within the Presbyterian church.Until the mid 1800s, both the Regulative Principle and tradition were usually enough to ensure that the Church Year had no place in the Presbyterian Church. In 1837 the Presbyterian Church in the United States had split into two separate camps, the New and Old school. The issues that had caused the split had to do with the feelings of ministers in either wing towards Calvinism and the traditional polity and practice of the Presbyterian church. The New School, which had been profoundly influenced by the sweeping revivals of the 18th and early 19th centuries, tended to believe that evangelistic considerations outweighed issues like strict adherence to Confessional standards. Their worship tended to be less constrained by the Regulative Principle and more inclined to incorporate elements that were to be found in the Protestant traditions that did not descend from Puritanism, or which had moved further away from their roots. Despite this tendency towards adopting new methods, the New School does not seem to have initially been any more eager than their more conservative counterparts to incorporate the observation of the Church Year into their worship. Before that could happen there was to be a more thoroughgoing revolution in Presbyterian attitudes towards worship.In 1855 a book that began to change the way Presbyterians of both the Old and New Schools thought about worship was published by a Presbyterian minister by the name of Charles Baird. Baird had been heavily influenced by the history of the continental Reformed churches, and in particular he began to discover that the Reformed tradition outside of England and Scotland had a rich tradition of using liturgies. His book Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches, was the result of his discoveries. By examining of the liturgies used by the likes of Calvin, Knox, and the Huguenots, Baird was able to construct an argument for the reintroduction of liturgical worship into the Presbyterian Church.While Baird did not advocate a reintroduction of the Church Year in Eutaxia, and his comments on the subject where limited to an observation that even Calvin had observed Christmas on a few occasions, his work paved the way for two important developments.The first was a reassessment of the use of liturgies in Presbyterianism and the second was the opening of a window in which the practices of Reformed churches that had pursued a less thoroughgoing reformation of Worship than the Scots and English Puritans might be introduced. Both played on the growing distaste of some within the Presbyterian church for purely extempore worship.Bairds book was to create an opportunity for other Presbyterians who wanted to improve Presbyterian worship by making it more liturgical, and in many cases, directly tied in to the Church year. One such individual was a Presbyterian elder and businessman by the name of Benjamin Bartis Comegys. Comegys had no sympathy whatsoever for the older Puritan view of worship. His views were highly colored by his romanticism and attachment to all things Medieval. His sympathies lay so thoroughly in the Anglican camp that one friend commented A stranger