COLLECT. A brief, comprehensive prayer varying (like the epistle and gospel, which it immediately precedes) with the season of the Church year. Such prayers are found in all the earlier Christian liturgies, and most of those now used come from the sacramentaries of Saint Leo. Gelasius. and Saint Gregory. The name (which, however, does not occur in the Boman missal, where the word oratio, prayer, is used is also of great antiquity. It probably conies from collecta„ in the sense of collectio, it gather ing, the prayer being originally designated oratio ad colic-clam. In the oldest liturgies only a sin gle collect was used, but with the growth of the calendar it became customary to 'eommemorate' a festival which was displaced by one of greater importance with the use of its collect ; the sacred number of seven, however, might never be ex ceeded. In the Roman missal two other prayers, the secrete and the coin m nolo, are of similar structure to that of the collect, and, like it. vary
with the day. These were not retained in the Anglican prayer-book, which has almost literal translations of the Latin collects for nearly all its services. In the morning and evening prayer of this book, as in all the offices of the Roman breviary except prime and compline, the collect for the day is repeated, to link the other offices with the eucharistic service. The structure of the collect is simple and uniform. It begins with a form of address nearly always to God the Father, generally including a commemoration of the special event celebrated, then offers as a rule a single petition for some grace or blessing, and ends normally 'through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with Thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end.'