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Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob ? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.' 1 Josephus fully corroborates the view taken of them in the Gospels, and exhibits them as thoroughly imbued with Epicurean and Stoic principles, which admit of no possibility for either survival or resurrection.2

(3) The Hellenistic School, whose brilliant exponent was Philo.3 For him the Platonic philosophy found its completest expression in the Torah. Moses had already described the genii' as angels.

These are souls fluttering about in the air. . . immortal and divine, moving about in that sphere which is most akin to the mind. Of these some descended into the bodies; others ever shrink from all earthly contact. The latter are consecrated to the Supreme Father and Maker of all, who makes use of them as His ministering angels in ruling mortal men. The former, on the other hand, having entered into human bodies, as if plunged in a stream, are at times completely engulfed in its whorls. Sometimes, however, struggling against the current, they succeed in emerging out of the troubled water, and then flying back to whence they came. These are souls who, exquisitely taught by highest philosophy, from first to last ponder over the death of their body, that they may attain the incorporeal and incorruptible life near Him who is uncreated and incorruptible. . . . For the flesh is the chief cause of ignorance, as evidenced by him who says: Wherefore can the spirit of God not stay, because they are flesh . . (Gen. vi. 3). A wise man looks not upon death as the extinction of his soul, but rather as the separation and freedom from bondage of the body, to return there whence it came for it came from God.

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The Essenes and Therapeutae also restricted themselves to a belief in the immortality of the soul; the body being a prison-house in which the soul is held in fetters and prevented from soaring aloft in full liberty. This doctrine depends on the conception of matter as essentially malignant. Resurrection of the body would involve a perpetuation of evil. So, too, in the Book of Jubilees,"

And at that time the Lord will heal His servants,
And they shall rise up and see great peace,
And drive out their adversaries.

1 Matt. xxii. 23; Mark xii. 10; Luke xx. 27; Acts iv. 1, 2, xxiii. 8.

2 Josephus, Bel. Jud. Bk. 2, viii. 14; Antiquit. xviii. 14.

Philo (ed. Mangey), De gigantibus, p. 285; De mundo, p. 1153; De

Abrahamo, p. 385-cf. Leg. allegor. i. 12 (i. p. 32).

4 Josephus, Bell. Jud. Bk. 2, viii. 2-13; Antiq. xiii. 5/9, xviii. 1/5; Vit. 2. Philo, Quod omnis probus liber, 12; Apol. pro Jud. ii. (cf. Lightfoot, Colossians). 5 Philo, De vita contemplat. ii. p. 471.

6 The Book of Jubilees (R. H. Charles), xxiii. 30, 31.

And the righteous will see and be thankful,

And rejoice with joy for ever and ever,

And will see all their judgments and all their curses on their enemies, And their bones will rest in the earth,

And their spirits will have much joy,

And they will know that it is the Lord who executes judgment And shows mercy to hundreds and thousands and to all that love Him.

Others would include in the Hellenistic School works like the Book of Wisdom and the Assumption of Moses,1 which seem to ignore the resurrection of the body, though no definite rejection can be proved. For the Book of Wisdom a good case in favour of incorruption could be made from vi. 18, 19, and ix. 15. The Assumption of Moses, after describing the levelling down of the high mountains, the darkening of the sun and the retirement of the sea into the abyss, shows the Eternal God alone appearing to punish the Gentiles, and

Then thou, O Israel, wilt be happy,

And thou wilt mount upon the neck [s and wings] of the eagle,
And [the days of thy mourning] will be ended.

And God will exalt thee

And He will cause thee to approach to the heaven of the stars

And He will establish thy habitation among them.

And then wilt thou look from on high and wilt see thy enemies in
Gehenna,

And thou wilt recognize them and rejoice,

And thou wilt thank and confess thy Creator.2

Finally, in 4 Machabees a Stoic ideal is aimed at, not devoid of supernatural motives and powers. No resurrection of the body is hinted at, even in the descriptions of the martyrdom of the mother with her seven sons. The Patriarchs will receive the righteous to enjoy communion with God (wow t❖ Oeg), vii. 19, etc.); the wicked will be tormented in fire for ever.3

One may conclude, therefore, that the primitive belief in the resurrection of the dead-vague and indefinite as it was, and charged with superstitious and idolatrous practices-was gradually purified from all accretions, and defined by God's inspired messengers to His chosen people. By the time of the advent of Our Lord, despite the influences of pagan philosophy and culture, the main current of

