ls very gently with me and gives me peace. What
are your _views_ of the dark valley of death now that you are
passing through it? _It is not dark_. Now, if it be said that
such questions and answers are not only in their place innocent
but natural and beautiful, I answer that this is not the point,
but this, viz., they are evidently intended, whatever their merits,
as a pattern of what _death-bed examinations should be_. Such is
the Visitation of the Sick in the nineteenth century. Now let us
listen to the nervous and stern tone of the sixteenth. In the Prayer
Book the minister is instructed to say to the person visited:
Forasmuch as after this life there is an account to be given to
the _Righteous Judge_ . . . I require you to examine yourself and
your estate both toward God and man. Therefore I shall rehearse to
you the _Articles of our Faith_, that you may know whether you do
believe as a Christian man should or no . . . 'Then shall the
minister examine whether he repent him truly of his sins, and be
in _charity_ with all the world: exhorting him to forgive from the
bottom of his heart all persons who have offended him, and if he
hath offended any other to _ask their forgiveness_, and where he
hath done injury or wrong to any man that he _make amends_ to the
utmost of his power.' . . . Such is the contrast between the dreamy
talk of modern Protestantism, and 'holy fear's stern glow' in the
Church Catholic."[18]

In this striking, though perhaps somewhat unnecessarily harsh way,
Newman brings out a point which is unquestionably true, namely,
that the language of the Prayer Book is of the sort which it is
just now the fashion to call realistic, that is, a language
conversant with great facts rather than with phases of feeling
and moods of mind; which after all is only another way of saying
that it is a Book of Common Prayer and not a manual for the
furtherance of spiritual introspection.

These, then, are the characteristics of the Prayer Book style:
it is simple, straightforward, unmetaphorical, realistic. Seriously
it looks almost like a studied insult alike to the scholarship and
to the religion of our day, to say that these are excellencies
attainable no longer. That revisers venturing upon additions to
the Prayer Book would be bound to set the face as a flint against
any slightest approach to sentimentality is true. But why assume
that the men do not exist who are capable of such a measure of
self-control? Gra