HOLY COMMUNION: III. THE PRESENT AMERICAN RITE

§ 1

Structure

Historically, the divisions of the Liturgy are the service of the Catechumens; the service of the Faithful; the consecratory Canon; and the Communion.

The Catechumens’ service is entirely general, and mainly didactic, and may be profitably attended by any human being. Technically, in our rite it ends with the Gospel, though there is no break of any kind in the text, save in the separate use of the “Ante-Communion,” which concludes at this point. Today, however, the dismissal of the Catechumens before the secret “Mysteries” known only to the initiate has been disused for over a thousand years. The whole service is primarily the Liturgy of the Faithful—though equally open to any auditor who chooses to attend it. The Anglican position of the Creed immediately after the Gospel and before the Sermon is witness that the ancient distinction has been forgotten; the natural turning-point of the service is at the Offertory, where the sacrificial action begins: and the general order, introductory to the eucharistic oblation, may be regarded as extending up to this point.

The service of the Faithful traditionally includes the Creed and the Intercession; which latter was originally par éminence the “Prayers of the Faithful.” The Creed, as we have said, is now in the preceding division. The Anglican rites have added to the service of the Faithful the devotions of preparation for communion.

The Canon comprises the Preface and the long Prayer of Consecration, concluding with the congregational Amen.

The remainder of the service beginning with the Lord’s Prayer is the Administration, to which medieval times gave the significant title of the “Canon of the Communion.”

§ 2

The General Order

The initial Lord’s Prayer and Collect for Purity are survivals of the priest’s preparation in the Sarum rite. Tradition has maintained the principle that the people should not say the Lord’s Prayer with the priest.¹

The use of the Decalogue, introduced in 1552, has never proved entirely satisfactory—perhaps because its purpose has not been clearly understood. Its quality as a form of Litany seems to have been felt in 1764, at which time it was finished off with a true Litany-Collect for grace to keep the commandments. Yet we still retain the rubric of 1637, directing the priest to face the people for its recitation, as if it were a fixed Old Testament Lesson. Some of its expressions pertain only to primitive Hebrew conditions: and the book of 1637, followed by the recent Scottish, English, and South African revisions, felt constrained to explain in the rubric that its terms should be applied according to a “mystical” or “spiritual” interpretation. The Commandments are chiefly negative in form: and the Nonjurors’ book of 1718, with the Scottish 1764, the American books, and the recent British revisions, offer our Lord’s “Summary” in positive and universal terms as a complement. Moreover they are lengthy, a distinct element of tedium in the service, and that at a most injudicious place, when the order of worship is just getting under way: hence all the latest revisions have presented them in an optionally or absolutely abbreviated form, similar to that of The Institution of a Christian Man of 1537, The Necessary Doctrine of 1543, and Cranmer’s Catechism of 1548. The American book of 1892 allowed them to be supplanted altogether by the Summary and Kyries, except once a Sunday; the 1928 book requires them only once a month.

The inherent rationale of the Decalogue-Litany is that it corresponds to, and may have been designed in some measure to replace, the old preliminary Confiteor of the Latin mass. Its intent is plainly to serve as the basis for an examination of conscience, which shall provide a real content of contrition to the General Confession made later in the service. It happens however that so few people have been, or are, in the habit of making private confessions, that this use of the Decalogue in preparation for a confession has been largely forgotten; and it is very doubtful if many communicants recognize this as a part of the service which calls upon them for a most earnest and active spiritual participation. Without such recognition, the Decalogue becomes merely something to be endured until it is over; and there is little wonder that it has been progressively eliminated from use.

Further experience will tell whether the measures adopted in the latest Prayer Books are sufficient to stay this trend, or whether new ones must be found. We have, for example, the method of flexible alternatives, which was hardly available in the sixth century, or the sixteenth. It might be quite practicable now to restore the Gloria in Excelsis to this place as a joyful beginning of the service on festal occasions, to be replaced by the Decalogue-Litany in penitential seasons. The Decalogue could be provided with a Bidding which should make clear its purpose, and arouse the people’s devout coöperation, and might be emphasized in its quality as a Litany by directing that it be said kneeling before the altar.

At present, it is not to be recommended that the Collect of the Commandments be said except after the Decalogue, though the rubric permits it in any combination. Saying the Summary, then this Collect, then making a fresh start with “The Lord be with you,” followed by the Collect of the day, is distinctly awkward.

