Father Spencer has paragraphs in every letter at this time full of hints taken from Saints' lives, showing that he evidently gave a great portion of his time to learn ascetic theology in these remarkable volumes. He is wishing also that Mr. Digby should become a priest, but in both cases he was doomed to be disappointed so far, though both his friends graced, by their virtues, the state of life in which they remained. He was ordained Deacon on the 17th December, Quater tense, 1831; and on the 26th of May, 1832, two years and four months after his reception into the Church, he was ordained Priest by Cardinal Zurla. He thus writes to Mr. Phillipps on the event: "I made my arrangements directly (on being called off suddenly to England) for ordination to the priesthood on St. Philip Neri's Day, and saying my first mass on the day following, which was Sunday. How will you sympathise with my joy when, in the middle of my retreat, Dr. Wiseman told me, what none of us had observed at first, that the 26th May was not only St. Philip's feast at Rome, but in England that of St. Augustine, our Apostle, and that he should ask Cardinal Zurla to ordain me in St. Gregory's Church, which his Eminence did. It was at St. Gregory's only that we learned from the monks that the next day was the deposition of Venerable Bede." The coincidences are really remarkable with regard to his destination for the English mission. He was born on the feast of the Apostle St. Thomas; he arrived in Rome, as a Catholic, on the feast of St. Gregory; he was ordained on the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury; he said his first mass of St. Bede, by special leave from the Pope, on that Saint's day. He was ordained by a Cardinal of the Camaldolese branch of the Benedictine Order, to which St. Augustine belonged; and he got the blessing and commission of {216} Pope Gregory XVI., a member of the same order; and under all these auspices set out directly for England.