It is remarkable that the rule thus established for Wednesdays and Fridays, when none desired to communicate, coincides with a custom observed at Alexandria from a very early period. "At Alexandria," says Socrates,1 A.D. 439," the Scriptures are read on the fourth day, and on that called. Preparation, and the Doctors expound them, and all the observances of a Synaxis are kept, except the Celebration of the Mysteries. And this is an ancient custom at Alexandria." There was clearly nothing wrong in making this partial use of the Liturgy, unless it was also wrong to admit Catechumens, Penitents, and others to the same portion of the Office, even when the Celebration was to follow for the Faithful. There is reason to believe, however, that our English use of the former part of the Liturgy, as a distinct Service, had a far more general counterpart in the rites of the early Church than the Patriarchate of Alexandria has furnished. In the daily prayers prescribed in the Apostolical Constitutions, Matins begin with the 63rd Psalm, Evensong with the 141st. In both, the Psalm is followed by the Prayers for the Catechumens and other non-communicants, and by their several dismissals, as when it is proposed to celebrate. Then comes the Prayer for the Faithful, or Eucharistic Litany, corresponding to our Prayer for the Church Militant, only those who communicate being present; and the Service concludes with a Prayer, a Thanksgiving, and a Blessing, proper for the Morning or Evening, as the case may be. In a word, the earliest Services for Morning and Evening, of which we have any account, consisted of a large portion of the Office for the Holy Communion and certain short additions at the beginning and end; and therefore furnish an almost exact parallel to our Second Service, which is composed similarly of the corresponding part of the Liturgy with the addition of "one or more" Collects and the Blessing.

II. With the above facts before him, the reader will not be tempted to join in the unworthy sneer against the English practice in which some modern writers have indulged. In condemning their own Church they are condemning the Primitive. There is less injustice, however, in comparing both the Primitive and English usage to the Missa Sicca or

1 Hist. Eccl. L. v. c. xxii. p. 235.

2 For the Morning Prayer, see L. viii. cc. xxxvii.-xxxix. ; for the Evening, cc. xxxv.-xxxvii.; for the Prayers for the Catechumens, etc., and the Faithful, see cc. vi.-x. Both the Litany and the additions proper for the Morning and Evening may be seen in Bingham, Book xv. ch. i. s. ii. and Book xiii. ch. x. ss. i. vi.-viii. ch. xi. ss. i.-iv.

Dry Mass of the Middle Ages; for, as that appears to have been usually performed, there is a substantial resemblance between them. One difference between the English practice and the Medieval custom is, that whereas the former is prescribed by the full authority of the Church itself, the Missa Sicca was an unauthorized act of private devotion. Another is, that the Missa Sicca was for especial occasions only,-for the sake of pilgrims and persons unable to go to Church from sickness or any other cause, for voyages by sea (when it was called Missa Nautica), and for use at funerals that took place late in the day. It must be confessed too that the Medieval rite was tainted by some admixture, at least, of superstitious motive, and sometimes of superstitious practice. There was evidently ascribed to it a quasi-Sacramental character, such as did not belong to the common Offices of prayer. It pretended to be more than it was; and hence it became necessary to warn men that it was without the grace" of the perfect Eucharist, and of "no profit to the Faithful."

It is an obvious conjecture, that the Mediæval Dry Mass was a relic of the early use of the Missa Catechumenorum before mentioned; but I cannot discover any facts which tend to confirm the suspicion. One of the earliest references to the rite occurs in the year 1212, when a Council of Paris (or Rouen) forbade priests to "celebrate Dry Masses for the Dead," if burdened with the number they were required to say. Priests were forbidden to burden themselves with too many Masses by the Synod of Salisbury held in 1217, but the Canon does not mention Dry Masses as a mode of discharging their obligation.