The use of the Creed in immediate sequence with the Gospel is an Anglican peculiarity; so (in the West) is its required use on all occasions, while in the Latin rite and in 1549 it was purely festal. But the closer the connection of the Creed with the Gospel, the more patent is the justification for its liturgical use: the proclamation of the Gospel is answered by the declaration of our personal and intelligent assent; and the formulation of the Church’s official faith is presented as a systematic summary of the scriptural narrative, as things that really happened. The Creed may (not must) be omitted if Morning Prayer has immediately preceded.

The present Prayer Book has some entirely new and really organic provisions for the use of special intercessions. But though the rubrics are perfectly clear, they do not seem so far to have been very well understood in practice. On p. 71, the direction after the rubric on Notices, Here, or immediately after the Creed, shall be said the Bidding Prayer, or other authorized prayers and intercessions, plainly means that any desired special prayers should be used at the reading-desk at announcement-time at a principal service where there are formal Notices before the Sermon; but that they may be read at the altar directly following the Creed at a “low celebration.” But on p. 74, Here the Priest may ask the secret intercessions of the congregation for any who have desired the prayers of the Church, certainly indicates special Biddings—not interpolated Collects—prefixed to the Bidding of the General Intercession.

It may be mentioned that the use of the Bidding Prayer is hardly desirable at a celebration of the Communion, for it constitutes an absolute duplication of the substance of the General Intercession which follows so closely in our rite. The Bidding Prayer may however be admirably employed in connection with the “Ante-Communion.”²

§ 3

The Devotions of the Faithful

The Offertory Sentences, which Cranmer originally designed to have sung as liturgical Anthems (Offertoria), now serve only to announce the beginning of the act of Oblation; and one of them is read whether or no there is a “collection” to be taken up. Another rubric provides for an independent “Hymn, or an Offertory Anthem,” to be sung “when the Alms and Oblations are being received and presented.” The descriptive phrase, “in the words of Holy Scripture or of the Book of Common Prayer,” establishes a standard, though perhaps hardly so rigid a one as to prohibit the use of anthems of equivalent quality which do not conform to the absolute letter of those categories; the further proviso that they should be “under the direction of the Priest” being apparently designed to restrain ambitious choir-directors who tended to depart too widely from this standard.

The “Minor Oblation” so dreaded in 1552 has been explicitly restored: the priest is told to “offer and place upon the Holy Table the Bread and the Wine,” following Scottish use since 1735. The intercalation in the Intercession is reduced to “accept our [alms and] oblations.” This makes it clear that the elements themselves are oblations, and constitutes the Intercession as a corporate offertory prayer. The entire action, beginning here, is sacrificial; and this part is quite as integral to it as the later “Major Oblation” which pleads the sacrifice before God.

The sense of a corporate and vital act is accentuated by the new rubric directing this connection for preferring the special petitions of the offerers who have desired the Church’s prayers.

In 1549 the First Prayer Book ordered that at the offertory-time the intending communicants should gather in the choir, and all others depart out of it—which, in a large church with a heavy chancel-screen, meant that they must get out of sight and hearing of the altar, and naturally resulted in their leaving the church altogether; in effect a “Dismissal of Catechumens and Penitents.” No Prayer Book since has continued this rubric in any form: but the English books since 1552 have ended the “Ante-Communion” with the Prayer for the Church; and the custom has survived to our day in many places in all branches of the Church for non-communicants to leave at this point.

Unsanctioned by rubric, and undesirable from the point of view of the communicants, whose devotions it interrupts, this custom is sometimes a practical necessity, especially in city churches. It is in fact a survival of the very ancient and entirely valid distinction between communicants and auditors; and while the Church no longer expels the latter from the celebration of its Mysteries, they do have the right to withdraw at their own option from a portion of the rite of which they are not actually participants.

After all, it really is the fact that the Invitation, Confession, Absolution, and Comfortable Words constitute a new movement in the service. They concern not a mixed congregation, but those who propose to receive the Sacrament. And as now prefixed to the Consecration, instead of to the Communion only, as in 1549, they have accentuated the sense of a united sacrificial action of the Church. They form an effective introduction to the solemn Prayer of Consecration; they symbolize the chancel steps by which the communicants “draw near with faith” to the inner shrine.

