on the day when it is first published, and first given a
distinctive title, a certain character the losing of which would be
the loss of personal identity. There is many an old cathedral that
might properly enough be called a re-edited book in stone. Norman
architecture, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular, all are
there, and yet one dominant thought pervades the building.
Notwithstanding the many times it has been retouched, the fabric
still expresses to the eye the original creative purpose of the
designer; there is no possibility of our mistaking Salisbury for
York or Peterborough for London.

The first Book of Common Prayer was built up of blocks that for the
most part had been previously used in other buildings, but the
resulting structure exhibited, from the very moment it received a
name, such distinct and unmistakable characteristics as have
guaranteed it personal identity through more than three hundred
years. Hence, while it is in one sense true that there are no
fewer than eight Books of Common Prayer, it is in another sense
equally true that the Book of Common Prayer is one.

An identity of purpose, of scope, and of spirit shows itself
in all its various forms under which the book exists, so that
whether we are speaking of the First Prayer Book of King Edward
the Sixth, or of the book adopted by the Church of Ireland after
its disestablishment, or of the American Book of Common Prayer,
what we have in mind is, in a very real and deep sense, one and
the same thing.

Let us proceed now to a rapid survey of the facts connected with
the first issue of the Common Prayer.

For a period long anterior to the Reformation there had been in
use among the English brief books of devotion known as "primers,"
written in the language of the people. The fact that the public
services of the Church were invariably conducted in the Latin
tongue made a resort to such expedients as this necessary, unless
religion was to be reserved as the private property of ecclesiastics.

By a curious process of evolution the primer, from having been
in mediaeval times a book wholly religious and devotional, has
come to be in our day a book wholly secular and educational. We
associate it with Noah Webster and the Harper Brothers. The New
England Primer of the Puritans, with its odd jumble of piety and
the three R's, marks a point of transition from the ancient to the
modern type.

But this by the way. The primer we are now con