[19] The rationale of this curious lapse is simple. The American revisers, instead of transferring the Commination Office _in toto_ to the new book, wisely decided to engraft certain features of it upon the Morning Prayer for Ash-Wednesday. In the process, the fifty-first Psalm, which has a recognized place in the Commination, dropped out, instead of being transferred, as it should have been, to the proper psalms. [20] See the Convocation Prayer Book. [21] _Prayer Book Interleaved_, p. 65. [22] A curious illustration of the sensitiveness of the Protestant Episcopal mind to anything that can be supposed even remotely to endanger our doctrinal settlement was afforded at the late General Convention, when the House of Deputies was thrown into something very like a panic by a most harmless suggestion with reference to the opening sentences of the Litany. A venerable and thoroughly conservative deputy from South Carolina had ventured to say that it would be doctrinally an improvement if the tenet of the double procession of the Holy Ghost were to be removed from the third of the invocations, and a devotional improvement if the language of the fourth were to be phrased in words more literally Scriptural and less markedly theological than those at present in use. Eager defenders of the faith instantly leaped to their feet in various parts of the House, persuaded that a deadly thrust had been aimed at the doctrine of the Trinity. Never was there a more gratuitous misconception. The real intrenchment of the doctrine of the Trinity, so far as the Litany is concerned, lies in the four opening words of the second and the five opening words of the third of the invocations, and these it had not been proposed to touch. In confirmation of this view of the matter, it is pertinent to instance the _Book of Family Prayers_ lately put forth by a Committee of the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury. This manual provides no fewer than six different Litanies, all of them opening with addresses to the three Persons of the adorable Trinity, and yet in no one instance is the principle advocated by the deputy from South Carolina unrecognized. Every one of the six Litanies begins with language similar to that which he recommended. [See also in witness of the mediaeval use, which partially bears out Mr. McCrady's thought, the ancient Litany reprinted by Maskell from _The Prymer in English_. Mon. Hit. ii. p. 95.] If the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, fondly supposed by us Anglicans to be the very citadel of sound doctrine, be thus tainted with heresy, upon what can we depend?