1 Assumption of Moses (R. H. Charles), x. 3-10.

2 Ass. Moses x. 8-10.

4 Mach. viii.-xii.

orthodox teaching in Israel looked forward to a resurrection in the body for all Israelites, immediately preceding the General Judgment which was to close the Messianic era on earth. Christ Our Lord, through His Apostles, definitively fixed the doctrine of the resurrection of the body for all men, good or bad, Jew or Gentile alike:

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For we must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, good or bad.2

T. J. AGIUS, S.J,

1 Acts xxiv. 14, 15.

2 2 Cor. v. 10.

THE POST-PENTECOSTAL SUNDAY

MASSES

BY REV. EDWARD STEPHENS

WHEN Pope Pius X restored to common observance the Sundays after Pentecost, he rescued from the danger of obsolescence a series of Masses which form an integral portion of the Roman Missal. The first day of the week is the earliest feast in the calendar, and the title Lord's Day,' which marks its dedication, is one of those golden phrases which fell from the pen of the inspired writer of the Apocalypse. Ever since the Reformation, whilst the division between liturgical and popular devotional services has tended to become more and more marked, popular devotion has also tended to make the liturgy subserve its purposes, and one result has been that Sunday lost its right to its own special outward solemnity, and the very name which it bears in the Rubrics ceased to have any significance. Yet, if it be truly the Lord's Day,' nothing but the weightiest reasons should ever avail to oust it from its rank and precedence. The Missae De Dominica, at least as far as their Collects is concerned, go back to the days of the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries; these, with the Leonian, are three of the earliest liturgical documents of the Roman Church. While the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries may fairly be allowed to represent, the one the Roman Mass Book at the beginning, the other at the end of the sixth century (there is sufficient weight of opinion among scholars to justify this view), it is uncertain whether the Leonian Sacramentary has any right to the name at all. No one can say whether it ever had any connexion with St. Leo the Great, or whether it ever was a Mass Book and not rather a collection of prayers drawn up for private use. Only one manuscript copy of it exists-a mutilated codex, which forms one of the chief treasures of the Chapter library

1 Cf. Downside Review, October 1917, p. 47.

of Verona. This copy lacks the Masses for the first three months of the year, and also the Canon-an irreparable loss to the scientific study of the origin of the Roman Mass. There is fair reason to conclude that the Canon was identical with that found now in the De Sacramentis.1

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The Masses are arranged according to months and days, and are assigned with the utmost profusion. The date of the original manuscript is a matter of conjecture. A recent English editor of the Leonianum, the Rev. C. Feltoe, claims that the Verona codex is itself an original and sui generis, with an antiquity going back no further than the seventh century. Sir E. Maunde Thompson, of the British Museum, is inclined to assign the seventh century as the date of the manuscript.3 Most scholars fix a period for the original (which they do not hold the Verona manuscript to be) between the years 440 and 480 A.D. It matters not much what the real character and date of the document is, whether a Sacramentary or a mere private collection of prayers, whether of the fifth or of the seventh century, since in its collection are found a large number of the earliest prayers of our present Missal, although not under corresponding dates. One might quote, for example, the Collect which stands in our present Missal for the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, da nobis fidei spei et caritatis augmentum et ut mereamur adsequi quod promittis fac nos amare quod praecipis '-the prayer now used at Mass over the blessing of the water at the Offertory and the prayer so often said against the persecutors of the Church, Ecclesiae hic quaesumus Domine.' It only needs the slightest acquaintance with the very pronounced style of the Majestic Leo' to recognize similarities of style and rhythm in some at least of the contents of the book which bears his name. The number of Roman topographical allusions is not without importance.

The Gelasian Sacramentary purports to be the Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae. No one will seriously maintain that we have it now as it was drawn up by Pope Gelasius I (492-496). 'It is an ordered collection in the form of three books. Speaking from the bulk of the

p. xv.

1 Downside Review, October 1917, pp. 58, 59.

• Sacramentarium Leonianum. Edited by Rev. C. L. Feltoe, Introduction,

. Ibid. p. vii.

4 Cf. Duchesne, Origines du culte Chrétien, 2nd Edition (English), p. 139.

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