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54 his countrymen. With the reverent love for the past, which could appropriate its excellencies, he could feel at the same time the necessity for change. While he could no longer regard the sacraments with a superstitious idolatry, he saw in them ordinances divinely appointed, and therefore especially, if inexplicably, sacred.

In this temper, for the most part, the English Church services had now, after patient labour, been at length completed by him, and were about to be laid before Parliament. They had grown slowly. First had come the primers of Henry VIII.; then the Litany was added; and then the first Communion-book. The next step was the Prayer-book of 1549; and now at last the complete Liturgy, which survives after three hundred years. In a few sentences only, inserted apparently under the influence of Ridley, doctrinal theories were pressed beyond the point to which opinion was legitimately gravitating. The priest was converted absolutely into a minister, the altar into a table, the eucharist into a commemoration, and a commemoration only. But these peculiarities were uncongenial with the rest of the Liturgy, with which they refuse to harmonize; and on the final establishment of the Church of England, were dropped or modified.