The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part I, Chapter I. Introduction to the Joyful Mysteries: The Ark of the Covenant Brought by King David to Mount Sion
“Behold,” says God, speaking by His prophet Isaias, “I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.” Although God had said to Adam, “In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread,” and to Eve, “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, for cursed is the earth for your sake;” still, notwithstanding, even on the earth, thus laid under a curse by reason of transgression, days of lightness of heart and rejoicing are to return; for “behold I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy” (Isaias lxv. 18).
In the royal David’s life, we are permitted to see a figure of the manner in which it has pleased the wisdom of God ‸to work out His scheme for the restoration to the fallen world of its forfeited joy. David began his career in hardship and privation, as the youngest and least esteemed son of his father. Early in life he received the divinely-appointed anointing to his throne, of which he did not come into possession till he had reached an advanced time of life, matured in dangers and trials. He was pursued by his adversary Saul, as if he had been a wild beast, over the mountains of Israel, and was, as it were, hunted from one rocky fastness to another. He had thus to pass through a long term of watchings and labours, eating the bread of sorrow, while patiently waiting for God to bring about the accomplishment of His purpose. At length, however, his own inspired words were fulfilled—“Lamentation shall endure until the evening, but in the morning there cometh joy” (Ps. xxix. 6). In the end joy came to David, and it came to him, through the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord his God. “Behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.” From the day that David accomplished his purpose of bringing the Ark of the Lord God of Israel, in the midst of the universal jubilee and acclamations of the people of Israel, within the walls of his city on the Mount Sion, the Lord whom he served began to give him rest from his enemies, and to establish his throne. Then, in the inspired words of Sacred Writ, Mount Sion began to be founded in the exultation of the whole earth, and attained the honour of being the city of the great king (Ps. xlvii. 2).
But these things, as St Paul would say to us, happened to them in a figure, and are written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the world are come. The same came to pass in like manner, as we shall see, on a far larger scale with the whole of the vast world. In the entire world there had been heard nothing but the voice of its lamentation up to its eventide, up to the very dawn of the morning when Mary was chosen to be the Ark of the New Covenant, and when the Mount Sion became no more in figure but in truth, “founded in the exultation of the whole earth, the city of the great king.”
All the polished literature of the world before the day of the glad tidings of great joy, which were accomplished in the Ark of the New Covenant, is one continued mirror that reflects the world’s sorrow and uneasiness, and utters its voice of lamentation. The thought of the future, to the fallen world, is always one that is wrapped in gloom, and ever, as far as possible, one to be drowned in the sense of present enjoyment.
“Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere,” says one of its poets, who perhaps best of all represents the pleasant, witty, and right-minded intelligence of a polished man of the world in its palmiest days—“Never trouble about the morrow, but enjoy the present hour.”
Let not to-morrow ’e change or chance Perplex thee, but as gain Count each new day. Let beauty’s glance Engage thee, and the merry dance, Nor deem such pleasures vain.
Gloom is for age.
— Horace, Martin’s Version.* “The time of our life, says the heathen,” in the Book of Wisdom, “is short and full of weariness. There is no comfort in the end of a man, nor has any one ever been known to return from the dead. For we are born out of nothing, and afterwards we shall be as if we had never been. Since the breath in our nostrils is as it were smoke, and our speech is as it were a spark wherewith our hearts have movement, the which when it is put out our body becomes dust, and our spirit is dissolved as though it were thin air, and our life vanishes as the vapour which is dispersed by the rays of the sun, being overpowered by its heat. Wherefore come, let us enjoy all the good things upon which we can lay our hands. Let us fill ourselves with costly wines and ointments, let not the flower of our time slip away from us. Let us crown ourselves with roses before they fade, for this is our lot and this is our portion.” (Wisdom ii. 1, &c.)
There is no effectual balm in the fallen world for the knowledge of the dread * Quem fors dierum cumque dabit, lucro Appone, nec dulces amores Sperne puer, neque tu choreas, Donec virenti canities abest Morosa.—Hor., Od. ix. Lib. I.
necessity of the death that is to come, and which is mercilessly to put an end to all its joy. The thought of it can never be excluded. There it stands, and say what you will, do what you will, it persists to utter its voice of lamentation.
For all must view Cocytus’ pitchy tide Meandering slow—..
Land, home, and winsome wife must all be left, And cypresses abhorred Alone of all the trees That now your fancy please Shall shade his dust who was a little while their lord.—Horace, Martin’s Version.* Yet so natural to the whole being and constitution of the human soul is the thought of joy, and so inborn is the desire to live in a continual state of rejoicing, that this can but be one of the surviving lineaments of the original condition of the soul, as it came forth from the hands of its Divine Creator. “To crown the head with roses only before they fade” may doubtless be a poor, erring mortal’s best actual attempt, in the absence of a better, to seize hold of the joy for which his nature tells him he has ample capacities; but who can fail to perceive that in thus acting he is but seizing upon the short-lived counterfeit, while true joy is eluding his grasp.
