of pottage,'' soldier's mess,' and in the solemn words for feasts, as Christmas for the Feast of the Nativity, Michaelmas for the Feast of St. Michael, and the like. In that case 'the mass' would be an example of a word which has come to convey an absolutely different, if not an exactly opposite, impression from that which it originally expressed.

2. Besides the name there are fragments of the ancient usage preserved in various Churches.

8

At Milan an old man and an old woman bring up to the altar the pitcher and the loaves, as representing the ancient gifts of the Church.

In England the sacred elements are provided not by the minister, but by the parish.

In the East always, and in the West occasionally, there is the distribution amongst the congregation of the bread from which the consecrated food is taken under the name of 'eulogia-blessed bread.' Eulogia is in fact another name for Eucharistia.

There lingered in the fifth century the practice of invoking the name of Christ whenever they drank; and Gregory of Tours describes the act of eating and drinking together as a kind of sacred pledge or benediction.1

The order in the Church of England and in the Roman basilicas is that the priest is not to communicate alone.

The practice in the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches of the priest communicating daily is a relic of the time when it was a daily event. It had been gradually restricted to the first day of the week, but traces of its continuance on other days are never altogether absent. It is now continued partly as a form, partly perhaps from a sense of its necessity. But the practice has its root in the original intention of it, as being the daily meal.2

• Crabbe Robinson, in Archæologia, xxvi. 242–53.

Cf. Bona, Rer. Lit. i. 10.

'Sozomen, Hist. i. 17.

1 Hist. vi. 5, viii. 2.

2 This is proved from the passages cited in Freeman's Principles of Divine Service, i. 180-90, of which the object is to show the rever

II. Another part of the original idea, derived both from the first institution and also from this festive social character, was that it was an evening meal. Such was evidently the case at Corinth and at Troas.

Its evening character.

This is still preserved in its name, 'Supper,' dɛîπvov, Cana, la Sainte Cène, Abendmahl. The deiπvov (supper) δεῖπνον of the Greeks was especially contrasted with the aptoTov (dinner, lunch), or midday meal, as being in the evening, usually after sunset, corresponding to the Homeric dóρπvov. The cœna of the Romans was not quite so late, but was certainly in the afternoon. The word 'supper' in English has never had any other meaning. Of this usage, one trace is the use of candles, lighted or unlighted. Partly it may have originated in the necessity of illuminating the darkness of the catacombs, but probably its chief origin is their introduction at the evening Eucharist. The practice of the nightly Communion lingered till the fifth century in the neighbourhood of Alexandria,3 and in the Thebaid, and in North Africa on Maundy Thursday; but as a general rule it was changed in the second century to an early hour in the morning, perhaps to avoid possible scandals; and thus what had been an accidental deviation from the original intention has become a sacred regulation, which by some Christians is regarded as absolutely inviolable.5

III. The posture of the guests at such a meal must have been kneeling, standing, sitting, or recumbent. Of these four positions no single Church now practises that The posture. which certainly was the original one. It is quite certain that at the original Supper, the couches or divans were spread round the upper chamber, as in all Eastern—it may Cyprian, Ep. 63; Socrates, v. 22; Sozomen, vii. 19.

Plin. Ep. x. 97; Const. Apost. ii. 39; Tertullian, De Fugâ in Pers. 14; De Cor. 3; Minutius Felix, 8. There were still nocturnal masses till the time of Pius V. (Bona, i. 21).

It is a curious fact that the practice of 'evening communions' in the Church of England is said to have been originated by the High Church party, to whom it has now become the most offensive of all deviations from the ordinary usage. (Evangelicals and Evening Communion. An Address to the Inhabitants of Dover, p. 3.)

be said, in all Roman-houses; and on these the guests lay reclined, three on each couch. This posture, which probably continued throughout the Apostolic age, is now observed nowhere. Even the famous pictures which bring it before us have almost all shrunk from the ancient reality. They dare not be so bold as the truth. One great painter only-Poussin -has ventured to delineate the event as it actually occurred."

The next posture is sitting, and it is the nearest approach in spirit, though not in form, to the original practice of reclining. It has since disappeared everywhere with two exceptions. The Presbyterian Churches receive the Communion sitting, by way of return to the old practice. The Pope for many centuries also received it sitting, probably by way of direct continuation from ancient times. It is disputed whether he does so now. It would seem that about the fifteenth century he exchanged the posture for one half sitting, half standing, just as in the procession of Corpus Christi he adopts a posture in which he seems to kneel but really sits.8

The third posture is that which indicates the transition from the social meal to the religious ordinance. It is the attitude of standing, which throughout the East, as in the Apostolic and Jewish Churches, is the usual posture of prayer. This is preserved in the Western Church only in the attitude. of the celebrating priest, who in the Roman Catholic Church remains standing. Whether in the English Church the rubric enjoins the clergyman to stand or to kneel while receiving has been much disputed. If the former, it is then in conformity with the ancient usage of the Roman Church; if the latter, it is in conformity with modern usage.

