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2. Manuale et Processionale ad usum Insignis Ecclesia Eboracensis. Edited with Preface and Appendices. By W. G. HENDERSON, D.C.L. Surtees Society, vol. lxiii, (Durham and London, 1874-5.)

3. The Lay Folks Mass Book, in four texts, from MSS. of the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century. With Appendix, Notes and Glossary. By T. F. SIMMONS, M.A., Canon of York. Early English Text Society, vol. lxxi. Original Series. (London, 1879.)

4. An Early Vernacular Service. A Paper read before the (Wiltshire Archæological) Society at Warminster, August 22, 1877, by H. T. KINGDON, M.A., formerly Vice-Principal of the Theological College, Sarum. (Printed at Devizes.)

5. The Roman Breviary. Reformed by order of the Holy Ecumenical Council of Trent. . . . Translated out of Latin into English by JOHN, Marquess of BUTE, K.T. 2 vols., with Special Supplements for England and for Ireland. (London and Edinburgh, 1879.)

ALTHOUGH we now have an English version of the Roman Breviary recently executed by the Marquess of Bute, and published, if not with authority, at least with tacit approbation, we can hardly see in such a fact any approach in that quarter to acceptance of the principle of vernacular public devotions. Still less is there any sign in the present of any admission of the laity to respond except by proxy, or to hear in their own language the sacred formularies of the Mass.

That to which we refer is just such a translation as might be expected from one thoroughly imbued with the Anglican versions, writing with the Latin before him. Some portions, such as the Apostles' Creed, are identical with the forms in our Common Prayer. The book itself (a work of nine years) is written in a great measure for those who were formerly Anglicans, accustomed to vernacular services, and for Anglicans or (we presume) Presbyterians, who-as the author hopesmay some day follow in his steps, but in the meanwhile are accustomed to read portions of the Roman Breviary, as, we gather from Mr. Ward's 'Ideal,' and from the Tracts for the Times,' a good many used to do at the commencement of the Catholic revival.

We think that Lord Bute would have done well to have followed certain common editions in giving an index of psalms and hymns, and another of Saints, in addition to the foot-notes, which he has borrowed from Alban Butler and

from other sources, including such Egyptians as Lowth, Pusey, and Walton.

Before we part with this book, which is decidedly an attractive one, we may observe that Lord Bute seems inclined to take rather a broad view of Invocation of Saints. In more than one instance he has diluted an address which appeals to a martyr for protection (protege') into an inoffensive desire for her prayers. And we might notice several passages in which the translator has assumed what we may call an Anglican position, where a simple version of the Latin of the Roman Breviary might have shocked us when read by the light of modern Ultramontanism.

There has been evidence from time to time of a determination to reserve the mysteries of the Church from the bulk of the faithful in Christian times, no less strictly than the secret was kept from the heathen when Pagan was as yet a very brisk giant indeed.

We can well understand the feeling which shrank back at the first suggestion of publishing the full Ceremonial of the Church; a feeling which was so powerful with Paris de Crassis, master of the ceremonies in the Papal chapel, that he procured the suppression of the first edition of Ritus Ecclesiastici sive Sacræ Ceremonia, although its compilation had been ordered by one Pope (Innocent VII.) and it had actually passed through the Venetian press in 1516 with the approbation of another (Leo X.). At the present time, however, there is no difficulty in procuring a modern edition of the Roman Pontifical, or a Rituale Romanum, containing not only the antient rites of Baptism, but the forms for blessing a railroad or a telegraph.

With respect to the most solemn part of the Mass itself, there has then, indeed, been some attempt at reserve; but we doubt if it has availed absolutely against the natural desire for a verbal knowledge of those devotions, the purport of which the laity were always encouraged to follow by attending to the dramatic sequence of the accompanying ceremonies. The translation of the Canon into Dutch was reprobated on all hands about 1470. In the following century, translations into French (some with the Latin in parallel columns) became widely circulated; but in 1651 one particular edition was brought under Papal censure, and a Bull was issued commanding that all copies should be surrendered for the flames.

One motive which may have encouraged some in authority to wink at the frequent contravention of such orders in recent

times, may be found in a hope that the free circulation of such books would increase the number of proselytes, much as the fact that 'in ipsa Angliâ et Germaniâ . . . . doctissimus quisque inter acatholicos tanto studio et sæpe etiam tam sincera indagatione in Ecclesiæ Romanæ dogmata piasque exercitationes hodiedum inquirit,' was considered by the Jesuit editor of the Celeste Palmetum, in 1846, a ground for expecting a sale of a new book of devotions in Latin.

At all events it was, in 1851, found necessary for the Congregation of Rites to forbid the translating, printing, or publishing of the Ordinary of the Mass in the vulgar tongue, and accordingly (as Canon Simmons tells us) a French translation of the Missal, in 1860, omits to construe the Latin of the Canon; and we have before us a Bréviaire et Missel Romain à l'usage des Laïques for the Diocese of Cambrai (1853), which provides certain private devotions in French, but gives the Public Services in Latin, with rubrics and instructions in the vernacular.

