worthily commemorate so wondrous a gift during the spiritual sadness and gloom of Holy Week: devotion to the first Friday, every first Friday, rather than to any fixed number, even the nine, because the Church has given a formal approbation to every first Friday.
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin is the old traditional devotion of Ireland; may it continue so to the end. There are persons living who can remember a time when there were no sodalities of the Sacred Heart, of the Holy Family, of the Children of Mary; when such forms of devotion were practically unknown, and yet when every Irish Catholic was a child of Mary, and devotion to her as prominent as it is to-day. One might find, in the poorest cabins, beads — ebony and silver — or portions of them, religiously preserved and handed down from parents to children. During more than two centuries we may well apply to Irish Catholics the words of St. Paul in his Epistle to the Hebrews: "They had trials of mockeries and stripes, moreover also of bands and prisons, wandering about, being in want, distressed and afflicted, in deserts and mountains, and in dens, and in caves of the earth, stoned, cut asunder, put to death by the sword." But
