A. B., a scholar thoroughly familiar, we will suppose, with the sources of liturgical material, is dissatisfied with the collects proposed for the successive days of Holy Week. Very well, he has a perfect right to his dissatisfaction and to the expression of it in the strongest terms at his command. He does only his plain duty in seeking to exclude from the Prayer Book anything that seems to him unworthy of a place in it. But seeing that he must needs, as a "liturgical expert," acknowledge that the deficiency which the Joint Committee sought to make good is a real and not a merely fancied deficiency, would not A. B. approve himself a more judicious counsellor if, instead of bending all his energy to the disparagement of the collects proposed, he should devote a portion of it to the discovery and suggestion of prayers more happily worded? And this remark holds good with reference to whatever new feature is to be found between the covers of The Book Annexed. If betterment be possible, these six months now lying before us afford the time of all times in which to show how, with the least of loss and most of gain, it may be brought about. The Diocese of Maryland is first in the field with an adequate contribution of this sort. A thoroughly competent committee, appointed in October, 1884, has recently printed its Report, and whether the Diocesan Convention adopt, amend, or reject what is presented to it, there can be little doubt that the mind of the Church at large will be perceptibly affected by what these representative men of Maryland have said.[57] Apart from a certain aroma of omniscience pervading it (with which, by the way, sundry infelicities of language in the text of the Report, only indifferently consort), the document, is a forcible one, and of great practical value. The Committee have gone over the entire field covered by the "Notification to the Dioceses," taking up the Resolutions one by one, and not only noting in connection with each whatever is in itself objectionable, but also (a far more difficult task) suggesting in what respect this or that proposition might be better put. The _apparatus criticus_ thus provided, while not infallible, is eminently helpful, sets a wholesome pattern, and if supplemented by others of like tenor and scope, will go far to lighten the labor of whatever committee may have the final recension of the whole work put into its hands.[58]