1

PUBLIC LIBRARY

143319

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILOLI FOUNDATIONS

1900.

TO HIS GRACE THE

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

YOUR

OUR Grace will, I trust, pardon the liberty

which I take in craving permission to recommend to your protection this second edition of the Book of Common Prayer, accompanied with Notes, historical, explanatory, and illustrative. Could I have hoped that the public reception of the first impression would have been so flattering, and the approbation of it só unqualified, as they have proved to be, I should have ventured to solicit the privilege of dedicating that edition to your Grace. By thus deferring however to avail myself of such auspices, I at least gain the advantage of approaching your Grace with a work, the worth of which may be now considered as less equivocal than, perhaps, it could have been, before it had met with such a réception, or been stamped with such an approbation. But, whilst I thus request the sanction of your Grace's countenance to one of my literary labours, let ine not be deemed impertinent, if I also intrude upon your Grace with a few particulars of my professional life. Allow me, then, to inform your Grace, that now nearly twenty years have elapsed since I became a Minister of the Established Church: during the last fifteen of which I have served the laborious Curacy of the parish of St. James, in the city of Bath; with what degree of activity or success, I would neither unbecomingly solicit, nor meanly shun, to have enquired. In the course of this period, I have written and published upwards of twenty, volumes, in Theology, and various departments of general literature; all tending, I would hope, to the promotion of piety, the confirmation of yirtue, and the diffusion of liberal knowledge; and I have, by my own exertions, effected the

establishment of an Institution, in the city wherein · I am a Minister, whose object it is to rescue the

most wretched of our species from the complicated evils, of guilt, infamy, and want. * During this long period, and under these (I would flatter myself) not discreditable circumstances, I have been unenlivened by the smiles of patrons, or the pro

The Bath PENITENTIARY, or Asylum for Penitent Prostitutes.