In _The Primer set forth by the King's Majesty and his Clergy_ in 1545, a sort of stepping-stone to the later "Book of Common Prayer," we find the BEATITUDES very ingeniously worked into the Office of The Hours, as anthems; beginning with Prime and ending with Evensong. Appropriate Collects are interwoven, some of them so beautiful as to be well worth preserving.[76] But the most interesting precedent of all remains still to be studied. In the first year of the reign of William and Mary, a Royal Commission was appointed to revise the Book of Common Prayer. The most eminent Anglican divines of the day, including Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Patrick, and Beveridge, were among the members. To all outward appearance the movement came to naught; for the proposed revision was not even put into print, until in 1854, the House of Commons, in response to a motion of Mr. Heywood, ordered it to be published as a Blue-book. And yet in some way our American revisers of 1789 must have found access to the original volume as it lay hidden in the archbishop's library at Lambeth; for not only does their work show probable evidence of such consultation, but in their Preface they distinctly refer to the effort of King William's Commission as a "great and good work,"[77] a thing they would scarcely have done had they possessed no real knowledge of the facts. Macaulay's sneering reference to the work of the Commission is well known, but, strangely enough, the justice which a Whig reviewer withholds, a high Anglican divine concedes, for no less exacting a critic than Dr. Neale, while manifesting, as was to be expected, a general dislike of the Commissioners of 1689, and of their work, does yet find something to praise in what they recommended.[78] Among the real improvements suggested by the Commission was the liturgical use of the BEATITUDES, and this in two places, once in "The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper," as an alternate to the Ten Commandments; and again in the Commination Office as a proper balance to the Anathemas of the Law. But the Commission, like the late Joint Committee on the Book of Common Prayer, was unfortunate in its choice of a response; and no wonder, for the task of finding the proper one is difficult.[79] A Beatitude differs from a Commandment in that while the latter enjoins the former only declares. The one therefore simply calls for assent, or, at most, assent coupled with petition, while the other peremptorily demands a cry for mercy. The immemorial form of the cry for mercy in the devotions of Christendom is the "Kyrie eleison," _Lord, have mercy upon us_; the immemorial form of assent the word _Amen_. Can we do better, therefore, in adapting the BEATITUDES to liturgical use than to treat them precisely as the Curses are treated in the Commination Office of the Church of England, namely, by inserting after each one of them a plain _Amen_.