[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.
[163]. swo doð: comp. 6/18 note.
[166]. estene dai, day of dainties, with a word-play on estre as in hu sel = wu god: sǣl, happiness.
[169]. sleðrende, falling gently, like dew or rain. Pluit &c.: Ps. lxxvii. 24, 25.