That hymn sung in the early morning, of which Pliny had heard, was kindling into the service of the Mass.
The Mass, indeed, would appear to have been said continuously from the Apostolic age.

Its details, as one by one they become visible in later history, have already the character of what is ancient and venerable.
"We are very old, and ye are young!" they seem to protest, to those who fail to understand them.

Ritual, in fact, like all other elements of religion, must grow and cannot be made--grow by the same law of development which prevails everywhere else, in the moral as in the physical world.

As regards this special phase of the religious life, however, such development seems to have been unusually rapid in the subterranean age which preceded Constantine; and in the very first days of the final triumph of the church the Mass emerges to general view already substantially complete.

"Wisdom" was dealing, as with the dust of creeds and philosophies, so also with the dust of outworn religious usage, like the very spirit of life itself, organising soul and body out of the lime and clay of the earth.