what a good thing you have in
that year of yours. Why don't you use it more?"

And true enough, why do we not? That we might learn to do so was a
wish very near to the heart of that holy and true man who, if
anyone, deserves the title of the saint among our priests, the
late Dr. Muhlenberg, the man who twenty-five years ago headed the
not wholly abortive movement known as the "Memorial."[96] One
fruit of that movement is perhaps to be seen in the earnest desire
now prevalent throughout the Church to see the scope of the Prayer
Book's influence enlarged. In General Conventions and Church
Congresses nowadays no topic excites greater interest than the
question how better to adapt the services of the Church to
the present needs and special conditions of all classes of the
population. To be sure, the apparent impotence of the governing
body to find or furnish any lawful way of relief is a little
discouraging, but it is something to see an almost universal
assent given in terms, to the proposition that relief ought to
be had. What we have to fear is that during the long delay
which puts off the only proper and regular method of giving more
elasticity to the services, there may spring up a generation of
Churchmen from whose minds the idea of obligation to law in matters
of ritual observance will have faded out altogether.

There is a conservatism so conservative that it will stand by and
see a building tumble down rather than lay a sacrilegious hand on
a single stone, will see dam and mill and village all swept away
sooner than lift the flash-boards that keep the superabundant water
from coming safely down. It is among the things possible, that for
lack of readjustment and timely adaptation of the laws regulating
worship, just such a fate may befall our whole liturgical fabric.

The plausible theory of "the rubric of common sense," about which
we have heard so much, a theory good within limitations, is
threatening, by the wholesale application it receives, presently
to annul all other rubrics whatsoever. When, by this process,
uniformity and even similarity shall have been utterly abolished,
when it shall have become impossible for one to know beforehand of
a Sunday whether he is going to mass, or to meeting, or to church,
the inquiry will be in order, What has conservatism of this sort
really conserved?

"The personal liberty of the officiating clergyman," I fear
will be the only answer; certainly not, "The liberty of t