Excerpt from The Parson's Handbook: Containing Practical Directions Both for Parsons and Others as to the Management of the Parish Church and Its Services According to the English Use, as Set Forth in the Book of Common Prayer I Should like to take this opportunity of making clear two points, which have been missed by nearly all those who have criticised this book. As these criticisms have been unexpectedly fair and kindly, I feel that the failure to understand my meaning must have been due to an insufficient insistence on these points in the Introduction. Yet I tried to anticipate them on page 36, and indeed in other places also. The first point is that this Handbook is not meant only for the extreme, still less is it meant to hound any parsons on to extravagances, or to provide a 'ritualistic' manifesto to swell the discordant noises which the newspapers are just now calling 'the crisis.' It would have been written, in the same way and at the same time, if the Philistine giant had never uplifted his head and shouted the war-cry of persecution. The reason why The Parson's Handbook contains as much ceremonial as it does is because I have tried to make it suitable for all parsons. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.