tions of our communion service that which corresponds to
the literal kiss of primitive times, as well as to the petrified
symbol of the original reality, the silver, ivory, or wooden
"osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday,"
a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again,
the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an
impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brushing these
away as so much trash! They are not trash, they are way marks that
tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love
the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings,
such as "_De Profundis_" and "_Miserere_," still possess such
associations for ourselves. There was a time when very many more
of them meant to men now dead and gone as much as "Rock of Ages,"
or "Sun of my Soul," or "Lead, kindly Light," can mean to you or
me.[95]

Then, too, the monuments of specially revered heroes of the faith
that dot the paths of the Common Prayer, how precious they are! We
like to think of Ambrose as speaking to us in the lofty sentences
of the _Te Deum_. It is pleasant to associate Chrysostom with the
prayer that bears his name, and to know that he who swayed the
city's multitude still prized the Master's promise to the "two or
three gathered together" in his name. So also, in our American Book,
Jeremy Taylor, the modern Chrysostom, meets us in the Office for
the Visitation of the Sick, in that solemn prayer addressed to Him
"whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered."
All these things help to make the Prayer Book the large-hearted,
wide-minded book we all of us feel it to be, so like a friend
whom we revere because he is kindly in his tone, generous in his
judgments, quick to understand us at every point.

So much for the past of the Prayer Book. We have touched it in no
image-breaking mood, but with reverence. "One generation passeth
away, another generation cometh," and it has been the peculiar
felicity of this book to stand

A link among the days, to knit
The generations each to each.

We pass on to consider the present usefulness of the Prayer Book
and the possibility of extending that usefulness in the future.
And now I shall speak wholly as an American to Americans, not
because the destinies of the Prayer Book in the New World are
the more important, though such may in the end turn out to be
the fact, but simply because we are at