hat here you have an
Order for Prayer and for the Reading of the Holy Scripture much
agreeable to the mind and purposes of the old fathers, and a great
deal more profitable and commodious than that which of late was
used.

This is conservatism in the very best sense, for the object aimed
at is plainly the conservation of purity, simplicity, and truth,
but surely it is not the conservatism of men with whom inaction is
the only wisdom and immobility the sole beatitude.

We change our sky completely in passing from Anglo-Catholic to
Broad Church criticism of _The Book Annexed_. This last has, in
the main, addressed itself to the rubrical features of the proposed
revision. "You promised us 'flexibility,'" the accusation runs,
"but what you are really giving us is simply rigidity under a new
form. Let things stay as they are, and we will undertake to
find all the 'flexibility' we care to have, without help from
legislation."

This criticism has at least the merit of intelligibility, for
it directly antagonizes what was, without doubt, one main purpose
with the revisers, namely, that of reviving respect for the
rubrics by making compliance with their terms a more practicable
thing.

Evidently what Broad Churchmen, or at least a section of them,
would prefer is the prevalence of a general consent under which
it shall be taken for granted that rubrics are not literally binding
on the minister, but are to be stretched and adapted, at the
discretion of the officiant, as the exigencies of times and seasons
may suggest. It is urged that such a common understanding already
in great measure exists; and that to enact new rubrics now, or
to remodel old ones, would look like an attempt to revivify a
principle of compliance which we have tacitly agreed to consider
dead.

The answer to this argument is not far to seek. If the Church
means to allow the Common Prayer, which hitherto has been regarded
as a liturgy, to lapse into the status of a directory; if, in other
words, she is content to see her manual of worship altered from a
book of instructions as to how Divine Service _shall_ be performed
into a book of suggestions as to how it _may_ be rendered, the
change ought to be officially and definitely announced, and not
left to individual inference or uncertain conjecture. We are
rapidly slipping into a position scarcely consistent with either
the dignity or the honor of a great Church--that of seeming
to be what we are not. To