perhaps in other Eastern Churches, the clergy kiss each other during the recital of the Nicene Creed, to show that charity and orthodoxy should always go together, not, as is too often the case, parted asunder. In the Coptic Church, the most primitive and conservative of all Christian Churches, it still continues in full force. Travellers now living have had their faces stroked, and been kissed, by the Coptic priest, in the cathedral at Cairo, whilst at the same moment everybody else was kissing everybody throughout the church. Had any primitive Christians been told that the time would come when this, the very sign of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood, would be absolutely proscribed in the Christian Church, they would have thought that this must be the result of unprecedented persecution or unprecedented unbelief. It is impossible to imagine the omission of any act more sacred, more significant, more necessary (according to the view which then prevailed) to the

edification of the service.

X. Then came the offering of the bread and wine by the people. It was, as we have seen, the memorial of the ancient practice of the contribution of the Christian comThe Liturgy. munity towards a common meal. The prayer in which this was offered was in fact the centre of the whole service. This is the point at which we first come into contact It has been often mainwith the germ of a fixed Liturgy.* tained that there are still existing forms which have come down to us from the first century, and even that the Liturgies which go under the names of St. James, St. Clement, and St. Mark were written by them. There are two fatal objections to this hypothesis. The first is the positive statement of St. Basil that there was no written authority for any of the Liturgical forms of the Church in his time. The second is the fact that

*An argument often used to account for the absence of written liturgies is the doctrine of "reserve, an argument which has been even pushed to the extent of thus accounting for the absence of any detailed account of the Sacrament in the New Testament or in the early Creeds. (Maskell, Preface to the Ancient Liturgy, pp. xxviii.-xxxi.) It is evident that the same feeling, if it operated at all, would have prevented such descriptions as are given by Justin, in a work avowedly intended for the outside world.

+De Spiritu Sancto, c. 27. The passage is quoted at length in Maskell (Pref. p. xxvi.) with the opinions strongly expressed to the same effect, of Renaudot and Lebrun, and the confirmatory argument that had written liturgies existed they would have been discoverable in the time of the Diocletian persecution. "There are no Liturgies," says Lebrun, "earlier than the fifth century" (iii. 1-17).

whilst there is a general resemblance in the ancient Liturgies to the forms known to exist in early times, there are such material variations from those forms as to render it impossible to suppose that the exact representatives of them anywhere exist. This will appear as we proceed, and therefore we shall only notice the details of the Liturgies so far as they contain the relics of the earlier state of things, or illustrate the changes which have brought us to the present state of Liturgical obser

vances.

*

The Prayer was spoken by the Bishop or Chief Presbyter, as best he could-that is, as it would seem, not written, but spoken. It is thus the first sanction of extempore prayer in the public service of the Church. But extempore prayer always tends to become fixed or Liturgical. If we hear the usual Prayers in the Church of Scotland, they are sure to retain on the whole the same ideas, and often the very same words. Thus it was in the early Church, and thus a Liturgy

arose.

There was one long prayer, of which the likenesses are preserved in the long prayers before or after the sermon in Presbyterian or Nonconformist churches, the Bidding Prayer and the Prayer of Consecration in the Church of England. The main difference is that in the early Church this prayer was all on one occasion, namely, at the time of the consecration of the elements; in the Roman and in the English Prayer Book it is, as it were, scattered through the service.

In this prayer there are two peculiarities which belong to the ancient Church, and have since not been brought forward prominently in any church. It is best seen in the Roman Missal, which incorporates here, as elsewhere, passages quite inconsistent with the later forms with which it has been incrusted.

It is clear, from the Missal, that the priest officiates as one of the people, and as the representative of the people, seeing that throughout the Office of the Mass he associates the people with himself as concerned equally with himself in every prayer that he offers and every act that he performs. Just as he unites the people's prayers with his own by the use of the

* Justin, Apol. c. 67.

plural forms, "We pray," " We beseech Thee," instead of the singular, so in the most solemn acts of the Eucharist, after the consecration of the elements as well as before, he uses the plural form, "We offer," that is, we, priest and people, offer; thereby including the people with himself in the act of sacrificing. And this is made still more clear when he is told to say, "We beseech Thee that Thou wouldest graciously accept this offering of Thy whole family, and also we Thy servants and also Thy holy people offer to Thy glorious Majesty a pure sacrifice." And not only so, but the attention of the people is called to it as a fact which it is desirable they should not be allowed to forget. Addressing the people the priest says, "All you, both brethren and sisters, pray that my sacrifice and your sacrifice, which is equally yours as well as mine, may be meet for the Lord." And so in the intercessory prayer of oblation for the living the language which the priest uses carefully shows that the sacrificial act is not his but theirs. "Remember," he says, "Thy servants and Thy handmaids, and all who stand around, and who offer to Thee this sacrifice of praise for themselves and for all their relations."

