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.