We give the title of Proper of Saints to that portion of our work which contains the feasts of saints, and all such parts of the Advent proper Office as have a fixed day; for example, the great Antiphons, the Vigil of Christmas, &c. This division into Proper of the Time and Proper of Saints is that which is adopted by the breviary and missal, and is familiar to all those who frequent Divine Service.
Our readers will have observed in the Proper of the Time of Advent, how intent the holy Church is on preparing for the great feast of the Nativity of our Lord; in the Proper of Saints, they will find her celebrating, with all possible devotion, the feasts of the friends of God, the saints, which come during that time. Our separated brethren accuse the Catholic Church of giving a place in the liturgy to the cultus of the saints, which belongs to God alone. They are led to make this accusation, which involves a very serious error, from having never considered, firstly, that the homage paid to God in His saints redounds to His glory who made them saints; and secondly, that, at the same time that the Church honours the saints by keeping their feasts, she pays to the sovereign and incommunicable majesty of God more acts of religion, in one short week, than Protestantism could possibly do in a whole year.
Let us, children of the Church, love and practise devotion to the saints, and remember how God, who demands our homage, requires us to pay that portion of it which consists in honouring Him in those whom He has crowned. Now, the first homage which we ought to pay to God in His saints is, to study to know them. One of the evils of our times is, that the saints are not sufficiently known. Protestant rationalism, under the false name of criticism, has done its utmost, during the last two hundred years, to lessen the devotion of the faithful towards the saints; and one is often surprised and shocked to meet with persons, otherwise well instructed, and attached to the faith, who know little about the saints, and have imbibed most uncatholic prejudices regarding them. But, if we may judge from the interest with which some very full and well-written lives have been recently received, these prejudices are fast disappearing, and the time is come when hagiography will become once more a serious study amongst our people, and the ancient devotion to the saints will be revived.
To further this happy tendency, we have resolved to imitate the Church herself, by giving the greatest development, in these pages, to all that regards the honour due to the saints. Firstly, the faithful must be brought to know them. No method, it seemed to us, could be more effectual to this end than the one adopted by the Church. She is most desirous that her children should know the heroes of sanctity whom God has given to her, and in whom, together with the incomparable Mother of God and the holy angels, she puts her greatest hope, after that which she places in her Saviour Jesus Christ, the King and Master and Head of all the saints. The faithful should, therefore, understand that the Church keeps an official register of the actions, and maxims, and virtues of the saints, who are her glory; there she has chronicled, through all these eighteen hundred years, the wonders which God has wrought in them and by them, and the blessings she has received through their intercession. This admirable history of the saints is known under the name of the Legends of the Breviary; a history which the Church is ever writing, for God is ever adding to the number of His saints: a history which the learned admire for its great beauty of style, and in which the children of the Church find that unction which has such power over the heart, and which the Catholic Church alone can put into human language. This is not the place to notice the objections which some critics have made to certain passages of some of the legends, of which they contest the historical exactitude: besides, they are very few and of little importance.
We therefore give, in this work, the Roman legends, just as they are in the breviary. By this means, we shall be giving a general idea of the life and actions of the saints to those who are completely ignorant of them. Even those who have grown familiar with the lives of the saints by having read such as are in general use, will sometimes find, in these legends of the Church, a very different, if not contrary, appreciation of the conduct of the saints from that which has been put upon it by modern writers. They will find that, notwithstanding their brevity, the legends of the breviary are often more complete and explicit than some of the lives they have read, which consisted of twenty or more pages. As to the doctrinal and moral appreciations, which almost necessarily accompany the written lives of the saints, a Catholic should remember that, when they come from the Church, they have for their guarantee the authority of God Himself.
After having received from the Church herself the knowledge we ought to have of the saints, we ought also to learn from her how we are to honour them. For this reason, we shall first insert the prayers, which the usage of the Church consecrated to them in ancient times; and then, those which were composed at a later period. Our work will thus become a complete manual of Catholic devotion to the saints, giving, first, the formulæ used in the universal Church; secondly, those which were composed during the first and middle ages of the Latin Churches; and thirdly, those which were in use in the several Churches of the east.
In order to give unity to these various liturgies, we shall continue the method we adopted in the Proper of the Time. A simple and concise commentary shall be given throughout the entire course of our work, explaining the several intentions of the Church in the prayers and usages, which we shall have to give. But with regard to everything which is strictly of the province of science and archæology, we shall use a prudent reserve, as such details will come better in a special treatise.
To derive solid advantages from the devotion we pay to the saints in the various seasons of the year, it is important that we should not disjoin the honour we give to them from that which we have to pay to the mysteries of our redemption, which the Christian year gradually brings before us, and which form the basis of the Proper of the Time, throughout the entire cycle. It will not be difficult to do this; for if we read over the Catholic calendar with an eye of faith, we shall not fail to see the secret relation, which unites the feasts of the saints with the various mystical seasons, in which they, as it were, bloom. A saint's feast is, generally, kept on the very day of his death; in other words, on the day of his entrance into heaven. That infinite Wisdom, which has revealed to us that not even a hair of our head shall perish without our heavenly Father's will, may surely be supposed to have selected a particular day for each saint's death, such as would be in keeping with the supernatural harmony of the Church's year. It should, therefore, be our duty to study, during the whole of the liturgical year, the relation which the saints, whose feasts are being kept, have with the season in which the Church celebrates their memory.
As the Office of the Church, in Advent, does not assign a saint's feast for each day, we have thought it advisable to fill up the vacant days by giving for each day, from December 1 to Christmas eve, reflections upon the events which preceded the divine mystery of the birth of Jesus. Our object is to aid the piety of the faithful, by offering them meditations, both upon the facts related in the sacred Scriptures, and upon the pious conjectures which almost irresistibly suggest themselves.
Lastly, in order to impress the spirit of this holy time more deeply on the mind, we have, on each day of this second part of our volume, given a liturgical prayer, taken from the Advent Offices of the various Churches and thus we shall be saying, each day, an additional prayer for the Messias to come: a prayer, too, which must be efficacious, because offered to the divine Majesty in the words of our holy mother the Church.