Among the several offices of the Roman Catholic Church the mass is the most fundamental and solemn--the chief doctrinal cornerstone on which is reared the whole superstructure of Catholic faith and worship. It was evolved from the dogma of the eucharist, to which was added at an early period the Jewish idea of sacrifice, which formed so vital a part of the old dispensation. Little by little it grew into the fair proportions of a great religious poem, magnificent in outline and texture, and breathing the religious ecstasies of the devout and holy teachers and leaders and saints of the church. Scriptural lessons, prayers, hymns, and responses are woven into the liturgic texture, all being brought into harmonious unity under the sway of the controlling idea of consecration and oblation. To the Roman Catholic the mass is ‘the permanent channel of grace ever kept open between God and his church.’ As often as the eucharistic elements of bread and wine are presented at the altar with certain prescribed prayers and formulas, the atoning sacrifice of Christ is repeated through the miracle of transubstantiation, ‘by which the bread and wine are transmuted into the very body and blood of Christ.’[14] The following sentences from Cardinal Gibbons’ ‘The Faith of Our Fathers’ make this central dogma of the Catholic faith still more clear: ‘The sacrifice of the mass is identical with that of the cross, both having the same victim and high priest--Jesus Christ. The only difference consists in the manner of the oblation. Christ was offered upon the cross in a bloody manner; in the mass he is offered up in an unbloody manner. On the cross he purchased our ransom, and in the eucharistic sacrifice the price of that ransom is applied to our souls.’ The mass is not the product of any one individual or council or hierarchical body, but, rather, is a gradual evolution,[15] a growth from the richest and holiest experiences of generations of pious and devout priests and monks, whose whole lives were dedicated to the service of the Most High and to the upbuilding of his visible kingdom on earth. Furthermore, in the mass the words of the liturgic text are not to be dissociated from the musical tones in which they are uttered by priest or choir. The spirit and meaning of the words so completely saturate the musical forms chosen for their expression that word and tone constitute an indissoluble artistic unit. And, while the aim of the church has always been to restrict the function of music in the service to a purely secondary place--to keep it in bondage to the ritual--the enormous value of music as an effective reinforcement of the poetic text was recognized from the very inception of liturgic forms.