This was the ancient and national liturgy of the church in France till the commencement of the 9th cen tury, when it was suppressed by order of Charlemagne, who di rected the Roman missal to be everywhere substituted in its place. All traces of it seemed for some time to have been lost until three Gallican sacramentaries were discovered and published by Thom asius in 168o under the titles of Missale Gothicum, Missale Gal licum and Missale Francorum, and a fourth was discovered and published by Mabillon in 1687 under the title of Missale Galli canum. Fragmentary discoveries have been made since. Mone discovered fragments of eleven Gallican masses and published them at Carlsruhe in 185o. Other fragments from the library at St. Gall have been published by Bunsen (Analecta Ante-Nicaena, iii. 263-266), and from the Ambrosian library at Milan by Car dinal Mai (Scriptt. Vet. Vat. Coll. iii. 2. 247). A single page was discovered in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, published in Zeitschrift fur Kath. Theologie, vi. 37o.
Liturgy.—Considerable variety of opinion has existed among liturgical writers as to the proper classification of the "Ambrosian" or "Milanese" liturgy. If we are to accept it in its present form and to make the present position of the great in tercession for quick and dead the test of its genus, then we must classify it as "Petrine" and consider it as a branch of the Roman family. If, on the other hand, we consider the important varia tions from the Roman liturgy which yet exist, and the traces of still more marked variation which confront us in the older printed and ms. copies of the Ambrosian rite, we shall detect in it an original member of the Hispano-Gallican group of lit urgies, which for centuries underwent a gradual but ever-increas ing assimilation to Rome. We know this as a matter of history, as well as a matter of inference from changes in the text itself Charlemagne adopted the same policy towards the Milanese as towards the Gallican church. He carried off all the Ambrosian church books which he could obtain, with the view of putting Roman books in their place, but the completion of his intentions failed, partly through the attachment of the Lombards to their own rites, partly through the intercession of a Gallican bishop named Eugenius (Mabillon, Mus. Ital. tom. i. Pars. ii. p. Io6).
It has been asserted by Joseph Vicecomes that this is an originally independent liturgy drawn up by St. Barnabas, who first preached
the Gospel at Milan (De Missae Rit. 1 capp. xi. xii.), and this tradition is preserved in the title and proper preface for St. Barnabas Day in the Ambrosian missal (Pamelius, Liturgicon, i. 385, 386), but it has never been proved.
There is only one liturgy to be enumerated under this group, viz. the present liturgy of the Church of Rome, which, though originally local in character and circumscribed in use, has come to be nearly co-extensive with the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes superseding earlier na tional liturgies, as in Gaul and Spain, sometimes incorporating more or less of the ancient ritual of a country into itself and producing from such incorporation a sub-class of distinct Uses, as in England, France and elsewhere. Even these subordinate Uses have for the most part become, or are rapidly becoming, obsolete.
The date, origin and early history of the Roman liturgy are obscure. The first Christians at Rome were a Greek-speaking community and their liturgy must have been Greek, and is pos sibly represented in the so-called Clementine liturgy. But the date when such a state of things ceased, when and by whom the present Latin liturgy was composed, whether it is an original composition, or, as its structure seems to imply, a survival of some intermediate form of liturgy—all these are questions which are waiting for solution.
The Roman liturgy seems to have been introduced into England in the 7th, into France in the 9th and into Spain in the 11th cen tury, though no doubt it was known in both France and Spain to some extent before these dates. In France certain features of the service and certain points in the ritual of the ancient national liturgy became interwoven with its text and formed those many varying mediaeval Gallican Uses which are associated with the names of different French sees.
The chief distinguishing characteristics of the Roman rite are these : (a) the position of the great intercession for quick and dead within the canon, the commemoration of the living being placed just before and the commemoration of the departed just after the words of institution; (b) the absence of an "Epiklesis" or invocation of the Holy Ghost upon the elements; (c) the po sition of the Pax or "Kiss of Peace after the consecration" and before the communion, whereas in other liturgies it occurs at a much earlier point in the service.