IN THY WORD MY SOUL TRUSTS IN THE LORD

FROM ALL HIS INIQUITIES

AND THE TRUTH OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER [154].

As can be seen from the above text of the lamp psalms, the choirs, alternating with each other, sang not the full verses of this or that psalm, but individual phrases from them, which, being taken out of the context of the psalm, sometimes turned out to be devoid of meaning, for example, "evening sacrifice" or "until I pass away." This was a direct imitation of those opening phrases like "And sleep. Glory to Thee, O God", with which the domestiki once began the singing of this or that psalm-antiphon at the hymned services. In this singing of the psalms, the prayerful attention of those present at the service was concentrated on the touching refrains: "Hear us, O Lord," "I have cried unto Thee, save me," and "Christ the Saviour, have mercy on us," which were attached to one or another phrase of the psalm. The refrain was not attached to the last six phrases, since they were combined with stichera.

During the singing of the lamp psalms, incense was performed. The latter, as is known, existed from ancient times in hymned vespers and was performed by a deacon. But when the Jerusalem Ustav appeared in the Russian Church with the rite of the All-Night Vigil, where it was instructed to perform the censing of the church before the beginning of the vigil to the priest in the presence of a candle by the paraecclesiarch, then they began to perform the censing on "Lord, I have cried;.." according to the example of the vigil. This order was first confirmed by the instructions in the printed service books [155], and then was legalized in the Typikon – "When the Lord begins to sing, the priest of the icon and the rector and the two faces and all the brethren cense, and the deacon walks before him with the priest" [156].

The Russian Church, like the Greek Church, inherited from Vespers the custom of making the entrance at Great Vespers, but at the same time it introduced into this rite something of its own, Russian. In the Russian Church, the evening entrance of the cathedral was performed without fail not only on feast days, but also on the eve of Sundays. The place of its celebration was the cathedral church of the given city, and not only all the city clergy were obliged to participate in it, but also the so-called "priests", i.e. priests who arrived in this city on some business from the periphery and stayed in it on the eve of the holiday. The priests of the city's churches had to perform vespers in their church a little earlier than it happened in the cathedral church, and appear in the latter to sing the lamp psalms.

This custom will be understandable in the light of the importance that the cathedral church had in the history of the ancient Russian city. In the cathedral church, all the most important church acts in the history of a particular principality were performed: the enthronement of a bishop, the church rite of "seating" the prince on the throne, councils, i.e. meetings of the clergy on issues of doctrine and church discipline. At the councils, the Church's activity in the field of the spiritual enlightenment of the people was mainly concentrated; The cathedrals were schools of church singing. Thus, the cathedral was the center of spiritual life not only of the city, but also of the adjacent periphery of the principality or region.

Therefore, when during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, Novgorod was deprived of the last rights of its political independence, and on this basis, apparently, some of the Novgorod clergy had the idea of the possibility of abolishing the cathedral entrances, then in 1551 Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow wrote to the Novgorod Archbishop Serapion: "And the priests should go out in the old way, and if a priest does not come to the exit, And on that he shall have the commandments according to the hryvnia according to the Novgorod one. And the priest will tell her, there was no time to go out, pain for either the woman in labor, or others for needing. And about him to be sent out into the street to search his parish by good people. And they will find out about him that he was not on the way out, and that those priests are not to have a commandment, and which the priest will lie, the parishioners will not say about him during the search: and on that priest the commandment to have in the old way a hryvnia and a well-trodden one" [157] (i.e. , legal costs. — N.U .).

The rite of the conciliar celebration of the evening entrance was an all-Russian, and not any local phenomenon. It was observed in the seventeenth century by the companion of Patriarch Macarius of Antioch, Deacon Paul of Aleppo, in the churches of Moscow [158], in the Kiev-Pechersk Monastery [159], in the Gustino-Trinity Monastery [160] and in the Moscow Novodevichy Convent [161]. In Moscow, where the entire multitude of its churches was administratively divided into "magpies" and each "forty" had its own cathedral, the clergy of each "forty" gathered at the entrance to their cathedral, while in the entrances of the Assumption Cathedral, the main church of the capital, participated the "authorities", i.e. the clergy who occupied a high position in Moscow – bishops, archimandrites, abbots, archpriests and "priestly wardens" – officials, close to the modern deans, as well as the clergy of this cathedral [162].

The peculiarity of the Russian evening entrance was that the procession of the clergy from the altar to the middle of the church in the presentation of lamps was performed through the north door with the holy gates closed.  When the deacon, having come to the middle of the church and performed the censing of the holy gates and the icons standing on either side of them, as well as the clergy, asked the primate's blessing "Bless the holy entrance," the sextons opened the holy doors with the push of candlesticks [163]. At first glance, this is a small detail of the entrance, but it was an echo of a very important moment of the ancient Vespers. The latter, as is known, began in the middle of the church, and none of the clergy entered the altar until the evening entrance. This ancient custom, which was known to our ancestors, who once performed Vespers, was not forgotten with the spread of the new monastic and parish rite of Vespers in Russia. Vespers began in the altar, and the holy gates were opened from the outside during the entrance itself.

It should be noted that this detail of the evening entrance was given great importance, so that even after the liturgical reform of Patriarch Nikon and the publication of the Typicon of 1682 , it was observed in certain places, and in the official of the Kholmogory Transfiguration Cathedral, compiled in 1715 , there is a categorical instruction: "Even now they make the entrance, they do not open the royal doors" [164].

After the holy doors were opened, the deacon censed them, exclaiming "Wisdom, forgive" [165], and sang "O Gentle Light..." The singers continued the hymn with the words "holy glory..." [166]. In order to create greater solemnity of the entrance, the anthem was sung in all eight tones, namely:

on Chapter 1 — The Holy Glory of the Immortal Heavenly Father

on chapter 2 — the Holy Blessed Jesus Christ, the Son of God