If we turn to books provided for the use of Roman Catholic laymen in England, we find in 1633 the offices all in Latin, but the 'Rubrikes in English, for the comoditie of those that doe not understand the Latin tongue. By John le Covsturier, permissu Superiorum.' But in 1737 we have 'the Roman Missal in Latin and English,' arranged in four parts like a foreign Breviary, in each of which is contained the Order and the Canon, with the words of the consecration printed in large letters in both languages. To come to more modern times, the earlier edition of Bishop Challoner's Garden of the Soul contains nothing from the Missal (apart from the responses for servers) excepting an English version of the Gloria in Excelsis, the Nicene Creed, and In Principio, with a running commentary on the whole action, and a supply of private devotions. In a later edition (1872), which to our mind is not in all points an improved edition, the Mass of the

1 The anonymous editor says, 'Though the Council of Trent Sess. 22, Can. 9, justly condemns those that shall say Mass is to be said only in vulgar languages; yet the Fathers of that Council in the said Session, Chap. 8, commend all pastors often to explain, especially on Sundays and Holy Days, some part of that Holy Sacrifice. But alas! our pastors are not permitted to comply with this decree of the Council; and to supply this defect, the daily Mass has often been translated into English. . . . I hope, therefore, no Catholick will find fault with this Translation.

...

'Let idolatry and false religions endeavour to conceal their shameful ceremonies from the people; but truth, in due circumstances, seeks only to be known, and unveil her mysteries, both for the sake of unlearned Catholicks and to undeceive sincere and misinformed Protestants.

So

Trinity is given in full in parallel columns throughout. also, in a recent cheap edition of the 'Missal for the Laity' (Burns, Oates, and Co.), the consecration is given in large type in Latin and English. But the idea that the vulgar tongue might be employed for such a service is so far removed from the Roman Catholic mind, that when Dr. Rock was criticizing Mr. Maskell's expression, 'the revival of the Liturgy “in a tongue understanded of the people'" he asked with honest surprise, 'What revival can Mr. Maskell mean?' Now, although with the enlarged range of liturgiological science (for comparative liturgiology has her changes no less than Roman theology 2), we may, perhaps, be so sanguine as to hope for the recovery of an Irish vernacular liturgy after Mr. Warren's researches, following upon the edition of the Book of Deer, it seems strange that it should not have occurred to Dr. Rock, as it did to Mr. Maskell (then a priest of the Church of England), that not only was the Greek Liturgy once in the vulgar tongue of the unlearned countrymen of S. Chrysostom, but that the Roman Missal itself was used once upon a time when its language was a tongue which was the vernacular of S. Gregory's congregation.3

But with regard to nationality in ceremonies and forms, and even to a limited extent in language, Dr. Rock wrote in a spirit worthy of an old Gallican, as he did with the candour and learning of a diligent liturgical scholar. 'That we Catholics of England should have ever left off our Salisbury, York, and other venerable missals and breviaries, and laid aside our fine old national uses and ritual-among the rest, the "bidding of the beads "--is deeply to be lamented. Let us hope, however, that, ere long, a rite which was practised most likely by the Britons, certainly by the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Normans, and the English, till the end of Mary's

1 Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England, p. lxxvi. See The Church of Our Fathers, i. 175 n.

2

eg. Dr. Rock's own statement (ibid. 90), made in 1849, that 'Papal infallibility is not an article of Catholic belief,' could hardly be asserted now in the face of the anathema of July 1870. Now probably merely the distinction between personal and official infallibility would be emphasized by the controversialist.

3 On the other hand, we must admit that the authorities who legislated for our Reformed Church, when dealing with the difficulty of a non-English speaking population in Ireland, had recourse to a Latin translation of the Book of Common Prayer, in the second year of Queen Elizabeth.-Irish Act of Uniformity, cap. 2. Under such circumstances they might naturally adhere to the Missal which had not the discredit of novelty. We doubt if the English was understood better than the Latin by many of the Manx or Welsh.

reign, may once more be taken up and put to fill its old place in the public worship of the Catholics of England; so that our people, as of yore, may all join the priest and say along with him, before he begins the sermon, the truly Catholic petitions of the “bidding prayer."" In the context also of his criticism of Maskell's Ancient Liturgy to which we just now referred, Dr. Rock observed that the Anglo-Saxon priests were strictly required [e.g. by the Canon of the Council: of Cloveshoo, A.D. 747] to study and unfold to their respective flocks the meaning of everything they saw and heard at Mass, and the administration of the Sacraments.' 2

6

It is to the use of the English language in these biddingprayers and in other instructions at Mass-time, and likewise to the promulgation of other devotions in English before the Reformation, that we now direct attention.

Since the early days of the Catholic revival the study of our early insular services has received considerable impulse. At first the only idea of pre-Reformation services was derived from the modern editions of the Roman service-books, which occasionally led even so learned and sober a theologian as Mr. Isaac Williams to make an unnecessary apology in his Sermons for what he erroneously supposed to have been innovations on the part of the Reformers, because he found theirs to differ from the Roman arrangement; whereas we now can tell that our revisers were but following the Sarum (and antient Roman) tradition.

In 1839 we find him following Dr. Newman in giving popularity to the hymns of a nearer continental Breviary (the Parisian, no longer now a living use). About that time we may note a higher degree of proficiency and accuracy in histories and commentaries bearing on our English Book of Common Prayer, to which improvement doubtless Mr.

1 The Church of Our Fathers, ii. 354 n.

2 Ibid. i. 174.

3 On the Epistles, &c., Nos. 52, 54, 56, 57, 72.

Palmer's Origines Liturgica had appeared in 1836. The supplement is dated 1845. The much earlier work of Wheatley was, and is, still usually produced in a garbled or modernized edition. Since then Archdeacon Freeman, Scudamore, Goulburn, Lathbury, Clay, Procter, Campion and Beamont, J. H. Blunt, and several other names occur in the field as editors of noteworthy works in this department of literature. Moreover the very existence of such books as the Priest to the Altar, second edition, 1869, 1879, as well as the multiplication of books and pamphlets on practical ritual-Directorium Anglicanum, in two editions (Mr. Purchas, 1858, Dr. Lee, 1866), Manuale Clericorum, 1874, Ritual of the Altar, Ritual Reason Why (1866), Notitia Liturgica (1866), The

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