mosa" applied to her in the Stabat Mater, but the sense of that expression is amplified and enlarged upon in the exquisitely beautiful hymn for the feast of the Seven Dolours in September :

O quot undis lacrymarum,
Quo dolore volvitur,
Luctuosa de cruento
Dum revulsum stipite,
Cernit ulnis incubantem
Virgo Mater Filium !
Os suave, mite pectus,
Et latus dulcissimum,
Dexteramque vulneratam,
Et sinistram sauciam,
Et rubras cruore plantas,
Ægra tingit lacrymis.
Centiesque, milliesque
Stringit arctis nexibus,
Pectus illud et lacertos
Illa figit vulnera,

Sicque tota colliquescit
In doloris osculis.

This seems a description of passionate grief, rather than of statue-tranquillity. It is also worthy of the learned reviewer's consideration, that, in the same office of the Seven Dolours, the Church, who in the series of responsories at Matins, commemorates the Dolours in their order, applies to the fourth of them (the meeting with Our Lord on the way to Calvary), those very words of the Gospel to which the reviewer draws attention as suggestive of a contrast between our Blessed Lady and the other holy women-“ Jesum, bajulantem sibi crucem, sequebatur turba mulierum, quæ plangebant et lamentabantur eum."-Resp. Lect. iv. Your obedient Servant, April 14th.

To the Editor of the DUBLIN REVIEW.

A PRIEST.

SIR, AS I have given a good deal of thought to the subject, will you allow me to offer a suggestion or two upon the Desolation of our Blessed Lady in the Triduo? The occasion of my doing so was the perusal of a letter in the Tablet, the writer of which, resting upon a hymn of the Church, endeavours to make her devotion there, as little as possible like Desolation, and as much as possible like to sensible sweetness.

Certainly I should like to accept as literally true a view of the matter put before me by a hymn of the Church. But, if grave reasons prevent my doing so, then for literal truth, I am driven to substitute a kind of pious fiction, so to say. But I will explain my meaning by-and-by, after I have put forward my grave reasons, or at least what strike me as such.

Now, if thousands of kisses were to be given to the Sacred Corpse, to give them reverently there must be great expenditure of time. Let us see then if the Gospels do not preremptorily refuse to us any such time. S. Mark and S. Luke say of Joseph of Arimathea: having taken it-the Sacred

Corpse-down, he rolled it in the linen.

This looks as if the latter action followed immediately upon the former. It is just possible that an interval should have occurred between the two actions; but likely it is not. For Joseph must be included in all Christ's acquaintance, who by that time (Luke xxiv. 47) had rallied round the Cross. He had then to go in to Pilate, and as he did not go in till it was late, he did not get back till it was later. There is then but a small space between "late," and six o'clock of our time, when the Sabbath began.

Into this short space the Gospels compel us to crowd the two processes of taking down, and of embalming with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes -no cassia mind. Where then is there any space left for anything like a thousand reverent kisses? I am not saying that it is impossible to reconcile the hymn, if literally taken, with the Gospel, but that to me in particular, as at present informed, the two accounts appear to be as incompatible as can well be.

The Psalm Eructavit has many difficulties in it; but I can safely say that I have myself no doubt whatever, that it is in the original a prophecy of S. John's adoration of God's Corpse. Without pretending to enter into a plenary justification of that view of the matter here, I may notice one or two things, which tend to justify it. (1) The Psalm clearly contemplates a time when Christ has fellows in His oil of gladness. This He had in Limbo and nowhere else before the Resurrection. (2) Neither the and nor the cassia belong, I think, to the original. We may translate that original thus:

Myrrh and aloes, finely parted,
Are Thy only garments (now).

S. John will then go on to invite the Queen to forget the Jews, and to kneel and adore God's Corpse; and thus we shall secure a Scriptural sanction for some adoration, indeed, though none for any long adoration. The Queen was standing before at the recently wounded right of the Corpse.

If, then, Holy Writ leaves us no room for any long adoration, how are we to manage the thousand kisses of the hymn? I will state why I think them pure fiction. What the Church aims at in her hymns is at encouraging such devotion as shall be intelligible to the run of Catholics. Intense aridity, real, genuine desolation, is a thing of which the run of Catholics have no cognizance of an experimental nature. It would not minister to their devotion to set such desolation before them, as a weeping and kissing Mother does administer thereto. In like manner, the succour of our Angel, after we are in trouble, is consoling to us. So the Church in the Hymn for Christ's Prayer in the Garden represents Christ as getting strength from the Angel after the bloody sweat. Let any one ponder the account of the beloved Physician (Luke xxii, 43-44), and he must, I think, see that S. Luke puts the infusion of strength (vioxvwv) by the Angel before the bloody

sweat.

This then is what I meant by "pious fiction," as opposed to historical truth. The Church considers what will move the greater number to devotional feeling, and shapes her hymns accordingly. Such is my view of the matter, to which I find myself, not altogether willingly I grant, driven by what seems

to me the plain meaning of Holy Writ. But I shall be glad if a better mode of reconciling the two can be pointed out to me.

A partial parallel to this disagreement of the hymns with the Scripture, may be found in a similar disagreement of things, revealed in visions about the Passion, therewith. For example any one who really studies the Gospel, will see that there is no time for the thousands of scourge-wounds which some visions represent Jesus as receiving. It is only a mode of setting before a Saint's mind in extension of time, intension of suffering. To the Gospel student, this looks at first like absurd and unauthorized exaggeration. But on weighing things fairly he will see, that that which cannot be pressed as literally true, is perhaps the only way in which the intensity of the Mother's sufferings can be set before the human imagination. When Julian speaks of Christ's suffering three hours or so 'a sennet's pain,' she measures the intensity of Christ's pain by extension of time, very much in the same way as the Church's thousand kisses measure the intensity of our Lady's love to Jesus.

I might add that we are encouraged by the Church to view our Lady's pains in the Triduo, as those of "Desolation." To my own mind it is clear that they were twofold: they were pains of sense, and pains of loss. The former came from the sight and touch of the mangled Corpse of God, and the latter from its being buried out of her sight. How each of these pains co-operated with what Christ's Soul was doing in Purgatory or in Limbo, it wonld be impossible here to discuss. But if they were accompanied literally and really with a profusion of sensible devotion and loving tears, I cannot see how they deserve the name of "Desolation." The most horrible and distressing aridity seems to me to be far, far more probable, because the greater her sufferings were, the greater would her co-operation be with what Jesus's Soul was working out in the other world.

If I have ventured to state boldly my difficulties in the way of accepting a literal meaning for the September Hymn, I can assure your readers that this is no random view of the matter, but one with myself of long standing, and based upon a long-continued study of the Passion as a well-organized and connected whole, in every stage of which some definite good is merited for the Church or its children.

Yours sincerely

J. B. M.