Destined to be a Scholar, Priest and Monk, Dom Guéranger would begin his work in the aftermath of the French revolution, when religious life was effectively abolished in all of Europe. Aiming to restore all aspects of monastic life, the preservation of Gregorian chant - the sung liturgy of the church - would be an essential part of Dom Guéranger's goal. He would re-found the Abbey of St. Peter in Solesmes.

Dom Geuranger himself writes: “My youth, the complete lack of temporal resources, and the limited reliability of those with whom I hoped to associate — none of these things stopped me. I would not have dreamed of it; I felt myself pushed to proceed. I prayed with all my heart for the help of God; but it never occurred to me to ask His will concerning the projected work.”

That last statement may surprise us, but Dom Guéranger explains: “The need of the Church seemed to me so urgent, the ideas about true Christianity so falsified and so compromised in the lay and ecclesiastical worlds, that I felt nothing but an urgency to found some kind of center wherein to recollect and revive pure traditions.”

Born in Sablé-sur-Sarthe, on April 4, 1805, Prosper Guéranger frequently made Solesmes the destination of his childhood walks, drawn by the charm of the church building and its life-sized saints in stone. Though as a child he never imagined himself a monk, he loved the solitude of the place. Aspiring first to the priesthood, a precocious vocation led him, after his high school studies in Angers, to the seminary in Le Mans. There, he was drawn intensely to the study of Church history, and soon he discovered what the institution of monasticism had been. Contact with the great scholarly works of the Maurists soon awoke in him a real desire for the monastic life.

Ordained a priest in 1827 (Guéranger was only 22 years old at the time, so that his bishop had to obtain a canonical dispensation), he pursued his work as the bishop's secretary in Paris and in Le Mans. In 1831, learning that the priory at Solesmes was destined to destruction for lack of a buyer, the idea came to him to find the means to acquire it and to take up the Benedictine life again. With the help of a few friends and encouraged by his bishop, he gathered together — with considerable difficulty — enough money to rent the monastery property, and subsequently moved in with three companions on July 11, 1833.

The fledgling community encountered, of course, difficult times. But its young prior, borne up by his absolute confidence in Providence, by his humility and by his natural mirth and optimism, proved to possess a calm tenacity. Without copying the past in a servile way, he took inspiration from solid monastic traditions pursuing above all the true spirit of St Benedict while accepting several very necessary material adaptations to modern times. As a result, by his uncommon intuition of the benedictine charism, liturgy and spiritual life, he became a living example to his monks. As for temporal matters, Solesmes' first friends saw to the most urgent needs. They inaugurated a second and long list of the monastery's benefactors: the Cosnards, the Landeaus, the Gazeaus, Mme Swetchine, Montalembert, the Marquis of Juigné, and so many others who thought constantly of the monks.

After a four-year tryout Dom Guéranger went to Rome, in 1837, to ask the Vatican for official recognition of Solesmes as a benedictine community. Rome not only granted Dom Guéranger's request, but on its own initiative raised Solesmes from the status of priory to that of an abbey making it the head of a new Benedictine Congregation de France, successor to the Congregations of St. Maurus and St. Vanne as well as the more venerable and ancient family of monasteries belonging to Cluny. On July 26, Dom Guéranger made his solemn profession in the presence of the abbot of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.

From then on began a new period in the history of Solesmes.

Before our Emmanuel came upon this earth, men were as sheep without a shepherd; the flock was scattered, and the human race was hastening on to perdition. Jesus would, therefore, not only be the Lamb that was to be slain for our sins; He made Himself, moreover, a Shepherd, that so He might bring us all back to the divine fold. But as He had to leave us when He ascended into Heaven, he has provided for the wants of His sheep by providing us with a succession of Pastors, who should in His Name feed the flock even to the end of the world. 

Now instruction, which is the light of life, is what the flock of Christ needs above all other things; and therefore our Emmanuel required that the Pastors of His Church should also be Doctors of sacred science. The Pastor owes two things to his people; namely, the Word of God and the Sacraments. He is under the obligation of dispensing, personally and unceasingly, this twofold nourishment to his flock, and of laying down his very life, if needed, in the fulfillment of a duty on which rests the whole work of the world's salvation.

But since the disciple is not above his Master, the Pastors and Doctors of the Christian people, if they are faithful in the discharge of their duties, are sure to be hated by the enemies of God; for they cannot spread the Kingdom of Christ, without, at the same time, taking from the power of Satan. Hence it is that the history of the Church is filled with the persecutions endured by her Pastors and Doctors, who continued the ministry of zeal and charity begun by Christ upon the earth. These contests have been threefold, and gave occasion to three admirable victories.

The Pastors and Doctors of the Church have had to struggle with Paganism, which sought, by inflicting tortures and death, to oppose the preaching of the law of Christ. It was this sort of persecution which gave the Church such saints as those whom we celebrate during this season of Christmas—Polycarp, Ignatius, Fabian, Marcellus, Hyginus, and Telesphorus.

When the era of Persecution was over, the Pastors and Doctors of the Christian people had to engage with enemies of another kind. Kings and Princes became children of the Church, and then sought to make her their own slave. They imagined that it would serve their political interests to interfere with the liberty of the Word of God, which, like the light of the sun, was intended to be carried, without hindrance, throughout the whole earth. They usurped the priestly power, as did the Pagan Caesars, and presumed to set limits to the administration of those sources of life which become corrupt as soon as they are touched by a profane hand. This usurpation gave rise to an incessant contest between the temporal and spiritual powers, and produced a second class of martyrs. God has glorified His Church during this long period of struggle, and has given her, from time to time, a brave defender of ecclesiastical liberty. We have met two of these champions of the Word and the holy ministry during Christmastide―Thomas of Canterbury, and Hilary of Poitiers.

But there is a third sort of battle in which the Pastors and Doctors of the flock of Christ have had to fight―it is the battle with the world and its vices. It began when Christianity began, and will continue to the day of Judgement. It was their courage in this battle that made so many saintly prelates hated for the Name of Jesus Christ. Neither their charity, nor their services to mankind, nor their humility, nor their meekness, protected them from ingratitude, spleen, calumny, and persecution. And what was their offense? They had been faithful in their duty of preaching the doctrines of their Divine Master, of encouraging virtue, and of chiding the sins of men. The amiable Francis de Sales was as much disliked and even hated by bad men, as was John Chrysostom himself, whose triumph gladdens the Church today, and who stands near the Crib of his Lord as one of the most illustrious martyrs of pastoral duty courageously discharged.

Fervent in the service of his Savior, even to the observance of the divine Counsels (for he had embraced the monastic life), this golden-mouthed Preacher made no other use of his wonderful gift of eloquence than that of urging men to the observance of the virtues taught in the Gospel, and of reproving every vice.

Satan sought to have his revenge against our Saint by raising against him many enemies. Among these were an Empress, whose vanities and sins he had rebuked; men in power, whose wickedness he had held up to notice; women of influence, who would have him preach a morality more in accordance with their own depravity; a Bishop of Alexandria, and certain Prelates of the Court, who were jealous of his virtues, and still more so of his reputation. He was exceedingly loved by his people—but neither that, nor his great virtues, protected him from persecution. He, whose eloquence had enraptured the people of Antioch, and won for him the enthusiastic admiration of the citizens of Constantinople, was deposed in a council convened for the purpose, his name was ordered to be cancelled from the diptychs of the Altar, notwithstanding the energetic protest of the Roman Pontiff; and at length he was condemned to exile, and died on the way, worn out by the hardships and fatigues he had to undergo. 

But this Pastor, and Doctor, was not vanquished. He said, in the midst of all his persecutions, “Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16). He made use, too, of those other words of the great Apostle: “The word of God is not bound!” (2 Timothy 2:9). The Church triumphed in him; she was more glorified and more consoled by the unflinching courage of Chrysostom, who was led into captivity for having preached the Gospel of Christ, than she had been by the success achieved by his eloquence, an eloquence which Libanius was heard to covet for his pagan orators.

Let us listen to the thrilling words of Chrysostom, which he addressed to the faithful immediately before his last banishment. He had been sent into exile once before; but a terrific earthquake immediately after his departure was looked upon as sent by heaven to punish the authors of so crying an injustice, and the Empress herself went, with tears in her eyes, to ask the Emperor to recall him. Accordingly, he was permitted to return. Shortly after, fresh occasions were sought for, and John was again sentenced to exile. He received the intimation with all the calmness of a Saint who knows that the whole Church is on his side. Let us study this glorious model of a Bishop trained in the school of our Lord who is, as the Apostle calls him, the Shepherd and Bishop oj our souls.

“Many are the waves, and threatening are the storms, which surround me; but I fear them not; for I am standing on the Rock. Let the sea roar; it cannot wash away the Rock! Let the billows mount as they will; they cannot sink the barque of our Lord Jesus Christ! And tell me, what would you have me fear? Death? To me, to live is Christ; and to die is gain.  Exile? The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. Confiscation of my goods? We brought nothing into this world; and certainly we can carry nothing out! No—the evils of this world are contemptible, and its goods deserve but to be laughed at. I fear not poverty, I desire not riches; I neither fear to die, nor wish to live, save for your advantage. Your interest alone induces me to speak of these things, and to ask of you, by the love you bear me, to take courage.

“For no one can separate us; no human power can part what God has united. It is said of husband and wife: ‘Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall be two in one flesh’ and  ‘Therefore what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’  Thou canst not, O man, dissolve the nuptial tie: how hopest thou to divide the Church of God? It is she whom thou attackest, because thou canst not reach him whom thou fain wouldst strike. Thou makest me more glorious, and thou dost but waste thy strength in warring against me, for it is hard for thee to kick against the sharp goad. Thou canst not blunt its point, and thou makest thine own foot bleed, just as the billows, when they dash against the rock, fall back mere empty froth.

“Believe me, O man, there is no power like the power of the Church. Cease thy battling, lest thou lose thy strength; wage not war with Heaven. When it is with man thou warrest, thou mayst win or lose; but when thy fighting is against the Church, it is impossible thou shouldst conquer, for God is above all in strength. Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than He? (1 Corinthians 10:22). God founded, God gave firmness: who shall be so bold as to attempt to pull down? Knowest thou not His power? ‘He looketh upon the earth, and maketh it tremble’ (Psalm 103:32); He gives His order, and that which trembled is made firm again. If He made firm the City after an earthquake had shaken it, how much more could He not glve firmness to the Church? The Church is stronger than Heaven itself: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass away’ (Matthew 24:35). What words:  ‘Thou art Peter; and upon this Rock will I build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it’ (Matthew 16:18)!

“If thou wilt not believe His word, believe facts. How many tyrants have sought to crush the Church? They had their gridirons and fiery furnaces, and wild beasts, and swords―and all failed. Where are those enemies now? Buried and forgotten! And the Church? Brighter than the sun! All they had, is now past; but her riches are immortal. If the Christians conquered when they were but few in number, canst thou hope to vanquish them, now that the whole earth is filled with the holy religion? ‘Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass away.’  Wonder not at it; for the Church is dearer unto God than the very heavens. He took flesh not from heaven, but from his Church on earth; and Heaven is for the Church, not the Church for Heaven.

“Be not troubled at what has happened. I ask this favor of you―be firm in your Faith. Have you not observed that when Peter was walking on the waters, and began to fear, he was in danger of sinking, not because the sea was rough, but because his faith was weak? Have I been raised to this dignity by human intrigue? Was it man that brought me to it, or can man now depose me? I say not this from arrogance or boasting; God forbid! I say it from the desire of calming your trouble.

“The devil no sooner saw that your City was tranquillized, than he plotted how he might disturb the Church. Thou wicked and most impious spirit! Thou couldst not throw down the walls of a city; and thinkest thou thou canst make the Church fall? Does the Church consist of walls? The Church consists of the multitude of the faithful. Look at her pillars, and see how solid they are, fastened, not by iron, but by Faith. Not only is the great multitude itself more vehement than fire, but even one single Christian would conquer thee. Hast thou forgotten the wounds thou receivedst from the martyrs? Oftentimes the combatant was a tender maiden: delicate as a flower, yet firmer than a rock. Thou didst mangle her flesh, but her faith was proof against all thy tortures Her blood fell as nature felt the wounds, but her faith fell not; her body was torn,but her manly soul flinched not; what was material was spoilt, what was spiritual was untouched. Thou couldst not vanquish one woman; and yet thou hopest to vanquish a whole people I Hast thou not heard these words of the Lord: ‘Where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’(Matthew 18:20). And thinkest thou He will not be in the midst of a numerous people, united together by the ties of charity?

“I have his pledge, and on that I trust, not on my own strength. I have His written promise. That is my staff, and my guarantee, and my tranquil port. What matters it to me if the whole world be upset? Have I not His written word? Have I not His letters? There is my rampart, and there my defence. What letters? I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world―Christ is with me―of whom shall I be afraid? Though stormy billows should rise up against me, though the sea should open to swallow me, though the wrath of kings should be enkindled against me, I will heed them no more than if they were so many spider's webs. Had not my love for you kept me, I would have started this very day on my exile, for this is my constant prayer: ‘O Lord! Thy will be done!’ (Matthew 6:10); I will do Thy will; not what such or such an one may will, but what Thou willest. This is my tower of strength, this is my firm rock, this is my trusty staff. If God will that I go, I will go. If He will me to remain here, I will give Him thanks. Yea, whithersoever He wills me to go, I will bless His holy Name."

What humility and courage in this saintly minister of Christ! What a consolation for the Church when God sends her men like this! He has given four to the Eastern Church: Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzum, Basil and Chrysostom. In spite of the immense dangers to which faith was exposed during the age in which they lived, these four holy Doctors, by their sanctity, learning, and courage, kept it alive among the people. Athanasius and Gregory appear to us in that period of the Ecclesiastical Year when the Church is radiant with her Easter joy, and celebrates the Resurrection of her Divine Spouse. Basil's feast gladdens us in the season of Pentecost, when the Church is filled with the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Chrysostom comes at Christmastide, and adds to the joy of the dear Mystery of Bethlehem. Let us, the favoured children of the Latin Church, which alone has preserved the primitive faith, because Peter is with her—let us honour these four faithful guardians of Tradition; let us today pay the homage of our devotion to Chrysostom, the Doctor of the universal Church, the conqueror of the world, the dauntless Pastor, the successor of the Martyrs, the Preacher par excellence, the admirer of St. Paul, and the fervent imitator of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Roman Church, in the lessons of the Divine Office, thus speaks the praises of our Saint.

John, surnamed Chrysostom on account of his golden eloquence, was born at Antioch. Having gone through the study of the law and the profane sciences, he applied himself with extraordinary application and success to the study of the Sacred Scriptures. Having been admitted to holy orders, and made a Priest of the Church at Antioch, he was appointed Bishop of Constantinople, after the death of Nectarius, by the express wish of the Emperor Arcadius. No sooner had he entered upon the pastoral charge than he began to inveigh against the licentious lives led by the rich. This courageous preaching procured him many enemies. He likewise gave great offense to the Empress Eudoxia, because he had reproved her for having appropriated to herself the money belonging to a widow named Callitropa, and for having taken possession of some land which was the property of another widow.

At the instigation. Therefore, of Eudoxia, several Bishops met together at Chalcedon. Chrysostom was cited to appear, which he refused to do, because it was not a Council either lawfully or publicly convened. Whereupon he was sent into exile. He had not been gone long before the people rose in sedition, on account of the saint's banishment, and he was recalled to the immense joy of the whole city. But his continuing to preach against the scandals which existed, and his forbidding the games held before the silver statue of Eudoxia, which was set up in the space opposite Sancta Sophia, were urged by certain Bishops, enemies of the saint, as motives for a second banishment. The widows and the poor of the city bewailed his departure as that of a father. It is incredible how much Chrysostom had to suffer in this exile, and how many he converted to the Christian Faith.

At the very time that Pope Innocent the First, in a Council held at Rome, was issuing a decree ordering that Chrysostom should be set at liberty, he was being treated by the soldiers, who were taking him into exile, with unheard-of harshness and cruelty. Whilst passing through Armenia, the holy Martyr Basiliscus, in whose Church he had offered up a prayer, thus spoke to him during the night: “Brother John I we shall be united together tomorrow.”

Whereupon on the following morning, Chrysostom received the sacrament of the Eucharist, and signing himself with the sign of the cross, he breathed forth his soul to his God, on the eighteenth of the Kalends of October (September 14th). A fearful hail-storm happened at Constantinople after the Saint's death, and four days after, the Empress died. Theodosius, the son of Arcadius, had the saint's body brought to Constantinople with all due honor, where, amidst a large concourse of people, it was buried on the sixth of the Kalends of February (January 27th). Theodosius, whilst devoutly venerating the saint's relics, interceded for his parents, that they might be forgiven.

The body was, at a later period, translated to Rome, and placed in the Vatican Basilica. All men agree in admiring the unction and eloquence of his numerous sermons, as indeed of all his other writings. He is also admirable in his interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, which he explains in their genuine sense. It has always been thought that he was aided, in his writings and sermons, by St. Paul the Apostle, to whom he entertained an extraordinary devotion. This most renowned Doctor of the Church was by Pope St. Pius X declared and appointed heavenly Patron of the preachers of holy things.

St. Maurus is one of the greatest masters of the Cenobitical Life, and the most illustrious of the Disciples of St. Benedict, the Patriarch of the Monks of the West. He shares with the First Hermit—St. Paul—the honors of the fifteenth day of January. Faithful, like the holy Hermit, to the lessons taught at Bethlehem, Maurus has a claim to have his Feast kept during the forty days, which are sacred to the sweet Babe Jesus. He comes to us, each January, to bear witness to the power of that Babe's humility. Who, indeed, will dare to doubt of the triumphant power of the poverty and the obedience shown in the Crib of our Emmanuel, when he is told of the grand things done by those virtues in the cloisters of fair France?

It was to Maurus that France was indebted for the introduction, into her territory, of that admirable Rule, which produced the great Saints and the great men to whom she owes the best part of her glory. The children of St. Benedict, trained by St. Maurus, struggled against the barbarism of the Franks under the first race of her kings; under the second, they instructed in sacred and profane literature the people in whose civilization they had so powerfully cooperated; under the third—and even in modern times, when the Benedictine Order, enslaved by the system of Commendatory Abbots, and decimated by political tyranny or violence, was dying out amidst every kind of humiliation—they were the fathers of the poor by the charitable use of their large possessions, and the ornaments of literature and science, by their immense contributions to ecclesiastical science and archeology, as also to the history of their own country.

St. Maurus built his celebrated Monastery of Glanfeuil, and Glanfeuil may be considered as the mother house of the principal Monasteries in France―Saint Germain and Saint Denis of Paris, Marmoutier, Saint Victor, Luxeuil, Jumieges, Fleury, Corbie, Saint Vannes, Moyen-Moutier, Saint Wandrille, Saint Waast, La Chaise-Dieu, Tiron, Cheza, Benoit, Le Bec, and innumerable other Monasteries in France, that gloried in being daughters of Monte-Cassino by the favorite Disciple of St. Benedict. 

