Alceste

“ Come, little sir, don't take such lofty airs.
ALCESTE
Faith, mighty sir, I’ll take what airs I please.
PHILINTE, stepping between them
Eh! sirs, you go too far. Let be, I pray you.
ORONTE
I’m in the wrong, of course; I’ll quit the field.
I am your servant, sir, with all my heart.
ALCESTE
And I, sir, am your most obedient servant.
SCENE III
PHILINTE, ALCESTE
PHILINTE
Well, now you see! For being too sincere,
You’ve got an ugly quarrel on your hands;
I saw Oronte, on purpose to be flattered . . .
ALCESTE
Don't speak to me.
PHILINTE
But ...
ALCESTE
I renounce mankind.
PHILINTE
'Tis too much. ”

“ Those eyes were not dead yet.
"It won't do," said Lord Alcester.
The girl laughed bitterly. "I thought you might like to look at your work," she said. "You were the ruin of me five years ago."
"My good woman," said Lord Alcester. "If I stopped in Piccadilly to talk to all the women who think I have been the ruin of them, it would stop the traffic. Let me go, please."
She still clung to his arm. "Just half a moment," she said. "The work-girl whom you gave a pretty dress to, and a string of pearls, and a fan that once belonged to a princess. You remember?"
"Good God! " said Lord Alcester. ”

“ Montausier had bought the governorship of Saintonge and Angoumois, and became a Roman Catholic before his marriage. During the Fronde he remained, in spite of personal grievances against Mazarin, faithful to the Crown. On the conclusion of peace in 1653 the marquis, who had been severely wounded in 1652, obtained high favour at court in spite of the roughness of his manners and the general austerity which made the Parisian public recognize him as the original of Alceste in the Misanthrope. ”

“ A good action, as the proverb says, always meets with its reward; you gave me alms yesterday, and that has determined me to get you a place, which shall be soon done, with a blessing on my endeavors. I know an old Dominican, by name Father Alexis, a holy monk, a ghostly confessor. I have the honor to do all his little odd jobs, performing my task with so much discretion and good faith, that he always lends his interest to me and my friends. I have spoken to him about you, and in such terms as to prepossess him in your favor. ”

“ Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us; For Thou alone art holy. Thou only, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father. Amen.” This is the earliest record of it, but it is also found in the Alexandrine Codex. Alcuin attributes the authorship of the Latin form—the Gloria in Excelsis—to St Hilary of Poitiers (died 367) . The quotations from the hymn in the pseudo-Athanasian De Virginitate, and in Chrysostom (Hom. 69 in Matth.) ”

“ Alethes, a priest of the Sun, surrounded by every luxury that earth can lay at the feet of its god, feels, like all before him, that the most glorious life is sad without a companion to sympathize with his feelings and share in his enjoyments. ”

“ The "Except ye be converted" of the Divine Teacher held as real a place in the creed of Clémence as in that of any Protestant; nor, under the circumstances, could the Catholic belief in sacramentary grace interpose its soft, misleading glamour between her eyes and the truth. So her soul went down to the depths of a sorrow without hope; depths that few are strong enough to sound, and those who do sound them seldom tell what they find there. Some, it may be, bring back from thence secrets of divine love, "treasures of the deep that lieth under," worth all they have passed through to learn them. ”

“ Late Greek writers ascribe the decease of Alcestis to her having nursed her husband through a fever. She takes it herself, and is laid out for dead, when a physician, sharper-sighted than the rest of the faculty at the time, discovers that the vital spark is not extinct, and cheats death of his foe by remedies unluckily not mentioned for the benefit of posterity. ”

“ But now that they would serve him in his need, he pretended that he had always laid them up in his heart, and intended to abide by them.
"Young man," he said, "they who would woo my child Alcestis must woo and win her as the gods have ordered. When she lay in her mother's arms, there came a prophet and stood over her and spake, saying, 'Child of evil fortune! whosoever thou weddest, woe to thy wedded life, sobeit thy lord come not to bear thee away in a chariot drawn by a lion and a boar.' Thus spake the prophet of the gods, and his words shall surely come to pass. ”

