The very points here objected to as faults I should have selected as excellencies.  For do not the duties and temptations occur in real life even so intermingled?  The imperfection of thought much more of language, so singly successive, allows no better representation of the close neighbourhood, nay the co-inherence of duty in duty, desire in desire.  Every want of the heart pointing Godward is a chili agon that touches at a thousand points.  From these remarks I except the last paragraph of s. 12: 

  (As to the prayer for Bishops and Curates and the position of the
  General Thanksgiving, &c.)

which are defects so palpable and so easily removed, that nothing but antipathy to the objectors could have retained them.

13.  The like defectiveness and disorder is in the Communion Collects for the day....  There is no more reason why it should be appropriate to that day than another, or rather be a common petition for all days, &c.

I do not see how these supposed improprieties, for want of appropriateness to the day, could be avoided without risk of the far greater evil of too great appropriation to particular Saints and days as in Popery.  I am so far a Puritan that I think nothing would have been lost, if Christmas day and Good Friday had been the only week days made holy days, and Easter the only Lord’s day especially distinguished.  I should also have added Whitsunday; but that it has become unmeaning since our Clergy have, as I grieve to think, become generally Arminian, and interpreting the descent of the Spirit as the gift of miracles and of miraculous infallibility by inspiration have rendered it of course of little or no application to Christians at present.  Yet how can Arminians pray our Church prayers collectively on any day?  Answer.  See a ’boa constrictor’ with an ox or deer.  What they do swallow, proves so astounding a dilatability of gullet, that it would be unconscionable strictness to complain of the horns, antlers, or other indigestible non-essentials being suffered to rot off at the confines, [Greek:  herkos hodonton].  But to write seriously on so serious a subject, it is mournful to reflect that the influence of the systematic theology then in fashion with the anti-Prelatic divines, whether Episcopalians or Presbyterians, had quenched all fineness of mind, all flow of heart, all grandeur of imagination in them; while the victorious party, the Prelatic Arminians, enriched as they were with all learning and highly gifted with taste and judgment, had emptied revelation of all the doctrines that can properly be said to have been revealed, and thus equally caused the extinction of the imagination, and quenched the life in the light by withholding the appropriate fuel and the supporters of the sacred flame.  So that, between both parties, our transcendant Liturgy remains like an ancient Greek temple, a monumental proof of the architectural genius of an age long departed, when there were giants in the land.