149. #Caro# &c.: S. John vi. 56: the quotation in l. 151 is from verse
54 of the same.
152. Morris says #muge# = muge ge: probably the latter word has dropped
out.
154. #ouelete#, oblation, the thing offered, here the wafer to be
consecrated. OE. #oflǣte#, #oflēte# from L. oblata.
156. #⁊ . . . hem#, and which: comp. 86/120. #swimesse#, lit. silent
mass, explained in Specimens as a mass without music; in Bradley-Strat.
as a low mass. But the words of consecration were used in masses low and
high; the meaning is the Canon of the Mass, containing the words of
consecration, which was said _secreto_, and was often called _secretum_,
as by Durandus, ‘secretum silentium in quo & misse canon devote
dicitur.’ Comp. ‘Si comenca puis le secrei | De la messe, par bone fei;
| Et quant li secrez ert finez, | Est danz Theophle auant alez; | Receut
le dulz cors de Jhesu,’ Adgar, Mary Legends, 113/1041; and see the Lay
Folks Mass Book, pp. 267, 274. A similar compound is ‘swidages,’ OEH ii.
101/15, the still days, the last three days of Holy Week, which is
called ‘swiwike’ in MS. Cleopatra of AR 70/7.
157. Comp. ‘colorem et saporem panis voluit [Christus] remanere, et sub
illa specie veram corporis Christi substantiam latere,’ Hildebert, 535.
159-61. The words in brackets were supplied in Specimens, with
translation, ‘Greater might doth our Saviour than the holy words which
he spake by his (the priest’s) mouth, when he giveth mankind his flesh
and his blood,’ an explanation unsatisfactory in substance, for the
‘might’ is not ‘greater,’ but the same. Besides ‘his’ must refer to
helende, and the earliest certain example of man’s kind = mankind ‘þar
he for mans kind wil dei,’ CM 14909, is more than a century later; the
word in this text is ‘mankin,’ 86/136 (#mann cynn#), ‘manken,’ OEH ii.
19/14. #mannes cuinde# cannot mean anything but man’s nature, humanitas,
like Orm’s ‘mennisske kinde,’ Dedic. 218, ‘mennisscnessess kinde,’ id.
15687. Omitting the supplement the meaning appears to be, Our Saviour
works a greater miracle than if the words of consecration were literally
fulfilled, since he gives us in the sacrament his perfect human nature.
161. #⁊ Naþeles# &c., and moreover when a man eats and drinks in the
ordinary way, the bread he eats and the drink he drinks do change into
flesh and blood by the natural working of the body, wherefore &c.