![]() ![]() These various Jewish rituals, as we shall see, came to have an influence upon the Christian liturgy as it slowly began to take form. In addition to these there was a ritual which had grown out of the custom the Jews had of assembling daily for prayer in times of fast or of national disaster or of other urgencies. This is important to remember because by the time of our Lord's coming on earth the Jews had developed an extensive liturgy, consisting of the temple worship, which centered around the sacrifices offered there by the priest and the synagogue worship, the latter derived, most likely, from the older temple worship. In examining these sources of the liturgy we have to keep in mind that the apostles and their first disciples were Jews and, as Jews, were accustomed to going to the temple for prayer. It was in these two services that the Christian liturgy, as we know it today, had its beginning and to these two we owe all our liturgical hymns. To understand this process one has to go back to the time when the Christian liturgy began and how, which means, stripped of non-essentials, the manner in which the apostles first celebrated the Eucharist and the way in which they and their followers gathered together for prayer. New feasts have been added to the Church's calendar, new offices and hymns composed for these feasts-the Feast of Corpus Christi, for instance, ordered to be observed throughout the world by Pope Urban IV in 1264 and the Feast of Christ the King, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1935. As time has gone on there have been additions to it, changes have crept in. ![]() One can merely record how various hymns came to be used in the liturgy, remained in it or were supplanted by other, newer hymns. In such a short article as this only the surface of the subject can be scratched. It would be a mere truism to say that a liturgical hymn is one which has a place in the liturgy without going further and showing how it found a place there, explaining, in part, what the liturgy is and how it began. ![]() Before the origin of the liturgical hymns can be explained one has to know what they are. ![]()
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