‘Once only in the year, yet once, does the world which we see show forth its hidden powers, and in a manner manifest itself. Then the leaves come out, and the blossoms on the fruit trees, and flowers; and the grass and corn spring up. There is a sudden rush and burst outwardly of that hidden life which God has lodged in the material world. Well, that shows you, as by a sample, what it can do at God's command, when He gives the word. This earth, which now buds forth in leaves and blossoms, will one day burst forth into a new world of light and glory, in which, we shall see Saints and Angels dwelling. Who would think, except from his experience of former springs all through his life, who could conceive two or three months before, that it was possible that the face of nature, which then seemed so lifeless, should become so splendid and varied?...
 
So it is with the coming of that Eternal Spring, for which all Christians are waiting. Come it will, though it delay; yet though it tarry, let us wait for it, “because it will surely come, it will not tarry”. Therefore we say day by day, “Thy kingdom come”; which means, - O Lord, show Thyself; manifest Thyself; Thou that sittest between the cherubim, show Thyself; stir up Thy strength and come and help us. The earth that we see does not satisfy us; it is but a beginning; it is but a promise of something beyond it; even when it is gayest, with all its blossoms on, and shows most touchingly what lies hid in it, yet it is not enough. We know much more lies hid in it than we see. A world of Saints and Angels, a glorious world, the palace of God, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the heavenly Jerusalem, the throne of God and Christ, all these wonders, everlasting, all-precious, mysterious, and incomprehensible, lie hid in what we see. What we see is the outward shell of an eternal kingdom; and on that kingdom we fix the eyes of our faith.
 
Shine forth, O Lord, as when on Thy nativity Thine Angels visited the shepherds; let Thy glory blossom forth as bloom and foliage on the trees; change with Thy mighty power this visible world into that diviner world, which as yet we see not; destroy what we see, that it may pass and be transformed into what we believe. Bright as is the sun, and the sky, and the clouds; green as are the leaves and the fields; sweet as is the singing of the birds; we know that they are not all, and we will not take up with a part for the whole. They proceed from a centre of love and goodness, which is God Himself; but they are not His fulness; they speak of heaven, but they are not heaven; they are but as stray beams and dim reflections of His Image; they are but crumbs from the table. We are looking for the coming of the day of God, when all this outward world, fair though it be, shall perish; when the heavens shall be burnt, and the earth melt away. We can bear the loss, for we know it will be but the removing of a veil. We know that to remove the world which is seen, will be the manifestation of the world which is not seen. We know that what we see is as a screen hiding from us God and Christ, and His Saints and Angels. And we earnestly desire and pray for the dissolution of all that we see, from our longing after that which we do not see’.

St John Henry Newman, 1801-1890

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov’d imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod’s jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

​John Donne, 1572-1631

‘It is a psychological fact that baffled wrath and baffled lust produce cruelty, but the whole revelation of love is that love is never baffled and has its own way of meeting and over-ruling the cruelties of sin. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents was due to the baffled wrath of Herod. But the same love that could conquer amidst all the cruelties of Calvary could conquer in ways that we may not understand, but can wholly trust, in this incident, in which the coming of the mysterious Child to His Maiden Mother brought such pain to so many little children and to so many mothers who were contemporaries of Blessed Mary.
 
The Church does not shirk stating the hard facts of life, but her liturgy twines the gold thread of faith, hope, and love amidst all the dark purple of her tapestries which portray for us life’s tragedies. The Festival of the Holy Innocents knits all child life to the sanctity of fellowship with the Holy Child, and the sufferings of little children are made to rank through this solemnity with the martyrdom of saints.
 
The fact that our Lord became a child must teach us that we cannot possibly think too sacredly of the responsibility of every kind of contact with child life, and in all our sadness at the knowledge of cruelties that have been done to the innocent and helpless we can comfort ourselves that there is a festival of the Holy Innocents. In the beautiful words of Baruch which form part of the proper lesson for the day we can say: “Be of good cheer, O my children… for my hope is in the Everlasting that He will save you… God will give you to me again with joy and gladness for ever”’.
 
