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418 After a few more prayers, the priest and deacon go to the diakonikon, the doors are again shut, and they take off their vestments. They make a short thanksgiving, and the liturgy is over. The Byzantine Liturgy takes two or three hours to celebrate. It is undoubtedly a very splendid and majestic service, and the prayers (the Preface especially) often reach a very high point of emotional poetry. Is it Latin prejudice that makes one think our shorter Mass, at the open altar, with its absence of all emotionalism, its simple ceremonies, and sternly reticent prayers, more dignified?

6. Other Rites; the Sacraments.

The Divine Office in the Byzantine Church is a very compli- cated thing. There is no Breviary, so the different parts have to be read from the various books described above (p. 401). It is also enormously long. To sing the whole office for one day is said to take about eight hours. The merest outline of this office will be enough here. Like the Western hours it consists essentially of psalm-singing. The psalter is divided into twenty parts, containing from four to eight psalms each, and it is sung right through in a week. The office also contains collects, prayers, litanies and an immense variety of hymns and antiphons, such as the Heirmos , which is a hymn having a tune of its own, the Troparion , which is sung to the tune of its heirmos, the Kontakion , a short hymn about the feast of the day, the Oikos , which is joined to the Troparion to develop the ideas

3 The numbers exactly in Nilles: Kalendarium, I. liv.