But there is the further question of what is the chief offering which is presented. The offering which is presented is, The offering throughout, one of two things: first the sacrifice of of the bread praise and thanksgiving, as in the words which we and wine. have already quoted; or secondly, the gifts of the fruits of the earth, especially the bread and wine, which are brought in, and which are expressly called "a holy sacrifice," and "the immaculate host." Every term which is applied to the elements after consecration is distinctly and freely applied to them before. What is done by the consecration in the Missal is the prayer that these natural elements of the earth may be transformed to our spiritual use by the blessing of God upon them. It is necessary to observe that the sacrifice offered, whether in the early Church or in the original Roman Missal, was either of praise and thanksgiving, which we still offer, both clergy and people, or else of the natural fruits of the earth, which we do indeed offer in name, but of which the full idea and meaning has so much passed out of the minds of all Christians in modern days, that we seldom think of it. It is one of the differences between the early Church and our own,

which it is impossible to recover, but which it is necessary to bear in mind, both because the idea was in itself exceedingly beautiful, and because it does not connect itself in the least degree with any of our modern controversies.*

The ancient form expresses in the strongest manner the goodness of God in Nature. It is we might almost say a worship or more properly, an actual enjoyment and thankful recognition-of the gifts of Creation. So completely was this felt in the early times, that a custom prevailed, which as time went on was checked by the increasing rigidity of ecclesiastical rules, that not only bread and wine, but honey, milk, strong drink, and birds were offered on the altar; and even after these were forbidden, cars of corn and grapes were allowed, and other fruits, though not offered on the altars, were given to the Bishop and Presbyters.

All this appears in unmistakable force both in the heathen and the Jewish worship, and from them it overflowed into the Christian, and received there an additional life, from the tendency which, as we have seen, runs through the whole of these early forms to identify the sacred and profane, to elevate the profane by making it sacred, and to realize the sacred by making it common. It lingers in a few words in the English Prayer for the Church Militant, "the oblations which we offer," and in the expression "It is very meet and right to give thanks." It included the recollection of, and the prayers for, the main objects of human interest-the Emperor, the army, their friends dead and living, the rain, the springs and wells so dear in Eastern countries, the rising of the Nile so dear in Egypt, the floods to be deprecated at Constantinople. The whole of their common life was made to pass before them. Nothing was common or unclean" to them at that moment. They gave thanks for it, they hoped that it might be blessed and continued to them.

66

There is a representation in the catacombs of a man and a woman joining in the offering of bread. The woman, it is sometimes said, is the Church; but if so this confirms the

*The Mass disowned by the Missal. A very able and exhaustive paper in the Madras Times, by Bishop Caldwell, Oct. 1867.

Apostolical Canons, 2.

See Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vii. 24.

samo idea. The bread and wine are still in England, as above noticed, the gifts not of the minister, but of the parish, and this offering by the congregation, which prevailed in the Catholic countries of Europe generally till the tenth century, lingered on in some French abbeys till the eighteenth. It is this offering of the fruits of the earth to which Cyprian* and Irenæust give the name of "sacrifice." It is probable that the tenacity with which this word clung to these outward elements in the early ages was occasioned by the eagerness to claim for Christian worship something which resembled the old animal and vegetable sacrifices of Judaism and heathenism, and that its comparative disappearance from all Christian worship in later times in like manner was coincident with the disappearance of the temples and altars alike of Palestine and of Italy.

Then

This offering formed the main bulk of the prayer. followed what in modern times would be called "the consecraThe Lord's tion." The earlier accounts of the Liturgy, whether Prayer. in Justin or Irenæus, agree in the statement that after the completion of the offering followed an invocation to the Spirit of God "to make the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ." But in what did it consist? Here again seems to be disclosed a divergence of which very slight traces remain in any celebrations of the Eucharist, whether Protestant or Catholic. It is at least probable that it consisted of nothing else than the Lord's Prayer. This was the immense importance of the Lord's Prayer; not as with us, repeated many times over, but reserved for this one prominent place. The first Eucharistic prayer was amplified more or less according to the capacities of the minister. The Lord's Prayer was the one fixed formula. It was in fact the whole "liturgy" properly so called. "The change "-whatever it were that he meant by it "the change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ," says Justin, "is by the Word of Prayer which comes from Him." † "It was the custom,"

*Cyprian, De Op. p. 203, ed. Tell. (Palmer's Antiquities, ii. 86).

See the Pfaffian fragment of Irenæus quoted in Arnold's Fragments on the Church, p. 129; and this, with all the other passages from Irenæus bearing on the question in Bunsen's Christianity and Mankind, ii. 424–29.

Compare Jestin, Apol. 66; Jerome, Adv. Pelag. 3: Apostolos quotidie Orationem Domini solitos dicere." (Maskell, Pref. p. xxxviii.) See also Am