our Father without haying the Church for our Mother; and we cannot have God for our Father without having the ever-blessed Mother as our Mother. We do not choose her as a patron. We are her children from our baptism, before we knew her, in the supernatural consanguinity of the Incarnation. So, also, we hardly choose S. Joseph; for he is the patron of the universal Church. We, therefore, are his foster-children through the maternity of the spotless Virgin Mary. Our patrons are of our own choosing. And a priest must be of a strangely unreflecting mind who does not find himself in manifold relations to "the Church of the first-born written in heaven."[1] The day or place of our birth, our falls, our faults, our needs, our works, all suggest to us many who, in their warfare on earth, were tried as we are. The habit of mind that turns to the Saints is a docile reverence; the habit of mind that turns away from them is an indocile self-sufficiency. Devotion and conscious relation to the Saints is a part of the gift of piety. It is the affection of mind by which we adore the ever-blessed Trinity with our whole soul and strength; for love and worship are the same affections, whether the object be infinite and uncreated, or finite and a creature.
- ↑ Heb. xii. 23.
