A section of the Established Church is greatly hurt because
the Commissioners for the revision of the Liturgy have retained a very few lessons from the Apocrypha. Considering the extra- ordinary stuff sometimes read in our churches in the form of a sermon, the objection seems a little unreasonable, more especially as one at least of the Apocryphal books, the Book of Wisdom, is decidedly superior both in its diction and in the character of its teaching to books we call canonical, such as the Proverbs, with its worldly shrewdness, and Ecclesiastes, with its undertone of Byronic despair. Lord Harrowby, however, writes to the Times that, although a few lessons from the Apocrypha were retained in deference to the opinion embodied in the Articles, still a clergy- man, with the consent of his Bishop, may under the Bill authorizing the new Lectionary substitute other lessons for these. Nothing, moreover, prevents any clergyman from announcing in his sermon his opinion that the Apocrypha are not inspired.
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