THE COLLECTS.

The origin of the Collects is involved in obscurity.

Dr.

Horn conjectures that their model may have been given by Acts i. 24, 25 and Acts iv. 24-30. Their name denotes that they are prayers in which the wants and perils, or wishes and desires, of the whole people or Church, are collectively presented to God. They are comprehensive prayers, changing with the seasons and festivals of the Church Year, many of which our Church has adopted from the ancient liturgies, and some which she has formed. for herself. They are either penitential or supplicatory Collects which as introductory prayers, (read before the Epistle and Gospel), express the fact of the day or the thought of the season and connect with it a supplication for appropriate grace; or they are Collects of praise and thanksgiving, which as closing prayers begin with thanks for the gift of grace received and end with a prayer to be kept in the same. They were used from a remote period in the Western churches, and are found in the earliest monuments of the Roman liturgy. † Most of those which we use are taken from Gregory the Great, or the Sacramentaries of Gelasius or Leo. The latter was used in the Roman Church, A. D. 483, and, according to Palmer, its Collects are much more ancient than those of Gelasius, (A. D. 494) and may be referred to the end of the fourth century.

The Gregorian Mass gave a special Collect to every principal Service. Later the multiplication of Collects caused complaint. Löhe says: "the Lutheran Church retained in her most ancient liturgies the custom of praying a collect de tempore before the Epistle. She arranged festival collects for the first half of the Church Year, but made no provision for the second half, except to leave it to the ministers to select one of the common collects according to the character of the Sunday."

Luther restricted the use of collects before the Lection to one, but favored the change of collect with the varying season. The Brandenburg-Nürnburg Order has fifteen common collects and one each for the festival of Christmas, the Passion season, and the festivals of Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday and Trinity; one for the coming of God's Kingdom, one for the doing of God's will and two Pro Pace. Nearly all the other Orders followed the same

*

Liturgics, p. 72.

+ Palmer's Orig.

plan of giving a small number of collects. The objection to a change of collect for each Sunday and festival was that the people ought to be able to follow and pray them with the pastor, an objection which has no force when every member of the congregation has a book containing the appointed collect which is easily to be found. The sources of the collects given in the Common Service may be found in "The Lutheran Movement in England.”*

The Church has ever used and provided for the united supplication of her worshipping people, and our forms of prayer are scriptural, historical and in fullest accord with the best traditions of the purest days of the Church's life. Hallowed by the use of the centuries, tested and approved by their perfect adaptedness to bear the devotion of the saintly generations to the throne of grace, fragrant as the incense of the Temple with the odor of sanctity and with the associations that cannot be separated from them, they are vital to-day, to every devout spirit, and bear us backward in sweet communion with the Church of all ages, while they lift us Heavenward, in our purest aspirations.

"O where are Kings and empires now,

Of old that went and came?

But, Lord, Thy Church is praying yet,

A thousand years the same."

New York, N. Y.

* Jacobs, p. 297.

C. ARMAND Miller.

THE VALUE OF

LITURGICAL STUDY FOR ORGANISTS.

THE church organist, by virtue of his position, is a person of more than passing importance, for upon him is largely dependent the proper expression of public worship, and in him is vested an educational power, which is wielded, not only over a few individuals, but over the entire congregation. It is true in case of necessity, we may be forced to ignore him, yet we all feel, under normal conditions, the value of his presence and services. From the organ-loft he rules, for weal or woe, over the most subtle influence temporally speaking, that is brought to bear upon the people. While in all else listlessness may be in control, yet music may permeate quietly and unobtrusively into the soul with. the gentle touch of revivifying power. Gladness ought to be expressed and from the organ comes the jubilant invitation to "Rejoice all ye believers." Penitence is to take possession, then by the plaintive sighings of the organ our emotions are led in the proper way. So, to all intervening states music adapts itself, and readily lends its power and influence to obtain the desired results. Unless deafness be our portion we can scarcely escape its influence, for where it is heard, there it takes quiet possession. How essential is it then, that this power should be properly and judiciously exercised; that its influence should be understandingly utilized and made most effective. In the church such understanding is of vital necessity to its proper use. Hence arises the question concerning the value of liturgical study for organists.

