of these foreign theologians, and speak for themselves. Both in the Confession (and particularly that in the Communion Service) and in the Absolution, which was taken from Pollanus and not from Calvin, who did not adopt any form of the kind, extreme expressions with regard to human depravity to be met with in the originals are studiously suppressed or qualified in the imitations, as if the morbid anatomy of our nature was not the theme on which they delighted to dwell, satisfied with having at least trampled under foot all pretensions of merit on man’s part, and with having vindicated the _exclusive_ claim of our Lord’s cross and passion to the salvation of a race fallen at any rate from a pernicious height.[368] The time of day at which the offices of the Prayer Book, thus completed, were performed, is not easily determined; and peremptorily as some have asserted that our morning service for Sundays consists of three entire services intended for three several hours of prayer, and extravagantly long, merely owing to this clumsy consolidation of them all, it would not be easy to prove that such division did ever in fact obtain. Two services probably are united: the Morning Prayer strictly so called, being one; the Litany and Communion the other;--but that the two latter again were ever separated seems very doubtful, or, indeed, that the first continued for any great while after the Reformation to be severed from the rest. That such was the case originally there are many reasons for believing. It naturally succeeded to the _matins_ of the Roman Catholic church, as the Litany and Communion did to the _High-Mass_;[369] and it would, therefore, be very likely that the hours in either case would also correspond. Moreover, in all the early Common Prayer Books, even in the very first, there is a Rubric, which directs such as intend to partake of the Communion “to signify their names to the curate over night, or else in the morning before the beginning of Morning Prayer _or immediately after_;”[370] a phrase which argues some interval between the two services, such as might suffice for considering the qualifications of the candidates, and for providing elements proportioned to the numbers who would attend. Neither is there wanting some internal evidence of the Morning Prayer being at first said betimes--“O God, who hast safely brought us to the _beginning_ of this day, defend us in the same,” being a phrase scarcely pertinent to any other prayers than orisons.[371] On the contrary, there are reasons still more satisfactory for thinking that the Litany was succeeded by the Communion Service without any pause whatever. In the injunctions of King Edward, put forth in 1547, there is one to this effect, that “immediately before _High Mass_, the priests, with other of the quire shall kneel in the midst of the church, and sing or say plainly and distinctly the _Litany_ which is set forth in English with the suffrages following.”[372] There is