“In art, as well as in poetry, the representation of these wild states of enthusiasm was apparently due to the imagination alone, for in prose literature we have very little evidence, in historic times, of women actually holding revels in the open air. Such a practice would have been alien to the spirit of seclusion which pervaded the life of womankind in Greece. … The festivals of the Thyiads were mainly confined to Parnassus.” Thus Sandys in the introduction to his justly admired edition of the Bacchae. Diodorus, on the other hand, tells us (4.3) that “In many Greek states congregations (βακχεῖα) of women assemble every second year, and the unmarried girls are allowed to carry the thyrsus and share the transports of the elders (συνενθουσιάζειν).” And since Sandys' day inscriptional evidence from various parts of the Greek world has confirmed Diodorus' statement. We know now that such biennial festivals (τριετηρíδες) existed at Thebes, Opus, Melos, Pergamum, Priene, Rhodes; and they are attested for Alea in Arcadia by Pausanias, for Mitylene by Aelian, for Crete by Firmicus Maternus. Their character may have varied a good deal from place to place, but we can hardly doubt that they normally included women's ὄργια of the ecstatic or quasi-ecstatic type described by Diodorus, and that these often, if not always, involved nocturnal ὀρειβασíα or mountain dancing.

There is hardly a point in the whole Quartodeciman question that has not, at one time or another, been vigorously contested. Since the days when the Tübingen school interpreted the struggle to support their separation of the Fourth Gospel from the Johannine Tradition, there has grown up a veritable library of controversial literature on the subject. Perhaps the most judicious statement of the problem in English appeared in Stanton's The Gospels as Historical Documents (Part I, pp. 173–197), which was dependent upon Schürer's De Controversiis Paschalibus (1869). Since that time, however, the question has been re-opened by Schmidt's learned Excursus appended to his text of the Epistola Apostolorum. Dating this work in the 60's of the second century, he claimed that in Chapter 15 there was a reference to the Paschal controversy that confirmed his view. Furthermore, he contended that this section of the Epistola had once for all settled a number of uncertain problems. Chief among these was the significance attached by the Asiatic Church to the 14th of Nisan. Schmidt concluded from the words, “But do ye commemorate my death,” that on this day the Easterners celebrated the Passion. Henceforth it would be impossible to claim that the Quartodeciman rite implied a Christian “Passover” which commemorated the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist (pp. 600–601). Indeed, he went so far as to urge that the whole Asiatic practice was centered in the Passion to the exclusion of the Resurrection. Contrasting the Quartodeciman with the Catholic custom he wrote, “Dort Passah, hier Ostern!” (p. 579).

In various mediaeval authors, writing in different localities and at different periods, there are a goodly number of quotations which obviously derive ultimately from a biblical text. These quotations, however, either are not found in exactly the form, in which they are quoted, in MSS. of the Bible, whether of Old Latin or of Vulgate versions, or, if they do occur in MSS., these are of a later date than the earliest author who uses the quotation. Since these quotations do appear in the liturgy of the Church, or in other texts which were used in worship, such as sermons, homilies, Saints' Lives, it is not illogical to suppose that their source is to be found, not in any special type of Bible text, but in the liturgy. As an illustration of this possibility I presented in this Review (XXXI, 1938, 41–51) a study of one of these quotations, the phrase viam universae carnis ingressurus, which occurs frequently in documents from the 11th century on. It does not occur in precisely this form in any biblical MS., although the substitution of carnis for terrae of the early MSS. is found in a MS. of the 13th century, but does occur in at least one liturgical text of the 11th century and in another which dates from the 13th century, if not earlier. The conclusion is certainly justified therefore that authors were indebted to the liturgy for this phrase and that the liturgical form influenced the reading in later biblical MSS.

The Bay Psalm Book, which was printed here in Cambridge three hundred years ago this summer, is something much more significant than a bibliographical rarity or a literary curiosity. Its early editions are, of course, choice items of Americana for collectors, and its verse, which at first sight seems so uncouth, has provoked the derision or sarcasm of unsympathetic critics who have done no more than glance at it. Unfortunately most people know little more about the book than these widely publicized facts. But the Bay Psalm Book deserves respectful consideration on other and better grounds, for it is the earliest literary monument of the English-speaking colonists on this continent; it is a key to an understanding of their religious life; and it was the fountain-head of that great stream of later American hymnody of which it is the direct spiritual ancestor.