he have acted differently if the State had then, as later, joined hypocrisy to tyranny, and tried to vindicate its spoliations by artful language, unknown to the straightforward highway robber? Where are now the State and the Cæsar of those days? It is no new thing for persecutors to end in shame; the imperial murderer of the great deacon had not long to wait; in less than two years, Valerian had become the footstool of Sapor, and afterwards his skin, dyed red, was hung from the roof of a Persian temple.

Laurence, meanwhile, has received more homage than was ever offered to king or Cæsar. What ancient Roman conqueror ever attained to his glory? Rome itself became his conquest: twenty-four sanctuaries dedicated to Christ in his name in the Eternal City eclipse all the imperial palaces. And throughout the world, how many important churches and monasteries rejoice in his powerful patronage. The New World imitates the Old, giving the name of St. Laurence to its towns and provinces, its islands, bays, rivers, capes and mountains. But among all Christian kingdoms, his native Spain justly distinguishes itself in paying honour to the illustrious Archdeacon; it celebrates on the 1st May his holy parents Orentius and Patience, who gave him birth in the territory of Huesca; and it consecrated to him the noblest monument of its grandest age, St. Laurence of the Escurial, at once a church, a monastery, and a palace, built in the form of a gigantic gridiron.

Let us close the Octave with the prayer addressed to him to-day by our common Mother: "Raise up, "O Lord, in thy Church, the spirit which was followed "by the blessed Levite, Laurence; that we being "filled with it, may study to love what he loved, and "in our works to practise what he taught."

We have just quoted the Collect of the Octave day; it is borrowed, together with the Introit and other prayers of to-day, from the Mass which was anciently celebrated in the night of the 10th August. We take the opportunity of remarking that supernatural prodigies at various times have proved that this glorious night won for the martyr a special privilege of delivering souls from Purgatory in virtue of his own fiery torture. It became the custom in Rome to pray for the dead in the basilica of St. Laurence in agro Verano, raised by the first Christian emperor over the martyr's tomb. The faithful of the Eternal City come to sleep their last sleep under its shadow, and within its walls Pius IX., of happy memory, willed to await his resurrection.

Notker gives us this fine Sequence, after which we will conclude with a prayer from the Leonian Sacramentary.

SEQUENCE.

O Laurence, martyr and brave soldier of the great and true David,

The tribunal of the emperor, The blood-stained hand of the executioners,

Are set at nought by thee, who followest the Desirable One, who is mighty of hand,

Who alone could overthrow the Kingdom of the cruel tyrant,

And whose holy love maketh his soldiers prodigal of their blood,

Provided they may behold him, at the price of the present life.

Thou despisest the fasces of Cæsar, and laughest to scorn the judge's threats.

Laurenti, David magni martyr milesque fortis,

Tu imperatoris tribunal, Tu manus tortorum cruentas,

Sprevisti, secutus desiderabilem atque manu fortem,

Qui solus potuit regna superare tyranni crudelis,

Cujusque sanctus sanguinis prodigos facit amor milites ejus,

Dummodo illum liceat cernere dispendio vitæ præseptis.

Cæsaris tu fasces contemnis et judicis minas derides.

PRAYER.

1 An allusion to the mysterious scene of Easter evening, when our risen Lord ate a piece of broiled fish and some honey-comb before his disciples, and gave them the remains.

AUGUST 18.

FOURTH DAY WITHIN THE OCTAVE
OF THE ASSUMPTION.

IN the eternal decrees Mary was never separated from Jesus; together with him, she was the type of all created beauty. When the Almighty Father prepared the heavens and the earth, his Son, who is his Wisdom, played before him in his future humanity as first exemplar, as measure and number, as starting-point, centre and summit of the work undertaken by the Spirit of Love; but at the same time the predestined Mother, the woman chosen to give to the Son of God from her own flesh his quality of Son of Man, appeared among mere creatures as the term of all excellence in the various orders of nature, of grace, and of glory. We need not then be astonished at the Church putting on Mary's lips the words first uttered by Eternal Wisdom: "From the beginning and before the world "was I created."

The divine ideal was realized in her whole being, even in her body. To form out of nothing a reflection of the divine perfections, is the purpose of creation and the law even of matter. Now, next to the Face of the most beautiful of the sons of men, nothing on earth so well expressed God as the Virgin's countenance. St. Denis is said to have exclaimed on seeing our Lady for the first time:

"Had not faith revealed to me thy Son, I should "have taken thee for God." Whether it be authentic or not to place it in the mouth of the Areopagite,1 this cry of the heart expresses the feeling of the ancients. We shall be the less surprised at this, if we remember that no son ever resembled his mother as Jesus did; it was the law of nature doubled in him, since he had no earthly father. It is now the delight of the Angels, to behold in the glorified bodies of Jesus and Mary, new aspects of eternal beauty, which their own immaterial substances could not reflect.

Now the unspeakable perfection of Mary's body sprang from the union of that body with the most perfect soul that ever was, excepting of course the soul of our Lord her Son. With us, the original Fall has broken the harmony that ought to exist between the two very different elements of our human being, and has generally displaced, and sometimes even destroyed, the proportions of nature and grace. It is very different where the divine work has not thus been vitiated from the beginning; so that in each blessed spirit of the nine choirs, the degree of grace is in direct relation to his gifts of nature. Exemption from sin allowed the soul of the Immaculate One to inform the body of its own image with absolute sway, while the soul itself, lending itself to grace to the full extent of its exquisite powers, suffered God to raise it supernaturally above all the Seraphim, even to the steps of his own throne.

For in the kingdom of grace, as in that of nature, Mary's super-eminence was such as became a Queen. At the first moment of her existence in the womb of St. Anne, she was set far above the highest mountains; and God, who loves only what he has made Ex pseudo-epistola DIONYS. ad Paulum. 2 THOM. AQUIN., Ia P., qu. lxii., art. 6.