The age was still Apostolic, two of the companions of the Saviour yet survived in the persons of Symeon and John; therefore no liturgy, unless we admit that of St. James[11] to be genuine, was in use, at least not in the Gentile Churches. In the early Apologies of Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, and in the letter of Pliny the Younger, the reader will find the primitive order in which the Sabbath services were celebrated. Afterwards the prayers of devout Christians were collected and arranged in the liturgical order in which we now have them. The manner in which the Psalms are read in the English Church was adopted by the early one of Alexandria, from the Jewish ritual. The primitive service, according to our earliest account, that drawn from the lips of the deaconesses by Pliny, commenced with a hymn in honour of Christ, sung alternately, which was followed by the worshippers binding themselves to observe the moral law with scrupulous exactness; after which they separated, but met together in a general repast, partaken together, temperately and without disorder. But the Christian authors cited give a perfect view of divine worship in the second century, which consisted of singing, prayer, preaching, and the reception of the Lord’s Supper, the substance being essentially the same as it is now,—the arrangement alone being different. The liturgy growing as it were out of the injunction of St. Paul, “Let everything be done with decency and order.” ----- [10] Now called Satterrania, by the Romans, from Subterranea, the modern Latin name of these quarries. [11] As the Jewish Church always had, and still has, a liturgical arrangement, the litany of St. James may have been used in the Christian Church of Jerusalem, but certainly without the additions at the end, which now disfigure it, as no invocations to saints were admitted into the worship of the primitive times. The prayer itself is very evangelical and beautiful. CHAPTER XII. “I am amazed—and can it be?— —Oh mockery of heaven!” SUCKLING. Unconscious of her danger, because unconscious of the vast influence the Hebrew captive held over her mind and affections, Lucia Claudia, though aware of his hatred to Christianity, did not know that in communicating to him the fact that she was a catechumen (as those persons were called who had put themselves under a course of instruction previous to their Christian baptism) she would risk the loss of that faith which seemed then so precious to her soul.