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 continued to shine in all its pristine splendor, within the shores of Erin, despite the cruelest and most tyrannical persecutions, for, although despotic rulers could hunt down her priests like wolves, and murder them as they offered the adorable sacrifice on the mountainsides of the Emerald Isle, such tyrants could never tear from the hearts of Erin’s faithful children their tender, undying love for Mary Immaculate, and, when those heroic Catholics were unable to partake of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and were deprived of the ministrations of the priest of God, they assembled in their cottages, around an image of the Mother of God, and recited with childlike confidence the holy Rosary.

 

The spontaneous, constant love of Catholics for the Rosary, and the remarkable results attributed to it, are easily understood when we carefully consider the nature of this devotion.

The great means of salvation and sanctification, the means which God has established for procuring efficacious grace to resist every temptation and acquire every virtue, the means that fertilizes, so to say, the sacerdotal ministry, is prayer. We need but read the Gospels attentively to 