4

This office is thus described by Durandus,5 A.D. 1286

1 Martene, L. i. c. iii. Art. i. n. xx.

2 Petrus Cantor, A.D. 1190, Verb. Abbrev. c. 29, in Bona, L. i. c. xv. n. vi.

3 P. i. c. xi. Labb. tom. xi. col. 61.

4 Can. xv. Labb. u.s. col. 251. Martene and others allege as a much earlier authority for the Dry Mass some instructions of Prudentius, Bishop of Troyes in the ninth century, for ministering to a sick person near death; but this is an oversight: for he expressly orders that the sick man receive at the end. "After that, let him communicate him. The Prayer post Communionem follows."-Mart. L. i. c. iii. Art. i. n. xx. The peculiarity is that Prudentius orders the Priest to say the Collect, Epistle, Gospel, Preface, and Lord's Prayer, before he communicates the patient with the reserved Elements, which he has brought. This has misled some of his readers, who did not notice the fact of the Communion. Canons that condemn Priests who celebrate without receiving are quite as little to the purpose.

5 Lib. iv. c. i. n. 23.

"It is called a Dry Mass, because if the Priest cannot consecrate (as having perchance celebrated already, or from any other cause), he can take his Stole and read the Epistle and Gospel, and say the Lord's Prayer, and give the Benediction. Nay, should he from devotion, not from superstition, wish to say the whole Office of the Mass without the Sacrifice, he may take all his sacerdotal vestments, and celebrate the Mass in its proper order to the end of the Offertory, omitting the secret prayers which belong to the Sacrifice. Yet he may say the Preface. . . . Let him not, however, say anything out of the Canon; but let him not pass over the Lord's Prayer, and let him not say those things which follow there to be said in silence. Let him not have Chalice or Host, nor let him say or do any of those things which are said or done over the Chalice or Eucharist. He may also say, The Peace of the Lord be always, etc., and let him complete the Office of the Mass in its due course from that point. Nevertheless it is better to omit the rest." This was, I presume, the general mode of celebrating a Dry Mass; but sometimes the rite was open to far stronger objections. We are told, for example, that when S. Louis1 returned from the Holy Land, he caused a reserved Host to be placed in the ship, and an Altar to be erected, where he used daily to "hear solemnly the Divine Office, to wit, all the Canonical Hours; and, with exception of the Canon, what pertained to the Mass, the Priest and Ministers wearing the sacred vestments according to the day." We read on one occasion of his life, in 1269, of" four Masses being sung (during a storm at sea) without Celebration, to wit, of the Blessed Mary, of the Angels, of the Holy Ghost, and a fourth for the souls of the Faithful departed." When Frederic III. was espoused to the Infanta of Portugal, "there came in a little ship a certain Priest carrying the Sacrament of the Eucharist in a Pyx that hung on his neck, and he showed the Lord's Body for devotion to all in the carac, and there also did he read a Dry Mass without the Canon, and gave the Blessing." The author of the Manipulus Curatorum, about 1333, says, " Rather [than that the Priest celebrate a second time] I approve of the custom which is observed in some Greek Churches, namely, when, after Mass said, pilgrims come to a Church, if there be not there another Priest prepared to celebrate, the Priest

1 Gulielmus de Nangiaco, Gesta S. Ludov. in Hist. Franc. Script. Du Chesne, tom. v. pp. 360, 385.

2 Nicolaus Lanckmann, Hist. Despons. Frid. III. Script. Austriac. Pez. vol. ii. col. 586. This text gives in quodam mercacio where the earlier reads in quadam pixide.

robes himself, as if he were to say Mass, and says for them a Mass of the B. V. M., or of the Holy Ghost, or of the Saint for whom the pilgrimage is made; he does not however say the Canon, nor consecrate, but shows them other relics in lieu of the Elevation of the Body of Christ; and that Mass is called a Dry Mass." Directions for a Dry Mass thus performed, whether for devotion, or at sea, or before the sick, are given in the Roman Sacerdotale printed at Venice in 1560. Relics, however, are not mentioned; but it is said, "He ought not to show the Sacrament in it, even if he have it ready there in the Church in its own sacred place, because of the danger of the ostension." 2

