Quis quem adloquitur?

"There is a father of the Church called St Tarasius, and I'm sorry to say that I know nothing about him, except that an extremely long and rather trying passage from one of his sermons came into the office yesterday, the [fifth day] in the Octave of the Immaculate Conception. He addresses our Lady in a series of very elaborate titles, mostly taken from the Old Testamemt; and among other things he says. 'Hail, thou light cloud, that dost scatter the heavenly rain'. At first, you rather wonder what he is talking about; but if you know your Bible very well, which I'm afraid most of us don't, you will remember that the prophet Isaias once said, 'Behold, the Lord shall go upon a light cloud, and shall enter into Egypt'. Well, that begins to put the thing more in its proper setting, and it's rather a nice idea, really, to think of the Flight into Egypt in that way--St Joseph trudging along, on those hard winter roads, and our Lady jogging along on the donkey's back, which isn't a really comfortable way of going long distances, though it's all right just for a few hundred yards at Folkestone, on the soft sand. But our Lord, you see, rests quietly on our Lady's breast, borne along as if on a light cloud."

Well; there you go. Who is the preacher? And ... you will have noticed the almost intimate, informal style of his preaching ... to whom is he speaking?

Here's a bit more:

"And you can think of it in another way; you can think of a country all parched with drought, and the farmers all scratching their heads and tapping the barometer and hoping for a nice drop of rain because what'll happen to the roots otherwise, and then a light cloud rising in the monotonous calm of the sky, with the promise of rain at last. That's how the world was, you see, when our Lord came, parched, dry, waiting for its redemption. And the cloud which brought promise of rain was the appearance on earth of our Blessed Lady, ready to bring down from heaven the precious Dew of Grace which would bring life into our starved natures once more."