1785 J J?EV. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 2O9 



in the liturgy, and to what extent they were agreeable to liim, 

 may be inferred, not only from the already quoted sermon before 

 the Convention of 1785, but from the ably written Preface to the 

 Proposed Book which contains the alterations, and in which, as 

 in notes to the sermon, he shows how necessary some alterations 

 really were ; how long they had been considered necessary in 

 England by many of its soundest divines, and how especially 

 desirable it was that any changes in the liturgy of the Church 

 in America should be made now when — uninfluenced and unre- 

 strained by any worldly authority whatsoever — they could so be 

 made as to promulgate to mankind Christianity and the truths of 

 the Gospel in the clearest, plainest, most affecting and majestic 

 manner. 



Dr. Smith, it must be remembered, was a Scotsman, not an 

 Englishman. He was not a parochial minister who had been 

 reading daily all his life the morning and evening prayers of the 

 English Church, but was the head of a college where all the rest 

 of the faculty were dissenters, and several of them dissenting 

 clergymen, and where probably he was continually urged and 

 sometimes compelled to use forms not to be found in the book of 

 common prayer. He was, moreover, frequently called upon as a 

 preacher for public occasions and ceremonies where religious ser- 

 vices were used, but where neither the order for daily morning 

 prayer, nor the order for daily evening prayer, of the book of 

 common prayer could be used without modifications. Neither 

 his education nor profession, therefore, gave him blind preposses- 

 sions or prejudices in favor of the liturgy of the Church of Eng- 

 land, as adopted in 1660 ; only one of five forms which that Church 

 had been using in the short term of about one century. Inde- 

 pendently of all this, his mind was rich and imaginative. His 

 conceptions of what best produced effect were somewhat the- 

 atrical. His own style of oratory was high and orotund ; oc- 

 casionally perhaps a little turgid, but oftener grand and sometimes 

 even majestic. 



Detesting, as matter of taste and of divinity also, we may 

 believe, " the way of Romaine," and all the sweetened mud of 

 the Methodist preachers of his day* — corresponding largely to 



* See Vol. I., page 423. 

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