The monastery of Cluny, which gave several Popes to the Church, and among them St. Gregory the Seventh and Urban the Second, was indebted to St. Maurus for that Rule, which gave her her glory and her power. We must count up the Apostles, Martyrs, Bishops, Doctors, Confessors and Virgins, who were formed, for twelve hundred years, in the Benedictine Cloisters of France; we must calculate the services, both temporal and spiritual, done to this great country, by the Benedictine Monks during all that period; and we shall have some idea of the results produced by the mission of St. Maurus, results whose whole glory redounds to the Babe of Bethlehem, and to the mysteries of His humility, which are the source and model of the Monastic Life. When, therefore, we admire the greatness of the Saints, and recount their wonderful works, we are glorifying Jesus, the King of all Saints.

The Monastic Breviary, in the Office of this Feast, gives us the following sketch of the Life of St. Maurus.

Maurus was, by birth, a Roman. His father, whose name was Eutychius, a Senator by rank, had placed him, when a little boy, under the care of St. Benedict. Trained in the school of such and so great a Master of holiness, he attained to the highest degree of monastic perfection, even before he had ceased to be a child; so that Benedict himself was in admiration, and used to speak of his virtues to everyone, holding him forth to the rest of the house as a model of religious discipline. He subdued his flesh by austerities, such as wearing a hair-shirt, night watching, and frequent fasting; giving, meanwhile, to his spirit the solace of assiduous prayer, holy compunction, and reading the Sacred Scriptures. During Lent, he took food only twice in the week, and that so sparingly as to seem rather to be tasting than taking it. He slept standing, or when excessive fatigue obliged him to it, sitting, or at times lying down on a heap of lime and sand, over which he threw his hair-shirt. His sleep was exceedingly short, for he always recited very long prayers, and often the whole of the Psalms, before the midnight Office.

He gave a proof of his admirable spirit of obedience on the occasion of Placid's fall into the lake. Maurus, at the bidding of the Holy Father, ran to the lake, walked dry-shod upon the water, and taking the child by the hair of his head, drew him safe to the bank; for Placid was to be slain by the sword as a martyr, and Our Lord reserved him as a victim which should be offered to Him. On account of such signal virtues as these, the same Holy Father made Maurus share the care of his duties; for, from his very entrance into the monastic life, he had had a part in his miracles. He had been raised to the holy order of Deaconship by St. Benedict's command; and, by placing the stole he wore on a dumb and lame boy, he gave him the power both to speak and walk.

Maurus was sent by his Holy Father into France. Scarcely had he set his foot in that land, than he had a vision of the triumphant entrance of that great saint into Heaven. He promulgated in that country the Rule which St. Benedict had written with his own hand, and had given to him on his leaving Italy; though the labor and anxiety he had to go through, in the accomplishment of his mission, were exceedingly great. Having built the celebrated Monastery, which he governed for forty years, so great was the reputation of his virtues, that several of the noblest lords of King Theodebert's court put themselves under Maurus' direction, and enrolled in the holier and more meritorious warfare of the monastic life.

Two years before his death, he resigned the government of his Monastery, and retired into a cell near the Oratory of St. Martin. There he exercised himself in most rigorous penance, wherewith he fortified himself for the contest he had to sustain against the enemy of mankind, who threatened him with the death of his Monks. In this combat a holy Angel was his comforter, who, after revealing to him the snares of the wicked spirit, and the designs of God, bade him and his disciples win the crown prepared for them.

Having, therefore, sent to Heaven before him, as so many forerunners, a hundred and more of his brave soldiers, and knowing that he, their leader, was soon to follow them, he signified his wish to be carried to the Oratory, where, being strengthened by the Sacrament of Life, and lying on his hair-shirt, as a victim before the Altar, he died a saintly death. He was upwards of seventy years of age. It would be difficult to describe the success wherewith he propagated Monastic discipline in France, or to tell the miracles which, both before and after his death, rendered him glorious among men.

Encircled by the radiant splendors of the post-Epiphany season, there comes before us, in company with Hilary of Poitiers, a humble lover of the virtues of the Crib of our Emmanuel. Though withdrawn by God himself from the fury of his persecutors, and thus from a martyr’s death which would have crowned his cruel torments and imprisonment, Felix nevertheless has won the right to his palm by the invincible courage he showed amidst all his sufferings. In Heaven he was already accounted worthy of his reward, but he was yet for a long time to gladden and strengthen the Church on earth by those examples of wonderful poverty, humility, and ardent charity, which now claim for him a place in the sacred cycle near to the lowly manger of the King of Peace.

The Infant God, in all his hidden lowliness, was to Felix his one love and exemplar, hence to-day this King of angels and men who is now manifested to the world and adored by kings, hastens to share with him the honors of his triumphant Epiphany. To him that shall overcome, I will give to sit with me in my throne, saith the Lord (Apocalypse 3:21), and in whom, other than Felix, has the realization of this blessed promise of the Divine Head to his members been more apparent?

A poor tomb received the mortal remains of the humble priest of Campania, and in its silence and obscurity, emblems of his earthly desires, he seemed destined to await the blast of the angel’s trumpet at the final Resurrection. But miracles, many and great, suddenly rendered this tomb illustrious; the name of Felix was carried far and wide, and everywhere wrought the like prodigies of grace. Hardly had peace been given to the Church and world by the accession of Constantine to the throne, when on all sides the people were aroused, and in countless flocks thronged to the martyr’s tomb; on certain days Rome herself seemed deserted, and the ancient Appian Road, the very soil of which was worn away by the tramp of the pilgrims, appeared to have no other purpose than to carry to the feet of Felix the homage, gratitude, and love of the entire world. Five basilicas did not suffice for the immense concourse; a sixth was erected, and the lowly field where once the remains of the martyr lay hid was encircled by a new town. 

The fourth century, so rich in Christian developments, saw the beginning of pilgrimages, and the city of Nola in Campania was, after Rome, the principal center of this devotion. “O happy city of Nola,” cries a contemporary, eyewitness of these wonders, “O happy city which through the merits of the blessed Felix has become second only to Rome herself, Rome ever the mistress, yesterday by her empire and victorious armies, to-day by the tombs of the Apostles!”

We have cited Paulinus, the illustrious consul whose name is inseparably linked with that of Felix, Paulinus whom we shall find, in the time after Pentecost, through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, giving also admirable examples of renunciation to the world. In the flower of a brilliant youth and already surrounded by honors and glory, Paulinus once found himself by the tomb of Felix―here it was given to him to understand true greatness, to realize the emptiness of human ambitions and glory. 

The Roman Senator, the consul, the descendant of Paulus Amelius and of the Scipios, here vowed himself to Felix who had conquered. Riches, honors, country, he sacrificed all and aspired only to dwell near to this tomb. A poet of no small merit, whose talents had already won applause in Rome, his inspiration now found expression in singing the praises of the blessed Felix on his feast day and in proclaiming himself the slave and humble doorkeeper of the servant of Christ. Such then is the triumph of our Emmanuel in His saints, such is the glory of His members―does it not seem that the Divine Head, mindful of His promises, is desirous only of the glory which this feast of Manifestation brings, so that they, enthroned with Him, may also receive the homage of peoples and kings?

After having consecrated the joyous Octave of the Epiphany to the glory of the Emmanuel who was manifested to the earth, the Church—incessantly occupied with the Divine Child and his august Mother, during the whole time from Christmas Day to that whereon Mary will bring Jesus to the Temple, there to be offered to God, as the law prescribes—the Church, we say, has on her Calendar of this portion of the year the names of many glorious Saints, who shine like so many stars on the path which leads us, from the joys of the Nativity of our Lord, to the sacred mystery of our Lady's Purification.

And firstly there comes before us, after the very day consecrated to the Baptism of Jesus, the faithful and courageous Hilary—the pride of the Churches of Gaul, and the worthy associate of Athanasius and Eusebius of Vercelli in the battle fought for the Divinity of our Emmanuel. Scarcely were the cruel persecutions of paganism over, when there commenced the fierce contest with Arianism, which had sworn to deprive of the glory and honors of his divinity that Jesus who had conquered, by his Martyrs, the violence and craft of the Roman Emperors. 

The Church had won her liberty by shedding her blood, and it was not likely that she would be less courageous on the new battlefield into which she was driven. Many were the Martyrs that were put to death by her new enemies ― Christian, though heretical, Princes: it was for the Divinity of that Lord, who had mercifully appeared on the earth in the weakness of human flesh, that they shed their blood. 

Side by side with these stood those holy and illustrious Doctors, who, with the martyr-spirit within them, defended by their learning and eloquence the Nicene Faith, which was the Faith of the Apostles. In the foremost rank of these latter we behold the Saint of today, covered with the rich laurels of his brave confessorship, Hilary: who, as St. Jerome says of him, was brought up in the pompous school of Gaul, yet had culled the flowers of Grecian science, and became the Rhone of Latin eloquence. St. Augustine calls him the illustrious Doctor of the Churches.

Though gifted with the most extraordinary talents, and one of the most learned men of the age, yet St. Hilary's greatest glory is his intense love for the Incarnate Word, and his zeal for the liberty of the Church. His great soul thirsted after martyrdom, and, by the unflinching love of truth which such a spirit gave him, he was the brave champion of the Church in that trying period when Faith, that had stood the brunt of persecution, seemed to be on the point of being betrayed by the craft of Princes, and the cowardice of temporizing and unorthodox Pastors.

The Divine Office (Breviary) reading tell us that:

“Hilary was born of a noble family in Aquitaine, and was distinguished for his learning and eloquence. He was married, but the life he led was almost that of a monk, so that later on, on account of his great virtues, he was made Bishop of Poitiers, and so well did he discharge the episcopal office, as to be the object of the deepest veneration on the part of the faithful. At that time the Emperor Constantius was inflicting every sort of harsh treatment, intimidation, confiscation of their property, and banishment, on the Catholics who refused to side with the Arians. Hilary set himself as a bulwark against the Arians, thereby bringing on himself all their fury. On this account they many times sought to ensnare him, and at length, by the treachery of Saturninus, the Bishop of Aries, he was banished from the Council at Beziers into Phrygia. There he raised a dead man to life, and wrote his twelve-books on the Trinity against the Arians.

“Four years after, a Council was called at Seleucia, a town in lsauria, at which Hilary was compelled to assist. Thence he set out for Constantinople. Where, seeing the extreme dangers to which the true Faith had been exposed, he petitioned the Emperor, by three public petitions, to grant him an audience, in order that he might obtain permission to hold a controversy with his adversaries concerning matters of Faith. But Ursacius and Valens, two Arian Bishops, whom Hilary had refuted in his writings, were afraid of allowing so learned a man to continue there any longer, and persuaded Constantius to restore him to his episcopal see under the pretense of showing him honor. Then did the Church of Gaul open her arms, as St. Jerome says, to receive Hilary on his return from battle with the heretics. St. Martin, who was afterwards Bishop of Tours, followed the holy Doctor to Poitiers; how much he profited by the instructions of such a master is evidenced by the sanctity of his after-life.

“From that time, he was left in perfect peace in the government of the Church of Poitiers. He led the whole of Gaul to condemn the Arian blasphemies. He composed a great many exceedingly learned books, of which St. Jerome says that they may be all read without the slightest fear of meeting any false doctrine in them; he assures her that she may run through the books of Hilary without stumbling on anything dangerous. He passed from this earth to Heaven on the Ides of January (January 13th), during the reign of the Emperors Valentinian and Valens, in the year of our Lord 369.

“Hilary was called by several Fathers and Councils an illustrious Doctor of the Church, and was publicly honored as such in certain dioceses. At length, at the petition of the Council of Bordeaux, the Supreme Pontiff, Pius the Ninth, after having consulted the Sacred Congregation of Rites, declared him to have been justly called, and to be in effect, a Doctor of the universal Church; and ordered that on his Feast all should recite the Mass and Office of Doctors”(Reading from the Divine Office for the feast of St. Hilary).

The ancient Gallican Liturgy, of which a few precious remnants have been handed down to us, thus celebrated the praise of the most illustrious of the Bishops of that great country. Our first extract is an Allocution addressed to the Faithful, taken from an ancient Sacramentary.

The Church of Poitiers has ever cherished with the utmost devotion the memory of her heroic Pontiff, and his Feast, as we may suppose, is kept there with great solemnity. She formerly sang in the Mass of his feast day the Preface of the Blessed Trinity, to express more forcibly her admiration of the zeal wherewith Hilary defended the master-dogma of our holy Faith the mystery of Three Persons in one God. It will be interesting to our readers to hear a few passages from the ancient liturgical books of this illustrious Church of Poitiers.

Thus did the holy bishop, Hilary of Poitiers, receive the honors of the Church's love for his having so courageously, and even at the peril of his life, fought in defense of the great Mystery. Another of his glories is that he was one of the most intrepid champions of that principle, which cannot be compromised without the vitality and very existence of the Church being endangered—the principle of that Church's liberty. A short while ago we were celebrating the Feast of our holy Martyr, St. Thomas of Canterbury; today, we have the Feast of the glorious Confessor, whose example enlightened and encouraged him in the great struggle. Both Hilary and Thomas à Becket were obedient to the teaching left to the Pastors of the Church by the Apostles; who, when they were arraigned the first time before the authorities of this world, uttered this great maxim: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” 

The Apostles and the Saints were strong in the battle against flesh and blood, only because they were detached from earthly goods, and were convinced that the true riches of a Christian and a Bishop consist in the humility and poverty of the Crib, and that the only victorious power is in the imitation of the simplicity and the weakness of the Child that is born unto us. They relished the lessons of the School of Bethlehem; hence no promise of honors, of riches, or even of peace, could make them swerve from the principles of the Gospel. How dignified is this family of Soldiers of Christ, which springs up in the Church! If the policy of tyrants, who insist on being Christians without Christianity, carry on a persecution, in which they are determined that no one shall have the glory of Martyrdom, these brave Champions raise their voice and boldly reproach the persecutors for their interference with that liberty which is due to Christ and his Ministers. They begin by telling them their duty, as Hilary did to Constantius, when he sent him his first Memorial: 

“My Lord and most gracious Augustus! Your admirable prudence will tell you that it is unreasonable and impossible either to force submission on men who resist you with all their strength, or to compel them to take part with the sowers of the seed of false doctrine. The one end of your endeavors, wise counsels, government and vigilance should be that all your subjects may enjoy the sweets of liberty. There is no other means of settling the troubles of the state, or of uniting what discord has separated, than that everyone be master of his own life, unconstrained by slavish compulsion. You should not tum a deaf ear to the voice of any subject who thus appeals to you for support: “I am a Catholic; I will not be a heretic: I am a Christian, and not an Arian: I would rather lose my life than allow the tyranny of any man to corrupt the purity of my Faith.”

When some people spoke to Hilary in favor of those who had been traitors to the Church, and had been disloyal to Jesus Christ, in order to keep in the good graces of the Emperor, they ventured to tell the Saint that their conduct was justifiable, on the ground that they had but obeyed the Law! The holy Pontiff was indignant at this profanation of the word, and, in his Book against Auxentius, courageously reminds his fellow Bishops of the origin of the Church: how her very establishment depended on the breaking of unjust human laws, and how she counts it one of her glories to infringe all such laws as would oppose her existence, her development, and her action.

We have a contempt for all the trouble that men of these days are giving themselves; and I am grieved to see them holding such mad opinions as that God needs man’s patronage, and that the Church of Christ requires to be upheld by an ambition that curries favor with the world. I ask of you Bishops, what favor did the Apostles court, in order that they might preach the Gospel? Who were the princes that helped them to preach Christ, and convert almost the whole world from idolatry to God? Did they, who sang hymns to God in prisons and chains, and whilst bleeding from being scourged—did they accept offices from the state? Did Paul wait for a royal permission to draw men to the Church of Christ? Did he, think you, cringe for the patronage of a Nero, or a Vespasian, or a Decius, whose very hatred of our Faith was the occasion of its being more triumphantly preached? 

These Apostles, who lived by the labor of their own hands, who assembled the Faithful in garrets and hiding-places, who visited villages and towns, and well nigh the whole world, traveling over sea and land, in spite of the Senate’s decrees and Imperial Edicts—these men, according to your principles, had not received the keys of the kingdom of Heaven! What say you to all this manifestation of God’s power in the very face of man’s opposition, when the more there was a prohibition to preach Christ, the more that preaching was exercised?

But the time came at last to speak to the Emperor himself, and to protest against the system whereby he aimed at making the Church a slave; then did Hilary, who was exceedingly gentle in disposition, put on that holy indignation which Our Lord Himself had, when He scourged the profaners of His Father’s House, and drove them out of the Temple. He braved every danger, and held up to execration the system invented by Constantius for insulting and crushing the Church of Christ. Let us listen to the language of his apostolic zeal.

“The time for speaking is come; the time for silence is past. Let Christ now appear, for Antichrist has begun his reign. Let the Shepherds give the alarm, for the hirelings have fled. Let us lay down our lives for our sheep, for thieves have got into the fold, and a furious lion is prowling around it. Let us prepare for martyrdom ...  for the angel of satan hath transformed himself into an angel of light. ...

“Why, O my God, didst thou not permit me to confess thy holy Name, and be the minister of thine Only Begotten Son, in the times of Nero or Decius? Full of the fire of the Holy Spirit, I would not have feared the rack, for I would have thought of Isaias, how he was sawn in two. I would not have feared fire, for I would have said to myself that the Hebrew Children sang in their fiery furnace. The cross and the breaking of every bone of my body should not have made me a coward, for the good thief would have encouraged me, who was translated into thy kingdom. If they had threatened to drown me in the angry billows of the deep ocean, I would have laughed at their threats, for thou hast taught us, by the example of Jonas and Paul, that thou canst give life to thy servants even in the sea.

“Happy I, could I thus have fought with men who professed themselves to be the enemies of thy name; every one would have said that they who had recourse to tortures, and sword, and fire, to compel a Christian to deny thee, were persecutors; and my death would have been sufficient testimony to thy truth, O God! The battle would have been an open one, and no one would have hesitated to call by the honest name these men that denied thee, and racked and murdered us; and thy people, seeing that it was an evident persecution, would have followed their Pastors in the confession of their Faith.

“But nowadays, we have to do with a disguised persecutor, a smooth-tongued enemy, a Constantius who has put on Antichrist; who scourges us, not with lashes, but with caresses; who instead of robbing us, which would give us spiritual life, bribes us with riches, that he may lead us to eternal death; who thrusts us not into the liberty of a prison, but into the honors of his palace, that he may enslave us: who tears not our flesh, but our hearts; who beheads not with a sword, but kills the soul with his gold; who sentences not by a herald that we are to be burnt, but covertly enkindles the fire of Hell against us. He does not dispute with us, that he may conquer; but he flatters us, that so he may lord it over our souls. He confesses Christ, the better to deny him; he tries to procure a unity which shall destroy peace; he puts down some few heretics, so that he may also crush the Christians; he honors Bishops, that they may cease to be Bishops; he builds up Churches, that he may pull down the Faith ....

