of Apostles, will you find the good without the wicked, and everywhere they conflict, because, says Christ, " The world loves its own, but since you are not of this world, therefore does the world hate you." This, besides being natural, is a divine dispensation. For, above all things, God desires His disciples to preserve the spiritual goods with which He endows them, and who is ignorant that virtue is often lost in prosperity and perfected in infirmity? A straight column is stronger the heavier load it bears, but the crooked gives way under the strain. Saul the shepherd, was an innocent lad; but Saul the king, was a villain. King David when deposed and a miserable fugitive, could pardon his would-be assassin, but, restored to his throne, he murdered his most devoted servant. So it ever is; the lot of the virtuous is affliction. The Patriarchs were virtuous, and their wandering lives were a series of miseries, threatened or experienced; the prophets were virtuous, and see the tortures they endured and the deaths they died; the Apostles were Christ's own, and St. Paul tells us they were treated as the refuse of this world and the off-scouring of mankind; and as for Christ the God of virtue — the crucifix is the history of His life.
" But the Scriptures," says St. Peter, " foretell not only the sufferings that are in Christ but the glories that should follow." " I am with him," says the Holy Spirit, " in tribulation, I will deliver him and glorify him." Where virtue is there is affliction; and where affliction is patiently borne, there are God's sweetest consolations. " Blessed are they that mourn," says
