ity,
Thou all in thy perfections dost exceed; If love be led by hope of
future meed, What pleasure more than thee in heaven to see? An earthly
sight doth only please the eye, And breeds desire, but doth not satisfy:
Thy sight gives us possession of all joy; And with such full delights
each sense shall fill, As heart shall wish but for to see thee still,
And ever seeing, ever shall enjoy.

IV

Sweet Queen, although thy beauty raise up me From sight of baser
beauties here below, Yet, let me not rest there; but, higher go To him,
who took his shape from God and thee. And if thy form in him more fair I
see, What pleasure from his deity shall flow, By whose fair beams his
beauty shineth so, When I shall it behold eternally? Then, shall my love
of pleasure have his fill, When beauty's self, in whom all pleasure is,
Shall my enamoured soul embrace and kiss, And shall new loves and new
delights distill, Which from my soul shall gush into my heart, And
through my body flow to every part.

HENRY CONSTABLE: 1562-1613.

PART TWO

CHAPTER XXIV

THE HOME OF S. JOHN

And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

S. John XIX, 27.

But now we unite to praise thee, O Pure and Immaculate One, blessed
Virgin and sinless Mother of thy great Son and the God of all. O
perfectly spotless and altogether holy, thou art the hope of despairing
sinners. We bless thee as most full of grace, who didst give birth to
Christ, God and Man. And we fall down before thee. We all invoke thee
and implore thy help. Deliver us, O Virgin, holy and undefiled, from
every pressing strait and from all temptations of the Evil One. Be thou
our peacemaker in the hour of death and judgment. Do thou save us from
the future unquenchable fire and from the outer darkness. Do thou render
us worthy of the glory of thy Son, O Virgin and Mother, most sweet
and clement.

A PRAYER OF S. EPHREM THE SYRIAN.

There is no scene in the whole range of Scripture narrative which is
more full of pathos than this scene of the Cross. Two agonies meet: the
agony of the nailing, the lifting, the dying; and the agony that looks
on in silent helplessness. But while our Lord's physical agony was in
some sort swallowed up in the intensity of the love which was the motive
for enduring it, overpassed in the vision of the need of those for whom
He was dying, S. Mary's agony was the pain of a love concentrated upon
the Sufferer Who hangs dying before her eyes. If t