Father Andrew SDC, 1869-1946

​Saint of the Sacred Heart
Sweet Teacher of the Word,
Partner of Mary’s woes,
And favourite of thy Lord!
 
Thou to whom grace was given
To stand where Peter fell;
Whose heart could brook the Cross
Of Him it loved so well!
 
We know not all thy gifts;
But this Christ bids us see,
That He who so loved all
Found more to love in thee.
 
Dear Saint! I stand far off,
With vilest sins opprest;
Oh may I dare, like thee,
To lean upon His breast?
 
His touch could heal the sick,
His voice could raise the dead!
Oh that my soul might be
Where He allows thy head.
 
The gifts He gave to thee
He gave thee to impart;
And I, too, claim with thee
His Mother and His Heart.
 
Ah teach me, then, dear Saint!
The secrets Christ taught thee,
The beatings of His Heart,
And how it beat for thee.
 
Frederick Faber, Cong. Orat., 1814-1863

Come, we shepherds, whose blest sight
Hath met Love’s noon in nature’s night;
Come, lift we up our loftier song,
And wake the sun that lies too long.

Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the noble infant lay:
The Babe looked up and showed his face;
In spite of darkness, it was day:-
It was the Day, Sweet! and did rise
Not from the east, but from thine eyes.

We saw thee in thy balmy nest,
Young dawn of our eternal day;
We saw thine eyes break from their east
And chase the trembling shades away;
We saw thee (and we bless the sight),
We saw thee by thine own sweet light.

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span!
Summer in Winter! Day in night!
Heaven in earth! and God in man!
Great Little One, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.

Richard Crashaw, c.1613-1649

Before the paling of the stars,
Before the winter morn,
Before the earliest cock crow,
Jesus Christ was born:
Born in a stable,
Cradled in a manger,
In the world his hands had made
Born a stranger.

Priest and king lay fast asleep
In Jerusalem;
Young and old lay fast asleep
In crowded Bethlehem;
Saint and angel, ox and ass,
Kept a watch together
Before the Christmas daybreak
In the winter weather.

Jesus on his mother’s breast
In the stable cold,
Spotless lamb of God was he,
Shepherd of the fold:
Let us kneel with Mary maid,
With Joseph bent and hoary,
With saint and angel, ox and ass,
To hail the King of Glory.

Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894

‘As in November we are reminded that we are souls, that spiritual values matter most, that All Souls were meant to be All Saints, so in December it is brought home to us that we have hearts, and that we can do much more by kindness than by force. It was in December with its chill and gloom that the Christ Child came.
 
After all, if the Wise Men who went across the wilderness had only found a purely human child, they would have found a mystery that it would have been worth going another journey to find the interpretation of. If they had only found a flower, or a little bird with a beating heart, they would have found what would have left their wisdom wondering. As it was, they found the Mystery which gives the key to all other mysteries, they found the glory of God revealed in the face of the Christ Child.
 
Now we know that our common human life is a divine business, that a carpenter’s shop, sheep and shepherds, boats and rigging, cities and silences, may have just as much to do with God as even church bells and church services. So let us turn aside and see this great sight, a little Babe snuggled up against the blue gown of a little Mother, who croons to Him and plays peep-bo with Him, and then hushes Him to sleep in the warm cradling of her motherhood. Let us give Him by all means our complicated gifts, and then let us go away rich in the blessing of His simplicity’.
 
Father Andrew SDC, 1869-1946

‘Advent... draws us into a deeper and richer understanding of the fact that the Church is present everywhere, in every single action that she performs... Nowhere is this more forcefully expressed than in the famous Devotion XVII which John Donne, a seventeenth-century Dean of St Paul’s, wrote in a set of meditations during a period of serious illness in 1623, and which were published the year after. Illness - especially when it is potentially life-threatening - has a habit of underscoring what is important and identifying what is secondary. Life is never the same afterwards.

“Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The Church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptises a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another”.

To watch and wait for the “Root of Jesse” is another exercise in patience - not least a patience that enlarges our sympathies and our awareness of just how deeply we are united together by our actions and our prayers, our circumstances and our struggles’.

from Watching and Waiting: A Guide to the Celebration of Advent, 2007
by Kenneth Stevenson (1949-2011), Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth, 1995-2009

‘“O Wisdom”, prays the Church late every Advent. In words inspired by the opening words of the great Hymn to Wisdom well into the Book of Ecclesiasticus, which forms the centrepiece of that late Jewish work, we find ourselves looking at the origin and nature of Wisdom... [W]e invoke Wisdom in terms of her ubiquity – she is everywhere, as the Wisdom of Solomon teaches… Whereas Ecclesiasticus on its on its own terms sees wisdom as a gift from God, the Book of Wisdom goes one stage further in viewing her as a kind of person separate from but derived from God. No wonder Wisdom came to be applied by early Christian writers to the third person of the Holy Spirit… But here she is applied to God himself: not specifically at the Christmas festival, but in the mystery of Advent. The Book of Wisdom teaches that a wise king prays for this divine attribute, not because she is everywhere, but because she comes from God and is of God; her origins explain her ubiquity, not the other way round’.
 
from Watching and Waiting: A Guide to the Celebration of Advent, 2007
by Kenneth Stevenson (1949-2011), Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth, 1995-2009

‘On this Third Sunday of Advent, known as “Gaudete” Sunday, the Liturgy invites us to rejoice. Advent is a season of commitment and conversion in preparation for the Lord’s coming, but today the Church gives us a foretaste of the joy of Christmas that is now at hand. In fact Advent is also a time of joy, because in this season expectation of the Lord’s coming is awakened in the hearts of believers; looking forward to a person’s arrival is always a cause of joy. 
 
…The joy the Lord communicates to us must encounter grateful love in us. Indeed, our joy is complete when we recognise his mercy, when we become attentive to the signs of his goodness, if we truly perceive that this goodness of God is with us and thank him for all that we receive from him every day. Those who selfishly welcome God’s gifts fail to find true joy; but the hearts of those who make God’s gifts an opportunity to love him with sincere gratitude and to communicate his love to others, are truly filled with joy. Let us remember that!’

Pope Benedict XVI, 16 December 2012

​O Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee: grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight; who livest and reignest with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. - Collect for Gaudete Sunday, Divine Worship: The Missal.

Our second Rorate Mass of the Advent season was offered at 7 am this morning, the above photo shows the church, just after 6.35 am, ready to receive the faithful and to honour Our Blessed Lady. The Alma Redemptoris Mater was sung following the Mass.

‘The Church has willed – and what is more just? – that the liturgy of Advent should be full of the thought of the Blessed Virgin; she continually makes us sing the divine fruitfulness of the Virgin, a wonderful fruitfulness that throws nature into astonishment…
 
There is something truly ineffable about the Virgin during those days. She lived in an intimate union with the Infant God whom she bore within her. The soul of Jesus was, by the Beatific Vision, plunged in the divine light; this light radiated upon his Mother. In the sight of the angels, Mary truly appeared as “a woman clothed with the sun”, all irradiated with heavenly brightness, all shining with the light of her Son…
 
Let us humbly ask her to make us enter into her dispositions. She will hear our prayer; we shall have the immense joy of seeing Christ born anew within our hearts by the communication of a more abundant grace, and we shall be enabled, like the Virgin, although in a lesser measure, to understand the truth of these words of St John: “The Word was God… and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory… full of grace and truth… And of his fulness we have all received, grace upon grace”’.

