the formula of exorcism, the commendatio animae, the Penitential, the Calendar and the Roman
cantus; they should learn to understand the homilies for Sundays and holy days as models of
preaching, and read the pastoral theology of Pope Gregory. This was the sum and substance of
clerical learning.^434 The study of the Greek Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures was out of the
question, and there was hardly a Western bishop or pope in the middle ages who was able to study
the divine oracles in the original.
The best, therefore, that the priests and deacons, and even most of the bishops could do was
to read the sermons of the fathers. Augustin had given this advice to those who were not skilled in
composition. It became a recognized practice in France and England. Hence the collection of
homilies, called Homiliaria, for the Gospels and Epistles of Sundays and holy days. They are mostly
patristic compilations. Bede’s collection, called Homilice de Tempore, contains thirty-three homilies
for the summer, fifteen for the winter, twenty-two for Lent, besides sermons on saints’ days.
Charlemagne commissioned Paulus Diaconus or Paul Warnefrid (a monk of Monte Cassino and
one of his chaplains, the historian of the Lombards, and writer of poems on saints) to prepare a
Homiliarium (or Omiliarius) about a.d. 780, and recommended it for adoption in the churches of
France. It follows the order of Sundays and festivals, is based on the text of the Vulgate, and
continued in use more or less for several centuries.^435 Other collections were made in later times,
and even the Reformed church of England under Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth found it necessary
to provide ignorant clergymen with two Books of Homilies adapted to the doctrines of the
Reformation.
In this connection we must allude again to the poetic reproductions of the Bible history,
namely, the divine epos of Caedmon, the Northumbrian monk (680), the Saxon Heliand" (Heiland,
i.e. Saviour, about 880), and the "Christ" or Gospel Harmony of Otfrid (a pupil of Rabanus Maurus,
about 870). These works were effective popular sermons on the history of redemption, and are at
the same time the most valuable remains of the Anglo-Saxon and old high German dialects of the
Teutonic language.^436
It was, however, not till the Reformation of the sixteenth century that the sermon and the
didactic element were restored and fully recognized in their dignity and importance as regular and
essential parts of public worship. I say, worship, for to expound the oracles of God, and devoutly
to listen to such exposition is or ought to be worship both on the part of the preacher and on the
part of the hearer, as well as praying and singing.
§ 94. Church Poetry. Greek Hymns and Hymnists.
See the Lit. in vol. III. § 113 (p. 575 sq.) and § 114 (p. 578), and add the following:
(^434) Hefele, III. 745.
(^435) F. Dahn,Des Paulus Diaconus Leben und Schriften, 1876; and Mon. Germ. Scriptores rerum Langobardicarum et
Italicarum saec. VI.-IX. 1878, p. 45-187, ed. by L. Bethmann and G. Waitz; Wattenbach,Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, 4th
ed. 1877, I. 134-140.
(^436) See above, p. 41, 105, 106. The paraphrase of Caedmon, the first Christian poet of England, is edited or discussed by
Thorpe, Bouterweck, Grein, Wright, Ettmüller, Sandrar, Morley, Ten Brink, etc. (see Lit. in Schaff-Herzog sub Caedmon); the
Saxon Heliand and Otfrid’s Krist by Sievers, Rettberg, Vilmar, Lechler, Graff, Kelle, Michelsen, etc. (see Herzog 2 IV. 428-435).