The opinions and praises of the saints who dwelt on this matter of the Breviary would fill a volume. Every priest has met with many such eulogies in his reading. Newman's words are very striking. "There is," he wrote, "so much of excellence and beauty in the services of the Breviary, that were it skilfully set before the Protestants, by Romanistic controversialists, as the book of devotions received by their communion, it would undoubtedly raise a prejudice in their favour, if he were ignorant of the case and but ordinarily candid and unprejudiced.... In a word, it will be attempted to wrest a weapon out of our adversaries' hands, who have in this, as in many other instances, appropriated to themselves a treasure" (Newman, _Tracts for the Times_, No. 275, _The Roman Breviary_). This tract raised a storm amongst Newman's fellow Protestants. All the old Protestant objections against the Breviary and its recitation (See Bellarmine, _Controv_. iii., _de bonis operibus de oratione_ i., i. clx.) were re-published in a revised and embittered form. What a change has come amongst non-Catholics! Hundreds of Anglican clergymen are reading daily with attention and devotion the once hated and despised prayer book, the Roman Breviary. How old Bellarmine would wonder if he saw modern England with its hundreds of parsons reading their _Hours_! How he would wonder to read "The Band of Hope" (1915), an address delivered by an Anglican clergyman to a society of London clergymen. It includes a rule of life beginning, "Every day we say our Mass and our Office." (_Cf_. R. Knox's _Spiritual Aeneid_, p. 102.) The Roman Breviary is excellent, too, in comparison with every other breviary (e.g., Aberdeen, Sarum, Gallican). For none of these can show the antiquity, the authority, the doctrine, the sublime matter, the beautiful order, which the Roman Breviary presents. It was for these reasons that the emperors, Pepin (714-768), Charlemagne (742-814), Charles the Bald (823-888), adapted the Roman rite (Gueranger, _Institutiones Liturgiques_, tom. i.). And Grandicolas (1772), an erudite liturgist, but a prominent Gallican with no love for Roman rites, declared that the Roman Breviary stands in relation to other breviaries as the Roman Church stands in relation to all other Christian bodies, first and superior in every way (_Com. Hist. in Brev. Rom._, cap. 2). St. Francis De Sales applied to his Breviary the words of St. Augustine on the Psalter, "_Psalterium meum, gaudium meum._" CHAPTER IV. THE CONTENTS OF THE BREVIARY. SECTION I.