Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the ninety-ninth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the liturgies, the church orders and the decisions of the councils that do not belong to any one author. This volume holds Isabel Hapgood’s English Service Book of the Orthodox Church, in two parts, as it was published in New York in 1906.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The Service Book was read by machine from a scan of the 1906 edition and has not been proofread against the printed book, so a misreading may remain.
In this volume
The Orthodox Church of the East keeps its worship in great books of services, and this volume gives Isabel Hapgood’s English version of them, made from the Old Church-Slavonic books used in the Russian church and compared with the Greek, and published in New York in 1906. Hapgood was an American translator, best known for her work on Russian literature and on the Russian church.
The first part holds the great daily and festal services: the symbolism of the church and the vestments, the all-night vigil, the hours, the liturgies of Chrysostom, Basil and the Presanctified, the twelve great feasts, Holy Week and Easter, and the offices of baptism, chrismation, confession, marriage, ordination and unction. The second part holds the burial services and the requiem offices, the blessings and the offices of thanksgiving, with an appendix on the eight tones of the church music and Hapgood’s own notes on the services. The directions to the clergy, which the printed book sets in italics, are shown here in square brackets.
Dates and authorship
The services in this book are those of the Orthodox Church as they were used in the Russian church and in the Greek church at the time of the translation in 1906; many of their prayers are far older. Each work begins with a short introduction.