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AUGUST.

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1st. Lammas Day.-The festival of St. Peter ad vincula in the Sarum and Roman use. Various derivations of the name given; but far the most probable is that it is a corruption of "Hlafmas,' "" i.e. "Loaf-mass,' the offering of the first fruits of the new harvest.

6th. Transfiguration, observed in the Eastern Church in the 8th century, in the West probably earlier; but first universally authorized by Calixtus 111. in 1457, in commemoration of the deliverance of Belgrade from the Turks. The Transfiguration of Our Lord, though it clearly marks an epoch in His early life, when he summed up the effects of His ministry, and began to prepare His disciples for His humiliation and death (see Matt. xvi. 13-xvii. 23), is but little dwelt upon in Holy Scripture (except in 2 Pet. i. 17), or in ancient Church Commemoration.

7th. Name of Jesus. Taken from the Sarum Calendar; formerly observed (as was natural) on the Feast of the Circumcision, and in the Roman Church, on the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany. Why it should be placed here, unless in connection with the display of Our Lord's majesty in the Transfiguration, it is hard to say.

10th. St. Lawrence, Martyr, the chief Deacon of the Church of Rome under Sextus II., and martyred after him in A.D. 258, in the persecution of Valerian. He was tortured for refusing to give up the Church treasures, and broiled to death on an iron frame like a gridiron. His name is commemorated in the Calendar of 354, and found in the Sacramentary of Gregory the Great. No martyrdom seems to have made more impression in the Middle Ages, or to have been more hallowed by festal celebration and dedication of

churches, both in the East and the West.

28th. St. Augustine, Bishop (354-430), the great Bishop of Hippo, and father of Latin Theology, who has perhaps more than any other writer affected Christian thought, especially on the doctrines of Justification and Predestination, and whose influence was dominant with all the great leaders of the Reformation. He was a native of Tagaste in North Africa, in his youth a student of literature and teacher of rhetoric, inclined to passion and self-indulgence, an inquirer in the Manichean and other schools, and even by the prayers of his saintly mother Monica not persuaded to be a Christian. At Milan he was converted and baptized by St. Ambrose at the age of 33, ordained priest and consecrated Bishop at Hippo in 395, where he ministered till, just before the conquest of North Africa by the Vandals, he was taken from the evil to come, in 430. The personal and spirit ual force of his Confessions and Retractations; the profound theology of his writings against Manichæism and Pelagianism, Arianism, and Donatism; his wonderful Commentaries on Scripture, Sermons, and Letters; his contrast of the "City of God" with the kingdom of the world, expiring in the fall of Rome-all have laid hold of the mind and heart of Christendom with a power fairly unexampled in the history of the Church, if not of the world.

29th. Beheading of St. John Baptist. The observation of this Festival is of early date in the Western Church, probably from a desire to carry out, in the case of St. John Baptist, the usual commemoration of martyrdom without trenching on the greater Festival of his Nativity. Why it was fixed to this day does not

appear.

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SEPTEMBER.

1st. St. Giles, Abbot (Egidius), a Gallican Saint of the 7th century, first a hermit, then drawn from his hermitage by Flavius, king of the Visigoths to found the famous Benedictine Abbey of St. Giles, near Nismes. He was the patron Saint of cripples (from a legend declaring that in his love of mortification he refused to be cured of an accidental lameness). Though unconnected with England, he was here specially honoured, and many churches were dedicated to him.

7th. Enurchus or Evortius.Bishop of Orleans in the 4th century. He is said to have been a martyr; but nothing can be said to be really known of him.

8th. Nativity of the Virgin Mary, a festival known at the close of the 7th century: but specially honoured by Papal authority in the 13th and 14th; probably marking the growth of the belief in the Immaculate Conception.

14th. Holy Cross Day, celebrating the exhibition of the True Cross in the Basilica built by the Empress Helena at Jerusalem in 326 (see "Invention of the Cross," May 3rd).

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17th. Lambert, Bishop, of Maestricht in the 7th century: evangelist to the heathen, and a martyr for the rebuke of vice in the person of Pepin of Heristal, A.D. 709. His relics were translated to Liege, the Cathedral of which is dedicated to him.

26th. St. Cyprian, Archbishop, the great Bishop of Carthage, exercising a kind of metropolitan jurisdiction (from A.D. 248-258). He was of high education and rank, converted in his manhood, and soon after raised to the Episcopate; notable as the great upholder and establisher in the Western Church of Episcopal dignity and authority, in staunch resistance to the growing claims of Rome; stern alike against Puritanism and

laxity in the restoration of those who had "lapsed" under persecution; maintaining even the need of rebaptism of those baptized by heretics, which was rigidly opposed by the Bishop of Rome, and disallowed by subsequent Church authority; a great ruler of unbounded influence and popularity; a writer of great vigour of thought and perfection of style; finally a martyr under the persecution of Galerius in 258.

30th. St. Jerome (Hieronymus; A.D. 342-420), the great critic and scholar of the West, as Origen of the East, standing almost alone among the Latin Fathers in knowledge, not only of Greek, but of Hebrew and Chaldee, and in the instincts of sound and scholarly criticism. He was born at Stridon in Pannonia, in early life a teacher of grammar and rhetoric; after his baptism he travelled to Gaul, Rome, and the East, and spent some time as a recluse in the desert of Chalcis; thence, after visiting Constantinople, he settled at Rome, as the trusted counsellor of Pope Damasus; afterwards he returned to the East, and spent the last thirty years of his life in seclusion and study at Bethlehem. His character was violent, and often undisciplined and fanatic, as in his championship of asceticism and monasticism, and his various controversies. But his service in producing, direct from the original, the great Latin Version of the Western Church (the "Vulgate "), superseding, except in the Psalter and the Apocryphal books, the varying and inaccurate versions previously existing, was simply priceless; and on all points of Biblical criticism his authority far outweighs all others in the Patristic literature of the West. His Scriptural Commentaries, his Letters and Treatises, and his historical and biographical works are also of the highest value.

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Enurchus, Bishop. Nat. of Vir. Mary.

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Revelation
Luke

1 v. 57

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14 v. 14 4 v. 16

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