Today, my beloved children, we are celebrating the first fruits of the coming of our Lord. For the Church, there is no more desirable period than this one. It is the time when she gives us the most magnificent pages to read, when she sings her most beautiful hymns. Just as spring is of all seasons of the year the gladdest and sweetest, so of all solemnities the most touching and the holiest is this time of Advent. This is the time for which the patriarchs of the Old Testament sighed with such ardent longing, as did all the holy souls who succeeded them for nearly five thousand years. They cried out for it with all their hearts: ‘Lord, oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down.’ (Is. 64, 1.) ‘To enlighten them that sit in darkness and ill the shadow of death.’ (Luke 1, 79.) All the happenings, all the types of the Old Testament had no other object but to proclaim the greatness and excellence of the one that they were always desiring and whose coming we are now about to greet.