“Let men talk as they will, and accuse me of strong language, and calumny: it is. the duty of a minister of the truth to speak the truth. If what I say be untrue, let me be branded with the name of an infamous calumniator: but if I prove what I assert, then I am not exceeding the bounds of apostolic liberty, nor transgressing the humility of a successor of the Apostles by speaking thus, after so long observing silence. . .. No, this is not rashness, it is Faith; it is not inconsiderateness, it is duty; it is not passion, it is conscience.

“I say to thee, Constantius, what I would have said to Nero, or Decius, or Maxirnian: You are fighting against God, you are raging against the Church, you are persecuting the saints, you are hating the preachers of Christ, you are destroying religion, you are a tyrant, not in human things, but in things that appertain to God. Yes, this is what I should say to thee as well as to them; but listen, now, to what can only be said to thyself: Thou falsely callest thyself a Christian, for thou art a new enemy of Christ; thou art a precursor of Antichrist, and a doer of his mystery of iniquity; thou, that art a rebel to the Faith, art making formulas of Faith; thou art intruding thine own creatures into the sees of the Bishops; thou art putting out the good and putting in the bad .... By a strange ingenious plan, which no one had ever yet discovered, thou hast found a way to persecute, without making Martyrs.

“We owe much to you, Nero, Decius, and Maximian! Your cruelty did us service. We conquered the devil by your persecutions. The blood of the holy Martyrs you made has been treasured up throughout the world, and their venerable relIcs are ever strengthenmg us in Faith by their mute unceasing testimony. . .. But thou, Constantius, cruel with thy refinement of cruelty, art an enemy that ragest against us, doing us more injury, and leaving us less hope of pardon .... Thou deprivest the fallen of the excuse they might have had with their Eternal Judge, when they showed him the scars and wounds they had endured for him, for perhaps their tortures might induce him to forgive their weakness. Whereas thou, most wicked of men! Thou hast invented a persecution which, if we fall, robs us of pardon, and, if we triumph, does not make us Martyrs!

“We see thee, ravenous wolf, under thy sheep’s clothing. Thou adornest the sanctuaries of God’s temples with the gold of the State, and thou offerest to him what is taken from the temples, or taxed by edict, or extorted by penalty. Thou receivest his Priests with a kiss like that which betrayed Christ. Thou bowest down thy head for a blessing, and then thou tramplest on our Faith. Thou dispensest the clergy from paying tributes and taxes to Cresar, that thou mayest bribe them to be renegades to Christ, foregoing thy own rights, that God may be deprived of His!” 

Glorious Hilary! Thou didst well deserve that thy Church of Poitiers should, of old, address to thee the magnificent praise given by the Roman Church to thy illustrious disciple, St. Martin: “O blessed Pontiff! Who with his whole heart loved Christ our King, and feared not the majesty of emperors! O most holy soul! Which, though not taken away by the sword of the persecutor, yet lost not the palm of martyrdom!” 

If the Palm of a Martyr is not in thy hand, yet hadst thou a Martyr’s spirit, and well might we add to thy other titles, of Confessor, Bishop and Doctor, the glorious one of Martyr, just as our holy Mother the Church has conferred it upon thy fellow-combatant, Eusebius, who was but Martyr in heart like thyself. Yes, thy glory is great; but it is all due to thee for thy courage in confessing the Divinity of that Incarnate Word, whose Birth and Infancy we are now celebrating. Thou hadst to stand before a Herod, as had the Magi, and like them thou hadst no fear: and when the Caesar of those times banished thee to a foreign land, thy soul found comfort in the thought that the Infant Jesus, too, was exiled into Egypt. Oh, that we could imitate thee in the application of these Mysteries to ourselves!

Now that thou art in Heaven, pray for our Churches, that they may be firm in the Faith, and may study to know and love Jesus, our Emmanuel. Pray for thy Church of Poitiers, which still loves thee with the reverence and affection of a child; but since the ardor of thy zeal embraced all the world, pray also for all the world. Pray that God may bless his Church with Bishops powerful in word and work, profound in sacred science, faithful in the guardianship of that which is entrusted to them, and unswerving defenders of ecclesiastical liberty.

Let us adore the power of our Emmanuel, Who is come to calm the tempest which threatened the human race with death. In the midst of their danger, the successive generations of men had cried out: “Lord! Save us! We perish!” When the fulness of time had come, He awoke from His rest; He had but to command, and the power of our enemies was destroyed. The malice of the devils, the darkness of idolatry, the corruption of paganism—all yielded. Nation after nation was converted to Jesus. They had said, when in their misery and blindness: “Who is this Jesus, whom no power can resist?” and then they embraced His Law. 

This power of Jesus to break down every obstacle, and that, too, at the very time when men were disquieted at His apparent slumbering, has often shown itself in the past ages of the Church. How many times has he not chosen for saving the world, that period which seemed the least likely for rescue! The same happens in the life of each one among us. Oftentimes we are tossed to and fro by violent temptations; it would seem as though the billows must sink us; and yet our will is firmly anchored to God.  And what is all this, if not Jesus sleeping in the storm-tossed boat, protecting us by this His sleeping? And if our cry for help at length awaken Him, it is only to proclaim His own and our victory; for He has already conquered, and we have conquered in Him.

Love of our neighbor is a consequence of that universal brotherhood which our Savior, by His Birth, brought us from Heaven. He came to establish peace between Heaven and earth; men, therefore, ought to be at peace one with another. Our Lord bids us not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil by good.  And did not He first practice this, by coming among us, who were children of wrath, that He might make us children of adoption by His humiliations and His sufferings?

The human race was infected with the leprosy of sin: the Son of God touches it by the mystery of the Incarnation, and restores it to health. But He requires that the sick man, now that he is healed, shall go and show himself to the priest, and comply with the ceremonies prescribed by the law; and this, to show that He allows a human priesthood to cooperate in the work of our salvation. 

The vocation of the Gentiles, of which the Magi were the first-fruits, is again brought before us in the faith of the centurion. A Roman soldier, and millions like him, shall be reputed as true children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; while they who are the sons of this Patriarch according to the flesh, shall be cast out, from the feast-chamber, into the gloom of blindness; and their punishment shall be given as a spectacle to the whole earth.

Let man, then, saved as he has been by the coming of Emmanuel, sing a hymn of praise to the power of God, Who has wrought our salvation by the strength of His almighty arm. Man had been sentenced to death; but now that he has God for a Brother, he shall not die: he will live: and could he spend his life better than in praising the works of this God that has saved him?

This name of Sons of God which has become ours by right through the bond of the sacred nuptials is none other, as Jesus Himself tells us in His Beatitudes, than Peace—the Peace of God, ours truly through the action of His grace ever working it out within us.

This peace which characterizes, in the abode of saints, the Sons of God, effects in like measure on earth the oneness of the Bride, that is of the Church: peace it is that makes her to be but one body, wherein the many members find their multiplicity, upheld and guided by the head, the one lord; their functions, so diverse in themselves, regulated and brought under the rule and love of the Bridegroom, Christ Jesus. 

This peace which has as its ruling motive Charity, the Queen of virtues, and which is so essential to Christianity; the Apostle specifies in detail its forms and conditions and adapts its practice to every social condition and circumstance of life. 

Far from a divine life in the peace of God which was its precious gift, the human race incurred death with its penalty of separation. Let us then sing of this wonder that has been wrought in our midst, and with the angelic choirs exalt the Lord in praise and admiration.

O the wonderful dignity of man! God has vouchsafed, says the Apostle, to show the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which had no claim to, nay, were unworthy of such an honor. Jesus bids the waiters fill the vessels with water and the water of Baptism purifies us; but, not satisfied with this, He fills these vessels, even to the brim, with that heavenly and new Wine, which was not to be drunk save in the Kingdom of His Father.  

Thus, divine Charity, which dwells in the Sacrament of Love, is communicated to us; and that we might not be unworthy of the espousals with Himself, to which he called us, He raises us up even to Himself. Let us, therefore, prepare our souls for this wonderful union, and, according to the advice of the Apostle, let us labor to present them to our Jesus with such purity as to resemble that chaste Virgin, who was presented to the spotless Lamb.

The third Mystery of the Epiphany shows us the completion of the merciful designs of God upon the world, at the same time that it manifests to us, for the third time, the glory of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The star has led the soul to faith; the sanctified Waters of the Jordan have conferred purity upon her; the Marriage-Feast unites her to her God. We have been considering, during this Octave, the Bridegroom revealing Himself to the Spouse; we have heard Him calling her to come to Him from the heights of Libanus; and now, after having enlightened and purified her, He invites her to the heavenly feast, where she is to receive the Wine of His divine love.

A Feast is prepared; it is a Marriage-Feast; and the Mother of Jesus is present at it, for it is just that, having cooperated in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, she should take part in all that her Son does, and in all the favors He bestows on His elect. But, in the midst of the Feast, the Wine fails. Wine is the symbol of Charity or Love, and Charity had failed on the earth; for the Gentiles had never tasted its sweetness; and as to the Synagogue, what had it produced but wild grapes? The True Vine is our Jesus, and He calls Himself by that name. He alone could give that Wine which gladdeneth the heart of man , He alone could give us that Chalice which inebriateth, and of which the Royal Psalmist prophesied.

Mary said to Jesus: “They have no Wine.” It is the office of the Mother of God to tell Him of the wants of men, for she is also their Mother. But Jesus answers her in words which are apparently harsh: “Woman I what is it to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come.” The meaning of these words is, that, in this great Mystery, He was about to act, not as the Son of Mary, but as the Son of God. Later on, the hour will come when, dying upon the Cross, He will do a work, in the presence of His Mother, and He will do it as Man:, that is, according to that human nature which He has received from her. Mary at once understands the words of her Son, and she says to the waiters of the Feast, what she is now ever saying to her children: “Do whatsoever He shall say to you!”

Now, there were six large waterpots of stone there, and they were empty. The world was then in its Sixth Age, as St. Augustine and other Holy Doctors tell us. During these six ages, the earth had been awaiting. Its Savior, who was to instruct and redeem it. Jesus commands these waterpots to be filled with water; and yet water does not suit the Feast of the Spouse. The figures and the prophecies of the ancient world were this water, and until the opening of the Seventh Age, when Christ, who is the Vine, was to be given to the world, no man had contracted an alliance with the Divine Word.

But, when the Emmanuel came, He had but to say, “Now draw out”, and the waterpots were seen to be filled with the wine of the New Covenant, the wine which had been kept to the end. When He assumed our human nature, a nature weak and unstable as water, He effected a change in it; He raised it up even to Himself, by making us partakers of the divine nature; He gave us the power to love Him, to be united to Him, to form that one Body, of which He is the Head, that Church of which He is the Spouse, and which He loved from all eternity, and with such tender love, that He came down from Heaven to celebrate His nuptials with her.

St. Matthew, the Evangelist of the Humanity of our Lord, has received from the Holy Ghost the commission to announce to us the Mystery of Faith by the star; St. Luke, the Evangelist of Jesus' Priesthood, has been selected, by the same Holy Spirit, to instruct us in the Mystery of the Baptism in the Jordan; but the Mystery of the Marriage-Feast was to be revealed to us by the Evangelist John, the Beloved Disciple. He suggests to the Church the object of this third Mystery, by this expression: This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and He MANIFESTED His glory. 

At Bethlehem, the Gold of the Magi expressed the Divinity of the Babe; at the Jordan, the descent of the Holy Ghost and the voice of the Eternal Father proclaimed Jesus (known to the people as a carpenter of Nazareth) to be the Son of God; at Cana, it is Jesus Himself that acts, and He acts as God, for, says St. Augustine, He who changed the water into wine in the waterpots could be no other than the same who, every year, works the same miracle in the vine. Hence it was that, from that day, as St. John tells us, His disciples believed in Him and the Apostolic College began to be formed.

Let us fix our thoughts on the Baptism of Our Lord in the Jordan, which is the second of the three Mysteries of the Epiphany. The Emmanuel manifested himself to the Magi, after having shown Himself to the Shepherds; but this manifestation was made within the narrow space of a stable at Bethlehem, and the world knew nothing of it. In the Mystery of the Jordan, Christ manifested himself with greater publicity. His coming is proclaimed by the Precursor; the crowd that is flocking to the river for Baptism is witness of what happens; Jesus makes this the beginning of His public life. But who could worthily explain the glorious circumstances of this second Epiphany?

It resembles the first in this, that it is for the benefit and salvation of the human race. The star has led the Magi to Christ; they had long waited for His coming, they had hoped for it; now they believe. Faith in the Messias having come into the world is beginning to take root among the Gentiles. But Faith is not sufficient for salvation; the stain of sin must be washed away by water. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.  The time is come, then, for a new manifestation of the Son of God, whereby there shall be inaugurated the great remedy, which is to give to Faith the power of producing life eternal.

Now the decrees of divine Wisdom had chosen water as the instrument of this sublime regeneration of the human race. Hence, in the beginning of the world, we find the Spirit of God moving over the waters, in order that they might even then conceive a principle of sanctifying power: as the Church expresses it in her Office for Holy Saturday. But before being called to fulfill the designs of God's mercy, this element of water had to be used by the Divine Justice for the chastisement of a sinful world. With the exception of one family, the whole human race perished, by the terrible judgement of God, in the Waters of the Deluge.

A fresh indication of the future supernatural power of this chosen element, was given by the Dove, which Noe sent forth from the Ark; it returned to him, bearing in its beak an olive-branch, the symbol that peace was given to the earth by its having been buried in water. But this was only the announcement of the mystery; its accomplishment was not to be for long ages to come. Meanwhile, God spoke to His people by many events, which were figurative of the future Mystery of Baptism.

Thus, for example, it was by passing through the waters of the Red Sea that they entered into the Promised Land, and during the miraculous passage, a pillar of a cloud was seen covering both the Israelites and the waters to which they owed their deliverance.

But in order that water should have the power to purify man from his sins, it was necessary that it should be brought in contact with the Sacred Body of the Incarnate God. The Eternal Father had sent His Son into the world, not only that He might be its Lawgiver, and Redeemer, and the Victim of its salvation, but that He might also be the Sanctifier of water; and it was in this sacred element that He would divinely bear testimony to His being His Son, and manifest Him to the world a second time.

Jesus, therefore, being now thirty years of age, comes to the Jordan, a river already celebrated for the prophetic miracles, which had been wrought in its waters. The Jewish people, roused by the preaching of John the Baptist, were flocking thither in order to receive a Baptism which could indeed excite a sorrow for sin, but could not effect its forgiveness. Our divine King approaches the river, not, of course, to receive sanctification, for He Himself is the author of all Justice―but to impart to water the power of bringing forth, as the Church expresses the mystery, a new and heavenly progeny.  He goes down into the stream, not, like Josue, to walk dry-shod through its bed, but to let its waters encompass Him, and receive from Him, both for itself and for the waters of the whole earth, the sanctifying power which they would retain for ever. The saintly Baptist places his trembling hand upon the Sacred Head of the Redeemer, and bends it beneath the water; the Sun of Justice vivifies this His creature; He imparts to it the glow of life-giving fruitfulness; and water thus becomes the prolific source of supernatural life.

But in this the commencement of a new creation, we look for the intervention of the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. All Three are there. The heavens open; the Dove descends, not as a mere symbol, prophetic of some future grace, but as the sign of the actual presence of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of love, Who gives peace to men and changes their hearts. The Dove hovers above the head of Jesus, overshadowing at one and the same time the Humanity of the Incarnate Word and the water which bathed His sacred Body. The manifestation is not complete; the Father's voice is still to be heard speaking over the water, and moving by its power the entire element throughout the earth. Then was fulfilled the prophecy of David: “The Voice of the Lord is upon the waters, the God of majesty hath thundered. The Voice of the Lord breaketh cedars”, that is, the pride of the devils. “The Voice of the Lord divideth the flame of fire”, that is, the anger of God. “The Voice of the Lord shaketh the desert, and maketh the flood to swell”, that is, announces a new Deluge, the Deluge of divine Mercy.  And what says this Voice of the Father? “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.”

Thus was the Holiness of Emmanuel, manifested by the presence of the Dove and by the voice of the Father, as His kingly character had been previously manifested by the mute testimony of the star. The mystery is accomplished, the waters are invested with a spiritual purifying power, and Jesus comes from the Jordan and ascends the bank, raising up with Himself the world, regenerated and sanctified, with all its crimes and defilements drowned in the stream. Such is the interpretation and language of the Holy Fathers of the Church regarding this great event of Our Lord's Life.

The Feast of the Epiphany celebrates this wonderful mystery of Jesus' Baptism; and we cannot be surprised at the Eastern Church having selected this day for one of the solemn administrations of the sacrament of Baptism. The same custom was observed, as we learn from ancient documents, in certain Churches in the West. John Mosch tells us that, as regards the Oriental Church, the font was more than once miraculously filled with water on the Feast of the Epiphany, and that immediately after having administered the Sacrament, the people saw the water disappear. 

The Roman Church, even so early as the time of St. Leo, decreed that Easter and Pentecost should be the only two days for the solemn administration of Baptism; but the custom of blessing the baptismal water with great solemnity on the Epiphany, was still retained and is observed even now in some parts of the West.

The Eastern Church has always religiously observed it. Amidst all the pomp of sacred rites, accompanied by his priests and ministers, who are clothed in the richest vestments, and followed by the whole people, the Bishop repairs to the banks of a river. After reciting certain beautiful prayers, which we regret not being able to offer to our readers, the Bishop plunges into the water a Cross richly adorned with precious stones; it represents Our Lord being baptized by 5t. John. At St. Petersburg, in Russia, the ceremony takes place on the River Neva, and it is through a hole made on the ice that the Metropolitan dips the Cross into the Water. This same ceremony is observed by those Churches in the West which have retained the custom of blessing the baptismal water on this Feast.

The faithful are very anxious to carry home with them the water of the stream thus sanctified; and St. John Chrysostom, in his twenty-fourth Homily, on the Baptism of Christ, speaks to his audience of the circumstance, which was well known by all of them, of this water never turning corrupt. The same has been often seen in the Western Church.

Let us honor Our Lord in this second Manifestation of His divinity, and thank Him, with the Church, for having given us both the star of Faith, which enlightens us, and the water of Baptism, which cleanses us from our iniquities. Let us lovingly appreciate the humility of our Jesus, Who permits Himself to be weighed down by the hand of a mortal man, in order, as He says Himself, that He might fulfill all justice; for having taken on Himself the likeness of sin, it was requisite that He should bear its humiliation, that so He might raise us from our debasement. Let us thank Him for this grace of Baptism, which has opened to us the gates of the Church, both of Heaven and earth; and let us renew the engagements we made at the holy font, for they were the terms on which we were regenerated to our new life in God.

