"I am satisfied our liturgical services as now used are to a certain extent impediments in our way. ... There are circumstances in which all the services help us. ... There are other circumstances in which the use of all the service is a manifest and felt hinderance. ... We are not as powerful a church as we might be if we had more liberty. Of this I am fully persuaded." [Footnote 58]
The missionary bishop of Oregon and Washington, out of his large experience, concludes:
"There are undoubtedly great advantages resulting to the church from a general uniformity of worship; but if that uniformity be so minute and fixed as to refuse adaptation to the actual condition and wants of Christian men, or to restrain in any degree the preaching of the gospel to every creature, then it becomes a yoke of bondage and a damage to Christ's kingdom." [Footnote 59]
[Footnote 59: _Memorial Papers_, p. 213.]
"I do not believe, sir, that the difficulty lies in the organization of the church, ... but in the unvarying and (in the esteem of many) invariable use of our forms and other usages of worship. ... The church may be entirely Catholic in her doctrine and polity, yet she can never be _practically_ so while she requires all men to worship everywhere in precisely the same forms." [Footnote 60]
"in the country-places, among the rural population, it has proved to be an almost hopeless task to introduce our services, that is, in their integrity." [Footnote 61]
And so great an advocate of formal worship as the Rev. Dr. Francis Vinton is reputed to have been exclaims:
"You cannot fulfil the Lord's will while the canons of our church are left in their stiffness." [Footnote 62]
We have already seen how much effect the movement, of which these well-considered statements form a part, finally produced upon the external system of the church, and it is only too well known that at this day the declarations of the _Memorialists_ are as applicable as they were twelve years ago. The evangelical leaders, hopeless of legitimated liberty, have grown more and more restless under the unyielding yoke, and here and there some bolder spirit has burst away from the intolerable servitude, and asserted his right and duty to do "the Lord's work" unhampered by her human institutions. Ever and anon some anxious writer ventures to repeat the declarations and the prayers of the _Memorial_. But those who dare to look for any change are few in number, and the high hopes of former days, that the iron bars were soon to be unloosed and the eager wings of Christian zeal unbound, are already well-nigh buried in despair.