- ing that of the old Mother Church. Here witness is borne to
the strength of those fundamental principles which underlie her life and constitute the enduring power which has preserved her unity and secured the continuity of her existence. No external forces could tend more strongly to the disintegration and overthrow of the Church than those arrayed against her subsequent to the Revolution. She was still the English Church, and misguided England had fought her children, and stained our soil with their blood. Her clergy were still under the authority of the English Bishop, and her service was still under the authority of the English Church. Within these walls the men worshipped who arraigned the injustice of the English government in the halls of legislation, and then marched forth to battle for their inalienable rights, and yet to-day there is in this Church the Prayer-Book from which the service was read in their hearing, and they held on to it, simply pasting the prayer for the President over the prayer for the King, yielding to human prejudices in changing the words of invocation to God from "King of Kings" to "Ruler of the Universe," but refusing to depart from the the continuity of the Church's life or abandon her time-honored liturgy, through which, by the spirit of God, the English people are reunited in one communion and fellowship in the mystical Body of Christ.
And then, in later years, when dreadful civil strife fell upon the nation, and the Southland found herself threatened with invading armies, the Churchmen of the South refused to drag party bitterness and the animosities of war into the Church. The Rector of Bruton Parish, so recently "numbered with God's saints in glory everlasting," took the Church Prayer-Book, and running his pencil through the words "President of the United States" wrote: "April 17th, 1861—The Governor of Virginia," and with these changes the people went on saying the same old service which was said at Jamestown and which was said to-day.
As we see so much of the organic religious life of the world breaking into fragments under external pressure or as
