_They offer incense_--You have none! Oh yes, you have. What does holy king David say? "_O Lord, direct my prayer as incense in thy sight._" Prayer is the blessed incense that is incessantly streaming up before God. This it is that restrains the arm of his anger, and brings down blessings like showers of rain. There is one prayer above all others which in a special manner is doing this. It is the Holy Mass. Blessed Leonard of Port Maurice asks himself, why it is that God does not nowadays visit nations with such terrible and unmistakable judgments as He did the Jews, and the nations round about them? {156} Then he makes answer to himself, it is because of the all-powerful intercession of the Holy Mass. As that pure and holy sacrifice ascends up like clouds of incense, from ten thousand altars, all over the world, God is disarmed of his anger. A wicked world is spared too, for the sake of what those little tabernacles contain, on the altars of Catholic churches. Hear mass, then, on a week day, or make a visit of a few minutes to the Blessed Sacrament, and you have the most fragrant incense to offer to God. _They offer myrrh_--You have none! Oh yes. Myrrh preserves from corruption. This was among the spices that the holy women brought on Easter morning to embalm our Lord's body. Well, there is something that preserves our souls, as myrrh and spices preserve our bodies. This is self-denial. Self-gratification is the corruption both of soul and body. Look around at the army of drunkards, and seekers of forbidden pleasures, and you will have abundant proof of the corruption of the body, and of the soul too, though not in the awfulness of its corruption, as God sees it. {157} Well, restrain your tongue; restrain your eye; restrain your appetite; and offer this to God in penance for your sins, in union with that sublime act of self-denial on the Cross, and you will offer to your Saviour as pleasing an offering as these holy Magi. My brethren, we are all on the road to another, the true Bethlehem. We, too, are going in search of Jesus and Mary. Our Bethlehem is heaven. Our glorious, supernatural, infallible guide, is the Holy Catholic Church. We have met with trials; we shall meet with more. Perhaps, thus far, we have only passed through a sort of preparatory state, which shall enable us to bear up under the real sacrifices that we shall be called upon to make in time to come. Nothing will sustain us under these, but implicit faith in our Guide, and an unshaken fidelity to her. Be loyal to her then. Show your love for God, by your obedience to her. Cling to her side, and she will lead you to that Bethlehem above, where it may be said of you also,-- "They found the Child with Mary his Mother." ---------------------- {158} Sermon X. Renunciation.