Nothing could have been more simple than the order of worship. The Christians had ended the Agape, the common meal of brotherly love, consisting of bread and fish and wine. They had exchanged the kiss of peace. The tables had now been removed by the young and smiling acolytes, and the seats arranged in front of the low wooden desk at which Linus and the elders and deacons stood. They had no distinctive dress, but wore the ordinary tunic or cloak of daily life, though evidently the best and neatest that they could procure. In such a community, so poor, so despised, there could be no pomp of ritual, but the lack of it was more than compensated by the reverent demeanour which made each Christian feel that, for the time being, this poor granary was the house of God and the gate of heaven. They knelt or stood in prayer as though the mud floor were sacred as the rocks of Sinai, and every look and gesture was happy as of those who felt that not only angels and archangels were among them, but the invisible presence of their Lord Himself. First they prayed;--and Britannicus had never before heard real prayers. But here were men and women, the young and the old, to whom prayer evidently meant direct communion with the Infinite and the Unseen; to whom the solitude of private supplication, and the community of worship, were alike admissions into the audience-chamber of the Divine. Never had he heard such outpourings of the soul, in all the rapture of trust, to a Heavenly Father. How different seemed such intercourse with the Eternal from the vague conventional aspirations of the Stoics towards an incomprehensible Soul of the Universe, which had no heart for pity and no arm to save! But a new and yet more powerful sensation was kindled in his mind, when at the close of the prayers they sang a hymn. It was a hymn to Christ, beginning-- ‘Faithful the saying, Great the mystery--Christ! Manifested in the flesh, Justified in the spirit; Seen of angels; Preached among the nations; Believed on in the world; Received up in glory!’ Britannicus listened entranced to the mingled voices as they rose and fell in exquisite cadence. He had heard in theatres all the most famous singers of Rome; he had heard the chosen youths and the maidens chanting in the temple processions; he had heard the wailing over the dead, and the Thalassio-chorus of the bridal song. But he had heard nothing which distantly resembled this melody and harmony of voices wedded to holy thoughts; and, although there were no instruments, the ‘angelical soft trembling voices’ seemed to him like echoes from some new and purer region of existence. He rejoiced, therefore, when they began yet another hymn, of which the first verse was-- ‘Awake thee, O thou sleeper, And from the dead arise, And Christ shall dawn upon thee, To light thy slumbering eyes.’[52]