calmly considered it, if they could have believed that a _memorial_ sacrifice and a _representative_ priesthood were what the Reformers claimed to retain. But they could not be persuaded to listen; they could not calm themselves sufficiently to listen; the spirit burned within them to root out and destroy popery; and every theological term, every religious ceremony, every ornament or vestment that had been used by papists, was regarded as of the very essence of popery itself! I believe that the reformers were justified in making temporary concession to this state of feeling, particularly in modifying ritual and ornament, which could only be useful so long as they were edifying, which were in fact doing harm to the Church’s cause and to individual souls while they were taken as representing and recommending the very things which had been repudiated. They doubtless justified themselves by considering that their second Prayer Book still contained the doctrines which the offending rites and vestments were meant to adorn; they hoped that men might come to understand and hold those doctrines when their prejudices were disarmed; at any rate they feared, lest, by a stubborn maintenance or violent enforcement at that critical time of anything not really essential, they should endanger the best interests of the Church; or even provoke and perpetuate among us a mere Protestant reformation. It seemed well then that they should make such concessions as the second Prayer Book of Edward VI contained. You know what followed; how within a year popery was established under Queen Mary, and how both Churchmen and Protestants had to flee the land and seek a home among German or Swiss reformers; or, if they remained, were savagely persecuted to the death. It might have been expected that the fact of Churchmen being treated as capital offenders against Rome would have disarmed the prejudices against them and their ritual which had hitherto existed, or at least that common misfortunes would have begotten common interests and sympathies and so have led to a truer appreciation of one another. This was not exactly what resulted. The Protestants retained and even strengthened their prejudices: the Churchmen who had lived in exile among them first of all fell in with their habits, their modes of worship, and their disuse of all vestments—or the substitution for them of a black gown—and presently they also contracted their prejudices. Accordingly when, soon after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the old law about vestments was re-enacted, it remained except in a few solitary cases a dead letter; men either hated such things, or they were too indifferent to the way of performing divine service to trouble themselves to wear them; or, if they had right notions and right feelings about them, they were too poor to provide them for themselves; and their parishioners did not care, perhaps objected, to provide them. I cannot but believe that it was the knowledge of this