CHAPTER XXXIX.

RECENT CHANGES.

§ 163. Subscription and the Oath at Ordination, 1865. Vide §§ 24, 153. These were altered by the Clerical Subscription Act, 28 & 29 Vict. c. 122, July 5th, 1865, the text of which can be seen in E.G. October 10th, 1865, p. 85. The new oath therein enjoined was that of 21 & 22 Vict. c. 48.

§ 164. Relinquishment of Holy Orders, 1870. Vide § 160.

§ 165. The New Lectionary, 1871. Vide § 37.

§ 166. Act of Uniformity Amendment Act, July 18th, 1872. This statute (35 & 36 Vict. c. 35) allows a shortened service for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, additional services for Sundays and holydays, a separation of services, as, e.g., the Lord's Supper and the Litany, and a sermon without any previous service (Cripps, 571). The Act may be seen in E.G., September 1872, p. 41. Only Morning and Evening Prayer (not the Sacraments nor any of the Occasional Offices) can be shortened; and not those on Sunday, Christmas Day, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Ascension Day. On any day, however, shortened

services can be used in addition to the regular ones. In a shortened service (which must be approved by the ordinary) nothing may be introduced which is not taken from Scripture or the Prayer Book, except Anthems and Hymns.

§ 167. The Reading of the Burial Service, 1880. Vide § 121. The Burial Law Amendment Act, 43 & 44 Vict. c. 41, September 7th, 1880, may be seen in E.G., October 15th, 1880, p. 54.

GLOSSARY.

ANTHEM (antiphon, åvτlpwvov, antiphonum but more usually antiphona in the plural), a word occurring four times in the English Prayer Book. In the rubric (1662) after the Third Collect it is the modern anthem which is meant. Two rubrics (1549) mention an anthem or anthems to be sung or said instead of the Venite, and these were verses of Scripture and the Gloria Patri. The Preface of 1549 speaks of Anthems, Responds, and Invitatories as obstructing "the continual course of the reading of Scripture," and on that account suppressed. The anthem here intended was a Scripture verse sung before Canticles and Psalms, just as the Gloria Patri followed them. On Advent Sunday, for example, the first anthem was from Gen. xlix. 10, “The Sceptre," etc., introducing a group of four Psalms under one Gloria. A second anthem from the same chapter commenced another similar group, and in like manner a third, while subsequent Psalms were preceded singly by their anthems. Above thirty Psalms were appointed on that day for the morning service alone (Proc. 182), and the difficulty of maintaining that large number so lengthened out appears to have led in practice to the omission of some of them. (Cf. NOCTURN.)

COMFORT (from the medieval Latin conforto, and that from fortis), to strengthen or invigorate. Ducange explains it by corroboro, firmo. In the portion of the Bayeux Tapestry which represents the battle of Hastings, Odo Bishop of Bayeux is figured, staff in hand, rallying the wavering ranks, and the legend of that scene is, "Hic Odo eps. baculum tenens confortat Francos."

COMMEMORATION (memoria), a word occurring in the Preface of 1549, in the sense of a memorial of a holyday, or feast-day. The celebration of a holyday and a "commemoration" of it, in the stricter sense there intended, were not the

same thing. For after a holyday had been observed in the usual way, a memory of it might be kept up on ensuing days by repeating a distinctive portion of its service. Something of the kind is done in the English Church still, though the term commemoration is not used to describe it, as when Advent Sunday and the First Day of Lent are kept in memory on succeeding days, by the continued use of their collects, or when a greater festival is remembered at Holy Communion seven days by a Proper Preface. A "commemoration" would thus mean a minor observance of a holyday in addition to the observance in chief. Again, a minor feast might happen one year to escape chief observance altogether, and receive a commemoration only, as would occur under the following circumstances. The large number of fixed feast days, about twenty in a month, would continually occasion one of them to fall on a Sunday or other moveable feast; and since both feasts could not be well celebrated by full service on one day, the minor one would be merely remembered or commemorated, by means of a fragment of its service, and that not a collect only, or a preface, but a lection, which would probably be a legend, or a patristic homily. One of the Scripture lessons might thus come to be superseded by an uninspired composition, while, even if the commemorating lection were Scripture, it would be a special passage, and thus the regular order would be disturbed, as complained of in the Preface. It would appear that the services of the Roman Church labour under the same disadvantages to this very day. The Breviary Lections, observes the Catholic Dictionary (A. & A. s.v. LECTION), are very incomplete, partly because the multiplication of festivals causes many even of the portions given in the Office to be left out altogether.

COMMON PRAYER, public prayer as opposed to private. Although adopted in the title of the Prayer Book of 1549, the expression was one already in use. Henry, in his letter to Cranmer, Aug. 20th, 1543, enjoining general rogations and processions for the cessation of rain, wishes" every person, both by himself aparte and also by commen prayer," to beseech God; and accordingly Cranmer, August 23rd, orders that God should be besought "publicis supplicationibus et

suffragiis" (Wilk. iii. 868). So again, "this Common Prayer of procession," p. 33.

EASTER. The early Anglo-Saxons, long anterior to their conversion to Christianity, called April Eostre-monath, the month sacred to their goddess Eostre, just as March was Rhed-monath, dedicated to their god Rheda (Bede's "De Mensibus Anglorum," forming chap. xv. of his De Ratione Temporum, Works, vol. vi. p. 178, ed. Giles). The days of the week also were called in a similar manner after early pagan divinities, as they still are. The paschal festival, commonly falling in April, came to be designated the Eostre Feast, and more briefly Eostre; but the christianised AngloSaxon needed no more to remember his discarded deity on the feast of Christ's Resurrection than we think of Woden, Thor, and Freya on Ash-Wednesday, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday. EMBER-DAYS. The word Ember in this connection is found in a very ancient Anglo-Saxon Gospel of St. Matthew, where it stands in a heading or rubric before the passage Matt. xx. 29-34, directing it to be read on one of the days in question. The spelling there is Ymbrene. It also occurs in the English council of Enham, A.D. 1009, the sixteenth canon of which runs-" Jejunia Quatuor Temporum (quæ Imbren vocant) conservantor" (§ 90). There would seldom be occasion for writing a vernacular Church-word in the age of Latin services, and in the Missal Ember Wednesday, for instance, was Feria quarta Quatuor Temporum (F. H. Dickinson's, Sarum Missal, 434). In the Reformation literature the native word emerges again, as when in 1549 the Act 2 & 3 Ed. VI. c. 19 enjoins the observance of "Embering days." It was for the promotion of the fishing business, so important in public economics and for the rearing of seamen, that legislation interfered in behalf of these days and Lent, and their non-observance, simply as fish seasons, was made penal. "Embering days," would therefore be a familiar expression. It is found in the writings of Thomas Becon the Reformer (Acts of Christ and Antichrist, 1563), and in Tusser's Five Hundred Points, Keep Embring days and fastings well." A Privy Council letter to the Primate in 1576 (Str. G. 336) again brings up the subject of embering days and the fisheries. Though the

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