Having laid their offerings at the feet of Jesus, as the sign of the alliance they had, in the name of all mankind, contracted with Him, and laden with His graces and blessings, the Magi take their leave of the Divine Babe; for such was His will. They take their departure from Bethlehem, and the rest of the world seems a wilderness to them. Oh, if they might be permitted to fix their abode near the new-born King and His incomparable Mother! But no; God's plan for the salvation of the world requires that everything savoring of human pomp and glory should be far from Him Who had come to take upon Himself all our miseries.

Besides, they are to be the first messengers of the Gospel; they must go and tell to the Gentiles that the Mystery of Salvation has begun, that the earth is in possession of its Savior, and that their salvation is nigh at hand. The star does not return to them; they needed it to find Jesus; but now they have Him in their hearts, and will never lose Him. These three men are sent back into the midst of the Gentile world, as the leaven of the Gospel which, notwithstanding its being so little, is to leaven the whole paste. For their sakes, God will bless the nations of the earth; from this day forward infidelity will lose ground, and Faith will progress; and when, the Blood of the Lamb having been shed, Baptism shall be promulgated, the Magi shall be, not merely men of desire, but perfect Christians, initiated into all the Mysteries of the Church.

The ancient tradition, which is quoted by the author of The Imperfect Work on St. Matthew, which is put in all the editions of St. John Chrysostom, and was probably written about the close of the 6th century, tells us that the three Magi were baptized by St. Thomas the Apostle, and devoted themselves to the preaching of the Gospel.

But we scarcely need a tradition on such a point as this. The vocation of these three Princes could never be limited to the mere privilege of being the first among the Gentiles to visit the eternal King, Who had come down from Heaven to be born on this earth and show Himself to His creatures; a second vocation was the consequence of the first, the vocation of preaching Jesus to men.

There are many details relating to the life and actions of the Magi, after they had become Christians, which have been handed down to us; but we refrain from mentioning them, as not being sufficiently ancient or important traditions to have induced the Church to give them place in her Liturgy. We would make the same observation with regard to the names assigned to them of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthassar,  the custom of thus naming them is too modern to deserve credit; and though it might be indiscreet to deny that these were their true names, it seems very difficult to give proofs of their correctness.

The Relics of these holy Kings were translated from Persia to Constantinople, under the first Christian Emperors, and, for a long time, were kept in the Church of Saint Sophia. At a later period, they were translated to Milan, when Eustorgius was Bishop of that city. There they remained till the 12th century, when, through the influence of the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, they were translated to the Cathedral Church of Cologne by Reynold, Archbishop of that metropolitan see. The Relics are in a magnificent Shrine, perhaps the finest specimen now extant of medieval metallic art, and the superb Cathedral ,where it is religiously kept, is, by its size and architectural beauty, one of the grandest Churches of the Christian world.

Thus have we followed you, O Blessed Magi! Fathers of the Gentile world! From your first setting out from the East for Bethlehem to your return to your own country, and even to your sacred resting-place; which the goodness of God has made to be in this cold West of ours. 

It was the love of children for their parents that made us thus cling to you. Besides, were we not ourselves in search of that dear King, Whom you so longed for and found? Blessed be those ardent desires of yours, blessed be your obedience to the guidance of the star, blessed be your devotion at the Crib of Jesus, blessed be the gifts you made Him, which, while they were acceptable to God, were full of instruction to us! We revere you as Prophets, for you foretold the characters of the Messias by the selection of your three gifts. 

We honor you as Apostles, for you preached, even to Jerusalem herself, the Birth of the humble Jesus of Bethlehem, of that Jesus Whom His Disciples preached not till after the triumph of His Resurrection. We hail you as the Spring Flowers of the Gentile world, but Flowers which produced abundant and rich fruits, for you brought over entire nations and countless people to the service of our divine King. 

Watch over us, and protect the Church. Be mindful of those Eastern countries, whence rises to the earth the light of day, the beautiful image of your own journey towards Bethlehem.

Bless this Western world of ours, which was buried in darkness when you first saw the star, and is now the favored portion of God's earth, and on which the Divine Sun of Justice pours forth his brightest and warmest rays. Faith has grown weak among us; re-enkindle it. 

Obtain of the divine mercy, that the West may ever send forth her messengers of salvation to the South and North, and even to that infidel East, where are laid the tents of Sem, and where the light that you gave her has been long extinguished by her apostasy.

Pray for the Church of Cologne, that illustrious sister of our holiest Churches in the West; may she preserve the Faith, may she defend her sacred rights and liberty; may she be the bulwark of Catholic Germany, and be ever blessed by the protection of her Three Kings, and the patronage of the glorious Ursula and her virginal army. 

Lastly, we beseech you, O venerable Magi, to introduce us to the Infant Jesus, and His Blessed Mother; and grant us to go through these forty days, which the Church consecrates to the Mystery of Christmas, with hearts burning with love for the Divine Child, and may that same love abide with us during the pilgrimage of our life on this earth.

The Magi were not satisfied with paying their adorations to the great King whom Mary presented to them. After the example of the Queen of Saba, who paid her homage to the Prince of Peace in the person of King Solomon, these three Eastern Kings opened their treasures and presented their offerings to Jesus. Our Emmanuel graciously accepted these mystic gifts, and suffered them not to leave Him until He had loaded them with gifts infinitely more precious than those He had vouchsafed to receive. The Magi had given Him of the riches which this earth produces; Jesus repays them with heavenly gifts. He strengthened in their hearts the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity; He enriched, in their persons, the Church of which they were the representatives; and the words of the Canticle of Mary were fulfilled in them: “He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away”, for the Synagogue refused to follow them in their search after the King of the Jews.

But let us consider the gifts made by the Magi, and let us, together with the Church and the Holy Fathers, acknowledge the Mysteries expressed by them. The gifts were three in number, in order to honor the sacred number of the Persons in the divine Essence, as likewise to express the triple character of Emmanuel. He had come that He might be King over the whole world; it was fitting that men should offer gold to Him, for it is the emblem of sovereign power. He had come to be High Priest, and, by His mediation, reconcile earth to Heaven; incense, then, was an appropriate gift, for the Priest uses it when he offers sacrifice. But thirdly, it was only by His own death that He was to obtain possession of the throne which was prepared for His glorified Human Nature, and the perpetual Sacrifice of the Divine Lamb was to be inaugurated by this same, His Death; the gift of Myrrh was expressive of the Death and Burial of an immortal Victim. The Holy Ghost, Who inspired the Prophets, had guided the Magi in their selection of these three gifts. Let us listen to St. Leo the Great, who, speaking of this Mystery, says with his usual eloquence:

“O admirable Faith, which leads to Knowledge and perfect Knowledge, and which was not taught in the school of earthly wisdom, but was enlightened by the Holy Ghost Himself! For whence had they learnt the supernatural beauty of their three Gifts? They that had come straight from their own country, and had not as yet seen Jesus, nor beheld, in His infant Face, the Light which directed them in the choice of their offerings? While the star met the gaze of the bodily eye, their hearts were instructed by a stronger light-the ray of Truth. Before setting out on the fatiguing journey they knew Him, to Whom were due, by Gold, the honors of a King; by Incense, the worship of God; by Myrrh, the Faith in His Mortal Nature.”

But these three gifts, which so sublimely express the three characters of the Man-God, are fraught with instruction for us. They signify three great virtues, which the Divine Infant found in the souls of the Magi, and to which He added increase by His grace. Gold signifies charity, which unites us to God; Frankincense prayer, which brings God into man’s heart; and Myrrh self-abnegation, suffering and mortification, whereby we are delivered from the slavery of corrupt nature. Find a heart that loves God, that raises herself up to Him by prayer, that understands and relishes the power of the cross―and you have in that heart the worthiest offering which can be made to God, and one which He always accepts.

We, too, O Jesus, offer Thee our treasure and our gifts. We confess Thee to be God and Priest and Man. We beseech Thee to accept the desire we have of corresponding to the love Thou showest us by giving Thee our love in return; we love Thee, dear Savior! Do Thou increase our love. Receive also the gift of our Prayer, for though, of itself, it be tepid and poor, yet it is pleasing to Thee because united with the prayer of Thy Church: teach us how to make it worthy of Thee and how to give it the power of obtaining what Thou desirest to grant: form within us the gift of prayer, that it may unceasingly ascend up like sweet Incense in Thy sight. And lastly, receive the homage of our contrite and humble hearts, and the resolution we have formed of restraining and purifying our senses by mortification and penance.

The sublime Mysteries which we are celebrating during this holy season have taught us the greatness of our own misery, and the immensity of Thy love for us, and we feel, more than ever, the obligation we are under of fleeing from the world and its concupiscences, and of uniting ourselves to thee. The Star shall not have shone upon us in vain: it has brought us to Thee, dear King of Bethlehem! And Thou shalt be King of our hearts. What have we that we prize and hold dear, which we can hesitate to give Thee in return for the sweet infinite treasure of Thyself, which Thou hast given to us?

Dear Mother of our Jesus! We put these our offerings into thy hands. The gifts of the Magi were made through thee, and they were pleasing to thy Son; thou must present ours to Him, and He will be pleased with them, in spite of their poverty. Our love is deficient; fill up its measure by uniting it with thine own immense love. Second our prayer by thy maternal intercession. Encourage us in our warfare against the world and the flesh. Make sure our perseverance, by obtaining for us the grace of a continual remembrance of the sweet Mysteries, which we are now celebrating; pray for us that, after thine own example, we may keep all these things in our hearts. That must be a hard and depraved heart which could offend Jesus in Bethlehem; or refuse him anything now that He is seated on thy lap, waiting for our offering! O Mary! Keep us from forgetting that we are the children of the Magi, and that Bethlehem is ever open to receive us.

The Magi have reached Bethlehem; the humble dwelling of the King of the Jews has been thrown open to them; there, says St. Matthew, “they found the Child with Mary His Mother” (Matthew 2:11). Falling down, they adore the divine King they have so fervently sought after, and for Whom the whole earth has been longing.

Here we have the commencement of the Christian Church. In this humble stable we have the Son of God made Man, presiding as Head over His mystical body; Mary is present, as the co-operatrix in the world's salvation, and as the Mother of divine Grace; Juda is represented by this holy Queen and her Spouse, St. Joseph; the Gentiles are adoring, in the person of the Magi, whose Faith is perfect now that they have seen the Child. It is not a Prophet that they are honoring, nor is it to an earthly King that they open their treasures; He before Whom they prostrate in adoration is their God .

“See, I pray you,” says St. Bernard, “and attentively consider how keen is the eye of Faith. It recognizes the Son of God, whether feeding at His Mother's breasts,or hanging on the Cross, or dying in the midst of suffering; for the Good Thief recognizes Him on the Cross, and the Magi recognize Him in the stable; He, in spite of the nails which fasten Him, and they in spite of the clouts which swathe Him.”

So that all is consummated, Bethlehem is not merely the birthplace of our Redeemer;  it is the cradle of the Church. Well did the Prophet say of it: “And thou, Bethlehem, art not the least among the princes of Juda.”  We can understand St. Jerome leaving all the ambitions and comforts of Rome to go and bury himself in the seclusion of this cave, where all these mysteries were accomplished. Who would not gladly live and die in this privileged place, sanctified as it is by the presence of our Jesus, embalmed with the fragrance of the Queen of Heaven, filled with the lingering echoes of the songs of Angels, and fresh, even yet, with the memory of those ancestors of our Faith, the holy Magi!

These happy kings are not scandalized at the sight they behold on entering the humble dwelling. They are not disappointed at finding at the end of their long journey a weak Babe, a poor Mother, and a wretched stable. On the contrary, they rightly understand the mystery. Once believing in the promise that the Infinite God would visit His creature Man, and show him how He loved him, they are not surprised at seeing Him humble Himself, and take upon Himself all our miseries that He might be like us in all, save sin. Their own hearts told them that the wound inflicted on man by pride was too deep to be healed by anything short of an extreme remedy; so that, to them, these strange humiliations at Bethlehem, bespeak the design and action of a God. Israel, too, is in expectation of the Messias, but He must be mighty and wealthy and exalted above all other kings in earthly glory; the Magi, on the contrary, see, in the humility and poverty of this weak Babe of Bethlehem, the indications of the true Messias. The grace of God has triumphed in these faithful men; they fall down before Him, and, full of admiration and love, they adore Him.

Who could describe the sweet conversations they held with His blessed Mother? For the King Himself, of Whom they were come in search, broke not, even for their sakes, the voluntary silence He had imposed on Himself by becoming an Infant. He accepted their homage, He sweetly smiled upon them, He blessed them; but He would not speak to them; Mary alone was to satisfy, by her sublime communications, the holy curiosity of the three pilgrims, who represented the entire human race. 

How amply must she not have rewarded their faith and love, by announcing to them the Mystery of that virginal Birth, which was to bring salvation to the world; by telling them of the joys of her own maternal heart; and by describing to them the sweet perfections of the divine Child! They themselves would fix their eyes on the Blessed Mother, and listen to her every word with devout attention; and oh, how sweetly must not divine grace have penetrated their hearts, through the words of her whom God Himself has chosen as the means to lead men to the knowledge and the love of His sovereign Majesty! 

The star which, but an hour ago, had brightly shone for them in the heavens, was replaced by another, of a lovelier light and stronger influence; and it prepared them for the contemplation of that God who calls Himself the bright and morning Star. The whole world seemed now a mere nothing in their eyes; the stable of Bethlehem held within it all the riches of Heaven and earth. They had shared in that long expectation of the human race, the expectation of four thousand years and now it seemed but as a moment, so full and perfect was their joy at having found the God, Who alone can satisfy the desires of man's heart.

They understood and entered into the merciful designs of their Emmanuel; they gratefully and humbly contracted with Him the alliance He so mercifully made, through them, with the human race; they adored the just judgements of God, Who was about to cast off an unbelieving people; they rejoiced at the glories of the Christian Church, which had thus been begun in their persons; they prayed for us, their posterity in that same Church.

We, dear Babe of Bethlehem, we, the Gentiles, Who, by our regeneration, have become the posterity of these first Christians—we adore Thee as they did. Since their entrance into Bethlehem, long ages have passed away; but there has been an unbroken procession of people and nations tending towards Thee under the guidance of the Star of Faith. We have been made members of Thy Church, and we adore Thee with the Magi. 

In one thing are we happier than these first-born of the Church; we have heard Thy sacred words and teachings, we have contemplated Thy sufferings and Thy Cross, we have been witnesses of Thy Resurrection, we have heard the whole universe, from the rising to the setting of the sun, hymning Thy blessed and glorious Name! Well may we adore and love Thee as King of the earth! 

The Sacrifice, whereby all Thy Mysteries are perpetuated and renewed, is now offered up daily in every part of the world; the voice of Thy Church is heard speaking to all men; and all this light and all these graces are ours! The Church, the ever-enduring Bethlehem, the House of the Bread of Life, gives Thee to us; and we are for ever feasting on Thy adorable beauty. Yea, sweet Jesus, we adore Thee with the Magi.

And thou, O Mary, teach us as thou didst teach the Magi. Unfold to us, and each year more clearly, the sweet Mystery of thy Jesus, and, at length, win us over unreservedly to His service. Thou art our Mother; watch over us and suffer us not to lose any of the lessons He teaches us. May Bethlehem, wherein we have entered in company with the holy Magi, work in us the renovation of our whole lives.

The star foretold by Balaam having risen in the East, the three Magi, whose hearts were full of the expectation of the promised Redeemer, are immediately inflamed with the desire of going in search of Him. The annoWlcement of the glad coming of the King of the Jews is made to these holy Kings in a mysterious and silent manner; and hereby it differs from that made to the Shepherds of Bethlehem, who were invited to Jesus's Crib by the voice of an Angel. But the mute language of the star was explained to them by God himself, for He revealed His Son to them; and this made their Vocation superior in dignity to that of the Jewish Shepherds, who, according to the dispensation of the Old Law, could know nothing save by the ministry of Angels.

The divine grace which spoke, directly and by itself, to the souls of the Magi, met with a faithful and unhesitating 
correspondence. St. Luke says of the Shepherds, that they came with haste to Bethlehem; and the Magi show their simple and fervent eagerness by the words they addressed to Herod: “We have seen his star in the East,” they say,“and we are come to adore him.”

When Abraham received the command from God, to go out of the land of Chaldea, which was the land of his fathers and kindred, and go into a strange country, he obeyed with such faithful promptitude as to merit being made the Father of all them that believe; so, likewise, the Magi, by reason of their equally docile and admirable Faith, have been judged worthy to be called the Fathers of the Gentile Church.

They, too, or at least one or more of them, went out from Chaldea, if we are to believe St. Justin and Tertullian. Several of the Fathers, among whom are the two just mentioned, assert that one, if not two, of these holy Kings was from Arabia. A popular tradition, now for centuries admitted into Christian Art, tells us that one of the three was from Ethiopia; and certainly, as regards this last opinion, we have David and other Prophets telling us that the colored inhabitants of the banks of the Nile were to be objects of God's special mercy.

The term Magi implies that they gave themselves to the study of the heavenly bodies, and that, too, for the special intention of finding that glorious star, whose rising had been prophesied. They were of the number of those Gentiles who, like the centurion Cornelius, feared God, had not been defiled by the worship of idols, and maintained, in spite of all the ignorance which surrounded them, the sacred traditions of the religion that was practiced by Abraham and the Patriarchs.

The Gospel does not say that they were Kings, but the Church applies to them those verses of the Psalm, where David speaks of the Kings of Arabia and Saba, that should hereafter come to the Messias bringing their offerings of gold. The tradition of their being Kings rests on the testimony of St. Hilary of Poitiers, of St. Jerome, of the poet Juvencus, of St. Leo, and several others; and it would be impossible to controvert it by any well-grounded arguments. 

Of course, we are not to suppose them to have been Monarchs, whose kingdoms were as great as those of the Roman Empire; but we know that the Scripture frequently applies this name of King to petty princes, and even to mere governors of provinces. The Magi, therefore, would be called Kings if they exercised authority over a considerable number of people; and that they were persons of great importance, we have a strong proof in the consideration and attention showed them by Herod, into whose palace they enter, telling him that they are come to pay their homage to the new-born King of the Jews. 

The city of Jerusalem is thrown into a state of excitement by their arrival, which would scarce have occurred had not the three strangers, who came for a purpose which few heeded, been attended by a numerous retinue, or had they not attracted attention by their imposing appearance. These Kings, then, docile to the divine inspiration, suddenly leave their country, their riches, their quiet, in order to follow a star: the power of that God, who had called them, unites them in the same path, as they were already one in faith. The star goes on before them, marking out the route they were to follow: the dangers of such a journey, the fatigues of a pilgrimage which might last for weeks or months, the fear of awakening suspicions in the Roman Empire towards which they were evidently tending―all this was nothing to them; they were told to go, and they went.

