heart to Mary: "Our Lord is with thee; obtain from Him that He may be also with me."

Another pious practice, which will obtain great graces for us daily, will be to combine a visit to Mary with our visit to the Blessed Sacrament, according to the recommendation of S. Alphonsus, in the most widely diffused of all the books of prayer which have ever been offered to the piety of Christians. Amongst all the prayers of this book, those which seem to us most fervent, most inspired, if we may use that expression, are the seven which he distributes among the seven days of the week, in which this Apostle of the Blessed Virgin teaches us to ask of God, by the intercession of His Mother, the pardon of our sins, perseverance, and the spirit of prayer, a good death, deliverance from the eternal punishment we have deserved, heaven, the love of Jesus, and the maternal protection of Mary.

The Hail Mary, the Rosary, or part of the Rosary, and the visit to Mary, will thus consecrate each day of our lives to the Mother of God, and will keep us united to God in her sweet company. Our weeks, our months, and our years will be thus consecrated to Jesus and to Mary; but we will join something special to the acts of each day, still further to consecrate every week, every month, and every year to the Mother of life. In every week the Saturday shall be specially consecrated to her by some work of charity or mortification, and by some pious lecture, to remind us of our Mother's greatness, love, and power of intercession. In every month we will celebrate some one of her Feasts,-in January, her Virginal Marriage with the purest, the humblest, the greatest of Patriarchs; in February, her Purification; in March, her Annunciation; in April, her Compassion and her Sorrows; in May, we will give her the whole month of the awakening of nature, thereby to consecrate the whole year to her; in June and July, we will prepare for the Feast of the Visitation, which will obtain for us the sanctifying Visitation of Mary, on the day on which her voice

sanctified S. John the Baptist and his Mother; in August, we will celebrate her Assumption; in September, her Nativity; in October, the Festival of her holy Rosary; in November, her Presentation; and lastly, in December, her Immaculate Conception. On each of these Festivals, which remind us of the principal acts of the life of our Mother, and of the dispensations of Divine Providence towards her, we will seek, as we have said before,1 light to illuminate our own life by the maternal example given us by Mary of faith, hope, the love of God and our neighbour, holy suffering, humility, purity, the obedience, the courage, and the patience which God requires of us all.

We have spoken of all the practices of piety used by the Church for the honour and invocation of Mary every day, every week, every month, and every year of our lives; but we have said nothing yet of the act which touches most closely the heart of our Mother, and proves to her most effectually that we are truly her children. How does a child prove his confidence in his mother, when he is in need, trouble, or danger? Is it not by calling her to his aid? Does not the name of his mother then rise at once to his lips? Even so the invocation of Mary,-the prompt invocation of Mary's name, above all, in trouble, trial, or temptation,— is the principal sign of the confidence we owe her. He prays not enough who prays only when he is on his knees. The spirit of prayer is chiefly manifested by ejaculations, by those habitual aspirations which go straight from the heart of man to the Heart of God, together with the prayers of Angels and Saints, and of the Queen of Angels and Saints. The frequent, habitual invocation of Mary shall be, therefore, our chosen practice of piety, our most cherished devotion, the devotion that shall sanctify, not only every day, but every hour, nay, the best moments of all the days of our lives. S. Peter of Alcantara used frequently to repeat: "O Mary, Mary, Mary!" This is the true proof of the love of children for the Mother of souls. The mere name of their Mother speaks to them See chap. xxiv.

more powerfully than all books, all sermons, or all the sublime thoughts which come rather from the head than from the heart.

Prayer.

Yes, blessed name of my most loving Mother Mary, thou art to me, next to the Name of Jesus, the sweetest word that I can hear, the sweetest that I can speak. Thou shalt be inseparably united to that thrice-holy Name both in my heart and on my lips; thou shalt be there in all my troubles; thou shalt be there in all my wants; thou shalt be there in all my struggles; above all, in all my temptations, from their first beginning till they shall be overcome. Thou shalt be there in my falls, to raise me; in my victories, to receive my thanks; in my whole life, that, by thy intercession, it may be pure and faithful; and lastly, in my death, that it may lead me whither thou art, in the bosom of my Father and my God, to love Him with thee, with all my strength, for all eternity.