In the first book of the Sacred Writ we have the secret of the world’s joyless existence fully revealed. The original joyous condition of the creation has been forfeited, and a life of penal labour has been substituted, to be terminated, beyond all doubt, at some unknown time by death; but which in the meantime, in particular cases, may also be vastly embittered by the injustice, cruelty, and unnatural conduct of others, as also by the personal visitations of many different mental and bodily ailments, the result of our own fault or misfortune. “Why hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree of which I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” said God to Adam. “Therefore, cursed is the earth in thy work; by * Visendus ater flumine languido Cocytus errans, ....
Linquenda tellus et domus et placens Uxor, neque harum quas colis arborum Te praeter invisos cupressus Ulla brevem dominum sequetur.
— Hor., Lib. I. Ode xiv. labours shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life, until thou return to the earth whence thou art taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. iii. 19). God might have dealt with the two first transgressors of His law as He dealt with the rebel angels, whom “He reserves in everlasting chains in darkness” (St Jude). He might have shut out from them even the hope of any amelioration of their condition. But God loves mercy as well as judgment (Ps. xxxv. 2); and while a certain measure of present consolation is not denied to them, they receive a distinct pledge which opens up a prospect of hope for the future. A promise is given to them of one to be born who shall crush the head of the serpent, their subtle adversary and betrayer. When this, therefore, shall be accomplished, then there will be a fountain of joy once more open for the whole earth.
In the meantime, the great secret of life, as taught and inculcated by the Divine Wisdom, is something totally distinct from the vain attempts at seizing the counterfeit joy “of crowning the head with roses before they fade.” The people of God are made to understand that such happiness as is still to be found in this life is obtainable only in a life of honourable industry and labour, cheered and sustained by looking forward in faith to the accomplishment of the Divine promises, as it were, anticipating the joy which God had pledged Himself to give back to the earth. It was said to the people of God, “that it was better to go into the house of mourning than into the house of feasting, for in it might be found a useful warning as to the end of all men; for the heart of the wise is where there is sorrow, and the heart of fools where there is laughter” (Eccles. vii. 3.) “What is a man better,” says the same inspired moralist, “for having spent his labour on the wind? This it is, therefore, that has appeared to me to be good: that a man should eat and drink, and that he should enjoy with gladness the fruit of his labour with which he has laboured under the sun all the days of his life which God has given to him, for this is his portion” (v. 17).
The son of Sirach inculcates the same lesson, that the proper life of man is one of labour. “Vast labour,” he says, “has been created for all men, and a heavy yoke is laid on the sons of Adam, from the day of their birth to the day of their burial, in the common mother of all” (Ecclus. xl. 1). Speaking of the life of the industrious artizan, he says, “that he gives his heart to the completion of his work, and rises early to bring it to perfection. All these trust in their hands, and each one is wise in his own art. These are the men who shall strengthen the framework of the world, whose prayer is in the midst of the works of their art, and whose search is in the law of the Most High” (Ecclus. xxxviii.)
Everywhere, again, throughout the Sacred Writers, there is to be heard a voice of warning against trusting to the vain and short-lived joys of the heathen. “The eye,” says Solomon, “is not satisfied with seeing, nor is the ear filled with hearing” (Eccles. i. 8). “Remember thy Creator,” says the same moralist, “in the days of thy youth, before the time of affliction comes, and the years draw near of which thou shalt say, they please me not” (Eccles. xii. 1). The uniform lesson of the inspired writers is, that mere fleeting pleasures of life are not to be relied upon, and that the best that a man can do is to rejoice from the fruit of his labour; “for this,” says Solomon, “is the gift of God” (Eccles. v. 18).
If then all the joys of the heathen are mere fleeting counterfeits of true joy; if it is perfectly sure that they will be followed by the years, of which men shall be forced to say, “they please me not;” nay, if even when they are at their very height, a poet (Lucretius) shall rise up to bear his testimony, and to betray the secret, that there is concealed bitterness in the cup, *—Where, we are entitled to ask, are the true and veritable joys to be found? The heart of man is plainly endowed by its Creator with the capacity for true and lasting joys, far higher and better than even those that God in His mercy has permitted to be found in the * “Medio de fonte leporum, Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat.” reaping in patience the modest fruits of prolonged and penitential toil. We ask our question, then, and what is the answer we receive. The voices of vast nations and peoples, the acclamation of many languages and tribes and kindreds of the earth, pour on their words from pole to pole, from shore to shore. They cry aloud with one accord, and say, It is none other than Mary the Virgin, blessed of all generations, who has brought true joy into the world. It is Mary, whom the Church salutes as the Ark of the New Covenant, who is the cause of the universal joy of the whole earth.
