national Church under the sun are so many matin ser- vices said as in our own." It may not be out of place here to add that seven hours formed the basis of the " Primers" (q. v.). " English editions of these, set forth
by authority in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and of queen Elizabeth, show that the English reform- ers did not wish to discourage the observance of the an- cient hours of prayer. As late as 1627, by command of Charles I, bishop Cosin published a ' Collection of Pri- vate Devotions in the practice of the ancient Church, called the Hours of Prayer, as they were after this man- ner published by authority of queen Elizabeth, 1560,' etc." See, besides the authorities already referred to, Procter, Prayer Book, chap, i ; Blunt (the Rev. J. H.), Diet, of Doctrinal and Hist. Theol. (Lond. 1870), i, 315; Siegel, Christl.-Kirchl. A Iterthumer, i, 270 sq. ; iv, 05 sq. Compare Canonical ; Breviarv. (.J. II. W.)
Hours of our Lady, the title of a devotion insti- tuted by pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095.— Walcott, Sac. A rchceol. p. 318.
House (ri'['3, ha'yith, which is used with much lat- itude, and in the "construct" form H'^S, heyth, Angli- cized " Beth," [q. v.] enters into the composition of many proper names; Gr. oIkoq, or some derivative of it), a dwelling in general, whether literally, as house, tent, palace, citadel, tomb, derivatively as tabernacle, temple, heaven, or metaphorically as family. See Palace.
I. Hktory and Sources of Comparison. — Although, in Oriental language, everj^ tent (see Gesen. Thes.y^.ZT) may be regarded as a house (Harmer, Ohs. i, 194), yet the dis- tinction between the permanent dwelling-house and the tent must have taken rise from the moment of the divis- ion of mankind into dwellers in tents and builders of cities, i. e. of permanent habitations (Gen. iv, 17, 20 ; Isa. xxxviii, 12). The agricidtm-al and pastoral forms of life are described in Scrijjture as of equally ancient origin. Cain was a husbandman, and Abel a keeper of sheep. The former is a settled, the latter an unsettled mode of life. Hence Ave find that Cain, when the murder of his brother constrained him to wander abroad, built a town in the land where he settled. At the same time, doubt- less, those who followed the same mode of life as Abel, dwelt in tents, capable of being taken from one place to another, when the want of fresh pastures constrained those removals which are so frequent among people of pastoral habits. We are not required to suppose that Cain's town was more than a collection of huts. See City. Our information respecting the abodes of men in the ages before the Deluge is, however, too scanty to af-
Orieutal Hut. ford much ground for notice. The enterprise at Babel, to say nothing of Egypt, shows that the constructive arts had made considerable progress during that obscure but interesting period ; for we are bound in reason to con- clude that the arts possessed by man in the ages imme- diately following the Deluge existed before that great catastrophe. See Antediluvians.
The observations offered under Architecture will preclude the expectation of finding among this Eastern ])eople that accompUshed style of building which Vitru- vius requires, or that refined taste by which the Greeks and Romans excited the admiration of foreign nations. The tents in which the Arabs now dwell are in all prob- ability the same as those in which the Hebrew patriarchs spent their lives. It is not likely that what the Hebrews observed in Egypt, during their long sojourn in that coun- try, had in this respect any direct influence upon their own subsequent practice in Palestine. See Tent. Xev- crtheless,the information which may be derived from the figiures of houses and parts of houses in the Egyptian
HOUSE
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HOUSE
tombs is not to be overlooked or slighted. We have in them the only representations of ancient houses in that l)art of the workl Avhich now exist ; and however differ- ent maj' have been the state architecture of Egypt and Palestine, we have every reason to conclude that there was considerable resemblance in the private dweUings
Model of an ancient Eiryptian Ancient Assyrian House three-storied House, in calca- (Koiiyouujlk).
reons stone. (In the British Museum.)
of these neighboring countries. The few representations of buildings on the Assyrian monuments ma}' likewise 1)2 of some assistance in completing our ideas of Hebrew dwellings. The Hebrews did not become dwellers in cities till the sojourn in Egypt and after the conquest of Canaan ((Jen. xlvii, 3 ; Exod. xii, 7 ; Heb. xi, 9), while the Canaanites, as well as the Assyrians, were from an earlier period builders and inhabitants of cities, and it was into the houses and cities built by the former that the Hebrews entered to take possession after the conquest (Gen. X, 11,19; xix, 1 ; xxiii, 10; xxxiv, 20; Numb, xi, 27; Deut. vi, 10, 11). The private dwellings of the As- syrians and Babylonians have altogether perished, but the solid material of the houses of Syria, east of the Jor- dan, may perhaps have preserved entire specimens of the ancient dweUiugs, even of the original inhabitants of that region (Porter, Damascus, ii, 195, 196; C. C. Graham in '• Camb. Essays," 1859, p. ICO, etc. ; comp. Buckingham, Arab Tz-to, p. 171, 172).