The Family Circle

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 7, 25 February 1925, Page 61

The Family Circle

PjK A PICTURE. i i W Green hills and a lovely valley, i ■PSt- A sky of softest blue; i A long, white road goes winding 1 The fields and meadows through. "'Pleasant little homesteads Are dotted o’er the hill; And a leaping, rippling streamlet Runs to the old flax mill. The fragrance of the hawthorn i Don’t you feel it in the air With the woodbine in the hedges?. Wild roses, too are there. There’s cowslips and there’s daisies, * And the pretty primrose too, And bluebells all a-glist’ning In the early morning dew. ’Tis a place in dear old Ireland I have tried to paint for you, Where Irish lips smile kindly And where Irish hearts are true. —Margaret T. Tubman. THE CATHOLIC PRAYER. The Rosary is the Catholic prayer in a remarkable way. It is a prayer for every person. The Pope in his prison in the Vatican, and the Breton fisherwoman, the proverbial example of utter simplicity; Windthorst facing Bismarck in the German Reichstag, the great Daniel O’Connell under the colonades of the English Parliament; the dear old granny that can no longer read even her heavy-print prayer--^hook; the innocent child going up to her First Holy Communion; the soldier boys in the trenches in the face of war’s hell; priests and religious and lay-people; learned and unlettered; — pray and prize their rosary. It is a prayer for every season. Christmas blends with the joyous mysteries; Lent with the sorrowful mysteries; Easter with the glorious mysteries. As the ecclesiastical year unrolls before our eyes the scenes of Our Lord’s life, so the rosary also takes you to Nazareth and Bethlehem, down through the gloom of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, into the glory of Easter and Heaven. HONOR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER. Among the great precepts Our Lord inculcated, He has set one: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” By this Commandment we are bound to show our parents due honor by giving them all respect, love, and obedience. God has placed them in authority over us, in order that we may honor our Creator, Himself in honoring them. To the fulfilment of this Commandment a promise is attached: “That thou, mayest be longlived in the land. which the Lord thy God shall give thee.” The same promise is re- < Heated in another part of the Bible in these * ‘ i r ords ; “He-that honoreth his father, shall enjoy a long life”; and again, “He that honoreth his mother is as one that layeth up a treasure.” (Eccles. III.) , Our Lord’s Example. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has . left us an example of-how we should observe

this Commandment, for He was obedient for ! many long years to Mary and Joseph. As * the Eternal Father has recompensed His * Son’s humility and obedience by exalting Him and giving Him a Name that is above 1 all names, so He will reward children when they obey their parents and strive manfully to observe all the precepts of His Holy law. No doubt, when children grow older they will desire to have much of their own way. They will succeed in this fight against evil if they follow the advice of their father and mother, who love them dearly and seek to 1 preserve them from injury and sorrow. . - Throughout all the ages of the world the noblest and wisest men were distinguished for the honor they gave their parents- and for their obedience to the restraint of duty and of law; and we should be desirous to be of their company rather than be reckoned among fools and criminals. The Holy Scripture says: “Cursed is he that honoreth not his father and mother.” (Dent, xxvii., 16.) A GREAT CHARITY. It is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead, for the reason given in holy Scripture, and which is that they may be released from their sins. It is surely a work of great charity to do for those souls what they cannot do for themselves, and to hasten the time when they shall have accomplished the period of their purification and shall be enabled to enjoy the beatific vision of God. It is wholesome for us to practice charity on all occasions, because the practice of charity is the very life-blood and soul of our religion. But it is wholesome for us in another sense, to pray for the souls of the faithful departed, because ’when we pray for them we are keeping our minds for a time from the things and interests of this life, and putting them on something that is not immediately concerned with our own direct benefit. Worldly Things. Our minds are all too worldly and are too likely to dwell on the things of this life as the only realities; the things that we can see and hear and touch and taste and smell and hold and possess. To keep our minds occupied with these things is the essence of worldliuess, and it is almost impossible to keep our minds from them, both because they are necessary to our life here below, and because, as it were, they force themselves on our senses in such a way that we cannot avoid them. It is not thus with the things of the soul. They have not the same ways of acting on our souls, because they belong to the unseen and the intangible; they do not belong to the things of sight, but to the things of faith. The things of faith are the deeper things of life, and the more important, but we must actually exert our minds in order 1 to see them. •We must in a way get beyond our senses and the immediate demands of our animal body, before we can perceive them at all. ; It is, therefore, very wholesome for us to ‘ keep before our own minds, a thing that

requires us to exercise our faith in the unseen and get away from guiding .ourselves solely by sight. It is so much easier to be charitable to a person whom we see with our eyes to be suffering, because mere human pity helps us to be charitable. But we can only see the souls in Purgatory suffer by the eyes of faith, and to be charitable to them is a pure act of supernatural charity. LOVE OF SOULS. Is modern Catholic woman looking for fields of activity and for worlds to conquer? Here is at least one world laid open for her enterprise, and nobly has she already acquitted herself of the great task set before her. The missionary activities of the Church, still show us that women are superior to men in the zeal and numbers which they give to the advancement of God’s cause. At home, there are many more Sisters than priests, and in the foreign mission fields there are about three times more women engaged in missionary work than men. Woman’s love of souls makes her rise above her natural timidity. She faces the cold of the Arctic North, and the heat of Equatorial Africa. She lives among the Eskimos, the Tartars, the Zulus, and the Kaffirs, with this one object in view, “to win all to Christ.” In the most remote corners of the earth, the missionary Sister may be found, busy in works of charity, in school, or orphanage, or leper asylum. At home, too, the women can teach men a lesson in mission co-operation. In almost every parish and diocese the majority of promoters of the Propagation of the Faith are women. But for their zeal the society could not exist. The sacrifices they make enable many a missionary to live. If all Catholic women sensed what a happiness it is to work for the missions, to help in gathering in the harvest white for the reaping, “a new era would dawn for Christianity.”—The Pilot (Boston). “JOE.” There were plans of mischief brewing, I saw, but gave no sign, For I wanted to test the mettle Of this little knight of mine, “Of course, you must come and help us, For we all depend on Joe,” The boys said; and I waited For his answer —“Yes” or “No.” He stood and thought for a moment, I read his heart like a book, For that the battle that he was fighting Was told in his earnest. look. Then to his waiting playmates Outspoke my loyal knight—“No, boys, I cannot go with you, For I know it wouldn’t be right.” How proud was 1. of my hero, As I knelt .by his little bed, And gave him the bedtime kisses, ' t And the good-night words were said!.. True to his Lord and manhood, May he stand in the world’s fierce fight, And shun each unworthy action, " Because it “wouldn’t be right,”