Their first stay is at Jerusalem, for the star halts there. They, Gentiles, come into this Holy City, which is soon to have God's curse upon it, and they come to announce that Jesus Christ is come! With all the simple courage and all the calm conviction of Apostles and Martyrs, they declare their firm resolution of going to Him and adoring Him. Their earnest inquiries constrain Israel, who was the guardian of the divine prophecies, to confess one of the chief marks of the Messias―His Birth in Bethlehem. The Jewish Priesthood fullfils, though with a sinful ignorance, its sacred ministry, and Herod sits restlessly on his throne, plotting murder.

The Magi leave the faithless City, which has turned the presence of the Magi into a mark of its own reprobation. The Star reappears in the heavens, and invites them to resume their journey. Yet a few hours, and they will be at Bethlehem, at the feet of the King of whom they are in search.

O dear Jesus! We also are following Thee; we are walking in Thy light, for Thou hast said, in the Prophecy of Thy beloved Disciple: “I am the bright and morning Star.” The meteor that guides the Magi is but Thy symbol, O divine Star! Thou art the morning Star; for Thy Birth proclaims that the darkness of error and sin is at an end. Thou art the morning Star; for, after submitting to death and the tomb, Thou wilt suddenly arise from that night of humiliation to the bright morning of Thy glorious Resurrection. Thou art the morning Star; for by Thy Birth and the Mysteries which are to follow, Thou announcest unto us the cloudless day of eternity. 

May Thy light ever beam upon us! May we, like the Magi, be obedient to its guidance, and ready to leave all things in order to follow it! We were sitting in darkness when Thou didst call us to Thy grace, by making this Thy light shine upon us. We were fond of our darkness, and Thou gavest us a love for the Light.  Dear Jesus! Keep up this love within us. Let not sin, which is darkness, ever approach us. Preserve us from the delusion of a false conscience. Avert from us that blindness into which fell the City of Jerusalem and her king, and which prevented them from seeing the Star. May Thy Star guide us through life, and bring us to Thee, our King, our Peace, our Love!

We salute thee, too, O Mary, thou Star of the Sea that shinest on the waters of this life, giving calm and protection to thy tempest-tossed children who invoke thee! Thou didst pray for the Magi as they traversed the desert; guide also our steps, and bring us to Him Who is thy Child and thy Light eternal.

The great Mystery of the Alliance of the Son of God with the universal Church, which is represented in the Epiphany by the Magi, was looked forward to by the world in every age previous to the coming of our Emmanuel. The Patriarchs and Prophets had propagated the tradition; and the Gentile world gave frequent proofs that the tradition prevailed even with them.

When Adam in Eden first beheld her whom God had formed from one of his ribs, and whom he called Eve, because she was the Mother of all the living, he exclaimed: “This is the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall be two in one flesh.” In uttering these words, the soul of our first Parent was enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and, as we are told by the most profound interpreters of the Sacred Scriptures (such as Tertullian, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, etc.), he foretold the alliance of the Son of God with his Church, which issued from his Side, when opened by the spear, on the Cross; for the love of which Spouse he left the right hand of his Father, and the heavenly Jerusalem, his mother, that he might dwell with us in this our earthly abode.

The second father of the human race, Noe, after he had seen the Rainbow in the heavens, announcing that now God's anger was appeased, prophesied to his three Sons their own respective future, and in theirs, that of the world. Cham had drawn upon himself his father's curse; Sem seemed to be the favored son, for from his race there should come the Savior of the world; but, the Patriarch immediately adds: “May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Sem.” In the course of time, the ancient alliance that had been made between God and the people of Israel was broken; the Semitic race fluctuated in its religion, and finally fell into infidelity; and at length God adopts the family of Japheth, that is, the Gentiles of the West, as his own people; for ages, they had been without God, and now the very Seat of religion is established in their midst, and they are put at the head of the whole human race.

Later on it is the great God himself that speaks to Abraham, promising him that he shall be the father of a countless family. I will bless thee, says the Lord, and I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven. As the Apostle tells us, more numerous was to be the family of Abraham according to the faith than that which should be born to him of Sara. All they that have received the faith of a Mediator to come, and all they that, being warned by the Star, have come to Jesus as their God—all are the children of Abraham.

The Mystery is again expressed in Rebecca, the wife of Isaac. She feels that there are two children struggling within her womb; and this is the answer she received from God, when she consulted him: “Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be divided out of thy womb; and one people shall overcome the other, and the elder shall serve the younger.” Now, who is this ‘younger’ child that overcomes the elder, but the Gentiles, who struggle with Juda for the light, and who, though but the child of the promise, supplants him who was son according to the flesh? Such is the teaching of St. Leo and St. Augustine.

Next it is Jacob, who, when dying, calls his twelve sons, the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel, around his bed, and prophetically assigns to each of them the career they were to run  Juda is put before the rest; he is to be the king of his brethren, and from his royal race shall come the Messias. But the prophecy concludes with the prediction of Israel's humiliation, which humiliation is to be the glory of the rest of the human race.  “The scepter shall not be taken away from Juda, nor a Ruler from his thigh, till he come that is to be sent, and he shall be the Expectation oj the Nations.”

When Israel had gone out of Egypt, and was in possession of the Promised Land, Balaam cried out, setting his face towards the desert where Israel was encamped: “I shall see him, but not now; I shall behold him, but not near. A Star shall rise out of Jacob, and a scepter shall spring up from Israel. ... Who shall live when God shall do these things? They shall come in galleys from Italy; they shall overcome the Assyrians, and shall waste the Hebrews, and at the last they themselves also shall perish.” And what kingdom shall succeed this? The kingdom of Christ, who is the Star, and the King that shall rule for ever.

David has this great day continually before his mind. He is for ever celebrating, in his Psalms, the Kingship of his Son according to the flesh: he shows him to us as bearing the Sceptre, girt with the Sword, anointed by God his Father, and extending his kingdom from sea to sea: he tells us how the Kings of Tharsis and the Islands, the Kings of the Arabians and of Saba, and the Princes of Ethiopia, shall prostrate at his feet and adore him: he mentions their gifts of gold. 

In his mysterious Canticle of Canticles, Solomon describes the joy of the spiritual union between the divine Spouse and his Church, and that Church is not the Synagogue. Christ invites her, in words of tenderest love, to come and be crowned; and she, to whom He addresses these words, is dwelling beyond the confines of the land where lives the people of God. “Come from Libanus; my Spouse, come from Libanus, come! Thou shalt be crowned from the top of Amana, from the top of Sanir and Hermon, from the dens of the lions, from the mountains of the leopards.”  This daughter of Pharaoh confesses her unworthiness: I am black, she says; but, she immediately adds that she has been made beautiful by the grace of her Spouse.

The Prophet Osee follows with his inspired prediction: “And it shall be in that day, saith the Lord, that she shall call Me ‘My Husband’, and she shall call me no more Baalim. And I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and she shall no more remember their name... , And I will espouse thee to me for ever .... And I will sow her unto Me in the earth, and I will have mercy on her that was without mercy. And I will say to that which was not My people: ‘Thou art My people’: and they shall say: ‘Thou art my God.’”

The elder Tobias, whilst captive in Babylon, prophesies the same alliance. The Jerusalem which was to receive the Jews after their deliverance by Cyrus, is not the City of which he speaks in such glowing terms; it is a new and richer and lovelier Jerusalem. “Jerusalem! City of God! Bless the God eternal, that he may rebuild his tabernacle in thee, and may call back all the captives to thee. Thou shalt shine with a glorious light. Nations from afar shall come to thee, and shall bring gifts, and shall esteem thy land as holy. For they shall call upon the great Name in thee. . .. All that fear God shall return thither. And the Gentiles shall leave their idols, and shall come into Jerusalem, and shall dwell in it. And all the kings of the earth shall rejoice in it, adoring the King of Israel."

It is true, the Gentiles shall be severely chastised by God on account of their crimes; but that justice is for no other end than to prepare those very Gentiles for an eternal alliance with the great Jehovah. He thus speaks by His Prophet Sophonias: “My judgement is to assemble the Gentiles, and to gather the kingdoms: and to pour upon them My indignation, all my fierce anger: for with the fire of my jealousy shall all the earth be devoured. Because then I will restore to the people a chosen lip, that all may call upon the name of the Lord, and may serve him with one shoulder. From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia shall My suppliants, the children of My dispersed people, bring Me an offering.”

He promises the same mercy by His Prophet Ezechiel: “One King shall be over all, and they shall no more be two nations, neither shall they be divided any more into two kingdoms. Nor shall they be defiled any more with their idols: and I will save them out of all the places in which they have sinned. And they shall be My people, and I will be their God. And they shall have One Shepherd. And I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will establish them, and will multiply them, and will set My Sanctuary in the midst of them for ever.”

After the prophet Daniel has described the three great Kingdoms which were successively to pass away, he says there shall be a Kingdom  “which is an everlasting Kingdom, and all kings shall serve Him” (the King) , and shall obey him.' He had previously said: “The power” (that was to be given to the Son of man) “is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away; and His Kingdom shall not be destroyed.”

Aggeus thus foretells the great events which were to happen before the coming of the One Shepherd, and the establishment of that everlasting Sanctuary which was to be set up in the very midst of the Gentiles: “Yet one little while, and I will move the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land. And I will move all nations, and the Desired of all nations shall come.”

But we should have to cite all the Prophets in order to describe in all its grandeur the glorious spectacle promised by God to the world, when, being mindful of the Gentiles, he should lead them to the feet of Jesus. The Church has quoted the Prophet Isaias in the Epistle of the Feast, and no Prophet is so explicit and so sublime as this son of Amos.

The expression of the same universal expectation and desire is found also among the Gentiles. The Sibyls kept up the hope in the heart of the people; and in Rome itself we find the Poet Virgil repeating in one of his poems'the oracles they had pronounced. “The last age,” says he, “foretold by the Cumean Sibyl, is at hand; a new and glorious era is coming: a new race is being sent down to earth from heaven. At the birth of this Child, the iron age will cease, and one of gold will rise upon the whole world... , No remnants of our crimes will be left, and their removal will free the earth from its neverending fear.”

If we are unwilling to accept, as didSt. Augustine and so many other holy Fathers, these Sibylline oracles as the expression of the ancient traditions-we have pagan philosophers and historians, such as Cicero, Tacitus, and Suetonius, testifying that in their times the world was in expectation of a Deliverer; that this Deliverer would come, not only from the East, but from Judea; and that a Kingdom was on the point of being established which would include the entire world. O Jesus, our Emmanuel! This universal expectation was that of the holy Magi, to whom thou didst send the star. No sooner do they receive the signal of thy having come, than they set out in search of thee, asking,  “Where is he born, that is King of the Jews?” The oracles of thy Prophets were verified in them; but if they received the first-fruits of the great promise, we posses; it in all its fuIlness. The Alliance is made, and our souls, for love of which thou didst come down from heaven, are thine.

The Church is come forth from thy divine side, with the Blood and Water; and all that thou dost for this thy chosen Spouse, thou accomplishest in each of her faithful children. We are the sons of Japheth, and we have supplanted the race of Sem, which refused us the entrance of its tents; the birthright which belonged to Juda has been transferred to us. Each age do our numbers increase, for we are to become numerous as the stars of heaven. We are no longer in the anxious period of expectation; the star has risen, and the Kingdom it predicted will now for ever protect and bless us. The Kings of Tharsis and the Islands, the Kings of Arabia and Saba, the Princes of Ethiopia, are come, bringing their gifts with them; all generations have followed them.

The Spouse has received all her honours, and has long since forgotten Amana, and Sanir, and Hermon, where she once dwelt in the mdist of wild beasts; she is not black, she is beautiful, with neither spot nor wrinkle upon her, but in every way is worthy of her divine Lord. Baal is forgotten for ever, and she lovingly speaks the language given her by her God. The One Shepherd feeds the one flock. The last Kingdom, the Kingdom which is to continue for ever, is faithfully fulfilling its glorious destiny.

It is Thou, O Divine Infant! That bringest us all these graces, and receivest all this devoted homage of Thy creatures. The time will soon come, dear Jesus! When Thou wilt break the silence Thou hast imposed on Thyself in order that Thou mightest teach us humility, Thou wilt speak to us as our Master. Caesar Augustus has long ruled over Pagan Rome, and she thinks herself the kingdom that is to have no end; but she and her Rulers must yield to the Eternal King and his eternal City: the throne of earthly power must now give place for the Throne of Christian charity, and a new Rome is to spring up, grander than the first. The Gentiles are looking for Thee, their King; but the day will come when they will have no need to seek Thee, but Thou, in Thy mercy, wilt go in search of them, by sending them apostles and missioners who will preach Thy Gospel to them. Show Thyself to them as He to whom all power has been given in Heaven and on earth; and show them also Her whom Thou hast made to be Queen of the universe. May this august Mother of Thine be raised up from the poor Stable of Bethlehem, and from the humble dwelling of Nazareth, and be taken on the wings of Angels to that throne of mercy which Thou hast made for her, and from which she will bless all peoples and generations with her loving protection.

In order that we may the more fully enter into the spirit of the Church during this glorious Octave, we will contemplate, each day, the Mystery of the Vocation of the Magi, and we will enter, together with them, into the holy Cave of Bethlehem, there to offer our gifts to the Divine Infant, to whom the star has led the Wise Men.

These Magi are the harbingers of the conversion of all nations to the Lord their God; they are the Fathers of the Gentiles in the faith of the Redeemer that is come; they are the Patriarchs of the human race regenerated. They arrive at Bethlehem, according to the tradition of the Church, three in number; and this tradition is handed down by St. Leo, by St. Maximus of Turin, by St. Cesarius of ArIes, and by the Christian paintings in the Catacombs of Rome, which paintings belong to the period of the Persecutions.

Thus is continued in the Magi the Mystery prefigured by the three just men at the very commencement of the world: Abel, who, by his death, was the figure of Christ; Seth, who was the father of the children of God, as distinct from the family of Cain; and Enos, who had the honor of regulating the ceremonies and solemnity to be observed in man's worship of his Creator. The Magi also continued in their own person that other Mystery of the three new parents of the human family, after the Deluge and from whom all races have sprung: Sem. Cham, and Japheth the Sons of Noe. And, thirdly, we behold in the Magi that third Mystery of the three fathers of God's chosen people: Abraham, the Father of believers; Isaac, another figure of Christ immolated; and Jacob, who was strong against God, and was the father of the twelve Patriarchs of Israel.

All these were but the receivers of the Promise, although the hope of mankind, both according to nature and grace, rested on them; they, as the Apostle says of them, saluted the accomplishment of that Promise afar off. The nations did not follow them, by serving the true God; nay, the greater the light that shone on Israel, the greater seemed the blindness of the Gentile world. The three Magi, on the contrary, come to Bethlehem, and they are followed by countless generations. In them the figure becomes the grand reality, thanks to the mercy of our Lord, who having come to find what was lost, vouchsafed to stretch out his arms to the whole human race, for the whole was lost.

These happy Magi were also invested with regal power, as we shall see further on; as such, they were prefigured by those three faithful Kings who were the glory of the throne of Juda, the earnest maintainers among the chosen people of the traditions regarding the future Deliverer, and the strenuous opponents of idolatry: David, the sublime type of the Messias; Ezechias, whose courageous zeal destroyed the idols; and Josias, who reestablished the Law of the Lord, which the people had forgotten.

And if we would have another type of these holy pilgrims, who come from a far distant country of the Gentiles to adore the King of Peace, and offer him their rich presents, the sacred Scripture puts before us the Queen of Saba, also a Gentile,' who hearing of the fame of the wisdom of Solomon, whose name means the Peaceful, visits Jerusalem; taking with her the most magnificent gifts-camels laden with gold, spices, and precious stones-and venerates, under one of the sublimest of his types, the kingly character of the Messias.

Thus, O Jesus! during the long and dark night, in which the justice of thy Father left this sinful world, did the gleams of grace appear in the heavens, portending the rising of that Sun of thine own Justice, which would dissipate the shadows of death, and establish the reign of Light and Day. But now all these shadows have passed away; we no longer need the imperfect light of types: it is thyself we now possess; and though we wear not royal crowns upon our heads, like the Magi and the Queen of Saba, yet thou receivest us with love.

The very first to be invited to thy Crib, there to receive thy teachings, were simple Shepherds. Every member of the human family is called to form part of thy court. Having become a Child, thou hast opened the treasures of thine infinite wisdom to all men. What gratitude do we not owe for this gift of the light of Faith, without which we should know nothing, even whilst flattering ourselves that we know all things! How narrow and uncertain and deceitful is human science, compared with that which has its source in thee! May we ever prize this immense gift of Faith, this Light, O Jesus, which thou makest to shine upon us, after having softened it under the veil of thy humble Infancy. 

Preserve us from pride, which darkens the soul's vision and dries up the heart. Confide us to the keeping of thy Blessed Mother; and may our love attach us for ever to thee, and her maternal eye ever watch over us lest we should leave thee, O thou the God of our hearts! 

The third Mystery of the Epiphany shows us the completion of the merciful designs of God upon the world, at the same time that it manifests to us, for the third time, the glory of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The Star has led the soul to Faith; the sanctified Waters of the Jordan have conferred purity upon her; the Marriage-Feast unites her to her God. We have been considering during this Octave, the Bridegroom revealing Himself to the Spouse; we have heard Him calling her to come to Him from the heights of Libanus; and now, after having enlightened and purified her, He invites her to the heavenly feast, where she is to receive the Wine of His divine love.

A Feast is prepared; it is a Marriage-Feast; and the Mother of Jesus is present at it, for it is just, that, having cooperated in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, she should take part in all that her Son does, and in all the favors He bestows on His elect. But, in the midst of the Feast, the Wine fails. Wine is the symbol of Charity or Love, and Charity had failed on the earth; for the Gentiles had never tasted its sweetness; and, as to the Synagogue, what had it produced but wild grapes? (Isaias 5:2). The True Vine is our Jesus, and He calls Himself by that name (John 15:1). He alone could give that Wine which gladdens the heart of man (Psalm 103:15); He alone could give us that Chalice which inebriates (John 22: 5), and of which the Royal Psalmist prophesied.

Mary said to Jesus: “They have no wine!” It is the office of the Mother of God to tell Him of the wants of men, for she is also their Mother. But Jesus answers her in words, which are apparently harsh: “Woman! What is it to Me and to thee? My hour is not yet come!” The meaning of these words is, that, in this great Mystery, He was about to act, not as the Son of Mary, but as the Son of God. Later on, the hour will come when, dying upon the Cross, He will do a work, in the presence of His Mother, and He will do it as Man, that is, according to that human nature which He has received from her. Mary at once understands the words of her Son, and she says to the waiters of the Feast, what she is now ever saying to her children: “Do whatsoever He shall say to you!”

