Christians like ourselves, and like those among whom we have lived.

My brethren, do we ever kneel around the dying bed of a Christian friend, without exercising this hope? It is this that gives wings to our prayers, and makes us so anxious that those whom we love should have the benefit of the adorable Sacrifice of the Mass offered for them-not that we believe them to be without need of our prayers, but because our Christian hope forbids our doubting that they have died in a state of grace, and that the Precious Blood of our Lord has begun, and will continue in them that blessed process of final purification which may be needed to make them perfectly fit to stand before the face of God for ever. My brethren, this has been the tradition of the Church from the first, it comes to us with all the weight of the constant instinct and practice of all the generations that have preceded us in the enjoyment of the Christian privileges and the means of grace, and we may be sure that it will go on beyond our time, and that, when we ourselves come to pass away, when it is said among our friends, that so-and-so has gone, either suddenly or after a long visible preparation as it may please our Blessed Father to arrange for us, our friends will gather around our bed or around our bier also, and will say for us the same holy prayers with the same holy hope and confidence in the mercy and providence of our God. Surely, my brethren, these things would not be so in the Church of God, if it were true that but few, except heroic Christians, were to be able to conform themselves to the image

which God has set before them as their pattern and model. And I say, that however much it may be right, and according to the intention of our Lord, that we should impress on ourselves and on others the first truth of which I have spoken, and which cannot be denied, that the imitation of our Lord is difficult, there would not be the constant traditional practice and feeling in the Church, if the other truth also were not firmly established in her heart, that an immense number of her children are able, by the mercy of God, to accomplish this difficulty.

Now, as to this it might be said, in the first place, that the salvation of the world is the work and the enterprise of God, the special end and object for which He has done the grandest thing that He has ever done at all, in Heaven and in earth, and that it is not the way of God to undertake great things which He does not bring to an accomplishment. To say this, is only to say in other words what St. Paul declares in the passage quoted to you last Sunday-" What shall we say to these things? If God be for us, who is against us? He that spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how hath He not also with Him. given us all things?" Surely it is not easy to think that God will let Himself be defeated, even by the malice of Satan and even by the obstinacy of the perverse human will, to such an extent as to contrive all this great economy of the Incarnation and the Passion and the Catholic Church, and then find at the end of all that it has been done in vain.

And again, my brethren, if it be an incongruous

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LIvelions System of the Catholic Church, with all its precepts and teachings and sacraments and ordimances brimming over, so to say, with graces and spiritual forces, a system coextensive in all its multitudinous arrangements and provisions with human Me in all its stages and fortunes and developments, only to see the whole arrangement fail, or at the most remain a witness, unparalleled in the whole istory of the world, of the perversity of men in refusing the most careful and wise and copious and

tender provisions made for them by their God? No, this cannot be, and more than that, this has not been. For the whole of history since our Lord's time, as the whole of prophecy before, tells us a different tale, seeing that it tells us of the imitation of our Lord's example by thousands and thousands of His saints.

IV.

From the very beginning of the ordinance of prophecy in the world, it has been said in these descriptions more or less clearly, what St. Jude quotes from the prophecy of the holy Enoch, that "the Lord cometh with thousands of His saints." And indeed it may be truly said that the presence of the saints is necessary in the great day of trial and manifestation, for the confusion of the wicked, as well as for the consolation of the just. Well, my brethren, and who are the saints of God? Have they been men and women of different mould from ourselves? We know indeed only a small part of the history of some few of them—we know that by far the greater number of that immense multitude have lived hidden from mortal sight, at least that their sanctity has never been proclaimed by the Church on earth, whose calendars are yet crowded and overcrowded by the number of those who in various parts of the Catholic world have been deemed, by the holy instinct of the Christian people, to be worthy of the special veneration which belongs to heroic virtue, 'and have been honoured by God, in return, through those manifestations of their power with him which He has vouchsafed to grant,

as an authentication, so to say, of the accuracy of the instinct which has led to that veneration. And if we cannot gather any certain conclusions as to their number from that of those whom we know in this way to be among the saints of God, at all events we can gather two things which are enough for our purpose now, namely, we can gather that the number, even of great saints, is very large, and we can gather also that they have been taken from all classes and conditions of men. We know thus much at least, they have not all lived in the deserts, they have not all been consecrated to the service of the altars of God, they have not all renounced the use of their earthly possessions or their homes, they have not all passed their days in the exercise of prayer or of practices of penance. If they had done this, they would have imitated only a portion of the example of our Lord. No, the saints of God (in the largest sense of the word), as far as we know them, have been, as I say, men and women like ourselves, they have been young and old, they have been rich, and poor, and learned, and unlearned, and high in position, as the world counts position, as well as lowly and obscure. Humanly speaking, they have often been as weak, and as feeble, and as unstable, and as heavily weighted with difficulties for the attainment of salvation as any of ourselves can be. Had they been persons of singular and exceptional dispositions or characters or histories, then it might be said that some characters and some dispositions and some circumstances were SO unfavourable to sanctity as to