It is plain, therefore, that the General Assembly, by the sanction it gave to the Book of Common Order, did not mean to restrict its ordained ministers to the use of a certain unvarying form of words, but to provide such a Directory or model as would guide them in "the substance and right ordering of all the parts of divine worship," as well as guide the readers and others not fully admitted to the ministry of the Word, through whose special aid alone they were able, in a time of so great dearth of qualified ministers, to supply in part the spiritual destitution of their countrymen. Nor in granting such an amount of liberty, at least to their ordained ministers, did they follow a course which was, as has been so confidently asserted, altogether novel, but rather, as in several other things, carried out more thoroughly and consistently[176] what others of the Reformed churches had adopted at least partially. In almost all the Reformed or Calvinistic liturgies the prayers are left partly free, and in several of them no form is furnished even as a guide or model for the prayer immediately preceding the sermon (and the same might be said of some of the earlier Lutheran _Agend-bücher_). In the churches of Basle, which probably in this respect only followed the general practice of the churches of East Switzerland, Hagenbach informs us that there was for fifty years after the Reformation no form of prayer, before or after sermon, imposed by public authority, and for fifty years longer only the prayer after sermon for all estates and conditions of men.[177] What, therefore, distinguished our reformers from their successors, and from the English Puritans of the seventeenth century, was not that the former disapproved of or curtailed free prayer while the latter advocated and encouraged it, but that the former retained in their Book of Common Order a variety of forms, not only as models, but also as aids to the officiating minister, while the latter put their Directory into such a shape that even the "help and furniture" it provided required the exercise of thought and care on the part of the minister to adapt it for use. This certainly was no great divergence, considering how thoroughly both parties were agreed, on the one hand, as to the liberty which should be left to ordained ministers, and, on the other, as to the limitations within which it should be confined. [Sidenote: Prayers of the Readers.]