Now, there were six large water pots of stone there, and they were empty. The world was then in its Sixth Age, as St. Augustine and other Holy Doctors tell us. During these six ages, the earth had been awaiting its Savior, Who was to instruct and redeem it. Jesus commands these water pots to be filled with water; and yet, water does not suit the Feast of the Spouse. The figures and the prophecies of the ancient world were this water, and, until the opening of the Seventh Age, when Christ, Who is the Vine, was to be given to the world, no man had contracted an alliance with the Divine Word.

But, when the Emmanuel came, He had but to say, “Now draw out!” and the water pots were seen to be filled with the Wine of the New Covenant, the Wine which had been kept to the end. When He assumed our human nature — a nature weak and unstable as Water — He effected a change in it; He raised it up even to Himself, by making us partakers of the Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4); He gave us the power to love Him, to be united to Him, to form that one Body, of which He is the Head, that Church of which He is the Spouse, and which He loved from all eternity, and with such tender love, that He came down from Heaven to celebrate his nuptials with her.

O the wonderful dignity of man! God has vouchsafed, says the Apostle, to show the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which had no claim to, nay, were unworthy of such an honor. Jesus bids the waiters fill them with water, and the water of Baptism purifies us; but, not satisfied with this, He fills these vessels, even to the brim, with that heavenly and new Wine, which was not to be drunk save in the kingdom of His Father (Romans 9:23). Thus, divine Charity, which dwells in the Sacrament of Love, is communicated to us; and, that we might not be unworthy of the espousals with Himself, to which He called us, He raises us up even to Himself. Let us, therefore, prepare our souls for this wonderful union, and, according to the advice of the Apostle, let us labor to present them to our Jesus with such purity as to resemble that chaste Virgin, who was presented to the spotless Lamb (2 Corinthians 11:2).

Sinners! Take courage! This Season of Christmas is one of grace and mercy, on which all, both just and sinners, meet in the fellowship of the same glad Mystery. The heavenly Father has resolved to honor the Birthday of his Son, by granting pardon to all save those who obstinately refuse it. O how worthy is the Coming of our dear Emmanuel to be honored by this divine amnesty!

Nor is it we that give this invitation; it is the Church herself. Yes, it is she that with divine authority invites you to begin the work of your new life on this day whereon the Son of God begins the career of his human life. That we may the more worthily convey to you this her invitation, we will borrow the words of a great and saintly Bishop of the Middle Ages, the pious Rabanus Maurus, who, in a homily on the Nativity of our Lord, encourages sinners to come and take their place, side by side with the just, in the stable of Bethlehem, where even the ox and the ass recognize their Master in the Babe who lies there.

“I beseech you, dearly beloved Brethren, that you receive with fervent hearts the words our Lord speaks to you through me on this most sweet Feast, on which even infidels and sinners are touched with compunction; on which the wicked man is moved to mercy, the contrite heart hopes for pardon, the exile despairs not of returning to his country, and the sick man longs for his cure; on which is born the Lamb who taketh away the sins of the world, that is, Christ our Savior. On such a Birthday, he that has a good conscience rejoices more than usual; and he whose conscience is guilty fears with a more useful fear ... Yes, it is a sweet Feast, bringing true sweetness and forgiveness to all true penitents. My little children, I promise you without hesitation that every one who, on this day, shall repent from his heart, and return not to the vomit of his sins, shall obtain all whatsoever he shall ask; let him only ask with a firm faith, and not return to sinful pleasures.

“On this day are taken away the sins of the entire world: why needs the sinner despair? ... On this day of our Lord’s Birth let us, dearest Brethren, offer our promises to this Jesus, and keep them, as it is written: Vow ye, and pay to the Lord your God (Psalm 75:12). Let us make our promises with confidence and love; he will enable us to keep them. ... And when I speak of promises, I would not have anyone think that I mean the promise of fleeting and earthly goods. No — I mean, that each of us should offer what our Savior redeemed, namely, our soul. “But how,” someone will say, “how shall we offer our souls to him, to whom they already belong?” I answer: by leading holy lives, by chaste thoughts, by fruitful works, by turning away from evil, by following that which is good, by loving God, by loving our neighbor, by showing mercy (for we ourselves were in need of it, before we were redeemed), by forgiving them that sin against us (for we ourselves were once in sin), by trampling on pride, since it was by pride that our first parent was deceived and fell.” (Fourth Homily On the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.)

It is thus our affectionate Mother the Church invites sinners to the Feast of the Divine Lamb; nor is she satisfied until her House be filled (Luke 10:2). The grace of a New Birth, given her by the Sun of Justice, fills this Spouse of Jesus with joy. A new year has begun for her, and, like all that have preceded it, it is to be rich in flower and fruit. She renews her youth as that of an eagle. She is about to unfold another Cycle, or Year, of her mysteries, and to pour forth upon her faithful children the graces of which God has made the Cycle to be the instrument. In this season of Christmas, we have the first-fruits of these graces offered to us; they are the knowledge and the love of our Infant God: let us accept them with attentive hearts, that so we may merit to advance, with our Jesus, in wisdom and age and grace before God and men (Luke 2:52). 

The Christmas Mystery is the gate of all the others of the rest of the year; but it is a gate which we may all enter, for, though most heavenly, yet it touches earth; since, as St. Augustine beautifully remarks in one of his sermons for Christmas (Eleventh Sermon On the Nativity of our Lord): “We cannot as yet contemplate the splendor of him who was begotten of the Father before the Day Star (Psalm109:3); let us, then, visit him who was born of the Virgin in the night- hour. We cannot understand how his Name continued before the sun (Psalm 71:17); let us, then, confess that he hath set his tabernacle in her that is purer than the sun (Psalm 18:6). We cannot as yet see the Only-Begotten Son dwelling in the Father’s Bosom; let us, then, think on the Bridegroom that cometh out of his bridal chamber (Psalm 18:6). We are not yet ready for the banquet of our heavenly Father; let us, then, keep to the Crib of Jesus, our Master (Isaias 1:3).”

In Cathedral and other principal Churches, after the Gospel has been sung, the approaching yet distant Feast of Easter Sunday is solemnly announced to the people. This custom, which dates from the earliest ages of the Church, shows both the mysterious connection which unites the great Solemnities of the year one with another, and the importance the Faithful ought to attach to the celebration of that which is the greatest of all, and the center of all Religion. After having honored the King of the universe on the Epiphany, we shall have to celebrate him, on the day which is now announced to us, as the conjuror of death. The following is the formula used for this Solemn announcement.

We also, O Jesus! come to adore thee on this glorious Epiphany, which brings all nations to thy feet. We walk in the footsteps of the Magi; for we, too have seen the Star, and we are come to thee. Glory be to thee, dear King! To thee who didst say in the Canticle of David thine ancestor: “I am appointed King over Sion, the holy mountain, that I “may preach the commandment of the Lord. The Lord hath said to me, that he will give me the Gentiles for mine inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for my possession. Now, therefore, O ye kings, understand: receive instruction, ye that judge the earth” (Psalm 2:6, 8, 10).

Thou wilt say, O Emmanuel! with thine own lips: All power is given to me in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18), and a few years after, the whole earth will have received thy law. Even now Jerusalem is troubled; Herod is trembling on his throne; but the day is at hand when the heralds of thy coming will go through out the whole world, proclaiming that He, who was the Desired of nations (Aggeus 2:8), is come. The word that is to subject the earth to thee, will go forth (Psalm 18:5), and, like an immense fire, will stretch to the uttermost parts of the universe. In vain will the strong ones of this world attempt to arrest its course. An Emperor will propose to the Senate, as the only means of staying the progress of thy conquests, that thy Name be solemnly enrolled in the list of those gods, whom thou comest to destroy. Other Emperors will endeavor to abolish thy kingdom by the slaughter of thy soldiers. But, all these efforts are vain. The day will come, when the Cross, the sign of thy power, will adorn the imperial banner; the Emperors will lay their crown at thy feet: and proud Rome will cease to be the Capital of the empire of this world’s strength and power, in order that she may become, for ever, the center of thy peaceful and universal kingdom.

We already see the dawn of that glorious day. Thy conquests, O King of ages, begin with thine Epiphany. Thou callest, from the extreme parts of the unbelieving East, the first-fruits of that Gentile-world, which hitherto had not been thy people, and which is now to form thine inheritance. Henceforth, there is to be no distinction of Jew and Greek, of Barbarian and Scythian (Colossians 3:11). Thou hast loved Man above Angel, for thou hast redeemed the one, whilst thou hast left the other in his fall. If thy predilection, for a long period of ages, was for the race of Abraham, henceforth thy preference is to be given to the Gentiles. Israel was but a single people; we are numerous as the sands of the sea, and the stars of the firmament (Genesis 22:17). Israel was under the law of fear; thou hast reserved the law of love for us.

From this day of thy Manifestation, O divine King, begins thy separation from the Synagogue, which refuses thy love; and on this same Day, thou takest, in the person of the Magi, the Gentiles as thy Spouse. Thy union with her will soon be proclaimed from the Cross, when, turning thy face from the ungrateful Jerusalem, thou wilt stretch forth thy hands towards the nations of the Gentiles. O ineffable joy of thy Birth! but O still better joy of thine Epiphany, wherein we, the once disinherited, are permitted to approach to thee, offer thee our gifts, and see thee graciously accept them, O merciful Emmanuel!

Thanks be to thee, O Infant God, for that unspeakable gift (2 Corinthians 9:15) of Faith, which, as thy Apostle teaches us, hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into thy kingdom, making us partakers of the lot of the Saints in Light (Colossians 1:12-13). Give us grace to grow in the knowledge of this thy Gift, and to understand the importance of this great Day, whereon thou makest alliance with the whole human race, which thou wouldst afterwards make thy Bride by espousing her. O the Mystery of this Marriage Feast, dear Jesus! “A Marriage,”says one of thy Vicars on earth (Innocent the Third), “that was promised to the Patriarch Abraham, confirmed by oath to King David, accomplished in Mary when she became Mother, and consummated, confirmed, and declared, on this day; consummated in the adoration of the Magi, confirmed in the Baptism in the Jordan, and declared in the miracle of the water changed into wine.” On this Marriage-Feast — where the Church, thy Spouse, already receives queenly honors — we will sing to thee, O Jesus! With all the fervor of our hearts, these words of today’s Office, which sweetly blend the Three Mysteries into one — that of thy Alliance with us.

Let us, then, open our hearts to the Joy of this grand Day; and on this Feast of the Theophany, of the Holy Lights, of the Three Kings, let us look with love at the dazzling beauty of our Divine Sun, who, as the Psalmist expresses it (Psalm 18:6), runs His course as a Giant, and pours out upon us floods of a welcome and yet most vivid light. The Shepherds, who were called by the Angels to be the first worshipers, have been joined by the Prince of Martyrs, the Beloved Disciple, the dear troop of Innocents, our glorious Thomas of Canterbury, and Sylvester the Patriarch of Peace; and now, today, these Saints open their ranks to let the Kings of the East come to the Babe in His crib, bearing with them the prayers and adoration of the whole human race. 

The humble Stable is too little for such a gathering as this, and Bethlehem seems to be worth all the world besides. Mary, the Throne of the divine Wisdom, welcomes all the members of this court with her gracious smile of Mother and Queen; she offers her Son to man, for his adoration, and to God, that he may be well pleased. God manifests himself to men, because He is great: but He manifests Himself by Mary, because He is full of mercy.

His magnificence is manifested to us so brightly on this Feast! Our mother, the Church, is going to initiate us into the mysteries we are to celebrate. Let us imitate the faith and obedience of the Magi: let us adore, with the holy Baptist, the divine Lamb, over whom the heavens open: let us take our place at the mystic feast of Cana, where our dear King is present, thrice manifested, thrice glorified. In the last two mysteries, let us not lose sight of the Babe of Bethlehem; and in the Babe of Bethlehem let us cease not to recognize the Great God (in whom the Father was well-pleased) and the supreme Ruler and Creator of all things.

The day of the Magi, the day of the Baptism, the day of the Marriage Feast, has come: our divine Sun of Justice reflects upon the world these three bright rays of his glory. Material darkness is less than it was; Night is losing her power; Light is progressing day by day. Our sweet Infant Jesus, who is still lying in his humble crib, is each day gaining strength. Mary showed him to the shepherds, and now she is going to present him to the Magi. The gifts we intend to offer him should be prepared; let us, like the three Wise Men, follow the star, and go to Bethlehem, the House of the Bread of Life.

O the greatness of this glorious Day, on which begins the movement of all nations towards the Church, the true Jerusalem! Oh! the mercy of our heavenly Father, who has been mindful of all these people, that were buried in the shades of death and sin! Behold! The glory of the Lord has risen upon the Holy City; and Kings set out to find and see the Light. Jerusalem is not large enough to hold all this sea of nations; another city must be founded, and towards her shall be turned the countless Gentiles of Madian and Epha. 

Thou, O Rome! Art this Holy City, and thy heart shall wonder and be enlarged. Heretofore, thy victories have won thee slaves; but, from this day forward, thou shalt draw within thy walls countless Children. Lift up thine eyes, and see — all these, that is, the whole human race, give themselves to thee as thy sons and daughters; they come to receive from thee a new birth. Open wide thine arms, and embrace them that come from North and South, bringing gold and frankincense to Him, who is thy King and ours.

The Magi, the first-fruits of the Gentile-world, have been admitted into the court of the great King whom they have been seeking, and we have followed them. The Child has smiled upon us, as he did upon them. All the fatigues of the long journey — which man must take to reach his God — all are over and forgotten; our Emmanuel is with us, and we are with him. Bethlehem has received us, and we will not leave her again — for, in Bethlehem, we have the Child, and Mary his Mother. Where else could we find riches like these that Bethlehem gives us? 

O let us beseech this incomparable Mother to give us this Child of hers, (for He is our light, and our love, and our Bread of life,) now that we are about to approach the Altar, led by the Star of our faith. Let us, at once, open our treasures; let us prepare our gold, our frankincense, and our myrrh, for the sweet Babe, our King. He will be pleased with our gifts, and we know He never suffers himself to be outdone in generosity. When we have to return to our duties, we will, like the Magi, leave our hearts with our Jesus; and it shall be by another way, by a new manner of life, that we will finish our sojourn in this country of our exile, looking forward to that happy day, when life and light eternal will come and absorb into themselves the shadows of vanity and time, which now hang over us.

The Feast of the Epiphany is the continuation of the mystery of Christmas; but it appears on the Calendar of the Church with its own special character. Its very name, which signifies "Manifestation", implies that it celebrates the apparition of God to his creatures.

For several centuries, the Nativity of Our Lord was kept on this day; and when, in the year 376, the decree of the Holy See obliged all Churches to keep the Nativity on the 25th December, as Rome did — the Sixth of January was not robbed of all its ancient glory. It was still to be called the Epiphany, and the Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ was also commemorated on this same Feast, which Tradition had marked as the day on which that Baptism took place.

The Greek Church gives this Feast the venerable and mysterious name of Theophania, which is of such frequent recurrence in the early Fathers, as signifying a divine Apparition. We find this name applied to this Feast by Eusebius, St. Gregory Nazianzum, and St. Isidore of Pelusium. In the liturgical books of the Melchite Church the Feast goes under no other name.

The Orientals call this solemnity also the holy on account of its being the day on which Baptism was administered—for, as we have just mentioned, our Lord was baptized on this same day. Baptism is called by the holy Fathers Illumination, and they who received it Illuminated.

Lastly, this Feast is called, in many countries, King’s Feast: it is, of course, an allusion to the Magi, whose journey to Bethlehem is so continually mentioned in today’s Office.

The Epiphany shares with the Feasts of Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost, the honor of being called, in the Canon of the Mass, a Day most holy. It is also one of the cardinal Feasts, that is, one of those on which the arrangement of the Christian Year is based; for, as we have Sundays after Easter, and Sundays after Pentecost, so also we count six Sundays after the Epiphany.

The Epiphany is indeed great Feast, and the joy caused us by the Birth of our Jesus must be renewed on it, for, as though it were a second Christmas Day, it shows us our Incarnate God in a new light. It leaves us all the sweetness of the dear Babe of Bethlehem, who hath appeared to us already in love; but to this it adds its own grand manifestation of the divinity of our Jesus. At Christmas, it was a few Shepherds that were invited by the Angels to go and recognize THE WORD MADE FLESH; but now, at the Epiphany, the voice of God himself calls the whole world to adore this Jesus, and hear him.

The mystery of the Epiphany brings upon us three magnificent rays of the Sun of Justice, our Savior. In the calendar of pagan Rome, this sixth day of January was devoted to the celebration of the triple triumph of Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire: but when Jesus, our Prince of peace, whose empire knows no limits, had secured victory to his Church by the blood of the Martyrs. Then did this his Church decree, that a triple triumph of the Immortal King should be substituted, in the Christian Calendar, for those other three triumphs which had been won by the adopted son of Caesar.

The Sixth of January, therefore, restored the celebration of our Lord’s Birth to the Twenty-Fifth of December; but, in return, there were united in the one same Epiphany, three manifestations of Jesus’ Glory: the mystery of the Magi coming from the East, under the guidance of a star, and adoring the Infant of Bethlehem as the Divine King; the mystery of the Baptism of Christ, who, whilst standing in the waters of the Jordan, was proclaimed by the Eternal Father as Son of God; and thirdly, the mystery of the divine power of this same Jesus, when he changed the water into wine at the marriage-feast of Cana.

But, did these three Mysteries really take place on this day? Is the Sixth of January the real anniversary of these great events? As the chief object of this work is to assist the devotion of the Faithful, we purposely avoid everything which would savor of critical discussion; and with regard to the present question, we think it enough to state, that Baronius, Suarez, Theophilus Raynaldus, Honorius De Sancta-Maria, Cardinal Gotti, Sandini, Benedict 14th, and an almost endless list of other writers, assert that the Adoration of the Magi happened on this very day. 

That the Baptism of our Lord, also, happened on the sixth of January, is admitted by the severest historical critics, even by Tillemont himself; and has been denied by only two or three. The precise day of the miracle at the marriage-feast of Cana is far from being as certain as the other two mysteries, though it is impossible to prove that the sixth of January was not the day. For us the children of the Church, it is sufficient that our Holy Mother has assigned the commemoration of these three manifestations for this Feast; we need nothing more to make us rejoice in the triple triumph of the Son of Mary.

So that you, O Christians must become children; you must not disdain to be tied in the bonds of a spiritual childhood; you must come down from your proud spirit, and meet your Savior who has come down from Heaven, and with him hide yourselves in the humility of the crib. Thus will you begin, with him, a new life. Thus will the Light that goeth forwards and increaseth even to perfect day (Proverbs 4:18) illumine your path the whole remaining length of your Journey. Thus the sight of God which leaves room for faith, which you receive at Bethlehem, will merit for you the face-to-face vision on Thabor, and prepare you for the blissful UNION, which is not merely Light, but the plenitude and repose of Love.

