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The Secret of the Rosary

decades or fifteen). They either fail to say it or only say it very quickly and in a lukewarm
manner.
Even if I did not believe that which has been revealed to Blessed Alan de la Roche, even then my
own experience would be. enough to convince me of this terrible but consoling truth. I do not know,
nor do I see clearly, how it can be that a devotion which seems to be so small can be the
infallible sign of eternal salvation and how its absence can be the sign of God's eternal
displeasure; nevertheless, nothing could possibly be more true.
In our own day we see that people who hold new doctrines that have been condemned by Holy Mother
Church may have quite a bit of surface piety, but they scorn the Rosary, and often dissuade their
acquaintances from saying it, by destroying their love of it and their faith in it. In doing this
they make elaborate excuses which are plausible in the.eyes of the world. They are very careful not
to condemn the Rosary and the Scapular as the Calvinists do but the way they set about attacking
them is all the more deadly because it is the more cunning. I shall refer to it again later on.
My Hail Mary, my Rosary of fifteen or of five decades, is the prayer and the infallible touchstone
by which I can tell those who are led by the Spirit of God from those who are deceived by the
devil. I have known souls who seemed to soar
like eagles to the heights by their sublime contemplation and who yet were pitifully led astray by
the devil. I only found out
how wrong they were when "I learned that they scorned the Hail Mary and the Rosary which they
considered as being far
beneath them.
The Hail Mary is a blessed dew that falls from heaven upon the souls of the predestinate. It gives
them a marvelous spiritual fertility so that they can grow in all virtues. The more the
garden of the soul is watered by this prayer the more enlightened
one's intellect becomes, the more zealous his heart, and the stronger his armor against his
spiritual enemies.
The Hail. Mary is a sharp and flaming shaft which, joined
to the Word of God, gives the preacher the strength to pierce,
move and convert the most hardened hearts even if he has
little or no natural gift for preaching.
As I have already said, this was the great secret that Our
Lady taught Saint Dominic and Blessed Alan so that they might convert heretics and sinners.
Saint Antoninus tells us that this is why many priests got

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