§ 98. THE LITUKGIES. THEIR ORIGIN AND CONTENTS. 525
tlic Postcommunio. It affords less room for symbolical action, but more for word and song, and follows more closely the course of the church year with varying collects and prefaces for the high festivals,' thus gaining variety. In this it stands the nearer to the Protestant worship, which, however, entirely casts off symbolical veils, and makes the sermon the centre.
Every Oriental liturgy has two main divisions. The first embraces the prayers and acts before the Anaphora or Oblation (canon Missse) to the Sursum. corda ; the second, the Anaphora to the close.
The first division again falls into the Mass of the Catechumens, and the Mass of the Faithful, to the Sursum corda. To it belong the Prefatory Prayer, the Introit, Ingressa, or Antiphon, the Little Entrance, the Trisagion, tlie Scripture Lessons, the Prayers after the Gospel, and the Expulsion of the Catechumens ; then the Prayers of the Faithful, the Great Entrance, the Offertory, the Kiss of Peace, the Creed.
The Anaphora comprises the great Eucharistic Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Commemoration of the life of Jesus, the Words of Institution, the Oblation of the Elements, the Invocation of the Holy Ghost, the Great Intercession for Quick and Dead, the Lord's Prayer, and finally the Communion with its proper prayers and acts, the Thanksgiving, and the Dismissal.'
^ The Collects belong strictly only to the Latin church, which has produced many hundred such short prayers. The word comes either from the fact that the prayer collects the sense of the Epistle and Gospel for the day in the form of prayer ; or that the priest collects therein the wishes and petitions of the people. The collect is a short liturgical prayer, consisting of one petition, closing with the form of mediation through the merits of Christ, and sometimes with a doxology to the Trinity. Comp. a treatise of Neale on The Collects of the Church, in Essays on Liturgiology and Church History, p. 46 ff., and William Bright: Ancient Collects and PrMvers, selected from various rituals, Oxford and London, 1860.
- It is a curious fact, that in the Protestant Episcopal Trinity chapel of New York, with the full approval of the bishop, Horatio Potter, and the assistance of the cnoir, on the second of March, 1865, the anniversary of tne accession of the Russian Czar, Alexander IT., the full liturgy or mass of the orthodox Grajco-Russian church was celebrated before a numerous assembly by a recently arrived Graeco-Russian monk and priest (or deacon), Agapius Honcharenko. This is the first instance of an Oriental service in the United States (for the Russian fleet whicn was in the harbor of New York in 1863 held its worship exclusively upon the ships), and probably alec the first instance of the celebration of the unbloody sacrifice of the mass and
526 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
§ 99. The Oriental Litin^gies.
Tliere are, in all, probably more than a hundred ancient liturgies, if we reckon revisals, modifications, and translations. But according to modern investigations they may all be reduced to five or six families, which may be named after the churches in which they originated and were used, Jerusalem (or Antioch), Alexandria, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Rome.' Most of them belong to the Oriental church ; for this church was in general much more productive, and favored greater variety, than the Western, which sought uniformity in organization and worship. And "among the Oriental liturgies the Greek are the oldest and most important.
1. The liturgy of St. Clement. This is found in the
the mystery of transubstantiation in a Protestant church and with the sanction of Protestant clergy. The liturgy of St. Chrysostom, in the Slavonic translation, was intoned by the priest ; the short responses, such as Ilospode^ Famelue (Kyrie, Elei- 8on), wore grandly sung by the choir in the Slavonic language, and the Beatitudes, the Nicene Creed (of course, without the " Filioque," which is condemned by the Greek church as a heretical innovation), and the Gloria in Excelsis in English There were wanting only the many genuflexions and prostrations, the trine immersion, and infant communion, to complete the illusion of a marriage of the two churches. Some secular journals gave the matter the siLcnificance of a political demonstration in favor of Russia ! One of the religious papers saw in it an exhibition of the unity and catholicity of the church, and a resemblance to the miracle of Pentecost, in that Greeks, Slavonians, and Americans heard in their own tongues the wonderful works of God ! But most of the Episcopal and other Protestant papers exposed the doctrinal inconsistency, since the Greek liturgy coincides in all important points with the Roman mass. Unfortunately for the philo-Russian movement, the Russo-Greek monk Agapius soon afterward publicly declared himself an opponent of the holy orthodox oriental church, and charged it with serious error. The present Greek church, which regards even the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope of Rome as unbaptizcd (because uniinmcrsed) heretics and schismatics, could, of course, never consent to such an anomalous service as was held in Trinity chapel for the first, and in all proliahility for the last time.
^ Neale now (The Liturgies of S. Mark, etc., 1869, p. vii.) divides the primitive liturgies into five families : (1) That of St. James, or of Jerusalem ; (2) that of St. Mark, or of Alexandria ; (3) that of St. Thaddjcus, or of the East ; (4) that oi St. Pkter, or of Rome ; (5) that of St. John, or of Ephesos. Formerly (Hist, of the Holy Eastern Church) he counted the Clementine Liturgy separately; but since Daniel has demonstrated the affinity of it with the Jerusalem (or, as he calls it, th* Antiochiau) family, he has put it down as a branch of that family.