with our Lord is already made perfect. We make these seven visits to the world of light and we recite the Holy Office because the Church lays it upon us under pain of mortal sin. We are bound to recite it for two reasons: the one, for the glory of God, the other, for our own sanctification. It is the wisdom and love of the Church for its priests that impose this grave obligation. The Church takes out of a priest's day so much of his time as his office requires, an hour and a half or two hours. That time no longer belongs to the priest, but to God and to the Church. The priest cannot alienate it, for it is not his own; but, under obedience and grave obligation, he is bound to use it for his own sanctification. The face of Moses shone after he had spoken with God; and our faces ought to shine, or our hearts at least ought to burn and to shine inwardly with the light of the heavenly court. When we say the hours, we "come to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the Church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect."[1] What ought to be the habitual piety, recollection, humility in word
- ↑ Heb. xii. 22, 23.
