in the Roman. It was on these grounds in addition to many others such as single instead of trine immersion, and the omission of unction, in Baptism, the allowance of consecration of a Bishop by a single Bishop instead of by three as required by the Council of Nice, etc., that Gildas, the British chronicler, made the exaggerated assertion about the year 570, "The Britons are at variance with the whole world, and are opposed to Roman customs." It is evidently then to Gaul, and to a branch of the parent Liturgy of S. John and Ephesus, and not to Rome, that we must look for the origin of the British Liturgy. It has been tersely said, "Rome may have been a stepmother of the Church of England, but assuredly the orthodox East has been her Mother." 3

2

As resemblances are often pointed out between the British and English Liturgies and the so-called Mozarabic, it is well to note that this ancient use of the Church of Spain is only a modified form of the Gallican. The word is derived from the Arabic, Arab most Arabe, which means an Arab by adoption. The term, however, is a misnomer as the liturgy was used long before the Arabic invasion. This national Spanish use was replaced in the eleventh century by the Roman Liturgy by the continuous efforts of the Roman see, "with that intolerance of other rites which has so incalculably injured ecclesiastical antiquity." It was used in six churches in Toledo and many others throughout the country until 1842

1 "The rubrics of all other Churches, Jewish or Christian, Eastern or Western, Orthodox or otherwise, from Rome to Malabar, are in the indicative. "The Priest doth' so and so. In the Gallican, Spanish, English, and in them alone, the imperative is used throughout: 'Let the Priest do so and so."" (Prin. Div. Ser. II, 401.) "Even as regards the contents of the rubrics, it may be safely affirmed that there is not one in the whole office exactly agreeing with the Roman" (Ibid., p. 418).

2 See Warren, Lit. and Ritual, etc., pp. 59, 61-76, 167.

• Lowndes, II, 545.

when most of them were suppressed by the government. It is now confined to one chapel in Toledo and to three other parishes where it is authorized. A peculiarity of the Mozarabic, like that of the English, is that it contains many little addresses to the people.1

1 See Neale, Essays on Liturgiology, pp. 132, 134, 149, 171, and Pullan, His. Bk. C. P., pp. 18, 19.

CHAPTER VIII

GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH LITURGY

"If all the liturgies of all the ancient Churches throughout the world be compared amongst themselves, it may be easily perceived that they had all one original mould.". HOOKER.

SHORTLY after Gregory, “that greatest and most lova

ble of Roman Bishops,"1 sent Augustine on his mission to convert the Angles and Saxons, who had driven the British Christians of the older Church into the mountains and wilds of Wales and Cornwall, he gave him directions concerning the liturgy and customs which he was to provide for the new Church among his converts from heathenism. The Pope's letter was in reply to questions which Augustine had put to him two years before and was dated in the summer of 601. Canon Bright says, "Gregory, who was deeply interested in liturgical questions, and revised and re-edited the 'Sacramentary' of his predecessor Gelasius, and brought the Eucharistic ceremonial to what he considered an elaborate perfection, was at the same time far from being a pedant or a bigot on such points: he advised, on the contrary, a wise eclecticism. Let Augustine 'collect into a sort of a bundle' the best usages of Rome, of Gaul, or of other Churches, whatever he had found to be most pious, religious, righteous and most likely to be pleasing to God, and so form a ritual of the English Christians, who were as yet young in faith and could become accustomed to whatever was given to them. There was no need to stick blindly to the Roman observances

1 W. Bright, Early English Church History, p. 34.

1

"2

as such." And he adds, "For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things." In passing, it is well to observe the marked contrast between this broad-minded policy of the great Bishop of the seventh century and the course now and for long pursued by his successors in that see, by which the national Liturgies of France, Spain, and every other country where the Papacy has control, are suppressed and supplanted by that of Rome.

It is not possible to say to what extent Augustine made use of Gregory's suggestion as to preparing a composite Liturgy for the young Anglo-Saxon Church. He probably did not possess the necessary faculty which was so conspicuous in his master Gregory, and besides was too busy with his rough missionary work to give much time to liturgical affairs. He seems to have contented himself therefore with establishing the Roman use in part, just as a modern English or American Bishop would establish the Anglican service in a heathen land, but with certain modifications. These, in Augustine's case, would naturally be derived from his knowledge of the Gallican liturgy acquired during his stay in Gaul, and in this he would doubtless have the sympathy of Queen Bertha of Kent (whose Saxon husband, Ethelbert, was his first convert), and the help of the Gallican Bishop who was her chaplain, and who conducted the Church services according to the Gallican use, in the little Church of S. Martin in Canterbury.3

More than a century passed away before the ancient British Churches and those founded by Augustine drew to

1 Early English Church, p. 57.

2 Bede, His. Ecc., i, 27.

• "The Anglo-Saxon books abound in Gallican details." Duchesne, p. 99, and compare Freeman, Prin. Div. Ser. III, 418.

1

gether. Augustine's untactful and imperious treatment of the British Bishops and their natural hostility to the race that drove them from their land, as well as their different traditional usages, were the chief occasion of this delay. Though the Celtic Churches of Britain and Ireland, as we have seen, did such splendid work abroad, and though the Scottish-Irish Church was the chief agent in winning the greater part of England (Northumbria, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Mercia, or the country bordering on North Wales) to the faith of Christ, it took much time and mutual forbearance to bring the two races and the two branches of the Church into formal and genuine unity. It is noteworthy, however, that this union was effected 150 years before the seven petty Saxon kingdoms were united, as they were in 827, under King Egbert. Even at the end of the eighth century this modified Roman use of Augustine had not entirely supplanted the modified Gallican of the earlier period. The older Church of the Britons still clung tenaciously to its usages. We find that as late as 747, when the Council of Clovesho passed a canon requiring the use of the Roman Liturgy, the Celtic Liturgy still retained its hold in the land. Fifty years later the Scottish Liturgy introduced by the missionaries from Iona, was still in daily use in the Church of York, and a letter of Alcuin, the famous Yorkshire headmaster of the great school of Charlemagne, written from France to Eanbald, Archbishop of York, tells us that there were then in use some service books "that did not entirely agree with the Roman." In Scotland the Celtic Liturgy

1 Theodore, a Greek of Tarsus in Cilicia, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 668, and "was as able and energetic as he was conscientious," did much to secure this unity. "He doubtless made concessions," Duchesne says, p. 99.

2 See Lingard, Anglo-Saxon Church, I, 229.