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3. Liturgical. A name given to ‘a comparatively short prayer, more or less condensed in form, and aiming at a single point, or at two points closely connected with each other’, one or more of which, according to the occasion and season, have been used in the public worship of the Western Church from an early date. Applied particularly to the prayer, which varies with the day, week, or octave, said before the Epistle in the Mass or Eucharistic service, and in the Anglican service also in Morning and Evening Prayer, called for distinction the collect of the day.As to the origin and history of the term, we are indebted mainly to the Rev. F. E. Warren, M.A., for the following notes: the Gregorian Sacramentary (ed. Muratori, 22, 28, 116) has in one place oratio ad collectam, and twice simply collecta (to which also the first is shortened in later copies), as the title of a prayer said at one of the appointed stations where the people collected in order to proceed together to the church where mass was said. Here the meaning was ‘a prayer for (or at) the collection or gathering’. But of even earlier date is the use, in the Gallican liturgies, of collectio, passing later into collecta, as a title of prayers, especially those of the mass, in which the sense was evidently the collecting or summing up in a prayer of the thought sketched out in the Rogatio or bidding, or suggested by the capitula for the day. It was from this source that the term, as a more or less general equivalent for oratio, passed into the medieval French and English missals and breviaries (see Paris Brev. 1836, Rubricæ Generales xii; Rituale Dunelmensis (Surtees Soc.) passim; Sarum Breviary (ed. 1882), Index, Sarum Missal (Burntisl. 1861) 3; Hereford Missal p. xxxv; York Missal (Surtees) I. 169, etc.), and thence, again, into the Book of Common Prayer, where it is the title of such prayers as were taken directly from the Breviary or other Service-books of the Sarum use, and of new compositions of the same type. Neither collecta nor collectio occurs as a title, or in a rubric, in the Roman Missal or Breviary, or in any authorized Roman Service-books; but the term is popularly applied, at least in France and England, to ‘the prayer in the Mass, after the Gloria and before the Epistle’ (see Catholic Dict. s.v.; also Littré).It does not appear that there was any original connection between the Roman and Gallican uses of collecta here mentioned; but from an early period etymologizing writers tried to connect them, so as to derive the collect from both at once: see the Micrologus (c1100) iii, of Gallican authorship, Joh. Bekethus Divin. Offic. Explicatio (a1200) xxxvii, Durandus Rationale Div. Off. (a1300) iv. xv. §13; see also Dict. Christian Antiq. s.v., and Canon Bright ‘On the Collects’ in the Prayer-Book Commentary (S.P.C.K.).