as if weeping like sinless virgins over the wrongs they knew only by name. A carpet of violets was spread below, the last offering of Lent, the fringes of the sweet pall of penance under whose folds the church spends her yearly vigil of reparation.

10. The heart of the child Benignus was breaking with joy and love, and he longed to be a flower himself, that he might sing the hymn the living grove had sung. The voice of the angel of the bell answered his unspoken wish :

"Wish not that thou wert other than thou art, for Jesus said, 'Unless ye become even as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.'"

And the flowers sighed and gave forth a sweeter fragrance, because they longed to be little children, and could not. Then Benignus wished he might be an angel, if he could not be a flower, and the voice from the altar sounded very softly, so low he thought no one could hear it but himself:

11. "This wish will I put into my cup, and when to-morrow dawns, and Jesus finds the first-fruits of this new Easter laid at His feet, thou shalt have thy answer."

Then came a soft chorus of welcome and congratulation, breaking forth among the flowery worshippers; but the angel of the bell held his peace. And in the morning, when the sun flung his golden curtains across the east window and crowned the saints and virgins thereon with richer gems than living monarchs wear, the Paschal procession came winding through All Hallow's church, and no one missed the little chorister Benignus.

12. But when his turn in the anthem came, a

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voice seemed to float from some unseen corner, and a shower of bell-like crystal tones rang in triumphant cadence to the very roof, and no one could tell if it were Benignus or an angel singing. The organ ceased, and the monk Cuthbert looked anxiously along the lines of white-robed choristers, but the child was not there. Still the voice sang on, and it seemed as if it floated now from the chalice on the altar to the distant belfry tower, and then back again to the fragrant forest of exotics in the choir.

13. And Cuthbert, looking up among the halfopened buds of the early roses that were piled up directly over the tabernacle, thought he saw one more lovely than the others just break gently from the frail green stem, and fall in showering petals around the pall-covered chalice at the very minute the wondrous voice ceased in one long reverberating "Alleluia."

Then Cuthbert knew who had been singing and where Benignus was, and he sang the "Gloria in excelsis" as he had never done before.

But the angel of the bell was sad, because the child would have helped him to bear abroad the message of God's truth to men.

LESSON CV.

MOTHER MOST PURE.

1. MARY has been made more glorious in her person than in her office; her purity is a higher gift than her relationship to God. This is what is implied in Christ's answer to the woman in the crowd who cried out when He was preaching, "Blessed is the womb that bare Thee." He replied by pointing out to His disciples a higher blessedness. Yea, rather blessed," He said, “are they who hear the word of God and keep it."

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2. Protestants take these words in disparagement of our Lady's greatness, but they really tell the other way. For consider them: He lays down a principle that it is more blessed to keep His commandments than to be His mother; but who will say that she did not keep His commandments? She kept them surely, and our Lord does but say that such obedience was in a higher line of privilege than her being His mother; she was more blessed in her detachment from creatures, in her devotion to God, in her virginal purity, in her fulness of grace than in her maternity.

3. This is the constant teaching of the holy Fathers. "More blessed was Mary," says St. Augustine, "in receiving Christ's faith than in conceiving Christ's flesh"; and St. Chrysostom declares that she would not have been blessed, though she had borne Him in the body, had she not heard the word of God and kept it. This, of course, is an impossible case; for she was made holy that she might be made His mother, and the two blessed

nesses cannot be divided. She who was chosen to supply flesh and blood to the Eternal Word was first filled with grace in soul and body; still, she had a double blessedness, of office and of qualification for it, and the latter was the greater.

4. And it is on this account that the angel calls her blessed. "Full of grace," he says, "blessed among women"; and St. Elizabeth also, when she cries out, "Blessed art thou that hast believed." Nay, she herself bears a like testimony when the angel announced to her the favor which was coming on her. Though all Jewish women in each successive age had been hoping to be the Mother of the Christ, so that marriage was honorable among them, celibacy a reproach, she alone had put aside the desire and the thought of so great a dignity.

5. She alone, who was to bear Christ, all but refused to bear Him; He stooped to her, she turned from Him; and why? Because she had been inspired, the first of womankind, to dedicate her virginity to God, and she did not welcome a privilege which seemed to involve a forfeiture of her vow. How shall this be, she asked, seeing I am separate from man? Nor till the angel told her that the conception would be miraculous, and from the Holy Ghost, did she put aside her "trouble" of mind, recognize him securely as God's messenger, and bow her head in awe and thankfulness to God's condescension.

6. Mary, then, is a specimen, and more than a specimen, in the purity of her soul and body, of what man was before his fall, and what he would have been had he risen to his full perfection. It had been hard, it had been a victory for the Evil

One, had the whole race passed away, nor any one instance in it occurred to show what the Creator had intended it to be in its original state. Adam, you know, was created in the image and after the likeness of God; his frail and imperfect nature, stamped with a divine seal, was supported and exalted by an indwelling of divine grace. Impetuous passion did not exist in him except as a latent element and a possible evil; ignorance was dissipated by the clear light of the Spirit; and reason, sovereign of every motion of his soul, was simply subjected to the will of God.

7. Nay, even his body was preserved from every wayward appetite and affection, and was promised immortality instead of dissolution. Thus he was in a supernatural state; and, had he not sinned, year after year would he have advanced in merit and grace, and in God's favor, till he passed from paradise to heaven. But he fell; and his descendants were born in his likeness; and the world grew worse instead of better, and judgment after judgment cut off generations of sinners in vain, and improvement was hopeless "because man was flesh" and "the thoughts of his heart were bent upon evil at all times."

8. But a remedy had been determined in heaven; a Redeemer was at hand; God was about to do a great work, and He purposed to do it suitably ; "where sin abounded, grace was to abound more." Kings of the earth, when they have sons born to them, forthwith scatter some large bounty or raise some high memorial; they honor the day, or the place, or the heralds of the auspicious event with some corresponding mark of favor; nor did the