Now our thoughts about things divine are painfully fallible and liable to change with change of times; but a want which is genuinely and entirely human is a permanent fact; the great needs of the soul never grow obsolete, and though the language in which the lips shall clothe the heart's desire may alter, as tastes alter, yet the substance of the prayer abides, and in some happy instances the form also abides. To an eye that looks wisely and lovingly on such sights, there is the same keen sense of enjoyment in finding here and there in the Prayer Book suggestions of forgotten customs, reminders of famous persons and events, that there is in detecting in the masonry of an old castle or minster tell-tale stones which betray the different ages, the "sundry times and divers manners" which the fabric represents. Who, for instance, that has traced the history of that apostolic ordinance, "the kiss of peace," down through the liturgical changes and revolutions of eighteen hundred years, can fail to be interested in finding in a single clause of one of the exhortations of our communion service that which corresponds to the literal kiss of primitive times, as well as to the petrified symbol of the original reality, the silver, ivory, or wooden "osculatory" of the mediaeval Church?[94] So with "Ash-Wednesday," a single syllable opens a whole chapter of Church history. Again, the Latin headings to the psalms of the Psalter; with what an impatient gesture can we imagine a spruce reviser brushing these away as so much trash! They are not trash, they are way marks that tell of times when devout men loved those catchwords, as we love the first lines of our favorite hymns. A few of the headings, such as "_De Profundis_" and "_Miserere_," still possess such associations for ourselves. There was a time when very many more of them meant to men now dead and gone as much as "Rock of Ages," or "Sun of my Soul," or "Lead, kindly Light," can mean to you or me.[95] Then, too, the monuments of specially revered heroes of the faith that dot the paths of the Common Prayer, how precious they are! We like to think of Ambrose as speaking to us in the lofty sentences of the _Te Deum_. It is pleasant to associate Chrysostom with the prayer that bears his name, and to know that he who swayed the city's multitude still prized the Master's promise to the "two or three gathered together" in his name. So also, in our American Book, Jeremy Taylor, the modern Chrysostom, meets us in the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, in that solemn prayer addressed to Him "whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered." All these things help to make the Prayer Book the large-hearted, wide-minded book we all of us feel it to be, so like a friend whom we revere because he is kindly in his tone, generous in his judgments, quick to understand us at every point.