​Blessed Columba Marmion OSB, 1858-1923

‘Today’s feast can easily be harmonised with Advent themes. The very name Lucy pulsates with light, a living symbol amid the season’s darkness (the days are now the shortest of the year). As a wise virgin Lucy advances with a burning lamp to meet the Bridegroom. She typifies the Church and the soul now preparing their bridal robes for a Christmas marriage.
 
That the famous Sicilian martyr really lived may be deduced from the great popular veneration accorded her since most ancient times. The Acts detailing her sufferings, however, merit little credence. According to these she made a pilgrimage to Catonia with her mother, who suffered from haemorrhage, to venerate the body of St Agatha. After praying devoutly at the tomb, Agatha appeared to her in a dream and consoled her: “O virgin Lucy, why do you ask of me what you yourself can procure for your mother? For your faith too has come to her aid and therefore she has been cured. By your virginity you have indeed prepared for God a lovely dwelling”. And her mother actually was healed.
 
Immediately Lucy asked permission to remain a virgin and to distribute her future dowry among Christ’s poor. Child and mother returned to their native city of Syracuse, and Lucy proceeded to distribute the full proceeds from the sale of her property among the poor. When a young man, to whom Lucy’s parents had promised the virgin's hand against her will, had heard of the development, he reported her to the city prefect as a Christian. “Your words will be silenced”, the prefect said to her, “when the storm of blows falls upon you!” The virgin: “To God’s servants the right words will not be wanting, for the Holy Spirit speaks in us”. “Yes”, she continued, “all who live piously and chastely are temples of the Holy Spirit”. “Then”, he replied, “I shall order you put with prostitutes and the Holy Spirit will depart from you”. Lucy: “If I am dishonoured against my will, my chastity will secure for me a double crown of victory”.
 
Aflame with anger, the judge imposed the threatened order. But God made the virgin solidly firm in her place and no force could move her. “With such might did the Holy Spirit hold her firm that the virgin of Christ remained immovable”. Thereupon they poured heated pitch and resin over her: “I have begged my Lord Jesus Christ that this fire have no power over me. And in testimony of Him I have asked a postponement of my death”. When she had endured all this without the least injury, they pierced her throat with a sword. Thus she victoriously ended her martyrdom’.

​​from The Church’s Year of Grace, 1953, by Pius Parsch, 1884-1954

‘[St Damasus] occupied the Chair of Peter from 366 to 384. The Church had recently acquired liberty and now it was the task of the popes to develop her potentialities, especially in matters pertaining to divine worship. Damsus proved himself equal to the task. It is to his credit to have given the Church a good translation of the Sacred Scriptures. He called upon St Jerome to render the Bible into Latin, the version later called the Vulgate. This translation is still used in the liturgy. On his feast day Damsus tells us: Read the Bible zealously.
 
He was also much interested in the liturgy. He is said to have introduced the chant of the psalms into all the Roman churches; the singing was to be by alternating choirs with the “Glory be to the Father…” added at the end of each psalm. In imitation of a custom at Jerusalem he introduced the Alleluia into Sunday Masses. Pope Damsus also provided honourable burial for the bodies of many martyrs and composed inscriptions in verse for almost all of the then-known martyrs, thereby becoming their highly distinguished panegyrist. St Jerome said of him: “He was the virgin teacher of a virgin Church”. A splendid encomium for any priest’.

​from The Church’s Year of Grace, 1953, by Pius Parsch, 1884-1954

‘I believe that it is very important that we return as soon as possible to a common orientation, of priests and the faithful turned together in the same direction — Eastwards or at least towards the apse — to the Lord who comes, in those parts of the liturgical rites when we are addressing God. This practice is permitted by current liturgical legislation. It is perfectly legitimate in the modern rite. Indeed, I think it is a very important step in ensuring that in our celebrations the Lord is truly at the centre.
 
