PRAYER-BOOKS
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PRAYER-BOOKS
tion is held steadfast by the firm and ardent affection
it excites. St. Ignatius and other masters in the art
of prayer have provided suggestions for passing from
meditation proper to these fui'ther degrees of prayer.
In the "Spiritual Exercises" the repetition of previous
meditations consists in affective prayer, and the ex-
ercises of the second week, the contemplations of
the life of Christ, are virtually the same as the prayer
of simplicity, which is in its last analysis the same
as the ordinary practice of contemplation. Other
modes of prayer are described under Contempla-
tion; QoiET, Prater of.
The classification of private and public prayer is made to denote distinction between the prayer of the individual, whether in or out of the presence of others, for his or for others' needs, and all prayer offered officially or liturgically whether in public or in secret, as when a priest recites the Divine Office outside of choir. All the liturgical prayers of the Church are public, as are all the prayers which one in sacred orders offers in his ministerial capacity. These public prayers are usually offered in places set apart for this purpose, in churches or chapels, just as in the Old Law they were offered in the Temple and in the synagogue. Special times are appointed for them: the hours for the v.arious parts of the daily Office, days of rogation or of vigil, seasons of Advent and Lent; and occasions of sjiecial need, affliction, thanksgiving, jubilee, on the part of all, or of large numbers of the faithful. (See Union of Prater.)
St. Thomas, II-II, Q. Ixxsv; Suarez, De oraiione, I, in De Teligione, IV: Pesch, PrcBlectiones dogmaticce, IX (Freiburg, 1902) : St. Bernard. Scala claustralium, attributed to .St. Au- gustine under the title of Scala paradisi in volume IX among his works; Roothaan, The Method of Meditation (New York, 1S5S); Letourneau, MHhode d'oraison mentale du siminaire de St- Sulpice (Paris, 1903); Catechism of the Council of Trent, tr. Donovan (Dublin, s. d.) ; Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer (St. Louis. 1911); Causade, Progress in Prayer, tr. Sheehan (St. Louis) ; Fisher. A Treatise on Prayer (London, 1885) ; Eoger, Are Oar Prayers Heardf (London, 1910) ; St. Francis de Sales. Treatise of the Love of God (tr. London, 1884); St. Peter of AlcAntara, a Golden Treatise on Mental Prayer (tr. Oxford, 1908); Faber, Growth in Holiness (London, 1854). Among the many books of meditation, the following may be mentioned: Avancini, Vita et doctrina Jesu Christi ex quatuor etangeliis collectm (Paris, 1850) ; de Ponte, Meditationes de prcecipuis fidei riostrce mysteriis (St. Louis, 1908-10), tr.. Meditations on the Mysteries of Holy Faith (London, 1854); Granada, Medita- tions and Contemplations (New York, 1879); Lancicius, Pious Affections towards God and the Saints (London, 1883); Segneri, The Manna of the Soul (London, 1892) ; St. John Baptist de La Salle, Meditations for Sundays and Festivals (New York, 1882); Bellord, Meditations (London); Luck, Meditations: Chal- LONER, Considerations upon Christian Truths and Christian Doctrines (Philadelphia. 1863); Clarke, Meditations on the Life, Teaching and Passion of Jesus Christ (New York, 1901): Hamon, Meditations for all the Days in the Year (New York, 1894); Mi- DAILLE, Meditations on the Gospels, tr. Etre (New York, 1907); Newman, Meditations and Devotions (New York. 1893); Wise- man, Daily Meditations (Dublin, 1S6S) ; Vercrctsse, Practical Meditations (London).
John J. Wtnne.
