FATHER BURKE ON THE ROSARY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 196, 29 December 1876, Page 15

FATHER BURKE ON THE ROSARY.

The Rev. Thomas N. Burke, 0.P., preached at High Mass, in St. Saviour's Church, Dominick street, Dublin, on Sunday, the festival of the Holy Rosary. An hour before Mass commenced every seat in the church was taken possession of. The congregation blocked all the passages, and even crowded outside the doors. Father Burke confined himself to an eloquent exposition of the origin of the devotion of the Rosary. Speaking of the three great faculties of mind, heart, and will with which God has endowed man — intelligence, love, and freedom of action — he showed that in fervent prayer lies the highest exercise of those three attributes of man's intellectual and moral nature, ana that without it the subtlest powers of a sceptical philosophy will nob keep him from stumbling at the lightest temptation. Ihis led him to describe the Rosary as a form of prayer, specially exhibiting mercy and love to man, since it was miraculously communicated to St. Dominic in the height of the Albigenscaii heresy. He then described how, St. Dominic journeying from Spain into Prance, saw the bloodshed and misery surrounding his path, and how iv response to his prayer the form of a beautiful woman appeared to him, holdiug in her hand the chaplefc of beads that was destined by God to crush the Albigenseaus better even than the power of De Montfort's warriors -a sword more powerful than the sword of steel, a shield stouter than a shield of triple brass—the sword of the Spirit of God. Europe, thus saved by the Rosary, was once more in 1571 threatened to be overrun by the Mussulman. Pope Pius V. (who had been himself a Dominican friar) ordered the Roaary to be set in every house on the eve of the great battle of Lepanto, and iv Catholic Ireland, too, the prayer went up upon that day. The Turks were advancing proudly through the waves in their splendid galleys when the banner of the Rosary met and scattered their power to tho winds, and crippled that Turkish domination that is " the puzzle of modern civilisation." In Ireland the Rosary was no less fruitful of blessing. There a persecution as fierce — nay, more fierce than that of the Turks, strove to crush out Irish faith. But, according to the unwilling confession of a late writer in the ' Times/ as the English overturned Irish altars and confiscated Irish churches, every cabin in the land became a home of prayer. In every humble homestead the Rosary was recited, its mysteries alleviated the heaviest afflictions of tho people by teaching them to unite their sufferings with the Lord's and many a priest coming to the bedside of a dying peasant in times of famine and woe, and arriving a few moments too late, found the beads clasped in the dead man's haud. The preacher concluded with an eloquent exhortation to the practice of this sublime devotion.