eleven struggle all the more fiercely the nearer they come to their goal; so we, seeing the goal of our lives, our salvation, so much nearer and clearer, should be the more eager and vigilant in its attainment.
To these reasons of St. Paul for our spiritual awakening, I would venture to add a third. To-day is the first day — the dawn of the Ecclesiastical Year. To-day we begin to prepare for Christ's spiritual coming at Christmas. Now is the hour for us to rise from the sleep of sin, and relight the lamp of God's grace in our souls and lovingly keep vigil against the coming of Our Lord. As at His first coming the tidings of great joy were told only to the watching shepherds, and the star of hope shone only on the wakeful seers; so now none but those vigilant in the service of God can realize the full benefit of Christ's spiritual coming. Never was this call to awake more appropriate, or neglect of it more culpable, than now. As the brightness and heat of the sun grow less age by age, so does faith grow dim and charity lose its ardor, and our souls, like ice-bound explorers benumbed with cold, sink into the fatal sleep of death. Hence, we are inclined even more than the people of St. Paul's time, to forget God in our devotion to the world, the flesh, and the devil. And our folly is more guilty than theirs. For, in the beginning of time and of Christianity, men did not know the world as they know it now; they had not, like us, a past history from which to learn its hollowness, nor had they, as we, learned from bitter personal experience that it is all vanity of vanities, and gives naught to its votaries
