Bishop's way of living. Mounted on his old gray horse, the saddle laden with a large valise containing Mass vestments and all necessaries for the journey, and accompanied by his man, also mounted, the good prelate would arrive on Saturday evening at some farm previously designated, and word having been given beforehand to all Catholics living within easy distance, Mass would be celebrated on Sunday in one of the barns, a blanket serving as a reredos to the hastily constructed altar, and another blanket doing duty as a baldachin. Sometimes he would spend two or three days in one place, hearing confessions, giving advice and even administering medical treatment to those who needed it, his training as a physician in early youth and the varied supply of medicines which always formed part of his outfit, rendering such services appreciable in districts where doctors were few and chemists' shops unknown.

Bishop Hay was compelled to resign the charge of the seminary in 1791 to fill Bishop Geddes' place in Edinburgh while the latter was away in Paris on business connected with the Scottish missions. Although he returned to Scalan for six months in the following year, he found it necessary to relinquish the post of superior to one of his priests.

In 1796 negotiations began with regard to the removal of the seminary to a more favorable site at Aquahorties, in Aberdeenshire. The project was carried out in 1799, and after serving as a seminary for eighty-two years and doing valuable service to the Church in Scotland, Scalan became once more a simple mission, under the charge of a single priest.

The former seminary is now used as a farmhouse. It is a modest building of two stories, about 50 feet long and 16 wide. A square room which takes up the whole of the north end of the house is still called "Bishop Hay's Room." Immediately over it, approached by a steep and narrow wooden staircase, is the small room formerly used as the chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament was reserved. It measures but 16 feet by to and is not more than 7 feet high. At one time access was gained to it by Catholics of the neighborhood by a flight of stone steps on the outer wall leading to a door since converted into a window. For it was necessary, in view of a gradually increasing congregation, to adapt the old kitchen which stands on the north side of the dwelling house, at right angles, to serve the purpose of a public chapel. The mark of the altar may still be seen on the wall of the memorable private chapel, the scene of those many hours of day and night devoted by the holy prelate to prayer.

At the opposite end of the house is the room set apart for the students. It was their oratory in the morning, schoolroom during the day and refectory at meal times. Above it was their dormitory. Life at Scalan was anything but luxurious and would be calculated to affright some of the hardiest spirits of our own days. The boys rose at six. There was no lavatory, but, summer and winter alike, they descended to the bank of the Crombie for their morning ablutions in the river. Breakfast and supper consisted of oatmeal porridge. Meat was given at dinner twice or thrice only during the week. On other days vegetables and oatcake and a kind of oatmeal soup, popularly called "sowens," comprised the fare.

A rigorous life, indeed! Yet it raised up a stock of hardy, selfforgetting, energetic clergy, who carried on to a later generation the tradition of a sturdy contempt for softness and delicacy in ecclesiastical training which has made Scottish priests such sturdy laborers in the vineyard of the Lord.

The words of the holy and learned Bishop Geddes, appended to his manuscript history of Scalan Seminary, which has formed the basis of this paper, may fitly serve as an apology for bringing the subject forward in these pages. "The time, by the goodness of God, will come when the Catholic religion will again flourish in Scotland, and then, when posterity will inquire with a laudable curiosity by what means any sparks of the true faith were preserved in these dismal times of darkness and error, Scalan and these other colleges will be mentioned with veneration, and all that can be known concerning them will be received with interest, and even this very account which I give you, however insignificant it may now appear, may one day serve as some monument for our church history, transmitting down to future ages the names of some of those champions who stood up for the cause of God."

Fort Augustus, Scotland.

MICHAEL BARRETT, O. S. B.

ON THE REVELATIONS OF ST. BRIDGET.

NE of the most popular books of devotion in Sweden among Catholics now and among Christians in pre-Reformation days is the "Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden." In the Middle Ages no spiritual book except "The Following of Christ" had so large a circulation in Scandinavia. It has been translated once or twice into French and partially into German, but never wholly into English; so a summary of its contents may be interesting to English readers.

First of all, it may be as well to say a few words about the authoress, a canonized saint of the Church, and the circumstances in which the Revelations were written, for they led to the foundation of a large religious order, which in its prime numbered over ninety double monasteries for monks and nuns, whose rule form part of the Revelations.

