Irish Church cannot draw a precedent for altering that which it already holds in common with England, from the history of the gradual drawing together of the originally independent Episcopal Churches of England and of Scotland, particularly when it recollects, till a very late date, the ministers of the former could not by Act of Parliament lend their pulpits to those of the latter; nor till a much later one could English patrons present Scottish ordained clergymen to the livings in their gift.
The case will not be bettered by reference to the circumstances under which the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States constructed its particular Prayer Book. The Churchmen of those old English colonies had gone on languishing generation after generation, prevented by the indifference or jealousy of the mother country from organizing their church in its completeness by the institution of a local Episcopate. At last came the Civil War and the Revolution, and the Churchmen of the thirteen states were empowered to frame their own constitution by the bitter arbitrament of bloodshed and civil hatred. They sought and found their Episcopate through two channels. Bishop Seabury, of Connecticut, was consecrated by the unestablished Church in Scotland, and represented the special High Church theology of that communion; Bishop White, of Pennsylvania, and his companions received their episcopal orders at Lambeth, and returned imbued with the mild and courtly politeness of the Established Church of George III. The divines who undertook for the American States the revision of the Prayer Book with, in all probability, the intention, above all things, of procuring its acceptance on the plea that it was not the Prayer book of then hated England, represented the differing schools of Seabury and White. To the former is due a Communion Service towards which the Scottish form, rather than the English, has been laid under contribution,
