It struck me yesterday, that just as the Octave Day of Christmas is (or was) the feast of the Circumcision (it still is, in the traditional Dominican Rite), so the Octave Day of the Epiphany is the feast of the Lord's Baptism: so the liturgy passes from Christ's Birth to his Circumcision, he being born a subject of the Law, and then on from the Epiphany, or the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, to his Baptism, a baptism of repentance which he vicariously undertook on our behalf at the hands of his cousin the Baptist, which sanctified the waters of the Jordan, and presaged his later institution of sacramental Baptism for all nations, by the power of his Passion applied to souls through the laver of regeneration.
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