INTRODUCTION

PEOPLE ARE COMING TO UNDERSTAND as they never understood before how much can be learned by the simple act of sight. The eye is an apt scholar, and not only takes in readily, but retains faithfully. Hitherto, however, it has been lazy, or, at any rate, it has not done its fair share of work. Hence a general determination that it shall make up now for lost time. Pictures are multiplied on every side. Our primers and our prayer-books swarm with them. Our magazines are coming to be in great part illustration. Our advertisements are often a picture and a word. In the lecture room the magic lantern is in constant requisition. So thoroughly, indeed, has every one waked up to the fact that a great means of education has been neglected in the past, that there is a danger of our suffering from its excessive use in the future.

Now, the Church found out the value of pictures long ago. She lined her walls with illustrations while she was yet in the catacombs. She carried all over the world the crucifix and the banner of Mary as her first instruction in Christian doctrine. She converted nations by paintings of the Last Judgment. And when the loving saint of Assisi found from his meditations on the Infant Jesus how useful it is to have a scene before us when we pray. She gave us the Christmas crib, which has become a necessity, not only in every Catholic church throughout the world, but in the schoolroom and the nursery. By means of Mystery and Miracle Plays the simple folk of this country were taught, as they have never been taught since, to realise Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and Calvary. And the lessons sank deep. The hold that the life of Christ and His Blessed Mother had on imagination and mind and heart in the ages of faith is evidenced, among other ways, by the rhymes then in common use that have been preserved to us in old manuscripts.

Yet pictures to be of any use must be looked at thoughtfully. Watch some people walking through an art gallery in which are gathered together master pieces of, say, the English school of painting. They move on with the regularity of a machine. Portraits, still life, landscapes, interiors, village scenes, battle, and sea pieces pass in unbroken procession before their eye, which has not the chance of conveying a single distinct impression to the brain. You ask them what they thought of the collection, and will be told: "Oh, it was all very nice!"

Something after this fashion do people look at the Crib and the Crucifix. What wonder, then, if sights that have drawn tears from sinners and from saints have no effect on them.

Not so did Mary look. She saw and pondered. She saw the little trembling form in the manger on Christmas night; the face of the Babe on the day of His Presentation; the look in the Boy's eyes when they met hers in the Temple courts. "And Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart." Strange to say, it was because she knew so much more and saw so much further than we see, that she took care not to hurry on and miss her lesson. She knelt in adoring love before her little One an hour old, and said to Him: "Wast Thou not from the beginning, O Lord, my God, my Holy One!" (Hab. 1). She looked at Him whose tiny fingers clasped hers so tight, and remembered that He had prepared the heavens and the earth, and compassed the sea with its bounds (Prov. 8). What wonder that her soul was for ever magnifying the Lord, and rejoicing in God her Saviour!

For she knew why all this was done. Long before St. Paul, she had said: "He loved me and delivered Himself for me." It was to get her her wondrous graces, to do great things for her, that He had emptied Himself of His glory and come down upon earth. She could not get used to these thoughts. They never lost their freshness. She gazed and gazed upon Him with untiring love and thankfulness, and ever-growing wonder and delight. And as she gazed, the virtue of the Sacred Humanity went out to her, as later to the needy, suffering crowd. For to look lovingly at Jesus in the mysteries of His human life is to draw into our own lives the virtues of His. The sun prints upon the sensitized plate the image we desire. More wondrously the true Light works upon our souls. But we must give it time. O that we had a little of our Mother's habit of pondering; blessed habit, it has made the Church's saints in every age!

In His prayer for His apostles at the Last Supper, our Lord said: "This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent" (John 17). By this knowledge of Himself, to which eternal life is attached, He surely intended no mere barren belief in the divinity of His Person, and in His Mission, but an interior and familiar knowledge akin to theirs who followed Him about during His earthly life, who stood by when He taught in the Temple, and toiled up Calvary, and spoke from the Cross. These sights and sounds were not for His Holy Mother and a few men and women of one generation only, but for His followers in all time. St. John says: "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men . . . the true light which enlighten eth every man that cometh into this world" (John 1). And St. Paul declares: "We shall be saved by His life" (Romans 5). That divine life is our great exemplar. A certain measure of conformity with it is a necessary condition of salvation. In proportion to their conformity is the eternal happiness of all the elect.

But the lessons of Christ's life on earth, which are as essential to us as the redemption He wrought on Calvary, can only avail us by being diligently pondered. St. Paul speaks of "learning Christ" (Ephes. 4), a phrase implying study. "Learn of Me," our Lord Himself says to us. We must watch, we must listen intently, it we would gain a real insight into the mysteries of the three and thirty years. And by the side of the Son, and for a fuller comprehension of Him, we must contemplate the. Mother, the first and most faithful of His disciples, who says to us, with far greater right than St. Paul: "Be ye followers of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Cor. 4). We cannot separate these two lives, the most closely interwoven that earth has ever seen. We cannot study them apart without missing the significance of each. Together they must work their effect upon our souls.

This being so, we might, be sure the Church would provide us with a method by which we may draw near to Jesus and Mary, near enough for the purposes of study: and an easy method, within reach of us all. She does not disappoint us. She sees her children in every generation, of every condition in life, under every variety of circumstances, rich and poor, learned and simple, young and old, the toilers and the leisured, the successful and the downtrodden, calling to her to supply their need, and her answer to all is-the Rosary. Here is an easy means of bringing the sacred mysteries of the Incarnation home to us, and of gradually conforming our lives to the likeness of the two perfect lives on which we gaze awhile each day. Hence our Holy Father, Leo XIII., in his Encyclical on the Rosary, says: "Among the several rites of honouring the Blessed Mary, some are to be preferred, inasmuch as we know them to be the most powerful and the most pleasing to our Mother; and therefore do we most specially name and recommend the Rosary, which recalls to our minds the great mysteries of Jesus and Mary-joys, sorrows, and triumphs." And again: "We most earnestly exhort all the faithful to persevere devoutly in the daily recitation of the Rosary" (Leo XIII. Brev. Salutaris ille). These are weighty words, and deserve to be considered attentively one by one.

We-the highest authority on earth, the Vicar of Christ, the mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit to the children of the Church, who learn the Will of God and the way of salvation from Our lips:

Most earnestly exhort-that is advocate and counsel with all the authority and solicitude of the pastoral office:

All the faithful-not only priests and religious, the needy, the troubled, the leisured-but all-busy men in the professions and trades, students, clerks, toilers in the factory and in the field, the sick, the old, the little children.

To the daily recitation-Does this seem an inconsiderate demand when work is so heavy and repose so short? It might be were the Rosary an additional burden. But the busiest and the most weary will tell you they can find ten minutes for their beads, time to avail themselves for that brief space of our Lord's invitation: "Come aside and rest a little."

And to persevere-It is easy to take up a holy practice. To persevere in it takes courage, generosity, self-sacrifice-in a word, a true love of God, and a dogged determination to save one's soul, and to take (he best means to that end.

Devoutly-This is harder still, unless we have come to love our Rosary, to say it-it not with sensible fervour, at least with the fervour of the will, i.e., with the reasonable application of mind and heart which is enough to ensure to us its precious fruits.

It is, alas, but too true that many of us find the ten minutes given to our Rosary a sadly weary time. It gets no easier with practice, and we see no reason for believing it is becoming more fruitful.

In the generality of cases the cause of this trouble is not far to seek. The Rosary cannot be well said,...