week-day, it is impossible to adhere at all rigidly to any self-made rule. If a priest has to go out to say mass at a Convent, it is hard to avoid his daily meditation being performed in a perfunctory fashion, or sometimes even omitted altogether. If he has to say mass twice or three times a week at ten o'clock and on other mornings at eight--as is often the case in town missions--regularity of life disappears. Then much of his pastoral work--such as visitations, sick calls, or unexpected calls to the Confessional--is entirely uncertain and variable as to time, and cannot be foreseen. Moreover, the anxieties of a priest are very distracting to the even tenor of our spiritual life. Add to this that much of his recreation has to be taken late in the evening, as being the only time that his friends in the parish are at home, and it is difficult to refuse _all_ invitations to dine out, or his position among his parishioners would suffer: yet the evening is the time of day when naturally a spiritual man wishes to be recollected. What then? Are the secular clergy to surrender their own sanctification for the sake of their work? The question has only to be asked to be answered in the negative. The dignity of the priesthood and the pastoral office is enough to put such an idea out of our thoughts. Some of the greatest saints of the Church--including the Apostles themselves--belonged to the secular clergy: and it would be manifest blasphemy to look on their state as anything but a school of holiness. Certainly we must look for an answer in a different direction from this. Three different answers may be suggested, each of which can lead us to important considerations. In the first place we have the three great Evangelical Virtues, Poverty, Chastity and Obedience, as practised by the priest, which inform their whole lives and give a character and greatness which overshadows everything that they do. These are so important that separate Conferences will be given to the consideration of each. Let it suffice here, then, to enumerate them as the first answer to the difficulty we are considering, of how the secular priesthood is to be made a school of holiness. The second answer is the spirit which prompts us to do our work. It is a spirit of complete self-sacrifice and trust in God, who will in his own way watch over His priests and ministers, so that if they have sacrificed themselves for the sake of preaching the Gospel of His kingdom, He will in return take them under his protection and accomplish their sanctification in His own manner and in His own time.