And so, dear Fathers, I ask you to implement this practice wherever possible, with prudence and with the necessary catechesis, certainly, but also with a pastor’s confidence that this is something good for the Church, something good for our people. Your own pastoral judgement will determine how and when this is possible, but perhaps beginning this on the first Sunday of Advent this year, when we attend ‘the Lord who will come’ and ‘who will not delay’ (see: Introit, Mass of Wednesday of the first week of Advent) may be a very good time to do this. Dear Fathers, we should listen again to the lament of God proclaimed by the prophet Jeremiah: “they have turned their back to me” (2.27). Let us turn again towards the Lord!
 
I would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers. Please facilitate this simple but profound reform in your dioceses, your cathedrals, your parishes and your seminaries’.

Robert, Cardinal Sarah
​Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments

‘The scripture saith not in vain, “Them that honour me, I will honour”. Neither was it a vain word that Eusebius delivered long ago, that piety towards God was the weapon and the only weapon that both preserved the Emperor Constantine’s person, and avenged him of his enemies. But now what piety without truth? What truth (what saving truth) without the word of God? What word of God (whereof we may be sure) without the scriptures? The scriptures we are commanded to search. They are commended that search and study them. They are reproved that were unskilful in them, or slow to believe them. They can make us wise unto salvation. If we be ignorant, they will instruct us; if out of the way, they will bring us home; if out of order, they will reform us; if in heaviness, comfort us; if dull, quicken us; if cold, inflame us. Take up and read, take up and read the scriptures (for unto them was the direction), it was said unto Saint Augustine by a supernatural voice, “Whatsoever is in the scriptures, believe me”, said the same Saint Augustine, “is high and divine; there is verily truth, and a doctrine most fit for the refreshing and renewing of men’s minds, and truly so tempered, that everyone may draw from thence, that which is sufficient for him, if he come to draw with a devout and pious mind as true religion requireth”. Thus Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome, “Love the scriptures, and wisdom will love thee”’.

from the preface in the first edition of the King James Bible​, 1611

The above photo was taken at 6.50 am this morning, just before the first of our Advent Rorate Masses was offered at St John Henry’s. One lady commented afterwards that the Mass - her first experience - was both beautiful and peaceful; a fitting honour for Our Lady in this season of expectation.

‘Desire and reformation of life are human factors; God’s advent through grace is intrinsically divine. Here Mary is the sublime model. She desired the kingdom of God and based her life on the words “I am the handmaid of the Lord”. Then came the great moment when God made her His dwelling place. She hears the greeting, “Hail, full of grace...” With open heart she receives God; her soul becomes His kingdom in all its fulness. Again she knows of nothing to say but “I am the handmaid of the Lord”. This brought Christmas to her heart.

Her example must be our perpetual goal on earth. We must ever be ready and willing to receive the kingdom of God within ourselves as opportunities present themselves. Baptism was our first Christmas, and every Eucharistic Sacrifice is Christmas repeated. The feasts of the Church’s liturgical year are days of grace, days of the kingdom of God. Maintain a calm, reverent, and recollected attitude so as not to disturb God’s holy stirrings within you’.

​from The Church’s Year of Grace, 1953, by Pius Parsch, 1884-1954

O God, who didst will that thy Word should take flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the message of an Angel: grant that we thy suppliants, who believe her to be in very deed the Mother of God, may be aided by her intercession with thee; through the same Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. - Collect for the Mass of Saint Mary: Advent to Christmas, Divine Worship: The Missal.

​‘This season, when the Church anticipates and prepares for the tolling out of the old and the ringing in of the new secular year, is surely a time for facing ultimate realities. The four words, death, judgement, hell, and heaven, stand for four great mysteries, about which we ought to arrive at a conclusion as well as we can. Death is a fact, and it is just as well to face facts.
 
What is death? When life is withdrawn from the material body, the material envelope in which it mysteriously swells, we say that that is death. But science teaches us very clearly that matter cannot be destroyed: it can only be redistributed. Even when anything is burnt, it is not destroyed but merely reduced to its ultimate elements. If matter cannot be destroyed, it would be unreasonable to think that spirit can be destroyed.
 
