A SERMON OF FATHER BURKES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 196, 5 January 1877, Page 14

A SERMON OF FATHER BURKES.

The reappearance of Father Tom Burke, the great Dominican, in ' the pulpit at Marlborough-street Cathedral on Sunday was not the least joyous feature of an occasion which, perhaps, is the most splendid in the annals of the Irish Church. The preacher, we are told, surpassed the sublimest efforts of his former career, and, stimulated by the august presence of a Cardinal who comes to Ireland straight from the centre of Catholicity, by the complimentary approval of the Cardinalatial head of the Irish. Church, by the venerable Archbishop whose very name is a sermon, and by the evident sympathy of the congregation which sat at his feet, Father Burke sent forth a torrent of eloquence which bore unresistingly before it the hearts and minds and souls of his entranced auditory. On Thursday, in the new Church of the College of the Holy Cross, Clonliffe, the Archbishop of Cashel delivered a discourse which rivals the strength and beauty of his famous panegyric of Daniel O'Connell — a sermon which astonished the correspondents of the London dailies, and won the admiration of all. In a different style the popular Dominican sent forth his fervid soul in impassioned oratory on yesterday, and thus were furnished within a few days two discourses which shall live as long as the English language, and which prove that Irish eloquence is no lost heritage, bnt lives in Ireland's Church. The number of people present on on this great occasion is estimated at 8000, and so great were the crush and heat that several bad to leave, and some fainted. Father Burke selected as his subject the seven dolors of the Blessed Virgin. He said that the present was an occasion of great joy when they had assembled to greet one of the greatest and highest personages in the Catholic Church. The Cardinal of Holy Church was come to them directly from the side and under the right hand of the Vicar of Christ, the holy, the immortal, and martyr Pope Pius IX. The occasion was joyful because of the consideration and esteem which it had revealed in the heart of the Sovereign Pontiff for Ireland and the Irish Church and people. Ireland had her type of the flight into Egypt when persecution and sorrow came down upon her, and year after year she beheld the best and highest and noblest of her sons go out and write her name in glory upon the pages of many a nation, and proclaim her greatness on many a well-fought field mostly in the cause of justice and of God. In the year 1684 the people of Dublin went out with streaming eyes and ■ broken hearts to see an Archbishop of Cashel dragged through the streets of the city to be tortured in St. Stephen's Green with a a fiendish ingenuity surpassing the Turkish atrocieties which were I horrifying Europe, and when her cathedrals and shrines were dc- ', molished, and a strange, a repulsive, a false, and a foreign worship was brought into her holy places, Ireland reached the summit of her Calvary. When God prepared these trials for his people he gave them as a safeguard his holy Church, with its head his Vicar on earth, and a centre, which was Some ; and in all their sufferings Ireland's people and Ireland's Church still turned to the seven immortal hills, and still remained constant to Rome. The Good Friday of our history was past, that gloomy Easter Saturday is gone, and the sun of our Easter has risen over the nation. The fervid genius of Ireland is now about to assert itself again throughout the whole world. The crown of our glory is coining back as the

well earned reward of a people who had known how to suffer with God and for God. Therefore they had come to pledge their returning glories to the envoy of Pius with the same welcome as their ancestors accorded to the envoy of Pope Celestine.— 4 Ulster Examiner.'