Prayer-Books. — -By "prayer-books" usage gen- erally understands a collection of forms of prayer intended for private devotion, and in so far distinct from the "service books" which contain the liturgical formularies used in public worship. In the Church of England, of course, the official liturgy is entitled "The Book of Common Prayer" or more compen- diously the "Prayer Book", but this is an exception. Of prayer-books in the sense defined, the early Chris- tian centuries have left us no specimen, neither can we be certain that any such existed. The work some- times known as "Bishop Serapion's Prayer-book" (Eng. tr. by J. Wordsworth, 1899) and compiled probably by an Egyptian bishop of that name in the fourth century should rather be described as a Pontifical or Euchologium than as a prayer-book, and was certainly not intended for private devotion. On the other hand we do find traces of isolated composi- tions, sometimes in prose, sometimes in a metrical form which entitles them perhaps to be regarded rather as hymns, which in all probability wore not
meant to be used in church, and there is nothing in
the nature of things which could render it improbable
that individuals may have copied these and other
more hturgical prayers into a volume as an aid to
piety. Thus one or two prayers or hjTnns of the
third or fourth century have been recovered from
buried papyri (see Wessely, "Les plus anciens Monu-
ments du Christianisme", Paris, 1906, pp. 195 and
205). An oslracon from a Coptic monastery at De
reli-Bahri preserves in Greek what amounts prac-
tically to a sixth-century equivalent of the Hail Mary,
though this may be liturgical (see Crum, "Coptic
Ostraca", 1902, p. 3), while two long prayers formerly
attributed to St. Cyprian, but probabh- of the fifth
century, are especially worthy of remark on account
of the light they throw upon certain early develop-
ments of Christian art (see K. Michel, "Gebet und
Bild in fruhchristlicher Zeit", 1902, pp. 3-7). But
on the whole the Christians in the first centuries
probably found that the Psalms sufficed for the needs
of private as well as public devotion (cf. Cassian,
"De ccenob. inst.", II, v, P. L., XLIX, 34; Euse-
bius, "In Psalm." in P. G., XXIII, 647), and the
fact is significant that a large proportion of the
surviving books of piety belonging to the early
Middle Ages which were copied for private use are
simply psalters, to which devotional supplements of
various kinds, for example the litanies, the Gloria,
Credo, Athan.asian Creed etc., were added with in-
creasing frequency.
Some few of these psalter prayer-books have been happily preserved to us, probably on account of their illuminations, ornamentation, or binding, while the plainer copies belonging to less exalted owners have entirely perished. The psalter of the Emperor Lothair (c. 845) is one of the earliest and most famous of these, but there is also a similar manuscript which belonged to Charles the Bald now preserved at Paris and two very fine psalters of St. Gall, one of them known as the "psalterium aureum", the work of the famous scribe Sindram and belonging to the beginning of the tenth century. Similar books of devotion are to be found in English libraries. The ancient psalter in the British Museum (Cotton M.S. Vespas., A. 1), formerly supposed to be one of the books brought by St. Augustine from Rome but really written in England about 700, is probably to be accounted liturgical. It is not a manual for private devotion, although in the eleventh century a number of non-liturgical prayers were added to it. On the other hand, the volume in the same collection, known as King Athelstan's psalter (ninth century), seems to have been intended for a prayer-book, being small in size and supplemented with a number of prayers in a later but tenth-century script. And here be it said that down to the time of the invention of printing, the Psalter, or at least a volume containing psalms and portions of the Office with a supplement of mis- cellaneous prayers, remained the type of the devo- tional manuals most favoured by the laity. After King Alfred, at the age of twelve or thirteen (861), as Asser tells us, had learned to read, "he carried about with him everjTvhere, as we ourselves have often seen, the daily Office {cursiim diurnvm), that is, the celebrations of the hours (cilebraliotjes horarum), and next certain psalms and a number of prayers, all collected into one book which he kept as an in- separable companion in his bosom to help him to pray amid all the contingencies of life". Similarly we read in the fife of St. Wenceslaus (tenth century) of the dog-eared prayer-book (codicdlum mamiale frequenlia rugosum) which he carried about with him while he continuously recited the Psalms and other prayers. These descriptions seem to apply accurately enough to a number of devotion.al manuals still surviving in manuscript, though often enough the whole Psalter was transcribed and not merely select
