that from the beginning of the
temple's history forms of worship not strictly speaking sacrificial
had been a stated feature of the ritual. But whether in the temple
or not, certainly in the synagogues, which after the return from
the captivity sprang up all over the Jewish world, services
composed of prayers, of psalms, and of readings from the law and
the prophets were of continual occurrence. Therefore we may safely
say that with these two forms of divine service, the sacrificial
and the simply devotional and didactic, the apostles, the founders
of the Christian Church, had been familiar from their childhood.
They were at home in both synagogue and temple. They knew by sight
the ritual of the altar, and by ear the ritual of the choir. They
were accustomed to the spectacle of the priest offering the victim;
they were used to hearing the singers chant the psalms.

We see thus why it is that the public worship of the Church should
have come down to us in two great lines, why there should be a
tradition of eucharistic worship and, parallel to this, a tradition
of daily prayer; for as the one usage links itself, in a sense,
to the sacrificial system of God's ancient people and has in it a
suggestion of the temple worship, so the other seems to show a
continuity with what went on in those less pretentious sanctuaries
which had place in all the cities and villages of Judea, and indeed
wherever, throughout the Roman world, Jewish colonists were to be
found. The earliest Christian disciples having been themselves
Hebrews, nothing could have been more natural than their moulding
the worship of the new Church in general accordance with the
models that had stood before their eyes from childhood in the
old. The Psalms were sung in the synagogues according to a settled
principle. We cannot wonder, then, that the Psalter should have
continued to be what in fact it had always been, the hymn-book of
the Church. Moreover, they had in the synagogue besides their
psalmody a system of Bible readings, confined, of course, to the
Old Testament Scriptures. This is noted in the observation that
fell from Simon Peter, at the first Council of the Church, "Moses
of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in
the synagogue every Sabbath day." Scripture lessons, therefore,
would be no novelty.

We gather also from the New Testament, not to speak of other
authorities, that in the apostolic days people were familiar with
wh