The Book of Common Order, the first official service book adopted by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland for the regulation of its worship, marked a distinct advance towards a freer form and greater liberty on the part of the minister in conducting Divine service. As compared not only with the English Prayer Book of the time, which was used in Reformed parishes in Scotland, but even with Calvin's order of worship, which had been so generally adopted by the Reformed Churches on the Continent, this Book of Common Order was characterized by a spirit of larger liberty in worship and less reliance upon forms either suggested or imposed. In the period of struggle through which the Church of Scotland passed in the reigns of James the First and Charles the First, the conflicts, civil and religious, only served, so far as they had any effect upon the views of the Church concerning worship, to strengthen the already strong opposition to prescribed forms of prayer and to ritualistic observances. Accordingly, when it was proposed to substitute for the Book of Common Order a Directory, in which there should appear no prescribed forms for any part of public worship, the Scotch Assembly gave a ready assent to the proposal, and, although some words of regret at parting with an historic symbol were spoken at that time by leaders in the Scottish Church, they were only such as it was natural to expect should be spoken in view of the strong attachment for that symbol fostered by its use during many years, but they were not such as indicate that those who so spoke felt themselves called upon to surrender any principle in laying aside the order to which they had been so long accustomed. Indeed the hearty and cheerful adoption by the Scottish Assembly of the strongly worded preface to the Westminster Directory, exposing as it does so vigorously the weakness as well as the dangers resulting from the use of a liturgy in public worship, plainly indicates that in the judgment of the Church of that day the use of liturgical forms was not only not helpful, but was positively perilous, as well to the best interests of the congregation as to the most efficient service of the minister. Again in a third epoch of the Church's history, in the days following the "killing time," and marked by the succession to the throne of William of Orange, and later by the union of England and Scotland, the Presbyterian Church of the latter country not only reasserted her loyalty to the principles of liberty in worship which she had so long defended, but she also succeeded in having secured to her by legislation, freedom from the imposition of ritualistic forms.