St. Bridget was a Swedish Princess, the wife of Ulph, Prince of Mercia, by whom she had eight children. She led a most holy mortified life with her husband, wearing a hair shirt under he court dresses, visiting the sick poor, nursing and tending them and often making long and fatiguing pilgrimages. On the death of Ulph in the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra, Bridget, who was living there at the time, began to have her revelations, which, Father Peter, the prior of Alvestra, who was Saint Bridget's confessor and director for many years, and also the companion of her travels after she became a widow, translated into Latin and wrote down. Ulph died in 1344, and two years after the saint, by the command of our Lord, went to Rome, where she made her headquarters for the next twenty-eight years, and eventually died there, on her return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in 1373, in her seventieth year. The following year her remains were translated to Vadstena, in Sweden, the mother house of the Order of St. Saviour, which she founded with the help of her daughter, Catherine the First, Abbess of Vadstena. St. Bridget was canonized in 1391 by Pope Martin V. The Revelations are in nine books, the last of which is called the "Revelationes Extravagantes," and is in some ways the most interesting, as it concerns the rule of St. Saviour. They are called "Extravagantes" merely because they were omitted when Father Peter, the prior of Alvastra, divided the original Celestial Revelations into eight books, and afterwards gave them to the monks at Vadstena, declaring they were divinely revealed to St. Bridget and written down by him from her mouth faithfully.

The edition from which this account is derived was published in Rome in 1606, and was edited and contains notes by Consalvus Durantus, priest and professor of sacred theology, and has a prologue by Matthias, canon of Lincopen, in Sweden, who it is interesting to know glossed the whole Bible excellently and was a very holy man and one of the spiritual advisers of St. Bridget.

The books are subdivided into chapters, which vary in length from a few lines to several pages of folio print, and the whole Revelations make up a large folio volume of nine hundred pages, by which it will be seen they were very lengthy. Each chapter has a titular heading summarizing it. As it would be impossible in the space of an article to deal with the whole of the Revelations, we shall confine ourselves here to the first book and the Extravagantes. The Revela lying in bed if he hears any words of comfort, and how the angels draw nearer to the souls they guard when they hear her name, and how the bad angels fear and let go of the souls they hold in their clutches at its sound. Our Lady further tells St. Bridget that as a bird when it has its nails and claws and beak in its prey, if it hears and sound leaves its prey, and when nothing follows, returns to it, so if no amendment follows, the demons return to a soul like a very swift arrow.

In the tenth chapter Our Lady describes the Annunciation and the Passion and Death of her Son. Before the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her she saw a star, but not as if it were shining in the heavens, and a light, but not like a light that lightens the world, and she smelt a most sweet scent almost ineffable, and she exulted for joy and heard a voice, but not from a human mouth, and she was afraid that it might have been an illusion, and immediately there appeared before her the angel of God, like a most beautiful man, but not clothed in flesh, who said, "Ave Maria."

She then tells how she brought forth Our Lord without any fatigue or pain, but with such joy of soul and exultation of body that her feet seemed not to feel the earth on which she stood. When she beheld His beauty her soul distilled as dew for joy, but when she thought of the prophecies concerning His Passion, her eyes filled with tears, and when He saw the tears, He was sad unto death. Then follows a most beautiful description of the Passion, and Our Lady tells how at the first stroke of the scourge she fell down as dead, and when she recovered she saw that He had been beaten till His ribs were visible. Her grief was increased by hearing some bystanders say that He deserved to be crucified, and at the first blow of the hammer she again fell to the ground, and her eyes were obscured and her hands trembling and her feet tottering, and she could not look again for sorrow until He was fixed to the Cross. Then she describes the burial, and adds that that good John took her home.

In Chapter XVIII. are instructions from Our Lord about the building of the first Brigittine monastery. "In My house should be humility, and a wall dividing the men and women, and a wall between the two habitations, which must be strong and not very high. The windows are to be simple and transparent, the roof moderately high, and nothing is to appear there save what is redolent of humility; the roof by being moderately high signifies that My Wisdom can only be partly understood, never fully. The four walls are My justice, My wisdom, My power and My mercy. I am the foundation."

The Revelations abound in this kind of mystical interpretation of