THE STANDARD PRAYER BOOK OF 1890.

The end we ought to have in view is the publication, in the year 1890, of a standard Book of Common Prayer, such as shall embody the ripe results of what will then have been a period of ten years of continuous labor in the work of liturgical revision. To this reckoning of ten years should properly be added the seventeen years that intervened between the presentation of "The Memorial" in 1853 and the passing of the "Enrichment Resolutions" in 1880: so that really our Revision would look back for its historical beginnings, not across a decade merely, but over almost the lifetime of a generation. No single one of the various revisions of the English Book has observed anything like so leisurely a movement.

But by what methods of legislative procedure could such a result as the one indicated be reached? The precedent of the last century does not help us very much. The American Book of Common Prayer was set forth on the sixteenth day of October in the year of our Lord 1789; but with an express statutory provision that the "use" of the book, as so set forth, should not become obligatory till the first day of October, 1790. We cannot copy this line of procedure, for the simple reason that no such undertaking as that of 1789 is in hand. It is not now proposed to legislate into existence a new Liturgy. The task before us is the far humbler one of passing judgment upon certain propositions of change, almost every one of which admits of segregation, has an independent identity of its own, and may be accepted or rejected wholly without reference to what is likely to happen to the other propositions that accompany it.

The Book Annexed as Modified is in no proper sense a Proposed Book, nor can it without misrepresentation be called such; it is simply a sample publication[56] illustrative of what the Book of Common Prayer would be, were all the Resolutions of Revision that passed their first stage of approval in 1883 carried into final effect; a result most unlikely to occur.