. That hymn sung in the early morning, of which Pliny
had heard, was kindling into the service of the Mass.

The Mass, indeed, would appear to have been said continuously from the
Apostolic age. Its details, as one by one they become visible in later
history, have already the character of what is ancient and venerable.
"We are very old, and ye are young!" they seem to protest, to those who
fail to understand them. Ritual, in fact, like all other elements of
religion, must grow and cannot be made--grow by the same law of
development which prevails everywhere else, in the moral as in the
physical world. As regards this special phase of the religious life,
however, such development seems to have been unusually rapid in the
subterranean age which preceded Constantine; and in the very first days
of the final triumph of the church the Mass emerges to general view
already substantially complete. "Wisdom" was dealing, as with the dust
of creeds and philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn religious
usage, like the very spirit of life itself, organising soul and body
out of the lime and clay of the earth. In a generous eclecticism,
within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power
within her, [127] she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other
matters so in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various
sources--Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan--to adorn and beautify the greatest act
of worship the world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church
came to be--full of consolations for the human soul, and destined,
surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human
experience, to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness.

TANTUM ERGO SACRAMENTUM VENEREMUR CERNUI:
ET ANTIQUUM DOCUMENTUM
NOVO CEDAT RITUI.

CHAPTER XXIII: DIVINE SERVICE.

"Wisdom hath builded herself a house: she hath mingled her wine:
she hath also prepared for herself a table."

[128] THE more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present
instances of the summing up of an entire world of complex associations
under some single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of
frescoes which commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or
like the play of Hamlet or Faust. It was not in an image, or series of
images, yet still in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a
single appeal to eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his
new impressions set