Since the Renaissance, the world has gained many sciences: but it has, in the process, lost not a few arts. All lost arts are to be regretted; but the loss of one of them should be a subject of special sorrow on the part of Catholics. It is the art of compiling Breviary Offices.

All flesh is not the same flesh: star differeth from star in glory. Each of our Breviaries—the Roman, the Monastic, the Dominican, the Ambrosian—contains offices of very varying degrees of beauty. Even the oldest offices, such as most of those in the Proprium de Tempore and the Commune Sanctorum, mark very different stages of the road to perfection; but speaking generally, it is in the Proper of Saints that the differences are most marked, and the modern offices which are the ugliest and least fitting.

The principal elements of the Breviary Office are five : antiphons, responsories, lessons, hymns and collects. The general custom of liturgists has always been to take the antiphons and responsories from Holy Scripture: although many locally-used offices exist in which these elements are rimed compositions of the form familiar to us from a number of the proper offices of saints in the Dominican use. The lessons, of course, are always taken from existing sources, the Bible or the writings of the Fathers. The compiler’s opportunity for free composition, therefore, is normally restricted to the hymns and collects. Equally, bad hymns and collects frequently spoil an office.