+ Blessed MONFORD SCOTT, Priest, 1591

PRAYER WITHOUT CEASING

BORN in Norfolk, he arrived on the English Mission from Douay 1577. "He was a man," we are told, "of wonderful meekness and of so great abstinence that his diet on common days was bread and water, and but little more on Sundays and holidays. So addicted also was he to prayer that he often spent whole days and nights in this exercise, insomuch that his knees were grown hard by the assiduity of his devotions, as it is related of St. James. 

One of the bystanders perceiving this when the martyr's body was being quartered said aloud, ' I should be glad to see any one of our ministers with their knees as much hardened by constant prayer as we see this man's knees are.' And so great and so general was the veneration this holy priest had acquired that Topcliffe, the noted persecutor, loudly boasted that the Queen and kingdom were highly obliged to him for having brought to the gallows a priest so devout and mortified." Father Scott was prosecuted and condemned solely on account of his priestly character. He suffered with wonderful constancy, and no less modesty and spiritual joy, to the great edification of the spectators, and the admiration even of the greatest enemies of his faith and profession, Tyburn, July 2, 1591.

"By all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the Spirit."—EPH. vi. 18