t anthems
analagous to the Easter one were to be inserted along with the
respective Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, for Christmas-day and
Whitsunday.

By this change we should put each of the three great festivals of
the year into possession of an invitatory anthem of its own; and we
should obviate on the fasting days, by the simple expedient of
omission, the futile efforts of choir-master and organist to
transform _Venite_ from a cry of joy into a moan of grief.

This brings us to the Psalter. Here we have an opportunity to
correct the palpable blunder by which it has come about that the
greatest of the penitential psalms, the fifty-first, has no place
assigned it among the proper psalms either for Ash-Wednesday or
for Good Friday.[19] It would also be well to make optional, if
not obligatory, the use of "proper psalms" on days other than those
already provided with them; _e_. _g_., Advent Sunday, the Epiphany,
Easter Even, Trinity Sunday, and All Saints' Day.[20] There would
be a still larger gain in the direction of "flexibility of use,"
as well as a great economy of valuable space, if instead of
reprinting some thirty of the Psalms of David under the name of
Selections, we were to provide for allowing "select" psalms to be
announced by number in the same manner that "proper" psalms are
now announced. Instead of only the ten selections we now have,
there might then be made available twenty or thirty groups of
psalms at absolutely no sacrifice of room. It has been objected
to this proposal that the same difficulty which now attaches to
the finding of the "proper psalms" on great days would embarrass
congregations whenever "select psalms" were given out; but this
is fairly met by the counter consideration that if our people were
to be educated by the use of select psalms into a more facile
handling of the Psalter it would be just so much gained for days
when the "proper psalms" must of necessity be found and read. The
services, that is to say, would run all the more smoothly on the
great days, after congregations had become habituated, on ordinary
days, to picking out the psalms by number.

Another step in the line of simplification, and one which it is
in order to mention here, would be the removal from the Morning
Prayer of _Gloria in Excelsis_, seeing that it is never, or almost
never, sung at the end of the psalms unless at Evening Prayer. As
to the expediency of restoring what has been lost of _Benedictus_