Was ever another command so
obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and
country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every
conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and
before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly
greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men
have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for
criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and
bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a
good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for
a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus
setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the
soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of
pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the
yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the
repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren
woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions
roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of
scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church;
tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively,
by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk;
gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages
with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them.
And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive
Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the
pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy
common people of God.
Dom Gregory Dix The Shape of the Liturgy, (London: 1945) 744
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