§ 4

The Canon of Consecration

The term “Preface” is purely Western. In the East, it is properly the “Thanksgiving”; and as such is not only integral to the central Anaphora³ (as appears in the first text of Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition, where it is an undivided part of the Consecration Prayer), but indeed is the portion from which the term “Eucharist” takes its name.

The Anglican Prefaces are all in line with the “basic” Hippolytan rite in rendering glory to God for phases of the Incarnation. Their number was judiciously enlarged at the last revision, with provisions for Epiphany, three festivals of our Lord, and All Saints’. Future ages may see this part of the service still further adorned; but it is a perilous task, demanding supreme expression. Some of the new Prefaces in other recent Prayer Books are distinctly pedestrian. The English and Scottish books however offer the somewhat attractive feature of extending the use of some Prefaces from Octaves only to some whole seasons every day of which is of equal honor: that of Christmas until the Epiphany, that of Easter until the Ascension, that of Ascension until Whitsunday, that of All Saints’ to Saints’ Days generally.

Our Consecration Prayer is a rich heritage. Roman scholars, humanly offended where we have abandoned their undeniably venerable but undeniably crude and obscure standards, have tended to dismiss it as a synthetic product. But it comes to us as the result of an organic evolution, a legitimate inheritance from the valiant Laud, the learning and devotion of the Nonjurors who embraced exile for conscience’ sake, the tenacity of the faithful remnant in Scotland, and the faith which ventured to found the Episcopate in the New World.

The Liturgy of Jerusalem which rightly attracted eighteenth-century minds by its supreme literary quality, and wrongly, as the supposed apostolic rite of the Cradle of the Faith, was in fact not as primitive as the Roman; but in the matter of the Invocation of the power of God to consecrate the Sacrament it did faithfully preserve a more ancient tradition which the Roman had once possessed, in the time of Hippolytus, but had so obscured as virtually to have lost. Once again the Anglican rites have restored what the most recent Roman scholars have reluctantly come to admit to be the rightful meaning of their own cryptic formulæ.

Though there has been some tendency in certain quarters in England to conform to Roman ideas of the meaning, formula, and moment of consecration, yet both the English and South African revisions, together with most of the local rites of the missionary dioceses, have accepted the historical evidence, urged by the eminent Scottish liturgiologists, and adopted the same Scottish structure of the Consecration Prayer which the American Church has had from its beginning.

Two Roman criticisms are that our narrative of the Institution is Lutheran, and our Invocation “receptionist.”

It is true that the Institution is very close to the Brandenburg-Nürnberg Kirchenordnung, reproduced in the Nürnberg Catechism of Justus Jonas, which was translated and adapted in Cranmer’s Catechism of 1548. But the fact is of no significance. The Roman narrative of the Institution is a conflation of all four scriptural accounts, plus certain rhetorical embellishments.⁴ The Nürnberg and English forms castigate the Latin text of the non-scriptural additions, and further conflate into it three phrases from the Pauline tradition. Yet the Mozarabic rite, which at some unknown time underwent a precisely similar revision,⁵ made almost identically the same excisions from the Roman, and the same additions from St. Paul.⁶

As to the Invocation, there is really a certain hollowness in the controversies between proponents of subjective and objective ideas of the Consecration. Obviously it is not possible to “receive” anything which is not in some sense objectively real; and on the other hand, it is of no importance what the Elements may be alleged to have been made in themselves, unless they are subjectively realized within the soul of the communicant.

Besides, even the most extreme form of 1552 was intrinsically not a bit more “receptionist” than the “ut nobis fiat” of the Latin original. The Invocation of the Roman liturgy, like that of every other, even the frankly “metabolist” formula of St. Chrysostom,⁷ ends by expressing a worthy communion as the objective of the whole consecratory action.

The present American rite expresses adequately the idea of an objective Consecration by returning to the First Prayer Book for the form then borrowed from St. Basil—“vouchsafe to bless and sanctify with thy Word⁸ and Holy Spirit these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine”—while retaining the Second Prayer Book’s safeguard for the equally vital subjective realization, “that we receiving them … may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood.”

Since the appearance of the 1928 book, two criticisms of the Consecration Prayer have been heard with some frequency.

