and might who art the
author and giver of all good things."

Cardinal Newman in one of his theological works written before
his departure from the Church of England, has a powerful passage
bearing upon this point. He is criticising the evangelicals for
their one-sided way of setting forth what it must mean to "preach
the Gospel." No less a person than Legh Richmond is the object of
his strictures.

"A remarkable contrast between our Church's and this false view of
religion," he says, "is afforded in the respective modes of treating
a death-bed in the Visitation of the Sick, and a popular modern
work, the Dairyman's Daughter. The latter runs thus: My dear friend,
do you not FEEL _that you are supported_? The Lord deals very gently
with me, she replied. Are not his promises _very precious to you?_
They are all yea and amen in Christ Jesus.. . Do you experience any
_doubts or temptations_ on the subject of your eternal safety? No,
sir; the Lord dea