The Christian Church succeeded to the Jewish. The younger society inherited the traditions of the elder, not less as a measure of necessity than as a matter of right; and by a kind of sacred instinct conformed itself from the very beginning in countless particulars to its divinely-appointed model. The same general Order of Service went on unbroken,—conducted by a Priesthood whose spiritual succession was at least as jealously guarded as had been the natural descent from Aaron in the Church of the Circumcision.(327) It was found that “the Sacraments of the Jews are [but] types of ours.”(328) Still were David’s Psalms antiphonally recited, and the voices of “Moses and the Prophets” were heard in the sacred assemblies of God’s people “every Sabbath day.” Canticle succeeded to Canticle; while many a Versicle simply held its ground. The congenial utterances of the chosen race passed readily into the service of the family of the redeemed. Unconsciously perhaps, the very method of the one became adopted by the other: as, for example, the method of beginning a festival from the “Eve” of the preceding Day. The Synagogue-worship became transfigured; but it did not part with one of its characteristic features. Above all, the same three great Festivals were still retained which declare “the rock whence we are hewn and the hole of the pit whence we are digged:” only was it made a question, a controversy rather, whether Easter should or should not be celebrated _with the Jews_.(329) But it is the faithful handing on to the Christian community of _the Lectionary practice_ of the Synagogue to which the reader’s attention is now exclusively invited. That the Christian Church inherited from the Jewish the practice of reading a first and a second Lesson in its public assemblies, is demonstrable. What the Synagogue practice was in the time of the Apostles is known from Acts xiii. 15, 27. Justin Martyr, (A.D. 150) describes the Christian practice in his time as precisely similar:(330) only that for “the Law,” there is found to have been at once substituted “the Gospel.” He speaks of the writings of “_the Apostles_” and of “the Prophets.” Chrysostom has the same expression (for the two Lessons) in one of his Homilies.(331) Cassian (A.D. 400) says that in Egypt, after the Twelve Prayers at Vespers and at Matins, two Lessons were read, one out of the Old Testament and the other out of the New. But _on Saturdays_ and _Sundays_, and the fifty days of Pentecost, both Lessons were from the New Testament,—one from the Epistles or the Acts of the Apostles; the other, from the Gospels.(332) Our own actual practice seems to bear a striking resemblance to that of the Christian Church at the earliest period: for we hear of (1) “Moses and the Prophets,” (which will have been the carrying on of the old synagogue-method, represented by our first and second Lesson,)—(2) a lesson out of the “Epistles or Acts,” together with a