208 LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE [l/^S 



factory to all of either the Church's clergy or its laity in England, 

 and which would have been long before reformed and altered in 

 England itself but for political heats and for the accidents of the 

 day. He meant, therefore, to have the Church in America have 

 its own Book of Common Prayer; one founded on Scriptural 

 usage and compiled from primitive liturgies, so much as might 

 be ; leaving the Church in the little and vanquished isles of Great 

 Britain to imitate and adopt it when she saw fit. 



Notwithstanding that the United States declared themselves in- 

 dependent of Great Britain in 1776, and were acknowledged by 

 her in 1783 to be so, it was a long while before, in many respects, 

 we ceased to be colonies and to be really independent. We are 

 so indeed only since the suppression, by the Federal arms, of the 

 late Rebellion, and the complete success of our Great Exhibition 

 of 1876. The leaders of the Federal party — men like Hamilton, 

 Gouverneur Morris, Marshall, and some others — would at once 

 have made us truly a nation of the earth, but some of the men of 

 New England, and even those further south, were not able, for 

 years, wholly to emancipate themselves ; while the Democratic 

 party, under the lead of Jefferson, Monroe, Gerry, and others, went 

 at once into a state of absolute vassalage to France; a vassalage 

 which continued pretty steadily to the time of Napoleon the bas- 

 tard, sometimes called Napoleon III.; when we saw in him the 

 lago of the plot of our late rebellion, and were disenchanted. 

 Dr. Smith, so soon as our political independence was acknowledged 

 — indeed so soon as he saw that it was achieved — comprehended 

 the whole situation. He saw at once, and with the glance of intui- 

 tion, what many men did not see for about a century — indeed hardly 

 see now, some of them — and he meant to make independence, at 

 once, a fact, instead of a dream. Even in 1785, as we have seen,* 

 on the first motion of a review of the Prayer Book, he hopes that 

 hymns for the festivals and other occasions " may be offered by 

 members of our own Church in America, who are distinguished 

 for their poetical talents." He anticipated by half a century a 

 hymnal which includes the strains of Muhlenburgh, of Henry 

 Ustick Onderdonk, and of the elder Doane. 



With what zeal he entered upon the subject of the alterations 



* Sltpra, p. 143. 



