a All the Sundays Year, &c. of the b The Feasts of our Saviour's Nativity, Passion, Resur rection, times a weekly, and sometimes an annual commemoration of those excellent and high benefits, which GOD, both by a Himself, b His Son, and His c blessed Spirit, one undivided Trinity, hath bestowed upon mankind, for the founding and propagating of that Christian Faith and Religion, which we now profess. d Ascension, &c. c Pentecost. d Trinity Sunday. And this Faith of ours, being no other e S. Mich. than the very same wherein the holy Angels and all Angels' f The 12 g S. Ste are set to succour us, and which the glorious of the f Apostles, the noble army of company g Martyrs, and the goodly fellowship of other phen and God's h Saints and servants, men famous others. thers and Christ ians. Cor. Mil. The Fa- in their generations before us, have some primitive maintained with the sanctity of their lives, and some sealed with the innocency of their deaths; it is for this cause that the names of ¿Tertul.de these holy and heavenly Saints are still S. Cypr. preserved in the Calendar of the Church, Ep. 37. there to remain upon record and register (as of old time they did) where they might Euseb. also stand as sacred memorials of God's S. Basil mercy towards us, as k forcible witnesses of His ancient truth, as confirmations of the Pont. Diac. in vit. Cyp. Hist. Eccl. 1. 4. c. 15. in Ascet. c. 40. faith which we now profess to be the same that their's then was, as provocations to the piety which they then practised, and as everlasting records to show Whose blessed servants they were on earth, that are now like the angels of God in heaven. Howbeit, forasmuch also as, in process of time, the multitude of men and women reputed holy in this kind became so exceeding numerous, that all the days of the year would not have been sufficient for a several commemoration of them; it was the great wisdom and moderation of those religious grave prelates, by whom God (of His especial blessing unto our Church above others) did reform such things, as were many ways remiss here among us, to choose one solemn All day alone, wherein to magnify God for the Day. generality of All His Saints together; and to retain some few selected days in every month for the special memory of others, both holy Persons and holy Actions, which they observed not our people alone, but the universal Church of Christ also, to be most affected unto, and best acquainted withal: hereby avoiding only the burden and the unnecessary num d Saints' ber of Festival Days; not disallowing the multitude of God's true Martyrs and Saints, whose memorials we are to solemnize howsoever in the general Festival of All Saints' Day, as by the proper Lessons, the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel then appointed in our public Liturgy, doth most evidently appear. t |