grand object of the churchservice was prayer and praise he hoped therefore to make Presbyterianism intoa people who express their devotions in well-ordered prayer and praise.20 Tothis end Comegys published An Order of Worship with Forms of Prayer for DivineService in 1885 and then A Presbyterian Prayer Book for Public Worship. Hisstated intention was to create a public opinion which will not be startled bythe move away from traditional Presbyterian Worship according to the RegulativePrinciple to a more expressly liturgical and Anglican model. Both books had animpact on American Presbyterian practice that was so deep that one need nothesitate in concluding Comegys achieved his stated intention. Needless to sayboth of Comegys books included mention of the Church Year. But as yet, therewas no official Book of Common Worship that would officially tie thePresbyterian Church to the observation of Holy Days.The stage had been set for the creation of such abook by the publication of several smaller books of forms of worship by theDenominational press the Presbyterian Board of Publication. The advantage ofcreating a book of forms for worship over a set liturgy was that it seemed totie in better with the Presbyterian practice of not forcibly determiningexactly how worship should proceed. The first of these books was A. A. HodgesManual of Forms published in 1877. Hodges manual was really quite conservativeand certainly did not advocate the observance of the Church year in any way.The second of these was Forms for Special Occasions by ex-moderator of theGeneral assembly, Herrick Johnson. Johnsons book published in 1889 wasnt thatmuch more radical than Hodges work, but it did take another step closer to aset liturgy by including liturgical diction in prayer.While Hodge and Johnson were cautiously movingtowards a more expressly liturgical format in worship, by producing books thatwere safe enough for the denomination to publish, private individuals likeComegys were producing other volumes that moved considerably more quickly.Eventually these two streams were to merge in the production of an officialBook of Common Worship. An important agency that was to pave the way for thiswas the Church Service Society formed in 1897 by two influential AmericanPastors Henry Van Dyke, pastor of the prestigious Brick Presbyterian Churchof New York City and Louis Benson an influential Philadelphian and pastor ofanother prestigious church in the suburbs of that city. Both had workedextensively to privately produce liturgical materials that included theobservation of the Church Year.The effect of forming the Church Service Societywas to create an organization that unified the various men fighting for theinstitution of a standardized Presbyterian Liturgy. Most of these men weregentlemen of pastoral, esthetic, and literary inclinations21 and not theforemost theologians of Presbyterianism. One author observed that this wasbecause most of Presbyterianisms theologians were too busy fighting in theopening engagements of the fundamentalist-modernist war and defendingscholastic Calvinism to take an active part in what became a significantmovement22While the organization stated their commitment tothe Presbyterian Standards in their Statement of Principles it seems clearthat with individuals such as Comegys on board, this commitment was to a verybroad definition of these Standards in regard to worship. The group did no morethan