Now, the holy Eucharist is the best of all the means whereby we can give to the Three divine Persons the worship we owe Them; it is, moreover, the bond whereby earth is united with heaven. It is easy, therefore, to understand how it was that holy Church so long deferred the institution of the two festivals

immediately following Whitsuntide. All the mys

teries we have celebrated up to this time, were contained in the august Sacrament, which is the memorial, and, so to say, the compendium of the wonderful things wrought, in our favour, by our Redeemer. It was the reality of Christ's presence under the sacramental species that enabled us to recognise, in the sacred Host, at Christmas, the Child that was born unto us, in Passiontide the Victim who redeemed us, and, at Easter, the glorious conqueror of death. We could not celebrate all those admirable Mysteries without the aid of the perpetual Sacrifice; neither could that Sacrifice be offered up, without its renewing and repeating them.

It was the same with the Feasts of our Blessed Lady and the Saints, they kept us in the continual contemplation of the holy Sacrament. When we honoured Mary on the solemnities of the Immaculate Conception, the Purification, or the Annunciation, we were honouring Her who had, from her own substance, given that Body and Blood which was then offered upon our altars. As to the Apostles and the Martyrs, whose memories we solemnised, whence had they the strength to suffer so much and so bravely for the faith, but from the sacred banquet which we then celebrated, and which gives courage and constancy to them that partake of it? The Confessors and Virgins, as their Feasts came round, seemed to us as so many lovely flowers in the garden of the Church, and that garden itself all fruitful with wheat and

1 Ps. cx. 4.

clusters of grapes, because of the fertility given by Him, who is called, in the Scriptures, both Wheat and Wine.1

Putting together all the means within our reach for honouring these blessed citizens of the heavenly court, we have chanted the grand Psalms of David, and hymns, and canticles, with all the varied formulas of the Liturgy ;-but nothing that we could do towards celebrating their praise could be compared to the holy Sacrifice offered to the divine Majesty. It is in that Sacrifice, that we entered into direct communication with them, according to the energetic term used by the Church in the Canon of the Mass, (communicantes). The blessed in heaven are ever adoring the most holy Trinity by and in Christ Jesus our Lord; and it is by the Sacrifice of the Mass that we were united with them in the one same centre, and that we mingled our homage with theirs; hence, they received an increase of glory and happiness. So, then, the holy Eucharist, both as Sacrifice and Sacrament, has always been prominently before us. If we are now going to devote several days to a more attentive consideration of its magnificence and power; if we are now going to make more earnest efforts to taste more fully its heavenly sweetness; it is not a something fresh, which attracts our special notice and devotion for a season, and will then give way for something else no; the Eucharist is that element prepared for us by the love of our Redeemer, of which we must always avail ourselves in order that we may enter into direct communication with our God, and pay him the debt not only of our worship, but also of our love.

And yet, the time would come when the Holy

1 Zach. ix. 17.

Ghost, who governs the Church, would inspire her with the thought of instituting a special solemnity in honour of that august mystery, in which all others are included. There is a sacred element, which gives a meaning to every feast that occurs during the Year, and graces it with the beauty of its own divine splendour; that sacred element is the most holy Eucharist, and itself had a right to a solemn festival, in keeping with the dignity of its divine object.

But that festive exaltation of the divine Host, and those triumphant Processions so deservedly dear to the present generation of Christians, were not practicable in the ages of the early Persecutions. And when those rough times had passed away, and the courageous Martyrs had won victory for the Church, those same modes of honouring the Eucharist would not have suited the spirit and form of the primitive liturgical observances, which were kept up for ages following. Neither were they needed for the maintenance of the lively faith of those times; they would have been superfluous for a period such as that was, when the solemnity of the Sacrifice itself, and the share the people at large took in the sacred Mysteries, and the uninterrupted homage of liturgical chants sustained by the crowds of Faithful adorers around the Altar, gave praise and glory to God, secured correctness of faith, and fostered in the people a superabundance of supernatural life, which is not to be found now-a-days. The divine Memorial produced its fruits; the intentions our Lord had in instituting the Eucharist were realised; and the remembrance of that institution, which used then to be solemnised as we now celebrate Mass on Maundy Thursday, was deeply impressed on the minds of the Faithful.

This state of things lasted till the beginning of the 13th Century, when, as the Church expresses it, a certain coldness took possession of the world; faith

1 Collect for the Feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis.

grew weak, and the vigorous piety which characterised the christians of the previous ages became exceedingly rare. There were grand exceptions, here and there, of individual saintliness; but there was an unmistakable falling off amidst people at large, and the falling off was progressive; so much so, indeed, that there was danger that the Mystery, which by its very nature is the Mystery of Faith, would suffer, in a special manner, from that coldness, that indifference, of the new generation. Even at that period, hell had been at work, stirring up sacrilegious teachers here and there, who dared to throw doubts upon the dogma of the Real Presence; fortunately, the people easily took alarm, and, as a general rule, were too strong in the old faith to be led astray. The Pastors, too, of the Church were alive to the danger,-for there were souls who allowed themselves to be deceived.

Scotus Erigena had formulated the sacramentarian heresy he had taught that the Eucharist "was but "a sign, a figure of spiritual union with Jesus, of "which the intellect alone could be cognizant." His teaching made little impression; it was regarded as mere pedantry, and was too novel to make head against catholic tradition, such as was to be found exposed in the learned writings of Paschasius Radbert, Abbot of Corbie. The sophistry of Scotus was revived, in the 11th Century, by Berengarius; but although its new promoter was more crafty and conceited than its originator, and did greater and more lasting mischief, yet it died with him. The time for hell to play havoc with such direct attacks as these had not yet come; they were laid aside for others of a more covert kind. That hotbed of heresies, the empire of Byzantium, fostered the almost extinct germ of Manicheism; the teaching of that sect regarding the flesh,-that it is the work of the evil principle,—was subversive of the dogma of the Eucharist. Whilst Berengarius was trying to bring himself into notice

by the noisy, but ineffectual, broachings of his errors, Thrace and Bulgaria were quietly sending their teachers into the West. Lombardy, the Marches, and Tuscany, became infected; so did Austria, in several places, and almost all at one and the same time; so, too, did three cities of France,-Orleans, Toulouse, and Arras. Forcible measures for repressing the evil were used; but it was one which knew how to grow strong by retreat. Taking the South of France for the basis of its operations, the foul heresy silently organised its strength during the whole of the 12th Century. So great was the progress it made thus unperceived, that when it came publicly before the world, at the beginning of the 13th Century, it had an army ready for the maintenance of its impious doctrines. Torrents of blood had to be shed in order to subdue it, and deprive it of its strongholds; and for years after the defeat of the armed insurrection, the Inquisition had to exercise active watchfulness in the provinces that had been tainted by the Albigensian contagion.

Simon of Montfort was the avenger of the Catholic faith. But, whilst the victorious arm of the Christian hero was dealing a death-blow to heresy, God was preparing for his Son, who had been so unworthily outraged by the sectarians, in the Sacrament of his love, a triumph of a more peaceful kind, and a more perfect reparation. It was in the year 1208, that an humble Religious of the Congregation of the Hospitallers, by name the Blessed Juliana of MontCornillon, near Liége, had a mysterious vision, in which she beheld the moon at its full, but having a hollow on its disc. In spite of all her efforts to divert herself from what she was afraid was an illusion, the same vision appeared before her, as often as she set herself to pray. After two years of such efforts and earnest supplications, it was revealed to her, that the moon signified the Church as it then