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the shadows retire, I will go to the Mount of myrrh, and to the Hill of frankincense.

Right well has the Church taken all in. She has fixed her abode on the Mount of Sacrifice; and there has she mingled the myrrh of her sufferings, and the frankincense of her worship, with the homage paid to the Trinity by the great High Priest, her Jesus. It is there that the fulness of Christ is filled by her partaking of it; there she receives, day by day, an increase of fruitfulness. Having there found Him whom her soul loved so ardently, she holds him fast, and will never leave the happy place he had fixed for the meeting. The day will come, when she is to flee with Him to the mountains, where the flowers of heaven blend their fragrance with that of the eternal Holocaust; but, even now, love predominates and triumphs; for, though the bright land of heaven seems so far away, yet from the Hills of her exile, where the ManGod continues his Sacrifice, the Church may, in all truth, say to her divine Spouse: My Beloved is mine, and I am his, till the Day break, and the shadows retire.5

We thought it a necessity to offer these considerations to our Reader, in order to give him a clearer idea of the importance of this Liturgical Season, and enable him to thoroughly understand its spirit. We may now resume our explanation of the Liturgy for this Time after Pentecost; our last Volume ended with the Third Sunday. The work of sanctification carried on by the Holy Ghost in the souls of men, and his ceaseless operations in the Church at large, would have provided us with abundant matter of instruction for each day of each of these twenty-four weeks. The Liturgy itself would have suggested admirable

1 Cantic. iv. 6.

2 Eph. i. 23.
Cantic. ii. 16, 17.

Cantic. iii. 4.

daily reflections, for we could have taken them from the Epistles and Gospels which, for a long time, were assigned to nearly every feria of this portion of the Year. But this would have obliged us to make our Volume as large again as it is. We shall, therefore, confine ourselves to an explanation of the Mass for each Sunday. The present usage of the Latin Church sets us the example; for, dating from the 16th Century, she prescribes, as a general rule, that should a feria, on which a saint's feast is kept, occur during the week, the Sunday's Mass is to be simply repeated. In order to supply the Faithful with suitable reflections for each of the weeks after Pentecost, we have taken the suggestion thus offered by the practice and rubrics of the Church for this holy Season, and have made our commentary on the several portions of the Sunday's Liturgy somewhat longer than will be found in the previous Volumes of the Work.

THE FOURTH SUNDAY

AFTER PENTECOST.

THE fourth Sunday after Pentecost was called, for a long period, in the West, the Sunday of Mercy, because, formerly, there was read upon it the passage from St. Luke, beginning with the words: "Be merciful, as your Father is merciful." But, this Gospel having been since assigned to the Mass of the first Sunday after Pentecost, the Gospel of the fifth Sunday was made that of the fourth; the Gospel of the sixth became that of the fifth; and so on, up to the twenty-third. The change we speak of was, however, not introduced into many Churches till a very late period;1 and it was not universally received till the 16th Century.

Whilst the Gospels were thus brought forward a week, in almost the whole series of these Sundays, the Epistles, Prayers, and the other sung portions of the ancient Masses, were, with a few exceptions, left as originally drawn up. The connection, which the liturgists of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries had fancied they found between the Gospel and the rest of the Liturgy for these Sundays, was broken. Thus the Church spared not those favourite views of explanations which were at times far-fetched; and yet she did not intend, by that, to condemn those writers, nor to discourage her children from perusing their treatises, for, as the holy reflections they contained were frequently suggested by the authority of

1Cf. cum Missali hodierno BERN. AUG. De offic. Mis. cap. v; MICROLOG. De eccl. obs. cap. lxi; HONOR. AUGUSTOD. Gemma animæ, l. iv; RUPERT. De div. off. 1. xii. DURAND. l. vi; etc.

the ancient Liturgies, such reading would edify and instruct. We are quite at liberty, then, to turn their labours to profit; let us only keep this continually before us, that the chief connection existing between the several portions of the proper of each Mass for the Sundays after Pentecost consists in the unity of the Sacrifice itself.

In the Greek Church, there is even less pretention to anything approaching methodical arrangement in the Liturgy of these Sundays. On the morrow of Pentecost, they begin the reading of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and continue it, chapter after chapter, up to the feast of the Exaltation of the holy Cross, in September. St. Luke follows St. Matthew, and is read in the same way. The weeks and Sundays of this Season are simply named according to the Gospel of each day; or they take the name of the Evangelist whose text is being read: thus, our first Sunday after Pentecost is called by them the first Sunday of St. Matthew; the one we are now keeping is their fourth of St. Matthew.

In a former volume,' we have spoken of the importance of the Eighth day, as the Christian substitute for the Seventh of the Jewish Sabbath, and as the holy Day of the new people of God. "The Syna"gogue, by God's command, kept holy the Saturday, "or the Sabbath,-and this, in honour of God's "resting after the six days of the creation; but the "Church, the Bride of Jesus, is commanded to honour "the Work of her Spouse. She allows the Saturday 46 to pass, it is the day of her Lord's rest in the Sepulchre: but, now that she is illumined with the "brightness of the Resurrection, she devotes to the contemplation of his Work the first day of the week,

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1 Paschal Time: p. 18.

"the Sunday it is the day of Light, for on it he "called forth material Light (which was the first "manifestation of order amidst chaos:) and, on the "same day, He that is the Brightness of the Father,' "and the Light of the world, rose from the darkness "of the Tomb."

So important, indeed, is the Sunday's liturgy, which, every week, is intrusted to honour such profound mysteries, that, for a long time, the Roman Pontiffs kept down the number of Feasts which were above the rank of semi-doubles; that thus the Sunday, which is a semi-double, might not be disturbed. It was not till the second half of the 17th Century, that this discipline of reserve was relaxed. Then it was, that it had to give way, in order thereby to meet the attacks, made by the Protestants and their allies the Jansenists, against the cult of the Saints. Need was of reminding the Faithful, that the honour paid to the servants of God detracts not from the glory of their Master; that the cult of the Saints, the Members of Christ, is but the consequence and development of that which is due to Christ their Head. The Church owed it to her Spouse to make a protest against the narrow views of these innovators, who were really aiming at lessening the glory of the Incarnation, by thus denying its grandest consequences. It was, therefore, by a special inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that the Apostolic See then permitted several feasts, both old and new, to be ranked as of a double rite. To strengthen the solemn condemnation she had pronounced against the heretics of that period, she wisely adopted the course of, from time to time, allowing the Feasts of Saints to be kept on Sundays, although these latter were considered as being especially reserved for the celebration of the leading mysteries of our Catholic faith, and for the obligatory attendance of the people.

1 Heb. i. 3.

2 St. John, viii. 12.

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