in Cambridge Texts and Studies.1 follows:

It is as

The very simplicity of the invocation Quam oblationem' in the Roman Canon is in accord with the almost embarrassing simplicity, or even it would seem want of technical exactness in suggestion, found in details of that document ;-a matter which did not escape those acute, eminently able, and most interesting writers, the great Anglican Divines of the seventeenth century.

Neither has the side open to criticism escaped an eminently capable and resourceful' member of the Society of Jesus; for in another extract following immediately is quoted Father Billot, S.J., as he was then, now a Cardinal; he finds difficulties in the interpretation of the Canon of a serious kind. Mr. Bishop in a note to this passage says, alluding to the difficulties felt by the Anglican writers of the seventeenth century in the interpretation of the Canon :

As, for instance, 'omnium circumstantium qui tibi offerunt hoc sacrificium laudis '

ut

nobis corpus et sanguis fiat' . . . The whole clause Supra quae propitio,' etc. .. Iube haec per

ferri,' etc. . . . 'Per quem haec omnia Domine.'

That the difficulties raised by those writers are not wholly to be attributed to the controversial

1 Vol. viii. No. 1, p. 136.

spirit that may have animated them, but must have some basis of reality in the text itself, I gather from the emphatic statement of the eminently capable and resourceful Father L. Billot, now for some years an oracle in the Gregorian University in Rome, that unless a certain method of interpretation advocated by him be adopted these difficulties are as good as insoluble: "Nam et ista (i.e. the Supra quae,' etc., and Iube haec,' etc.) et alia multa quae nobis objiciunt haeretici, quantum essent inextricabilia extra principia hactenus declarata,' etc.

It has been said above that even the grammar of the Canon has not escaped assault. Dr. Adrian Fortescue (the quotations under his name that follow are taken from his work The Mass, ed. of 19121; a book appearing with the approval of Cardinal Bourne in the 'Westminster Library ') is inclined to offer explanations of this kind:

The form: Communicantes et memoriam venerantes' is difficult. Communicantes' means ' in communion with,' a quite beautiful insistence on our union with the Saints in one body. . . . But why these participles ? No finite verb follows (except in a dependent clause). They must be taken as finite verbs. One can make the phrase very bad Latin by understanding 'sumus.' 2

1 Longmans, 1912.

2 Fortescue, The Mass, Longmans, 1912, p. 332.

Many years ago I was going over the Canon with the late Monsignor Ceriani, the Prefect of the Ambrosiana at Milan, and he pointed out that in his opinion Communicantes was a Semitic construction. This seems one of the best of the explanations that are now in vogue. An Anglican friend has suggested that Communicantes qualifies the noun to which qui tibi offerunt is the relative. One of the highest authorities on Latin in this country has assured me that he can find nothing wrong with the grammar of Communicantes.

Putting aside details of language and grammar, the structure of the whole prayer has been thought by eminent Roman Catholic liturgists to show marks of a complete rearrangement, or even dislocation and shortening, of the different clauses; in which process the Canon has suffered very severely. Some think Te igitur is wholly out of its place in the present mass-book. Dom Fernand Cabrol, the Abbot of the Benedictines from Solesmes settled at Farnborough, and editor of the large Dictionnaire d'Archéologie et de Liturgie, which is now coming out, writes thus under the word Canon :

If we talk of the present state of the Roman Canon there is no doubt that it begins at Te igitur.

The preface is sharply divided from it and has quite a different character. Te igitur, in spite of the resumptive force of igitur, has so little connexion with the prayer before it, that not a few liturgists, as will be seen later on, have not scrupled to separate it in its origin from the preface and to put it back after the first Memento or even after the Anamnesis. Other liturgists perceive between the preface and Te igitur an hiatus caused by the absence of Vere Sanctus which joins on the preface to the Canon in the Gallican liturgies.1

Dr. Fortescue lets us know what the trouble is in the present state of the Canon. It has deflected from the type set out in the Eastern rites. Roman as he is, yet he holds that a Christian liturgy must conform in its chief features with the Oriental liturgies; and when it does not, then difficulties arise. He regards it as a fault when the Roman Canon does not follow the type of the Oriental liturgies, which invoke the Holy Ghost to come down and consecrate the sacred gifts.

The chief peculiarities and the greatest difficulties are the absence of any invocation of the Holy Ghost to consecrate the oblation and the order of the various elements of the Canon. This last is the

1 F. Cabrol, Dictionnaire d'Archéologie chrétienne et de Liturgie, Paris, Letouzey, 1907, t. ii. col. 1849, sub voce Canon.

great question of all. It seems clear to anyone who examines our Canon that its order has been somehow dislocated. There is an absence of logical sequence in the elements of this prayer that can hardly fail to strike one, especially if we compare it with the Antiochene and Alexandrine Anaphoras. The Canon is indeed full of difficulties. There is the prayer Supplices te rogamus that both by its place and its form so plainly suggests the ghost of an Invocation with all the essential part left out. And there is the tangle of the great Intercession. . . . It seems impossible that this dislocated Intercession can be the original form.1

Thus it will be understood that the Prayer Book is not alone in containing an Eucharistic order that has undergone dislocation in its central portion. That 'the Canon is indeed full of difficulties' appears to be the opinion largely accepted by learned Roman Catholics who have dealt with this point of late.

Further, speaking of the conjectural reconstructions of the old Mass, attempts to recover it as it was before the days of St. Gregory the Great, Dr. Fortescue says:

We may accept as admitted on all sides that there has been such a recasting. It is in the pro

1 Fortescue, op. cit., p. 110.