Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/732

 708 LITURGY discovered in the library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1867, which has not yet been published. These documents, illustrated by early Gallican canons, and by allusions in the writings of Sulpicius Severus, Coesarius of Aries, Gregory of Tours, Germanus of Paris, and other authors, enable scholars to reconstruct the greater part of this liturgy. The previously enumerated signs of Eastern origin and influence are found here as well as in the Mozarabic liturgy, together with certain other more or less minute peculiarities, which would be of interest to professed liturgiologists, but which we must not pause to specify here. They point to the possibility of the theory that the Gallican liturgy was introduced into use by Irenseus, bishop of Lyons (c. 130-200), who had learned it in the East from St Polycarp, the disciple of the apostle St John. 3. Ambrosian Liturgy. Considerable variety of opinion has existed among liturgical writers as to the proper classifi cation of the &quot; Ambrosian &quot; or &quot; Milanese &quot; liturgy. If we are to accept it in its present form, and to make the present position of the great intercession the test of its genus, then we must place it under Group V., the &quot; Petrine,&quot; and con sider it as a branch of the Roman family. If, on the other hand, we consider the important variations from the Roman liturgy which yet exist, and the still more marked and numerous traces of variation which confront us in the older printed and MS. copies of the Ambrosian rite, we shall detect in it an original member of the Ephesine group of liturgies, which for centuries past has been undergoing a gradual but ever increasing assimilation to Rome. We know this as a matter of history, as well as a matter of inference from changes in the text itself. Charlemagne adopted the same policy towards the Milanese as towards the Gallican Church. He carried off all the Milanese Church books which he could obtain, with the view of substituting Roman books in their place, but the complete ness of his intentions failed, partly through the attachment of the Lombards to their own rites, partly through the intercession of a Gallican bishop named Eugenius (Mabillon, Mus. Ital., i., ii. p. 106). It has been asserted by Joseph Vicecomes that this is an originally independent liturgy drawn up by St Barnabas, who first preached the gospel at Milan (De Misssc, Rit., i. chap, xi., xii.), and this tradition is preserved in the title and proper preface for St Barnabas Day in the Ambrosian missal (Pamelius, i. 385, 386). We can trace the following points in which the Milanese differs from the Roman liturgy, many of them exhibiting distinct lines of Ephesine or Eastern influence. Some of them are no longer found in recent Ambrosian missals, and only survive in the earlier MSS. published by Pamelius (Liturgicon, torn. i. p. 293), Muratori (Lit. Rom. Vet., i. 132), and Ceriani (in his edition, 1881, of an ancient MS. at Milan). (a) The collect entitled &quot;oratio super sindonem,&quot; correspond ing to the eux^7 M f Ta rb airAa&amp;gt;0rj c rb f!-r)T6i&amp;gt; ; (b) the procla mation of silence by the deacon before the epistle ; (c) the litanies said after the Ingressa (introit) on Sundays in Lent, closely resembling the Greek Ektene ; (d) varying forms of introduction to the Lord s Prayer, in Ccena Domini (Ceriani, p. 116), in Pascha (ib., p. 129); (e) the presence of passages in the Prayer of Consecra tion which are not part of the Roman canon, and one of which at least corresponds in import and position though not in words to the Greek ETRKA^O-JS : Tuum vero cst, omnipotcns Pater, mittcre, &c. (ib., p. 116) ; (/) the survival of a distinctly Gallican form of con secration in the Post-Sauctus in Sabbato Sancto &quot; : Verc Sanctus, cere benedictus Dominus nostcr, &c. (ib., p. 125); (g) the varying nomenclature of the Sundays after Pentecost; (h) the position of the fraction before the Lord s Prayer; (i)the omission of the second oblation after the words of institution (Muratori, Lit. Rom. Vet., i. 133); (k) a third lection or Prophetia from the Old Testament pre ceding the epistle and gospel ; (I) the lay offering of the oblations and the formulae accompanying their reception (Pam., i. 297) ; (m) the position of the ablution of the hands in the middle of the canon just before the words of institution; (n) the position of the &quot;oratio super populum &quot; which corresponds in matter but not in name to the collect for the day before the Gloria in Excelsis. 4. Celtic Liturgy. We postpone the consideration of this subject to a position under the heading of the liturgies of Great Britain and Ireland. GROUP V. St Peter, Italian, Rome. There is only one liturgy to be enumerated under this group, viz., the present liturgy of the Church of Rome, which, though originally local in character and circumscribed in use, has come to be nearly coextensive with the Roman Church, sometimes cuckoo-like ejecting earlier national liturgies, as in France and Spain, sometimes incorporating more or less of the ancient ritual of a country into itself, and producing from such incorporation a subclass of distinct uses, as in England. France, and North Italy. Even these subordinate uses have for the most part become, or are rapidly becoming, obsolete. The genius and policy of Rome are in favour of uniformity; and it requires no keen powers of vision to foretell that, liturgically speaking, she will be, before long, within all her dominions supreme. The date, origin, and early history of the Roman liturgy are obscure. The first Christians at Rome were a Greek - speaking community, and their liturgy must have been Greek, and is possibly represented in the so-called Clemen tine liturgy. But the date when such a state of things ceased, when and by whom the present Latin liturgy was composed, whether it is an original composition, or, as its structure seems to imply, a survival of some intermediate form of liturgy, all these are questions which are waiting for their solution, and to which no certain answer can be given, unless and until some further discovery shall be given of earlier liturgical remains. One MS. exists which claims to represent the Roman liturgy as it existed in the time of Leo I., 440-61. It was discovered at Verona by Blanchini in 1735, assigned by him to the 8th century, and published under the title of Sacramentarium Leonianum ; but this title was from the first purely conjectural, and is in the teeth of the internal evidence which the MS. itself affords, and is now being gradually abandoned. It is impossible here to enter into the minutiae of the evidence for this and other conclusions. The question is discussed at some length by Muratori, Lit. Rom. Vet., i. chap. 3. A MS. of the 9th or 10th century was found at Rome by Thomasius, and published by him in 1680 under the title of Sawamentarium Gelasianum. But it was written in France, and is certainly not a pure Gelasian codex ; and, although there is historical evidence of that pope (492-96) having made some changes in the Roman liturgy, and although other MSS. have been published by Gerbertus and others, claiming the title of Gelasian, we neither have nor are likely to have genuine and contemporary MS. evidence of the real state of the liturgy in that pope s time. The larger number of MSS. of this group are copies of the Gregorian sacramentary, that is to say, MSS. representing, or purporting to represent, the state of the Roman liturgy in the days of Gregory the Great (590-604). But they cannot be accepted as certain evidence, for the following reasons: not one of them was written earlier than the 9th century ; not one of them was written in Italy, but every one north of the Alps ; every one contains internal evidence of a post-Gregorian date in the shape of masses for the repose or for the intercession of St Gregory, and in various other ways. The Roman liturgy was introduced into England in the 7th, into France in the 9th, and into Spain in the llth century. In France certain features of the service and certain points in the ritual of the ancient national liturgy became interwoven with its text, and formed those many varying medieval Gallican uses, which are associated with the names of the different French sees. The distinguishing characteristics of the Petrine liturgy are these : (a) the position of the great intercession within the canon,