always remain a sheer
impossibility, we pass to a consideration of the six articles
contributed to the _Church Times_ in July and August last, under
the title, _The Revised American Prayer Book_. Here we come upon
a writer who, if not always edifying, has the undoubted merit of
being never dull. In fact, so deliciously are logical inconsequence
and accidental humor mingled throughout his fifteen columns of
discursive criticism that a suspicion arises as to the writer's
nationality. It is doubtful whether anyone born on the English side
of the Irish Sea could possibly have suggested the establishment
of a Saint's Day in honor of the late respected Warden of Racine
College, or seriously have proposed that Messrs. Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Russell Lowell, Henry James, and W. D. Howells be appointed
a jury of "literary arbitrament" to sit in judgment on the liturgical
language of _The Book Annexed_; and this out of respect to our
proper national pride. Doubtless it would add perceptibly to the
amused sense of the unfitness of things with which these eminent
liberals must have seen themselves thus named, if permission could
be given to the jury, when empanelled, to "co-opt" into its number
Mr. Samuel Clemens and Mr. Dudley Warner.[42]

The general tenor of the writer in _The Church Times_ may fairly
be inferred from the following extract from the first article of
the series:

The judgment that must be pronounced on the work as a whole is
precisely that which has been passed on the Revised New Testament,
that there are doubtless some few changes for the better, so obvious
and so demanded beforehand by all educated opinion that to have
neglected them would at once have stamped the revisers as blockheads
and dunces; but that the set-off in the way of petty and meddlesome
changes for the worse, neglect of really desirable improvements,
bad English, failure in the very matter of pure scholarship just
where it was least to be expected, and general departure from
the terms of the Commission assigned to them (notably by their
introduction of confusion instead of flexibility into the services,
so that the congregation can seldom know what is going to happen)
has so entirely outweighed the merits of the work that it cannot
possibly be adopted by the Church, and must be dismissed as a dismal
fiasco, to be dealt with anew in some more adequate fashion.

This paragraph is not reproduced for the purpose of discrediting
the writer of it