So far we have been speaking only of the living members of the Church, whether they began the life of grace during the holy Season of Advent, or were already living in the grace of the Holy Ghost when the ecclesiastical year commenced, and spent their Advent in preparing to be born with Jesus to a new year of higher perfection. But how shall we overlook those of our Brethren who are dead in sin; and so dead, that neither the coming of their Emmanuel, nor the example of the Christians throughout the universal Church earnestly preparing for that coming, could rouse them? No, we cannot forget them: we love them, and come to tell them (for even now they may yield to grace, and live), that there hath appeared the goodness and kindness of God our Savior (Titus 3:4). 

If this volume of ours should perchance fall into the hands of any of those who have not yielded to the solicitations of grace, which press them to be converted to the sweet Babe of Bethlehem, their Lord and their God; who, instead of spending the weeks of Advent in preparing to receive him at Christmas, lived them out, as they began them, in indifference and in sin: we shall, perhaps, be helping them to a knowledge of the grievousness of their state, by reminding them of the ancient discipline of the Church, which obliged all the Faithful, under pain of being considered as no longer Catholics, to receive Holy Communion on Christmas Day, as well as on Easter and Whit Sundays. We find a formal decree of this obligation given in the fifteenth Canon of the Council of Agatha (Agde) held in 506. We would also ask these poor sinners to reflect on the joy the Church feels at seeing, throughout the whole world, the immense number of her children, who still, in spite of the general decay of piety, keep the Feast of the birth of the Divine Lamb, by the sacramental participation of his Body and Blood.

Let us give the holy Martyrs a thought, whose memory is offered to our veneration by the Church in her Martyrology of this Christmas season (click here for the Martyrology). Diocletian and his colleagues in the Empire had recently published the famous edict of persecution, which waged against the Church the fiercest war she has ever sustained. The edict was torn down from the Emperor’s palace at Nicomedia by one of the Christians, who paid for this holy daring by a glorious martyrdom. The faithful of the same city were ready for the combat, and feared not to brave the Emperor’s power by continuing to frequent their Church, which was condemned to be pulled down. 

Christmas Day came, and several thousands of them had assembled there, in order to celebrate, for the last time within those walls, the Nativity of our Savior. Being informed of it, the Emperor became furious, and sent one of the officers of his court to order the Church doors to be fastened, and a fire to be enkindled on each side of the building. This being done, the clang of trumpets was heard, and then a herald’s voice proclaiming to the faithful, in the Emperor’s name, that they who wished to save their lives would be permitted to leave the Basilica, on the condition of their offering incense on an altar of Jupiter, which had been placed near the door; but that otherwise, all were to be left a prey to the flames. One of the Christians thus answered, in the name of the whole assembly: “We are all of us Christians; we honor Christ as the one only God and King; and we are all ready to lay down our lives for him on this Day.” Where upon the soldiers were commanded to set fire to the Church. In a very short time, it was one immense mass of flames, whence was offered to the Son of God — who deigned to begin on this same day the human life he had assumed — the generous holocaust of these thousands of lives, laid down as witness to his having come into this world. Thus was glorified, in the year 303, Emmanuel, who had come from Heaven to dwell among us. Let us, after the example of the Church herself, join our homage to the Babe of Bethlehem with that offered him by these courageous Christians, whose fame the Liturgy will perpetuate even to the end of time.

Once more let us visit in spirit the dear Cave, where Mary and Joseph are loving and nursing and adoring the Divine Infant. Let us, too, adore him, and ask his blessing. St. Bonaventure, with an unction worthy of his seraphic soul, thus expresses the sentiments which a Christian should have on this Day, when admitted to the Crib of Jesus: “Do thou also kneel down — thou hast delayed too long. Adore the Lord thy God, and then reverence his Mother, and salute, with much respect, the saintly old man Joseph. After this, kiss the feet of the Infant Jesus, laid as he is on his little bed, and ask our Lady to give him to thee, or permit thee to take him up. Take him into thine arms, press him to thy heart, and look well at his lovely face, and reverently kiss him, and show him confidently the delight thou takest in him. Thou mayest venture on all this, because it is for sinners that he came, that he might save them: it was with sinners that he so humbly conversed, and at last gave himself to sinners, that he might be their food. I say, then, that his gentle love will permit thee to treat him as affectionately as thou pleasest, and will not call it too much freedom, but will set it down to thy love.” (Meditations on the Life of Christ, by St. Bonaventure.)

Speaking of Our Lady's spiritual and divine Maternity,Mary’s prerogative is indeed incommunicable, and it makes her the Mother of God, and the Mother of men. But we must also remember the answer made by our Savior to the woman, who spoke those words: “Yea rather”, said Jesus, “blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it!” (Matthew 12:50), “hereby declaring,” continues Venerable Bede, “that not only is she blessed, who merited to conceive in the flesh the Word of God, but they also who endeavor to conceive this same Word spiritually, by the hearing of faith, and to give him birth and nourish him by keeping and doing what is good, either in their own or their neighbor’s heart. For the Mother of God herself was Blessed in that she was made, for a time, the minister to the wants of the Incarnate Word; but much more Blessed was she, in that she was and ever will be the keeper and doer of the love due to that same her Son.” 

Is it not this same truth which our Lord teaches us on that other occasion, where he says: “Whosoever shall do the will of My Father that is in Heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother?” (Matthew 12:50). And why was the Angel sent to Mary in preference to all the rest of the daughters of Israel, but because she had already conceived the Divine Word in her heart by the vehemence of her undivided love, the greatness of her profound humility and the incomparable merit of her virginity? Why again, is this Blessed among women, holy above all creatures, if not because, having once conceived and brought forth a Son of God, she continues for ever His Mother, by her fidelity in doing the will of the heavenly Father, by her love for the uncreated light of the Divine Word, and by her union as Spouse with the Spirit of sanctification?

But no member of the human race is excluded from the honor of imitating Mary, though at a humble distance, in this her spiritual Maternity: for, by that real birth which she gave Him in Bethlehem, which we are now celebrating, and which initiated the world into the mysteries of God, this ever Blessed Mother of Jesus has shown us how we may bear the resemblance of her own grand prerogative. We ought to have prepared the way of the Lord (Matthew 3:3; Isaias 40:3) during the weeks of Advent; and if so, our hearts have conceived Him: therefore now our good works must bring Him forth, that thus our heavenly Father, seeing not us ourselves, but His own Son Jesus now living within us, may say of each of us, in His mercy, what He heretofore said in very truth of the Incarnate Word: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!” (Matthew 3:17).

Where shall we find an interpreter of the twofold mystery which is wrought at this holy season — the mystery of the Infancy of Jesus in the soul of man, and the mystery of the infancy of man’s soul in his Jesus? None of the Holy Fathers has so admirably spoken upon it as Pope St. Leo the Great. Let us listen to his grand words.

“Although that Childhood, which the majesty of the Son of God did not disdain to assume, has developed, by growth of age, into the fullness of the perfect man, and, the triumph of His Passion and Resurrection having been achieved, all the humiliations He submitted to, for our sakes, are passed; nevertheless, the Feast, we are now keeping, brings back to us the sacred Birth of the Virgin Mary’s Child, Jesus Our Lord. So that whilst adoring His Birth, we are, in truth, celebrating our own commencement of life; for the Generation of Christ is the origin of the Christian people, and the Birth Day of Him, that is our Head, is the Birth Day of us that are His Body. 


"It is true, that each Christian has his own rank, and the children of the Church are born each in their respective times; yet the whole mass of the Faithful, once having been regenerated in the font of Baptism, are born, on this Day of Christmas, together with Christ; just as they are crucified together with Him in His Passion, and have risen together with His Resurrection, and in His Ascension are placed at the right hand of the Father. For every believer, no matter in what part of the work he may be living, is born again in Christ; his birth according to nature is not taken into account; he becomes a new man by his second birth; neither is he any longer called of the family of his father in the flesh, but of the family of our Redeemer, Who unto this was made a Son of Man, that we might become the Sons of God.” (Sixth Sermon on the Nativity of our Lord, Ch. 2).

Yes―this is the Mystery achieved in us by the holy Season of Christmas! It is expressed in those words of the passage from St. John’s Gospel, which the Church has chosen for the third Mass of the great Feast: “As many as received Him, He gave them power to be made the Sons of God, to them that believe in his name; who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:22). So that all they who, having purified their souls, freed themselves from the slavery of flesh and blood, and renounced everything which is of man, inasmuch as man means sinner, wish now to open their hearts to the Divine Word, that is, to the LIGHT which shineth in darkness, which darkness did not comprehend (John 1:5), these, I say, are born with Jesus; they are born of God; they begin a new life, as did the Son of God Himself in this mystery of His Birth in Bethlehem.

How beautiful are these first beginnings of the Christian Life! How great is the glory of Bethlehem, that is, of our holy Mother the Church, the true House of Bread! For in her midst there is produced, during these days of Christmas, and everywhere throughout the world, a countless number of sons of God. O, the unceasing vitality of our mysteries! As the Lamb, who was slain from the beginning of the world (Apocalypse 13:8), sacrifices Himself without ceasing, ever since His real sacrifice; so also, once born of the Holy Virgin his Mother, He makes it a part of His glory to be ceaselessly born in the souls of men. 

We are not, therefore, to think for a moment that the dignity of Mary’s divine Maternity is lessened, or that our souls enjoy the same grand honor, which was granted to her: far from that, “let us,” as Venerable Bede says, “raise our voice from amid the crowd, as did the woman in the Gospel, and say to our Savior, with the Catholic Church, of which that woman was the type: Blessed is the Womb that bore thee, and the Breasts that gave thee suck!” (Commentary on St. Luke, Book 4, Chapter 49). 

The time has now come for the faithful soul to reap the fruit of the efforts that they made during the penitential weeks of Advent to prepare a dwelling-place for the Son of God, Who desires to be born within them. The Nuptials of the Lamb are come, and his Spouse hath prepared herself (Apocalypse 19:7). Now the Spouse is the Church; the Spouse is also every faithful soul. Our Lord gives His whole self to the whole flock, and to each sheep of the flock with as much love as though He loved but that one. What garments shall we put on, to go and meet the Bridegroom? Where shall we find the pearls and jewels wherewith to deck our soul for this happy meeting? Our holy Mother the Church will tell us all this in her Liturgy. Our best plan for spending Christmas is, undoubtedly, to keep close to her, and do what she does; for she is most dear to God, and being our Mother, we ought to obey all her injunctions.

But, before we speak of the mystic Coming of the Incarnate Word into our souls; before we tell the secrets of that sublime familiarity between the Creator and the Creature; let us, first, learn from the Church the duties which human nature and each of our souls owes to the Divine Infant, whom the Heavens have at length given to us as the refreshing Dew we asked them to rain down upon our earth. During Advent, we united with the Saints of the Old Law, in praying for the coming of the Messias, our Redeemer; now that He is come, let us consider what is the homage we must pay Him.

The Church offers to the Infant-God, during this holy season, the tribute of her profound adoration, the enthusiasm of her exceeding joy, the return of her unbounded gratitude, and the fondness of her intense love. These four offerings, adoration, joy, gratitude, and love, must be also those of every Christian to his Jesus, his Emmanuel, the Babe of Bethlehem. The prayers of the Liturgy will express all four sentiments in a way that no other Devotions could do. But, the better to appropriate to ourselves these admirable formulas of the Church, let us understand thoroughly the nature of each of these four sentiments.

The first of our duties at our Savior’s Crib is Adoration. Adoration is Religion’s first act; but there is something in the Mystery of our Lord’s Birth which seems to make this duty doubly necessary. In Heaven the Angels veil their faces, and prostrate themselves before the throne of Jehovah; the Four-and-Twenty Elders are for ever casting their crowns before the throne (Apocalypse 4:10) of the Lamb; what, then, shall we do — we who are sinners, and unworthy members of the Tribe of the Redeemer — now that this same great God shows Himself to us, humbled for our sakes, and stripped of all His glory? Now that the duties of the creature to his Creator are fulfilled by the Creator Himself? Now that the eternal God bows down, not only before the Sovereign Majesty of the Godhead, but even before sinful man, His creature?

Let us endeavour to make, by our profound adorations, some return to the God who thus humbles Himself for us; let us thus give Him back some little of that whereof He has deprived Himself out of love for us, and in obedience to the will of His Father. It is incumbent on us to emulate, as far as possible, the sentiments of the Angels in Heaven, and never to approach the Divine Infant without bringing with us the incense of our soul's adoration, the protestation of our own extreme unworthiness, and lastly, the homage of our whole being. All this is due to the infinite Majesty of the Babe of Bethlehem, Who is the more worthy of every tribute we can pay Him, because He has made Himself thus little for our sakes. Unhappy we, if the apparent weakness of the Divine Child, or the familiarity wherewith He is ready to caress us, should make us negligent in this our first duty, or forget what he is, and what we are!

The example of his Blessed Mother will teach us to be thus humble. Mary was humble in the presence of her God, even before she became His Mother; but, once His Mother, she carried herself before Him who was her God and her Child with greater humility than ever. We too, poor sinners, sinners so long and so often, we must adore with all the power of our soul Him Who has come down so low: we must study to find out how by our self-humiliation to make Him amends for this Crib, these swathing-bands, this eclipse of His glory. And yet all our humiliations will never bring us so low as that we shall be on a level with His lowliness. No; only God could reach the humiliations of God.

But our Mother, the Church, does not only offer to the Infant God the tribute of her profound adoration. The mystery of Emmanuel, that is, of God with us, is to her a source of singular joy. Look at her sublime Canticles for this holy Season, and you will find the two sentiments admirably blended — her deep reverence for her God, and her glad joy at his Birth. Joy! did not the very Angels come down and urge her to it? She therefore studies to imitate the blithe Shepherds, who ran for joy to Bethlehem (St. Luke ii 16), and the glad Magi, who were well-nigh out of themselves with delight when, on quitting Jerusalem, the star again appeared and led them to the Cave where the Child was (St. Matt. ii 10). Joy at Christmas is a Christian instinct, which originated those many Carols, which, like so many other beautiful traditions of the ages of Faith, are unfortunately dying out amongst us; but which Rome still encourages, gladly welcoming each year those rude musicians, the Pifferari, who come down from the Apennines, and make the streets of the Eternal City re-echo with their shrill melodies.

Come, then, faithful Children of the Church, let us take our share in her joy! This is not the season for sighing or for weeping. For unto us a Child is born! (Isa. ix 6). He for whom we have been so long waiting is come; and he is come to dwell among us (St. John i 14). Great, indeed, and long was our suspense; so much the more let us love our possessing him. The day will too soon come when this Child, now born to us, will be the Man of Sorrows (Isa. liii 3), and then we will compassionate him; but at present we must rejoice and be glad at his coming and sing round his Crib with the Angels. Heaven sends us a present of its own joy: we need joy, and forty days are not too many for us to get it well into our hearts. The Scripture tells us that a secure mind is like a continual feast  (Prov. xv 15), and a secure mind can only be where there is peace; now it is Peace which these blessed days bring to the earth; Peace, say the Angels, to men of good will!

Intimately and inseparably united with this exquisite mystic joy is the sentiment of gratitude. Gratitude is indeed due to him who, neither deterred by our unworthiness nor restrained by the infinite respect which becomes his sovereign Majesty, deigned to be born of his own creature, and have a stable for his birth-place. Oh! how vehemently must he not have desired to advance the work of our salvation, to remove everything which could make us afraid of approaching him, and to encourage us, by his own example, to return, by the path of humility, to the Heaven we had strayed from by pride!

Gratefully, therefore, let us receive the precious gift — this Divine Babe, our Deliverer. He is the Only- Begotten Son of the Father, that Father who hath so loved the world as to give his only Son (St. John iii 16). He, the Son, unreservedly ratifies his Father’s will, and comes to offer himself because it is his own will (Isa. liii 7). How, as the Apostle expresses it, hath not the Father with him given us all things? (Rom. viii 32). O gift inestimable! How shall we be able to repay it by suitable gratitude, we who are so poor as not to know how to appreciate it? God alone, and the Divine Infant in his Crib, know the value of the mystery of Bethlehem, which is given to us.

Shall our debt, then, never be paid? Not so: we can pay it by love, which, though finite, gives itself without measure, and may grow for ever in intensity. For this reason, the Church, after she has offered her adorations and hymns and gratitude, to her Infant Savior, gives him also her tenderest Love. She says to him: “How beautiful art thou, my Beloved One, and how comely! (Canticles 1:15). How sweet to me is thy rising, O Divine Sun of Justice! How my heart glows in the warmth of thy beams! Nay, dearest Jesus, the means thou usest for gaining me over to thyself are irresistible — the feebleness and humility of a Child!” Thus do all her words end in love; and her adoration, praise, and thanksgiving, when she expresses them in her Canticles, are transformed into love.

Christians! Let us imitate our Mother, and give our hearts to our Emmanuel. The Shepherds offer Him their simple gifts, the Magi bring Him their rich presents, and no one must appear before the Divine Infant without something worthy His acceptance. Know, then, that nothing will please Him, but that which He came to seek — our love. It was for this that He came down from Heaven. Hard indeed is that heart which can say,” He shall not have my love!”

These, then, are the duties we owe to our Divine Master in this his first Coming, which, as St. Bernard says, is in the flesh and in weakness, and is for the salvation, not for the judgement, of the world.

Christmas 'Lights'
There is another subject, too, which we regret being obliged to notice only in a passing way. It is that, from the day itself of our Savior’s Birth even to the day of our Lady’s Purification, there is, in the Calendar, an extraordinary richness of Saints’ Feasts, doing homage to the master feast of Bethlehem, and clustering in adoring love round the Crib of the Infant-God. 

To say nothing of the four great Stars which shine so brightly near our Divine Sun, from whom they borrow all their own grand beauty — St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist, the Holy Innocents, and our own St. Thomas of Canterbury: what other portion of the Liturgical Year is there that can show within the same number of days so brilliant a constellation? 

► The Apostolic College contributes its two grand luminaries, St. Peter and St. Paul: the first in his Chair of Rome; the second in the miracle of his Conversion. 

► The Martyr-host sends us the splendid champions of Christ, Timothy, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Vincent, and Sebastian. 

► The radiant line of Roman Pontiffs lends us four of its glorious links, named Sylvester, Telesphorus, Hyginus and Marcellus. 

► The sublime school of holy Doctors offers us Hilary, John Chrysostom, and Ildephonsus; and in their company stands a fourth Bishop — the amiable Francis de Sales. 

► The Confessor-kingdom is represented by Paul the Hermit, Anthony the conqueror of Satan, Maurus the Apostle of the Cloister, Peter Nolasco the deliverer of captives, and Raymond of Pennafort, the oracle of Canon Law and guide of the consciences of men. 

► The army of defenders of the Church deputes the pious King Canute, who died in defense of our Holy Mother, and Charlemagne, who loved to sign himself “the humble champion of the Church.” 

► The choir of holy Virgins gives us the sweet Agnes, the generous Emerentiana, the invincible Martina. 

