To the Members of the Confraternity

IN THE CHURCH OF THE LONDON ORATORY.

My DEAR FRIENDS:-—

I have written this little Book for you, and now dedicate it to you with feelings of the warmest affection. It is ten years next August since the Holy Father set up our Confraternity. Since then we have enrolled upwards of thirty-eight thousand Members, and a hundred and four Religious Communities. Besides this, several other Confraternities of the Precious Blood have been set up and afliliated with ours; and their members are also very numerous. Some others have been erected in imitation of ours, and independently of it, and are successfully propagating our favorite devotion.

The meetings at the Oratory on Sunday nights testify to the abundant blessing which _ our Lord has given to this apostolate of prayer. Letters are arriving daily, and from the remotest quarters of the world, either asking our prayers, or returning thanks for unexpected answers to 1* 5 prayer, or recounting signal conversions, obtained through the intercession of the Confraternity. Of late these divine favors have greatly increased; and, while this is a fresh motive for the love of God and for confidence in prayer, it also deepens our feeling of our own unworthiness, and greatly humbles us. The Confraternity is now so.extended that the correspondence includes letters from Ireland and Scotland, from France and Germany, from Canada and Y vfoundland, from the United States and Ceutral America, from California and Brazil, from Australia and New Zealand, from the East Indies and the Chinese Missions, from the Cape of Good Hope and other British Dependencies. When we think of all this, we must prize more and more the privileges of this grand union of intercessory prayer. The success of the Confraternity is naturally an object of lively interest both to you and me. To you, because it is connected now with so many secret joys and sorrows of your lives, and so many hidden mercies and sweet answers to prayer, which are known only to yourselves: to me, because it is the realizing of my hopes beyond what I ever could have dreamed: and to both of us, because it is an humble increase of the glory of our dearest Lord.

OF THE MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD. Tt

I have watched the growth of thé Confrater- — nity with a pleased surprise; and the tokens of God’s blessing upon it have overwhelmed me with gratitude and confusion: and I have thought what I could do. Though many of you are present at the London Oratory every Sunday evening by your letters, comparatively few of you can be there in person. Yet I have felt that we belong to each other, and that I should satisfy my own feelings, while I should be gratifying yours, if I could make some affectionate offering to the whole of my dear Confraternity.

_ Therefore I have written this little Book. I have tried to tell you all I know about the Precious Blood, all that many years of hard study and much thought have enabled me to learn; and I have tried to tell it you as easily and as simply as I could. I thought I could not please you better than by this. I thought I could not show my gratitude to our Blessed Redeemer better than by striving to increase a devotion which he himself, by his blessing on the Confraternity, has shown to be so pleasing to him. I believed we could not repay the paternal kindness of the Sovereign Pontiff, our Father and Founder, who has enriched us with Indulgences, in a manner more wel-

$ TO THE MEMBERS OF THE CONFRATERNITY, ETO.

come to himself than by an effort to propagate the devotion to the Precious Blood, in whose honor he has established a new feast in the Church of God. I know that I could not please myself better, than by magnifying the Precious Blood, which of all the glorious objects of Catholic devotion has been for years the dearest to my heart.

Accept, then, this little but loving gift. Let it stand as a memorial of my love of you, of your love of Jesus, of the filial devotion of both of us to the Holy Father, and of our united thanksgivings to our Blessed Savior for his goodness to our Confraternity, and for our salvation through his Blood.

Your affectionate Servant and Father, FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER, Priest of the Oratory.