The first concerns the emphatic designations of Christ’s “one Oblation of himself” at the beginning. In origin, these were distinctly Protestant phrases, designed to safeguard the uniqueness of the Cross against medieval ideas of repeated immolations of Christ in the repudiated “sacrifices of masses.” This danger having long been forgotten, the objection now is that these terms are too close to concepts of a substitutionary Atonement which have been very generally superseded in the minds of modern men. It may be admitted that there is something in this contention—certainly “satisfaction” is one word too many.

Every ancient liturgy contains archaic phrases, once held in interpretations now outgrown, which we do not so hold or interpret. Bringing the language up to date is sometimes very difficult—it has so far proved impossible in the case of the Apostles’ Creed. Recent suggestions are not acceptable which would omit the essential content of this part of the Consecration Prayer, or water it down inconclusively. This weighty, solemn, and for the most part directly scriptural language is in fact a restoration of the primitive Post-Sanctus in rites both Eastern and Western, consisting of a narrative of the Redemption as an objective historical fact, and forming an indispensable introduction of the Institution as a narrative equally objective and historical, rather than as a magic formula of consecration. Its balance should not be destroyed, nor its force weakened, in any future alteration.

The other criticism is of the conclusion of the Prayer, following the paragraph entitled “The Invocation.” There is a distinct lag in the service at this portion, with some tendency to wandering of mind.

Some of the phrases here are really superfluous now, as the transfer of the Prayer of Humble Access to a closely adjacent position has revealed certain duplications of ideas concerning the fruits of communion.

What is fundamentally the trouble with this passage is that historically it is composed of odds and ends of Collects from the Latin order, from which their substantive, concrete, and interesting elements have been eliminated.⁹ On the other hand, our prayer contains some valuable and distinctive phases of the Christian sacrifice, notably the Church’s corporate oblation of itself, which ought not to be lost. It ought to be possible to reduce this paragraph to elements not expressed elsewhere, providing a dignified but brief conclusion.¹⁰

This growing desire to terminate the Prayer of Consecration as soon as may be after the Invocation, is an instance of the sound instinct which caused the first American book of 1789 to reject the use of Scotland since 1735 and Bishop Seabury’s form of 1786, which followed Syrian precedent by appending the General Intercession after the Consecration, succeeded by the Preparation for Communion as in 1549.

An anticlimax is an essential part of every art-form—after the soaring upward rush of the spirit there must be a return to common earth—but it is an artistic necessity that such an anticlimax be as brief as possible, else the whole effect is ruined. The sharp descending limb of the parabolic curve, which is the scientist’s graph for the wax and wane of any natural phenomenon, should be our guide for any artistic form, whether it be the emotion of a sonnet, or the spiritual movement of a liturgy.

Structurally, the Scottish arrangement is a mistake; and the tedium of its inordinately lengthy anticlimax may probably account for the fact that it has never been able entirely to supplant the rite of the Church of England in Scotland itself. Historically, it is no less a mistake, for, as we have seen, the Syrian and Scottish place for the General Intercession is not primitive, while the English and American location is.

§ 5

The Canon of the Communion

(a) Structure

The consummation and objective of the whole Liturgy is the act of Communion. Unlike the Pro-Anaphora, which at various times and places has varied widely, in ways of considerable interest but little fundamental importance, the concluding portions of the rite from the earliest examples to the latest have possessed and preserved a structural framework more definite, more primitive, and more resistant to alteration, than even the consecratory Canon itself. The medieval liturgiologists who called it the “Canon of the Communion” were imbued with a sound instinct. But it can hardly be said that any modern student has hitherto given it even his serious attention. The rationale of this part of the service has been, and is, so little understood, and even so misunderstood, that the treatment of its history and principles has been deferred to this point for examination in detail.

The first available texts in the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions¹¹ and the possibly still earlier Ethiopic Church Order,¹² present this structure in the clearest form:

1. A Prayer of the Fraction or Breaking of Bread.¹³
2. The Bishop’s Blessing of intending communicants.
3. The so-called Elevation (really the bringing out of the Elements ready for reception with a word and gesture of invitation).
4. The Act of Communion.
5. The Postcommunion Thanksgiving.
6. A Commendatory Prayer over the congregation.
7. The Dismissal.

