1785 J REV. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 21 5 



this beneficent nature could never be unsphered to us ; and through 

 that Church's mighty and long enduring ministration he sought, 

 therefore, to reveal the iris-lustre inherent in the common day, 

 but there invisible.* 



That the purposes of Dr. Smith in his Proposed Book were 

 good is undeniable. That the book itself — unlike the book of the 

 so-called " Reformed Episcopal Church " — did not carry the re- 

 view of the English Book of Common Prayer " into essential 

 points of doctrine," has been uniformly admitted both by the Eng- 

 lish and the American bishops and other clergy. How far the 

 plan of the Proposed Book would have secured the purpose which 

 it had in view — since the book was never adopted as the liturgy 

 of the Church in America — no man in this day can do more than 

 conjecture. 



To Dr. Smith, too, aided considerably by Dr. Wharton, we owe 

 the system adopted in the Proposed Book, of leaving out psalms now 

 in the Psalter, or verses of particular psalms that are inappropriate 

 for public service; and of joining parts or verses of one psalm to 

 those of another so as to make a uniformity of thought and feel- 

 ing, and then of dividing the whole into parts of suitable length. f 

 Both of these gentlemen — Dr. Smith being, doubtless, the more 

 operative agent — could not but see the inappropriateness of people 

 reading in the public worship psalms and verses, some of which 

 — unless before they came to church they had read an Exposition 

 of the Psalter — were wholly unintelligible ; and others of which, 

 even if they did understand them, were entirely inappropriate ; 

 expressing sometimes high states of exultation, and at others 

 deep despondency — feelings, which — as common to them all, and 

 whether one or the other — could hardly exist in any congregation 

 of worshippers whatsoever. 



The plan — though executed in the Proposed Book with great 

 skill and great good taste — was subject, no doubt, to objections 

 of more sorts than one. And the '^Selection of Psalms," as made 

 in our present book and than which no arrangement or use of the 



* See "Art and Scenery in Europe," by the late Horace Binney Wallace, of Phila- 

 delphia; Second Edition, page 78; some of whose language I here quote. 



f This plan has been adopted in his "Family and Private Prayer" — a beautifnl 

 manual of family worship — by the late Rev. William Berrian, D. D., Rector of Trinity 

 Church, New York. 



