months following one another without a single break. By the way, why nine — not fewer and not more? Was that particular number honored by Our Lord's choice for this purpose in memory of the first nine months of His human life?
But "The Three Thursdays" is only a name by which three special days of the year are perhaps now for the first time linked together on account of certain Eucharistic associations which I am going to explain — Holy Thursday Ascension Thursday, and the Feast of Corpus Christi. These are the only religious solemnities that are attached to the fifth day of the week as such; and they all three — two of them expressly, and one (as we shall presently see) indirectly and by suggestion — are special reminders and memorials of the Blessed Eucharist. Perhaps some devout souls who are eager to seize on any excuse or device for renewing their fervor will reproach themselves with having too completely overlooked the Eucharistic claims of Thursday, and with having scarcely heeded the invitation which its associations address to the pious faithful to extend practically to all the Thursdays of the year the liturgical title of Thursday in Holy Week — Feria quinta in coena Domini, Thursday of the Lord's Supper.
The first, then, of the Three Thursdays is Maundy Thursday, for which the faithful have, with good reason, invented for themselves the name of Holy Thursday, though it is not called so in the Missal, as Holy Saturday is. This solemn day was not chosen arbitrarily to do honor to the Blessed Eucharist, but because it was on this day that Our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled His promise and instituted this memorial of His love, on the night before He suffered, on the eve of Good Friday.
So, too, the Feast of the Ascension is not an arbitrary feast in the calendar, but is kept on one fixed and determinate Thursday for this reason : because Our Saviour, after His Resurrection, fingered on for another forty days in the desert of this world, as He had spent forty days in the desert at the beginning of His public life; and in these forty days after Easter Sunday we reach exactly the Thursday of the sixth week of Paschal time, which is, therefore, the anniversary of Our Lord's Ascension from Mount Olivet, and which we therefore call Ascension Thursday.
The particular date, however, of Corpus Christi, the third of these Three Thursdays that I am linking together, was not thus fixed beforehand by the circumstances of the event that it commemorates; but it was chosen deliberately for the following excellent reasons. This great feast of the Blessed Sacrament was intended to make amends to
