Dissertation on the Dccasional Offices. I. HAVE avoided as much as possible the addition of notes to the text of the Offices which form the greater part of this volume: being desirous that the reader should be furnished with an accurate edition and arrangement of those offices, illustrated only by some important variations between them and the Uses of the other Churches of York, or Hereford, or Bangor; and by an explanation of some parts of them, which seem to be involved in any difficulty or obscurity. Hence I have not noticed the almost numberless variations, many of them of the highest importance, which exist between the old ritual and pontifical of the church of England, and the modern ones which correspond to them of the church of Rome. These latter books are to be procured any where, and every reader who may wish to pursue the subject, can easily make the comparison for himself. My object has been to illustrate our present Book of Common Prayer, and to furnish some information respecting the observances and faith and practice of the English Church, from her own authentic documents, during the middle ages. But I think that some observations may not unfitly be thrown together, by way of preface, or preliminary dissertation, consisting chiefly of extracts and collections from canons and orders of the Church of England, which regard the due celebration of these holy offices. Three of the offices which I have edited, viz. of Confirmation, Marriage, and Extreme Unction, were considered, by the church of England for some centuries before the reformation, to be sacraments in the same sense in which those of Baptism and the Eucharist were held to be. The rite of extreme unction is now no longer practised or allowed in the church of England: but confirmation and marriage she teaches us are sacraments, although not such as two only are, "generally necessary to salvation." It was in this sense that the framers of Queen Elizabeth's Act for Uniformity spoke, when they enacted that "all and singular ministers shall, from and after the feast of the Nativitie― be bounden to saie and use the Matins, Euensong, celebracion of the Lordes supper, and administracion of eche of the Sacramentes, -in such order and forme, etc." But the reader will remember that, certainly in the later canons before 1530, which may be cited, the term sacramentum is to be understood, not only with S. Augustine, as the "invisibilis gratiæ visibilis forma, but, as the "invisibilis gratiæ visibile signum ad nostram justificationem institutum." Or to take the number and necessity of the sacraments from a provincial statute of Archbishop Peckham, in the year 1281: Septem ecclesiæ sunt sacramenta, quorum dispensatores sunt prælati ecclesiæ; quorum quinque ab omnibus debent recipi Christianis; utpote baptismus, confirmatio, pœnitentia, eucharistia, extrema unctio; sunt et alia duo sacramenta, scil. ordo et matrimonium, quorum primum perfectis convenit, secundum |