it at all likely that the
Church could be persuaded to accept the amended book?

Unless the first of these two eminently proper questions can be
met, there is, or ought to be, an end to all talk about revision.
The advantage to a Church of being able to keep all its authoritative
formularies of worship within the compass of a single volume is
inestimable. Even the present enforced severance of the Hymnal
from the Prayer Book is a misfortune.[32]

Those were good days when "Bible and Prayer Book" was the Churchman's
all sufficient formula so far as volumes were concerned.

Rome boasts a much larger ritual variety than ours, but she secures
it by multiplying books. The Missal is in one volume, the Breviary
in four, the Pontifical, the Ritual, and the Ceremonial in one each,
making eight in all.[33] This is an evil, and one from which we
Anglicans have had a happy escape. It was evidently with a great
groan of relief that the Church of England shook herself free from
the whole host of service-books, and established her one only
volume. It behooves us to be watchful how we take a single step
towards becoming entangled in the old meshes.[34]

But need the enrichment of the Prayer Book--such enrichment as has
been described, necessarily involve an unwieldiness in the volume,
or, what would be still worse, an overflow into a supplement?
Certainly not; for by judicious management every change advocated
in this paper, and more besides, might be accomplished without
transgressing by so much as a page or a paragraph the limits of
the present standard book. All the space needed could be secured
by the simple expedient of omitting matter that has been found by
actual experience to be superfluous. Redundancy and unnecessary
repetition are to the discredit of a book that enjoys such an
unrivalled reputation as the Common Prayer. They are blemishes
upon the face of its literary perfectness. Who has not marvelled
at the strange duplication of the Litany and the Office of the Holy
Communion in the Ordinal, when the special petitions proper to
those services when used in that connection might easily have been
printed by themselves with a direction that they be inserted in
the appointed place?

Scholars, of course, know perfectly well how this came about. The
Ordinal does not belong to the Prayer Book proper, but has a
separate identity of its own. When printed as a book by itself
it is all very well that it should include the Litan