stood by the people, "And this is done on all occasions in the Holy Celebration," "then when the reader has ceased, the President verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things."

But universal as this Scripture reading and teaching was in all the liturgical services, there is no proof that it formed a part of the ordinary daily offices in the first three or four centuries of the Church. These consisted only, during all that period, in acts of confession and penitence, combined with sacred hymns and psalmody and outpourings of prayer. And the reason for the omission of Bible lessons from these offices is probably to be found in their relation to the other portions of the Church's worship and in the special purpose they were designed to serve in the growth and cultivation of the Christian life.

The question of the distinctive character of the daily services, and their connection with the Sacramental offices has been frequently discussed and often very much confused in the discussion. Archdeacon Freeman, who has given this subject a full, and in some respects most suggestive consideration, regards "the ordinary worship" of the Church as essentially a continuation and personal application of the great sacramental services. He says: "It is strictly complementary to them as filling up their1 idea, not supplementary as if adding anything to it." And he finds in this all their necessity and benefits. They are indeed adjuncts and subsidiary to the Divine Sacraments, and from the nature of the Church and its Sacraments this

1 Freeman, ut sup., p. 202.

must be so. If the one of these is the means of the union of the soul and the whole man with the Church and life of Christ, and the other is given for his spiritual nurture, communion and self-sacrifice, through the constant receiving and feeding on Christ by "the Spirit," and "as a continual remembrance of the sacrifice of the death of Christ," whatever is or can be done, whether of private endeavor or by the public worship of the Church, must be in some way dependent on or related to the idea of one or the other of these Sacraments. But this does not account for the especial characteristics which distinguish these daily services, nor for their limitation to the few and peculiar elements which originally entered into their composition.

The fundamental difference in the two classes of service appears to me to be derived from two closely related yet profoundly different attitudes of man's soul before God, as He is made known in the Gospel and presented to us in His Church.

In one of these conditions God presents Himself to men in the character of the Divine Giver, and we come before Him chiefly as receivers. This is the distinctive purpose of the Sacraments, and of His revelation of Himself in Holy Scriptures. The very definition of a Sacrament is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us." They require indeed for their "wholesome effect or operation" proper dispositions in those who receive them, with a life corresponding to what they "represent," and they are administered with forms that call into play many and

1 Articles of Religion, Art. 25.

various elements of our mental and spiritual self, but yet in each the inner and vital reality is a gift of God to us, and our attitude before Him is that of receivers and partakers of the blessing that is given.

But the Christian life requires more for its complete development and perfecting than merely to be a recipient of Divine gifts and favors. Man needs to express his own inner life and feelings, to realize and make known his felt necessities, to soar upward in the utterance of his holy aspirations, to confess and beg forgiveness for the sins that oppress him-in a word, to respond by his own acts and speech to the blessings that have been given him by Christ. If he is to cultivate his entire being as a child of God, he must let his whole self open out its thoughts, and pour forth its desires and praises to the Divine, and must, in conscious penitence and prayer, unfold the struggles of his inmost spirit to the ear of God.

The character of the daily services of the Church in their original form corresponds precisely to these requirements. They were throughout expressive of man's upward look toward God, and were the speaking out of his own self to God. The worshiper was not there so much to receive or learn from Christ, as to meditate and feel, and utter forth his own heart and yearnings as a child of Christ. And in this personal self-exercise of the soul, and its responding in its own acts and words back to God, it not only manifests its entire dependence upon Him, and love for Him, but also realizes more fully what a true life in God should be, and at the same time both applies the gifts which the Gospel has already given him, and is the better

prepared for the right use of those which he must always need to receive.

In this view of the nature of these services there was no need in them of Scripture reading as instruction. This as essentially a gift of God to man was placed with the other acts expressive of the Divine giving in the Liturgy, and for a considerable period was confined almost wholly to this service.

There were, indeed, large portions of the Bible in the daily services then, as with us now. In fact these constituted a chief element in both the morning and evening prayer; but only those parts of the Scripture were employed which represented man speaking himself forth to God, and it was from its peculiar appropriateness for this purpose that the Psalter entered so largely into these offices. This is the only portion of the Bible in which, as a whole, man opens cut his own heart to the Deity. The other writings tell us mainly of God, are from Him, instruct us in His will, reveal His love, His works and ways. This marvelous collection is all from man's face turned Godwards. It is the universal, ever sounding voice of human nature, as it cries up to God in seeking, hope, struggle, agony, penitence, joy, trust, praise and prayer. There is no phase of the heart of man, or of man's life that is not here-calm meditation, heart-broken confession, humiliating self-abasement, confiding trust in the Divine forgiveness, indignant wrath, sublime devotion, agonizing desolation that would have been despair but for a hope in God, and such exultant praise as never elsewhere has been hymned by human tongue or pen, all find a voice, and all are given fitting utterance in

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this wonderful self-revelation of the human soul to God.

It is because the Psalter is this, and has thus given to men everywhere the fullest and fittest means of expressing their thoughts, and struggles and aspirations to God that it has always been, and to the end of time will be, the chiefest element in that part of the worship of the Church in which man presents himself as a conscious soul before God, to respond by his own words to Christ's giving, and with heart and voice to seek for more and more of the blessings of Christ's love.

So long as the two classes of service retained their primitive characteristics unchanged, the Scripture reading and instruction were given with every Liturgy, but the daily offices consisted chiefly of the confessions, psalms and prayers of the worshipers, as at the first.

After a time, however, the same influences that led during the Middle Ages to so many other changes in the Eucharistic worships of the Church caused also the practical exclusion of the reading of the Bible from the Mass, only the short gospel and epistle for the day were retained, and these in a language unknown to the congregation; and following in the same line with this the daily offices, which had, in other respects, been widely perverted from their original intention, were now still further changed by the insertion into their contents of a confused jumble of the lives and miracles of saints, and extracts from the writings, real or suppositious, of the fathers, so that the reading of the Scriptures was really null in one set of the services, and only this miserable substitute for it given in the other, and thus the whole ancient system of Bible lessons