the Liturgy, and making certain omissions and emendations in it.  Introductory essays were prefixed.  The book was addressed to ‘the Governing Bodies of Church and State,’ more immediately to the two Houses of Convocation, and commended itself by the modest and generally judicious spirit in which it was written.  Warburton wrote to Doddridge that he thought the ‘Disquisitions’ very edifying and exemplary.  ‘I wish,’ he added, ’success to them as much as you can do.’[411] Some of the bishops would gladly have taken up some such design, and have done their best to further its success.  But there was no prospect whatever of anything being done.  It was evident that the prevailing disposition was to allow that there were improvements which might and ought to be made, but that all attempts to carry them out should be deferred to some more opportune season, when minds were more tranquil and the Church more united.  The effect of the ‘Disquisitions’ was also seriously injured by the warm advocacy they received from Blackburne and others, who were anxious for far greater changes than any which were then proposed.  Blackburne, in the violence of his Protestantism, insisted that in the Reformed Church of England there ought not to be ’one circumstance in her constitution borrowed from the Creeds, Ritual, and Ordinaries of the Popish system.’[412] A little of the same tendency may be discovered in the proposals put forward in the Disquisitions.  In truth, in the eighteenth, as in the seventeenth century, there was always some just cause for fear that a work of revision, however desirable in itself, might be marred by some unworthy concessions to a timid and ignorant Protestantism.

Revision of the Liturgy, although occasionally discussed, cannot be said to have been an eighteenth-century question.  Subscription, on the other hand, as required by law to the Thirty-nine Articles, received a great deal of anxious attention.  This was quite inevitable.  Much had been said and written on the subject in the two previous centuries; but until law, or usage so well established and so well understood as to take the place of law, had interpreted with sufficient plainness the force and meaning of subscription, the subject was necessarily encompassed with much uneasiness and perplexity.  Through a material alteration in the law of the English Church, the consciences of the clergy have at last been relieved of what could scarcely fail to be a stumbling-block.  By an Act passed by Parliament in 1865, and confirmed by both Houses of Convocation, an important change was made in the wording of the declaration required.  Before that time the subscriber had to ’acknowledge all and every the Articles ... to be agreeable to the word of God.’[413] He now has to assent to the Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and of the ordering of priests and deacons, and to believe the doctrine therein set forth to be agreeable to the Word of God.  The omission of the ‘all and every,’ and the insertion of the word ‘doctrine’ in the singular, constituted a substantial improvement, as distinctly recognising that general adhesion and that liberty of criticism, which had long been practically admitted, and in fact authorised, by competent legal decisions, but which scarcely seemed warranted by the wording of the subscription.