d A GUIDE FOR PASSING Advent HOLILY, IN WHICH IS FOUND FOR EACH DAY, A PRACTICE, MEDITATION, THOUGHTS UPON PORTIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE FOR SENTENCES FROM THE HOLY SCRIPTURES AND THE FATHERS; AND ONE POINT IN THE INCARNATION. BY AVRILLON. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, AND ADAPTED TO THE USE LONDON: WILLIAM JONES CLEAVER, 80, BAKER STREET, PORTMAN SQUARE; & J. H. PARKER, OXFORD. 1847. 1405 f. 19 PREFACE. THE Nativity of our LORD having ever been celebrated by the Church as one of its chief Festivals, being at once the greatest and most awful of all mysteries, and involving in itself all the other miracles of mercy of Almighty GoD, it is impossible but that there must have been from the first some preparation for its approach. Christians, of old, well knew that the mind could not at once entertain holy thoughts fully; that it could not pass at once from things of earth to things of heaven, from all our manifold distractions in things of time and sense, to gather up ourselves in the contemplation of Him Who is GoD, Consubstantial, Coequal, Coeternal with the Father, emptying Himself, and becoming as one of us, a little Child. And accordingly, in the earliest collection we have of the Church's prayers, the Sacramentary of Gelasius (A. 492), we find a distinct Advent service'. Be 1 This examination of the Gelasian Sacramentary was occasioned by the statement of M. Guéranger, l'Avent Liturgique, p. 7, that "the Sacramentary of S. Gelasius contains |