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 SLAVES

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SLAVONIC

in slavery the descendants of those who had been made slaves in this unjust way? The last conspicu- ous Catholic moralist who posed this question when it was not merely a theoretical one, Kenrick, resolves it in the affirmative on the ground that lapse of time remedies the original defect in titles when the stabil- ity of society and the avoi<iancc of gi'ave disturbances demand it.

St. Thom.is, I-II, Q. xciv, a. S, ad S™; H-II, Q. Ivii, a. 3, ad 2"™. and a. 4, ad 2"™; de Logo, De just, el jure, disp. 3, 5, 2; Puff- ENDORF, Droit de la Nature et des Gens, I. VI, ch. iii, s. 7; Gro- TID8, De Jure Belli ae Paeis. I. ii, c. v, .s. 27; Kenrick, Theologia Moralis, tract. V, c. vi; Meyer, Institutiones Juris Naturalis, par. ii, .^. ii. c. iii, art. 2; Cathrein, Moralphilosophie (4t-h ed., Freiburg, 1904).

James J. Fox.

Slaves (Dene "Men"), a tribe of the great Ddnfi family of American Indians, so called apparently from the fact that the Crees drove it back to its original northern haunts. Its present habitat is the forests that lie to the west of Great Slave Lake, from Hay River inclusive. The Slaves are divided into five main bands: those of Hay River, Trout Lake, Horn Mountain, the forks of the Mackenzie, and Fort Norman. Their total population is about 1100. They are for the most part a people of unprepossessing appearance. Their morals were not formerly of the best, but since the advent of Catholic missionaries they have considerably improved. Many of them have discarded the tepees of old for more or less com- fortable log houses. Yet the religious instinct is not so strongly developed in them as with most of their congeners in the North. They were not so eager to receive the Catholic missionaries, and when the first Protestant ministers arrived among them, the liberalities of the strangers had more effect on them than on the other northern Denes. To-day perhaps one-twelfth of the whole tribe has embraced Protest- antism, the remainder being Catholics. The spiritual wants of the latter are attended to from the missions of St. Joseph on Great Slave Lake, Ste. Anne, Hay River, and Providence, Mackenzie.

Mackenzie, Voyage through the Continent of North America (London, 1801) ; McLean, Notes of a Twenty-five Yejirs' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory (London, 1849); Petttot. Mono- graphiedes D^ni-DindjiS; Idem, Autour du Grand Lac des Esclaves (Paris. 1S91) ; MoRicE, The Great Dine Race (Vienna, in course of publication, 1911).

A. G. MORICE.

Slavonic Language and Liturgy.— Although the Latin holds the chief place among the liturgical lan- guages in which the Ma.ss is celebrated and the praise of God recited in the Divine Offices, yet the Slavonic language comes next to it among the languages widely used throughout the world in the liturgy of the Church. Unlike the Greek or the Latin languages, each of which may be said to be representative of a single rite, it is dedicated to both the Greek and the Roman Rites. Its use, however, is far better known throughout Europe as an expression of the Greek Rite; for it is used amongst the various Slavic nationahties of the Byzantine Rite, whether Cathohc or Orthodox, and in that form is spread among 11.5,000,000 people; but it is also used in the Roman Rite along the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea in Dahnatia and in the lower part of Croatia among about 100,000 Catholics there. Whilst the Greek language is the norm and the original of the Byzantine or Cireek Rite, its actual u.se as a church language is limited to a comparatively small number, reckoning by population. The liturgy and offices of the Byzantine Church were translated from the Greek into what is now Old Slavonic (or Church Slavonic) by Sts. Cyril and Methodius about the jear 866 and the period immediately following. St. Cyril is credited with having invented or adapted a special alphabet which now bears his name (Cyrillic) in order to express the sounds of the Slavonic lan- guage, as spoken by the Bulgars and Moravians of his day. (See Cyril and Methodius, Saints.)

Later on St. Methodius translated the entire Bible into Slavonic and his disciples afterwards added other works of the Greek saints and 1 he canon law. These two brother saints always celebrated Mass and ad- ministered the sacraments in the Slavonic language. News of their successful missionary work among the pagan Slavs was carried to Rome along with com- plaints against them for celebrating the rites of the Church in the heathen vernacular. In 868 Saints Cyril and Methodius were summoned to Rome by Nicholas I, but arriving there after his death they were heartily received by his successor Adrian II, who approved of their Slavonic version of the liturgy. St. Cyril died in Rome in 869 and is buried in the Church of San Clemente. St. Methodius was afterwards con- secrated Archbishop of Moravia and Pannonia and re- turned thither to his missionary work. Later on he was again accused of using the heathen Slavonic lan- guage in the celebration of the Mass and in the sac- raments. It was a popular idea then, that as there had been three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, inscribed over our Lord on the cross, it would be sacri- legious to use any other language in the service of the Church. St. Methodius appealed to the pope and in 879 he was again summoned to Rome, before John VIII, who after hearing the matter sanctioned the use of the Slavonic language in the Mass and the offices of the Church, saying among other things: "We rightly praise the Slavonic letters invented by Cyril, in which praises to God are set forth, and we order that the glories and deeds of Christ our Lord be told in that same language. Nor is it in anywise opposed to wholesome doctrine and faith to say Mass in that same Slavonic language (Nee san;e fidei vel doctrinae aliquid obstat inissam in eadem slavonica lingua ca- nere), or to chant the holy gospels or divine lessons from the Old and New Testaments duly translated and interpreted therein, or the other parts of the di- vine office: for He who created the three principal lan- guages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, also made the others for His praise and glory" (Boczek, Codex, torn. I, pp. 43-44). From that time onward the Sla- vonic tongue was firmly fixed as a liturgical language of the Church, and was used wherever the Slavic tribes were converted to Christianity under the influ- ence of monks and missionaries of the Greek Rite. The Cyrillic letters used in writing it'are adaptations of the uncial Greek alphabet, with the addition of a number of new letters to express sounds not found in the Greek language. All Church books|in Russia, Ser- via, Bulgaria, or Au.stro- Hungary (whether used in the Greek Catholic or the Greek Orthodox Churches) are printed in the old CyriUic alphabet and in the ancient Slavonic tongue.

But even before St. Cyril invented his alphabet for the Slavonic language there existed certain runes or native characters in which the southern dialect of the language was committed to writing. There is a tra- dition, alluded to by Innocent XI, that they were in- vented by St. Jerome as early as the fourth century; Jagic however thinks that they were really the orig- inal letters invented by St. Cyril and afterwards aban- doned in favour of an imitation of Greek characters by his disciples and successors. This older alphabet, which still survives, is called the Glagolitic (from gla- golati, to speak, because the rude tribesmen imagined that the letters spoke to the reader and told him what to say), and was used by the southern Slavic tribes and now exists along the Adriatic highlands. (See Glagolitic.) The Slavonic which is written in the Glagolitic characters is also the ancient- language, but it differs considerably from the Slavonic written in the Cyrillic letters. In fact it may be roughly compared to the difference between the Gaelic of Ireland and the Gaelic of Scotland. The Roman Mass was trans- lated into this Slavonic shortly after the Greek liturgy had been translated by Sts. Cyril and Methodius, so