“ The Albigensian solution was that Christ was created sinless man in heaven, and in His perfect nature of body, soul and spirit was born in the Virgin Mary. The one passage of Scripture which was read at their distinctive service—the Consolamentum—was St. John i. 1-17, where the order is "the Word was made flesh and (then) dwelt among us." The two clauses in the Creed, therefore, should be reversed and run: "He was made man, and came down from heaven." It followed from this real humanity of Christ that His suffering was real and not Docetic. ”

“ It was fitting enough that Alcuin should have remonstrated with those who studied their Virgil to the exclusion or neglect of the Bible ; but the fact proves nothing as to his general regard for letters, and the testimony of his writings and acts is more eloquent than such private admonitions. Alcuin and the Scots, we take it, laboured, with whatever transient jealousies, in a common love of learning. The old temper which regarded religion and letters as irreconcilable sqq. opposites, was clean forgotten ; the spirit is caught up by the rulers of the church themselves ”

“ But that which must weigh above all other considerations, with warriors and Christian heroes, is that Alexius is willing to swear, on the holy Gospel, to put an end to the heresy which now defiles the empire of the East, and to subject the Greek Church to the Church of Rome. So many advantages being attached to the enterprise proposed to you, we feel confident you will listen to our prayers. We see in Holy Writ that God sometimes employed men the most simple and the most obscure to make known his will to his chosen people ”

“ Savitri, the Indian Alcestis
There are few of the Greek stories that we love so much as that of Alcestis. Every one remembers how Admetus, her husband, was under a curse, and unless one could be found to die for him, he must, on a certain day, give up his life and betake himself to the dark realms of Pluto. And no one can forget that there was one to whom death seemed a little thing to suffer, if only thereby Admetus might be saved. ”

“ O Mary! conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee! By thy most Holy Virginity and thy Immaculate Conception, O most Holy Virgin! obtain for us purity of heart and body, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen!"
But this does not satisfy the prelate's piety; he also entreats the Sovereign Pontiff that the belief in the Immaculate Conception be expressed in the litanies of the Blessed Virgin. The Holy Father grants this petition, and permits the addition to the litany of the invocation: "Regina sine labe concepta, ora pro nobis." ”

“ In the midst of the covering and veil, where the priests were allowed to enter, was situated the altar of incense, the symbol of the earth placed in the middle of this universe; and from it came the fumes of incense. And that place intermediate between the inner veil, where the high priest alone, on prescribed days, was permitted to enter, and the external court which surrounded it—free to all the Hebrews—was, they say, the middlemost point of heaven and earth. But others say it was the symbol of the intellectual world, and that of sense. ”

“ Many that are still sound in body testify the same. To more persons, however, this brightness appeared in the same manner, not on that but on a former night, namely, on the night of the first Sunday after the Ascension.
“At that same hour there was displayed to a certain hermit in Italy the army of the heavenly deacons, sounding forth the ineffable praises of Christ in the air; in the midst of whom Alchuin [71] stood, clothed with a most splendid dalmatic, entering with them into heaven to minister with perennial joy to the Eternal Pontiff. ”

“ All that he received he gave to the poor, even to clothes from his back, and his sequestrated property consisted solely of pious books, rosaries and objects of devotion. He speedily gathered around him disciples, prominent among whom was Fray Bartolomé de Alcalá, vicar of the Geronimite convent; the number of their penitents, all espirituales was large, and these usually partook of the sacrament daily or oftener; many of them had revelations and were consulted by the pious as being in direct relations with God, from whom they received answers to petitions. ”

“ West finds evidence that as early as the time of Alcuin, the monks trained by him or in his schools, wrote from dictation. “In the intervals between the hours of prayer and the observance of the round of cloister life, come hours for the copying of books under the presiding direction of Alcuin. The young monks file into the scriptorium and one of them is given the precious parchment volume containing a work of Bede or Isidore or Augustine, or else some portion of the Latin Scriptures, or even a heathen author. ”

