Under this heading of Proper of the Time, we here comprise the moveable Office of the Sundays and Ferias of Advent. Though anxious to give to the faithful the flowers of the Advent Liturgy, yet were we to bring forward even those which might be considered as the choicest, four volumes would have barely sufficed. The fear of making our work too expensive to the faithful, persuaded us to limit it within much narrower bounds, and out of the abundant treasures before us, to give what we thought could be least dispensed with.
The plan we have adopted is this: We give the whole of the Mass and Vespers for the four Sundays of Advent. On the Ferial days, we give one, at least, of the lessons from Isaias, which are read in the Office of Matins; adding to this a Hymn or Sequence, or some other poetic liturgical composition. All these have been taken from the gravest sources, for example, from the Roman and Mozarabic Breviaries, from the Greek Anthology and Menæa, from the Missals of the Middle Ages, &c. After this Hymn or Sequence, we have given a Prayer from the Ambrosian, Gallican, or Mozarabic Missals. So that the faithful will find, in our collection, an unprecedented abundance of liturgical formulæ, each of which carries authority with it, as being taken from ancient and approved sources.
We have not thought it desirable to give a commentary to each of the liturgical formulæ inserted in our work. It seemed to us that they would be rendered sufficiently intelligible by the general explanation which runs through our work, and in which explanation we have endeavored to excite the devotion of the reader, give unity to the several parts, and afford solid instruction. We shall thus avoid all those repetitions and common-place remarks, which do little more than fatigue the reader.
We have inserted the Great Antiphons and the Office of Christmas Eve in the Proper of the Saints, because both of these have fixed days in the Calendar, and to put them in the Proper of the Time, as they are in the Breviary and Missal, would have required us to introduce into a book, destined for the laity, rubrics which are somewhat complicated, and would, perhaps, not have been understood.