► And lastly, from the saintly ranks which stand below the Virgins — the holy Widows — we have Paula, the enthusiastic lover of Jesus’ Crib. Truly, our Christmastide is a glorious festive season! What magnificence in its Calendar! What a banquet for us in its Liturgy!

Christmas Colors
A word upon the symbolism of the colors used by the Church during this season. White is her Christmas Vestment; and she employs this color at every service from Christmas Day to the Octave of the Epiphany. To honor her two Martyrs, Stephen and Thomas of Canterbury, she vests in red; and to condole with Rachel wailing her murdered Innocents, she puts on purple: but these are the only exceptions. On every other day of the twenty she expresses, by her white Robes, the gladness to which the Angels invited the world, the beauty of our Divine Sun that has risen in Bethlehem, the spotless purity of the Virgin-Mother, and the clean heartedness which they should have who come to worship at the mystic Crib.

During the remaining twenty days, the Church vests in accordance with the Feast she keeps; she varies the color so as to harmonize either with the red Roses which wreathe a Martyr, or with the white Amaranths which grace her Bishops and her Confessors, or again, with the spotless Lilies which crown her Virgins. On the Sundays which come during this time — unless there occur a Feast requiring red or white or, unless Septuagesima has begun its three mournful weeks of preparation for Lent — the color of the Vestments is green. This, say the interpreters of the Liturgy, is to teach us that in the Birth of Jesus, who is the flower of the fields (Canticles 1:1),we first received the hope of salvation, and that after the bleak winter of heathendom and the Synagogue, there opened the verdant spring-time of grace.

With this we must close our mystical interpretation of those rites which belong to Christmas in general. Our readers will have observed that there are many other sacred and symbolical usages, to which we have not even alluded; but as the mysteries to which they belong are peculiar to certain days, and are not, so to speak, common to this portion of the Liturgical Year, we intend to treat fully of them all, as we meet with them on their proper Feasts.

Let us now respectfully study another mystery: that which is involved in the place where this Birth happened. This place is Bethlehem. "Out of Bethlehem", says the Prophet, "shall He come forth, that is to be the Ruler in Israel"(Micheas 5:2). The Jewish Priests are well aware of the prophecy, and a few days hence will tell it to Herod (Matthew 2:5). But why was this insignificant town chosen in preference to every other to be the birth-place of Jesus? Be attentive, Christians, to the mystery! 

The name of this City of David signifies the "House of Bread": therefore did He, Who is the living Bread come down from Heaven (John 6:41), choose it for His first visible home. Our Fathers did eat manna in the desert and are dead (John 6:49); but behold, here is the Savior of the world, come to give life to His creature Man by means of His own divine Flesh, which is meat indeed (John 6:56). Up to this time, the Creator and the creature had been separated from each other; henceforth they shall abide together in closest union. The Ark of the Covenant, containing the manna, which fed but the body, is now replaced by the Ark of a New Covenant, purer and more incorruptible than the other: the incomparable Virgin Mary, who gives us Jesus, the Bread of Angels, the nourishment which will give us a divine transformation; for this Jesus Himself has said: "He that eateth My flesh abideth in Me, and I in him" (John 6:57).

It is for this divine transformation that the world was in expectation, for four thousand years, and for which the Church prepared herself, by the four weeks of Advent. It has come at last, and Jesus is about to enter within us, if we will but receive Him (John 1:12). He asks to be united to each one of us in particular, just as He is united by His Incarnation to the whole human race; and for this end He wishes to become our Bread, our spiritual nourishment. His coming into the souls of men, at this mystic season, has no other aim than this union. He comes not to judge the world, but that the world may be saved by Him (John 3:17), and that all may have life, and may have it more abundantly (John 10:10). 

This divine Lover of our souls will not be satisfied, therefore, until he have substituted Himself in our place, so that we may live, not we ourselves, but He in us; and in order that this mystery may be effected in a sweeter way, it is under the form of an Infant that this Beautiful Fruit of Bethlehem wishes first to enter into us, there to grow afterwards in wisdom and age before God and men (Luke 2:40, 52).

And when, having thus visited us by His grace and nourished us in His love, He shall have changed us into Himself, there shall be accomplished in us a still further mystery. Having become one in spirit and heart with Jesus, the Son of the heavenly Father, we shall also become sons of this same God our Father. The Beloved Disciple, speaking of this our dignity, cries out: "Behold! what manner of charity the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called, and should be the Sons of God!" (John 3:1). We will not now stay to consider this immense happiness of the Christian soul, as we shall have a more fitting occasion, further on, to speak of it, and show by what means it is to be maintained and increased.

Everything is Mystery in this holy season. The Word of God, whose generation is before the day-star (Psalm 109:3), is born in time — a Child is God — a Virgin becomes a Mother, and remains a Virgin — things divine are commingled with those that are human — and the sublime, the ineffable antithesis, expressed by the Beloved Disciple in those words of his Gospel, THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH, is repeated in a thousand different ways in all the prayers of the Church; and rightly, for it admirably embodies the whole of the great portent which unites in one Person the nature of Man and the nature of God.

The splendor of this Mystery dazzles the understanding, but it inundates the heart with joy. It is the consummation of the designs of God in time. It is the endless subject of admiration and wonder to the Angels and Saints; nay, is the source and cause of their beatitude. Let us see how the Church offers this Mystery to her children, veiled under the symbolism of her Liturgy.

The four weeks of our preparation are over — they were the image of the four thousand years which preceded the great coming — and we have reached the twenty-fifth day of the month of December, as a long desired place of sweetest rest. But why is it that the celebration of our Savior’s Birth should be the perpetual privilege of this one fixed day; whilst the whole liturgical Cycle has, every year, to be changed and remodeled, in order to yield that ever-varying day which is to be the feast of his Resurrection — Easter Sunday?

The question is a very natural one, and we find it proposed and answered, even so far back as the fourth century; and that, too, by St. Augustine, in his celebrated Epistle to Januarius. The holy Doctor offers this explanation: “We solemnize the day of our Savior’s Birth, in order that we may honor that Birth, which was for our salvation; but the precise day of the week, on which He was born, is void of any mystical signification.” Sunday, on the contrary, the day of our Lord’s Resurrection, is the day marked, in the Creator’s designs, to express a mystery which was to be commemorated for all ages. St. Isidore of Seville, and the ancient Interpreter of Sacred Rites who, for a long time, was supposed to be the learned Alcuin, have also adopted this explanation of the Bishop of Hippo; and our readers may see their words interpreted by Durandus, in his Rationale.

These writers, then, observe that as, according to a sacred tradition, the creation of man took place on a Friday, and our Savior suffered death also on a Friday for the redemption of man; that as, moreover, the Resurrection of our Lord was on the third day after his death, that is, on a Sunday, which is the day on which the Light was created, as we learn from the Book of Genesis — “the two Solemnities of Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection,” says St. Augustine, “do not only remind us of those divine facts; but they moreover represent and signify some other mysterious and holy thing.” (Epist. ad Januarium.)

And yet we are not to suppose that because the Feast of Jesus’ Birth is not fixed to any particular day of the week, there is no mystery expressed by its being always on the twenty-fifth of December. For firstly we may observe, with the old Liturgists, that the Feast of Christmas is kept by turns on each of the days of the week, that thus its holiness may cleanse and rid them of the curse which Adam’s sin had put upon them. But secondly, the great mystery of the twenty-fifth of December, being the Feast of our Savior’s Birth, has reference, not to the division of time marked out by God himself, which is called the Week; but to the course of that great Luminary which gives life to the world, because it gives it light and warmth. Jesus, our Savior, the Light of the World (St. John viii 12), was born when the night of idolatry and crime was at its darkest; and the day of his Birth, the twenty-fifth of December, is that on which the material Sun begins to gain his ascendency over the reign of gloomy night, and show to the world his triumph of brightness.

In our “Advent” we showed, after the Holy Fathers, that the diminution of the physical light may be considered as emblematic of those dismal times which preceded the Incarnation. We joined our prayers with those of the people of the Old Testament; and, with our holy Mother the Church, we cried out to the Divine Orient, the Sun of Justice, that he would deign to come and deliver us from the twofold death of body and soul. God has heard our prayers; and it is on the day of the Winter Solstice — which the Pagans of old made so much of by their fears and rejoicings — that he gives us both the increase of the natural light, and him who is the Light of our souls.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Ambrose, St. Maximus of Turin, St. Leo, St. Bernard, and the principal Liturgists, dwell with complacency on this profound mystery, which the Creator of the universe has willed should mark both the natural and the supernatural world. We shall find the Church also making continual allusion to it during this season of Christmas, as she did in that of Advent.

“On this the Day which the Lord hath made,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa, “darkness decreases, light increases, and Night is driven back again. No, brethren, it is not by chance, nor by any created will, that this natural change begins on the day when He shows Himself in the brightness of His coming, which is the spiritual Life of the world. It is Nature revealing, under this symbol, a secret to them whose eye is quick enough to see it; to them, I mean, who are able to appreciate this circumstance of our Savior’s coming. Nature seems to me to say: Know, O Man! That under the things which I show thee Mysteries lie concealed. Hast thou not seen the night, that had grown so long, suddenly checked? Learn hence, that the black night of Sin, which had reached its height by the accumulation of every guilty device, is this day stopped in its course. Yes, from this day forward its duration shall be shortened, until at length there shall be naught but Light. Look, I pray thee, on the Sun; and see how his rays are stronger, and his position higher in the heavens: learn from that how the other Light, the Light of the Gospel, is now shedding itself over the whole earth.”(Homily On the Nativity.)

“Let us, my Brethren, rejoice,” cries out St. Augustine: (Sermon On the Nativity of our Lord, iii) “this day is sacred, not because of the visible sun, but because of the Birth of him who is the invisible Creator of the sun. ... He chose this day whereon to be born, as he chose the Mother of whom to be born, and he made both the day and the Mother. The day he chose was that on which the light begins to increase, and it typifies the work of Christ, who renews our interior man day by day. For the eternal Creator having willed to be born in time, his Birthday would necessarily be in harmony with the rest of his creation.”

The same holy Father, in another sermon for the same Feast, gives us the interpretation of a mysterious expression of St. John Baptist, which admirably confirms the tradition of the Church. The great Precursor said on one occasion, when speaking of Christ: He must increase, but I must decrease (St. John iii 30). These prophetic words signify, in their literal sense, that the Baptist’s mission was at its close, because Jesus was entering upon his. But they convey, as St. Augustine assures us, a second meaning: “John came into this world at the season of the year when the length of the day decreases; Jesus was born in the season when the length of the day increases.” (Sermon In Natali Domini, xi). Thus, there is mystery both in the rising of that glorious Star, the Baptist, at the summer solstice: and in the rising of our Divine Sun in the dark season of winter.

There have been men who dared to scoff at Christianity as a superstition, because they discovered that the ancient Pagans used to keep a feast of the sun on the winter solstice! In their shallow erudition they concluded that a Religion could not be divinely instituted, which had certain rites or customs originating in an analogy to certain phenomena of this world: in other words, these writers denied what Revelation asserts, namely, that God only created this world for the sake of his Christ and his Church. The very facts which these enemies of our holy Religion brought forward as objections to the true Faith are, to us Catholics, additional proof of its being worthy of our most devoted love.

Thus, then, have we explained the fundamental Mystery of these Forty Days of Christmas, by having shown the grand secret hidden in the choice made by God’s eternal decree, that the twenty-fifth day of December should be the Birthday of God upon this earth.

We apply the name of Christmas to the forty days which begin with the Nativity of our Lord, December 25th, and end with the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, February 2nd. It is a period which forms a distinct portion of the Liturgical Year, as distinct, by its own special spirit, from every other, as are Advent, Lent, Easter, or Pentecost. One same Mystery is celebrated and kept in view during the whole forty days. Neither the Feasts of the Saints, which so abound during this Season; nor the time of Septuagesima, with its mournful Purple, which often begins before Christmastide is over, seem able to distract our Holy Mother the Church from the immense joy of which she received the good tidings from the Angels (Luke 2:10) on that glorious Night for which the world had been longing four thousand years. The Faithful will remember that the Liturgy commemorates this long expectation by the four penitential weeks of Advent.

[There are some who wrongly think that Septuagesima Sunday terminates the Christmas Season and thus shortens the 40 days to a lesser number. This is false, because Septuagesima Sunday is not the start of Lent, but merely a warning sign that Lent approaches. Hence the Nativity Scene stays up until the end of the Christmas season on February 2nd]

The custom of celebrating the Solemnity of our Savior’s Nativity by a feast or commemoration of forty days’ duration is founded on the holy Gospel itself; for it tells us that the Blessed Virgin Mary, after spending forty days in the contemplation of the Divine Fruit of her glorious Maternity, went to the Temple, there to fulfill, in most perfect humility, the ceremonies which the Law demanded of the daughters of Israel, when they became mothers.

The Feast of Mary’s Purification is, therefore, part of that of Jesus’ Birth; and the custom of keeping this holy and glorious period of forty days as one continued Festival has every appearance of being a very ancient one, at least in the Roman Church. 

Was Jesus Born in December?
And firstly, with regard to our Savior’s Birth on December 25th, we have St John Chrysostom telling us, in his Homily for this Feast, that the Western Churches had, from the very commencement of Christianity, kept it on this day. He is not satisfied with merely mentioning the tradition; he undertakes to show that it is well founded, inasmuch as the Church of Rome had every means of knowing the true day of our Savior’s Birth, since the acts of the Enrollment, taken in Judea by command of Augustus, were kept in the public archives of Rome. 

The holy Doctor adduces a second argument, which he founds upon the Gospel of St Luke, and he reasons thus: we know from the sacred Scriptures that it must have been in the fast of the seventh month (Leviticus 22:24 and following verses. The seventh month (or Tisri) corresponded to the end of our September and beginning of our October. —Tr.) that the Priest Zachary had the vision in the Temple; after which Elizabeth, his wife, conceived St John the Baptist: hence it follows that the Blessed Virgin Mary having, as the Evangelist St Luke relates, received the Angel Gabriel’s visit, and conceived the Savior of the world in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, that is to say, in March, the Birth of Jesus must have taken place in the month of December.

But it was not till the fourth century that the Churches of the East began to keep the Feast of our Savior’s Birth in the month of December. Up to that period they had kept it at one time on the sixth of January, thus uniting it, under the generic term of Epiphany, with the Manifestation of our Savior made to the Magi, and in them to the Gentiles; at another time, as Clement of Alexandria tells us, they kept it on the 25th of the month Pachon (May 15), or on the 25th of the month Pharmuth (April 20). St John Chrysostom, in the Homily we have just cited, which he gave in 386, tells us that the Roman custom of celebrating the Birth of our Savior on December 25th had then only been observed ten years in the Church of Antioch. 

It is probable that this change had been introduced in obedience to the wishes of the Apostolic See, wishes which received additional weight by the edict of the Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian, which appeared towards the close of the fourth century, and decreed that the Nativity and Epiphany of our Lord should be made two distinct Festivals. The only Church that has maintained the custom of celebrating the two mysteries on January 6 is that of Armenia; owing, no doubt, to the circumstance of that country not being under the authority of the Emperors; as also because it was withdrawn at an early period from the influence of Rome by schism and heresy.

The Feast of the Purification
The Feast of our Lady’s Purification, with which the forty days of Christmas close, is, in the Latin Church, of very great antiquity; so ancient, indeed, as to preclude the possibility of our fixing the date of its institution. According to the unanimous opinion of Liturgists, it is the most ancient of all the Feasts of the Holy Mother of God; and as her Purification is related in the Gospel itself, they rightly infer that its anniversary was solemnized at the very commencement of Christianity. Of course, this is only to be understood of the Roman Church; for as regards the Oriental Church, we find that this Feast was not definitely fixed to February 2 until the reign of the Emperor Justinian, in the sixth century. It is true that the Eastern Christians had previously to that time a sort of commemoration of this Mystery, but it was far from being a universal custom, and it was kept a few days after the Feast of our Lord’s Nativity, and not on the day itself of Mary’s going up to the Temple.

But what is the characteristic of Christmas in the Latin Liturgy? It is twofold: it is joy, which the whole Church feels at the coming of the divine Word in the Flesh; and it is admiration of that glorious Virgin, who was made the Mother of God. There is scarcely a prayer, or a rite, in the Liturgy of this glad Season, which does not imply these two grand Mysteries: an Infant-God, and a Virgin-Mother.

For example, on all Sundays and Feasts which are not Doubles, the Church, throughout these forty days, makes a commemoration of the fruitful virginity (The Collect, Deus qui salutis aeternae beatae Mariae Virginiate fecunda humano generi, etc.) of the Mother of God, by three special Prayers in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. She begs the suffrage of Mary by proclaiming her quality of Mother of God and her inviolate purity (V. Post partum, Virgo, inviolata permansisti.  R. Dei Genitrix, intercede pro nobis.), which remained in her even after she had given birth to her Son. And again the magnificent Anthem, Alma Redemptoris, composed by the monk, Herman Contractus, continues, up to the very day of the Purification, to be the termination of each Canonical Hour. It is by such manifestations of her love and veneration that the Church, honoring the Son in the Mother, testifies her holy joy during this season of the Liturgical Year, which we call Christmas.

Our readers are aware that, when Easter Sunday falls at its latest — that is, in April — the Ecclesiastical Calendar counts as many as six Sundays after the Epiphany. Christmastide (that is, the forty days between Christmas Day and the Purification) includes sometimes four out of these six Sundays; frequently only two; and sometimes only one, as in the case when Easter comes so early as to necessitate keeping Septuagesima, and even Sexagesima Sunday, in January. Still, nothing is changed, as we have already said, in the ritual observances of this joyous season, excepting only that on those two Sundays, the fore-runners of Lent, the Vestments are purple, and the Gloria in excelsis is omitted.

Although our holy Mother the Church honors with especial devotion the Mystery of the Divine Infancy during the whole season of Christmas; yet, she is obliged to introduce into the Liturgy of this same season passages from the holy Gospels which seem premature, inasmuch as they relate to the active life of Jesus. This is owing to there being less than six months allotted by the Calendar for the celebration of the entire work of our Redemption: in other words, Christmas and Easter are so near each other, even when Easter is as late as it can be, that Mysteries must of necessity be crowded into the interval; and this entails anticipation. And yet the Liturgy never loses sight of the Divine Babe and his incomparable Mother, and never tires in their praises, during the whole period from the Nativity to the day when Mary comes to the Temple to present her Jesus.

The Greeks, too, make frequent commemorations of the Maternity of Mary in their Offices of this Season: but they have a special veneration for the twelve days between Christmas Day and the Epiphany, which, in their Liturgy, are called the Dodecameron. During this time they observe no days of Abstinence from flesh-meat; and the Emperors of the East had, out of respect for the great Mystery, decreed that no servile work should be done, and that the Courts of Law should be closed, until after January 6th.