The Divine Office | Page 5

their assembly psalms and hymns (Ephes. v. 19; Col. Iii. 16; I. Cor. xiv.
26).
What form did the public prayers, which we may call the divine office,

take in the time of the Apostles? It is impossible to say. But it is certain
10 that there were public prayers, 20 that they were offered up daily in
certain determined places and at fixed hours, 30 that these public
prayers consisted principally of the Psalms, hymns, canticles, extracts
from Sacred Scripture, the Lord's Prayer, and probably the Creed, 40
that these public prayers varied in duration according to the will of the
bishop or master who presided.
"The weekly commemoration of Christ's resurrection, the yearly
recurrence of the memory of the great facts of Christ's life, the daily
sanctification of the hours of the day, each led the Christian to draw
upon the hours of the Psalter, and when, gradually, fixed hours for
daily prayer passed beyond the home circle and with groups of ascetics
entered the public churches, it was from the Psalter that the songs of
praise were drawn, and from the Psalms were added a series of
canticles, taken from the books of the Old and the New Testaments,
and thus, long ages before any stereotyped arrangement of the Psalms
existed, assigning particular Psalms to particular days or hours, the
Psalms were feeding the piety of the faithful and teaching men to pray"
(_The New Psalter_--Burton and Myers). In this matter of public prayer,
it is hard for us to realise the "bookless" condition of the early
Christians and their difficulties. It was twenty-five years after the
Ascension before the first books of the New Testament were written,
and many years must have elapsed before their wide diffusion; hence,
in their bookless and guideless condition the early Christians were
advised to use the Psalms in their new devotional life (Ephes. v. 19;
Col. iii. 16; St. James, v. 13).
The first clear evidence of a division of the Psalter for use in the
Western Church is found in the work of St. Benedict (480-543). He had
spent his youth near Rome, and keeping his eye on the Roman usage he
assigned the Psalms to the various canonical hours and to different days
of the week. The antiphons he drew from existing sources, and of
course the canonical hours were already in existence. In his
arrangement, the whole Psalter was read weekly, and the whole Bible,
with suitable patristic selections, was read every year. He also arranged
the Sunday, Festal and Ferial offices. For the recitation of the offices of

a saint's day, St. Benedict arranged that the Matins shall have the same
form as a Sunday office--_i.e._, three nocturns, twelve lessons and
responsories, but the psalms, antiphons and lessons are proper to each
saint. This arrangement interrupted the weekly recitation of the whole
psalter, and caused great difficulty in later times; for when the feasts
increased in number the ferial psalter fell almost into complete disuse.
St. Benedict's arrangement of the psalms and his other liturgical
regulations spread rapidly, but the Roman secular office never adopted
his arrangement of the psalms, nor his inclusion of hymns, until about
the year 1145. In some details each office shows its independent history.
It is a matter of dispute among liturgists whether Prime and Compline
were added to the Roman secular office through the influence of the
Benedictines (Baudot, The Roman Breviary, pp. 19-26).
The period following the death of St. Benedict in 543 is a period of
which little is known. "We repeat with Dom Baumer (vol. i., pp.
299-300) that the fifth century, at Rome as elsewhere, was a period of
great liturgical activity, while the seventh and eighth centuries were,
viewed from this point of view, a period of decline" (Baudot, _op. cit._,
p. 53). The labours of St. Benedict probably were continued and
perfected by St. Gregory the Great (590-604). His labours are summed
up by Dom Baumer (Histoire du Breviare, vol. i., pp. 289, 301-303): "It
is he who collected together the prayers and liturgical usages of his
predecessors and assigned to each its proper place, and thus the liturgy
owes its present form to him. The liturgical chant also bears his name,
because through his means it reached its highest state of development.
The canonical hours and the formulary of the Mass now in use were
also carefully arranged by him." "The whole history of the Western
liturgy supports us in maintaining that these books received from the
great Pope or from one of his contemporaries a form which never
afterwards underwent any radical or essential alteration." The Roman
office spread quickly through Europe. The enthusiasm of Gregory
became rooted in the monasteries, where the monks learned and taught,
with knowledge and with zeal, his liturgical