[116] See Macaulay’s Essay on History.
[117] Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Latest English Historian. By James F. Meline. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
VENITE ADOREMUS.
It comes to us, as a messenger of peace and love, a memory of home, a voice of the past, with the echo of unforgotten joys, and the refrain of ever-silent sorrows; with the sacred thoughts of that most touching feast, Christmas, of that most tender mystery, the Infant-God; with the human thoughts of friends gone from us and loved ones far away—Venite adoremus!
It conjures up pictures before us of a happy, ignorant childhood, peaceful as a meadow-brook—a young life passed amid smiling hills, and fruitful vales, and woods where the honeysuckle twines round the old gnarled hawthorns, and the oak spreads its green, trembling tent over carpets of wild hyacinths. There, before the mind’s eye, rises the vision of a house, gray and picturesque, a broad, lovely terrace, and oriel windows looking down and beyond it into a sloping orchard. At the back, leaning on the grassy bank, dotted by firs and elms, lilacs and guelder-rose, and fragrant syringa and gold-blooming laburnum, stands a gaunt old tower, clad in dark purple-berried ivy—a ghost tower, the haunt of mystery, overshadowing the little cloister and the tall, gray roof of the chapel. But it is winter, and I have been forgetting that the Venite adoremus is a snow-flower of devotion, a “Christmas rose,” not a red June rose, regal in its dusky, velvety mantle of richest, warmest color; for now we hear the chant of the holy Christmas song, and the tapers are lighted on the stone-carved altar, where, on each side of the niched reredos, white angels kneel with their eternal torches, ever still, ever adoring, like some heavenly exile bound to earth’s temples by a divine spell, of which art holds the key. Above, the Annunciation is blazoned forth on the pictured window; but you cannot see it now, the night blots out its fairness. Angels, again, on the frescoed wall, bear scrolls, whose silent voices chant a ceaseless Gloria to the Babe in the tabernacle—Laudamus te, Benedicimus te, Adoramus te, Glorificamus te—and the rest of the narrow chapel is dark and voiceless, save where a taper glimmers on the desk of the little, humble harmonium, round which stand reverentially the few singers, whose only guerdon is the smile of the unseen but not unfelt God. Dark and dusky red are
the hangings that tapestry the wall, bearing over their surface thick growths of the white fleur-de-lis; while above the simple benches of stained wood, at the back, rises a long, dark gallery. It was there I heard the first Midnight Mass I ever heard in my life.
Venite adoremus! It brings back visions of a mother’s patient, doting love; of a gathering of friends; of pleasant, hushed talk of ghosts and spectres; of long, dark corridors, where the wind moaned like a soul in pain; of oriel windows, many-paned, through which came the distant sound of young owls hooting mournfully in the snow-covered plantations.
How kind a mother the church is! Are not all her feasts as many days of remembrances given to the past joys of home? Are they not a faultless calendar of our hopes and fears for years past? When the children, with earnest, unsuspicious gravity, debated upon the arrangements of the “crib,” what excitement! what interest! When the parents and the old retainers closed one room in mysterious silence, and decorated the glittering Christmas-tree, what wonderment! what whisperings!—and on the revelation, what delight! When piles of blankets and warm clothing were distributed among the poor, what curiosity to see which child got the petticoat Eleanor hemmed, or the jacket Frances put together!
All this is in the voice of the Venite adoremus as it sounds faintly now through a half-opened door, a Sunday surprise in a house hardly given to much solemnity—a house far away from the old gabled homestead and the snow-veiled chapel-roof.