toConfessional standards. Their worship tended to be less constrained by theRegulative Principle and more inclined to incorporate elements that were to befound in the Protestant traditions that did not descend from Puritanism, orwhich had moved further away from their roots. Despite this tendency towardsadopting new methods, the New School does not seem to have initially been anymore eager than their more conservative counterparts to incorporate theobservation of the Church Year into their worship. Before that could happenthere was to be a more thoroughgoing revolution in Presbyterian attitudestowards worship.In 1855 a book that began to change the wayPresbyterians of both the Old and New Schools thought about worship waspublished by a Presbyterian minister by the name of Charles Baird. Baird hadbeen heavily influenced by the history of the continental Reformed churches,and in particular he began to discover that the Reformed tradition outside ofEngland and Scotland had a rich tradition of using liturgies. His book Eutaxia,or the Presbyterian Liturgies: Historical Sketches, was the result of hisdiscoveries. By examining of the liturgies used by the likes of Calvin, Knox,and the Huguenots, Baird was able to construct an argument for thereintroduction of liturgical worship into the Presbyterian Church.While Baird did not advocate a reintroduction ofthe Church Year in Eutaxia, and his comments on the subject where limited to anobservation that even Calvin had observed Christmas on a few occasions, hiswork paved the way for two important developments. The first was a reassessmentof the use of liturgies in Presbyterianism and the second was the opening of awindow in which the practices of Reformed churches that had pursued a lessthoroughgoing reformation of Worship than the Scots and English Puritans mightbe introduced. Both played on the growing distaste of some within thePresbyterian church for purely extempore worship.Bairds book was to create an opportunity for otherPresbyterians who wanted to improve Presbyterian worship by making it moreliturgical, and in many cases, directly tied in to the Church year. One suchindividual was a Presbyterian elder and businessman by the name of BenjaminBartis Comegys. Comegys had no sympathy whatsoever for the older Puritan viewof worship. His views were highly colored by his romanticism and attachment toall things Medieval. His sympathies lay so thoroughly in the Anglican camp thatone friend commented A stranger visiting his library would probably concludethat its owner was a clergyman of the Church of England, as few clergymen inthis country, even those of the Episcopal Church, possessed so complete aliturgical library.18This combination of Romanticism and sympathy forhigh-church Anglicanism led Comegys to an almost total rejection of theRegulative Principle of Worship and in particular the Puritan rejection of HolyDays. Consequently, he endeavored to see Holy Days restored, and while heagreed that these Holy Days had no warrant in scripture, he pointed out thatthe Presbyterian Church had been gradually introducing other innovations thatdid not square with the regulative principle and that no bad effects havefollowed. From this he concluded that the average layman (and presumablyhimself) could not see why other changes may not be adopted.19Comegys even went so far as to say that preachingwas not the primary element in Sunday worship: The