The fourth is the posture of kneeling. This, which prevails amongst all members of the English Church, and amongst lay members of the Roman Catholic Church, is the

• The words ἀνεκεῖτο ἀνακειμένων-ἀνέπεσε (Matt. xxvi. 20; Mark xiv. 18; Luke xxii. 14; John xiii. 12, 23, 28) are decisive.

There is also a quite modern representation of the same kind in the altarpiece of a church in Darlington.

• The question is discussed at length in the chapter on the Pope.

most modern of all. It expresses reverence, in the most suitable way for Western Christians; but all trace of the original, festive, Oriental character of the ordinance is altogether superseded by it.

We now come to the sacred elements.

IV. The lamb, the bitter herbs of the first Paschal feast, if they were retained at all in the Apostolic times, soon disappeared. It was not on these, but on the homely, universal elements of the bread and wine that the First Founder of the ordinance laid the whole stress.

The bread.

9

The bread of the original institution was not a loaf, but the Paschal cake-a large round thin biscuit, such as may be seen every Easter in Jewish houses. He broke the bread,' the breaking of bread,' is far more suitable to this than to a loaf. Of this form the trace remains, reduced to the smallest dimensions, in the wafer as used in the Roman and Lutheran Churches. It may be doubted, however, whether they took it direct from the Paschal cake; first, because the Greek Churches, which are more tenacious of ancient usages than the Latin, have not done so; secondly, because the round form is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that the bread used by the ancient world (as seen in the bakers' shops at Pompeii and also in the paintings of the catacombs) was in the shape of round flat cakes. It is also alleged (though this is doubtful) that the common bread of the poor in early times was in the West unleavened, whereas

A long argument was maintained in an English newspaper to impugn the validity of the Roman Sacrament, on the ground that its wafers were made not of bread, but of paste. A curious example of an adventitious sacredness attaching itself to a particular form of Sacramental bread is to be found in the use of 'shortbread,' instead of the ordinary leavened or unleavened bread, amongst the hill men' of Scotland. 'I myself,' writes a well-informed minister of the Church of Scotland, 'thirty years ago assisted at an open air Communion in the parish of Dalry, in Galloway, where this had been the custom from time immemorial. The minister's wife sent so many pounds of fresh butter to a distant baker, and received back, preparatory to the Communion, so many cakes of "shortbread," i.e. brittle bread, which was kept nearly as carefully as a Roman Catholic would keep his wafer.'

in the East it was leavened. There are some parts of the Greek Church where the use of leavened bread is or was justified by the assertion that they had an actual piece of the very loaf used at the Last Supper, and that it was leavened.'

This peculiarity of form is an illustration of two general principles. First, it is evident that the Roman and Lutheran Churches, by adhering to the literal form of the old institution, have lost its meaning, and that the Reformed Churches, whilst certainly departing from the original form, have preserved the meaning. The bread of common life, which was in the first three centuries represented by the thin unleavened cake, is now represented by the ordinary loaf. The mystical fancy of the Middle Ages which attached to the wafer is in fact founded on that which was once the most ordinary form of food. Secondly, the fierce controversy which broke out afterwards between the Greek and Latin Churches, on the question whether the bread should be leavened or unleavened, arose, in the first instance, out of the most trivial divergence respecting an usage of ordinary life.

The wine.

The wine in the original institution was (as we know from the practice at the Paschal Supper) arranged in two, three, or sometimes four cups, or rather bowls. In the bowl was the wine of Palestine mixed with water. The water is not expressly mentioned either in the account of the original institution or in the earliest accounts of the primitive Communion; but it was beyond question there, in accordance with the universal practice of the ancient world. To drink wine without water was like drinking pure brandy The name for the bowl which they used was κρατήρ, which means a mixing' vessel. To this day wine in modern Greek is called xpaσí, ' the mixed.'

now.

2

The deviations from the original use of the cup are instructive from their variety. Not a single Church now

1 Pashley's Crete, i. 316.

2 Thus in the Syro-Jacobitic liturgy (see Neale's Translations of Primitive Liturgies, pp. 202, 223) it is said He 'temperately and moderately' mingled the wine and water. It is also mentioned in Justin Martyr, Apol. c. 97.

E