mple, after the manner of the old service-books, an invitatory
opening with versicles and responses, or if the present mode of
opening by sentences were preferred, specially chosen sentences,
different from those with which the Sunday worship has made us
familiar, could be employed. Moreover, the anthems or canticles
and the prayers, with the exception of the two just mentioned,
ought also to be distinctive, and, in the technical sense of the
word, _proper_ to the week-day use.

Again, it would serve very powerfully and appropriately to emphasize
the pivot points in the ritual year if this same principle were to
be applied to saints' days, and we were to have special _Holyday
Matins_ and _Holy-day Evensong_, there still being required, on the
greater festivals and fasts, the normal Morning and Evening Prayer
proper to the Lord's Day.[24]

The argument in favor of thus specializing the services for week-days
and holydays, in preference to following the only method heretofore
thought possible, namely, that of shortening the Lord's Day Order,
rests on two grounds. In the first place permissions to skip and
omit are of themselves objectionable in a book of devotions. They
have an uncomely look. Our American Common Prayer boasts too many
disfigurements of this sort already.

Such a rubric as _The minister may, at his discretion, omit all
that follows to, etc. _, puts one in mind of the finger-post
pointing out a short cut to weary travellers. It is inopportune
thus to hint at exhaustion as the probable concomitant of worship.
That each form should have an integrity of its own, should as a
separate whole be either said complete or left unsaid, is better
liturgical philosophy than any "shortened services act" can show.

In the second place, a certain amount of variety would be secured
by the proposed method which under the existing system we miss.
There is, of course, such a danger as that of providing too much
liturgical variety. Amateur makers of Prayer Books almost invariably
fall into this slough. Hymn-books, as is well known, often destroy
their own usefulness by including too many hymns; and Prayer Books
may do the same by having too many prayers.[25]

To transgress in the compiling of formularies the line of average
memory, to provide more material than the mind of an habitual
worshipper is likely to assimilate, is to misread human nature.
But here, as elsewhere, there is a just mean. Cranmer and his
colleagues i