Antiquity of collects.  No one can say with certainty who the composers of the collects were.  All admit the antiquity of these compositions.  In the fourth century certain collects were believed to come from apostolic times; indeed, the collects read in the Mass on Good Friday, for Gentiles, Jews, heretics, schismatics, catechumens and infidels bear intrinsic notes of their antiquity.  Other liturgical collects show that they were composed in the days of persecution.  Others show their ages by their accurate expression of Catholic doctrine against, and their supplications for, heretics, Manicheans, Sabbelians, Arians, Pelagians and Nestorians.  St, Jerome in his Life of St. Hilarion (291-371) writes, “Sacras Scriptures memoriter tenens, post orationes et psalmos quasi Deo praesente recitabat.”  It is said that St. Gelasius (d. 496), St. Ambrose (d. 397), St, Gregory the Great (d. 604) composed collects and corrected existing ones.  The authorship and the period of composition of many of the Breviary collects are matters of doubt and difficulty.  Even the date of the introduction of collects into the Divine Office is doubtful.  In the early Christian Church there seems to have been one and only one prayer, the Pater Noster, in liturgical use.  St. Benedict laid it down in his rule that there should be none other.  It is generally held by students of liturgy that the collects were originally used in Mass only and were introduced into the Office at a time much later than their introduction into the Mass books.

In the Masses for Holy Week we see the collects in their oldest existing form.  The rite of the Mass has been shortened at all other seasons, and there remains now only the greeting, Oremus, and the collect itself.  The Oremus did not refer immediately to the collect, but rather to the silent prayer that went before it.  This also explains the shortness of the older collects.  They are not the prayer itself, but its conclusion.  One short sentence summed up the petitions of the people.  It is only since the original meaning of the collect has been forgotten that it has become itself a long petition with various references and clauses (compare the collects for the Sundays after Pentecost with those of modern feasts)—­(Cath.  Encyl., art.  “Collects").

The following examples which are not extreme, may help to make clear and emphatic the matter of the shortness of the old and the length of the new collects.

“Protector in te sperantium, Deus, sine quo nihil est validum, nihil est sanctum:  multiplica super nos misericordiam tuam; ut te rectore, te duce, sic transeamus per bona temporalia, ut non amittamus aeterna.  Per Dominum.”

Translation—­“O God, the Protector of all that hope in Thee, without Whom nothing is sure, nothing is holy, bountifully bestow on us, Thy mercy, that Thou being our ruler and our guide, we may so pass through temporal blessings that we lose not the eternal.  Through our Lord ...”  (Collect for third Sunday after Pentecost.)