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PROPER OF THE TIME.

119

shadows retire, 1 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, 3 and will never leave the happy place he had fixed for the meeting. The day will come, when she is to flee with Him 4 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 1 am his, till the Day break, and the shadows rethe

tire}

We thought

a necessity to offer these considerahim a clearer idea of the importance of this Liturgical Season, and it

tions to our Reader, in order to give

him

We

thoroughly understand its spirit. 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 enable

to

may now resume

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.

4

Cantic.

i.

23. ii.

»

16, 17.

Cantic.

iii. 4.