endeavour to adapt it to the wants of a heathen population. The more elastic employment of our actual formularies, especially the now universal recognition of the separate use of the Litany and of the Eucharistic service, is sufficient for the present necessity; and it behoves impatient reformers on either side to try a little longer and a little harder what they can do by those simple means, before they busy themselves to pull down the house under which they have so long rested.
We feel the inexpediency of touching the Prayer-book so strongly, that we are inclined to stand aghast at the facility with which the Archbishop of Canterbury, generally so cautious, threw on the floor of the House of Lords, without consultation with his brethren, or with the remaining clergy or laity of the Church, a promise to open up the Table of Lessons. We are not afraid to say why we are frightened at this movement. We do not think that the selections from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, or Ezekiel are absolutely the best chapters that could be chosen, or that there is any conclusive reason for throwing out Chronicles and the Song of Songs. But we should look upon it as a great misfortune to the Church of England if the use of the Apocrypha in her public worship were to be called into question. The Apocrypha is the Apocrypha, and the books contained in it are Deuterocanonical. All parties agree to that. Then comes the divergence. The innovationists protest that, because they are so, they should be made sealed books to the Christian congregation. The more conservative minded Churchman looks to his Thirty-Nine Articles, and desires, like S. Jerome and the English Church, still to have them 'read for example of life and instruction of manners.' It is nobody's business to settle the precise value of that most venerable collection. It is sufficient to say that the Universal Church has ever rated that volume very highly—in some portions of it, and in later times, too highly; that the Church of England in her lectionary orders the Apocrypha to be read, and in her Articles of Religion gives an excellent reason why that reading should take place. To expunge the Apocrypha now would be wilfully to dissever a link between our own actual Church and the purer Church of undivided Christendom. Is it, then, cowardice for us to say that we are sorry to see the status in quo of the lectionary given up in face of a fanatical party, which is openly and vehemently clamouring for the condemnation of the Apocrypha?
We have imperceptibly found ourselves drifting into the consideration of the ritual side of Church prospects. This leads us to our last topic, the sensational movement. It may not unreasonably be guessed, that we do not intend to let this section pass without venturing some opinion upon the doings of the