If the literature of the heathen world bears a certain testimony to the universal expectation of all nations as to a day of joy that was believed to be about to dawn, the inspired writers of the Holy Scripture abound in the most glowing anticipations of the joy which was, in the time and in the way predetermined in the counsels of God, to be restored to the fallen life of man. Our Lord tells us that Abraham, who, as St Paul says, was as it were a chief among the company of those who saw the Divine promises from afar, and who saluted them and confessed themselves to be but strangers and pilgrims upon earth (Heb. xi), rejoiced to see His day; he saw it and was glad (John viii. 56). “How beautiful,” says the soothsayer Balaam, “are thy tabernacles, O Israel, and thy tents, O Jacob, as the shady valleys, as the well-watered gardens, as the dwelling-places which the Lord hath planted, as the cedars near the waters” (Num. xxiv.) “Though the fig-tree blossom not,” exclaims the prophet Habaccuc, “and the vine put not forth her shoots; though the sheep be cut off from the fold, and no herd be found in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, and I will joy in God my Saviour” (Hab. iii.)
Again, the language of prophecy further determines the very spot of the earth which is to be the fountain, from whence this universal joy is to come. It is to be the city of Sion. “The Lord shall comfort Sion, and shall raise up all her ruins. He shall make the desert a delight, and the wilderness as the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found in her, the giving of thanks and the voice of praise” (Isaias li.) And again, “Behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy” (lxv.) And in the Psalms “Mount Sion is said to be founded in the exultation of the whole earth” (Ps. xlvii.) Nor is the favoured place only determined, but also the very person in whom the Divine promises are to be accomplished. He is to spring from the root of Jesse, and to be the Son of David, born in the royal house and family of David. His mother, also, a prodigy unknown over the whole earth, is to be a virgin. “Behold,” says Isaias, “a virgin shall conceive, and shall bring forth a son, and His name shall be called Emmanuel” (Isaias vii. 14.)
Thus the eyes of the whole world, both of Jew and Gentile, of all the tribes and kindreds of the earth, as well as of the chosen people, are concentrated on the expected coming of a Heavenly Visitor, who will bring back to the earth, and to the children of Adam, the joys that were lost in their fall and banishment from Paradise. This Heavenly Visitor is no other than the long-expected Son of the ever blessed Virgin Mother Mary, whom St John Damascene thus addresses:—“Hail Mary, full of grace! O name and creature more gracious than every joy! O thou from whom Jesus, the Eternal Joy, the Medicine of all the sorrows inflicted on Adam, has deigned to come into the world, hail to thee, most beautiful Paradise! Hail to thee, thou Garden more choice than Eden, in which every plant of virtue has freely germinated, in the midst of whom the tree of life has sprung up! Hail to thee, by whose presence we gain our lost estate, through whom the flaming sword that barred our return is taken away! Hail to thee, thou City of the Great King, in whom the courts of heaven have again been opened to us mortals, enrolled in the ranks of whose heavenly citizenship we poor sojourners of the earth again clap our hands for joy! O thou whose memory and whose annals are glorious in the tongues and acclamations of the people of the entire earth, O Virgin Mother of Jesus, who in thee has looked down in mercy on me, notwithstanding that in my poverty and want of eloquence, words have failed me in which to celebrate thy countless praises!” (Sermon on the Nativity of Mary.)
Thus when full four thousand years of labour and sorrow and fruitless attempts at rejoicing had passed over the world; when one after another its great empires had failed, and were failing, and the shades of its evening were settling upon it, the morning of its joy begins to dawn. The heavenly messenger is sent to Nazareth to the pre-elect Virgin, espoused to Joseph, of the house and family of David. She hears the gracious words of the Holy and Ever-blessed Trinity to her, and she replies, “Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy Word.” The Divine Word takes its effect, the expectation of the nations of the world is fulfilled, and henceforward its long-lost Joy is more than restored to a fallen world in Mary, who has become the “Ark of the New Covenant.”
And now to return to our figure. The evening of David’s troubled and agitated life is drawing towards its close. He has been a man of war from his youth up; and at length, after his long life of warfare and hair-breadth escapes, God appears to be about to give him rest. But in the midst of all his kingly glory David experiences a void in his heart that is not filled up. He says to the elders and princes of Israel, “Let us send to all our brethren who are dispersed, and let us bring back the Ark of the God of Israel, for we sought it not in the days of Saul” (1 Par. xiii.) And David swore to the Lord, and vowed a vow to the God of Jacob, saying, I will give no sleep to mine eyes, nor slumber to mine eyelids, nor rest to my temples, until I find a place for the Lord, and a tabernacle for the God of Jacob” (Ps. cxxxi.)
Therefore David and all Israel went out to bring the Ark of the Lord from Cariathiarim; and David and all the people rejoiced before the Lord with all their might in canticles, with stringed instruments, psalteries, dulcimers, cymbals, and trumpets. And David and all Israel sang this canticle to the Lord (Ps. civ.)
“Praise the Lord, and call upon His name; make His deeds known unto all people. Sing unto Him and give praise, and relate all His wonderful works.” Thus did the Mount Sion begin to be “founded in the exultation of the whole earth.” And God created Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy, in the
Ark of the Covenant of the God of Israel, a figure of the glad tidings of great joy which the angel announced to the shepherds of Bethlehem, “which shall be to you and all people;” and which came to the lost world through Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant.