as they were one, involving the church in a mathematical, as the medieval church has involved it in a natural contradiction to the senses our Creator has given us. For a thousand years the church had been content with the words of Christ and his apostles. It now compels all to use a language as well as rites unknown to Christ and his apostles. On Corpus Christi, a festival of the middle ages, established to commemorate the settlement of this singular controversy, the Church of Rome sings,

"This is not bread, but God and man, my Saviour."

In the hymn of Thomas Aquinas, her angelic doctor, who gave scholastic form to this medieval doctrine, the Church of Rome sings in her Missal:

"I adore thee, devoutly, latent Deity, who hidest thyself under these figures. My whole heart is subject to thee-because meditating on thee all fails. Sight,

In

touch, taste in thee is deceived. hearing alone do I trust. I believe what the Son of God said—nothing truer than that word of truth."

Thus the church doctrine of the Mass grew with the church forms of the Mass-adapted, and adapting themselves to each other. Unknown by name for a thousand years-laying hold of the natural figures of Scripture to sustain itself: strengthened by the exaggerated and rhetorical language of the Fathers -encouraged, perhaps, by the desire of exalting this sacrament in the estimation of those that were neglecting it, or whose love had grown cold, at last the solemn acts of the church of the middle ages fastened it on its creed, and has fastened to this day on the greater part of the world calling itself Christian, a doctrine the most remote possible from the gospel, and yet so singularly adapted, both to exalt the power of the priesthood by whom this daily miracle is wrought, and to soothe the superstitious feelings of the laity, that of all medieval doctrines it is the most rooted, defying alike argument and ridicule. It is incredible that such a doctrine could have been in the minds of the apostles, on the night of its institution, without suggesting more doubts and difficulties than did the tidings of Christ's resurrection to Thomas. It is incredible that such a doctrine

1 Even Thomas Aquinas uses language, as if after all his scholastic definitions be was still unsatisfied-as quoted in the Brev. p. 396, he speaks of "the ineffable mode of the Divine presence." If ineffable, why did the church presume to define it?

TENACITY OF THE SACRAMENTAL THEORY.

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could have prevailed in the early church in times yet pagan, without subjecting the churches to unmeasured ridicule and reproach. If the Mahometan of the present day thinks it monstrous in the Romish Christian to pretend to eat his godwould the philosophers and wits of the first three centuries of the Christian era have spared their shafts? Would the early apologies for Christianity have contained no notice of its existence, and the early creeds of the church been utterly silent? Would an Arius and other heretics, that denied the mysteries of the Trinity and incarnation, have found no difficulties in receiving the church theory of transubstantiation? Yet this church theory is now the pillar of Roman orthodoxy, the test of true discipleship: and unreasoning submission to it the mark of that corpselike obedience required of those that would be perfect. By this doctrine the power of the priesthood is secured for ever, and the voice of the church exalted not only to an equality with God, but above the voice of God. Rome has pronounced the man accursed that doubts it; yet, were this doctrine written in the Divine word as with a sunbeam, it were not more clearly the teaching of the word, than the opposite is the teaching of the senses; and the man who believes God speaking in the book of Creation is equally devout with the man who believes God speaking in the book of Revelation. It were a balanced judgment at best, staying all decision, and taking away all moral responsibility.

CHAPTER V.

THE BREVIARY.

Many Breviaries before the Reformation.-Each national church its Breviary.— The use of such a Book to the Priesthood.-Its reformation.-The Breviary of Cardinal Quignonius.-Its rejection.-The theory of the Breviary.-Arrangement of the twenty-four hours of the day.-Obligation to its use. Scripture readings. Fragmentary character.-Mutilation.-Considered as a substitute for Scripture.

THE Breviary is the book of the priest-his private liturgyand to all practical purposes his Bible. It is adapted to the ecclesiastical year, its seasons and festivals, furnishing not, for Sundays only, but for each day of the year, its appropriate prayers, psalms and hymns, its scripture lessons for daily reading, with their accompanying comments from the fathers and doctors of the church, and the legends of its saints and martyrs. Such helps existed long prior to the Reformation, and may have originated in the best of motives-in the anxious desire for the better instruction of the priesthood, and in the necessity of providing some book that should be an abbreviation of many books to which few priests in the middle ages could have access. Like the pictures in the churches, which Pope Gregory called "the books of the common people"-the Breviaries of the middle ages, in all probability, served for a season a still higher purpose, in the best way then available, even for the priesthood. We can little conceive now the ignorance and helplessness of the general priesthood of Europe-their inability to select for themselves or their want of all the materials for a good selection, even in their Cathedral churches and monasteries. The good bishop of the middle ages saw to the spiritual instruction of his clergy, by seeing to their being all provided with and making daily use of their Breviary—and a good priest, in his daily use of the devotions and scripture readings of this one

book, gave exactly the same proof of his piety and conscientiousness, as the youthful Protestant minister in his daily study of his Bible.

