angel’s robe has swept past our own garments a moment ago.
And as this scene fades away, while the silence is again broken by the sweet song of home, Venite adoremus! we see another and a last picture dawning from the gray mist of memory.
Not far from the old home where the first Midnight Mass of our childhood entranced our imagination is another house—a home, too, in some sense, yet not the home that the mother hallowed in the dear, olden days, for now she is only present in the spirit, and she never even saw the first Christmas snows in this new and stately hall.
But a church, fair and carven, stands above her grave, and her loving heart is the first stone, the foundation-stone of the new shrine. Close above her resting-place is the altar, and close below, the organ. There Christmas is enthroned again, the Venite adoremus echoes once more through wreathed arches and festooned pillars; there again a small household and a few newly-converted children of the faith of old England kneel in silent prayer, and mingle thoughts of the foundress of the church with those of the new-born King whose praises, whose Gloria, she is now singing in heaven. Thus the soul-stirring Christmas hymn links the past with the present, the memories of foreign lands with the dear thoughts of home, and binds them together as a sheaf of golden straw to lay in the crib of the Babe of Bethlehem.
Venite adoremus! It has been sung to our infancy when the nurse
rocked the cradle where slept the first-born; it has cheered our early childhood when the young mother-voice taught it to us at the Christmas fireside; it has thrilled our heart in youth when, far from the old home, we have listened to its solemn, familiar strains; it will stir a chord of memory through each succeeding year as our early associations grow dim and our path waxes more lonely; it will breathe a sweet farewell and echo in our ears on our very deathbed, linking the thought of our first earthly home to that of our expected eternal one in the bosom of our Jesus and the arms of our new-found, glorified Mother.
Those who are dear to us on earth, those who grew up round the same hearth, and knelt peacefully at the same father’s knee, and held his hand the day the mother-angel winged her way to her God, can never forget the Venite adoremus, the Christmas pledge of undying love and indissoluble union, which they learned and sang together for long, long years of joy, nor can they dream that, however far apart, that hymn does not make the heart beat and the eye grow dim with tears even as in the days of old; while—O happier thought even than that!—they never can forget that as on earth, so will it be hereafter, that the crown of song will lack no jewel, will miss no note, of all that once were in it, and that for ever and for ever one will be the undiminished chorus of father and mother, brethren and sisters, in the halls of the “Everlasting Christmas.” Venite Adoremus! venite adoremus Dominum!
MR. CLARKE’s LIVES OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS.[118]
“Like stars to their appointed heights they climb.”—Shelley.