PREFACE.
I have all my life been an interested student of ecclesiastical and ecclesiological questions, so I ventured to publish in the quiet days of 1861 a book upon 'The English Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century,' considered both as a building and as an institution, and in 1874, at a time of great excitement, to bring out 'Worship in the Church of England.' But I had been both before and after these dates, and down to the present day, a writer on the class of questions with which those books are concerned, as well in shorter articles and letters to newspapers, as in essays of the longer sort contributed to reviews, and in papers read at the annual Church
Congresses.
The belief had grown up in my mind that the course of events was calling upon me to supplement my former books with further matter, brought together in the solid shape of a volume. So upon turning back to the various essays which I had published, some with and others without my name, I satisfied myself that by grouping a selection of Congress papers and longer review-articles with regard to their subjects more than to their chronology, I could construct in a somewhat consecutive form a collection which should connect and supplement my former publications.
My 'Worship in the Church of England' appeared at