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Bona, who died in 1674, believed that in his time the Missa Sicca had, "through the provident care of the Bishops, been everywhere abolished and done away;" but he was mistaken. Martene, 1699, heard that it was still in use at funerals in the diocese of Poictiers. De Moleon, about the same time, tells us that a "Dry Mass, or Mass of the Catechumens," was then said on Rogation Days in those Churches in Rheims at which the procession made a station, and again at Rouen on Palm Sunday for the blessing of the Palms. He also informs us that this rite was observed in the Diocese of Clermont, whenever a funeral took place in the afternoon. The Carthusians, we may add, still read daily in their cells an Office formed on the model of the Mass of the Catechumens; but this hardly deserves, though it has received, the name of a Dry Mass, not being said at the Altar, nor in the Eucharistic vestments.8

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III. Wheatley, writing near the beginning of the last century, says, "It is certain that the Communion Office still everywhere retains the old name of the Second Service;" and he ascribes the origin of this name to the fact that the Communion Office was originally used some time after Morning Prayer, not, as now, without any interval between them. It was doubtless so called because to the apprehension of the people it was a perfectly distinct service, and followed the other; but there is reason to believe that the name was not in use until long after the union of the Offices, which appears

to have begun with Grindal1 in 1571, and very soon to have become general. At least I do not meet with any instance of the usage earlier than the seventeenth century. To give an example or two:-Bishop Wren2 in 1636 orders that "the whole Divine Service be read, both the First and Second Service, on Sundays and Holy Days, and Lecture-days, if they have any; and that the Communion Service, called the Second Service, be audibly and distinctly read at the Communion Table," etc. In 1640 the following inquiry was inserted in the Visitation Articles prepared by order of Convocation, "as an uniform Book of Articles to be used in every Diocese:"-" Doth your Minister read the Communion Service, or the Second Service, on every Sunday and Holy Day throughout the year, though there be no Communion, according as it is appointed in the Book of Common Prayer?" 3 In the Services for Jan. 30,4 as put forth immediately after the Restoration, the Second Service is called "The Latter Service." After a long period of disuse this would naturally appear the more appropriate title; because the former is more suggestive of an interval between it and the Matins or First Service.

We may notice, before we quit the subject, that this partial use of the Liturgy was called a "commemoration of the holy Communion;" as by Grindal,5 in 1571, and Aylmer, in 1586, who distinguish between the "commemoration " and the "administration."

IV. In this Rubric, as it stood in the Book of 1549, it was ordered that the Priest should, when there is no Communion, "say all things at the Altar (appointed to be said at the Celebration of the Lord's Supper) until after the Offertory," etc. When the Rubric was remodelled in 1552, the place at which these prayers are to be said was unfortunately not mentioned. This gave the Puritans an excuse for saying them in the desk. So early as 1571 Grindal' found it necessary to order that "the Prayers and other Service appointed

Injunctions for the Laity, n. 9; Remains, p. 137; or Ritual Comm. Report ii. App. p. 414. See before, Part 1. Ch. ii. Sect. i. p. 30. 2 Doc. Ann. vol. ii. p. 251. Similarly p. 255.

3 Append. to Sec. Rep. of Rit. Comm. p. 590. This question is copied verbatim into the Articles of Pory, Archdeacon of Middlesex, 1662, ibid. p. 626.

4 A Form of Common Prayer to be used upon the 30th of January. Printed by John Bill, 1661. I have used a copy in the Bodl. Libr.

5 Articles at York, n. 3; App. to Sec. Rep. of Ritual Comm. p. 407. 6 Artt. for Lond. n. ii. ; ibid. p. 431.

7 Injunct. for the Laity, n. 2; Remains, p. 132; or Rep. u.s. p. 413.