Page:For Remembrance (ed. Repplier) 053.jpg

 memories that last. Saints and heroes are the hinges on which the opening and shutting doors of history turn. When the family is abiding, as with the Israelites, the whole people look back from generation to generation to their fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to the God of their fathers.

The Catholic Church, a religion of historic continuity, a religion which returns even to the beginning, to the promise of the Messiah, and comes down through the ages with the chosen people, through captivity and dispersion and seeming destruction, until the Desired of the nations is born,—what a weight of memories she bears! what dates and shrines, what saints and heroes are hers! She fills the days and the years with solemn festivals in commemoration of the Saviour and of those who have loved Him with a perfect love. At His birth what glad songs break forth from a chill and ice-bound earth; what merry laughter of children, what happy hearts are gathered around blazing hearths, full of pleasant and cheering thoughts, because Christ is born! And when He enters on His passion and agony and bows His head, consenting to death, though the sunshine be golden, the air balmy and all nature fair and fragrant, again darkness falls upon the world and a stone is rolled upon the human heart. But when He rises we too laugh with the flowers and sing with the birds. Serene as the azure skies, we feel the thrill of immortal joy; a new spirit within telling us that once having risen to the life of the soul we can never wholly die.

As in devout reverence the Church follows with sacred and solemn ritual her Divine Lord from the announcement of His birth even to His ascension into heaven, so she keeps vigil and festival with His saints—apostles, confessors, martyrs, virgins. And among them she loves to place the founders of religious orders and societies. It is, then, in a right Catholic spirit that to-day in many lands the daughters of the brave, humble, loving and faithful woman who established the Society of the Sacred Heart a hundred years ago are gathered, that the memory of her and her work may inspire in them a purer love of the Divine Master and a more unconquerable purpose to labor even unto death in the cause for which He lived and died. She has not as yet been placed in the 37