“ Flowing from God’s heart of love first came the privilege of Nazarite consecration; and then, by the act of consecration, His loving heart is so gladdened that it further overflows in these rich benedictions.
Looking, on the other hand, at the human side, we may learn that the soul which is fully consecrated always receives the blessing of God. Where that blessing is not enjoyed, there is always something unreal or defective in the consecration. ”

“ There is surely no harm in this pleasant drama; for the devil ought not to have had the boy. But there follow quite different "Miracles" of Our Lady. The next one is typical. An abbess sins with her clerk. Her condition is observed by the nuns, and the bishop is informed. The abbess casts herself on the mercy of Mary, who miraculously delivers her of the child and gives it into the care of a holy hermit. An examination of the abbess takes place, after which she is declared innocent by the bishop. But she is at once moved to repentance, and confesses all to him. ”

“ Their surprise was heightened, when they witnessed a religious rite which reminded them of the Christian communion. On these occasions, an image of the tutelary deity of the Aztecs was made of flour of maize mixed with blood, and, after consecration by the priests, was distributed among the people, who, as they ate it, 'showed signs of humiliation and sorrow, declaring it was the flesh of the Deity.' How could the Roman Catholic fail to recognize the awful ceremony of the eucharist? . . . . . With the same feeling they witnessed another ceremony, that of the Aztec baptism. ”

“ When Joseph, the bishop of the city of Tours, a man good and beloved of God, heard that the blessed Alchuin was dead, he came to the spot immediately with his clerks, and washing Alchuin’s eyes with his tears, he kissed him frequently. He advised, moreover, using wise counsel, that he should not be buried outside, in the place where the father himself had willed, but with all possible honour within the basilica of the holy Martin, that the bodies of those whose souls are united in heaven should on earth lie in one home. ”

“ Show yourself gentle and humble to the better; hard and rigid to the proud; all things to all men that you may gain all. Have in your hands honey and wormwood; let each man eat which he chooses. Let him who would live on pious preaching have the honey; let him who needs hard invective drink of the wormwood, but so that he may hope for the honey of pardon to follow, if the blush and confusion of penitence go before.”
[166]
Alcuin would have been an excellent man to have as preacher at the consecration of a bishop. ”

“ Alcuin’s letter to the king proceeds:—
“It is now nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have dwelt in this most fair land, and never before has such a horror appeared in Britain as we now have suffered at the hands of pagans. And it was not supposed that such an attack from the sea was possible. [133] Behold, the church of the holy Cuthbert is deluged with the blood of the priests of God, is spoiled of all its ornaments; the place more venerable than any other in Britain is given as a prey to pagan races. ”

“ Angel of mighty Counsel brought down to us, that we might be justified before God. Why then does Auxentius hold that the faithful, those baptized in the name of the Trinity are to be re-baptized, when the Apostle says, Eph. iv. 5. One faith, one baptism; why does he say that he is the adversary of men, not of Christ, seeing that he spurns the counsel of God, and contemns that Baptism which Christ gave us for the redemption of our sins. ”

“ Very soon he publishes these in a circular of December 15th, 1836, on the occasion of consecrating the parish church of Our Lady of Loretto. It is a fact we are jealous of confirming, and the knowledge of which we desire should reach even the most remote parts of the Catholic world; in our diocese this devotion has become more deeply rooted with time; the afflicted still affirm, increase and extend its marvelous progress; signal favors, graces of healing, preservation [70] and salvation seem to multiply among us, in proportion as we implore the tender pity of Mary conceived without sin. ”

“ At this time, always absolutely sincere, incapable in anything of being carried away by feeling, Alexandrine thought of entering a convent; she relinquished the idea, but resolved to live in poverty for the poor. From this day she dreams no more, she writes no more, she acts. Her love expresses itself in joyous accents, in words of heavenly sweetness, accompanied by austere virtues. It is the miracle and the triumph of true piety, What is this? demands a disdainful world. ”