which we see around us, bring vividly before us the dignity of our own office in trying to rescue our people from the results of their own folly. Still more when we minister at the death either of one who has led a good Christian life, or one who has become a true penitent, are we brought almost into touch with the other world. There is a sacredness about a Catholic death-bed which is all its own. One moment the patient is going through the last of his sufferings in this world, dependent upon our poor help and our prayers, and receiving the consolations of religion at our hands: a moment later he is in the other world, looking down on us, with knowledge and experience which we so long to have, his salvation we hope assured, and this the result of our ministry. Can any priest come back from a Catholic death-bed without a feeling of awe, and his faith strengthened as though he were in actual contact with the next world? To sum up then, the pastoral work of the priest is in itself a means of sanctification as direct and as efficacious as any personal religious exercises can be; and while we should always be jealous of omitting any of our accustomed devotions through carelessness or laziness, we need have no misgiving when they are omitted in consequence of the pressure of our pastoral work. We may fitly conclude with one more quotation from Cardinal Manning on the sanctifying power of the self-sacrifice which a true pastor practises:-- [9] "The pastoral office is in itself a discipline of perfection. For first of all it is a life of abnegation of self. A pastor has so many obediences to fulfil, as he has souls to serve. The good and the evil, the sick and the whole, the young and the old, the wise and the foolish, the worldly and the unworldly--who are not always wise--the penitent and the impenitent, the converted and the unconverted, the lapsed and the relapsed, the obdurate and the defiant, all must be watched over--none may be neglected, still less cast off--always, at all times and in all ways possible. St. Philip used to say that a priest should have no time of his own, and that many of his most consoling conversations came to him out of hours at unseasonable moments. If he had sent them away because they came out of time, or at supper-time and the like, they might have been lost. Then again, the trials of temper, patience, self-control in bearing with the strange and inconsiderate minds that come to him, and the demands made upon his strength and endurance day and night in the calls of the sick and dying, coming often one after another when for a moment he has gone to rest; the weary and continual importunities of people and of letters, till the sound of the bell or the knock at the door is a constant foreboding, too surely fulfilled; all these things make a pastor's life as wearisome, and, strange to say, as isolated as if he were in the desert. No sackcloth so mortifies the body as this life of