Christian Missions; (6) A Prayer for the General Synod of the Church of Ireland to be used in all churches and chapels on the Sunday preceding the meeting of the General Synod and during the Session of the Synod-a prayer that makes one sensible of the lack of public prayer for the Convocations of Canterbury and York;* (7) A Prayer to be used in Colleges and Schools (a prayer, which is based on the prayer Pro docilitate, composed by Erasmus, apparently at the desire of Dean Colet, for the use of the scholars at St. Paul's School, London); and (8) A Thanksgiving for Recovery from Sickness. †

The American Church, beside prayers corresponding more or less closely to those in our Prayer Book, now possesses (1) A Prayer to be used at the Meetings of Convention which (with certain alterations) is to be said for both the Diocesan and the General Conventions; (2) For the Unity of God's People; (3) For Missions; (4) Two alternative prayers to be used on Rogation Sunday and the Rogation Days, for Fruitful Seasons; (5) For a Sick Person; (6) For a Sick Child; (7) For a Person or Persons going to Sea; (8) For a Person under Affliction;

* Some of the Scottish Bishops have put out forms of prayer for their Diocesan Synods and for the Representative Church Council.

It may be mentioned that the Church of Ireland has also enriched its Prayer Book by adopting from the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. the exquisitely beautiful collect, "God, which makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of thy only Son," etc., to be used at a second celebration of the Holy Communion on Christmas Day, and similarly, for a second celebration on Easter Day, the Collect "O God, who for our redemption," etc. (from the same source), used in 1549 "afore Matins" with the Faster anthems.

Q

(9) For Malefactors, after Condemnation [i.e., as the contents of the form show, after condemnation to suffer death]. There are also some new special forms of thanksgiving; but what has been said is sufficient to show the sense of the need of a larger number of special supplications and thanksgivings than the English Prayer Book supplies. In fact the need of a large increase of such forms, duly authorised, is a grave want.

APPENDIX A.

Reasons for thinking that the Venice edition (1528) of the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom was the main source of Cranmer's "Prayer of Chrysostome" in the Litany of 1544.

IN

IN an article contributed to the Guardian (August 17th, 1898) I discussed the immediate source of our "Prayer of St. Chrysostom" at considerable length. It must be due, one must suppose, to the extreme rarity of the Venice edition that scholars had not earlier observed the remarkable resemblances between the Latin translation, which there accompanies the Greek text, and Cranmer's English. The Latin runs as follows:

"Qui communes has et concordes nobis largitus es supplicationes, et qui duobus aut tribus convenientibus in nomine tuo petitiones tribuere pollicitus es: tu et nunc servorum tuorum petitiones ad utilitatem expleas, tribuens nobis in praesenti saeculo cognitionem tuae veritatis et in futuro vitam aeternam concedens."

If Cranmer had this book before him he would have had the Greek of the prayer facing the Latin translation; yet it is worth observing (1) that Cranmer's phrase “two or three gathered together in thy name" seems to have been suggested rather by his way of understanding the "duobus aut tribus convenientibus" of the Latin than by the original, συμφωνοῦσιν. Erasmus had given the meaning more correctly as "quando duo aut tres concordant in nomine

Again (2) our English "supplications" corresponds with the Venice "supplicationes"; while Erasmus had written preces. And And once again (3) our our English "petitions" corresponds with the Venice "petitiones," where Erasmus had rendered the Greek by postulationes.

On the other hand, the words "O Lord" (in the phrase "fulfil now, O Lord"), which have nothing corresponding to them either in the original or in the Latin of the Venice edition, find something of a parallel in the "ipse nunc quoque Domine" of Erasmus.

On the whole, it would seem that the phenomena presented by Cranmer's rendering can be sufficiently accounted for if we suppose him to have had open before him the Venice edition of the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom (1528) with its Greek and Latin on opposite pages, together with Erasmus' version in the Bâle edition of Chrysostom's works (1539) which we know was one of the books in the library of the Archbishop.

Cranmer was, no doubt, a competent Greek scholar, and did not need a translation to help him; but with the Latin as well as the Greek before him (if our conjecture be correct) nothing is more likely than that his turns of expression were influenced by it. It is likely enough that convenientibus (which we may remark appears also in the translation of Hervetus included in the volume with his translation of Cabasilas' De divino altaris sacrificio, Venice, 1548) was meant to express the notion of "agreeing together"; but it looks very like as if Cranmer, taking it in the sense of "coming together" and remembering Matt. xviii. 20 ("For where two or three are gathered together in my name": so Coverdale), gave us the English of the prayer as we have it without any effort to follow the Greek more closely. It was quite after Cranmer's manner to use some liberty in his renderings, aiming

rather at conveying the spirit than at a very close verbal translation.

At the phrase "knowledge of thy truth" the Venice edition of 1528 reads "cognitionem tuae veritatis," and Erasmus simply "cognitionem veritatis"; but I cannot lay stress on this, for a glance at the original Greek would have shown Cranmer that the Venice rendering was that which should be followed.

Again, if we are right in the conjecture offered above (p. 149), that the suffrage in our Litany for those that are "in danger, necessity, and tribulation" was suggested by a similar suffrage in the Deacon's Litany, it is certain that Cranmer either independently corrected the curious rendering by Erasmus, "ut liberet nos ab omni tribulatione irae (sic) et necessitatis (sic)," or else was led to see the real meaning of the Greek by the Venice rendering given at p. 149.