These graces, O my Mother, are too great for me, and I acknowledge myself to be wholly unworthy of them; but if they are too great to be granted to my prayer, they are not too great to be granted to thine. I hail thee, then, "full of grace," and I hope that thou wilt obtain for thy poor child something of the plenitude of his Mother's abundance. "The Lord is with thee;" but is He also with me? I remember His presence in the days of my childhood, His Divine and often-repeated visits to my soul; I remember His illumination, His unction, His light, which raised me far above the world and myself. But thou knowest, holy Mother, better than I do, that I went away into a strange land, far from God and from Thee; and that there I fell into great misery,-suffering cold and hunger in that, alas! too-willing servitude. But thou didst come and say to me: Remember thy better days, and return by me to thy God. And I have returned, but exhausted by my long and faithless flight, and hardly able to recover my strength. Redde mihilætitiam salutaris

tui! Restore to me, O my Mother, the first joy of Jesus my Saviour: stolam primam (" the first robe of my soul"). Restore to me innocence, by repentance. Restore to me charitatem primam (" my first love"). Thou canst do it, and thou wilt do it. Thou wilt do still more; thou wilt not be content to see me recover lost love, lost light, lost unction, lost strength, lost life; but thou wilt obtain for me that love, light, unction, strength, and life shall increase within me now and all the days of my life; and that the hour of my death shall be that in which I shall have most loved my God in time, that so I may go to love Him with all His Saints throughout eternity. Amen.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE ROSARY.

We have already spoken of the holy Rosary, but we will again revert to this practice of devotion, in order the more fully to develop its beauty, its sweetness, and, above all, its utility.

I. In the first place, it is sweet and beautiful in its origin and its history, for it breathes the perfume of Christian antiquity and the memories of God's merciful providence over His Church.

The Christians of the early ages were accustomed to lay garlands of flowers at the foot of their altars and holy images, and in doing so they gave expression to a touching truth, namely, the obligation we are under of referring the gifts of God to their source, of honouring God in His works, and especially in His work of predilection, the victory of His Saints. In accordance with this pious custom, S. Gregory Nazianzen composed garlands of spiritual flowers, so that the offering of the faithful might ascend to heaven with the incense of prayer. S. Bridget—a humble virgin, living in Ireland 1 Chap. xxx., supra.

in the sixth centuryl-being desirous to facilitate this practice, and to make it more general, composed crowns of the two principal prayers used by Christians,—the Pater and the Ave Maria. And in this she only followed the example of the anchorites of the first ages of the Church, who, when they were prevented from reciting the Great Psalter, or the hundred and fifty Psalms, supplied the omission by offering the Lord's Prayer to God a certain number of times; and made use of a chain of small stones, or something else of the same sort, similar to the beads of the chaplet, by which to reckon the number of their prayers.

This number was not to them an object of superstition, but a help to perseverance in prayer, and a remedy against spiritual sloth. There are some who think that they prove their spirituality by turning numbered and measured prayers into derision. But we would know if these fastidious critics themselves pray without measure. The custom of reciting the Angelical Salutation in the same manner as the Pater established itself afterwards, as it were, spontaneously. S. Albert and Peter the Hermit-who lived long before S. Dominic-propagated the popular practice of reciting the Pater and Ave, as a means of enabling the faithful to unite themselves with the Canonical Hours. But S. Dominic was the true author of the Psalter of Mary,-i. e. of the practice of reciting one hundred and fifty Hail Marys, divided into decades, in honour of the principal mysteries of the faith. This pious practice at first bore the name of Chaplet, from a Latin word which signifies a little crown;' as the word Rosary signifies a crown of roses, or odoriferous prayers. S. Dominic was moved to establish the devotion of the holy Rosary by an im

1 She must not be confounded with the S. Bridget who is so celebrated for her revelations, who lived in the fourteenth century, and founded the Order of the Bridgettines, for men and women; the priests of this Order were the first who received powers to indulgence Chaplets.