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Not many years ago, in a small town in Valencia, and on a Sunday, the parishioners assembled in the square according to custom, waiting till the bell should announce to them the hour of entering the church to hear mass; hour after hour passed—no bell sounded—the people directed their steps towards the house of the priest’s querida, where they found that he had passed the night in orgies of drunkenness and dissipation, and was, even then, in a state of intoxication.
And when I think that I was perhaps the only girl of the family or in the whole world that he ever in his priest’s life patted on the head! When I think of that I . . . I believe at that moment I was as wretched as he was himself. I handed him an envelope with a big red seal which quite startled him.
The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction, and His servant crying out: “Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish me,” and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: “Let my prayer rise up before Thee,” and again incense from the priest’s censer and the kneeling and the prayer.
Sometimes a morning zephyr, stirring from the east, would tear down the garlands and throw them upon the brows of the kneeling worshippers, and would spread fragrance abroad as from a priest’s censer.
I must prepare you, and send you back to Sicca, to collect and restore this scattered flock.” Agellius turned, and leaned against the priest’s shoulder, and laughed. “I am laughing,” he said, “not from lightness of mind, but from the depth of surprise and of joy that you should so think of me.
Now, where he hath read that Joash made himself the keeper of the money, and prescribed how it should be disbursed, also that he took the administration from Jehoiada, I cannot guess; for the text hath no such thing in it, but the contrary, viz. that the king’s scribe, and the high priest’s officer, kept the money, and disbursed the same, as the king and Jehoiada prescribed unto them.
While the aged man was amusing himself with the sight of this gathering, suddenly the rabbits vanished into the earth, and the flocks of sparrows fled to the roof before new guests, who were coming into the yard with quick steps. These were the envoys whom the assembly of gentry at the priest’s house had sent to consult Maciek.
Canhotka ska—the “white frost”—became the priest’s robe as he petitioned at the sacrament of winter. The universe to him became a sounding-board of every emotion that thrilled his being. He found in its phenomena an answer to his longings and the high expression of every fervour of his soul.
The Mass must not be said without a Missal under the priest’s eye; nor in any language but that in which it has come down to us from the early hierarchs of the Western Church. But, when it is over, and the celebrant has resigned the vestments proper to it, then he resumes himself, and comes to us in the gifts and associations which attach to his person.
If it be said, that the circumstance of the person changeth the kind of the action, so that the making of laws about things pertaining to religion, if they be made by ecclesiastical persons, is an action of spiritual jurisdiction; but if, by the civil magistrate, an action of civil jurisdiction, this were a most extremely unadvised distinction; for so might Uzziah the king have answered for himself, 2 Chron. xxvi. 18, that, in burning incense, he did not take upon him to execute the priest’s office, because he was only a civil person; so may the Pope say, that he might not take upon him the power of emperors and monarchs, because he is an ecclesiastical person.
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