Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/158

Rh 140 S A C S A C upon a purple ground, as distinguished from the vermilion cursive letters of the rest of the MS. With this the sacrifice proper was concluded. (6) But, since the divine injunction had been " Do this in remembrance of Me," the sacrifice was immediately followed by a commemoration of the passion of Christ, and that again by an invocation of the Holy Spirit (epiclesis) that He would make the bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ. Of this invocation, which is constant in all Eastern rituals, there are few, though sufficient, surviving traces in Western rituals. 1 Then after a prayer for sanctification, or for worthy reception, followed the Lord's Prayer, and after the Lord's Prayer the communion. In the course of the 8th and 9th centuries, by the opera- tion of causes which have not yet been fully investigated, the theory which is first found in Cyprian became the dominant belief of Western Christendom. The central point of the sacrificial idea was shifted from the offering of the fruits of the earth to the offering of the body and blood of Christ. The change is marked in the rituals by the duplication of the liturgical forms. The prayers of in- tercession and oblation, which in earlier times are found only in connexion with the former offering, are repeated in the course of the same service in connexion with the latter. The designations and epithets which are in earlier times applied to the fruits of the earth are applied to the body and blood. From that time until the Eeformation the Christian sacrifice was all but universally regarded as the offering of the body and blood of Christ. The in- numerable theories which were framed as to the precise nature of the offering and as to the precise change in the elements all implied that conception of it. It still remains as the accepted doctrine of the Church of Rome. For, although the council of Trent recognized fully the dis- tinction which has been mentioned above between the Eucharist and the sacrifice of the mass, and treated of them in separate sessions (the former in Session xiii., the latter in Session xxii.), it continued the mediaeval theory of the nature of the latter. The reaction against the mediaeval theory at the time of the Reformation took the form of a return to what had no doubt been an early belief, the idea that the Christian sacrifice consists in the offer- ing of a pure heart and of vocal thanksgiving. Luther at one period (in his treatise De Captivitate Bdbylonica) main- tained, though not on historical grounds, that the offering of the oblations of the people was the real origin of the con- ception of the sacrifice of the mass ; but he directed all the force of his vehement polemic against the idea that any other sacrifice could be efficacious besides the sacrifice of Christ. In the majority of Protestant communities the idea of a sacrifice has almost lapsed. That which among Catholics is most commonly regarded in its aspect as an offering and spoken of as the " mass " is usually regarded in its aspect as a participation in the symbols of Christ's death and spoken of as the " communion." But it may be inferred from the considerable progress of the Anglo- Catholic revival in most English-speaking countries that the idea of sacrifice has not yet ceased to be an important element in the general conception of religion. (E. HA.) SACRILEGE. The robbery of churches was in Roman law punishable with death. There are early instances of persons having suffered death for this offence in Scotland. In England at common law benefit of clergy was denied to robbers of churches. The tendency of the later law has been to put the offence of sacrilege in the same position as if the offence had not been committed in a sacred build- 1 It is found, e.g., in the second of Hone's masses from the Reichenau palimpsest, and in Mabillon's Missale Gothicmn, No. 12 ; it is ex- pressly mentioned by Isidore of Seville as the sixth element in the Eucharistic service, De Offic. Eccles., i. 15. ing. Thus breaking into a place of worship at night, says Lord Coke, is burglary, for the church is the mansion- house of Almighty God. The Larceny Act of 1 86 1 punishes the breaking into or out of a place of divine worship in the same way as burglary, and the theft of things sacred in the same way as larceny. The breaking or defacing of an altar, crucifix, or cross in any church, chapel, or church- yard is a'n offence punishable with three months' imprison- ment on conviction before two justices, the imprisonment to be continued unless the offender enter into surety for good behaviour at quarter sessions (1 Mary, sess. 2, c. 3). SACRO BOSCO, JOHANNES DE, or JOHN HOLYWOOD, astronomical author, died 1244 (or 1256) as professor of mathematics at the university of Paris. Nothing else is known about his life. He wrote a treatise on spherical astronomy, Tractatus de Sphera Mitndi, first printed at Ferrara in 1472, and reprinted, generally with copious notes and commentaries, about sixty times until the end of the 17th century. About the year 1232 he wrote De anni ratione sen ut vocatur vulgo comjmtus ecclesiasticus, in which he points out the increasing error of the Julian calendar, and suggests a remedy which is nearly the same as that actually used under Gregory XIII. three hundred and fifty years later. SACY, ANTOINE ISAAC, BAEON SILVESTRE S DE (1758- 1838), the greatest of French Orientalists and the founder of the modern school of Arabic scholarship, was the second son of a Parisian notary, and was born at Paris on 21st September 1758. From the age of seven years, when he lost his father, he was educated in more than monastic seclusion in the house of his pious and tender mother. Designed for the civil service, he studied jurisprudence, and in 1781 got a place as counsellor in the cour des monnaies, in- which he continued till, in 1791, he was advanced to be a commissary-general in the same depart- ment. De Sacy had a natural turn for business and liked variety of work, while he seems to have had little or no need of absolute repose. He had successively acquired all the Semitic languages while he was following the usual course of school and professional training, and while he was engaged in the civil service he found time to make himself a great name as an Orientalist by a series of pub- lications which, beginning with those Biblical subjects to which his education and sympathies naturally directed his first Semitic studies, gradually extended in range, and already displayed the comprehensive scholar who had chosen the whole Semitic and Iranian East for his domain. 3 The works of these early years do not show the full maturity of his powers ; his chief triumph was an effect- ive commencement of the decipherment of the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sasanian kings (1787-91). It was the French Revolution which gained De Sacy wholly for letters. As a good Catholic and a staunch royalist he felt' con- strained in 1792 to retire from the public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he was called to be professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages. The years of retire- ment had not been fruitless ; they were in part devoted to the study of the religion of the Druses, which continued to occupy him throughout life and was the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Expose de la Religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). Nevertheless, when called to be a 2 His father's name was Silvestre, the addition De Sacy he took as a younger son after a fashion then common with the Parisian bourgeoisie. 3 A communication to Eichhom on the Paris MS. of the Syro- Hexaplar version of IV. Kings formed the basis of a paper in the latter's Rtpertorium, vol. vii. (1780). This was De Sacy's literary debut. It was followed by text and translation of the letters of the Samaritans to Jos. Scaliger (ibid., vol. xiii., 1783) and by a series of essays on Arabian and Persian history in the Recueil of the Academy of Inscriptions and in the Notices et Extraits.