they were again kindled to show that He had risen again.
Some writers inform us that all the lower lights were emblematic of the Apostles and other disciples of the Saviour who at the period that his sufferings grew to their crisis, became terrified at His arrest, His humiliations, His condemnation and crucifixion, as well as by the supernatural exhibitions upon Calvary and in Jerusalem and that the extinction shows the terror and doubts by which they were overwhelmed, but that the Blessed Virgin who is represented by the candle upon the summit and which is not extinguished, alone retained all her confidence unshaken, and with a clear and perfect expectation of His Resurrection, yet plunged in grief, beheld the appalling spectres that came as from another world to bear testimony of a deicide. But the most instructive explanation appears that which informs us that the candles which are arranged along the sides of this triangle, represent the patriarchs and prophets who under the Law of Nature and the written Law gave the world that imperfect revelation which they received, but all tending towards one point which was Christ the Messias, who as the Orient on High was to shed the beams of knowledge upon those minds that had been so long enveloped in darkness, as these lights are extinguished, one at the end of each psalm, so were these chosen ones, after having proclaimed the praises of the Redeemer, consigned to death, many of them by the people whom they instructed. (Bishop England's Works; Vol. III, p. 365.)
The noise made at the conclusion of the service reminds us of the convulsions of nature at the Saviour's death, and the production of the light still burning and shedding its light abroad, recalls the Resurrection of the Saviour, and His effulgence on the world.
The principal features of the Office are the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremias, in which under the
