§ 98. THE LITURGIES. THEIR ORIGIN AND CONTENTS. 518
of the EucLarist in particular; then, the book or collection of the prayers used in this celebration. The Latin church calli the public eucliaristic service Mass, and the liturgical books, sacrmnentarium, rituale, missale, also libri mi/sterioricm , or simply lihelli.
The Jewish worship consisted more of acts than of words, but it included also fixed prayers and psalms (as Ps. 113-118) and the Amen of the congregation (Comi). 1 Cor. xiv. 16). The pagan Greeks and Eomans had, in connection with their sacrifices, some fixed prayers and formulas of consecration, which, however, were not written, but perpetuated by oral tradition. The Indian literatm-e, on the contrary, has liturgical books, and even the Koran contains prescribed forms of prayer.
The New Testament gives us neither a liturgy nor a ritual, but the main elements for both. The Lord's Prayer, and the "Words of the Institution of baptism and of the Holy Supper, are the living germs from which the best prayers and baptismal and eucliaristic formulas of the church, whether oral or ^vritten, liave grown. From the confession of Peter and the formula of baptism gradually arose in the Western church the Apostles' Creed, which besides its doctrinal import, has also a liturgical office, as a pubKc profession of candidates for baptism and of the faithful. In the Eastern church the Nicene creed is used instead. The Song of the angelic host is the ground-work of the Gloria in Excelsis. The Apocalypse is one sublime liturgic vision. With these belong also the Psalms, which have passed as a legitimate inheritance to the Christian church, and have alforded at all times the richest material for public edification.
In the ante-Nicene age we find as yet no traces of liturgical books. In each church, of course, a fixed order of worship gradually formed itself, which in apostolic congregations ran back to a more or less apostolic origin, but becan)^ enlarged
Christ; Acts xiii. 2; Rom. sv, 16; Rom. rv. 27; 2 Cor. ix. 12, where religious fasting, missionary service, and common beneficences are called XeiroLfiyia or Aei- Tuvpytiv. The restriction of the word to divine worship or sacerdotal action occura as early as Eusebiua, Vita Const, iv. 37, bishops being there called Kurovpyoi. Th4 limitation of the word to the service of the Lord's Supper is connected with tha development of the doctrine of the ?uchanstic sacrifice.
i520 THIKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
and altered in time, and, until the fourth century, was pel petuated onlj^ by oral tradition. For the celebration of the sacraments, especially of the Encliarist, belonged to the Disciplina arcani, and was concealed, as the most holy thing of the church, from the gaze of Jews and heathens, and even of catechumens, for fear of profanation ; through a misunderstanding of tiie warning of the Lord against casting pearls before swine, and after the example of the Saniothracian and Eleusinian mysteries.' On the downfiiU of heathenism in the Roman fcmpire the Disciplina arcani gradually disappeared, and the administration of the sacraments became a public act, open to all.
Hence also we now find, from the fourth and fifth centuries onward, a great number of written liturgies, and that not only in the orthodox catholic church, but also among the schismatics (as among the Nestorians, and the Monophysites). These liturgies bear in most cases apostolic names, but in their present form can no more be of apostolic origin than the so-called Apostolic Constitutions and Canons, nor nearly so much as the Apostles' Creed. They contrast too strongly with the simplicity of the original Christian worship, so far as we can infer it from the New Testament and from the writings of the apologists and the ante-Nicene fathers. They contain also theological terms, such as ofioovaio^ (concerning the Son of God), SeoTOKa (concerning the Virgin Mary), and some of them the whole Nicene Creed with the additions of the second oecumenical council of 381, also allusions to the worshij) of martyrs and saints, and to monasticism, which point unmistakably to the Nicene and post-Nicene age. Yet they are based on a common liturgical tradition, which in its essential elements reaches back to an earlier time, perhaps in some points to the apostolic age, or even comes down from the Jewish worship through the channel of the Jewish Christian congregations. Otherwise their afiinity, wliich in many respects reminds one of the affinity of the Synoptical Gospels cannot be satisfactorily explaine<l. These old catholic litnrgies differ from one another in the
* Corap. Tcrtullian, Apolop;. c. 7 ; Origen, FTomil. 9 in Lcvit. toward the end Cyril of Jciusalem, Prtefat. ad Catcch. § 7, etc.