First, last, and always this is to be said with respect to the revision of the American Common Prayer, that unless we can accomplish it with hearty good feeling the attempt at improvement ought to be abandoned altogether. The day has gone by when new formularies of worship could be imposed on an unwilling Church by edict, and although under our carefully guarded system of ecclesiastical legislation there is little danger of either haste or unfairness, we must bear it well in mind that something more than "a constitutional majority of both houses" is needful if we would see liturgical revision crowned with real success. Of course, absolute unanimity is not to be expected. Every improvement that the world has seen was greeted at its birth by a chorus of select voices sounding the familiar anthem, "The old is better"; and the generation of those, who, in the sturdy phrase of King James's revisers, "give liking unto nothing but what is framed by themselves, and hammered on their anvil," will be always with us. But substantial unanimity may exist, even when absolute unanimity is impossible, and if anything like as general a consent can be secured for revision in 1886 as was given to it in 1883, the friends of the movement will have good reason to be satisfied. That there has been, since the publication of _The Book Annexed as Modified_, a certain measure of reaction against the spirit of change must be evident to all who watch carefully the pulse of public opinion in the Church. Whether this reaction be as serious as some imagine, whether it have good reasons to allege, and whether it be not already giving tokens of spent force, are points which in the present paper will be touched only incidentally, for the writer's purpose is rather irenic than polemical, and he is more concerned to remove misapprehensions and allay fears than to seek the fading leaf of a controversial victory. LIMITATIONS.