The value of such study is plainly evident to all who are interested in any way in the proper comprehension of the subject under consideration, and of these none should be more interested than organists. They, by their very position, are constrained to follow such lines of study. They are continually confronted by

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liturgical questions, theoretical and practical, and should be in a position to properly deal with them. This necessitates study, and study which is not of the superficial type, for here as in other relations

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."

To do this they must step backward into past ages, yea even beyond the dawn of the Christian cultus, for in the Jewish ritual we find the first established form of worship to the only true God. And as the prophecies preceded the Son of Righteousness and found in Him their fullest expression, so has the ancient Jewish ritual yielded to the spirit of Christian worship. This ancient worship of the Jews however, was not entirely destroyed but only superseded, and we find it in many ways coloring the more enlightened worship of the new era. This condition we note in the transfer of the Psalter bodily to the new form of worship,in the merging of the Passover into the Festival of Easter,-of the Festival of Harvest or Pentecost into the Christian Pentecost or Whitsunday. Thus is seen the inception of the new cultus of worship, meagre in point of details, yet carrying over the Holy songs of the temple worship and infusing them with renewed life. Man realizes with pleasure that the Master Himself sang thus with His Disciples at their last Passover. And from the heathen Pliny in his letter to the Roman Emperor, we learn that the early Christians were wont to come together to sing their "psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs." Soon certain great truths came into clearer light and about them were clustered forms of expression. These integral parts readily found points of contact and thus the liturgy was gradually woven into one harmonious whole.

The attention of the organist will then find an abundant field of operations in tracing the growth of the liturgy until it became overweighted and was returned in the Reformation among the Swiss Reformers to a bald, bare type of worship, and among the Germans to a conservative mean. In tracing the growth of the liturgy the organist, if he is thorough, will be led into a consideration of the ramifications of that growth as they group themselves into families, e. g. the Eastern and Western Church; and as these are again subdivided in the East into the Greek, Armenian, Nestorian, etc.; and in the West into Roman, Gallican, Ambrosian, Mozarabic and others. By thus approaching the

subject in its broadest and most general aspects, the ground plan is laid according to an ample measure and of substantial material, so that the superstructure will not be endangered by the weakness of the foundation.

In this way is gained not simply knowledge but a glimpse is also obtained of the animating spirit of liturgics generally, and of its different manifestations. Liturgics is simply engaged with the proper setting forth of the worship of the Eternal God. It aims to put that worship in the most chaste form, to beautify it, as the Psalmist has said to "worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness," to invest every act with fullest significance, to impress the great truths of Christianity, to declare unto man in many ways that he worships, that he is in the presence of the Most High. The spirit of liturgics is essentially the spirit of worship. With organists, in a greater degree than with most men, should this spirit be present, that God may be worshipped in spirit and truth, and that all things may be done decently and in order. This spirit goes much further than simply to follow rubrical directions, but is a spirit moving upon the face of the waters bringing order out of chaos. It is a guardian angel protecting us from excrescences, from mutilations and extraneous matters. It guides' and directs where there are no written laws and at all times and under all conditions it exerts its powerful, even if silent, influence.

It will not be long before the student organist will find that the liturgy is not simply a form of worship but is essentially a confession of faith. We see this in the differences between the Greek and Roman Church, and find it especially marked in the Nestorian liturgy where its parts are adapted to meet the archerror of Nestorianism, namely, its Christological doctrine. The Reformers found abundant error in the Roman liturgy and among their early tasks was the necessity of purging and purifying the liturgy that it might give proper expression to the true faith. This confessional character of the liturgy must be ever kept in mind, so that we may not only possess the spirit of worship but also the spirit of true worship.

A general knowledge of liturgics, however, is not sufficient, for, as we intimated above, there are many digressions and many animating spirits. This should lead organists to more specific lines of study, that they may learn to know the animating spirit of each church body, the significance of their forms of worship,