CHAPTER XVI.

SOME MINOR PROBLEMS IN THE TRANSLATION OF THE LATIN FORMS.

OF

F the thousands who thankfully use the English Prayer Book there are but few who reflect on the difficulties attending scores of questions that presented themselves for solution to the divines who undertook the task of substituting a vernacular for a Latin service-book. Several of the most familiar formulas in constant use, which now run glibly over the tongue, were reached only after many tentative efforts; and some of them when closely examined suggest that perhaps a further rehandling might have endowed the English Church with something even more satisfactory than what she possesses. Taken as a whole, we can gladly acknowledge that the Reformers have given us the sense of the originals in dignified and harmonious English. And it only enhances our gratitude to consider the difficulties they had to encounter.

A sacred diction had to a large extent to be created. The Primers and other popular forms of devotion had, to be sure, done something. But in the main it is to Coverdale's Bible and the Prayer Books of Cranmer and his colleagues that we are

indebted for the language, so apt, so stately, so tender and winning, in which religious thought and feeling has been wont to find utterance for the last three hundred and fifty years.

The free renderings of the ancient collects, loyal in spirit, and yet unembarrassed by any over-close adherence to literalness, seem to me the greatest literary triumph of the English Prayer Book.* These have been already considered. We turn to examine some of the cases where old and well-established formulas of the Latin service-books had to be transferred into the vernacular. In these, in the Canticles, and more especially in the Creeds, there is clearly apparent a desire to be closely accurate in the renderings. In the prayers Cranmer and his colleagues, to our great advantage, allowed themselves a wider latitude.

I. The conclusion of "Gloria Patri." We are very familiar with the words, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen." And it requires some little effort to imagine how difficult they were of attainment, and how slowly they were achieved. The Latin Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen," was evidently a hard problem to deal with. Not to go further back, we have the Primer (about A.D. 1400) printed by Maskell† giving us, "As it was in the bigynning, and now, and evermore, and into

* When loyalty to the sense is spoken of exception must, of course, be made in cases of deliberate rejection of pleading the merits of the saints, etc.

+ Mon. Rit., vol. iii.

the world of worlds. So be it." More than a hundred years later, in the Primer of 1535,* we read: "As it was in the beginning, as it is now, and ever shall be. So be it." So be it." Here we have (a) the verb repeated and the tense altered, so as to suit the adverbs of time; and (b) the difficult "in saecula saeculorum" silently skipped. In the Primer of 1539 the same form is reproduced. The Litany of 1544 was Cranmer's work; but he had not yet reduced the formula to its final shape, for it runs, "As it hath been from the beginning, is, and shall be ever, world without end. Amen." Here we have palpable errors in "hath been" and "from the beginning"; but an attempt is made to render "in saecula saeculorum" by the phrase "world without end."+ "World" was still sometimes used in the sense of its Anglo-Saxon original (weoruld) as equivalent to an "age" or "period of time" (literally and originally, according to Mr. Skeat, "the age of a man," "a lifetime"). It still carries this sense in such phrases as "this world and the world to come." The King's Primer of 1545 (probably also Cranmer's work) makes a distinct. improvement: "As it was in the beginning, and is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen." In the Prayer Book of 1549 the first "and" was dropped, in my judgment to the disadvantage of the form, which by its repetition of the word had brought

* BURTON'S Three Primers set forth in the Reign of Henry VIII. In the Prayer Book version of the Psalms we have four examples: Psalm xli. 13, "world without end. Amen"; Psalm xlv. 18, Psalm xc. 2, Psalm cvi. 46, "world without end, and let all the people say, Amen."

out with more clearness the threefold division-" the beginning," the present, the future. Though we may not be wholly satisfied with our English rendering, it would not be at all easy to say how it could be improved.

2. Sursum Corda, etc. St. Cyprian takes us back to remote times. As Bishop of Carthage he suffered death in A.D. 258 for the offence, in the words of the judicial sentence, of “having long been a ringleader in impiety against the gods of Rome." In a little treatise of his On the Lord's Prayer he makes reference to the customary use in the service of the Church of the exact formula which the Reformers had to deal with, and which continues to this day to be a portion of the Latin Mass. When urging the duty of throwing oneself with all earnestness into prayer, and banishing wholly all carnal and worldly thoughts, Cyprian says: "The priest in the preface preceding the prayer prepares the minds of the brethren with the words Sursum corda; and when the people reply Habemus ad Dominum they are reminded that they ought to give their thoughts to nothing else than the Lord."* This is not only a very early but a very lucid testimony; we are supplied with the priest's words of exhortation and the people's response. Yet, early as it is, there can be little doubt that the Latin was only a translation of a yet earlier Greek form.

There is a primitive simplicity, if we should not rather say an abrupt and elliptical rudeness in the manner, which testifies to its early date. Indeed, *De Oratione Dominica, c. 31.

the highly-condensed character of the style is attended by certain uncertainties as to the exact sense. Thus our Reformers have rendered Sursum corda by "Lift up your hearts"; but it might just as well be rendered "Let us lift up our hearts." And this latter is, as a matter of fact, the form pointed to by the ancient Liturgy of Alexandria (St. Mark's). And the first person plural in the next versicle, "Let us give thanks," etc., may be regarded as leaning in the same direction. But it would seem that the Western way of understanding the highlyabbreviated formula, Sursum corda, was that followed by the Reformers. A work ascribed to Alcuin paraphrases the expression in the words "Direct your hearts from earthly cares upwards to the Lord."+ Again, the English Reformers had before them Archbishop Hermann's Order for "the Supper" in German (1543); and there the rendering was, “Lift up your hearts." I do not object to the rendering of the Prayer Book; I only point out that it presented a problem which had to be solved one way or another.

The response Habemus ad Dominum is uncouth Latin, and its meaning is not quite clear. It was probably the difficulty it presented that caused the substitution in the Mozarabic Missal of the words

* "Avw ǹμŵv tàs κapòlas (BRIGHTMAN's Eastern Liturgies, p. 125.) Similarly, but more fully, in the first person we have it in the Liturgies of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom, "Avw oxŵμev тàs kapdías.

In HITTORPIUS' De Divinis Ecclesiae Catholicae Officiis, etc. edit. 1568.

Erheben euwer hertzen. See RICHTER's Evangelische Kirchenordnungen, ii. 43.