Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 Excerpt: ...the eagle of St. John. C. P. Lectionaries (Latin, volumina lectionaria, or libri Uctionorii) were tables of religious lessons selected from Holy Scripture with a reference to their special applicability to a certain day, as, for instance, the narrative of the birth of Christ to Christmas, that of his resurrection to Easter, etc., and read on that very day by the lector from the ambo as part of the divine service. This custom of having sacred lessons read at every service, between the hymns, the prayers, the sermon and the administration of the sacraments, was, no doubt, adopted by the primitive church from the synagogue, and the lessons were, of course, taken from the Old Testament only. Then the books of the New Testament came in; then the Acta Hartyrum, letters from and sermons by eminent divines, etc. But already the Council of Laodicea, 860, forbade to use uucanonical writings for church lessons, and gradually the selection was confined to the Old and New Testaments. The number of such lessons varied in the various churches. Thus the churches of Gaul and Spain, before the introduction of the Roman ritual, had three lessons: one from the Old Testament, one from the gospels, evangelistaria, and one from the epistles, epistolaria, while the Greek and the Roman Church, followed In this point by the Anglican and the Lutheran, had only two, of which the latter was always taken from the gospels. Originally these lessons ran on continuously, the next always beginning where the preceding had stopped. But soon it became general practice, on account of the special applicability of certain portions, to select and fix the lessons for each day of the year--a little arbitrarily, it would seem, as when the Book of Genesis was always read in Lent--and thus sprang up the...
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