In the medieval Roman rite this lucid order was somewhat obscured. The original One Loaf of the oblation had been supplanted by separate wafers, ready for the communion of the people, so that the ancient “Breaking of the Bread” survived only in the form of a ritual Fraction of the Priest’s Host; and the Prayer of Fraction was reduced to a vestige, the Prologue to the Lord’s Prayer, and its original Prayer to form the so-called “Embolismus.”¹⁴ The “Elevation” remained informally, in the celebrant’s turning to the people and holding up the host, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.” The Thanksgiving after receiving was represented by the Postcommunion Collect, variable with the day: but while usually with some reference to the Sacrament received, in most instances it had lost the note of thanksgiving, which had been absorbed in the priest’s private prayers at the Ablutions. The Commendatory Prayer over the congregation (“Super populum”) is found in nearly all masses in the Leonine Sacramentary, in most in the Gelasian, from Septuagesima to Easter in the Gregorian, and has finally been confined to the weekdays of Lent in the present Missal of Pius V: vanishing pari passû with the development of a declarative sacerdotal Benediction at the end.

The Blessing of Communicants disappeared from the Roman rite very early, because the bishop’s Salutation, “The peace of the Lord be alway with you,” which originally introduced it, by the beginning of the fifth century had attracted to itself the Kiss of Peace from its former location at the beginning of the Anaphora.¹⁵ But this Blessing survived in the Gallican rites, and remained as a Gallican inheritance in England down to the Reformation, with numerous formulæ, varying with the season, in the Sarum Pontifical. But priests did not use it; and we have seen¹⁶ that in England as elsewhere a Confession and Absolution were interpolated here to supply the psychological lack of some immediate preparation for communion.

Nearly all of this rational order for the Administration of the Communion in the primitive liturgies has been restored in substance in our present service—intuitively, we may say, and by an instinctive feeling for liturgical principles; since neither Cranmer nor any subsequent revisers possessed an historical knowledge of what the primitive scheme was.

There is now, indeed, no Prayer of the Fraction, as a legitimate evolution has absorbed this supplication into a setting for the Lord’s Prayer. But our latest revision restored the Lord’s Prayer to its place of primary honor and greatest significance immediately after the Consecration, and provided it with the ancient Prologue to introduce it with proper dignity. This Prologue contains a touching reminder of the disciplina arcani of the days of persecution, that reserved the knowledge of this most sacred of all prayers from the uninitiate. The old tradition, which the Roman rituals still preserve intact, was never to repeat the Lord’s Prayer aloud in any of the offices of worship, except at the moment of baptismal initiation into the Christian Mysteries, and at this place in the Communion.¹⁷ Here, at the consummation of the Christian Sacrifice, with all alien ears excluded, the faithful rightly “are bold to say” the Lord’s own words.

The recent restoration of the Prayer of Humble Access to the position before the act of communion, for which it was originally designed, fills a real need. Both in tone and content it is a full equivalent of the bishop’s Blessing of those about to receive in the Eastern rites, from which, in St. Basil’s version, Cranmer took the idea for this prayer, and some of its expressions.¹⁸ The ceremony only is different, the celebrant now identifying himself with the worshipping congregation, and kneeling with them to make this preparation for himself as well as for them, instead of pronouncing it over them in benediction.

The Postcommunion Thanksgiving also reverts to Eastern standards¹⁹ in being a fixed prayer, instead of a “Gallican” variable Collect. It should be noted that this is properly our own—and only—“Postcommunion.”

Instead of a blunt word of dismissal by the Deacon, the service now ends with a priestly benediction in the Name of God. The Sarum rite had not yet acquired the final Benediction of the present Roman;²⁰ and it appears that Cranmer turned from the untranslatable Latin “Ite, missa est,” to the Byzantine “Let us depart in peace,”²¹ where he found the suggestion for the beautiful use of Phil. 4:7 to introduce the Blessing.

Thus it appears that the only missing elements of the primitive structure are some sort of immediate Invitation to communicants, and a final Commendatory Prayer “over the congregation.”

Cranmer had something of the nature of the Invitation in his “Christ our Paschal Lamb” in 1549;²² but this was dropped in 1552, and never restored in any form. The matter is hardly important; but a small awkward pause at this juncture sometimes bears witness of this ritual link that has dropped out, and indicates that such an Invitation might be of value to start a diffident congregation toward the altar-rail. At a choral service, this is sometimes virtually supplied by the Hymn at the communion-time, corresponding to the Ambrosian Anthem Ad Accedentes—i.e. “For those who draw nigh” to receive the communion.

