cathedral and a levelling up to the ways of modern times. We here assist at the promotion there of the hard rules of the Pie, resulting so often from the multiplication of octaves on the one hand and on the other the disuse of the good old Roman simple plan of observing an octave by saying a prayer on the sole eighth day after the feast and that was all.1

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represent for the Liturgy, as for the greater number of other ecclesiastical institutions, a period of decline, for it is the time of schisms, and in that one word everything harmful is summed up. The few documents that are available for the liturgical history of that time attest this, as, for example, the 'Gesta BeneIdicti XIII' and the XV Ordo Romanus.' Disorder and abuses crept into the Liturgy as into everything else. 2

Monsignor Marco Vattasso, the well-known author of the invaluable Initia Patrum and a Scriptor in the Vatican Library, has reviewed a work of Father Tacchi Venturi, s.J., on the history of the Company of Jesus in Italy. The reader may judge for himself from the account given by the Monsignor in Il Momento, Turin, Monday, 22 November, 1909, of the scandals

1 F. A. Cardinal Gasquet and Edmund Bishop, The Bosworth Psalter, London, Bell, 1908, p. 71 note.

2 F. Cabrol, Catholic Encyclopædia, New York, no date, ? 1907, vol. ii. p. 774, under Breviary.

of the time. The sixteenth century was indeed a bad age; but how came it that the Church could allow such a state of affairs to be possible? Monsignor Vattasso holds that

The state of the Church before the Council of Trent was most wretched. Innumerable disorders were to be found everywhere. . . . The first of these was the promotion to holy orders of ignorant and unworthy candidates; the second that in presenting to livings more attention was paid to the profit of the person called to the office than to the good of souls; the third was the non-residence of bishops on their Sees. . . . The education of the secular clergy was very low. Some did not know how to read, or in reading made nonsense: others were completely ignorant of grammar; others did not know the form of absolution.

A little further on he tells us that the bishoprics had become family livings, and the bishops themselves were entirely free from a shadow of an ecclesiastical vocation.

For the Gregorian Collects Dr. Fortescue has of course nothing but praise:

It is the old collects that really are collects and not long florid prayers. A tendency to pile up explanatory allusions, classical forms that savour of Cicero and not at all of the rude simplicity that is real liturgical style, florid rhetoric that would suit

the Byzantine rite in Greek rather than our reticent Roman tradition, these things have left too many traces in the later propers. It is astonishing that the people should have so little sense of congruity, apparently [should] never think of following the old tradition, or of harmony with the old ordinary. We obey the authority of the Church, of course, always. But it is not forbidden to hope for such a Pope again as Benedict XIV who will give us back more of our old Roman Calendar.1

Nothing in the Missal is so redolent of the character of our rite, nothing so Roman as the old collects -and nothing, alas, so little Roman as the new ones. 2

Dr. Fortescue is able, however, to congratulate himself that by the decree Divino afflatu of November 1, 1911, published by Pius X, much of the old Proprium temporis for office and mass has been brought back.3

Speaking of the text of the Antiphoner in use at the beginning of the ninth century Batiffol quotes Amalarius to show that it was even then corrupt.

God knows whether they are mistaken or those were mistaken, who boasted that they had received them from the masters of the Roman Church, or

1 Adrian Fortescue, The Mass, p. 212.

2 Ibid., p. 249.

3 Ibid., p. 213, note 1.

whether the Romans have since lost them through carelessness and neglect.1

Another grave deterioration in an important part of the Divine Service, the metrical hymns, took place in the revision of Urban VIII after the Middle Ages had ended. The hymns of the breviary were 'corrected' and brought, it was thought, into conformity with the rules of classical poetry. But it will now be almost universally acknowledged that the hymns have been much injured. Dr. Richard Chenevix Trench, the Archbishop of Dublin, complains that' well nigh the whole grace and beauty and even vigour of the composition had disappeared in the process.

2

Batiffol admits this, owning that:

At the present time all the world agrees in regretting this modernization of the ancient hymns. Urban VIII and his versifiers started from a wrong principle, through ignorance of the rules of rhythmic poetry, a kind of poetry quite misunderstood in an age when people in all simplicity believed the hymns of S. Thomas Aquinas to have been composed 'Etrusco rhythmo.' It would be cruel to insist further on such a mistake."

1 Amalarius quoted by Batiffol, p. 68 note.

2 R. C. Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry, London. edition, Kegan Paul, 1886. Introduction, p. 15 note. 3 Batiffol, p. 222.

Third

The old Kalendarium, still printed at the beginning of the Missal, is merely a relic of earlier days. It is no more consulted than the directions for finding Easter. We now need a current 'Ordo' that tells us which Mass to seek in which appendix. A further complication is caused by the popular modern plan of attaching a feast, not to a day of the month, but to some Sunday or Friday. Such feasts are fitted awkwardly among the fixed ones.1

A certain number of our people have for years been telling us that liturgical perfection may be found in the Roman Rite, especially after the foundation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites; so that it may be news to them to learn that members of the Roman Communion still have faults to find in their liturgy.

1 Adrian Fortescue, The Mass, p. 212.

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