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are fallen into an age when the love not only of the many, but of most, has waxen cold. These rules of holy living are found in the sublimest counsels of Christ and His Apostles, suitable to the high expectations of another life, proper instances of a heavenly love, and all followed by the greatest saints of the Church.

WILLIAM LAW,

Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.

THE ANCIENT MONK.

THE great antique heart: how like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth; making all the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover doing God's messages among men: that rainbow was set in the clouds by the hand of God. Wonder, miracle encompass the man; he lives in an element of miracle; Heaven's splendor over his head, Hell's darkness under his feet. A great Law of Duty, high as these two Infinitudes, dwarfing all else, annihilating all else—making royal Richard as small as peasant Samson, smaller if need be! The "imaginative faculties"? "Rude poetic ages?" The "primeval poetic element"? O for God's sake, good readers, talk no more of all that! It was not a Dilettantism this of Abbot Samson.

It was a Reality, and it is one. The garment only

of it is dead: the essence of it lives through all Time and all Eternity!

THOMAS CARLYLE,

Past and Present.

ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND HIS COMPANIONS.

On the dawn of the day on which, in the year 1534, the Church of Rome celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, a little company of men, whose vestments bespoke their religious character, emerged in solemn procession from the deep shadows cast by the towers of Notre Dame over the silent city below them. In a silence not less profound, except when broken by the chant of the matins appropriate to that sacred season, they climbed the Hill of Martyrs, and descended into the Crypt, which then ascertained the spot where the Apostle of France had won the crown of martyrdom. With a stately though halting gait, as one accustomed to military command, marched at their head a man of swarthy complexion, baldheaded, and of middle stature, who had passed the meridian of life; his deep-set eyes glowing as with a perennial fire from beneath brows which, had phrenology then been born, she might have portrayed in her loftiest style, but which without her aid, an

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nounced a commission from on high to subjugate and to rule mankind. So majestic, indeed, was the aspect of Ignatius Loyola, that during the sixteenth century few if any of the books of his order appeared without the impress of that imperial countenance. Beside him in the chapel of St. Denys knelt another worshipper, whose manly bearing, buoyant step, clear blue eye, and finely-chiselled features, contrasted strangely with the solemnities in which he was engaged. Then in early manhood, Francis Xavier united in his person the dignity befitting his birth as a grandee of Spain, and the grace which should adorn a page of the Queen of Castile and Arragon. Not less incongruous with the scene in which they bore their parts, were the slight forms of the boy Alphonso Salmeron, and of his bosom friend, Jago Laynez, the destined successor of Ignatius in his spiritual dynasty. With them Nicholas Alphonso Bobadilla, and Simon Rodriguez-the first a teacher, the second a student of philosophy-prostrated themselves before the altar, where ministered Peter Faber, once a shepherd in the mountains of Savoy, but now a priest in holy orders. By his hands was distributed to his associates the seeming bread, over which he had uttered words of more than miraculous efficacy; and then were lifted up their united

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