because people are waiting for him. He must first wait upon God, and then he may serve his neighbour."

A third answer to our question on the means of our sanctification may be given, of a different kind from the other two. It is that the very works of our ministry may be a direct source of sanctification far greater than the various exercises, which from time to time we give up. Some of these we may enumerate.

First and foremost comes our daily mass. This can never be omitted through pressure of external work, whether there is a congregation or not. Time was, when in the days of our youth, we looked forward to the privilege of saying mass as almost too great and too sacred to be spoken of. It seemed to us that with this daily privilege, all life would be sanctified and sin would become impossible to us. What has been our experience after many years of this daily privilege? Has it fulfilled our expectation? Alas, our first experience has been that with frequent repetition the act has become perfunctory, and has often been performed with inadequate preparation, too short a thanksgiving, and little real devotion. Perhaps we have been free in too often omitting it. But it is not too much to assert that when it has been said properly, with suitable preparation and recollection, it has more than realised our most sanguine expectations, and that no instrument of sanctification could exceed in strength the daily mass of the priest, well prepared, well celebrated, and with a suitable thanksgiving.

After this we may look at the various exercises of the pastoral ministry. Take the Confessional; who can rise up from a long session in the box without the consciousness that he is a better man? Why is it that the time spent in the exercise of hearing the Confessions of others never seems long, except that during the whole time we are conscious that it is reacting upon ourselves? Cardinal Manning enumerates five different truths upon which the Confessor assimilates:—[8]

"First, self-knowledge, by bringing things to his own remembrance and by showing him his own face in a glass by the lives of sinners.

"Secondly, contrition, in the sorrow of penitents who will not be consoled.

"Thirdly, delicacy of conscience in the innocent whose eye being single and their body full of light, accuse themselves of omissions and deviations from the will of God which we, perhaps, daily commit without discernment.

"Fourthly, aspiration by the fervent, whose one desire and effort, in the midst of burdened and restless homes, is to rise higher and higher in union with God.

"Fifthly, self-accusation at our own unprofitableness, from the generosity and fidelity of those who are hindered on every side, and yet in humility, self-denial, charity and union with God surpass us, who have every gift of time and grace needed for perfection."

A similar effect is produced in us by the ordinary visitation of our people, even in the most difficult surroundings. How many do we not come across whose daily uphill struggle for virtue puts our own lives to shame! Others whose trust in God in apparently hopeless circumstances, and the answers which we see to their prayers, bring the closeness of God's providence over His elect sensibly nearer to us. Then our prayer with our people and for our people, our instructions and sermons, our indirect influence over them, all alike continually keep us in the presence of God. There is a tendency among some priests to look upon the devotions in which they lead their people as one thing, and their own spiritual exercises—their Office, Meditation, Spiritual Reading—as another. There is no need for any such distinction. The devotions which a priest goes through with his people—the Rosary, confraternity prayers, Benediction and the like— react on his spiritual life quite as strongly as his Meditation or Spiritual Reading which he may have omitted in their favour. The Cure of Ars for many years practically gave up his private spiritual exercises, except his mass, in order to devote the whole of his time to his pastoral work, either in the Confessional, or in the midst of his people, preaching to them, or saying night prayers or other devotions with them. In his later years he was dispensed by Rome even from saying his Office. His was indeed an extreme case; but the same principles hold good, in their measure, in the case of every priest who devotes himself to his pastoral work. Even the sin and misery which we see around us, bring vividly before us the dignity of our own office in trying to rescue our people from the results of their own folly. Still more when we minister at the death either of one who has led a good Christian life, or one who has become a true penitent, are we brought almost into touch with the other world. There is a sacredness about a Catholic death-bed which is all its own. One moment the patient is going through the last of his sufferings in this world, dependent upon our poor help and our prayers, and receiving the consolations of religion at our hands: a moment later he is in the other world, looking down on us, with knowledge and experience which we so long to have, his salvation we hope assured, and this the result of our ministry. Can any priest come back from a Catholic death-bed without a feeling of awe, and his faith strengthened as though he were in actual contact with the next world?

To sum up then, the pastoral work of the priest is in itself a means of sanctification as direct and as efficacious as any personal religious exercises can be; and while we should always be jealous of omitting any of our accustomed devotions through carelessness or laziness, we need have no misgiving when they are omitted in consequence of the pressure of our pastoral work. We may fitly conclude with one more quotation from Cardinal Manning on the sanctifying power of the self-sacrifice which a true pastor practises:—[9]

"The pastoral office is in itself a discipline of perfection. For first of all it is a life of abnegation of self. A pastor has so many obediences to fulfil, as he has souls to serve. The good and the evil, the sick and the whole, the young and the old, the wise and the foolish, the worldly and the unworldly—who are not always wise—the penitent and the impenitent, the converted and the unconverted, the lapsed and the relapsed, the obdurate and the defiant, all must be watched over—none may be neglected, still less cast off—always, at all times and in all ways possible. St. Philip used to say that a priest should have no time of his own, and that many of his most consoling conversations came to him out of hours at unseasonable moments. If he had sent them away because they came out of time, or at supper-time and the like, they might have been lost. Then again, the trials of temper, patience, self-control in bearing with the strange and inconsiderate minds that come to him, and the demands made upon his strength and endurance day and night in the calls of the sick and dying, coming often one after another when for a moment he has gone to rest; the weary and continual importunities of people and of letters, till the sound of the bell or the knock at the door is a constant foreboding, too surely fulfilled; all these things make a pastor's life as wearisome, and, strange to say, as isolated as if he were in the desert. No sackcloth so mortifies the body as this life of perpetual self-abnegation mortifies the will. But when the will is mortified, the servant is like his Master, and his Master is the exemplar of all perfection."

[1] St. Matt. xix. 21.