Structure
A collect generally has five parts:
- Invocation or address, indicating the person of Trinity addressed, usually God the Father, rarely God the Son
- Description of a divine attribute that relates to the petition (often qui ... - who ...)
- The petition, "for one thing only and that in the tersest language"
- The desired result (begins with the word ut - in order that)
- Indication of a further purpose of the petition
- Conclusion indicating the mediation of Jesus Christ.
- Response by the people: Amen
In some contemporary liturgical texts, this structure has been obscured by sentence constructions that depart from the Latin flowing style of a single sentence.
Read more about this topic: Collect
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“When a house is tottering to its fall,
The strain lies heaviest on the weakest part,
One tiny crack throughout the structure spreads,
And its own weight soon brings it toppling down.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.”
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918)
“Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.”
—Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)