How to live piously. A little book of simple instructions, exhortations, and prayers; designed chiefly for the use of the flock entrusted to his care. By the Rev. Thomas Murphy, P.P. Dublin: James Duffy and Sons.-Although these instructions are specially designed to meet the spiritual needs of a particular congregation in Ireland, they contain much good advice applicable to the present time. It is always desirable to compress books of popular devotion into modest dimensions, as far as this can be done without sacrifice of legibility. This collection of thoughts and prayers is sufficiently full to be of great practical utility, and is comprised within the limits of a thin volume, easily carried and easily read. "The pious practices recommended," as it is said in the Preface, "are such as may be easily observed by the young as well as by the old, by the hardworking poor as well as by those who are placed in comfortable circumstances." Bound up in the

same volume is "an easy catechism for the use of uninstructed adults," to which is appended a short collection of Catholic hymns.

Intention of the Apostolate of Prayer for February.

RELIGIOUS ORDERS AND THEIR MISSION OF
ATONEMENT.

THE thought of reparation can never in these days be long
absent from the minds of those who care for the interests
of the Sacred Heart. The Divine Majesty is daily and
hourly outraged with a deliberate refinement of malice
scarcely conceivable in ruder times. Reparation must
keep proportion with outrage. The Sacred Heart of Jesus
has not forgotten mercy, but the condition is, as it always
has been, self-sacrifice in union with the great Sacrifice
of Calvary. Those who "will not help themselves" must
perish, or find help in the prayers and penance of more
generous souls.
The wicked must be won from their
wickedness, or deprived of their power of hurting by the
intervention of the good. So God has willed. Men do
not stand or fall alone, without help or hindrance from
their fellow-men. It was the first murderer who tried to
establish the plea that each man is responsible for
himself alone. "And God said to Cain: Where is thy brother
Abel? And he answered: I know not; am I my brother's
keeper?"* As our Lord went about doing good unto all,
so all who belong to Him by being good must make them-
selves like him in doing good. It has ever been the
teaching of the Church that the prevailing prayer of the
just man is not efficacious only for himself. Even the
guilty cities of the plain would have been spared if a
sufficient number of the friends of God had been there
to lift up their hands in supplication, piercing the clouds

* Genesis iv. 9.

with their humble prayer, and holding back the vengeance of fire. "And the Lord said: the way of Sodom and Gomorrha is multiplied, and their sin is become exceedingly grievous. . . . And the Lord said to him: If I find in Sodom fifty just within the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake. And Abraham answered and said: Seeing I have once begun, I will speak to my Lord, whereas I am dust and ashes. What if there be five less than fifty just persons? . . . I beseech Thee, saith he, be not angry, Lord, if I speak yet once more: what if ten should be found there? And He said: I will not destroy it for the sake of ten.” *

All Catholics accept the fact that within certain limits it is as possible to relieve the spiritual necessities of our neighbour as the temporal. Just as the rich who have worldly substance are able and are expected to give more money than others for the support of the indigent poor, so the saints who are rich in grace are able and are expected to contribute more largely than others to the conversion of sinners. When at the sight of many miseries, of truth diminished and charity growing cold, of the realities of earnest life changed into idle ostentation, of sensuality and selfishness feebly resisted, of crimes multiplied in consequence, we cry out to the Lord to send some great saint to purify and elevate society before it shall be irrecoverably degraded, we are obeying a true impulse of faith. The saints have power over the souls of men, because their hearts are made conformable to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. With Christ they are fastened to the Cross, and they share His victory. They are saviours in imitation of Him, because they are victims of the sacrifice in union with Him.

But if, while we cry aloud to God: "Send whom Thou wilt send," we so cast all our hope upon a deliverer to come as to neglect the remedy which is within our grasp, we are no longer obeying the impulse of faith, for such a prayer would express the spirit, not of the Christian,

* Genesis xviii. 20, 26-28, 32, 33.

but of the Jewish dispensation. The Great Deliverer has already come. The rich gifts purchased by the Precious Blood are already within our reach. We have been made children of God and heirs of Heaven. We have sacraments and Sacrifice. All who seek find, all who pray are heard in the measure of their earnestness. If all who pray, or even if those who pray would pray with sufficient fervour to supply for the want of prayer in others, and so to bring sinners almost in spite of themselves to repentance, there would be less need of preachers and wonder-workers.

God may or may not send another Bernard or Vincent Ferrer, but in the meantime there is much to be done by all; and, if by all, then most certainly by those who make profession of belonging to Jesus Christ under the consecration of perpetual vows, separated for ever by their own voluntary act from "the rest of men" precisely for the purpose of surrendering themselves unreservedly to the service of their Divine Master. If there are men and women upon whom more immediately the duty devolves of making themselves personally holy and therefore powerful before God, they are surely those whose state of life obliges them to aspire to perfection. If there are men and women to whom the interests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus should be dear beyond all other interests, they are surely those who have been commanded to leave all things for His sake. If there are men and women who more than others are bound to conform themselves to their Saviour in His sufferings, they are surely those who expressly undertake to lead a life of incessant selfdenial, fastening themselves to the Cross, as ascetic writers say, with the three nails of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. Religious life is intended to be a self-immolation. A vocation to religion is a call to follow Jesus more closely with a resolution fixed for life, and all who have indeed received that call, and obeyed it, assume at once a special character and a fresh responsibility. Their work has thenceforth what may be termed an official

significance.

In sanctifying their own souls by active zeal or patient suffering they are at the same time strengthening the hands of their holy mother, the Catholic Church, and enabling her to save from a wicked generation tens of thousands who, like the people of Nineveh, "know not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left."* A kind of public importance attaches to their acts. They may be entirely withdrawn from intercourse with the great world, buried in the obscurity of the strictest inclosure, shrinking from observation, but they may nevertheless be said to owe it to society at large that they should faithfully fulfil their sacred engagements, because they are of the number of those who can do great good or great harm in the world, qui multum prodesse vel obesse possunt.

The days we may trust are for ever gone by when younger sons and less marriageable daughters were encouraged by their friends to enter the cloister. Never perhaps was there less admixture than now of worldly motives to tarnish the purity of religious vocation. Exceptional cases of self-delusion or parental interference may occur, but they only serve to put in a clearer light, at least to Catholics, the welcome truth that those who forsake the world, be they young or old, have learned in almost every instance to despise it before they leave it, and that they act under no other compulsion than the strong attraction of grace. It is therefore not wonderful that we seldom, if ever, hear of any real scandal, and that instances of oppression, which promised to afford the most lively satisfaction to the members of Protestant Alliances, have generally ended in the dullest disappointment. This we may acknowledge with deeply grateful hearts, but there is more to be done than to note with gladness that faith and charity are still active in the midst of us, and the solicitude of the Church in her Religious Orders extends to something higher far than mere goodness of vocations