The Commendatory Prayer “Super populum” has completed the process of degeneration which it underwent in the Roman books, by being entirely absorbed in the invariable use of Phil. 4:7 which ushers in the final Benediction, and which indeed represents its essential content. It survives separately and unmistakably, however, in the three services in the Ordinal. The three prayers there are not in any sense “Postcommunions”—they have no allusion to the Sacrament received—they are precisely Commendatory Prayers over the newly ordained clergy and the congregation, for enabling grace in time to come.

The Ordinal of 1550 directed these prayers to be said after the last Collect, and immediately before the benediction. Now in 1550 this “last Collect,” which normally occurred “immediately before the benediction,” was in fact the fixed Postcommunion Thanksgiving. But when in 1552 and all following books the Gloria in Excelsis was transferred to the place “immediately before the benediction,” the rubric in the Ordinal—which stands unaltered to this day—became quite inaccurate: and this misleading reference gave rise to the mistaken hypothesis that these final Commendatory Prayers in the ordination services were themselves Postcommunion Collects, and that their rubric implied the habitual use of a “last Collect” in the normal service.

Hence the use of so-called “Postcommunions” at the option of the celebrant now has the prescription of a long tradition, and indeed has been explicitly authorized in the recent Scottish and English revisions. We have seen that our book of 1892 allowed the Occasional Prayers to be used at this place,²³ and that the amended rubric of 1928 was not quite definite enough to bring this practice to an end.

But the fact is that Anglican use has displayed an unanalyzed confusion of three quite different types of prayer, and misuse of two of them in this place: special intercessions and commemorations, which have no appropriateness here; Postcommunion prayers and thanksgivings, of which there is only one possible example in our Prayer Book, that in the text of the service; and final Commendatory Prayers over the congregation. It seems that the old rule for terminating the “Ante-Communion” with General Collects, and the present custom of “Table Prayers” appended to Morning Prayer and Sermon, have kept alive the sound liturgical instinct of the early Church to conclude the Communion with some comprehensive supplication for perseverance in righteous living. It is this last, though under the wrong name, which the British books have sanctioned, and which will probably continue to prevail in our own.

(b) Music

To all this essential structure of the Administration of the Communion, there has been added an adequate musical adornment. The “Hymn” which 1789 provided after the Consecration, now naturally follows the Prayer of Humble Access, and accompanies the Breaking of Bread and the Communion. The proposal to restore the Agnus Dei at this point was narrowly defeated in 1928; but the Agnus may be described as a “hymn,” and hence has continued to be sung with some color of liturgical authorization, as it long has been in England with none.²⁴

The provision of a Hymn as a substitute for the Gloria in Excelsis was introduced in 1789 because of the frequent difficulty of getting the Gloria sung under pioneering conditions. The alternative is useful now in replacing the Gloria in penitential seasons, at least in a choral service; at an early celebration it can hardly be said that the singsong repetition of a metrical hymn is edifying. The English use of 1928 follows 1549 in permitting the Gloria to be simply omitted on weekdays. Historically, the Gloria was an interpolation on festivals; and there seems little reason why it should not be recognized and treated as such.

The Ablutions come after the Blessing in our rite. This seems, and indeed was, sheer afterthought, as this provision was not made at all until 1637; the first three Anglican Prayer Books having taken it for granted that the Priest would make the Ablutions in the wonted place for them, immediately after the Administration. It was only as the memory of this tradition died out, and Puritan clergy threw out any of the consecrated elements that were left over, or took them home for domestic use, that explicit directions for their disposal became necessary. It may be noted that the rubric refers only to any overplus inadvertently left over from the Communion: it has no application to a portion of the elements which has been intentionally set aside for the later communion of the sick or absent. Canons and customs of the Church regulate the question of “Reservation”—not this rubric.

The Ablutions, occurring now after the Benediction, entail an awkward pause, and are a distinct drag on the smooth conclusion of the service. It is interesting to observe how, extra-rubrically, they have attracted to themselves the singing of the Nunc Dimittis or some other musical morceau—yet another instance of the old instinct to accompany silent ceremonial actions with musical ornament. But it might seem desirable to restore the Ablutions to their natural location at the end of the act of communion.