The idea of such a book of the priesthood did not, therefore, originate in Romanism, but seems to have arisen spontaneously in almost all the national churches of Europe, long prior to the Reformation. The Goths of Spain had their Breviary; the French Church had its Breviary; England-" the Breviary of Salisbury" and Scotland, "the Breviary of Aberdeen"-all which, along with many more evidences of the independence of national churches, Rome has laboured to obliterate, by commanding the exclusive use of the Roman Breviary, and thus extinguishing every appearance of a divided worship, and of independent national and self-regulated churches.

Since the Reformation, Rome has been careful to have the Breviary that was to supersede all others, revised and polished, and even reformed. No book, not excepting the Missal, has undergone so many revisions; and none except the Missal is more widely diffused throughout her ecclesiastical bounds, and in more frequent use by her educated priesthood. It is regarded even more than the Missal, as the great liturgical monument reared by the church, at once the book of instruction and of devotion to all her religious orders.

The name Breviary once expressed brevity, yet it is now the largest of all her liturgical books-containing more matter than all the others put together-yet, as a compilation of scriptures, fathers, doctors, martyrologies, and legends of church history, as well as of devotional exercises, it is still appropriately enough called "the Breviary." The legends are brief indeed, compared to the compilations of the Bollandists in their “Acta Sanctorum," in fifty folio volumes, and not yet finished; and the devotions are brief also, compared with the twenty folio volumes of the liturgy of the Greek Church-through which no reforming hand has yet swept its way. Others, however, conjecture that the name originated when this help to the private duties of the priesthood consisted only of an epitome of prayers and scripture lessons, rather referred to than cited at length, or containing only the psalms and Sunday prayers, made in the time of Pope Damasus, by the aid of his friend and adviser Jerome, who may have used some such help in his monasteries in Palestine afterwards, the scripture lessons were added for the use

of the monks. Thus it grew-Pope Gregory the Great adding the prayers, hymns, and responses, to the lessons and gospelsother popes touching and retouching it, adding some new part, or displacing some old one, until the ideal of the Breviary came to be, that of carrying the priest through the entire Scriptures of the Old and New Testament once a year, and through the Psalter every week, along with lessons from the doctors of the church and narratives of its worthies; that devotion and duty, faith and practice might grow together-an ideal altogether worthy of a Christian church seeking the spiritual training of its teachers—at a time when the multiplication of books was so difficult to all, and access to them impossible to the majority of her clergy.

The idea had been perfect had all Scripture been given. Yet the extracts from Scripture, contained in the various Breviaries of the middle ages, were surely better than no Scripture at all, and must have contributed to maintain whatever Scriptural knowledge then existed. What Protestant can forbear observing how much better still it had been for the priesthood of that period, as well as for their flocks, had the desire for the better instruction of the clergy, which called for the help of church Breviaries, and so multiplied them, taken the direction of multiplying in the vernacular tongue, or even in Latin, copies of the entire Scriptures, and put every ordained priest in possession of a copy of the Word of God, instead of a Breviary? In what a different state of religious intelligence would the ecclesiastics of Europe have been when the art of printing laid open to all the stores of knowledge, and the Reformation stirred anew the hearts of men! The Breviary, which might have been a help before the Reformation, became a hinderance and stumblingblock after it, and, instead of creating the taste and desire for the entire Scriptures, satisfied her priesthood, and superseded the Scriptures. The first book printed in Scotland was not the Bible, but "the Aberdeen Breviary," printed at Edinburgh in two volumes, black letter, by Walter Chepman-and how little "the Aberdeen Breviary"1 had done for the Scriptural instruction of the priests of Scotland, we learn from a provincial Council of the Scottish Church, held in 1551 and 1552, which de

1 A copy of "the Aberdeen Breviary," in good preservation, may be seen in the Library of the University of Edinburgh. We believe it is now in course of publication by the Burnett Club.