Philip Schaff

“ In Germany a passing stranger often sees the pious peasantry at Mass, singing with all their hearts their beautiful German hymns. It misleads, however. They are not attending to the Mass, but consoling themselves by spiritual songs, while it goes on without their assistance. The bell rings: they adore the host, but that is all their relation to the worship of the Christian liturgies. Hirscher loved their hymns, but bewailed the utter loss of their liturgic communion, once common to the faithful. ”

“ The rhetoric of the liturgies and of the Fathers was unhappily made into the logic of the Schoolmen, and hence the stupendous system of propitiatory Masses, with Masses for the dead, and that traffic in Masses which so fearfully defiles the priesthood of Western Europe and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America. In vain does the pious Hirscher complain: [23] “The rich, then, are the happy sinners in this respect: they can buy innumerable Masses, and establish them in perpetuity; their privileges have no limit, and their advantages over the poor extend through all eternity.” ”

“ In both the Mozarabic and the Gallican Liturgies there was an invocation as well as an oblation. Irenæus [24] says (and he, writing at Lyons, must have in mind the Gallican Liturgy) , ‘The bread which is of the earth, having received the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist.’ The word translated ‘invocation’ is ἐπίκλησιν ”