But what shall be said of the composition of entirely new services and offices, if it should be judged expedient to give admission to any such? How can we be sure that such modern additions to the edifice would be sufficiently in keeping with the general tone of the elder architecture? It might be held to be an adequate answer to these questions to reply that if the living Church cannot now trust herself to speak out through her formularies in her natural voice as she did venture to do in the seventeenth century and the eighteenth, it must be that she has fallen into that stage of decrepitude where the natural voice is uncertain. But, really, what ought to be said is this--that if the same canons of style that ruled the sixteenth century writers are studied and obeyed, there is no reason in the world why a result equally satisfactory with the one then attained should not be reached now. There is nothing supernatural about the English of the Prayer Book. Cranmer and his associates were not inspired. The prose style of the nineteenth century may not be as good as that of the sixteenth, but, at its best, it is vastly superior to eighteenth century style, and of this last there are already no inconsiderable specimens in the American Book of Common Prayer. The Office for the Visitation of Prisoners, for example, is so redolent of the times of the Georges, when it was composed, that it might be appropriately enough interleaved with prints out of Hogarth. A bit of Palladian architecture in a Gothic church is not more easily recognized. Many worse things might happen to the Prayer Book than that the nineteenth century should leave its impress upon the pages.