In our incarnate state in this life we have a material body which subserves the purpose of our self-expression here. We can trust God, Who has given to us a material body for this stage of our eternal life, to provide us with a spiritual body to subserve the purposes of our self-expression in that higher stage to which we believe that at death we pass.
 
Our holy religion, though it is pre-eminently a way of life, does face the fact of death. Its great central service is the remembrance and the showing forth of a death, and its chief symbol is the crucifix, which holds up to us death – death revealing love, and love revealing death as sacrifice and prayer. Our religion interprets for us the fact of life, and gives us the truest philosophy about the fact of death’.

Father Andrew SDC, 1869-1946

‘Today the Church begins the fast of the Quattuor Tempora, or as we call it, of the Ember Days. As we have seen, this observance is not peculiar to the Advent Liturgy; it is one which has been fixed for each of the four seasons of the ecclesiastical year. The intentions which the Church has in the fast of the Ember Days are the same as those of the Synagogue - namely, to consecrate to God by penance the four seasons of the year. The Ember Days in Advent are known in ecclesiastical antiquity as the fast of the tenth month (the ancient meaning of ‘December’); and St Leo, in one of his sermons on this fast, of which the Church has inserted a passage into the Office of the Third Sunday of Advent, tells us that a special fast was fixed for this time of the year, because the fruits of the earth had then all been gathered in, and that it behooved Christians to testify their gratitude to God by a sacrifice of abstinence - thus rendering themselves more worthy to approach God, the more they were detached from the love of created things. “For fasting,” adds the Holy Doctor, “has ever been the nourishment of virtue. Abstinence is the source of chaste thoughts, of wise resolutions, and of salutary counsel. By voluntary mortifications, the flesh dies to its concupiscence, and the spirit is renewed in virtue. But since fasting alone is not sufficient whereby to secure the soul's salvation, let us add to it works of mercy towards the poor. Let us make that which we retrench from indulgence, serve unto the exercise of virtue. Let the abstinence of him that fasts, become the meal of the poor man”.

Let us, the children of the Church, practice what is in our power of these admonitions; and since the actual discipline of Advent is so very mild, let us be so much the more fervent in fulfilling the precept of the fast of the Ember days. By these few exercises which are now required of us, let us keep up within ourselves the zeal of our forefathers for this holy Season of Advent. We must never forget that although the interior preparation is what is absolutely essential for our profiting by the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, yet this preparation could scarcely be real unless it manifested itself by the exterior practices of religion and penance’.

from The Liturgical Year by Dom Prosper Guéranger OSB, 1805-1875

A few snaps of today’s Litany and Solemn Mass for Advent Sunday at St John Henry’s. A perfect liturgy to begin our preparations for the two comings of Christ to which we look forward in this holy season. A number of visitors - always welcome - and great fellowship afterwards. 

‘Our journey sets out from God in our creation, and returns to God at the final judgement. As the bird rises from the earth to fly, and must some time return to the earth from which it rose; so God sends us forth to fly, and we must fall back into the hands of God at last. But God does not wait for the failure of our power and the expiry of our days to drop us back into his lap. He goes himself to meet us and everywhere confronts us. Where is the countenance which we must finally look in the eyes, and not be able to turn away our head? It smiles up at Mary from the cradle, it calls Peter from the nets, it looks on him with grief when he has denied his master. Our judge meets us at every step of our way, with forgiveness on his lips and succour in his hands. He offers us these things while there is yet time. Every day opportunity shortens, our scope for learning our Redeemer’s love is narrowed by twenty-four hours, and we come nearer to the end of our journey, when we shall fall into the hands of the living God, and touch the heart of the devouring fire’.

from The Crown of the Year, 1952, by Austin Farrer, 1904-1968