AN OASIS IN THE DESERT.

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we enter into Holy Week, this "Holy of Holies", and during which, by the exercise of prayer, retirement, selfdenial, and a disengagement from secular conversation and sinful associations, our souls may be predisposed to contemplate the many august mysteries presented to our consideration, and harmonize with the examples of abjection, and humiliation, and sufferings exhibited in the passion and death of our crucified Lord. Holy Week is, as it were, the burning bush, in which we hold intimate converse with God, and during the Lent, the Church warns us to approach with pure and sanctified souls. She whispers us, "take off the shoes from thy feet, for the place on which thou standest is holy ground". The Egyptians of old erected their temples in the midst of solitary groves, through which the worshipper had to pass, before he reached the vestibule —and before the weary travellers and the thirsty camels of the caravansara can fully appreciate the verdant herbage, the shady foliage, the flowering meads, and refreshing waters of the "oasis", they must first traverse the vast wastes, and parching sands, of the dreary desert. After we pass through the penitential season of Lent, we too shall, at Easter, be satiated, when the glories of God shall appear!

Ceremonies and Art.

HE senses are the mediums of communication between external objects and the soul, and holy Church eagerly employs their coöperation, to impress the soul with sentiments of religion, piety, morality, and to convey information and edification, by means of certain external conventional signs. She effects this sometimes through the organs of

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RITES SIGNAL TO THE SOUL.

vision, as by letters, writing or reading, painting or sculpture; sometimes through the ear, as by preaching or music; and sometimes by external rites, in which all these external signs are united: and these latter she calls ceremonies. To admit that it is legitimate for the Church to employ reading, or preaching, to impress the soul with religious feelings, and to deny her the right to employ other external signs, would be unmeaningly to limit the salutary influence of those powerful auxiliaries. If to attain this holy object of the amelioration of the soul, some signs be proclaimed legitimate, certainly other signs for the attainment of the same holy end, cannot in reason be asserted to be meaningless, mischievous, and superstitious. The only external signs which the Church sanctions in her ceremonies, are those which are eminently calculated to enlighten the mind, by communicating additional knowledge, to excite devotion, and melt the soul to tender sentiments of piety, to compunction for sin, reprobation of vice, to unbounded gratitude to God for His numberless mercies, in contemplating His miracles of love, His bitter passion, and glorious resurrection; to promote His glory, and the welfare of our fellow-creatures; to stimulate us to the imitation of Christ and His saints, to heroic deeds of virtue, and to aspire to perfection. No reasoning mind can deny that rites and ceremonies, replete with such tendencies, are useful, salutary, precious, and edifying. Such are the noble objects which the Church aspires to effect in the souls of her faithful children, by the institution of her ceremonies. Music softens the soul to such piety and unction as to render it delicately sensitive to any character of exalted and refined sanctity with which heavenly grace may please to impress it. The prolonged notes of her choral service hover round the text, to allow time as we pass,

ART WHISPERS TO THE SOUL.

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to suck the honey from the delicious words of the Royal Psalmist, unctuous, and redolent of inspiration. Other plaintive notes break the hardened heart, and open sluices for floods of tears from the overflowing reservoirs of a penitential spirit. Even by one glance at Michael Angelo's great painting, presenting to our eye a representation of the last judgment, we are awe-stricken, in anticipation of that dread day of assize, and all the terrors of God's terrible judgments. Another painting of the agony in the garden, overwhelms us with confusion, conscious of our apathy, our tepidity, in the ways of God, the little advance we have made in virtue after our lengthened years in the school of Christ, our persevering reluctance to adhere to God, to forsake all, and watch with our agonizing Saviour -it seems to whisper significantly and pathetically: "What! could you not watch one hour with me?" The countenances of Murillo's Madonnas, clothed with such sweet expressiveness, such tender devotion, such surpassing amiability, immaculate innocence, and enraptured recollection, win our hearts' affection to love her, to venerate her, to aspire to her imitation, to fly to her patronage, and confidently to commit the care of our salvation to the powerful intercession of that holy Mother of God with. her adorable Son. Nay, the enemy of our salvation employs external signs to allure souls. The very pagans perpetuated the history and elicited the sympathy of generations, by the tortuous writhings and agonizing expressions of the Laocoon and his suffering youths, in the coils of the serpents, by the great statue of antiquity in the Vatican Museum. Shall then the Church be denied the use of these, and similar external signs, through the instrumentality of the senses, to perpetuate their history of the august mysteries of salvation, and elicit the sym

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INGRESS TO THE SOUL.

pathies of the soul for our agonizing Redeemer's passion and death, and the soul's exultation at His glorious and triumphant resurrection? Away with such futile reasoning! The wicked world employs every sense to effect an entrance, to devastate and demoralize the soul. Holy Church will not only close those gates, and render them impregnable to the enemy, but shall employ them for her own ingress to God's citadel. She shall utilize not only one or two, but she shall zealously employ a union of all those external signs, to win the soul to religion, to virtue, and to God. Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, vestments, incense, torches, elaborately chased plate of gold and silver, chaunting, actions, and processions, and those constitute her ceremonies, rites, and ritual observances, and they are a language that addresses the soul through the action of the eye, as eloquently as the glowing page, and through the tympanum of the ear, as forcibly as the most pathetic sermon, and she shall ever justly appreciate their use as salutary and valuable for the weal of the soul!

Object of the Ceremonies.

HE object of the institution of these ceremonies was by no means intended for mere external show, not merely to make a display, or to produce what is understood to be an effect. An effect may indeed result from their observance, but it was neither the reason, the motive, nor the end of their institution. The reason of their institution is because they are recommended, and sanctioned by doctrine. The motive of their institution is, that external impressions on the senses may become auxiliary to the production

TRUE RELIGION IS INTERIOR.

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of interior devotional sentiments in the soul.

The great

end of their institution, is the promotion of the glory of God, the edification and sanctification of the souls of mankind.

Religion, to be true, must be interior. It especially consists in the undivided empire of God over all the faculties of the soul; in establishing Him as the sole object of all our desires; the end of all our actions; the principle of all our affections; the dominant tendency of all our interior inclinations. The soul is instructed, and aided, to correspond with the operations of divine grace, in establishing this interior reign of Christ, through the medium of the senses, that is, through the organs of hearing or seeing, usually either by the voice of the preacher, or by the written word. Now words, either spoken or written, are mere conventional signs, instituted for the purpose of conveying certain ideas, and imparting certain impressions to the soul; other signs, directed to our eyes and ears, may be equally efficacious in conveying these salutary impressions, and tending to establish this interior reign of grace in our souls, and holy Church judiciously employs them, and these she calls ceremonies. That religion which confines itself exclusively to external rites or ceremonies, irrespective of the interior worship of God in the soul, our holy Church regards as false, useless, pernicious, hypocritical, and superstitious. But when ceremonies are employed either as external expressions of our interior sentiments of religion, or as means to enliven our piety, and inflame our charity, or to conduct more easily the simple and illiterate, who cannot read or write, to a knowledge of the sublime mysteries of Christianity, then she regards them as most useful, most precious, and most venerable. When the Son of God con